the way to a man’s heart is through…
... that little 3ft x 3ft tile-floored, three-walled vestibule area just inside the front door.
Well, at least to this man's heart, on this night, it is.
Keaton had a friend drop by for a few hours this evening. At one point, he was pulling around Chicken Dance Elmo in the little wagon while Keaton followed close on his heels wheeling her baby doll in the stroller. They'd circle their little procession around the living room room a few times and then head for the front room. On their way Keaton would shout, "Going to our house!," and her friend would echo, "Our house!"
Their house, such as it was, was that little 3ft x 3ft tile-floored, three-walled vestibule area just inside the front door. They'd both cram in there with the wagon and stroller and baby doll and Chicken Dance Elmo, and be "home." At first, Sharaun and I thought it was a fluke. But, after they did it several times, we decided they were really playing house. It was the coolest thing to watch. Where the heck do kids get this stuff?
Now I will tell a short story.
In fifth grade, our class went on a field trip to the town's public pool. Somehow, a friend and I convinced one of the girls in our class to sneak a camera, which we provided, into the girls locker room. Her instructions, once inside, were to snap dirty pictures of a certain other girl in our class. I have no idea why she agreed to this, maybe she didn't like the other girl. The boys and girls split and went to their respective rooms to change into swimsuits, and we were jumpy with anticipation. When she finally did return the camera, we hung on her every word. "Yeah, I took some," she said passively, as if this weren't the successful culmination of every fifth-grade boy's best-laid plans. I don't remember how we got the film developed without involving the folks, but we did. In the end, our mole only managed to take a single picture, which was extremely tame and unsatisfying, but which I still have to this day. Sorry Kristina, I was in fifth-grade-love with you, it's what we did.
Goodnight.
you’re all in my chest
Wednesday night kinda crept up on me this week. I'll be honest up-front tonight and admit that I'm not really in much of a blogging mood. It's the first night in a couple weeks that I hadn't already picked and mentally half-written my next day's topic before sitting down with the laptop. I guess that's bad, because now I'm here writing about not knowing what to write again. But, I've got the house to myself (Keaton's sleeping, Sharaun out) and the iPod is on shuffle... so maybe the words will come.
Speaking of the iPod, I have this new obsession with my "Unplayed" smart-playlist. That's the playlist where any song that's never been listened to (at least, not since have to reset all my play-counts to zero) goes. Right now, it's sitting at eleven-thousand some-odd songs, and I listen to it every day to try and reduce the number. I want to get that sucker to zero unplayed tracks. Today, the thing played a trick on my by shuffling up the near thirty-minute version of "Dark Star" the Dead played at Woodstock in 1969. The Dead's entire mega-historical Woodstock set has been around for along time on bootleg, I even bought one back in college, but the sources were always really poor audience tapes that sounded awful. So, when the actual soundboard-sourced recording leaked a few years back, I was totally excited. Thirty minutes per track, however, don't make for quick work on zeroing that playlist...
Anyway, I won't bore you with all that. I might as well get to what you've been waiting for anyway... the one-week update to my month-long Enzyte Challenge. First, before I get to the results (which you can probably already see on the screen below anyway), I wanted to document some of my initial impressions:
- These pills do nothing.
OK, that's done. Let's move onto the results:
(Learn how to interpret this chart here.)
Yeah, those little Daves are both exactly the same height (and width). I'm serious. Print it out and draw lines on it to prove it to yourself if you doubt me. That's a one-week total change of zero in both dimensions, not even a single centimeter (which I'd have chalked up to noise anyway).
But folks, I've only been on the pills for nine days now, so it's probably a little premature to be calling results already. In fact, when I made the call to Enzyte "nutraceuticals" headquarters the other day to ensure my free sample doesn't conveniently auto-renew for another $60 month, they told me I was too early to cancel - that they wanted me to at least "experience the solution" for a couple weeks, and that my no-charge grace period actually lasts until such-and-such a date (I made a reminder on my phone so I'll remember to call back).
As an aside, I'm fairly certain Enzyte-HQ call center (at least the "discontinue me" ward) is staffed by females only. It didn't bother me, but I bet some men would have a hard time answering the "And may I ask why you'd like to discontinue use of the product, sir?" question with, "Uhhh... my wang is just as small as ever..." Good psychology Enzyte, bravo.
