SpottedWalrus

The past 4 days were spent in Austin, TX at this years SXSWi Festival.

I met lots of new people and was able to finally meet in person many people I’ve conversed with over the past few years.

Overall the experience was a good one. There were a number of really good panels, though I do have to say that I was a bit let down by some of them. Seems a lot of the panels were good in theory but just weren’t executed well.

I would have liked a few more panels that weren’t on such a beginner level, but I understand a huge number of people that go to SXSW are really knew to this stuff.

Twitter remarkably withstood the onslaught of constant updates from thousands of attendees and was used for just about all communication between people getting together during the day and for parties in the evenings.

It’s good to be home and hit the ground running with some renewed energy about things and if I met you this year, it was a pleasure.

So generally I’m pretty weary about telling people to click on links and “Sign up for this and tell your friends to sign up and we’ll all get rich”. But this really has worked for me.

Blingo is a search engine that awards prizes on random searches. It uses Google search results so it’s the same thing as searching Google.

Each time you search, you could possibly win something from a simple as a movie ticket up to stuff like a car.

In the past month I’ve won 3 free movie tickets.

On top of that, what’s cool is if you get people to sign up under you, you win whatever they win. So say you sign up with my link and then you win a $100…I also win $100.

So, what are you waiting for? Sign up for Blingo!

So some 10+ years ago I was really in to collecting baseball/hockey cards.

I initially collected hockey cards because I was a huge hockey fan but all my friends were collecting baseball cards so I inevitably switched to collecting those so I could have something to trade with them.

I estimate I’ve got some 2000-3000 cards stuffed away in the basement (about 60% hockey, 40% baseball). I’ve always wondered what my collection was worth but just didn’t care to look all the cards up.

Thankfully I’ve stumbled upon Beckett’s myBeckett feature!

I’ve started the painfully slow process of inputting all my cards where they will be eternally tracked by Beckett. So 10 years down the road when I wonder how much my collection is now worth, I just fire up myBeckett, hope I still remember my login info, and easily pull up how much my collection (as well as each individual card) is worth!

It could honestly take me the better part of a year to input all of my cards, but it will certainly be nice once they’re all in there.

Now for the participation portion of the show. What sort of things have you collected in your lifetime?

My list would be: Stamps, Coins, Baseball Cards, Hockey Cards, and (my current love) Urban Vinyl Toys.

Thanks to software like SpamAssassin, my email inbox only gets around 5-8 spam emails a day and about 99.9999% of that gets caught by Mail’s junk filter.

Unfortunately the USPS has not caught on to using any kind of “junk” filter for their service.

How is it that in the short time the internet has been around, there are already solid solutions for almost completely eliminating junk while the USPS, which has been around for over 200 years, offers no real solution for keeping my mailbox free of crap?

Over 90% of the mail that is in our physical mailbox is pure junk. Unsolicited, useless junk. Sure there are ways to opt-out of some of the things like credit card offers, but the real problem is the “local” unsolicited mail. Things like postcards advertising the new gym down the street or a brochure from the shop nearby that is having a big sale.

All these business have to do is include the line “Current Resident” in the address line and it will always get delivered to your mailbox. The USPS’s policy to allow this crap through the system without offering a way to opt-out is just as criminal as the spammers who send millions of spam email every day.

So, USPS, if the piece of mail doesn’t have my name on it, or even worse just has “Current Resident” as the recipient, don’t deliver it to my mailbox. I don’t want it.

So this past weekend I launched a new site called Decomodo (pronounced however you feel like).

It’s my little plot of intarweb real estate for me to post all the randomly sweetness stuff I come across day-to-day.

Basically, it’s the most awesome site you’ll ever see. Period.

Go visit Decomodo right now…or else!

So this past Friday was quite an interesting day.

It was a normal day of work here in my home office and I had just had a nice, hardy Grilled Steak Stuffed Burrito from the one and only Taco Bell.

