How many differences can you spot?
The stuff you don’t notice until you’re cataloging.
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Category Archives: Experiment
Name that dog
I know we have a creative bunch reading the bloggh, so here’s the deal: friends of ours got a dog and they’re changing the name (the previous name translated to “little flatulence” or something like that). They’d like your help in choosing a name. Yes, Ewok names will be considered. I already submitted Logray to the mix. I personally think he looks like a mogwai, though.
Post your ideas in the comments.
Commercial Bowl XLV
Considering the gamma radiation (or whatever it is that pulses from this monitor) is making me dizzy, I may not be the best to offer commentary (or maybe that IS the best) for this year’s Super Bowl.
I’ve been sick since Thursday night and have been in bed/on the couch in a stupor. Today my goal is to be ready for work tomorrow, since I only have 77 sick days remaining (I don’t call in much).
As promised, here is the Bloggh’s CoverIt Live of the Super Bowl. Feel free to request a name to add to the commentary:
A focused booyoring
This is the camera plan for Friday. This is for my own records, but I’m sure some can appreciate the schematic.
Thanks, J, for making it comprehensible.
As if the bloggh wasn’t weird, today you’ll help make it weirder.
Today some of you will be in your houses handing out candy, some will be in your houses protesting that you have to hand out candy, and some will go out in search of candy even though you’ve used the same ghost/sheet costume for two decades.
There’s one thing that I know all my readers can rally around: esoteric narrative with postmodern themes and motifs.
Today we’ll be crafting a story together. I’ll give you the starter and you put aside any pretenses that there’s quality assurance in content and just post the next part of the story in the comments.
The community effort will be like Wikipedia, except without all the jerks who say my edits are “dubious”. Facebook readers, you can respond to the note.
Here’s the start…
……
There was a group of friends who hung out in the driveway. They were surprised by the first trick-or-treater.
You will see this later.
There’s a story here
Of this you can be certain
Go ahead and guess
Perfect 10?
How are you celebrating 10-10-10? Are you doing crazy things at 10:10pm tonight?
You could go out into the streets and shout Star Wars obscenities in binary, if that’s your thing.
01000111 01101111 00100000 01101011 01101001 01110011 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110111 01101111 01101111 01101011 01101001 01100101
My wife is going to be watching our church secretary try out for roller derby.
Yeah. Not being sarcastic.
On the topic of the unexpected: I came across this article about concert violinist Joshua Bell and a social experiment he did in the subway. Well worth the read.
Testing out my thumbs
I’m posting from a smartphone right now. More info later. Let’s just say there’s a Google App for that.
Star Wars Night Live: How Sean Killed Off an Entire Party
Today is youtube’s lifeinaday.
It’s a film that’s going to be directed and edited by Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald. It’s actually going to be a major release and the big catch is that the online community is supplying the footage. You’re supposed to film what you’re doing today and then answer their questions.
The questions:
- What do you love?
- What do you fear?
- What makes you laugh?
- What’s in your pocket? Is there a story behind any of the objects?
I am so filming Star Wars night from the MacBook.
I set up a CoverIt Live event as an experiment. If we have Internet, I’ll post some updates. Even if we don’t have a wi-fi signal, I set it up to read Twitter updates from people’s Twitter timeline and add it into the conversation. If you want to join the fun, add the hashtag #starwarsnight or #swn to your Twitter update to be added to the timeline.
Oh, the Interwebs. More fun than hitting myself in the head with empty milk jugs.
The Melt List
Spies have a Burn List, nerds have a Melt List. Easy, right?
I think you may see an EB Lane blog post about our proud state’s infernal sunshine sometime in the near future. I’m intrigued by what people want to see melted in the sun. Leave a comment with additions to the list of things to melt:
- Edward Cullen/Jacob Nakedguy doll – you could have a whole, “Whose team do you want to melt?” competition to find out who really sparkles – vampire/sunlight irony
- a copy of Fahrenheit 451
- quesadilla
- @algore‘s hopes and dreams
- pop corn kernels
- Peep
- Gummi Bear
- Barbie with kerosene
- Barney VHS
- rubber soles of old shoes
- army man under Death Star magnifying glass (make your own solar death ray with instructions from here)
- M&M’s – melt in your mouth, not in your hand?
- Old Spice – eliminate the advertising competition – not being able to watch the funny videos would be a hefty cost, though
- ice cream
- cheap steak
- pancakes
- crayons
- popsicles
- dry ice
- milk shake
- eggs
- bacon
- crayons
- snooty candles
- tapered candle
- JELL-O
Thanks to @kennokishi, @jesseisme, @fierypinkgirl, and @billando for the ideas. You can also message @ElScorpio, the Madman, (get it? play on the advertising thing…wakka wakka) with ideas.
This feels a bit like MythBusters.
