being a baby sucks

I'm sure it makes me a horrible person but this face made me laugh.

And it inspired this design:

I think this would be totally awesome printed on a onesie

Yup, I like it.

Irony in Advertising

I just got an email from American Express advertising American Express Gift Cards.


The ad was titled, "Be more original this year" and led with the line, "Gift giving just got a little more thoughtful."


And all this time I thought I was copping out with the gift card...

Foreign Hits

I use a website called SiteMeter to monitor the traffic on my blog. I put this in back when I thought I was going to be a rich and famous blogger one day and would need to know the traffic patterns of the millions of my adoring fans. If I'd gotten an agent instead, he would have told me that going months without posting would kill my readership to die hard friends and family. So now, instead of analyzing traffic patterns, I just use SiteMeter to spy on my visitors. For anybody who still thinks 'anonymous' and 'web-surfing' belong in the same sentence, let me tell you that you leave far more than comments when you stop by my blog. I can see your:

• Domain Name
• IP Address
• Service Provider
• Physical Location
• Computer Operating System
• Web Browser
• Size of your Monitor (I have no idea why that would be important)
• Time of Visit
• Length of Visit
• Number of Pages Viewed
• The Web Page Where you Clicked the Link to My Blog
• The First Page you Looked At
• The Last Page you Looked At
• The Link you Clicked on to Leave my Blog

One thing that's really neat is that I can look at a map of the last 10/20/50/100 visits. I usually just see the dots in the places you'd expect: California, Utah, St. Louis, Indiana. Every once in a while, though, I will be surprised to see dots in Brazil, Poland, Russia, the Netherlands, India, Japan, or the United Kingdom.

I can't help but wonder what brought them to my blog. Enter the spying. I can click on the dot to get details about their visit. Most of the time I find that they linked from a list of Google Search results, in which case, SiteMeter also tells me what their search terms were. The word, 'nerd' is always present.

This has led me to some interesting conclusions. First of all, 'nerd' is a slang term. This means that for all its ubiquity in conversation, it is used only rarely in written communication. Thus, the fact that I use the term so often causes my blog to rank highly in searches where 'nerd' is in the search string. This post seems to be the most often stumbled upon: it is usually on the first page of results for the searches that bring foreigners to my blog.

Secondly, I can't help but wonder if some people in some other country are taking me seriously. Perhaps I need to put a warning up in several languages that the writer of this blog is rarely serious and that nothing contained within it should be used in research papers of any kind (This post got a hit by somebody looking for sources about the medical benefits of vapor machines).

I've also realized that I'm not being very helpful to the international community, as evidenced by the fact that most visitors spend only a second or two looking at my blog before they hit the 'back' button. I never seem to be what they're looking for. This would probably hurt my feelings if I still had any.

Kid's got chops!

In case there were any doubts remaining as to my nerd cred, I played trombone in the high school marching band. I never took my trombone to college, though, so it sat unused in my parents' basement for 10 years. In January, I happened to be passing through with space in my trunk and so brought the instrument home where it now sits unused in my house. I pull it out every few months and play some of the songs from a book of John Williams music my wife got me. My son has lately been asking if he can play it. To him, it's just one of daddy's toys and aren't we always telling him to share?

Last night, I let him try it, thinking he would be disappointed when he couldn't make it work.

When he found something to hold it up for him, things got easier.

Yes, a trombone does sound like a fart. No, I haven't grown out of laughing at it either.

80's Movies Weekend

My wife went to girls camp a couple weeks back, leaving me home alone with the kids for 4 days. It wasn't so bad really. People from church watched the kids during the day while I was at work and I had enough time saved up that I didn't even have to go to work on Friday. Evenings were the only really boring part.

My wife and I have always spent our evenings together: watching television or a movie, reading a book, playing games, going over the budget (*cringe* I hate those nights, they're so boring!), or whatever else suited our fancy. It wasn't until recently that I realized that not all couples do this. Some spend their evenings separately, choosing their own diversions. Having not had this practice, it was actually kind of difficult to find something to do with myself in the evenings. I didn't want to watch one of the movies we'd checked out from the library because I knew my wife would want to see it too and we'd watch it together when she got home. Ditto with our television shows. Games are pretty boring by myself and there was no way I was doing the budget unless I had to.

So I did the dishes. And cleaned the kitchen. And tackled my running list of odd jobs around the house that it takes me a while to get to because they rank just higher than doing the budget. By Thursday night, though, I was bored. Since I wasn't going to work on Friday, it was the beginning of my weekend too, so I felt like I needed something special. I took the kids to the library on the way home from the sitter's house and I perused the DVD racks for a movie that my wife wouldn't mind missing. I struck gold. I found The Last Starfighter and The Karate Kid.

I remember seeing and enjoying both when I was younger but I didn't remember much about either besides the crane kick at the end of karate kid. Both were fun, but The Last Starfighter was definitely the better of the two for me; the acting was much better, which is really saying something for an 80's sci-fi flick. That isn't to say that it was a cinematic masterpiece. The computer graphics were groundbreaking at the time but, as with so many special effects decades later, now they just look laughable. The martial arts in The Karate Kid probably looked impressive when I was 8 but last weekend I couldn't help thinking that Jet Li could have destroyed everybody in that movie. At the same time. Twice. Plus that kid seriously bugged me. I just wanted to smack him a lot of the time.

What was also a lot of fun was watching the Making of documentaries on the discs, which were filmed much more recently and featured some of the original cast members, none of whom has had a starring role in 20 years. In retrospect, it probably wasn't hard to get them to do the documentaries for the special edition DVDs. It's not like they were busy with anything else. Speaking of people who'd gone downhill, though, when I realized that at 11:30pm on a Friday night I was watching the bonsai documentary from the special features section on The Karate Kid, I decided it was a good thing my wife was coming home the next day.

Sawdust and Gasoline

A while ago, as I was parking my car at work, I noticed some workers across the road cutting down trees and shrubs with chainsaws. I caught the aroma of sawdust and gasoline which immediately reminded me of my dad. He used to smell just like that when he would come in from working outside. He spent a lot of time using his chainsaw to cut up fallen trees from the forest in our backyard for fire wood. That smell was usually the precursor to a cold hand down the back of your shirt while you were sitting on the couch watching Saturday morning cartoons. That meant it was time to go haul wood up the hill and, no, in case you were brave enough to ask, it didn't matter that Batman was tied up and the Joker was about to blow up Wayne Manor.

Because of my dad, I have an irrational desire to own a chainsaw. It doesn't matter that I have absolutely no use for one. In my mind, you just can't be a good father unless you cut stuff up and make your kids carry it. Also because of my dad, I learned how to split and chop wood, which is uber-impressive if you ever happen to be dating a farm girl.

Maybe that's why the memories evoked by sawdust and gasoline made me smile. The missed cartoons weren't important like they were when I was ten but the lessons I learned instead were. And even more so, the man that taught them to me. Thanks, Dradums.

...and dibs on the chainsaw.

Fail

Safety fail:

I took this picture at the hotel we were staying at across the street from Disneyland. It reminded me of a picture I took at the Pima Air and Space Museum back in November.

Botany fail: