Excited for 24

Today during a staff meeting, I forgot to turn off my ringer on my cellphone and so everyone heard this: http://www.zumodrive.com/share/2rgJMzIyZj A 24 Ringtone. Everyone had a laugh on my expense. Oh well.

Then I saw this later in the morning.

Needless to say I am excited for 24 this winter!

Kim is still a moron in my eyes

Ok, this all started a few years ago. I don't want to admit this, but I actually listened to Kim Komando. If you look her up in Wikipedia she actually looks like she might know what she is talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Komando. I am happy that she tries to educate people about technology, but she just fills them with incorrect and worthless information and in some cases it's totally ridiculous. I'm not the only person who thinks this about this poor woman, http://shrine.slowblog.com/2006/11/07/kim-kommando-incompetent/.

I must admit, yes, I do listen to what might be considered her competitors, but even they probably just dismiss her because if I were to compare her to someone like Leo Laporte, that's like comparing Lennie from John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men to Albert Einstein, of course I'm referring to Kim as Lennie.

This morning I received a comment on my wordpress.com blog and it made me so mad I almost deleted it. Here is the comment from "Ron": "Sounds like your the moron. You have a petty pathetic attitude in trying to show stones at her in a lame effort to get someone to watch your stuff. Usually people with your type of attitude are early relegated to the garbage dump no matter how smart they are." Actually, I'm glad I got the comment. I'm also considering continuing to use wordpress.com since I barely ever get any comments on blogspot. By the way "Ron" why would I show stones at her? I know you meant throw, but I just had to point that out.

Ok, so now I guess you are wondering why I think Kim is such an incompetent person? It's because, the few times I have listened to her, I developed a severe headache from the garbage that was coming out of her mouth. For example, check out this article, USA Today: Web delivers new worry for parents: Digital drugs she claimed that music could make you high? Okay, what kind of drugs is she on? Yes, if you read it she doesn't exactly say that you can get high from digital drugs, but she does say that they can lead to real drugs? What? Excuse me, I'm going to go hit my head against a wall.

I'm sure she's said other things just as stupid but I can't stand listening to her, so I need other people to let me know what else she is saying. All I know is I will not listen to her unless someone forces me to do so, such as kidnapping me and tying me up with ropes so I can't plug my ears.

Most of you will probably just dismiss my ramblings about her and think, "Jeez, if she makes you so upset, don't listen to her then!" I don't, I just don't want anyone else to either, the things she says is mind numbing... and to think her mom was part of the original UNIX development team. Yes, I did my research on her and yes her real name is Kim Komando. Okay, I've spent way to long on this topic.

Christmas lights and getting ready for "The Holidays"

The Christmas lights are up. I'm not finished but it looks a lot better than what I did last year. Last year, I just had one of those blow up Christmas globes that blew away sometime around Christmas. I'm still no Clark Griswold, but my wife and kid are pleased with what I've done. It's actually quite a lot of work to put up Christmas lights, thankfully this year it was the warmest I've ever experienced for putting up lights, I didn't even need to wear gloves. Usually your fingers would freeze off you did not have gloves on this time of year in North Dakota. We actually haven't had much snow at all, I don't think it's ever covered the ground completely. I'm ok with that, as long as we have some snow on the ground for Christmas.

On Friday, on the way home from my visiting my parents we listened to the Holiday Traditions channel on XM Radio. I love Christmas music but a person can become sick of it, and you usually only want to hear it one or two months of the year. I was at the drug store the next and I heard an older lady complain about the store playing Christmas music, she said it was too early. Is it, I thought to myself. My answer, is no, October would be too early but after November 25th or specifically Thanksgiving, that is the perfect time of year to start playing Christmas music. I'm sure if you work retail you will be very sick of it come Dec. 25th but that's just too bad.

I just discovered that Pandora.com has tons of Christmas stations, so I know what I will be listening to tomorrow at work. I love Pandora.com it's a great website.

The only bad part of Black Friday, which has now become a tradition for me and my wife to endure is all the fricken people. Good God, could some of them stay home? Including me, I'd gladly volunteer to do that. Anyway, this year we went to Brainerd at 3:45 a.m., Minnesota and visited Herbergers at 4:15 a.m., not too crazy, then we were off to Wal-Mart at 5:00 a.m. it was open ahead of schedule or maybe our clocks were off a few minutes. It was crazy but not that bad, we didn't buy anything. Then I dropped my wife at 5:30 a.m. at Best Buy and I went to Target. Target had long lines for checkout and I only had one string of Christmas lights to buy, I went to the electronics section to check out and it took about 20 minutes. Best Buy wasn't that bad, my wife said the staff didn't know what they were talking about when it came to what was on sale, but I knew that, the Geek Squad sucks. They don't even know what to do with Linux. Anyway, then we went to Fleet Farm at 6 a.m. I couldn't find a parking spot and my wife was trying to get a free stuffed animal. I was happy that we were unsuccessful, my daughter has so many stuffed animals we could fill a small car with them. Then at 6:15 or so we went to Menards or as I like to call it Mens Nards and we were there for three hours. We were in line to check out for three hours, we actually move to a smaller line after I started to get restless and look for more items. They really need to focus on getting people out of the store faster on such a busy day and have employees spend less time on helping people find items. What I thought was hilarious was that they still use Windows 98 at the Brainerd Menards. If you don't believe me, see for yourself in this very blurry photo http://twitpic.com/r5qgl Maybe that's why they have long lines?