Epic Yarn and a spontaneous haircut
The yarn is in no way related to the haircut.
Today was Nintendo’s E3 press conference. I got to watch it live (via streaming) and go crazy right alongside the people in the audience. Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword looks great, as anticipated. The controls were a little off and the demo guy told the audience to turn off all wireless devices, making fun of the trouble Steve Jobs had connecting to the Internet during the iPhone reveal.
Kirby: Epic Yarn has an amazing style. Every character is made from a piece of string.
EA Sports Active 2.0 looks cool. It’s completely wireless and one of the controllers is a heart-rate monitor, checking more accurately how efficient your workout is. It also has the ability to coordinate data online like the Nike+iPod system.
The big reveal for me, though, was GoldenEye. I remember my residents at NAU playing this for hours on end in the days of the Nintendo 64. It retained the split-screen multiplayer but now includes 16 online types of matches. I’ll be curious to see if FORZO (or whatever Slade calls himself now) and I can play online versus the world.
Oh. And the portable game system that can take 3D photos and play 3D movies and games.
Sunday we had our birthday celebration. Yeah, some things have happened in the past few months. During one of the conversations, J’s youngest brother agreed to a spontaneous haircut.
He went from Tired Aquatic Mad Scientist to In a Similar Manner to Lincoln Brewster. I think we should have gone more David Crowder.
Summer Art Contest #1: The Robot
Here’s the first in an ongoing collection of drawings my daughters and I will be doing throughout the summer. Today’s subject: robots. Unintentionally my oldest and I drew food robots. The proximity to dinner is suspect.
Click on the thumbnail to see the full picture.
Mine – Double Cheeseburger Amana Robot
My oldest – FoodMaker Robot
My youngest – “Ha Ha! Robot!”
The unbroken crayon selection is quite girly in our house. I need to get my own set or Darth Vader will be sporting hot pink Sith alchemy.
Why Man is Sometimes Better than Aquaman
May 14
May 17
May 22
I am but a mere mortal and no king of Atlantis and yet my powers of beardery are more applicable than Aquaman’s. In the same respect, you’ll notice a ceramic seahorse that I’ve constructed. The sea only gives it the ability to be asymmetrical. At a later date you will witness the unspeakable wrath of my forgeborne horse.
The proper response shall be to cower and/or sing a telegram.
We moved up the experiment, sir.
I was going to take a picture each week to show my facial hair renewal, but I realized the unsurpassed beardery harnessed by my follicles.
Do you see the beard returning from Friday? Madness!
It’s been a while since I’ve been impatient about my beard regrowing. There were so many comments from teachers questioning who the new librarian was. The change in hair status was literally a classroom disruption…twice (three times if you count the class walking by that stopped to stare). I walked into a class to solve a projector problem (the Video source button is the one you want to hit when you want to show a video) and the class gasped.
To be honest, I did pretend to take on Slade’s “walking around the mall” persona for a bit today. Here’s a simulation:
#votekishi
This marks the start of the grassroots movement to get Ken no Kishi elected to some political office.
In his own words, here’s why he’s the best candidate:
“#votekishi: Because I don’t know enough about the real estate market to even attempt to defraud it.”
“If elected as governor, I promise that every household will have a robot servant. #votekishi”
“Just for that, I’m misappropriating your image to use in my first campaign ad.”
You can follow him on Twitter by clicking here. Use the hashtag #votekishi to spread the word.
The Facebook page is here.
Look Older in only Four Years!
It’s starting. Being President is making Obama’s hair turn gray.
I have to admit that I kept refreshing my browser (all the good sites were blocked) during the iPadapalooza whereas I wasn’t as glued to the State of the Union. I think that may be because we all have a general sense of the state of the union versus anything from Steve Jobs always promises to be a turtlenecked spectacle.
I still think that Obama should have presented a keynote using the tablet and then ended with, “Oh? What’s this, you ask? Why it does…” and then list off the tech specs. I also think that, of the stuff the iPad has, it was a big oversight to leave off a microSD slot. Of course they want you to spend more money on the bigger hard drives, but that instant expandability needs to be built into most devices these days.
If you remember a post from a while back, we looked at how being President of the United States was proof that stress causes gray hairs. Expect to see Obama’s hair get even grayer in the coming years.
We’re Home, A Thank You, and A Bloggh Project
We are home.
That would be the easiest bloggh post this month, but I won’t stop there.
(If you haven’t read about the build, make sure you click here first.)
Thank you, Dogwhisperer G, for watching Indiana. You’re a mercenary to the last, you old scoundrel. You’ll be paid in due time.
We just got word from the other build team that went down with us. The INS made one of the vans get out of the rental van and walk across the border as pedestrians.
What, to prove that Americans can be physically fit?
