I won’t be posting very much the next couple of days. My wife has gone to the “Hearts at Home” conference in Bloomington, so I’m Mr. Mom this weekend. And, of course, I still don’t have a computer since my son destroyed my laptop.

But, that will soon change. I have ordered a new laptop and it should arrive sometime next week, so I’ll be back in business soon.

In the meantime, please use this as an open thread to talk about whatever you wish.

Disaster befell the Peoria Chronicle technology department on Sunday, March 11, 2007.

My beloved one-year-old son James found a glass of soda tonight and proceeded to dump it onto my laptop keyboard this afternoon — a cold-blooded execution of the most expensive and data-sensitive electronic gadget I own. My only hope is that the hard drive and the data it contains are salvageable.

Please observe a moment of silence for my departed Dell Inspiron 1100. It served me and my wife well these past several years and did not deserve such an ignoble death.

I’m posting from my work computer this evening. I came in to look at new Dell laptops online, how long they take to ship, and what the credit terms are. I won’t be posting much in the next few days — just what I can post from work before/after working hours. I’ll still be able to get my e-mail over the web at work and other various computers.

R.I.P., my faithful laptop.

UPDATE (3/12): On my lunch break, I bought an enclosure for my laptop’s hard drive and I’m happy to report that all the data is intact.

Happy Casimir Pulaski Day, everyone! In honor of the “Father of the American Cavalry,” and in light of the fact that my wife is one-quarter Polish, I’m taking the day off from blogging.

You know, every year at this time, people all over Illinois ask the same question: Who in the heck was Casimir Pulaski? I encourage you to read up on this Revolutionary War hero and find out why all the kiddies get the day off from school. Then when your friends ask you who Pulaski is, you can say, “are you kidding me? You’ve never heard of Casimir Pulaski? What, did you flunk fourth grade?” And then proceed to enthrall them with stories of Pulaski’s exciting exploits at the Battle of Brandywine and Warren’s Tavern!

Well, whatever you decide to do, enjoy Illinois’ only Polish-American holiday, and I’ll see you all tomorrow.

Thanks to Billy Dennis, I found this site, which let me add “Recent Comments” to my sidebar (look a little to your right).

Now, you won’t have to go searching through all my old posts to find out if there are any new comments there! This has been one of my favorite features on Billy’s site, and now I’m pleased to be able to offer the same feature to my readers.

The next post I put up will be the first one on the Peoria Chronicle not written by yours truly. Instead, it will be a guest editorial by a regular reader of my blog — an anonymous commenter who goes by the handle “justanobserver.” Justanobserver has a different view than I about the current designs for the Peoria Riverfront Museum and how they fit with New Urbanism, as you will be able to tell immediately.

So, why a guest editorial? In a previous post, “Museum Project Too Big, Too Expensive,” there was quite a back-and-forth discussion going between a museum supporter and a museum critic, and both felt the use of the comments section to express themselves was a little constraining. So I made an offer:

I happen to think this discussion has been very interesting and educational. I love to hear both sides of the issue, and I feel like that’s what we’re getting here.

If you want, and if it would make this forum easier for each of you, I’ll make you an offer. Each of you write up your “side” of the argument — make your case — and send it to me via e-mail, and I will post both of them as guest editorials on my blog.

It sounds like you two are quite involved in Lakeview and can make a good case for your opinions, and I think my readers would love to hear both sides of the argument. Scott could write about what his vision is for a museum and why the Museum Collaboration plan isn’t living up to that ideal. Observer can write about why the current museum plan is better than the Heart of Peoria Plan vision. … Or however you want to organize it — I’m just trying to say you can both feel free to give your positive vision of how the museum project should go. If you’d rather not proceed in this way, that’s fine too. Just wanted to provide you with another option, if you’re interested.

My offer has been accepted, so the next post will be the very first guest editorial to run. I hope you enjoy hearing a different voice once in a while. Let me know what you think.

Note: Right now, I’m not accepting unsolicited editorials. It’s probably unlikely that I would get a flood of submissions if I were accepting them, but Billy is already providing that service on his blog, so it would seem superfluous for me to do the same. To differentiate myself, my guest editorials will be by invitation only.

The Chronicle is back.

I’ve been looking for a new WordPress theme to change things up a little for the new year. I kinda like this one, called “WuCoco.” It’s based on “Wuhan,” which is the theme I was using before; it’s very similar, actually. I found the featured picture of Peoria online; it’s credited to Christine Wainwright. It’s a great shot of Peoria, but as far as its place on my blog, it’s temporary. I’ll be replacing it with my own picture of Peoria, hopefully soon.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas!

Seriously, folks, it’s time for me to really put my nose to the grindstone and heavily focus on editing the big Christmas program for Christmas Eve at 10:30 p.m. and Christmas Day at 12 noon on WEEK-TV. Thanks to a couple snow days and some big news days I got a little carried away with the blogging stuff.

But the time has come. I wish to remain employed, and unlike Billy, I get $0 from blogging. So it must take a backseat for the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, please feel free to comment on anything you’d like in response to this post — treat it as an open thread — and don’t forget to visit the fine folks on my blogroll.

Merry Christmas!

UPDATE (12/17): There’s an article in the Journal Star about the big Christmas production I’m editing. The article by Michael Miller and including many pictures of the concert is called “Holiday Celebrations.”

I usually use Firefox for my web browser. It’s leaner and less and annoying than Internet Explorer (IE). But recently I was on a computer that only had IE on it, so I looked up my blog and noticed that, while it still looked pretty normal, there were several things askew. The top of the page (where you can click on “home” and “e-mail” and “search”), for instance, is not centered vertically in the box. Also, the lines separating the different sections of my sidebar look like they’re sticking out the left side a bit.

My question is, has my blog always looked this way, or is this something new with IE7? I’m sure I checked this on IE before and it looked okay…. I’m not sure how to fix it, but I’ll see what I can do. It’s not a big deal, but it’s going to bug me now.