A juggling technophile shares personal stories, challenges, humor and perhaps some political commentary.
Evan, 3 years old: "Bye-bye Daddy!"
Dad:"Bye-bye."
Evan:"Thank you Daddy."
Dad:"You’re welcome. I love you!"
Evan:"I love you too Daddy"
These exchanges make me melt. Evan’s speech has inflections, pauses, and energy that we take for granted. His words say, "I have mastery of this language but I am still learning." I love to see a child grow!
What is our society coming to when you cannot even shoot your lawn mower in your own yard without going to prison!
Watch this NSFW video titled Why every guy should buy their girlfriend Wii Fit and you’ll understand too!
Now the real reason I linked to the video: Views: 5,362,590 in two months! Holy cow! That’s called "going viral!" If Youtube was paying $5 for every thousand views (as suggested in Business Week) that one minute, nine second video of a girl in her panties swinging her hips would be worth $26,812.95!
How does it get viral? Emailed, social networks, links from sites like Asylum.com (AOL) and Popurls.com. This one in particular is being passed around so much that you almost have to work to not see it. Getting content to go viral is the dream of most content producers such as bloggers, video makers, podcasters, and so forth. But only one viral piece can bring down your servers and net you very little money. Figuring out the secret to getting content to regularly go viral is how people quit their day jobs and make their living blogging. Is it the underwear? Am I wearing the wrong underwear when I type?
Joystick Division interviews Giovanny Gutierrez who works for Tinsley Advertising to see if this one minute video was a marketing stunt.
Now even though the president of the company told me this is just a private video you posted with your Tinsley account, I’m not fooled. Admit it: you’re a part of a clandestine, Nintendo-sponsored viral marketing campaign!
The whole thing was just an idea I had for a spec viral video. I came up with the idea because that really is my girlfriend (not my sister like many have assumed), she loves Wii Fit and even more, looks hot doing it. [Source, Joystick Division, Q&A With the Man Behind "Why every guy should buy their girlfriend Wii Fit"]
So he did pre-meditate it going viral! That’s powerful. The LA Times even picked up the story. Here’s a great spoof video!
Maintaining the illusion of normalcy during troubled times is like maintaining the illusion that you can breathe underwater. However, both are important.
Knoxville needs a sign ordinance.
I have had a post in draft that I thought Dr. Helen would enjoy but I just haven’t found the time to finish it. Today she posted "Every possible form of interaction between an adult and a child is perceived as yet another opportunity for child abuse." and I commented with the story from my post:
We are creating a horrible side affect in the way our children perceive the world. The lack of trust and an understanding that most people are good will impact the choices they make in our future as they become voters and influence laws in our society.
Last year I dropped by the high school band practice to give my daughter some money since she decided to stay from practice to the game instead of coming home. My wife and 3 other children were in the van as I approached the field. The girls on the flag team became concerned because "a creepy stalker guy" was approaching the field. Their response was an immediate jump to the negative.
How strong was the impact of this experience with my daughter? Two days ago I offered to drop by during band camp to offer support to the team and my daughter begged me to stay away. She reminded me specifically that I am “that creepy stalker guy.” Wow. Gee. Thank you society for the hollow feeling you have put in my chest, destroying bonding opportunities between my daughter and me, and embarrassing my daughter in front of her peers.
How can we be raising happy children to become happy adults when we are teaching them to focus only on the negative…and a negative that is highly unlikely?
As a male in our society, I encounter these horrid attitudes more and more frequently particularly as I lead scouts or visit schools. Boy Scouts of America has added training for the adult leaders as well as the children regarding child abuse. Nothing is more uncomfortable than talking to an 8 year old about potential child abuse except maybe talking to a second grader about sexual harassment but that’s a different a story for a different time.
Recently, an adult was asking about how to handle my children while they were at camp and I instructed, "Be firm. Be direct. Tell them they are being annoying." He said he couldn’t do that to another person’s child. You know. We used to say, "it takes a village [to raise a child]." Now everyone in the village is a suspect for an imagined crime that has yet to happen. I believe in the school of hard knocks. I believe in common sense. And I believe in people! Wrong me once, shame on you; wrong me twice, shame on me. I will protect my children within reason. I will not/cannot bubble wrap them and protect them from every sharp corner or hard surface. They will learn more and live fuller lives by me allowing them to fall down or break a bone than by my words and fears. I will teach them trust, and impact upon them common sense.
See also: Slate, 800,000 Missing Kids? Really? Making sense of child abduction statistics.
