New Top Ten List on Larry’s Humor Pages

Top Ten Signs You Work in a Bad Office

10. Employees must swallow all sensitive documents instead of using a paper shredder
9. 60 Minutes team camped out in lobby
8. Just now upgrading to Commodore 64s from Vic 20s
7. You work on a project whose acronym is an acronym of acronyms of acronyms
6. Cubicals purchased from surplus zoo outlet
5. Daily meetings to show off the new Org Charts
4. Sensitivity training involves attaching electrodes
3. Coffee Machine now named employee of the month five months in a row
2. Management convinced "internet thing a fad"
-- And The Number One Sign You Work in a Bad Office --
1. Company directory shows mug shot of CEO

I’m just back from lunch and I had tried to kill two birds with one stone by dropping my car off for an oil change while I ate next door. I got the lunch but not the oil change. Seems the local Jiffy Lube can’t change my oil today because lightning fried their computer yesterday.

I remember when grocery stores first started to switch over to computer controlled inventories and UPC labeled goods only, computers where much more likely to go down hard during any kind of power interruption back then. Sometimes the stores would keep attempting to sell items, sometimes they wouldn’t (it might take them hours to get the central server tied registers back up). I haven’t seen this kind of No-Sales-Because-Computer-Down for over ten years now. But I must say not being able to just get a simple oil change because the cash register or home office server connection is down seems bizarre.

Jiffy Lube seemed to have the full crew of personnel on duty, and someone came out right away to inform me there would be no service, pressing a $5 coupon into my hand with an apology. I’m not mad or put out, just surprised at what would seem to be an overdependence on computers for so mundane a task. Couldn’t they just change the oil, write a receipt (if needed) by hand, and enter the sale later?

I’m sure others out there have true horror stories of computers being needed to do the most trivial of tasks and causing complete work stoppages when they go down. Maybe we can get a discussion thread going here.

NEW TOY !!! The BNL Graffiti Board (try it out)

*** This is the post that was to be sent yesterday, but I couldn’t get Bogger.com to accept posts ***

OK, I’ll add this edit by hand, which I can do since I’m not on blogspot.com as well. Today Blogger gives me:
Error
We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it.

*** ON WITH THE ORIGINAL POST (which was attempted while Blogger.com was sputtering out) ***

I just about went crazy yesterday [day before yesterday] from blogger’s slow ability to update. I then found my hit counter was just about unusable as well, causing the page to freeze in mid-load waiting for the hit count. Then I discovered some recent change to my sidebar had messed up the sidebar look in IE though it looked fine in FireFox. I put in some quick bandaids and took the hit counter out. Trouble shooting all this with blogger on the fritz just about had me pulling my hair out.

Today [yesterday] blogger’s responsiveness is even slower and has even timed out on occasion with “unable to connect to server” messages. Blogger’s profile stats have been inactive for going on a month now.

I realize this is a free service or at least free the way I’m using it, but if service quality gets much worse I will have to think about switching blogging tools. I’m not on blogspot.com so this is a real possibility.

OK with the rant out of the way onto blog business.

About the NEW TOY

Hope you guys enjoy the new toy I’ve put on this page. Not many have left comments yet, so it remains to be seen how popular this will be but I have created a Graffiti Board for BNL

The GB allows you to cover a brick wall with Graffiti. Not real Graffiti, and sadly not with a virtual spray can, though I am thinking about how to code such a beast. This Graffiti Board does however let you use various Font Styles, Colors, and Backgrounds. Graffiti will show up in random positions on the wall, but you can keep your graffiti grouped with someone else’s by clicking reply first. Short messages get a very large font, long messages a very small font. A new board will show up every month and the old boards can still be visited.

You can vote for the best Graffiti with trash or keep buttons. Too many trashes and the graffiti gets erased with a flashing TRASH tag and a garbage can icon.

I wrote this Perl/HTML program for The Canopy Club and it gets used a lot there. Here is the Canopy’s GB should you want to check one that has a lot of use and has had a lot of past months filled.

I can’t offer this code for reuse for everyday bloggers – sorry – it relies on being on the server side, plus I don’t want to release it into the wild until I’ve decided what to do with it.

In the coming months I plan on putting a collection of interactive toys on this site, but only ones that I am the author of, so please let me know what you think of them as they come online. I’ll also take any suggests for things you think would be COOL and I’ll see if I’m up to the coding challenge.

