William Youmans

It's funny how listening to music can be such an emotional experience. Here is a list of bands that are particularly important to me:

Making April makes me think of driving through the green Iowa corn fields on a warm summer day. This is the only CD I had in my car for the first few months of moving to Iowa in 2006. Since I didn't know anyone yet, I used to drive through all the small towns North and West of Cedar Rapids blasting Making April in my red 1991 Mazda 323 hatchback.

The Weepies make me think of winter in Iowa. In as much as I despised Iowa winters, listening to The Weepies brings back really good memories. I rented a basement during my second winter in Iowa. After helping the landlord shovel the driveway, I would go into the cozy basement and drink tea while The Weepies played in the background.

Rage Against the Machine makes me think of my senior year of high school. My friends and I would drive all over southeast Charlotte blasting RATM.

Saves the Day reminds me, oddly, of my first Counting Crows concert. In April of my senior year of high school, I drove with my friend Andrew up to Grantham, PA for a small college show. On that trip I was introduced to Saves the Day when some guy left the CD playing in the dorm bathroom for those few days I stayed there.

Hard Candy, the Counting Crows album, reminds me of Washington DC. I got this CD in high school and listened to it exclusively on a family thanksgiving trip to DC.

I could go on...

Oct 19th, 2009

I have created a new web development company: Klanoma Web Services. My goal for this project is not to make money, but to build up my web development skill set and web portfolio. I have spent the last few days brainstorming, and I think I have developed a decent logo and site design. Now, I need to write the CSS and polish the logo (Inkscape is awesome!). I'll keep you posted.

Klanoma: Providing professional web solutions since 2009.
Klanoma: Salt Lake City's premier web development solution.
Klanoma: We make all your dreams come true.

Obviously, I'm still working on the slogan...

Oct 10th, 2009

I have come to the conclusion that the reason I let my website (and my software development skills in general) lapse over the last several years is that I sold my PC and switched completely over to Mac OS X. Don't get me wrong. I think Mac is by far the best computing platform out there, but I find it easier to use certain windows based tools to be productive.

I have made it my goal to get back into software development and web design. So expect to see some changes on gotwilly.net in the coming months. I also have ideas for a few projects that will allow me to pull out and dust off some of my parked domains!

Mar 29th, 2009

I recommend that you check out Songbird. It is a new open source cross-platform media player project based on Mozilla. I am still evaluating it, but it has the potential of replacing iTunes for me! Because it is powered by Mozilla, there is a large community developing add-ons that make the application very customize. I have found add-ons that allow iPod syncing and scrobbling to last.fm (two requirements of any media player in my opinion). Now, as soon as Songbird interfaces with my video podcast feeds, I will use it as my primary media player. Songbird can be downloaded for free from getsongbird.com.

I am currently looking for a new software development project to work on in my spare time. I want to learn more about web based application development. Specifically, I want to come up with a project that forces me to learn how to use AJAX and Ruby on Rails. Let me know if you have any ideas...

Oct 11th, 2008

'nuff said

Apr 12th, 2008

I am safely moved to Iowa. It was an interesting wintery trip.

Dec 31st, 2007

In the time since the last post I have graduated from college and gone to spend Christmas at my parent's house. I am having a good time packing and Christmas shopping before I move again to a VERY cold place!

Dec 19th, 2007

It seems like every single political headline lately has been about Oprah! She decided to publicly throw her support in the direction of Obama for President. Come on people! Who didn't see that coming? The sad thing is that Obama will probably get a lot of support because a certain demographic (*read middle aged women) would jump off a bridge of Oprah told them too. Don't get me wrong, I think Obama would make a great president, I just think people should base their political decisions on the issues, not on who is supporting whom.

Dec 10th, 2007

Class is finally over! I have been completely stressed out over the past couple of days, but now it is time to relax until graduation next week.Did anyone watch Mitt Romney's speech in Houston the other day called "Faith in Politics?" Everyone was expecting a speech on how Romney's Mormonism is reflected in his view of politics, similar to JF Kennedy's speech on his Catholicism. I didn't actually get to watch it, but from the things I have read, it was a very generic speech. I saw it summed up as: "I am a man of faith, and it really doesn't matter which faith."Thats enough for now.

Dec 7th, 2007

I am having a lot of trouble with formatting with the new blog engine. It seems to automatically remove <br> tags from my html. Also, I was looking at the old entries that I imported from blogger.com and it seems that all the quote marks were replaced by weird characters like "�." Please keep this in mind if you ever go back to browse the archives. If I have a large block of free time someday, I will go through and fix them.

I need a motivation boost!

Dec 4th, 2007

My Blog

I am in the process of porting over my old wordpress MySQL database over to my own custom CMS. It will take me a little while to develop a user friendly front-end, so for now, this page only shows the last ten posts. Check back soon for more updates.