After a false start at 3am, I woke at 5am to taxi a child around town and have landed at my keyboard to frantically get some code out in the next hour. How goes your Thursday?
I just looked at the number of people following me on Twitter. I used to have many more following me than I was following. Now 60 people less than the number I follow are following me. My friends abandoned me! (or the spammers went away) I can only assume that in allowing Twhirl to stay in a visual part of my second monitor today, which encouraged Twitter to act as a chatroom instead of notification board, that the number of Tweets I made drove a large group of people away! I am sure that all the localized Knoxville tweets, family tweets, non-topic specific jokes, and overwhelming lack of technical or political relevance had nothing to do with it. I’m a Twitter abuser!
Update: It’s a Twitter bug!
I spent the morning banging on the keys on my keyboard taking stress breaks to jot a few words here and abuse Twitter (Twhirl makes it a bit too easy to use Twitter as a chatroom). I had a couple of posts I wrote several days ago scheduled for today so it probably looks like I blogged all day. I made great progress before the crack of dawn and through early morning. About lunch time I had to address the monkeys on my back. See, they’ve been getting fat and are weighing heavy without my permission.
One of the monkeys and I are fighting over whether or not the food was deserved, and, in the meantime, he’s cramming it down like the crops will run out tomorrow! I call him Chubs along with some words I won’t print here. He wants me to spend a couple of hours documenting the food to prove ownership. I cannot take that time from my clients so I delay the documentation until tomorrow and start pounding keys.
Another monkey taps me on the shoulder and explains that the commitment he made to me cannot be honored because he is changing the rules. That tune plays out to eight grand a year so it’s painful tap on the shoulder. There is an opportunity to get that monkey to stick to his commitment but it will require phone calls, emails, online chats, and, you guessed it, paperwork and documentation.
I am back to pounding keys to make my clients happy. They happen to be the ones who provide food for my monkeys. At 3:40pm, one of my monkeys decides that I should take action by 4:00pm or else I’d receive a hefty food penalty. I feed that monkey! And decide to make good use of my time. On the same trip, I drop 90 gallons of clothing and toy donations at Goodwill. (three 30 gallon trash bags of stuff = 90 gallons) I also drop by the grocery to make sure my family has dinner. And PetSmart since the dog food ran out. One of the monkeys burp. No! He belches!
I make it home by 5pm to return to coding at a panic’d rate. May I code until my fingers fall off!
Dad:"Who put the roll of toilet paper on the bathroom floor?"
Amy, 6 years old:"Not me."
Dad:"Didn’t you just use the bathroom?"
Amy:"Yes."
Dad:"Then you put the toilet paper on the floor."
Amy, the wordsmith:"No. I didn’t put the toilet paper on the floor. I dropped it on the floor!"
Friday Tommy has Freshman orientation. We have a ton of paperwork to get done before and during orientation. I have yet to see the campus. If I can arrange a babysitter for 12 hours on Friday for a 3 year old, 6 year old and two German Shepherds, I can accompany Tommy and Cathy on the orientation. We have never used a babysitter other than relatives. Exactly how does one go about getting someone to come to your house and deal with your screaming children for twelve hours?
In other miracles, I kindly request the Tennessee Lottery Corporation to select my numbers. Yes, after hearing about Russ’s doorman, I bought a ticket for tonight’s Powerball but I purchased it with ad revenue from TNLotteryResults.com.
The Kill Squad is as sneaky as they come; they better not jeopardize my mission. See them here: www.nbc.com/
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If I was going to buy ONE AJAX reference book to add to my library of dust collecting, quickly antiquated computer references, which AJAX book would you suggest? And by the way, does anyone need a copy of Ben Forta’s ColdFusion Application Construction Kit for version 3 of CF?
In case you missed the announcement, Dave who developed Spam Karma is no longer going to make changes or update the code. Instead he has released it as GPL v.2 and created a Google Code repository in hopes that some talented people will pickup where we he leaving off. I wonder if we Spam Karma users had actually donated money toward his efforts if he would have continued.
Spam Karma puts Akismet and other spam fighting tools to shame. I think in all the time I have been using Spam Karma, I have had only one false positive. I get false negatives on trackbacks but that is because it was only recently that I realized I could change the settings for how Spam Karma handles trackbacks so I’m still making adjustments.
I also found Dave’s comments on a WordPress replacement very interesting. Specifically he notes, "If you look at it, blog systems are over 10 year old now. Their UI have barely evolved since the first versions. … There is a bad need for a groundbreaking platform that would get rid of ten years of accumulated UI habits."
