Tuesday gets concerned about noises coming from the floor.
Freaked Out Tuesday
Top 10 things you can’t live without
What would they be? For the sake of ignoring reality forego the basics like breathing, eating and sheltering. Let’s also rule out people and pets. This Top 10 list is concerning 10 things you could live without if you really, really had to but….
Here are mine:
- NPR – I’m a loyal listener to the end (even through fund raiser week.)
- Plants – the more the merrier.
- Socks – for years, like my children, I was a barefooter. Then one day (I think it was the day of the birth of my aforementioned first born,) socks = security. They don’t have to be fancy or cute socks, just plain old white crews. Happy feet!
- Cargo pants – the epicenter of geeky organization.
- A car – I know a lot of folks who don’t have one and they seem quite content but to me automobile = independence.
- Books – Confession, I haven’t read all the books I own. I’m looking for that magic device that will allow the contents of each unread book in my library to instantly drain into my brain upon contact with the top of my head.
- The Black Hills – It matters not the time of year, the Black Hills have an undeniable magnetism not just for me but for many.
- A mini arsenal of tech toys (not to be confused with the gargantuan collection of ‘glee’ in Dylan’s possession.)
- Laughter – wit and humor is very close in value to the ability to breathe.
- Football – I watched SuperBowl I with my dad, need I say more?
How about you? What’s on your ‘must have’ list?
Blogs – Talk the talk and walk the walk
I have to admit that I am a true devotee and student of the English language. As a consequence, when I go off on an exploratory research adventure for no particular reason, it often has to do with the pursuit of some lexicographic whim or another. It was the chasing down of the blogging term, ‘Doppelblogger’s origin that set me plunk in the middle of the web page Giant Blogging Terms Glossary: Need a Blog Dictionary?
My favorites come from the Blogging Habits section:
- Metablogging - writing articles about blogging
- Blogstipation - writer’s block for bloggers. Cant think of what to blog about?
- Blogathy - I do not want to post today and I do not care about it
- Blogopotamus - A long long blog post
- Blogorrhea - unusually high output of articles
- Bleg - To use one’s blog to beg for assistance etc.
- Hitnosis - Refreshing your browser repeatedly to see if your hit counter or comments have increased
- GAD - Google Adsense Disorder. Repeatedly checking your adsense earnings. more
- Blego - Blog+Ego. Measuring blogger worth
- Blog hopping – jumping from one blog to another
- Blogroach - A commenter who rudely disagrees with posted content
- Blogoholic - addicted to blogging
- Blogorific = blogtastic – something which a blogger says is terrific
- Blogsit - maintaining a blog while the primary blogger is on leave
- Blogvertising - Also called blogvert. Advertising on a blog.
- Blurker - a blog reader not posting comments, just lurking around quietly.
- Blogathon - update your website every 30 minutes for 24 hours straight. Maybe collect sponsorships. more
- Blogiversary - your blog birthday
- Blog Carnival – Links to other articles covering a specific topic.
- Multiblog - running multiple blogs
- Blog Tipping – Compliment 3 blogs on day 1 of every month. more
- Blogger bash - a blogger party
- Commenter - someone who leaves remarks / comments
- Reciprocal Links - called link love. You link to my blog, I link to yours. To improve search engine rankings.
- Linkbaiting - a habit of writing good content with the sole purpose of getting it linked from multiple sites.
- Blogstorm – a large amount of blogosphere activity due to particular controversy. Also called Blog Swarm.
- Blogsnob – refusing to respond to blog comments from “not-friends”.
- Doppelblogger – plagiarize the content of another blogger. To Doppelblog.
- Blogophobia – Fear of blogs and blogging.
- Bloggerel – the same opinion posted repeatedly on a blog
If you want to sally down the Blog Talk path a bit further head over to WhatIs.com’s bloglossary. Words are such fun.
The story of creation (via Twitter)
This wonderfully witty post is from Tom McNichol at the Huffington Post
Day One
Let there B-lite. OMG! Or shld I say Oh Me! It’s so much easier 2-C now. WTF was I thinking B4? Spent the rest of the day dividing lite from drkness. It is good. 
Day Two
Made a firmament (sort of a dome thing) to divide the waters under firmament from the waters above. Assigned firmament the file name <heaven>. +<:-)
Day Three
Gathered waters and let dry land appear. Dry land tagged <earth>, waters tagged <seas>. Uploaded grass and herb-yielding seed into <earth> folder. GR8!
Day Four
More lighting wk. Installed 1 great lite to rule day [<sun>] & lesser lite to rule night [<moon>]. Beta tested them & everything seems to work. It is gd. 
Day Five
Bushed from tweaking fish & fowl files. They wouldn’t be fruitful and multiply until I found it’s a simple <duplicate> command. >:-? Thank Me It’s Friday.
Day Six
Created 2 humans, file names <adam> and <eve>. At last – I now have 2 Twitter followers! Tweeting just to myself is sooo Day One. LOL! 
Day Seven
[no tweets]
Remembering 9/11
Most of us will take some time today to reflect on the September 11th tragedies of eight years ago. Its sobering to remember the disbelief, apprehension and grief we all held as the day unfolded. As the days and months passed we learned of the 2,752 who had died, we witnessed the ceaseless acts of bravery from those who were assigned to ‘make it right’ again and we watched the ushering in of a new era. One of muffled hope and cultivated fear.