Still Hawking my Meme

Remember, try to work the phases “gone all eights” or “he went all eights” into everyday conversations (see last post).


*** OK I'm trying again tonight to repost this the correct way ***

I had a fairly interesting post that I tried to submit from work today. Due to Blogger.com problems earlier I couldn’t get it to submit. I forgot to email it to myself so rather than try to recreate it I’ll just try again when I get back to the office tomorrow.

Just making a quick post from work and an attempt to create a new meme.

From Merriam-Webster
Main Entry: meme
Pronunciation: 'mEm
Function: noun
Etymology: alteration of mimeme, from mim- (as in mimesis) + -eme
: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

In a recent phone call to my cable TV provider I explained how my set top box had “gone all eights” in describing its untimely demise, the channel and time readout showing nothing but. It occurred to me that phrases like “gone all eights” or “going all eights” or “he went all eights” have a certain tech meme-appeal in describing either things or people that breakdown under stress. For those of you that are 1337 maybe “g0n 411 8s”

I did a Google search and didn’t find that it is yet in use so help me -- Larry a.k.a. DumbSwede -- spread this new meme. Hopefully we will soon see it in the jargon watch column of Wired Magazine.

My previous attempt at creating a meme seems not to have been too successful, see: Piety by Proxy however I have not completely given up on this one, perhaps someone can suggest some catchier alteration or contraction of this phrase.

BTW, I use FireFox at home to view my webpage and I've just found recent template changes have made my blog look very ugly under IE. I will have to be sure and double check template changes on both in the future. Sorry for its disgraceful appearance the last few days. IE still seems to insist on putting extra line breaks after links in the sidebar, but at least I've got the sidebar where it's supposed to be and not smushed at the bottom

I guess I can say I now have a reasonable amount of content on my site. I have had a few visitors that have taken the much-appreciated time to leave BlogHop reviews by clicked on one of the five little boxes, Green−Loved−It thru Red−Hated−It in the sidebar. Originally I had hoped to use this blog just to be a stepping stone to my other web content, but I find BNL becoming my main obsession.

I have just added a visit count to BNL. I started it at 100, which seemed a fair number. I waited about half an hour, it had gone from 111 to 115. So new visits 112 thru 115, but since I’m 115 this makes 112 thru 114 visits other than myself -- so 3 visits. The other 10 hits were from experimenting, formatting, and making sure it was working. I don’t know that it was exactly a half-hour, this last check was at 1:19pm central-standard time, we’ll check again as close to 2:19pm as possible to see what the hourly visit rate is. Of course today is Easter Sunday, so I don’t know if that will slow visits or increase them over any other random hour.

Of course I still won’t know where the visits are coming from, but I’m pretty sure for now the majority are coming from Blogger’s Next-Blog button from sites with the Blogger Navigation Bar enabled. I have clicked thru hundreds of sites myself using the Navigation Bar. I post to Slashdot.org frequently, so when I have a highly moderated comment I’ll probably also see some spikes in visitation -- BNL being listed in my signature line.

It is my plan to promote BNL in the future, but only in a limited way, hoping to slowly climb in visibility with patience, persistence, frequent posting, and quality.

Coming up on 2:19, and the count is…. 116, subtracting one for me that makes, err, um, uh, ZERO new visitors in that last hour. Serves me right however, having already decided on the tittle for this post.

Time to get away from the keyboard. I need to think up some genuinely interesting things to post about. I’m a bit drained after the update to one of my other blogs “Larry’s Life” as mentioned in the post just before this one. Next weekend I’ll be visiting Indianapolis again, this time with my friend A.C. So if nothing else interesting happens between then and now, expect a posting about our nightclub hopping.

BTW, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the new “Battlestar Galactica” but I can’t say enough good things about this Sci-Fi channel series. I think it is about the only genuine science fiction I have seen on TV, and it asks a lot of what-does-it-mean-to-be-human questions similar to those raised in the movie “Blade Runner” though in a totally different setting.

Yawn... Almost 4am, but I’ve finally got all the stuff transferred from Slashdot.org that belongs in my spin-off blog Larry’s Life and added the 7000 word new chapter I’d been working on “Funny She Didn’t Mention You…” It's about a 13 page long description of my weekend three weeks ago in Indianapolis, so follow the link if you are up for a longish read.

