In February 2005 I got some bad news from my brother. I found out that his squadron, the VMFA-142 Flying Gators, were to be deployed to Iraq's tumultuous and violent Anbar province.

My brother and I had casually discussed ways in which we could use the web to assist the Marines of VMFA-142 during their deployment. After much talking I finally decided on a course of action; a blog. They are relatively easy to setup and manage, and a blog's ease of use may enable the Marines in Iraq to help with the updates, eliminating myself as a middleman and ensuring the folks back home got information as fast as possible.

Finally, about a week before the deployment, I got to work on a design that incorporated the look and feel of the Gators Squadron.

Once the design was settled and everything was setup through Blogger I just needed content to post.

March came around and it was time for the Gators to leave their Atlanta home for their temporary quarters at Al Asad airbase in Iraq.

Many photos were taken at the deployment departure and I posted them to the blog immediately. My brother got the word out among the pilots and he assured me I'd get some photos tracking their progress. I was skeptical, it'd be difficult to handle the responsibilities of a Marine being sent into a war zone, and also take digital photos and find a way to email them out for posting to the blog.

Slowly though, the photos came and the url began to arrive into the inboxes of more and more family members. They started to comment on the site, generating more proliferation and participation. The response was more than I'd ever thought it would be.

I'd spend an or or so a night, processing pictures for posting, and the site got as many as 1,000 daily hits.

Family members overwhelmed me with their appreciation. The site had more of an impact than I thought it was capable.

Eventually the squad came home and the site now stands frozen as a unique visual log of their deployment. I plan to leave it up so that anyone who wishes can return to look through the old photos of their 2005 deployment.

I was fortunate enough to be recognized by the Gators at the Atlanta, GA Marine Corps Ball with a large squadron portrait signed by all of the squadron members.

Though I will say it seems strange to be recognized in such a way for something that was so rewarding in and of itself.

The people over at Microsoft have been working on a new version of Internet Explorer for the last year or two. When first hearing of IE7, all of us at Plexus breathed a sigh of relief and said "Finally!." Internet Explorer has been the thorn in every CSS developer's side since the dawn of stylesheets. IE has a couple of "bugs" that prevent it from displaying rendered CSS correctly. While there are 'hacks' to fix this behavior, it's a big pain to implement them. A large chunk of our QA time is spent making sure the website looks the same on IE as it does on Firefox, Netscape, and Safari. We don't spend as much time on Opera because it's usually just as screwy as IE.

I digress. Anyway, unbeknownst to Colin, I decided to use his computer (on his day off) as a guinea pig and install IE 7 beta 2. I have to say, the new version looks a LOT better and they've added a lot of the features that make Firefox so great. The performance, however, doesn't seem to have changed much since the last version. Within three minutes of browsing it had already crashed. Way to go Microsoft. I realize that it's still in beta, but I've started setting my expectations very low for Microsoft products. The other negative is that the rendering seems to be even more broken in IE 7 than it is in 5.5 and 6. I'm really hoping that in the next few months as we near the official release date Microsoft does a LOT of work to rectify the state of Internet Explorer.

For anyone who still uses IE as their principle web browser, do yourself a favor: get Firefox. I promise you, you will not regret it.

Check out this cool site that renders CSS and markup as you type it. Great place if you're learning CSS or just like instant gratification.

Adam and I were able to attend the first international Rails Conference this past weekend (June 23rd-26th) in Chicago. It was good to see what everyone in the community was doing and to hear the latest things coming down the pipe from the core development team. The community around Ruby on Rails is growing fast and it was interesting to meet some of the other early adopters.

...you can find me at Walt Light's enjoying the best chicken n' dumplings this side of the Mississippi with my fellow bowlers. We are formerly known as Team 6, though this summer another team was assigned that team number so now we are Team 1. Don't let the name fool you - we are pretty pretty pretty bad. Well maybe I should speak for myself.

Anyways, see you down at the lanes! Showtime that is...Not just bowling, bowling with real bowlers.