Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

The blogosphere is loud, packed with people and you can’t hear the peopel you want to hear.
I’m at the Blogopshere event and there are way too many people here.
The inside of the space is packed and people are milling about outside. A few of us are trying to get the computer to play the audio via wifi, btu laptop speakers are painfuly weakl compared to a crowd outside.
MOre later.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. We had some fun in the morning and both girls had mini parties at school. Instead of a party at work, I had another five hour long meeting about Media Asset Management. Let the good times roll!
Michele called me during the day to explain that Zoe had kissed ‘Ethan’ on the cheek today. Zoe had been describing how ‘cute’ Ethan was the night before and how she was going to give him a valentine. During the day Ethan had given Zoe a valentine of a large tube of M&Ms with a heart on top.
I wondered what Ethan’s intentions were. What was his major and plans for a career?
After work, the family headed over to the Diggs house for dinner and playtime. Martin made some excellent pizzas and Michele managed to piss Casey off via instant messaging. Of course, pissing off Casey is not hard to do.
After dinner, Zoe started to complain about feeling hot. After all the adults touched her forehead, the women agreed that she had a fever and the men said maybe, but probably not. When we got home I took her temperature with the super whiz bang electronic ear infrared thermometer. 102. Zoinks, she was sick.
We gave her the Tylenol and put her to bed. I kept checking during the night and after an initial drop, it went up to 104 at 3AM. More Tylenol. Temperature drops. Whew. The idea of giving the child a cold shower at 4AM was not appealing.
This morning it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Zoe kissed a boy.
Zoe gets sicks.
OMG! Zoe got the cooties! She’s sick with the cooties from kissing a boy!
I can’t remember the specific cure for cooties, but I need to find out quick.
Michele suggested that this could serve as a long term boy-deterrent if we explained it to Zoe.

Happy Valentine’s day to all Cruft readers. I wish you a happy day with plenty of smiles and fun.
Capping yesterdays news, here is a picture of the invasion. Note the small 1/2″ by 1/2″ chip that the ants found under the toy chest.

There’s a big meting at work this morning I have the pleasure of chairing. Mor stuff about Media Asset Management, Digital Rights Managment, etc. I know you are all jealous.
Rather than fresh tasty …
[NEWS FLASH]
While writing this entry, I heard screams from the front. The ants had attacked. I just spent the last 20 minutes battling them with my daughters acting as spotters while I counterattacked with the vacuum and cedar oil spray.
The rain drives them in, and I drive them out. Victory will be mine.
You will have to wait until later for stuff. OKay, at least go check out Casey’s latest ramblings…..

Still unable to get to my work email I browsed over to Anita’s page. Here husband Jack took the public information at the Nasa site and made it into a understandable animation about what happened on Columbia.
You must check it out.

I’m having trouble getting my work email at home, so I thought I’d goof off.
Referrers
Like most webloggers, I peruse my stats and look at what pages are linking to my site. These are commonly know as ‘referrers’. I look at these regularly. OK, I check them daily.
Many of the referrers are search engines. As an example, here are the top keyword searches from this month so far including the number of times someone has gotten to my site from a search engine.
Atari 10-in-1 57
how to make a cup of tea 20
important quotes 19
buildabear 15
crawfish boil 13
history of hdtv 12
baseball cap washer 12
cantenna 12
washing baseball caps 9
Clan MacGregor scotch 7
“Pictures of dead people” 7
burger king tacos 6
Dr. Pepper and the imposters 6
Beyond the keyword, it’s always interesting to see the site that point to me.
Here are a few examples…
An eBay auction is pointing at my cantenna page. If he sells it, I wonder if I get a cut.
Adventures into the Well Known has a link to me somewhere. When I read the About page I saw that he must be part of Matt’s circle of DC bloggers. I then read that he grew up in Lawrence, Kansas. Small world. Guess who else grew up in Lawrence, Kansas? Yeppers, Martin and Jennifer!
There’s a link from g2gk.com. I’m not sure what g2gk.com is about, but they like the site.
That’s just an example of what I see in the referrer links. Now I need to see if I can check my work email.

The question is:
Brush then floss or floss then brush?
Personally, I’m a floss then brush person. All you brush then floss people are crazy.

