Cameras and I

Should not be allowed to spend too much time together without adult supervision. As proof see below.

In today's economy you have to add a little extra to get things to sell. This house comes with it's owner.

Not sure about you but when I ask a blind kid what they did at camp this summer the one thing I don't expect to hear is "I learned to fire projectile weapons"

I hope they didn't really mean it.

There appears to be a man in a coat beating his fist against a window in the background. Why? We may never know. (Update: One of the people in the picture tried to convince me this was the reflection of the camera person holding the camera up. Of course, that would have to be a VERY warped as it could not have reflected someone back to themselves if they were standing at that angle. Also, why would someone taking a picture be holding the camera off to the side of their head to do so? I think there is something going on here they don't want us to know about...)

Da da, da da, da da, da da, BatDog!

Great new improvements for your convenience.

Whenever someone tells me what a great thing they're doing for me I tend to look extra hard for the hook that's going to make me their dinner. I got an email from Coca Cola a while back telling me they had "Great news: we've made big improvements." They also announced that this great news was that there were no more daily code limits. That is to say that you can enter as many codes per day as you want. There used to be a 10 code per day limit. They then go on to tell me that there is now a 120 point per week limit instead.

Now I saw the lack of glitter in this immediately. I even wrote to Coke and told them off for insulting me and they wrote back with a point rundown that SOLIDIFIED how badly they're limiting their players. Let us look at just a few of the comparisons. All of the products are this way.

20 oz bottles (the closest we'll come to a "deal") are 3 points each.

Old system you could do 10 per day. That equals 30 points per day. Seven days in a week means you could do 210 points per week.

New system limits you to 120 points per week. That is 17 points per day. That comes out to 1.7 codes per day limit.

12 pack of cans = 10 points

Old system let you do 100 points a day for a total of 700 points per week.

New system is 120 points per week. That's 12 codes per week. About 1.7 codes per day

24 pack "fridge pack" = 20 points

Old system let you do 200 points per day for a total of 1400 per week

New system is 120 points per week. That's 6 codes per week. About 0.85 codes per day

But it's all ok because they told us it's "Great news" and a "big improvement." So that makes it better for us.

Beware what you wish for

I have a teenager who is constantly saying things like "you never pay attention to me" and there is the broader "you should pay more attention." There are other choice phrases that he uses but they all lean towards his assertion that we as his parents and, indeed, all adults need to pay more attention to the world around them.

It seems the way of things that teenagers feel that adults don't pay enough attention to anything and don't know what we're doing or talking about most of the time. They are constantly telling us to pay more attention, get our "facts" straight and stop jumping to conclusions.

Well, most of us uneducated and oblivious adults know of the old quote "Beware what you wish for." That is profound wisdom which we try to give freely to our children and which they never seem to take to heart. Case in point is something that happened just yesterday. My wife and I had to go on a 6 hour trip so we left our 14 year old home watching our 8 year old. We gave them chores to do, rules to follow and a cell phone to use as a life line to their Grandfather if need be.

One rule was "do not play on the mattresses." The mattresses being some old bedding that we let them play with and which allows them to fly through the air and crash down with impunity. This is, however, a privilege that we feel is best enjoyed with adults in the immediate vicinity just in case someone bounces or lands awkwardly. (Have you ever noticed how awkward the word awkward looks?)

So off we go on our trip and everything goes fairly well. When we return home, however, we begin to "pay attention" to things. The first thing I notice is that two of our AA batteries are missing from the baggy in the kitchen. The kids were asleep by this time so I was intending to ask them what they had used the batteries for when they woke. The reason for the inquiry is that the only thing they have that requires batteries (and doesn't have a fresh set in it) is the teenager's Airsoft gun (which was off limits until the next ice age.) Then I notice that my digital camera is sitting on the kitchen table instead of being next to the computer. No big deal there, they play with it sometimes. Next, however, I sit by my computer and find the rechargeable batteries for the camera are next to the computer which clues me in to where those AA batteries might have gone.

I fire up the camera and find four pictures on it with the kids playing around in the house. That's ok too but those rechargeable batteries are good for about 60 pictures and there are only four on the camera which had to have its batteries changed. So, being the oblivious and uneducated adult that I am, I swiftly load up my file recovery software and aim it at the SD card. Thereupon I find a half dozen recoverable pictures of the neighbor and our 8 year old leaping through the air onto the mattresses which had been labeled off limits. Due to the most excellent embedding of EXIF data into JPEG images they retained the time and date of the image capture. And what's most precious in my opinion is that whilst his head was probably reeling with "I thought we deleted those pictures" the teenager's response was "Oh, that was Zach. I told them not to do that." Which, of course was a difficult statement for him to defend when we brought up the picture that had both his brother and the neighbor in it and pointed out that there was only one other person present who could have taken the picture.

Maybe now he won't desire so greatly for us to "pay attention." And maybe, just maybe, he'll spend the next few days at least wondering how many other things he does that we do notice and just chose not to react to.