Next year we will probably be back in Grand Forks for Black Friday. Maybe I will get lucky and come down with the flu or something so I don't have to go but I know I will be avoiding Menards at all costs. I don't care if they give away free life size teddy bears.

Blogging via thumbs aka SMS

I wonder how many people blog via sms. I am sure many people would like to do that, but really who wants to type a long posting using their thumbs on a tiny keyboard. I just realized the problem with blogging via sms too, your limited to 160 characters. So it's basically just like twitter but 20 characters more. Yippee! Ok, I doubt I will use this feature, but it's nice to know I have the option. Too bad you can't post some type of code in each message that would tell your blog to string the messages together. I'm sure some nerd out there has figured out how to to do just that. If so, please tell me too.

Star Wars

I have to get this out of my system. This weekend while my daughter was having a friend over, they were playing Lego Star Wars on the Wii and then I suggested they watch a Star Wars movie. I went to get out the DVDs and then for a fleeting moment, I had to think of which movie had the Ewoks, ok, yes this is where the real Star Wars fans stop reading. I am a Star Wars fan, but only of the first three Star Wars movies. That's where the confusion came in, I have the newer DVDs where the series is re-numbered so the third movie is now Roman numeral VI. Of course I was referring to Star Wars Return of the Jedi, as what I like to call the final Star Wars movie, those newer recreations are just excuses to pay for George Lucas' yacht. Yes, as a college student I stood inline to get to see the Phantom Menace, and at the time I thought it was awesome, it's still a good movie but nothing beats the original ones. I'm not even sure I've seen the other movies after that, I know I rented them but I don't recall what they were about.

I'm also a big Kevin Smith fan, and of course he's a Star Wars fan and throws in a Star Wars reference in practically every movie, including his best movie ever, Clerks. I agree the Death Star may have sub contractors working on it. Another movie which was awesome was Fan Boys, where Star Wars fans go on a road trip for a dying fan.

Ok I think that's all I have to say about this subject, I just had to vent about my frustration. By the way, my daughter and her friend didn't even make it thru the first 30 minutes of the movie, so dad ended up re-watching a classic and I was prepared to sit thru all of the movies with them. I did that too in college, actually several times and occasionally I'd watch Space Balls in addition.

So, May the Force be with You!

A new way for me to blog

Now, instead of logging into blogger.com which is really hard to do
(can you sense sarcasm) I can just post from e-mail. Actually, I have
been able to do that for a long time, but having one more easy way to
do it, wouldn't be bad. Also, I think I can attached photos and other
files as well and they will automatically just be added, so I am going
to try that now and see what I get.

Posted via email from Dennis's posterous

My First Blog Post on Posterous

This is my first time trying Posterous, I am not sure exactly how it
works, but I have been hearing so many good things about it, I thought
I better check it out! That's all I have to say.

Posted via email from Dennis's posterous

Blogging so softly

Lately I've been neglecting my blog. I have been focusing my attention on twitter and Facebook.

I am working on a novel and I am posting each line on twitter as I write it. I have another blog where you can read the entire blog, but you can visit therandomstory.comto find everything you need to read it.

I am having major writers block but I hope that will end soon, in the meantime, I am going to get my dad's book published on Lulu.com. His book titled Up in the Woods Early Times, by Raymond Stangl is exactly what the title says, it's about living in Minnesota during early times, specifically the early 1900s until the 1980s. My dad will be 84 on August 27th. I know he doesn't read my blog, so I can say that I will be giving him that for his birthday hopefully. If I don't accomplish that I will have this blog post to make me ashamed of my uncompleted goal.

I think the reason I am stuck while writing my novel is that I ran out of enthusiasm for it. I had a great idea to write a novel using twitter but then as I started writing it I just couldn't think of any great ideas. It started to become boring for me, hopefully the people who are following the story on twitter don't feel the same way.

A few years ago, I would post to my blog on an almost daily basis or at least weekly. Lately, I have been only posting on a monthly basis. Another reason I don't feel as compelled to write is that I really don't have anyone reading my blog as far as I can tell. I bet more people read my cat's fake blog than mine, how sad huh?

Well that's all for today!