more will be revealed

I remember being in high school when the first laser pointers started popping up in classrooms, only they weren’t being used by the teachers. Mischievous students would slyly point them at the teachers bald spot, or their rear, and of course all of the class would laugh. I wanted one at first, but the novelty of a laser pointer soon faded away and they became more of a nuisance than anything. Well, a nuisance when people pointed them at me. I’ll admit, it’s still funny to see a someone walk around a room not knowing a laser dot is on them. I’m reminded of a hilarious Seinfeld episode where George is seemingly stalked by an unknown person who keeps pointing a laser at George, no matter where he seems to go in the city. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’ll have to find it on DVD or keep watching the reruns.

I say all of this because I found out yesterday that the lasers you can get today are not the same ones available ten years ago! My friend Kent is a middle school science teacher and one of his students brought in a GREEN laser for Kent to demonstrate in class. The laser was so powerful that you could easily see the beam in a darkened room. Kent brought over the laser last night as well as several small mirrors. We used those as well as a glass of water to bounce the laser beam around. Here are some cool pictures that I took of us messing around with the laser:

Check out the beam bending through the water

Bouncing off of a mirror into the water

Reflecting off a mirror and then off of the surface of the water

Cat’s Cradle?

As you can tell, I’ve changed up the look of the site to what is now before you. Smashing Magazine had a post listing 83 Wordpress themes that they found to be quite good. I browsed through the list and came across Gridlock, which I like quite a bit. It has an online magazine sort of feel, is clean and elegant, and is built about as one can build a Wordpress theme, from what I could gather. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

I’m thinking about changing up the look of my blog…again. I’ve had this Simpla theme running for oh, I don’t know…four months or so? I do like the clean styling and fast page-loads it allows, but I’ve got that itch again for a new look. Wordpress makes it quite easy to change the look of the site by simply pointing and clicking on a new theme in the Admin area of the blog. If there were a ton of coding and design involved, I’d be much more hesitant to change things up.

This urge to change comes usually after I visit a visually appealing blog running on Wordpress. I’m considering using the Unsleepable theme running on this blog or the Cutline theme running on this one. I’m leaning towards the Unsleepable look…but who knows, maybe I’ll install them both and see which one I like better.

I know I haven’t posted much of anything meaningful lately, other than some videos and pictures, but I plan on getting back in the saddle and writing something worthwhile soon. Until then…

For some reason, I can’t get any emails at my tomosypian.com addy. So if you’ve tried to email me in the last day or so, I didn’t get it. I’m working with my hosting company to get things fixed, so until then use an alternate email addy of mine to get in touch with me. Or leave a comment. Just don’t send me a message on my contact form on this site…that won’t work either.

::UPDATE::

The support team of my hosting company was able to point out the problem and now my email is again up and running. It was actually a user error, with me being the user. : ) DOH! I turned on a setting in my webmail setup to shoot any unrouted mail to a blackhole. I had figured it would stop the spam I was getting to fake @tomosypian.com addresses. Well, I didn’t have my email account setup correctly and all of my mail in the last 18 hours or so got dumped into the blackhole. I’ve fixed the config of my email addresses and shouldn’t miss any more emails now.

Right now I’m at Granger Community Church in Indiana (near South Bend) participating in an IT Roundtable discussion with fellow IT staff members from churches across the country. I’m learning so much! And I’m very encouraged to know that other guys in much larger contexts are dealing with the same issues I am. I am not alone. : ) It’s a one day thing so I’ll be back home tomorrow. I’ll be sure to update what I walk away with!