Oh, and it ends with me getting thrown out of a bar, so there is that to spice up the story

BNL’s negative reviews on BlogHop tripled overnight, which is to say they went from one to three negative reviews. Still it’s discouraging to see overall ratings drop from 75% to 66%. I suspect this is for voicing an opinion on a certain news outlet or a certain new topic currently in the headlines, but I’ll never now for sure. I should just be happy that BNL is being seen by anyone, negative ratings or not, but I want to do better in the future and someday get onto BlogHop’s front page of best blogs. So already I’m torn between journalistic integrity and trying to satisfy everyone. The frustrating part about negative reviews on BlogHop is you have no idea what garnered the hit. With a positive review you can probably assume they felt good in general with your layout, writing style, and opinions.


While I don’t intend to hold my tongue on current issues, I do plan on putting the more contentious ones in my Slashdot Journal in the future and then link to them from BNL. I had reworked my blog description to be of a more humorous nature, so perhaps I should try to keep content posted directly here more of a personal and humorous nature. The original purpose behind BNL was to coordinate my other web projects. Instead I find myself doing mostly posting to BNL and worrying about whether people out there in web-space like me/BNL enough.

Of course another thing that may turn off some is my tendency to write about how I feel about writing and blogging, or perhaps too much minutia on HTML issues. It’s hard to say.

I’ll just keep on blogging on I guess, but I would really encourage those visiting BNL to leave comments. BNL is really for you, and I will try to give you more of what you like about BNL (if anything), when I know what it is of course. If there are things you don’t like about BNL I can’t promise to change them, but I will give them due honest consideration. When my interests conflict with what BNL readers want in general, I can always spin those topics off into separate blogs or webpages.

Looking back at last night’s post it seems a little disjointed and rambling. Tonight’s will probably not be much better, but hopefully have a little more substance.

I have a few new things to say about what is going on with Terri Schiavo, but first a quick note about my love-hate relationship with both Fox News and CNN. I typically watch Fox News for TV coverage, and read CNN.com for web based news. Even mentioning Fox News in a Slashdot.org discussion will almost guarantee a Troll rating, but I prefer seeing news with a little variety. I don’t respect every celeb on Fox, I find Hanity especially excruciating and inflexibly set in his ideology, but you can’t go wrong with the News panel on "FOX News Watch" hosted by Eric Burns. Oddly this weekend week-in-review discussion show cannot be found on FoxNews.com’s front page and I had to do a site search to be sure I was getting the host’s name correct. For critics of Fox News, try this show out. Often the most honest and accurate criticisms of Fox News comes from Fox News itself on this show, as well as criticism for any other media outlet not serving the truth well.

OK with that out of the way I have had to avoid Fox News the last two-days, it having become an all Shiavo all the time network. Worse it seems to have turned into some kind of 700 Club clone with endless footage of people petitioning God and the Courts for intervention. The quickest way to a comma these days would be to watch Fox News and chug a beer every time the word “moral” is used. I could switch back to CNN which I used to watch all the time, but they seem to have become pabulum the last few years, or perhaps passive-aggressive is a better term. Maybe CNN is left leaning maybe its not. If it would just become more in-your-face with their shows I would probably watch them. They seem afraid of offending guests, interviewees, and watchers alike.

On to less blood pressure raising items. If you’ve been here before you may have noticed a slightly changed layout. Should anyone leave comments, the design element of this blog is one of things I most interested in. I started out with one of Blogger.com’s more basic templates, but I have been tweaking, changing, and of course stealing from others to give it a less cookie cutter look. It still has a standard bloggish look, but I’m only aiming to look good enough that you wouldn’t assume it was an amateur endeavor by its layout.

Yesterday I threw a photo in more or less for the hell of it. It may be sometime before I begin posting pictures regularly, which shouldn’t be a big deal, I’m technically competent, I bought a nice digital camera three years ago but found I have hardly taken any pictures with. Then when my cell-phone went on the fritz last fall I upgraded to a new one with camera built in. Again, nada, no pictures taken. This last because a VGA res cell-phone picture would be far less quality than what I can take with my Mavcam, plus I have no one to really trade cell-phone shots with. The Mavcam is too big to lug around, and having spent hundreds of dollars on cell-phones and a digital camera in the past, I’m reluctant to plunk down another 300-500 dollars for a reasonable replacement. Granted today’s 5-Meg pixel models are far better, cheaper, and smaller than the 1.8-Meg Pixel Mavcam I have, but it gets the job done, especially for web publishing. I think I will force myself to carry the Mavcam around this weekend and take some pictures to get in the habit. If you don’t see any photos on Monday or Tuesday, you’ll know I punked-out. Ironically I have no trouble dragging the camera around when I’m shirtless and on roller-skates. But you just don’t see people with cameras slung around their neck around here at the mall or other public areas. What an odd introversion, the reluctance to look out of place with an oversized digital camera, when I’m so extraverted in so many other ways.