Saturday morning and Michele is out of town. The kids and playing up front and have no idea we are going to Camp Snoopy at Knott’s Berry Farm today.
Linkage: The Fark Photoshop trhead on warning signs. Good stuff. Don’t click on it if you don’t have broadband or are easily offended. I warned ya…
Thanks to Thompsonian I was shown the Milky Way® Comparison Page. Excellent work gentlemen! You are to be commended for your scientific work.
Outnumbered and outgunned
This morning Zoe requested to use the ‘small’ computer. She meant the laptop.

It’s clear to me now that they are smarter, faster, and more persistent than I am. My only edge is knowledge and guile. I’m doomed. By the time they are teenagers, they’ll be telling me how to run the computers.
Run in with Homeland Security
Michele loves Roger Moore as James Bond. Don’t ask me why, but she says he’s the best James Bond. She wanted to have the Live & Let Die DVD but is hard to find since it was only released in the US as part of a Bond collection. I resorted to eBay to find her a copy.
I found a reasonable price and bought out an auction. THe DVD looked real and not a bootleg. I soon realized that the seller was in Bangkok, Thailand. I paid the money and within a week, the package had arrived.

Yes, US Customs, a division of Homeland Security, had opened my package to make sure I wasn’t receiving information from Al-Queda. Assured that I was only being shipped a movie, they resealed my package and sent it onwards to me.
I can only imagine what they are looking for by opening the mail. Terrorist literature? Porn? Drugs? Cash? Who knows? All I know is that they touched my ‘rare & OOP’ Bond DVD.

The DVD is not a bootleg and plays fine. Much happiness for Michele.
Of course I now wonder what the entry in the Homeland Security database says about me now… “Suspect like Roger Moore as James Bond. Movie involves interracial sex. Watch more closely for other ungoodthink.”
Time to get ready to take the kids out. Have a good Saturday.

I finished Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom this morning. My self restraint is low and I blew through the book.
I enjoyed the story and can’t seem to get whuffie ideas out of my head.
Michele is leaving for a four day trip tomorrow and I need to get some rest.
The expansion for Battlefield 1942, Road to Rome, arrived today and I played for a little bit. The seems to be some problem with the sound. I’ll check for a patch tomorrow.
At the office we recieved one of the new 12″ Mac laptop computers. While many Macaddicts drool over this computer, I saw it as nothing more than a prop for a gag photo.

The web page is courtesy of Mister P.
I pondered quite a bit about how to show my disrespect. I couldn’t think of a funny thing to show me doing to the computer. The best I could do was put it in the microwave and threaten to cook it.

What should I have done to the laptop?

Michele and the girls just rolled out on the morning school run. I’ve got a few minutes to tidy up and even blog before heading to work.
I’ve started reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctrow. It’s not long, and I’ve blown through about half the books in two days. I kinda feel like I’m eating candy in the movie theater and the taste is so good, I’ll have an empty box before the movie starts. I should probably slow down a bit and savor it.
I like Doctrow’s take on the idea of ‘whuffie’. Whuffie is roughly a measure of the esteem others hold you in. Imagine having an eBay feedback measurement for not just your buy/sell behavior, but for how you deal with people and how hard others perceive you work. At work, we often refer to it as ‘juice’. It’s intangible power given to you by others because they believe you are doing good things. Kinda hard to explain, but believe me, ‘juice’ plays a big role in how Disney works. Yes, title rank is important, but those with the most ‘juice’ are the ones that drive the company.
In Bruce Sterling’s book, Distraction, he also talks about ‘trust networks’ and their role in future society. I have to agree with these guys that this type of whuffie/trust rating is going to play a larger role in our society going forward. The net has brought people closer together, but in a way that eliminates society’s previous methods of introduction. People needs a method to evaluate those they met online as only a screen name or web site.
You can see the beginnings at places like heatware.com, a feedback/trust site outside of a specific trading site. If you go to resellerratings.com, you can see what other people think of online merchants. It’s quite nice to review other people experiences with a company before handing them your credit card. Will it ever be orgainized into a single database like ‘whuffie’, not for while. But will it happen? Yes.
OK, time for work. More later.