Everyone gets a funny hat here in…
Lunchlady Land!
Regardless of your political views or persuasions you are probably disturbed by how slanted political ads tend to be. Here’s a geeky look at political ads (sorry if it doesn’t fit the theme very well):
It’s true! Just like these people…
Of course, I’m also a Mac. 
I may not let them watch it this young but they can still re-enact my favorite scenes for me.
We finally have furniture in the last unfurnished room in our home. We’ve only been here in Texas for 9 months. You’d think we’d have done this by now. We got an outstanding deal at Rooms To Go.
I haven’t posted anything here for a long while. I’ve been busy living. I recently updated my iPhone to the 2.0 software and yesterday WordPress released a blog client for the iPhone. I had to try it, of course. You tell me — is this going to result in more posts? Or perhaps just short ones occasionally? Time will tell. At any rate, this is being written from my iPhone.
All that you know is about to change…
That’s what Aslan said in the trailer. He was trying to warn you to not go see this movie. I won’t spoil it for you other than to say that this movie barely resembles the book from which it was derived. Please allow me to introduce to you a verb that we created a while back.
Eragon verb
The movie Eragon was a horrible adaptation of its namesake book, which was rather unfortunate. The most recently eragonned movie was The Spiderwick Chronicles. If you saw the movie without ever having read the books you won’t know what I mean. But the original namesake and The Spiderwick Chronicles can’t hold a candle to what they did to Prince Caspian.
To say that they eragonned the movie is too kind an assessment. We were excited to see the next installment of the Narnia series. We even went to see the midnight premier. What we saw was more than merely disappointing. What we saw would have C.S. Lewis turning in his grave fast enough to power a small city. People actually got up and left the theater during the show. We sat through this train-wreck hoping that at some point it would improve but alas, it did not. We might have left too, but were too polite to get up in front of all the other viewers (we were in the middle of the row, 3 rows up from the walkway in a newer Cinemark).
If this movie makes all of its money back, I’ll be surprised. I will not pay full price to see another sequel directed, produced or written by the same team. In fact, I want my money back. I want my two hours and twenty minutes back. Disney and Walden Media should be ashamed of what they’ve done to C.S. Lewis’ work. Boo!
Or at least I wish I was. That was a really cool movie. I can’t wait for the sequel.
That’s it. No spoilers from me. You’ll just have to go and see it for yourself.
I was awestruck watching this:
This absolutely floored me. I have never thought that I’d be able to truly realize my creative ideas since I haven’t got a lot of time to work on practicing guitar or other instruments. This allows me so much wiggle-room in that department I can even envision creating an entire symphony orchestra from a few samples. This is simply amazing. I can’t wait!
It’s rather interesting to read about schools these days. A year or so ago, I’d have been quick to jump on the allegations of threats and attacks made a few days ago. I’m glad that I don’t have to print a retraction now. Have a look. I think her parents are doing the right thing letting her face the consequences of her choices. They’ve been dignified in apologizing to all involved and in letting everyone know that the proper authorities will be handling things from this point. It does illustrate a point — it’s not always the parents’ fault if a child misbehaves. I can’t say for sure that such is the case here, but it certainly seems as though the parents have been trying to do the right things at home, based solely on their reaction to what unfolded.
In other news, a girl was beaten by six of her classmates for thirty minutes at someone’s home. The perpetrators filmed this incident and posted video footage of the attack on YouTube, apparently in retaliation for things the victim had posted on MySpace. As cold and callous as these acts are by themselves, the behavior exhibited by some of the perpetrators as they were in the process of being arrested and booked into the local jail goes even farther:
Judd said the most shocking thing about the attack is how lightly the alleged assailants took their actions. Vieira asked him if they showed any remorse when they were arrested.“None at all,” he said. “When we had them arrested and in detention, they were laughing and joking, ‘Guess we’re not going to go to the beach on this spring break.’ One girl actually asked our detective, ‘Am I going to be released in time to go to cheerleading practice tomorrow?’ “
I can’t even begin to understand such cold inhumanity. Apparently one girl tried to warn her, but what of the remainder? I don’t understand. Are they desensitized to violence? Are they so filled with aggression that they no longer behave as rational humans but rather as creatures of base instincts and passions?
Schools may not be the problem, but they certainly don’t seem to be helping the problem either. My own memories recall a certain prey or be preyed upon element to school, but no one ever dared take it as far as these girls did.
The victim suffered a concussion, loss of hearing in her left ear and reduced vision in her left eye. According to this report the victim will be homeschooled now. I can’t say that I blame her. Going back to school would be rather difficult, leave alone the psychological mending which will need to take place before she will feel safe around her peers again.
How do you teach your children to treat others with dignity and respect? The victim apparently wrote some rather threatening and incendiary things about the other girls on MySpace. This doesn’t make the beating justified — not by any stretch. But would the perpetrators have had a reason to even consider attacking her if she’d treated them with dignity and respect? Why did the perpetrators feel like their animalistic, violent attack on the victim was justified? Didn’t their parents teach them to resolve their differences in more constructive ways? Did they not get that memo? If they did, what made them set it aside and choose to behave so cruelly? What about the girl who made false accusations? Does she not realize how damaging false accusations can be to someone’s character and destiny?
Man’s inhumanity to man apparently knows no bounds. I believe that the best way to combat this is to begin at home. Parents have the duty and obligation to teach their children to respect others: Respect their beliefs, respect their personal boundaries, respect their culture. Treat them as you would like to be treated — with respect and dignity. If children don’t learn these things at home, the chances that they’ll learn them on their own at some future point drop dramatically. What do you think? How do you feel?
While this story is (to me) about a gift, it starts out as a gag Improv Everywhere cooked up. The premise is that they would make a little league baseball game between 10 year-olds into “the best game ever” — which basically made it a major league type of event. Follow the link and read the story, watch the video clip. It is funny, make no mistake. But at the same time they made the event extremely wonderful for the children and their parents. NBC sportscasting on a jumbotron? The Goodyear blimp? At a little league game? They even did a post-game press conference!
This story got me thinking about how it must have felt to be one of those kids. How cool would you feel if you had TV cameras pointed at you? How about people you’ve never even met chanting your name and cheering for you? This was an amazing gift to give. I think that must be why NBC and Goodyear were willing to help out with this “stunt.” Improv Everywhere tries to make sure there are no victims or anyone being hurt by its pranks, so far as I have seen. Something like this could have been malicious or so over the top that it was hokey and embarrassing. It wasn’t though. They made those kids feel terrific, even if it was only for a day. I think that such a gift is amazing. I hope that they do more like it and that it inspires others to do similar things.
Instead of “Candid Camera” styled pranks where the usually good-natured target is embarrassed but relieved at the end, what if a new style of prank were set up where the target is treated to something like these little leaguers? I think it’s an untapped market. I also think it takes more work to put together and pull it off. I’d love to see it done, though. It’d make the world a better place, or at least a happier place — which is better in my book.
All told though – it was a great bit. I wish I was there to witness it in person!!
UPDATE: The NBC/Goodyear blimp participation makes sense in light of this comment off of digg:
From the I.E. site, looks as though this was performed back in March 2007. Also from the I.E. site, they were working with NBC on a pilot version of the show for national broadcast. This must be one of the pranks they lined up with the network for use in the pilot. The financial backing needed, the clearance to use the NBC logos… and it would also explain why a year-old prank was just published this week – NBC probably needed to “release” the prank to I.E. given they weren’t going to pick up the show.
I had some issues with my cable internet service, of late. I took the liberty of taking a screen-cap of the speed test results:
By the way, the exceptional ping time on the “before” picture was an anomaly. That tended to be in the 87ms range. Also, the “after” picture was going through my proxy server where the “before” was not. All things considered, keep in mind that this was going through a cable modem, a wi-fi router, 2 GigE switches and a proxy server. That’s a nice ping time by any stretch.
