Star Wars Rates High

The Revenge of the Sith was released last week. I saw it with Sam and George on Thursday night (10 p.m. showing). We stood in line with Darth Vader. The movie managed to meet high expectations. I found that it was almost as good as episode IV and much better than I or II. I was surprised at the number of parents with very young children attending the Saturday showing ( I saw the noon showing also). The movie contains material not suitable for young children. More on this post to come...

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

Today is the long awaited release date of the final Star Wars pre-quel, Revenge of the Sith. I have tickets for the 10:00 p.m. showing at Carmike 15. Sam III and George will be going with me. It is hard to believe that the first Star Wars movie premiered 28 years ago - the year Sam III was born. We plan to meet at the theatre at 9:15, about 45 minutes before the movie starts. I bought the tickets several days ago. I doubt if it is a sellout, but I expect it to be very crowded.

I read a number of reviews of the movie. Most find that the dialog is horrid. Most also agree that the action is spectacular. I'll find out for myself in about an hour.

Winning The CSS Battle

I recently completed a complex page layout using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to accomplish the presentation. I was assigned the task of creating an XHTML and CSS version of a comp that had been worked up by the staff at Southern Living magazine for the Encyclopedia of Alabama. I have spent quite a lot of time over the past few months reading many books on CSS and Web Standards. I have read several authors including Eric Meyer, Dan Shea, Molly Holzschlag. Web Standards is so the way to create web pages today. The code can be so efficient and eloquent. CSS can be frustrating at first, but web sites like www.csszengarden.com continue to insire me to learn more. Thanks to the CSS community for the many helpful techniques that have been developed and publicized over the past couple of years.

George Will Graduate From Columbus State University

Youngest son George will graduate on Saturday from Columbus State University. He will be receiving a bachelor of Business Administration degree with a major in Computer Information Systems. I am so proud of George because he has worked long and hard to earn this degree. I hope that he will use it to help him reach the career goals to which he aspires. I will be watching the graduation from the Fine Arts buildings since tickets are in short supply. I will be so happy to see this wonderful young man in his cap and gown!

TSYS Is Now The Largest

The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer reported this morning that the local credit card processor, TSYS has reached an agreement to add 50 million accounts from Capital One to its portfolio. This will bring the total to about 420 million which is a few million larger than the second largest processor, First Data. Go TSYS!

Plum Is Just Peachy!

I've spent some time over the past week working with the new ColdFusion Methodology, IDE, Framework, and all around Wizard. This free (with a small ad) software can be downloaded at www.productivityenhancement.com. The software is written by the father/son team of Adam and David Churvis. These guys have put together over the past several years, a labor of love for the ColdFusion community. Can you imagine having a working application up and running in a matter of hours rather than weeks? It can be done in Plum. Plum creates all of the add, edit, search, list, and delete forms that your application will use in a matter of minutes. Add to this, client and server-side validation with no additional work! Plum also handles authentication and authorization with a custom tag called . The Plum feature list is huge! I found that I could easily modify the header.cfm and footer.cfm files along with the baseline stylesheet to create completely different look and feels with no problem. The custom tags that makeup the product encapsulates code so that you can just add a couple of lines of code that will call 50 lines of code. This product is a real timesaver. Thanks to Adam and David!