Thoughts
Baldo Turns 10
That’s right folks, the comic strip Baldo has been in syndication for 10 years now.
To celebrate Carlos and Hector hosted a party line style love in. They had guests and fans who popped in and asked questions about the comic and their careers. I was lucky enough to be invited and was very pleased to be there for this milestone moment. I was able to get a question in and I was entertained with the answer given…SCORE!
Carlos should be posting the recording of the party line soon. When I find out where I will post it here as an update.
Until then be sure to check out Baldo at http://baldocomics.com
Congrats to Carlos and Hector. Here is to 10 more years.
Tongue Compulsion
I went to the Dentist today and had my teeth cleaned. That was this morning. 12 hours later and my tongue is sore from exploring my new polished teeth feel.
Why won’t my tongue just leave my teeth alone!
Blind
I often wonder what it would be like to be blind. I mean I already have poor vision. But that is a far cry from not being able to see at all.
I like to think I would be the type of person who would stand up to the challenge. I Imagine the first thing I would do is install some type of text to speech on my computer so I can hear my email and blog comments.
Could you deal with going blind?
UPDATE:
After posting this article I received a very inspiring comment that I would like to share.
Cory,
Funny you should mention this subject, as I have a genetic disorder that is making me blind over time. It is a loooong drawn out process with crushing headaches as it happens.
Once I got past the initial depression/panic I began to educate myself in ways to interact with the world…text to speech/speech to text, began research into learning brail, spending considerable amounts of time having my eyes closed and a host of other things (seeing as much as I can and appreciating my sight while I have it).
I can say now that I am feeling good about my ability to handle the change. I’ll have to give up WoW and a host of other technical goodness but that is ok. Still plenty of things to do to keep myself enteratined.
Thank you Cory for sharing your story with me. I have always felt a kinship with those who have lost/losing their sight or hearing, something that we often take for granted.
You are my hero. I marvel at your attitude as you face this situation.
Brian Dunaway
Observation
I saw the most convincing possum this morning. He was lying in the road with his guts hanging out. That’s what I call playing possum.
Hopefully, he will be feeling up to the awards ceremony later this month.
Invention Fail
You may not know this about me, but I often have ideas about things that I could use to make my life easier. Once those ideas are in my head, I will think on them for a day or two and see if they are worthy of my “Big Book Of Inventions That I Will Never Tell You About Until I Get A Patent First.”
Obviously, this invention I thought of today was NOT one of those “Great Ideas.” Just as a side not….I seem to be using “Quotes” in my blog a lot today.
The Problem: Blue Jeans are heavy. They want to be on the ground. That’s why I wear a belt. Even with the belt, the center of my blue jeans where I button them seem to sag below my belt. Not cool.
The Solution: A belt that attaches to my button so the belt and pants are “one.”
Now when I say button. I do not mean the snap kind of button. I mean the ones that slip through a buttonhole. hehe…”buttonhole”….shutup! Anyway, I was thinking. If I had a belt that had buttonholes like my pants do then I could just insert the button through the hole in addition to the buttonhole on my pants.
That makes sense, right? Button goes through your pants buttonhole and then through the belt buttonhole. Now you don’t need a belt buckle or nothing. These belts could be cheap. No metal needed. Make them from a thinner piece of cloth or leather so you would have the space for the stem of the button to insert through both pieces of material (blue jean and belt.)
Perfect. And it solves my problem of my stupid jeans sagging in the middle. Let’s patent it! But wait. One more thing I always think about. Would people buy them? So I put on my “consumer hat.” Now pretend it is 2am and I am watching TV because I can’t sleep. Would I buy this item…..Crap. even I wouldn’t buy it.
Oh well, back to the drawing board.
OS Love/Hate
Living in the southern part of the United States, specifically South Carolina, I am in daily contact with people who passionately declare that their truck manufacturer is better than the competitor’s truck. People will expend great thought and varying degrees of creative effort into how they can insult their opposition. I’ve certainly seen my fair share of Calvin, of the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes, peeing on a Ford or Chevy emblem. But even with all that hate, there is a bit of playfulness to it. Not a lot of venom in that bite.
Now switch over to the internet. Tell someone how fond you are of your OS and you will find yourself in a whole heap of trouble that even the Duke boys couldn’t get themselves out of. YeeeeHaaaaaaa!
So why all the love/hate when it comes to your choice of OS? If a bunch of rednecks can be civil about the truck they drive, can’t we all play nice when someone has something nice to say about their own OS choice? Maybe if we let off a little steam by having cartoon characters peeing on our rivals logos we could talk to each other in comments and message boards with a little more kindness.
I’m Brian Dunaway and I love all OSes.
Driving, horning and giving the finger
This morning I was driving. Actually, I was sitting at a green light waiting for my turn to take a left against oncoming traffic. I pulled into the intersection and waited for the light to change. This particular intersection has no green turn arrow and during this time of the morning there is a constant flow of oncoming traffic.