I don’t know. I may be getting bored of the whole blog thing. It’s been nearly 6 months since I last posted, and that was only an announcement that I was moving. I no longer feel compelled to write about a lot of things.
Perhaps this is because I no longer feel it prudent to poke fun of other’s views in an acerbic manner. This has been a staple of the internet for a decade now, but it’s become tired and boring, even when it seems that such satire and occasional vitriol are deserved. Perhaps I’ve become to cautious in my writing. I lack some of the boldness I once had, but perhaps this is not entirely accurate. It is more likely that my desire to point out flaws in reasoning or logic has been tempered by wisdom. I just don’t feel like it’s my job to do that. Don’t ask me why I felt that way in the past. I don’t know the answer to that question yet.
As such, this blog is dying on the vine. I could still write about my observations, but I am a bit hesitant to do so. It’s not as though there’s a dearth of silliness and stupidity in the world, I am simply recalcitrant now. I have no desire to share my insights with the world at large. Why are my opinions important enough to warrant publishing them? I don’t know. I do know, however, that this site presents a very raw and sometimes embarrassing look at how my thoughts have changed and grown all neatly arranged in a timeline. Perhaps that is enough by itself.
I read many blogs and news sources day by day. I have found it interesting to observe how some bloggers opinions change and some do not. I have seen myself change, and I hope that it is for the better. It would be curious to do a study of bloggers to see what has changed about them over the course of years. The information could only be drawn from their writings. I would be very curious to know how many change and for what reasons. Equally interesting would be how many do not change even so much as a single viewpoint.
Being static in the world today seems impossible, and yet the evidence is around us that many people do not change their minds, once set. An opinion formed in some of these seems like a document set in stone, never to be altered or edited, even when experience and evidence point to differing conclusions.
I’m rambling now, though. And I still can’t think of anything to say.
Yes, I’m moving to Texas. I’ve accepted a job in Austin and I will be there on the 29th.
Perhaps I’ll blog more once I’ve done this. We’ll have to see. Things are likely to be busy in the meanwhile.
At any rate, my family and I are moving to Texas. I’ll be going first in order that I might get situated. My wife will be joining me to help in hunting for a home while my mother-in-law keeps an eye on our children. My wife will be with me for a week or so.
We barely listed our home on Monday and a realtor is coming to show the house tonight. We could only be so fortunate as to have someone want to buy our house so soon.
That’s all the update I have time for right now. I will have to keep this updated more regularly after I move.
We’re headed off to Southern Utah tomorrow to do some camping with a few of our friends and their families. Among the fun things we have planned are some stargazing (with accompanying Mac laptop running “Starry Night” software) and a big Mother’s Day breakfast prepared by the men.
I’ll see about taking some photos and perhaps chronicle our journeyings. Hopefully we’ll all come back intact and uninjured. Sunburn and heatstroke are likely to be the chief worries. It’s barely May and the temperature is set to hit the high 90s (that’s above 35 C for those who use centigrade).
Camping is one of the few pleasures I can say I enjoy that are completely without computers. I’d be lying if I said “gadget-free” because I still find my way to get some of those into my gear. Most of those are camping related, though. Cooking equipment, lanterns, backpacks. etc. I can’t escape being a geek entirely, now can I?
This won’t be the first time I’ve gone camping in a hot, sandy environment (the site is named Snow Canyon, which seems a strange choice of names during the summer months). I prefer high mountain tops and alpine meadows and less dense forests, however. I especially enjoy it if there’s a lake or fishable stream nearby. Come to think of it, the sounds of wind and water are inextricably connected to camping for me. I miss the white noise combination of a breeze in the trees with a babbling brook nearby. I feel more connected to nature when I have those extra sensations. Besides, it’s usually cooler at that altitude.
Have a happy Mother’s Day weekend!