Anyway, I'm not gonna be too rough on this particular nutraceutical just yet. I'm willing to give it a fair thirty-day shake. So, stay tuned... and we'll see. Hopefully this one-week update wasn't too terribly anti-climactic.
Goodnight my friends, you're all in my chest.
you’ve been sacked
Hey hey Tuesday night. Glad you could join me again today for another installment her at sounds familiar. I seem to be on a roll as far as the posting-regularity goes this month, so here's hoping I didn't just jinx it by saying as much. Should be a chuckle of a blog today, if I did my job right. So let's get right down to it then, shall we?
OK, before I do this next bit, I’m going to ask, dear readers, that you either cast your memory back a couple days, or go quickly read this post from Thursday last week.
Done reading and/or refreshing your memory? OK, good.
Now, if you weren’t lying when you responded in the affirmative to that last sentence, you’ll remember that, when I was sharing the “hotlink prevention” story with Ben, he suggested that I take screen-captures of all my “victims.” Well, bored the other night, I started paging through my referrer logs and doing just that. Turns out, it was a great time looking at all the surprised people out there who’d previously been “borrowing” bandwidth from my site when their intended image got “sacked” with my new script. I had such a good time, in fact, that I wanted to share with you some the various places my new “hotlink stopper” image is showing up in cyberspace.
For your convenience, I’ve pixelized the NSFW image in the screencaps below, but you can always take a peek at the real-deal right here if you’ve forgotten the hilarity/horror of it all.
Let's start off with a relatively low-impact MySpace profile picture. Looks like "mumu" might want to update his-or-her profile...
A lot of people seem to link my pictures in forums, here are some examples. (That last guy was attempting to link to a picture of a middle-finger-salute from my site. Funny enough, I think the same sentiment is conveyed even with the image-swap):
A tad more embarrassing, some people even used hotlinked images from my server for their forum avatars. Sorry Soda Popinski:
Looks like that hotlink-replacement image transcends the barriers of language as well! Here are some Spanish and what I think might be Finnish forums where I got the drop on unsuspecting hotlinkers. (I especially like the English reply in the Finnish thread, "Mmmmm.. sexy...." Anyone read Spanish?):
Switching gears, a lot of MP3-blogs hotlink to my Question Mark & The Mysterians album covers to accompany their posts about the band's classic 1960s output. Funny, I didn't realize genitals were featured this prominently on a rock album cover before Lennon did it:
Sadly, most of the threads that get "sacked" with the image-swap are long-dead, and thus aren't impacted much by the hotlink-hijinks. I saved the funniest bunch of screencaps for last, however. These are the ones where the "sacked" thread is still "alive" enough that people notice the image-swap. I love the response in the below thread:
My absolute favorite of them all, though, has got to be this very-much-alive thread over at the "306 GTi-6 & RALLYE Owners Club" forums, where the poster is off-topic and asking anyone if they've ever had their back waxed (the original hotlink was referencing the picture of an extremely hairy back which accompanies this post). As a bonus for this one, you can click that link above you here to read the actual thread, complete with hilarious responses and one stymied poster who eventually asks this:
Oh man... good times. Thanks for the suggestion Ben. Funny thing is, I steal 99% of my blog-accompanying images myself, I just have the decency to actually host the pilfered images on my own server with my own bandwidth. C'mon you other unscrupulous web-types, get some scruples...
And, before I go I should acknowledge that I bet some of you came here today looking for my week-one Enzyte Challenge update. Well, it's coming, it was just a bit of rough night and I had this entry pretty much canned and good to go - so I left the thing on auto. You'll get your update soon enough, don't fret.
Oh hey Pat's got some pictures up from their New Year's Eve party, check 'em out.
And, with that, I'm gonna cut this thing loose. Have a good night folks, and, to those of you with difficult days ahead - we're here for you. Love you all and goodnight.
snack-a-cheerios
Mondays mean I have to go back to work, so normally Mondays blow. This Monday, however, was quite pleasant. I got a ton of work done, hung out with friends at lunch, and came home to a big "Hi Daddy!" and hug from Keaton. I got home a little late (meeting ran long and I hung around talking to Ben a little bit), and we had leftovers for dinner (which I like, honestly, since I do dishes and leftovers mean less cleanup).
Tonight Keaton and I called Grammy and Grandpa together, we do that sometimes. Keaton likes to use the phone, and can actually hold something of a conversation (well, a two-year-old talks to an adult kinda conversation). Tonight, it went a little like this:
Grandpa: Hello?
