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There are no snowy lanes where I live. Icicles don't dangle sparkling from steep rooflines. No red cardinals perch in evergreens. Holly doesn't grow here.
Pines and firs are trucked a thousand miles away to act as Christmas trees. Cranberry sauce is a cylindrical gel. Snow on windowpanes comes from spray cans.
Electric stars adorn hilltops. Plastic wise men, young families, and farm animals gaze eternally at plastic mangers. Joy.
Here we are again at that wonderful time of the year, The Holidays. Several weeks of non-stop bullshit and pretense.
Chestnuts roasting, Jack Frost nipping, roaring fires - all figments of some imaginary frozen land back east. Kids don't play in piles of fallen leaves because our trees (none of which are native) don't lose their leaves. Sleigh bells don't ring-a-aling because there are no sleighs. None of it is real for me. The stuff of children's picture books. Fiction.
I've lived my whole life in the San Diego area. It's warm and sunny today. Things are starting to green up after last week's rain. Sometimes the Santa Ana winds bring dry air from the desert, it gets blazing hot. We've had huge wildfires as late as New Year's Day. Sandcastles, perhaps. Snowmen? Not so much.
Most of the season's festivities come from someone else's distant memories. They celebrate a time and place that holds no relevance for me. I don't worship any deities. I don't eat turkey, ham, and prime rib, nor stuffing, rolls, and pie. I've never hung my sock
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For over a year I've been working (off and on) on a new website for the dojo where I train, Aikido of San Diego. I did all the photography, design, and development - hand-coded in HTML/CSS. It's the biggest web project I've taken on, and the most important (to me). We have a tradition of giving something to the dojo or making some lasting improvement to the facility when we test at dan ranks. This is my (early) shodan gift:
This site is responsive (works on desktops, tablets, and phones), and includes more content, all new photos, and more videos than our previous site (which was pretty darned good already). We even have Member Spotlight features, where you can read about how people got started, and what Aikido means to them.
For the techies out there, I started with the Zurb Foundation framework, and then did all the layout and design through HTML and CSS. (It's not a CMS or templated site). It's highly optimized for SEO, so people can find us easily.
There is a lot of information on the site. We will be refining and expanding over time, too. Our dojo handbook is available only as a PDF now (from the Membership and Resources pages). We will be creating an HTML version of the manual too, for easier online reading. We will also be adding pages to address specific concerns or demographics, too, so that people searching for that information can discover us more readily. We'll be continuously improving and k
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11-29-2013 12:32 PM 
