What's the dumbest thing YOU'VE ever done?

I was watching a movie in the darkened living room the other day, and was annoyed by the brightness of the PC screen on the end table next to me. Normally, it switches to slideshow mode after a few minutes and shows photos from our digital phot archive. That's fine under normal room lighting, but when the lights are low, the screen is sorta bright and distracting. It occurred to me that i could write a simple program so that I could click an icon on the PC desktop and turn the screen to black. Moving the mouse or pressing a key would bring the screen back. As I pondered the best programming language to use to write the software and how it would be most intuitive if I made the desktop icon look like an on/off switch . . . I noticed . . . that there was already an on/off switch on the monitor that pretty much does exactly what I needed. There's one on your monitor, too, right there under the screen. Push it and the monitor goes dark. Push it again and it comes back on. Duh.

The point is, this is one of those moments when I embarrass myself with my own stupidity. But not nearly the worst. The dumbest thing I ever remember doing was when I bit myself in a french-fry feeding frenzy. You know how you can get into a rhythm while eating fries? Pick one up, chomp, chomp chomp . . . pick up another, chomp, chomp, chomp. Apparently, my hand and teeth got out of sync, or one of the fries was too short, because one of those those third chomps landed squarely on my finger. And it hurt. It hurt bad. Now, I can understand getting bit while feeding french fries to a dog or an emu. But I think biting yourself by accident while eating is one of those things that Mother Nature thought she had weeded out of the gene pool by now.

So, that was a humbling experience that I try to remember whenever I sense that I'm getting too big for my britches. Now it's your turn. Click the "Comments" link below and tell us about the dumbest thing you've ever done. Go ahead . . . it'll be cathartic. And we'll all enjoy it.

Virtual Variety Show

These are some of the more interesting videos of human performances I've found on the net. (WARNING: These links really need a high-speed internet connection)

Human Slinky
Piano Balls
Two Heads
Evolution of Dance
Karaoke for the Deaf
YMCA Puppets
Quick Change

Backyard Bouquet

Dad and Butch drove over from Bossier this weekend on their way up north, and brought this bouquet for Carla. Beautiful flowers in a professional arrangement, to be sure, but the amazing thing about this bouquet is that it was assembled entirely out of flowers and greenery from Mom and Rena's back yards!

It was apparently Dad's idea, and Mom and Rena set to work collecting and putting it together. And somehow Butch managed to transport it 300 miles intact.

Cool, huh?

Informed Decisions

If you really want to take advantage of the internet, you need to have the following things bookmarked. These are sites that provide unbiased information about things that affect you daily, where a wrong decision can cost you time or money. I won't claim that all these links are the end-all reference in their category, but if you know of some that are better, please share. I won't list all the obvious resources, like news, weather, maps, and shopping, but rather the ones you might not know about.

• rottentomatoes.com -- Never waste two hours of your life watching a cruddy movie again. This site collects and combines ALL reviews of every movie released in the past decade or so, to create a single score from 0-100. You're not making a decision based on one reviewer's opinion, but on the average opinion of all professional reviewers. You can make allowances for your "cutoff point" (I usually will not go to the theater to see anything below 75%), but if a movie gets below 30% on the TomatoMeter, you can be pretty sure it's a stinker. The main thing I like about this site is that I'm not being guided by one person's opinion, but by the aggregate opinion of lots of people who have each seen and reviewed lots of movies.
• imdb.com -- Once you've seen a movie, or while you're watching it, if you're wondering where you've seen that actor before or what sort of trivia is floating around about the movie, this site is your best reference. Besides being able to browse the cast list, click on an actor's name and find out where I've seen them before, I particularly like the "trivia" and "goofs" links.
  
• en.wikipedia.org -- This is a community-maintained online encyclopedia that has information about anything you can imagine, much more so than any printed encyclopedia. Because anyone can edit it, you should treat its information with a small grain of salt. But I have found it to be just as reliable as any other online data source.
  
• accuweather.com -- Weather forecasts on TV or in the newspaper simply cannot be accurate to your location, because they are published for a much wider audience (everyone in the area). However, if you bookmark a good local or regional weather radar site, you can get up-to-the-minute animated radar maps that actually show the clouds moving through your area, color-coded to how likely they are to dump rain on you. Once you locate your place on one of these maps, you can estimate to within 5 minutes when rain will arrive and when it will move on. There is no way you'll ever get this level of accuracy from TV or the paper, because they can't broadcast info for every spot in the area, 24 hours a day.
• groups.google.com -- Anyone who hasn't lived under a rock for the past eight years already knows that you can find anything on the web with Google. What you might not know is that you can tap into the collected wisdom of years of online information exchanges between individuals. For example, go to this site and type in the model number of something you own, plus the word "problems", and you'll see all the times that anyone has asked or answered questions about problems with that item. These information exchanges are called "usenet newsgroups", or just "news groups". You can create a free account through Google to post messages here, but I mostly use them to find answers to questions other people have already asked.
  

Well, Here I Am

I've blogged intermittently since before the word "blog" existed, but never consistently. Mainly because it's just as easy to email Mom instead. We all know that 97% of blogs have an audience of one . . . the blogger's mother. And 80% of statistics are made up.

So why have I started a blog? Certainly not because I have anything interesting to say. Although my mom finds all my pointless ramblings fascinating, that's just because she's my mom. I can step back and be objective enough to realize that there are not thousands (or even dozens) of people around the world waiting eagerly for whatever I might write next. But there are two good reasons for me to start a blog:

1. It's an effective way to share information with family and friends without spamming them with daily emails or presuming that they are actually interested. If they're interested, they'll check the blog. If not, they won't.
   
2. I'd really like to read blogs by my friends and family, and it will much easier to convince them to start blogging if I can point to some first-hand experience with these online blogging tools.

So, here I go.