Keaton (at Dad's prompting whispers): Hi Grandpa! I love you Grandpa!
Grandpa: Why, hi Keaton! I love you too! Want to talk to your Grammy? (Ahh... the classic dad-answered-the-phone handoff, "Hey there!... let me get your mom.")
Grammy: Hello?
Keaton (more whispers from dad): Hi Grammy! I love you Grammy!
Grammy: Hi Keaton! I love you too! What are you doing?
Keaton: Snack-a-Cheerios!
Grammy: Oh, you had some Cheerios?
Keaton: Yeah.
Grammy: We're they good?
Keaton: OK.
Keaton: Me hold-a baby Colton!
Grammy: Yeah! Did you see baby Colton?
Keaton. OK.
Awkward silence....
Dad: Keaton, can you tell Grammy what you did today?
Keaton: Today.
Dad: What did you do today?
Keaton: Slide-a-Krittal.
Dad: Oh, that means "Slide with Crystal," mom. That's the person at the gym's childcare.
Grammy: Oh, you went to the gym?
Keaton: OK.
Grammy: Did you have fun?
Keaton: Had-a-Cheerios!
...
And on and on and on it went like that. But, Grammy never seemed to tire of the conversation.
Well then, I am going to paste in something I wrote a while ago... maybe it's interesting, let's see:
Did you guys know that, no matter how you cut it, there is a certain element of the earnable respect a person can have which is entirely age-based? Well, I'm telling you that there is, whether you knew it or not. Now, people may tell you that this is false, but they are either misinformed or lying. If you’re a young whippersnapper, no matter how much of a superstar you are at what you do, and regardless of the number of millions you make, you’ll be still deprived at least some percentage of the respect you could garner (from those older than you) because of your age.
Furthermore, I bet I can roughly quantify that percent-deprived by looking at the median age of your peers (those who do the same tasks as you in your chosen profession) and subtracting your age from that. For instance, if you’re a thirty-two year old middle manager at your dead-end warehouse job, and the average middle-manager at the warehouse company is actually thirty-nine years old, you’ll be deprived of about 20% of the respect you could earn were you seven years older.
Now I know there’ll be a lot of fast-trackers and young up-and-comers out there who’d completely disagree, and maybe even argue that they are, in fact, more respected than some of their elders. And I’m not saying that can’t be possible or doesn't happen (because, in point-cases, I'm certain it does), I’m just saying that, in a general sense, they’d be wrong. Sure, if there’s a deadweight fifty year old who’s coasting along as your peer, you may indeed be more respected in comparison. But, in general, those who are older than you will still have it in the back of their heads that they've "been around" and you're "fresh off the tit."
Seriously, you're gonna have to work around this. It’s just a simple fact that you trust people who are your age or older because your brain tells you they’ve had at least as much, or more, experience than you yourself have. Think about it, we inherently think of those younger than us as less-experienced than we are (and, because physics says that time flows forward, we're probably right in doing so). Young people are expected to "earn and learn" their way to the top. Just look to the longstanding, pre-medieval, concept of apprenticeship, or the way lawyers and accounts log hours to win partner.
Anyway, I'm actually not criticizing the concept - it's common sense. I'm just saying, if you're planning on being number-one top-cheese in your chosen field by thirty-one, you may be surprised. You might even make it to CEO by that age, but you'd better bet some of the musty members of the board are looking down their noses at your unwrinkled brow and perky breasts. Hey, I'm OK with it... just gotta do the time (or get insanely rich, cash out young, and run for the hills).
Hmmm... I dunno if that was an entertaining read or not...
Hey, Keaton made Megan's photoblog: check it out.
Love you guys and your unwrinkled brows and perky breasts. Goodnight.
youthwise
Sunday, Sharaun's out shopping and Keaton's asleep. So far, naptime sans pacifier has proven more difficult than bedtime - Keaton not seeming to mind its absence at all at night, yet having a hard time missing it during her afternoon naps. Yesterday I couldn't get her to go down at all, and eventually brought her back out into the living room having caught nary a wink. Today, however, I decided to get serious, and, when she was once again playing and talking to herself instead of napping, went in and rocked her for about fifteen minutes in the glider. Once her deep, ragged breathing convinced me she'd fallen asleep on my shoulder, I transferred her to the crib, where I'm happy to say she's still slumbering peacefully. On the whole, I'd say operation pacifiers-be-gone is moving along quite well.