The light turns yellow. There is a small gap between a car that just passed me in the oncoming traffic lane and another car behind it approaching the intersection. The approaching car does not appear to be slowing down very much. They may be thinking about making it through the yellow light. I slowly let my foot off the brake in case he decides to stop. But I’m not stupid. I’m not going to pull out in front of someone who is still moving at 30+ mph.
Then I hear a horn blow behind me. Obviously, this person really has to be somewhere and can not deal with waiting through another red light before turning. I can understand that. I’ve been there. But you know what. I don’t care how many times you blow the horn. I am not turning in front of an oncoming MOVING car.
Road Rage Time!!
I held up my hand for the individual behind me to see. I extended a single finger. But for some reason it wasn’t the one I thought I was going to hold up. Instead, I held up my index finger. I started wagging it. I said “No No” and I shook my head.
It may have been passive aggressive. But I felt better. I was basically saying “What are you…5 years old?”
This was the final straw for me and horns. I think horns should be removed from all cars. They are seldom used for their intended purpose. So much so that they cause more trouble than they solve. Often, people use them to express their dissatisfaction with how they perceive your driving skills or to get their friend’s attention. “HEY! BEEP BEEP!! I KNOW YOU!!”
The few times I have seen people blow the horn for a real reason, such as to notify another driver of their presence and to please not hit them, they always blow the horn about 3 seconds too late and then it turns from something useful to a long blast that says “HEY MORON!! YOU ALMOST HIT ME.”
Just like everyone else, my first reaction to someone invading my personal car space is for me to hit the brakes and put my hands at 10 and 2. Which is what I should do. I shouldn’t be concerned about the dang horn.
Down with car horns!
Brian’s Brain: Environmental Fixers
“Save The Frogs Day” is April 30, 2010. What’s that you say? You didn’t know that the frogs needed saving. I was not aware myself until I was channel surfing recently and stopped on one of the local ETV channels where I caught this episode of Nature – Frogs: The Thin Green Line. You can watch the full video here:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/frogs-the-thin-green-line/video-full-episode/4882/
You're Doing It Wrong
The episode mostly deals with scientist in the field who are trying to save many species of frogs from extinction due to a naturally occurring disease and predators as well as man influenced environmental changes such as introduction of trout into the ecosystem where there previously were none as well as chemical runoff into the the frogs natural habits.
Now, you may be thinking to yourself: I didn’t know Brian was a tree hugging hippie! Well, I’m not. But I also am no fool. When you start messing with the food chain I start getting concerned. Because, I like to eat. Not frog legs of course. That’s just nasty. Do you know where those legs have been!
Anyway, this got me to thinking. When do we cross the line between fixing what we broke and interfering with the natural order of things? I love frogs. I think they are beautiful to look at and they are very important to our ecosystem as we know it. I think we should be correcting things like the pollution we are introducing to these frogs that are causing mutations (are mutations always a bad thing? That’s another article I’ll have to cover later.) Also, we should try to remove the trout we placed unnaturally into the frogs habitats years ago. But should we be stopping chytridiomycosis.
The Chytrid fungus is naturally occurring in the environment and may play a role that we are not aware of. Nature has a way of evolving and replacing things that are removed from the ecosystem. It’s very resilient. As a human I value life and I think frogs are beautiful and I would love to always have them around. So I support saving the frogs. But I also question how much and how far our good intentions will swing before we stall the natural evolution of things.
I’m no expert. I’m just a guy who likes to question things. I also value your opinion. So be sure to comment below even if it’s to say “Brian. You are an idiot and you don’t know how to use commas.”
Brian D.
How do you laugh on the Internet?
Before the invention of the colon followed by the end parenthesis to create an ASCII smiley face, it was hard times on the Internet for sarcastic comments. Personally, I have had several discussions with people that ended in arguments because I had forgotten to add the :) at the end of my comments. I have also had on-line conversations where people end everything with a :). That really makes me angry. >:(
Now, onto the thing I want to really discuss today. Just like in real life, everyone seems to have their own laugh on the internet. Personally, I have always preferred the easy to type ‘hehe.’ To me, it says “What you said was funny or clever but I am not rolling on the floor. I do not do that in real life and I am not about to do it on the Internet.” However, I have been known to throw out the occasional “LOL” but that is sacred to me. Do not expect to get an “LOL” out of me unless I really “laughed out loud.”
Please take the poll below and let me know your preferred laugh on the Internet. if you do not see your laugh in the poll, add it to the comments.
To www or not to www
I was going over some google analytic stats today and noticed about 20% of my visitors to a particular website were getting there via www.domain.com and 80% were getting there by domain.com.
So this has me curious. Who are those 20% that still are using www before the url? Turns out that some of those people could be coming from the short cut ctrl+enter after typing in just the domain itself. Ctrl+Enter adds the www. and .com to your url entry if they are missing.
Take the poll below: