I was cruising around on the internet - googling my own name with different phrases - and I found my old Angelfire site. ( http://www.angelfire.com/apes/fuzzonline2/nascar/welcome.html ) The Angelfire site was what I used to teach myself website code four years ago. Now, most of the site does not show anything because some links have expired, and the main page redirects to this site, but I did manage to find the hard links to my NASCAR photos from 2002 at Lowe's Motor Speedway.

There are 100 of them, located here:

New, Old NASCAR Photos

Martina and John McBride have something extra-special to be thankful for this holiday season as they are expecting their third child in mid-June.

The couple announced the happy news during the Thanksgiving holiday. The new McBride will join big sisters Delaney, who will be ten in December, and Emma who is six.

“We're so blessed and thrilled to be having another baby,” says Martina. “Emma and Delaney are very excited and it will be great to share this whole experience with them.”

I don't smoke, but once a nice-looking young lady offered me a free lighter if I filled out a questionaire regarding my smoking habits. Since free things are nice, and my inhibitions had been lowered by a mixture of Jager-bombs, Corona, and friends, I said, “sure.” I spent two minutes or so pressing buttons on her hand-held survey machine, and thus, I went home with a free zippo lighter void of any Marlboro markings what-so-ever. It was nice.

Two months later I received a huge package in the mail from Marlboro. The outside of the packaging was nicely decorated with a rugged Montana-esque landscape; inside was a free Marlboro cookbook along with a coupon for great savings off America's favorite carcinogen. This wasn't some small pamphlet cookbook, either, it was completely filled with great grilling ideas . We tried some - they were delicious.

Another month went by, and with it came another gift from the people at Phillip Morris. This time I received a CD filled with songs that apparently increase the degree of 'coolness' you exude while smoking on a C-stick. I didn't recognize any of the artists on the CD, and I was afraid of subliminal “smoke me” messages - so I tossed the CD in the trash. It was a nice jesture, but I get paid to listen to music all day. Listening to music on my 'free time' usually only includes my favorite artists in my favorite genres.

Today I noticed a glimmering silver envelope resting on the edge of my coffee table. It looked like your typical piece of junk mail, but it contained the Marlboro letterhead. I knew it was another gift.

Upon opening the 'gift,' my eyes came upon a credit card looking object. My first thought was, “great, another credit card offer.” Then I thought, “wait, this looks too real to be one of those 'offer' cards.” Did they give me a REAL credit card? Did someone fill out a credit card offer for me? Was there some kind of identity theft going on?

Since my eyes are keenly trained in the art of skimming mail for bills and checks, this felt akward to me… but I had to actually read the letters on the paper attached to the card. It said “$10 for now, $25 for later.” What?!?!?! Are they giving me $10? Sure enough. The card, affixed to the paper with that cool booger glue, was a gift card in the amount of $10. In order to receive the extra $25 I would have to send in 125 Marlboro Miles - but since I don't actually smoke I was happy with my free 10-spot.

Apparently now that Phillip Morris isn't allowed to advertise in any of the expensive “main stream” mediums (like their favorites: Ranger Rick Magazine & Nickelodeon) they have to hit their core demo through the mail. What a great idea! There is no faster way to a person's heart and lungs than through cold, hard, cash.

Thank you Congress, for forcing Phillip Morris to put together the best advertising campaign I have ever been affected by.

The advertising worked, by the way, as I plan on buying Marlboro cigarettes with the $10 they gave me. I won't, however, be smoking these cigarettes. I will send them to my friends in Iraq who are smokers. Evidently the only cigarettes they have over there either 1.) are stale, 2.) are the wrong brand, or 3.) are just plain disgusting.

If you don't hit a deer this winter, you can thank my Father-in-Law Ron for taking 9 of them off of the 'streets.' Here is the deer slayer with 5 of his prized kills. The big buck on the left weighed 188lbs after it was gutted.

I realize that many of you could not care less about technical notes, so I will make this my last nerdy entry on the subject. The RSS for FuzzMartin.com and the Friends of the Show/Sites I Frequent links are once again up and running.

Since this is will be my final list of technichal notes I'll give you the specifics on how I solved my website woes.