This was on Sunday, the final day of the build, when your arms are tired from slinging stucco and/or drywall. I’d be annoyed. Keep in mind that this happened at the U.S. side of the Giant Fence (where we are citizens).
While down in Juarez my mind slipped back into my college minor. I used to (I guess I still am) be trained to also be a Spanish teacher. I keep that pretty secret (good thing I didn’t post that fact on the Interwebs for all to see).
My wife and I feel like we need to practice our Spanish more. But we’re not going to re-visit my college textbooks for Spanish acquisition.
We could care less where the nearest ferrocarril tracks are or how to get the camarero’s attention for more gazpacho. I’m also pretty sure we won’t be visiting any discotecas in Juarez anytime soon, so we can skip that chapter.
Each week, though, I’m going to put up some sentences under the Casas category. I promise that the bloggh won’t be overrun by the subjunctive (no more than usual, I hope (that was a grammar joke, by the way)) but I post it for my own benefit; feel free to join in the fun.
This week’s phrases (with rough equivalent translations):
Me llamo _____.
My name is _____ .
Tengo un martillo y clavos.
I have a hammer and nails.
¿Mi barba es muy buena, sí?
My beard rocks.
(More or less the translation)
My goal is to use these sentences this week.
Infinite Improbability
As I am a fan of TVTropes, the best way to start sifting through all that information is to randomly click the Random Item button (appropriately enough).
I realized that I have quite a bit of information here that may be intimidating to go back and read. (You know, if you’re a chronomentrophobic and can’t stand my archives calendar/any timekeeping device. I have to be sensitive to those readers.)
I messaged this guy, this guy who said he was the president of the galaxy. He promised that this girl he knew had a heart of gold and to call her flat at 2079460347. Long story short, I now have an Infinite Improbability Drive installed on the bloggh. Check the sidebar, but whatever you do, don’t click it.
I don’t want anyone turning into sofas.
“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space…
Arthur looked up. “Ford!” he said, “there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.”
“Five to one against and falling…” she said, “four to one against and falling…three to one…two…one…probability factor of one to one…we have normality, I repeat we have normality.” She turned her microphone off – then turned it back on, with a slight smile and continued: “Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.”
He reached out and pressed an invitingly large red button on a nearby panel. The panel lit up with the words “Please do not press this button again.”
How many Truck Months do we need? Let me check the calendar.
Many moons ago, when the Reliant was having the first of its troubles, I considered a new(er) car. It’s tough, since the Reliant was one of the only cars that I could fit in (that’s the major reason why the Scion rocks).
I must confess to you now that I fell into propaganda. I was emphatic about buying a truck because I saw an ad that it was Truck Month. If it’s only for one month, those deals will run out!
Then my high Wisdom modifier wife made a lasting comment: “It’s always Truck Month.” Over recent years I have noticed this same thing: every month is Truck Month.
So, like in good bloggh tradition, I’ve decided to keep track of the Truck Months. It’s like a paper chain counting towards Christmas, but instead of Christmas, it’s over-hyped vehicles. And instead of paper, it’s words on a screen. But other than that, it’s the exact same.
For the first one, the October one, Ford warns that it is the Final Days. [insert multi-horned goat/2012 joke here]
On the topic of Abominations of Desolation, have you seen the new Range Rover Sports? They definitely know that the era of the gas-guzzling SUV is waning, and I might be wrong, but I think they’re taking style tips from a mix between the Scion xB and a RAV4.
I wonder what the difference is between the $17,000 xB and the $60,000 Range Rover Sport. $43,000 floor mats?
Unrelated news: the word count is at 7,000+ as of last night/this morning. Also, Mike, you could be a mayor who patrols like Batman/the mayor of Newark. When Hulu puts up Conan’s interview with him, I’ll try and link to it. (The reason I heard about the Flagstaff mayor was because she broke up a drug deal right outside of one of her meeting rooms. She was on the news saying something to the effect of, “Not on my watch!”)
Have you seen Auto-tune the News?
Uses for Marshmallows
This is taken from a Reader’s Digest book someone donated to the library, Extraordinary Uses for Ordinary Things: 2,317 Ways to Save Money and Time:
- Stop ice-cream drips – Put one in the bottom of the cone. It doesn’t stop the top mess, but at least that you can see coming. It’s the bottom of the cone shenanigans that get me.
- Keep wax off birthday cakes – Put the candle in there. If the wax melts, you can discard the marshmallow. And it’s festive! (Festive? Like for Marshmallow Day or something?)(Dang! I guess there is a Marshmallow Day! August 30!! We missed it. Maybe we can catch the two day celebration of Día de Melcochas)
- Keep brown sugar soft – Throw a marshmallow in to dish out the moisture
- Separate toes when applying polish – I’ll have to take their word for it.
- Impromptu cupcake frosting – Add a marshmallow a minute before taking the cupcake out of the oven.