I soon began to notice that my peripheral vision in my right eye was going in and out. I was beginning to think I was taking crazy pills so I went and took my contacts out and put my glasses on only for it to get worse.

Within an hour of that I had a pounding headache. I went back to my bedroom to try and maybe rest a little to see if that would help, but this headache had no intention of letting me do any such thing.

Thirty minutes later I called my wife to come home and take me to the E.R…I felt like my head was about to explode and I could barely walk…much less drive.

Long story short…1 CAT Scan, 1 MRI, tons of pain meds, throwing up, and 6 hours in the E.R., it seems I had a nasty migraine. I’ve never had one before and I sure as hades don’t want one again. So, I’m curious…has anyone heard of any correlation between migraines and computer monitors?

I sit in front of a monitor some 8-10 hours a day 5-6 days a week and if that ultimately will cause me to have more migraines, then I really need to do something about it.

So yesterday I got a jury summons in the mail. I’ve never been summoned before, so I don’t really know what it’s like to go possibly serve on jury. I will say that I have no desire to go sit in a court room for even one 8 hour day to listen to a bunch of lame cases and I certainly have no desire to get stuck having to go for like a week…that just isn’t something I need right in the middle of a super busy time with client work.

So, last night I was chatting with some folks trying to figure out clever ways to get out jury duty. I have absolutely know idea if any of these will work, but I’m dang well willing to try them.

(Note: I claim no legal responsibility for your butt if get thrown in prison if somehow one of these is illegal.)

1. Show extreme bias towards people in general. Call the court and ask lots of questions about the race, gender, ethnicity, or religion of the possible cases. Chances are they won’t actually give you any of that info, but it makes them think you’re fairly bias towards those topics.
2. Tell them you’ll starve if you miss a day of work for this. Some states (like Colorado) don’t give a rip if it means you wouldn’t eat that night because you couldn’t work, but other states have a heart.
3. As a follow up to the extreme bias, when you actually go in for the interview, ask all of those questions AGAIN. Make statements like “Is this person white/black/hispanic/asian? Because it’s so typical of ‘those people’ to commit crimes.” Obviously this is completely politically incorrect and if you really meant it, then you’d be a jerk.
4. Show up dressed like the opposite sex. They’ll just freak out and tell you to go away.
5. When you’re sitting around, waiting to be interviewed, be sure to talk to other folks in a loud voice and say thing like “I’ve always wanted to convict somebody of a crime!” or “I can’t wait to sentence this guy to death!”
6. And my personal favorite: Show up wearing a t-shirt that says “I Send People To Prison”…the ultimate goal being to make them think that you either won’t take it seriously or you really just want to send somebody to prison regardless of if they’re guilty or not.

Now, the obvious answer to this is to simply show up and do your civic duty and serve. Doing so guarantees that you pretty much won’t ever get summoned again. But where’s the fun in that?

Is it just me, or does anybody else think that taking an actual bath is just gross? Seriously. Think about it. You’re sitting in a small bucket-like container wallowing in your own filth. Sure it’s diluted…but still. Kinda makes me gag just thinking about it.

Or maybe I’m taking crazy pills here.

So I’ve officially stopped watching LOST tonight. I’m just bored with it. The plot hasn’t progressed a single bit. The promos are just flat out laying about what the shows will be about the next night.

It really is unfortunate. The first two seasons were absolutely fantastic but this third one really has taken a turn for the worst. With so many commercials throughout the show, it almost feels like they’re just milking this as much as they can because they know it won’t be around another season.

Oh well…atleast The Office is still good.

So, I think I’ve injured my right pinky…and it wasn’t doing anything manly like chopping down trees or chopping people in the face.

I’ve got a nice, sharp pain that shoots through my pinky whenever I’m using my keyboard…which is like 12 hours a day. It seems to revolve around the movement my hand makes when hitting the ‘delete’ key on my keyboard. Basically I think I’m overextending my pinky muscle.

Man…how unmanly is that?

This reminds me of a recent snickers commercial…I think I’ll go and rip out some chest hair now so I don’t feel like a pansy.