That’s all for tonight, I am working on some real content for the other areas. Someone I met last weekend is supposed to give me a call when they get off work. I’m not overly expectant that anything will come of it, but I find her very pleasant. I’ll probably mention this blog when we next speak, so of course I have nothing but good things to say about her in case she should read this. Of course I haven’t mentioned a name, so there could be a dozen women I’m hoping to hear from and they would all think they are the one. But no, tonight it is you Terry (and yes she spells it with a y and not the more common girl’s i or ie) I am thinking of.

Having visited hundreds of blogs over the last week or so, I’m getting a feel for what makes a good blog and what makes a bad blog. Of course content is the most important thing followed by frequent updates. Perhaps this is all that should matter, but without a reasonable visual presentation the eyes seem to have trouble staying on a web page. On the other end of the spectrum are pages that are too cute or have too much visual clutter and noise, drawing all attention away from the words. And finally a judicious use of picture help to hold interest, probably to confirm some impression we get from the words what the author is like.

I know there are blog tools to make picture blogging easy, but I have not subscribed to them so we have to do it the old fashion way with html and FTPing to my host sight. I should thank jaytv.com by the way for letting me do whatever the hell I want there. This is of course in trade for various web design work done for the Canopy Club.

So to break up the unbroken text of my blogging here is a shamelessly vain picture of me showing off my first tattoo which I got last summer. This summer I plan on getting something done on the left shoulder.



BTW, it has been pointed out that some people can't figure exactly what the picture is in the BNL Header. That's me out rollerskating in downtown Urbana, Summer of 2004, taking a picture of myself in the reflection of a main street shop window.

More Karma Whoring

I have started to get BlogHop reviews on this blog, and they are glowing for the most part, so thank you. No comments to BNL directly as of yet, but Blogger.com has had all sorts of server problems this month, so it’s not impossible that Blogger.com is dropping the ball. I would like to acknowledge and thank Frisky070802 on Slashdot who was the first to send feedback and comments back to my Slashdot Journal entries a year and a half ago. Frisky will probably not see this acknowledgement directly however, so this is test to see how wide a circle of friends I now have in getting word back to Frisky at Slashdot.org.

Making Progress

"Funny She Didn't Mention You..." is coming along, it's probably about 1500 words right now, so expect about 5000 words and a new Larry's Life posting by the end of the coming weekend

End with a Joke

I hesitate to share this office story, but it got so many laughs I can’t resist. In talking about piracy and the motivation some people have for downloading videos, I related a delinquent behavior I had engaged in years ago, that being shoplifting girly magazines as a teen. I rationalized this IP theft because they would not have sold the magazines to me directly. A coworker named Dan asked me why I didn’t just have an of age friend buy them for me. I replied that then like now (in my best deadpan voice) I didn’t have any friends, but if I’m hearing you correctly what I need to make friends now is to buy girly magazines for underage teens

I should leave this subject alone, but I have some observations on the Terri Schiavo case.

I guess one thing that disturbs me is that the parents of Terri are almost certainly lying about Terri’s mental capabilities. They relate how they asked Terri to say “I want to Live” and Terri struggled to say back, “Ahhhh Waaaa…” and did so in voice so loud it startled a guard just outside the door.

Here is a women examined dozens of times by doctors and other professionals, who has had the majority of her front cortex area die, atrophy, and be replace by spinal fluid. This person who is not in a temporary confused state with a few neurons out of kilter, but a persistent vegetative one because she literally has no frontal brain left. No cortical region through which the adaptive brain can re-rout neurons to take over new function. Why this would be a true miracle, either growing back a brain or speaking to her parents without one.

The Schindlers, Terri's parents, would no doubt pounce on any reflexive action by the shell that Terri has left behind to feel their daughter is with them. I’m sure the Schindlers believe they are acting ethically, and others not. But it is not hard to imagine one of the Schindlers shouting “Ahhhh Waaa…” themselves and then pretending these were Terri's words to startled listeners just outside the door. All the more effective, as a mob of miracle believers will accept that this is the case unquestioningly, and that the state is rabidly try to take Terri away -- that the cost of her care is the determining factor, not her quality of life or true wishes.

