Like I said, it takes days to develop a new design even  when I start with a proven baseline.  So I stopped.  My time is too valuable to do something which I can outsource or pick up a professional looking theme from Woo Themes.

But sometimes I get an idea for starting a new niche and dream about what theme to use even before I’ve worked on developing the content.  I  know that it is going to take a couple of months to get ranked in the SERPS and the only ones really looking at the sites are bots.   Anyway the dreaming lasts for a few wasted hours causing nothing but grief when I could have done productive work.

After the content on the site is aged, I install one of my canned themes I use for Adsense or eBay depending on the type of niche the market falls into.

Lately, I’ve been looking (dreaming?) into updating my canned niche themes using Thesis. I just need a simple design that I can baseline without spending days reinventing the wheel again every time Wordpress comes out with a new version.

However after just reading Lis’ Frugal Theme Review, there may be another platform other than Thesis which you can quickly customize including:

1. Frugal’s ability to have unique pages layouts with either no sidebars or sidebars unique to that page. In fact you can develop an entire business website using WordPress pages only with these options.
2. Frugal Theme’s easy use of images which uses WordPress’s native support for thumbnails which means associating a thumbnail with a post’s extract as simple as clicking one button.
3. Frugal’s ability for you to choose colors for your text and backgrounds by either using a color picker tool or by typing in the hexadecimal code (much easier to get a number of different elements exactly the same color by typing in the code).
4. Frugal Theme’s code is very efficient – that means its fast loading on your website – a factor which Google is taking more and more into consideration.
5. There is fantastic support for Frugal from the detailed step by step videos from the developer to an active support forum where questions are answered quickly.

While I’m more familiar with Thesis, I’m going to have to take a second look at Frugal.  It looks like you can produce some really professional looking sites that I can create that are basic and simple for my niche sites.

I woke up at 11:55 all prepared to drive over to GameStop to pick up the game I paid for on my lunch hour 12 hours ago; however, the deep sleep prevented my tired bones from leaving the couch.

So today — if they still have my copy — I’ll pick it up but I can only wait until tonight to see if GOW III is worth the time and money to play.

I’ve been struggling using 3rd party solutions to post whereby many simply don’t work very well.  My biggest complaint is that when you take a picture and want to post it to your blog, it doesn’t show up there.

For example, if you use PixelPipe to post to your blog, the photo is hosted on their server instead of on hosting account.  Here, WP accels by uploading your photo directly to your site.

Take this photo below.  It’s not interesting, other than I took the backside of the DVR to get the serial number since Time Warner wanted to know what it was when I tried to activate the box.

Backside of the Time Warner DVR

I don’t know why they would ask the information other than I have two cable boxes in the house and they need to isolate which one to activate.  (The simple solution would be to activate both boxes at once and not have the customer unrack the cable box just to get the s/n on the bottom of the box.)

Anyway, the WP Droid Application is incredible if you like to blog from your phone.  I don’t care to plog other than uploading photos to my digital photos site.  Now if there only was someway to plog using dictation …

The first time it failed, the NO test failed.  This usually is an adjustment so that more of the unburnt fuel is sucked backed into the ignition system instead of going out the tail pipe.   A simple adjustment that most mechanics can repair for under $100.

We took our Avalon to the Toyota dealer and they did the adjustment, but this caused the hydrocarbon test to fail.  The dealer said they had to repair the catalytic converter for a hefty $1,700.

We sorta gave up the idea of repairing the emission system and decide that we were going to get a new SUV instead.  We narrowed our new car choice down to the Toyota Highlander since it has plenty of room for us.  Even with the Limited upgrade version, the price is not too high and keeps us in the mid 30k range including taxes and fees.

I was so suprised that cataytic converter repair was so expensive, that I called around a few muffer shops in town (Thousand Oaks).  All of the quotes were under $500 so we took a chance at Competition Muffer on 50 Skyline Drive and the mechanic installed a new one in under an hour.  He said that we need to put on a good ten miles before retesting the smog.

The smog test passed and we’re good for another two years before we need test again.  This should give us some time to consider before buying our next car.

I’m really big on Virtual PC and keep my personal and business expenses running and backed up on virtual computers that I run on my pristine copies of Windows 2000 Pro.

The virtual drives are kept small to fit on a 4g DVD which makes backup of the entire system as simple as burning a new DVD.  Before making drastic changes, I always create a copy of the file containing the virtual drive image in case something goes wrong.

Of course it did.

I ran the disk cleanup utility and all the unused files, old system upgrades were compressed or deleted leaving with 1GB of free space.  Plenty of space to install TurboTax.

Apparently .NET needed to be installed taking up 200 MB with the usual reboot.  Somehow pci.sys was corrupted in the intall or the disk cleanup utility messed it up.

I had a backup the backup copy, but it took 30 minutes to do the cleanup.  I decided to mount the virtual drive on another Virtual PC and copy a good version of pci.sys to the bad version.  Rebooted the QuickBooks and hoped nothing else was dorked.

That seemed to resolve the problem and I continued with the TurboTax install and everything installs fine, except …

We’ve noticed that you’re running Windows 2000.  This is the last year that you can run TurboTax using this operating system…

TurboTax, you’re killing me.  Now I got to move my data to an Windows XP Pro Virtual PC.

The first time I noticed this was that my credit card payment was delivered late. The second time was a letter we sent to Alabama that took over 30 days to deliver.  The strange thing was that instead of being postmarked in Thousand Oaks, it was postmarked in New Jersey.

So, mail your Christmas cards early this year. But at least there are 12 days in Christmas and the USPS will have until Jan 5, 2009 to deliver them.