XL Birthday

It is harder to get everyone together and we were still lacking Bob, but I certainly am thankful for everyone coming to my 40th birthday. It was great to see Michael running around and I was very surprised to see Danny come up from Spring Hill and glad Nicole could make it too. Susan really enjoyed seeing everyone too since she is usually out of town for the big holiday get-togethers and vacations. The food was delicious! Thanks too for all the great presents; when I got home I got really, really drunk, baked cookies, and watched movies.

Thanks for all the good food and the loud company. It was an XLent birthday!

(XL is 40 in Roman numerals – ed.)

That Google

Susan and I recently rented a newly released DVD starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn. Later on I was writing the review (B+) and I wanted to look up some information on the movie, so I went to Google. I entered “the translator” (not in quotes). It gave about 3 results and then under that said “Results for The Interpreter” with the first link going to imdb’s page about the movie I had watched and whose title I had not been able to remember correctly (getting only “the” correct). I’ve always liked that Google could detect misspellings and ask “Did you mean . . . “, but this is a new level of outhinking otherwise less intelligent human beings.

I don’t think this is good for our future. Evolution worked for centuries making people stronger, with better vision, hearing, etc. Then we came up with machines that could make up for our weaknesses, made glasses for the myopic and hearing aids for the hard of hearing. Now Google is taking away the penalties for being stupid.

By the way, I tried this on MSN and Yahoo just now and got a bunch of results for translator-related stuff.

When I started putting rotating quotes in the blog description I would go to Google and enter the name of a movie and then the word “quotes” (not in quotes) and the first link would be imdb’s page of quotes for that movie. Compare that with going to imdb, searching for the title of a movie, picking that movie from the results page, then scrolling down to some quotes and clicking “more”. It’s actually easier to navigate imdb’s website using Google than it is by going to imdb.

Halloween

I started this as a reply to Kelly’s blog entry about Halloween, but it got to be too long so I decided it should be it’s own entry. Oh well, that’s one less comment for Kelly and one more entry for me . . .

I ask people what they are as much as a I can. Sometimes the answers are pretty funny, even though I didn’t have any Zombie Pirate Clowns come by. I had a record number of people come by without costumes. Three of them showed up and I asked what they were dressed as. They said “Nuthin'”. And I said well, you don’t get any candy. They looked shocked as I shut the door.

I wound up giving out Sweetarts, Starburst, and Sugar Babies. I wanted to get the Sweetarts that come in the paper package with 3 pellets because they are so cheap. I figured they would be good for people who didn’t wear costumes. But this year the store didn’t have those so I had fun-size packages which had about 10 or so in each package. I had some left over packages of saltines from getting chili at Wendy’s the night before so I thought that would be good to give to people without costumes. I put them in the bowl with the candy and gave one of the packages to a girl without a costume. I don’t think she noticed. Then in the next group this guy (in a costume) says “Oh, man saltines! I love saltines!” so I gave him the other package of saltines.

The funniest group was a little girl in an Incredibles outfit. Her Dad was with her too and *he* was wearing an Incredibles outfit. But then behind them was the girl’s little brother who could hardly walk, also in an Incredibles outfit and then behind him, the mother Incredibles! So it was the whole family.

Avondale was a zoo as always. There are just tons and tons of people. I went through half of my candy in the first half hour and saw only one white kid, so I know most of the people weren’t local. Later on I got a better mix of people but ran out of candy after about an hour and a half. That’s okay because thirty minutes later (at 8:00) Halloween officially ends and the police drive around with their bullhorns telling people to go home. It turns out the Starbursts were pretty cheapo because each pack only had two squares, but I had a lot of them so the candy held out longer than in most years.

Rotating Descriptions

After some success with the rotating banner images, I decided to take Jeb up on his offer of doing rotating descriptions. I’ve had Gandalf’s quote about tempermental wizards for a while now. I don’t really have much else to say, but I picked up some movie quotes from Holy Grail, Raising Arizona, and Princess Bride. I like some of the quotes, but others have to go. If there are any you don’t like, let me know and I’ll get rid of them.

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New Banner Pictures

In an effort to have as nice a blog as Kelly and Eric , I added pictures to the banner of my blog. There are 14 different pictures that can show up at the top of the page. With the exception of the Escher lizard pattern, Susan or I took all of the pictures. Most are from our trips including Baja California, Galapagos, New York, and Colorado, but also local trips to Stone Mountain and the Kangaroo Center. One (a funny one of Katie) is from my backyard. You can keep clicking Refresh (or Reload) to see more images. Or you can cheat and click here to see a list of them.

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