I will be migrating the Abbey Workshop to a new web host over the weekend. I'm finishing a process I started this summer of moving my sites to http://www.dreamhost.com. A really cool web host with great features at a good price.

So there may be some funkiness with the DNS for the next week. Hopefully it will all be sorted after a week or so.

If you have seen the movie "Lost in Translation", you know that American celebrities often make ads in Japan. They are paid really well and have the satisfaction knowing no one in the US will ever see the ad. Thus they can't be accused of "selling out".

Well I ran across a site that has an archive of a number of these ads. Check out: http://www.japander.com. A lot of the ads are really funny. Makes one wonder why you would be embarassed to do something similar in the US.

I see I have been remiss in posting this month. I wanted to make a quick comment on something that I have seen on a few sites recently, mostly on news and newspaper sites.

These sites have been actually using HTML layers and CSS to pop up ads over the top of their content. Not a popup window mind you, but graphics actually popping up inside the page and covering the text. Why you would want to do this is beyond me. You must have little or no respect for your own content.

If ads are your only priorty, why have content. Just have ads. Enough said on that.

My sports blog is back up! Check it out at http://www.randomdribble.com. As you may or may not know, the name came from the fact I couldn't figure out whether I would do a basketball or a soccer blog. Since both sports use the term "dribble", thus the name.

The blog is going to focus on the NBA, the Denver Nuggets, and and fantasy basketball. There may be a few soccer posts here and there, but I think my time is better spent in hoops. I have been playing in rotisserie fantasy hoops leagues for 10 years now and really enjoy it. But I find that there really isn't a lot of good coverage of the basketball that helps fantasy owners. Newspaper stories cover the facts of the game, but that's it. Not a lot about how the team is playing. Who's playing. Who is hot, and who is not. Hopefully I can provide a little more detail on the games I get a chance to see.

About a week back I did a little playing around with XSL-FO for the first time in a while so I setup Apache FOP, and Ant to do a little testing. I wrote a quick howto so you too can benefit from my XSL-FO Sample.

This is by no means a tutorial on XSL-FO, more of a test framework you can use to start experimenting with XSL-FO. If I get a chance I will put up a few more. O'Reilly has written a book on the subject if you are interesting digging in more.