In many ways 2001 seems far, far in the past. We learn, communicate, heal, analyze, travel, even play differently now. We can thank (or curse) technology for many of the sweeping changes.
In order to get a finger on America’s heartbeat concerning 9/11 I did a Twitter search. I followed some links in the unending stream of thousands and thousands of tweets to read posts written by journalist, actors, conspiracy believers and politicians. I wondered what would have happened if Twitter or Facebook or the endless list of other social sites existed on that fateful day.
Our estimated time is…. Forever
Those are the words of one of the Primal Quest’s participants when s/he was presumably asked ‘when will you finish the race?’
For those who don’t know, Primal Quest is “an expedition-level adventure race in which endurance athletes from around the world compete with one another and against a 600 mile (965+ KM) wilderness course.”
This year that race is now and the 600 miles are in the Black Hills and the Badlands.
I’ll admit that I am completely hooked on watching the progress of these remarkable young (and in some cases not so young) people. They are such a contrast to the huge Harley populace that touched each and every sense of each and every one of us less than two weeks ago.
69th Annual Sturgis Rally
Today we drove from Rapid City to Spearfish and back again. It was a typical August Black Hills day – hot, dry, windy and dusty. My predictions from yesterday seem to be holding true because there were lots and lots of motorcycles on the road. There were also a lot of cops parked here and there, stalwarts reminding us all to behave.
The Sturgis Rally is an odd annual event. One that drives marketers to madness because there are no definitive indicators or metrics allowing an accurate prediction of how many wallets, er bikers will attend. One year there may be half a million, the next a mere 250,000.
Obviously, gas prices weigh in. Last year was perhaps the least attended rally in a long time. A gallon of gas? $3.94. This year we are sitting at around $2.36/gallon (unless you fill up on Mt. Rushmore Road, the rally goers most traveled road – it’s $2.47.) Continue reading »
2009 Sturgis Rally Goers Go Shopping
Ok, so this was wild. I went to the grocery store at about 3:30 this afternoon to pick up a couple things. It’s Saturday, it’s summer and the mid afternoon store is usually pretty quiet. It wasn’t today.
Let me preface the rest of this post with the fact that the Black Hills of South Dakota hosts an unpredictable ‘rally’ every year at this time. It is the Sturgis Rally and it is hard to explain. I just say that hundreds of thousands of motorcyclists travel by plane or car (most of their bikes are trucked in separately) to gather, PARTY, with no particular agenda for 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 days. They stay in hotels but most of them camp in campgrounds that spring to life once a year.
It is an event that has a huge impact on our rural population and environment.
Last year was an off year. The numbers varied from 250,000-350,000 attendees. So no one knew what this year would bring. By the looks of the early, usual pre-camp setup days, it didn’t look like the numbers would be much better than last year. Continue reading »
Reality check and your cyber safety
Michael Vick is young, famous and until recently had more money than god. Who knows what lead him to dog torture for pleasure? Michael Jackson was not young, he was very famous and had more money than Michael Vick. Who knows what lead him to self torture? Is money the common denominator? Maybe. It certainly helped.
My west of the Missouri River thinking says reality is to blame. It says reality is a slippery slope. If I came face to face with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (other than willing myself into butter on an Iranian summer day) I would have nothing to say to him. He would have nothing to say to me either. Our realities are universes apart.
If I ran into Michael Vick and I told him I had a dog – half pit bull – that I love. My reality might allow me to ask, ‘Dude, you did what? Shocked them, beat them, starved them, isolated them?’ Bet your life, I wouldn’t understand his answers. He lives in another reality that made that ok.
So it goes with hackers, cracker and identity thieves. Folks, these guys make Michael Vick look like a saint. Heed these warnings:
- Don’t use the same password for everything. Twitter, the sparkling new go-to site just got hacked and embarrassed big time.
- Install security software and keep it up to date.
- Archive your email.
- Don’t be lulled into the, ‘I have nothing to hide’ mentality. You have a social security number, one or two or three bank accounts and an identity that is worth big bucks –valuable assets that deserve as much protection as the contents of your car when you park at the grocery store.
You see the folks who are in the business of cyber theft live in a different reality. Think about it! Just for a minute. Please.
Point is – protect your identity. Keep a password cheat sheet. But keep it private. Don’t be lazy. And please, be tolerant of pit bulls. They are the best dogs in the world.
One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
What were you doing 40 years ago today when Apollo 11 made its historic landing on the moon?
My unscientific statistics-ometer assumes about half of you weren’t doing anything because you were still twinkling away in your mom and dad’s eyes. For many of us, at the time much younger, ‘boomers’ however it was one of our first opportunities to actually watch history in the making.
On July 12, 1969 a Lunar Module camera provided live television coverage of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon’s surface at 8:56 pm MDT.
We were living on a wide shelf outcropping in a quonset hut at New Mexico’s Bandelier National Park along with several other employees who occupied similar shelf-plunked huts. The spacing was generous and the beauty was breathtaking It was primitive, isolated and as a result the small community of Bandelier workers was tight. Continue reading »