This site is created with Macromedia Dreamweaver using the templates feature, and is powered by pMachine using a PHP/MySQL interface. Initially I had created a separate weblog for the “Friends of the Show” links, the “Sites I Frequent” links, and any other content you find in the sidebars.

That all worked great until I implemented RSS and the capability to browse FuzzMartin.com with live bookmarks.

When a live bookmark was clicked, the content passed to the home page ended up being displayed in the sidebar, instead of in the main body of the site. This made Fuzzy angry.

With the help of the online manual, I learned that it is better to put static content into pBlocks rather than their own separate weblog. This actually saved me enough time that I actually had 5 minutes to be a good husband and father. Unfortunately that time was saved while my wife and child were sleeping, so thosee 5 minutes were wasted at Addicting Games dot com.

Saving time makes Fuzzy happy!

If you are coming to the site looking for pictures of Brianna - the new ones are located in the 20041126 folder in the gallery.

New Pictures of Brianna

I had proclaimed that my friends of the show links would be up and running by the end of last weekend. I lied. The RSS Feed, however, is now working correctly. As soon as I get done with the 18 billion other irons in the fire, I will fix the friends of the show links… provided that I have any friends left. (I would insert a smiley face here, but that is childish.)

Burger King Fry Guy - Hilarious!

I use many computers each day. Hell, I have three sitting at front of me at home, one in my cubicle at work, three in studio A, three in studio B, two servers, and one to do my music programming. I interact with thirteen computers on average per day.

Nearly all of the computers I deal with have access to the internet. Eleven out of the thirteen computers that I use are Windows based (pos) computers; my two favorite computers are Macs. The Windows computers use Microsoft's antiquated Internet Explorer by default, and they use it for… well, basically everything. I know, I know, most people hear a person bash Internet Explorer and think “wow, this dude must be some kind of anti-social computer nerd,” but that is simply not the case. I am a normal guy who happens to use way to many computers to complete my daily tasks.

My Macintosh computers come stock with a great Apple-designed program called “Safari.” While Safari is not perfect, it is 1) faster, and 2) less pop-up prone than IE. I do not like the way Safari parses CSS, though. There are many sites, like BootsandSabers.com that get jumbled when I open them with Safari. Most people in this world do not have a Mac, or Safari for that matter, so it is impossible for every web designer/programmer to design for Safari. Apple knows that - Apple needs to work on that.

My new favorite browser is Mozilla Firefox. I started using the standard Mozilla browser about a year ago. Then I decided to test out their beta version of Firefox. It was (in Tommy Boy voice) AWESOME! Especially on my Windows computers. It is faster than both Safari and IE, way faster than Netscape, and the pop-up blocker on Firefox is the best I've ever seen. Mozilla has just released Firefox 1.0, the good-to-go version, which I am now using on five of the computers I use most often - including both Macs.

There are some other amazing benefits of using Firefox. You'll especially enjoy the download, it's only 4.6MB, so even if you are still using dialup you'll be able to download Firefox in just 10 minutes. That's about 20 minutes less than it takes some dialup users to download Microsoft's “oops we forgot something” Internet Explorer updates. Dialup users will be even happier once they have the Fox installed, as the decrease in downloading times is tremendous.

If you're still using Internet Explorer and you're sick of your slow computer and constant viral scares - invest in Firefox. Afterall, it's free!!!

More pictures from my beautiful baby girl. This time she is joined by her friend Ashton, who apparently aspires to be a dentist - see pics.

New Pictures of Brianna

I am having an issue with my pMachine setting on something, causing articles to be displayed in my sidebars rather than where they belong. I have had to disable the “Sites I Frequent” and “Friends of the Show” links until I can get those issues resolved.

Also, if you use the RSS feed for FuzzMartin.com, you will experience an incorrect link for the time being. All articles will point to the main page with no distinction made for the separate articles.

I expect these issues will be fixed before Sunday.

In high school, we had a bad ass football team, but we never made it to state. We came close 3 years in a row, but we could never get past the 2^nd or 3^rd round of the playoffs. Last Friday, Coach Keith Hensler led the Mukwonago Indians to the WIAA State Finals for the first time EVER!

Congratulations to Coach Hensler and the entire Mukwonago Indians team. Good luck at state. Make us old guys proud.

Fuzz High School Football - Circa 1995

Fuzz Junior High Football - Circa 1990
Fuzz Martin (age 13) with Steve Zindars

As I sit here, congratulating myself with a Bud Light after successfully completing my Mac OSX 10.3.6/Mac OSX 10.2.8/Windows 98SE network, I have realized I am the kid I used to make fun of in school. I'm surprised I wasn't the kid with tape on his glasses pushing the VCR cart down the hallway during 5th period. If only I had this much direction and drive when I was 16…

Well, at least I got chicks, right?

Lord, help me.

UPDATE: I just realized that I spent last night upgrading to the new versions of PHP, MySQL, and PHPMyAdmin on my eMac… I really need to get out more.

I found this little gem while cruising the web. I'll never get up to get a beer again.

Virtual Bartender

Our prayers are with Bob Cahow, Rob Svoboda, and the entire 1st Battalion Company D of the 128th Infantry in River Falls. Their unit shipped out last Tuesday to Mississippi and they will eventually (if not already) head to Iraq.

Bob is our friend Mandi's husband and Rob is her brother. Please pray that they return safely upon accomplishing their mission.

Our prayers are also with my fraternity brother Pat Sykes who has been in Baghdad since February. Pat's birthday is November 20th. If you'd like to send him a card or care package the address is:

Pat Sykes
266th Ord. Co.
APO, AE 09378-1785

God Speed.

Bob's Unit

Bob Close Up

Bob with Bob and Mandi's new dog

The FuzzMartin.com Gallery is being put together. I finally found a script/program that funtions well and is easy to customize.

FuzzMartin.com Gallery

***Note: Gallery is best used with your browser window maximized and all sidebars hidden***

The jury has found Scott Peterson Guilty of 1st and 2nd degree murder. Let the appeals begin.

Brianna is going to feed our family with her new career as a Kung Fu Movie Actor.

Advertiser: SBC Yellow Pages
Medium: Radio

Context: The new slogan being used by SBC Yellow Pages is: “Life's Most Used Book.”

Thoughts: I wouldn't consider myself a religious zealot, but the first thing I think of when I hear “Life's Most Used Book” is: The Holy Bible. Whenever I hear SBC's new slogan I can't help but think if their church is filled with Yellow Pages under the pews.

Priest: “…our next reading is from Automobiles: Rebuilding and Repainting, page 53…”

The slogan is quite offensive. I know what the creative team was going for when they wrote it - but “Life's Most Used Book” taken already. It's time for another brainstorming session.

Copy Tip:
Too many business owners believe they need their street address in their commercials. They Don't! Have you ever tried to find a company based on its street address? It's damn near impossible. Especially if the address sounds like this:

VO: “…visit our new store at West 1-34-56 South 4-57 Highway Q in Menomonee Falls…”

Nobody is going to find that address. No one will even remember that address. A better solution is to simply tell the listener where the company is located:

VO: “…visit our new store next to Home Depot on Highway Q in Menomonee Falls…”

Some business owners have hang-ups about mentioning other businesses in their spots. They shouldn't worry about it - it's not like you're listing the new sale prices at that business. If anything it is just an easy way for the listener to realize where the company is located. Plus, the neighboring business may appreciate the mention enough to spark a nice relationship between the companies. Of course, you never want to say it's “next to” one of the business's competitors.

You never want to overstate the location, however. Just this week I had a commercial come through that had THREE entire lines of location.

VO: “…our new store is located just off Highway 45 on Paradise Drive in West Bend. We are in the Paradise Plaza in between Big Apple Bagels and Quiznos Sub. We're right across from the Home Depot.”

If I was listening to that on the radio I would have changed the channel at “in between.” If the business's call-to-action is
well-written and well-stated, the listener will find you - don't worry about that.

We changed the above example to:

VO “…our new store is located in the Paradise Plaza, across from the Home Depot in West Bend.”

That change freed up nearly 20 words that we used to enhance the advertiser's call-to-action.

To sum up proper location information:
1. Never use street addresses
2. Never overstate your position
3. Always make it easy for your listener to find the business in as few words as possible.
4. If the offer is worth-it, the listeners will find it.