I uh have a uh problem with the uh President

I knew a speech teacher once who had a cardinal rule. He absolutely did NOT allow "pause words" as he called them. He detested the unintelligent vocalizations made by people who had forgotten or lost track of what they were going to say. He would, in fact, tally up the number of times you said "er," "um," "uh," or any other similar sound and would take that many points off of your score for your presentation. He felt that should you lose your place or the flow of your speech that silence was preferable to anything else.

I must say that I agree with him on this point. It is distracting to me when I hear someone say "uh" over and over in their speech. I find that it detracts from the message as I fixate on the faltering as much as the speech.

I watched a news clip of President Obama today. It showed him in a fairly informal meeting discussing his economic stimulus plan. The clip was 1 minute 43 seconds long. I wasn't 20 seconds into it when I lost the flow of what he was saying and started fixating on the number of times he said "uh." You see, he said "uh" no less than 20 times in a 103 second clip. There were a couple where "uh" followed or preceeded "a" so I didn't count those and I may have missed one or two that piggybacked on one another. In the end, however, my tally came to 20.

That meant he said "uh" an average of once every 5 seconds.

Keep that in mind though over the next few months and I'll bet you it reduces drastically. He'll have some PR speech expert use a shock collar if necessary to break him of the habit.

See I told you (read previous post for explanation)

Now why do I say that, at 33 years of age, I'm still a strange child? Well I do tend to know a lot and, perhaps, even to think too much. I love the jingles that have been created for the "free credit report dot com" commercials (all except the last one.) I find them catchy (but not catchy enough to use their services ever again.)

The problem I have is with the commercial where he's "dressed up like a pirate in this restaurant." You see, in this jingle he says "Should have gone to freecreditreport.com, could have seen this coming at me like an atom bomb."

Well, I've expressed my issues with this to the people around me and they all roll their eyes and tell me I'm weird so now I'm posting it here to my blog instead since that's basically what I created the blog for in the first place.

My issue is that an Atom Bomb is built to be fast and difficult to detect. In fact, in "Remembering the Manhattan Project" By Cynthia C. Kelly it's stated that an ICBM can reach any target within 30 minutes. I'm pretty sure I would like to see credit problems coming at me in a more detectable way and with more than 30 minutes warning. How about the rest of you?

I was a strange child (and I still am, just see the next post)

When I was a child I used to watch the cartoon "Captain Planet." I liked the whole 5 element idea as it appealed to my Native American background. There was, however, something that bothered me about the ol' Cap'n. I always wondered why he wanted to kill everyone on earth.

Now I'm sure you're wracking your brain trying to recall when he ever tried to destroy life on earth as he was the epitome of environmentalism in the late 80's (that's when I watched anyway.) It is, however, in his very theme song where you can find evidence to this.

You see his theme song states "Captain Planet he's our hero. Gonna take pollution down to zero."

Now I know I was a geeky child and probably knew "too much" if such a thing is possible. It's just that I was aware even then that moisture that is suspended in the clouds condenses around airborne particulates (pollutants) and that condensation is what forms rain drops. Without these particulates it doesn't rain. Without rain we all die.

So there you have it. Proof positive that Captain Planet wants us all dead.

The Blinking Light Phenomenon

I have always been fascinated by the ability of a blinking light to bring the most intellectual people to the verge of drooling. We see it all the time. The police use blinking lights to get our attention and make us dumb enough to confess to whatever it is they say we were doing to make them pull us over, stores use it to make us buy things we would laugh at someone else for purchasing, lighthouses use them to make us sail blindly into rocks and shallow reefs. It seems that any time we are faced with a blinking light that our brain takes a temporary vacation.

There is nowhere that I find this more annoying than at a broken traffic signal. Any time I see a blinking stop light I dread approaching the intersection. People will sit there for eons with this look upon their face that clearly indicates their feelings of betrayal that a light which has told them day in and day out just what they should do with their cars has now forsaken them.

Today I was pulling up to one such intersection and that familiar feeling set upon me. There was an SUV in the lane beside me and we reached the intersection together. As we came to a stop the “left hand turners” going the direction opposite us were just clearing the intersection leaving one vehicle sitting there waiting to go straight ahead. It was clearly his turn. Not only was he at the intersection before us but he was the only other car there and he was to our right hand side (I can see my driving instructor beaming with pride that I actually read my driver’s handbook.) The driver of the SUV and I were both sitting there staring down the other driver and waving him on. His response was to sit there and look back at us so I did the logical thing and after a good 10 or 15 seconds of just sitting there I took my foot off the brake and hit the gas. This, of course, was the opposing drivers cue to do the same. Thankfully his brain awoke from it’s blinking-red-light induced stupor and he stopped before our cars became one with each other.

It’s the perfect time of the year to send cash, checks or money orders to the owner of this blog.

Sorry, my bad, go back about your business.