Odd that this case has become some kind of right to life litmus with impact on abortion and the death penalty. Every politician and activists wants to advance an agenda through Terri’s tragedy. It seems grotesque.

I maters little to me whether Terri is fed through a tube or not. She’s not really there anymore. It does seem a waste of care dollars that could be spent much better elsewhere. And its not just keeping the food going into the tube in her stomach, but attending to bed sores, and deciding what level of care to give when there are momentary health crises. We spend a million dollars rescuing a single stray animal when they are in the media spotlight; say a whale cut off from the ocean by flows of ice. Terri has become just such an animal, because she is not truly Terri any more, nor, unsympathetic as it sounds, human either. But this time rescue isn’t really what we are doing because Terri will still not be returned to her original native state when we do whatever we are going to do either way.

Again it isn’t a tragedy to me whether Terri is fed today or not. The original tragedy was years ago and uncorrectable now. What does bother me is the mantle of victim the parents have assumed, the black hat placed on the husband’s head in the public's eyes, and all because the parents will do or say anything, anything at all if it will keep the illusion of Terri with them awhile longer.

I had to delete an entry in my blog yesterday. It was a duplicate. An entry I had sent to Blogger.com by email over a week ago had finally made it into my blog. Since this entry didn't show up in the first 24 hours, I had put it in there manually. It's also been over two weeks since my profile statistics have changed, so I'm hoping they get that fixed soon also.

Anyway this is just sort of a test to see that email entries are working again, and to report I have made some good progress on the next "Larry' Life" entry to be entitled (tentatively) "Funny She Didn't Mention You..."

Planning to Plan

In the Planning to Plan department, I am working towards having 4 regularly updated sections available, coordinated through this blog.
Larry's DumbSwede Slashdot Journal Entries (tech editorials mostly).
Larry's Humor Pages
Larry's Writing Projects (fiction/non-fiction)
Larry's Life

A lot of "Bare Naked Larry" you will note is filled with minor details about how I'm putting BNL together. Some people will find this of interest, some won't. I had intended to have more intimate day-to-day details of my life, but when I write on these topics, it usually ends up in a multi-page story better suited for "Larry's Life" (and yes damn it, I haven't actually moved the old Slashdot Journal pages over yet).

Hopefully I will find the right balance for entries here, but please don't consider BNL my main effort, but rather the clearinghouse for my other stuff, which I hope I can entice you give a glance at. I see now that I have to reformat Larry's Humor Pages to be more bloggish, even though I do add to them semi-frequently, the same with Larry's Fiction and Nonfiction, which are just indexes of some past (mediocre) writing attempts.

One thing that blogging has given me, uneven as my current efforts may be, is a sense of voice in my writing. It finally feels like things are coming together from a writing standpoint, and I am hoping to apply these new skills (if skills they be) to some new fiction writing projects that have been in the back of my mind for years.

Enough for now, visit often, but don't leave your clothes lying around.

I started an editorial on music and movies a few days ago and just couldn’t quite get it to bed. Yippy, it’s done, but a 1500 word analysis of the state of the music industry is a bit much for this blog however, so it's over in DumbSwede’s Journal as The Past is Back and other Ramblings about Fame, Music, and Movies

My intended Journal and Blog entries had been stacking up, but I’m finally making some progress. Still the more I do, the more that seems needing to be done. I need to spin-off a new blog just for writing projects. I have about 4 barely started writing projects, and I’m thinking about serializing them.

The Larry’s Life section is unfilled. I need to transfer the old Slashdot Journal entries that are applicable, then get to work on a new chapter. It’s actually been a fairly eventful month and I need to get this stuff down before I start to forget. Expect to be regaled with how I got physically thrown out of a bar in Indianapolis three weeks ago. I’m no troublemaker, so the novelty of this experience was worth it.

For those that would like some taste of Larry’s Life now, here are a couple of older Slashdot entries that fit well with recent experiences.
Almost A Fight
A Nicole Weekend

What a wasted Saturday (and now Sunday). Made the four hour round trip to Indianapolis last night to take in the nightlife. Took a 2 hour nap at a rest stop on the way back. Today I’m catching up on my PVR’d TV -- I’m watching “Magnificent Seven” for the first time from begining to end, and it becomes obvious that “A Bugs Life” is a remake of sorts. Of course “Magnificent Seven” is itself is a remake of Akira Kurosawa's “Seven Samurai.”

