It was a nice, long, relaxing birthday weekend with bouts of beer involved.  As far as birthday’s could go it was tame but it was good in that monotony.  Basically it was a weekend of poker, which I sucked out another win, a few beers out with friends, and a round of golf.  The golf ended up being way more expensive than we expected due to the course moving the twilight rates later, luckily the poker winnings which would’ve covered the week’s expenses was just enough to cover the round.  An upside was I shaved 13 strokes off the last time I played.  While that sounds good Im still three strokes over 100 so its not too impressive.  Golf can be a fun or frustrating game depending on how serious you wanna take it.  It would’ve been better to have walked the course but with the heat I cant complain about having the cart.

Nothing compares to last years birthday present of the Carolina Hurricanes bringing home the Stanley Cup four days before the 23rd though.  After going to every game of every series, except Game 2 against Montreal, it was a good month.  I have no worries they’ll pull it out for me again sometime soon since they’re currently averaging a trip to the finals every 5 years.

This week will be back to training mode, starting with a four mile run and then soccer tonight.  Usually I don’t run on soccer days but Zack was telling me that he’s been doing it and it doesn’t wear him out to bad.  So I’ll try it out and see how it goes, since we’ve got subs again finally I can get off the field if I get too tired.

Yep, the site is back up and still going strong.  My apologies if you stopped by today to be greeted by blank pages, error messages, warnings, etc., etc.  For my work, web consulting, Im moving our server from our old hosting company to a new one which entails getting the new server setup the same as the old one.  Needless to say there are tons of issues to run into and little tweaks to perform.  Since we cant do this with our revenue generating sites Im using my few sites as the guinea pigs to work out the kinks.  Today there were plenty of kinks to go around but eventually they were all ironed out, hence the site being back up and available.

So I apologize for any inconvenience, actually ill be selfish and say Im glad if you noticed cause it means you’re reading.  LAFRider is moved and rolling again and wont be going under any more maintenance.  Thanks for understanding.

I got back from Ocracoke yesterday and will be getting back into the routine starting Tuesday.  The hamstring feels back to normal but Im still catching up on sleep before getting back to the training.  One good thing about the vacation is that since it’s a small island we ended up walking everywhere.  From the beach to the pub to the breakfast place to the pub to the store to the pub, etc.  Id say we ended up putting in a few miles of walking a day if not more which kept the hamstring loose and offset the overeating and adult beverages.

As you may be able to tell, probably not if you’re new to the site, I have been able to restore the original LAFRider template.  It was the weirdest set of errors after the upgrade that was messing up the setup, images were completely renamed, etc.  It made no sense but I was able to get things back to normal.  In the end all the upgrade hassles were worth it because the spammers have been silenced.  I haven’t had a single spam comment show up in my box since I installed all the spam filters, next I get to concentrate on trying to get the forum back.

In the end I realized that not having the template up and running with my donation links pretty cut the goal of the site in half since casual visitors wont have the opportunity to donate through the site which is one of the primary goals of the site.

I was able to get in a four mile run yesterday for Livestrong Challenge training which was good.  Tomorrow I plan to head down to the pull to finally get in some laps.  I’m way overdue getting ready for the triathlon next month.

Looks like we’ll be keeping around this standard template for much of, if not all, of the week.  I was hoping to be able to knock out the upgrades to the normal LAFRider.com template but circumstances kept me from finishing it up.  Now that the week has started it will be harder for me to sit down and give it my undivided attention.  This week is packed with a soccer game, trivia night, Carolina Hurricanes game, management discussion forum, and an English paper on top of the normal workday.  Sounds like fun doesn’t it?  Also I still need to fit in some Livestrong Challenge training as well this week.  Its weeks like these that test one’s time to train.

On a brighter note, I may have finally gotten comments back.  I’ve had them turned off forever because of spammer scum but with the upgrades I’ve installed about four separate spam controls that are running on each and every post/comment.  So I’ve been able to turn comments back on and hopefully readers will be able to comment again, instead of spammers.  It’ll be nice to see whose reading and get some feedback again.