This weekend, I decided it was high time I worked a bit on all the more obscure BitTorrent downloads that've been piling up in my downloads directory, un-listened to and unloved. In line with my laziness, I often leave the "hardest" downloads for last. For my downloading habits, the "hardest" albums are the rare live stuff I love to collect, but hate to sit down and figure out the details on so I can properly organize it, tag it, and merge it into my general collection. It may sound easy, but tracking down the details of that live Jefferson Starship jam I grabbed one day because it looked interesting when the only thing I have to go on is a folder in my "unprocessed" directory called "starship73_SBD_matrix1" is sometimes hard to do. But, I persevered, and Saturday I used Keaton's naptime to process I whopping ~15GB of rare live FLAC audio. In fact, I've snipped in the resulting anally-organized list is below for your perusal, because I know you value this stuff as much as I do, right?
I'm gonna do a general interest bit for nerds now, you can turn your head if you'd like to remain cool.
When I was a kid, I read with gusto a book called Big Secrets by William Poundstone. I've written about the book before here on sounds familiar, in the context of my youthwise obsession with backwards audio. The book, was filled with all sorts of cool stuff. One of the coolest, in fact, was the section on mysterious shortwave radio "number stations." I think (dad, correct me if I'm wrong) that my pop used to mess around with shortwave, and I kind of remember this being partly why I was interested in that particular chapter.
Anyway, numbers stations are an "unexplained" global radio phenomenon, in which a string of random numbers and/or letters is broadcast on a given radio frequency with no explanation, the general consensus being that they are coded communiques intended for participants international espionage community. Some stations have been broadcasting these cryptic strings of numbers since back around the time of World War I. Enticed by the mystery, amateur hammers have, on occasion, turned armchair secret-agents and attempted to triangulate signals and hunt down the broadcast locations. Reading it all back then, I was fascinated. It was like some real-life Hardy Boys thing to me... and I dreamed about getting a radio, studying the signals, and breaking the code...
Anyway, if you're interested in this type of "cloak and dagger" type stuff, Wikipedia has a great article on numbers stations here, and you can read about the "outing" of one of my favorites from Poundstone's book, the "Russian Woodpecker," right here (also via the great Wikipedia). For further reading, this page keeps a list of actively transmitting numbers stations (with sound samples), and even has some cool video of radio-nuts tracking down the transmitting antennas.
I'm sorry if that was boring, but I enjoyed writing it, so you, dear reader, can suck it.
Before I go, a tip of my babymakin' hat to friends Erik and Kristi for the birth of their strapping young buck, Colton. Way to go guys, he and Keaton can be best friends until they're around fourteen, then they're forbidden from seeing each other until they're twenty-three.
Goodnight.
struggles
Hi internet.
Can I get a collective sigh for the long-awaited arrival of Friday? Good; good job internet. Without jinxing it, I wanted to mention that tonight is the fourth night Keaton's gone to bed "big girl style." For you barren folks, that means she goes to sleep without the aide of a pacifier. This is an awesome milestone for us. At this point, she's going down for both naps and bedtime without much protest. In fact, Sharaun actually packed up and mailed her pacifiers to her sister (who's about to pop herself), and let Keaton help pack them. When I put her down the other night, she said, "Paci mail to baby Hobson." Yup, the pacifiers were mailed to baby Hobson. Goodbye pacifiers.
All day yesterday guys, I was struggling with myself to make a choice. I've written before about how I tend to worry most over the little things (I know I have, but it's getting harder and harder to find entries in this mass of writing), and this is a good example. And, since it's foremost on my mind, I'm going to gestate and give birth to this decision right here, laid bare, in front of the blog. Here we go.
The setup: I've been invited to a "pub crawl" with a group of upstanding fellows. These fellows, while not the normal crew I run with, are all birds of a feather and of like age with me. For those unaware with today's modern street-vernacular, a "pub crawl" is a walking outing centered around moving from bar to bar whilst having one drink or so at each. The idea being that you get to check out a bunch of new bars, hang out with friends, and drink alcohol.
The problem: I can't tell if I want to go or not. Deep inside me, I bet it would be an awesome time and I think I'd have a blast with the guys. In some other way, though, I feel like this is not my bag. There are a couple factors at play here, but I can summarize it plainly by saying that 1) I'm typically not the guy at the bar, and 2) I'm not sure, but I think I kinda feel "too old" to be crawling pubs. Now, I know both of these things are rubbish, but they are indeed the psychological blocks I'm dealing with. Let's take them one by one.
