BrianShelledy.com

Just to give some of you who are looking at this website some information about how things are going with us, I’m not sure what they are showing on the national news.  We have the local news streaming to us over the internet.  Ironically, our cable is out but the internet is still working! Anyway, we still do not have power yet, and according to the local authorities, our power company has suffered a catastrophic failure which will prevent us from getting power for 2-4 weeks.  This morning, another thunderstorm came through as a result of a cold front, unrelated to the hurricane.  This woke all of us up with some heavy lightning, thunder, and rain.  Fortunately for us, this did not cause us any extra problems, however there is some more significant flooding closer to the cost for our fellow Houstonians. 

Our family is still doing well.  The generator that we were able to purchase is providing us some comfort, and we shared some of that with our neighbors yesterday as we had a sort of hurricane party.   It was good to get together with them and have a outlet for some of the stress associated with some of the damage we sustained.  We also had alot to celebrate as our neighborhood escaped without any injury. 

For now, we’re just taking some time to relax for a little bit, and soon we will get ready to begin cleaning things up.  We have alot of supplies here and we hear that the grocery stores will be opening again soon.  Again, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for thinking about us and praying for us.  We believe that we have been truly blessed to escape alot of the damage that our fellow Houstonians and neighbors have experienced.

Tree down in my Front Yard

EDIT: Pictures

EDIT: More Pictures 6:45 PM 9/13/08

Well, if you’ve been paying attention to the news, Hurricane Ike came through the Houston area this weekend.  I have lived here for some years, and I’ve never had a storm this bad. Of course, the only other hurricane we’ve been through was Rita, but we didn’t have any damage then.  As you can see from the picture, though, we have some damage this time.  The tree in the picture used to stand in our front yard, but now it’s fallen down across our driveway.  We had our cars parked in the driveway, and fortunately saw that the tree was going to come down.  We took the risk and moved our cars into the street, and made it ok.  5 minutes later, the tree came down.  While we were outside, we saw that there were a number of trees down on our street.  Also, we have a tree down in our backyard that looks like it crashed through our fence.

The power is out right now, but our recent generator purchase is allowing us access to power, internet, TV and coffee.  It’s been a long night, but it looks like we’re all going to be ok now.  I’ll try and post more pictures as I get them, and post more information as I find it out.

UPDATE: Read more »

This is just Ridiculous.

Today I was looking at the transcripts for various segments of the Rush Limbaugh show – I listen to him in the mornings but usually can only get the first hour before I have to go to class – and I came across an interesting segment on how George Bush and Batman had alot in common.  After seeing the Dark Knight, I look back at the movie and there’s alot of truth to it, in my humble opinion.  As far as whether it was deliberate or not, I leave that to you.  But for your reading pleasure, here’s a couple links for you:

Conservatism and the Dark Knight - Rush

What Bush and Batman Have in Common – Referenced Wall Street Journal Article

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.6, as well as upgrading some of the underlying apps.  Let me know if you run into any issues.

EDIT: I also changed themes. Hope you like it.

Well, what a political race it’s been so far… I thought it’s about time that I weigh in on what I think about what’s going on here.  This is probably the least excited I’ve ever been about an election, not that I’ve been able to participate in that many.  However, looking at this from a conservative point of view, I don’t really see a big win in either candidate.  However, I sill have to vote for McCain I think, because I am frankly scared of what could happen if Obama gets elected. 

As it stands, there are a number of problems with him as a Candidate.  First off, he has no experience.  He has not produced any significant legislation.  As we’ve seen him come up through the ranks of the Democratic party, I think that it’s easy to see how everyone was so easily swayed.  He definitely has a charisma that we haven’t really had much of for a while.  I’ll admit, though Bush does have a few highlights, his speeches are more ridiculed then any president in my lifetime.  However, if you see Obama speaking without a prepared speech and teleprompter, then you might be surprised to find his speaking skills are not what they’ve been said to be.  Read more »

One of the big issues currently on the Democratic Campaign trail is weather or not the votes in the Florida and Michigan state primaries should be counted towards the presidential nomination.  Right now there is a lot of press going back and forth on the issue.  Some people don’t want them to count because the votes were not taken seriously, and in Michigan’s case, Senator Obama was not even on the ballot.  The other side of the ticket is that we shouldn’t disenfranchise Florida and Michigan voters by not counting them. 

Read more »

I haven’t been able to update in a while, and I just wanted to let everyone know I am still alive.  I have been busy with school, the semester is winding down and that means everything is due.  This weekend was kindof a relax weekend for me because some of my major projects were due last week.  This week shouldn’t be nearly as bad, and I only have one more project to really worry about before finals in three weeks. 

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, I have really been wanting to finish another part of Impulse that I’ve been working on and write a blog article about the whole “disenfranchising” of Florida and Michigan, but I just haven’t had time to do so.  But, I just want to let you know that there is still plenty to think about in my head, so while I’ve been down, I am not out. 

In all honesty, I probably could have written some of the stuff I wanted to if it weren’t for Facebook apps taking all my clicks.  Never fear, when I can do more then mindless clicking in my free time I’ll be back.

I recently upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 and everything is looking good.  Sorry if you tried to access within the last 24 hours and things didn’t work out like you thought.  I have finished the upgrade process now, though, so it should be good to go. 

In other news, school is taking up alot of my time lately, so that’s why you haven’t seen me update in a while.  I will update more soon though, I promise!  Also, IPower claims that they have done some work on the MySQL servers that my website runs off of, so hopefully we’ll see some performance gains soon.  Thanks for your patience as the performance issues get resolved.

It seems like some of the SQL issues I’ve been having are being resolved, though it still is a bit tempramental.  I hope that it continues to do well, so that it is easier for me to update more.  I have updated Impulse, though, with a post called Words to Live By.  Hopefully you can enjoy it.