First, it'd be fairly accurate to call me a "homebody," at least as a generalization. If it comes down to the choice between "going out" and getting some drinks or staying home and drinking some beer with friends - I'll usually choose the latter (by the way, neither my homebodiness, nor my propensity to go out, is tied to alcohol consumption, I'm just framing this in the context of a "pub crawl.") Some part of this is built into my Scrooge-logic, where I realize that socializing at home with friends is cheaper than socializing at the local overpriced watering hole. Some of it is just my nature.
Second, a "pub crawl" makes me feel old. In fact, most bars make me feel old these days. Unless they're the dank, cavernous, dreary kind, they're usually glitzy-trendy hotspots filled to the brim with fancy-smelling youngsters all looking to shack up for the night. Me and glitzy-trendy just don't work, I just feel awkward and out of place. In fact, the whole concept of a "pub crawl" seems to shout "wasted college kid" to my subconscious. And, while that may have been OK when I was actually in college, thinking about it now makes me feel a bit like the fat, old, balding guy who's just posturing.
Anyway... there it is. Still not sure what I'm going to do.
Goodnight.
shepherd’s pie
Hey internet. How was your Wednesday? Mine was OK. I went to work, where things were, surprisingly, busy today. It was a nice change, as the slowness I've been working through lately had my apathy at record highs of late. I think I needed a little kick to get me ambulatory again. I also learned that Radiohead is definitely coming to the city for their In Rainbows tour. Wild horses couldn't keep me away. It'll be my third time seeing them... I'm so excited.
I hadn't really planned on writing tonight. In fact, I was going to take the night off because 1) I had nothing to write about and wasn't feeling guilty about it, and 2) I felt like not writing. But... then... as I often to, I became bored just sitting on the couch listening to music (Sharaun was out and about so I had the place to myself). I tried reading some from a book a buddy lent me, but I'm having the hardest time getting into it. So, to the internet I turned. And, after my standard ~20 page surfing cycle, I ended up back here in the old familiar WordPress post window... stringing words together for no reason at all. So, I decided I'll just post a bunch of random, un-connected stuff I've been saving up for a while... sort of like a shephard's pie of a blog. Here goes.
I had planned to write a blog about something I recently did, but I ended up chatting with Ben about it yesterday morning via IM, and the chat sums it up nicely and is a good break from my normal dry paragraph-style narrative. So, here's there story, in the no-caps shorthand that is IM-speak:
Dave:
dude... i have to tell you what i did the other night.
so, i notice in my logs that a ton of my bandwidth is people hotlinking my blog-accompanying images and using them for forum avatars, myspace profile avatars, etc. so, i set out to eff the bandwidth-stealing hotlinkers.
the internet taught me how to put a mod-rewrite .htaccess that'll swap any hotlinked image out for one of my choosing.
so...
now, when anyone hotlinks my blog-accompanying images, they get instead a picture of some dude's nuts with a beach in the background. it's outstandingBen:
HAHAHAHDave:
this pic is pricelessBen:
OMG... that is the funniest thing I've ever heard.Dave:
here's the actual image (warning, don't open with people around). i should write about it... right?Ben:
Yeah, you totally should. Hilarious.Dave:
is that img classic, or what? pat was at my place while i was doing this... and we were giddyBen:
Outstanding.Dave:
we actually went to a couple pages from my logs where people had been stealing and looked at their new nutsack avatars for a laugh.Ben:
hahahahaha. Ohhh.. it's sooo good.Dave:
hehe, i thought so tooBen:
you should screencap thoseDave:
steal my bandwidth, will ya? oh yeah i totally should.Ben:
fantasticDave:
balls in profile w/the ocean behind.Ben:
So excellent.
Well, that was fun.
Want to see something neat? Take a look at the I-got-a-new-iPod Christmas traffic spike my entry "new iPod & I want my old tunes!" Kinda neat to see the internet turning to my tiny blog in their time of holiday need... I wonder if anyone actually managed to get help from the entry?
Oh, what? That wasn't neat at all? Oh my, I'm sorry. I'll do better next time. But, next time is gonna have to be tomorrow or something, because I'm outta here tonight. Sorry I left you with such a stanky post. Better luck next time.
Goodnight and I'll talk to you tomorrow.
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