Anyway I promised some blog reviews, so I have been surfing blogs for the most part of my lazy day.

Observation One: I’m not much interested in random blogs.
Observation Two: My blog is probably not as good as many of the average blogs I find so uninteresting.

Surfing Blogspot

After having visited over a hundred blogs at blogspot.com here are the ones I felt like sharing (though not necessarily giving them a glowing review). It should be noted Blogger and by extension Blogspot claim to have passed the million blog mark. That would have to be close to about a third of all blogs on the net if true. Anyway, I suspect I will have to search more like a few thousand blogs on Blogspot to find the real gems. On the other hand, there is something engaging about just clicking on the next blog button and be whisked away to someone else’s attempt at immortality.

Evil Twin Phil Liked its clean layout. Seems to be posting often, but having started fairly recently.

Ignorance is Bliss Very professional eye candy look. The owner mentions using a new “skin” so perhaps there is less to credit here. The anti-war message is a bit at odds with the teen cartoon look. Some might enjoy this site.

You Color My World. The neon on black color scheme is hard to ignore. A professional look, but of the teen Japanese girl kind. Lots of Leet-Speek (I mean l33t5p34k), web shorthand, and lower case “i”s. This is a site where the look totally dominates content, but if you use omg and lol a lot, this site might be for you.

On to BlogHop and its Top Blogs page

Soul To Squeeze Eye Candy, but I may go back and copy some blog references and HTML tricks. Not an English site, but with English comments and copied cartoons.

Much Ado About Me Eye candy anime look. Has a good list of other blogs worth a look and some blog-rings. I’m surprised my random blog searching didn’t find any blog-rings. Not so surprising to find them in a highly rated site I suppose. I will have to add a blog set of links to my side bar.

Enough To Go By A very hip looking site, looks like a labor of love from a music industry insider. If you are under 30 and into the music scene give it a go. Not overly Leet, but a little.

Coffee Achiever Very professional look personal blog/diary, links to a photo-blog as well. If you are among a certain class of blog-surfer voyeurs this site might be for you.

Blogstreet’s Top Personal Blogs

This fish needs a bicycle Very professional personal blog/diary. I see some of my earlier journal entries at Slashdot were very much like this in style. I will probably try to get back to a more intimate personal style. Another site for those that like glimpses into personal lives.

Anne… straight From the hip Another well-done personal blog/diary site.

Better Living Through Blogging Professional and uncluttered personal blog/diary. This probably is the style I hoping for when I started Bare Naked Larry, but have found I don’t have the discipline for frequent medium sized posts.

Summing up

Random jumping with Blogger or Blogspot will take you to a lot of vanity blogs (like my own) and also a lot of Splogs -- a contraction of Spam and Blogs that I’m sure I have not invented (though not seen before). The Next Blog button that Blogspot puts on these pages makes this the easiest way to jump through blog space, but it is of course tied to sites maintained by Blogger and Blogspot. You may not get to the best sites quickly this way, but you're giving a lot of people a look that would never get exposure so it feels very egalitarian.

BlogHop has a Best Blogs listing as rated by the viewers. When I started to type this entry (Saturday night) I had no votes for my blog on BlogHop. Today (Sunday) I have two votes: one “love it”, one “hate it”, nothing in between. Surfing Top Blogs with BlogHops Best Blogs page will keep you clear of splogs and quality will be high, but most seem to lack some elusive soul that makes a good blog.

I’m cultivating a love-hate relationship with Blogstreet. It is unclear to me that BNL will be accepted as a listed blog, a search for “Bare Naked Larry” currently returns nothing. There is a personal blogs directory with 1040 listings. So this would appear to be an elitist site (and I want in damn it). All the sites listed here are very slick and professional. This Modern World is listed Number one and WIL WHEATON DOT NET is listed at number two. The first is the site of a professional cartoonist, and the second the actor who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and who has turned his Second String Star Trek status in to a sort of Geek Sheik. At number 13 is The Mad Prophet Blog, which I won’t link because it shows what is wrong with Blogstreet. This blog was only maintained for a short time and then put on permanent hiatus. It is mostly an anti Bush anti War harangue -- BUT with lots of other sites and blog links. The message here is it isn’t how good your site is, but how many incestuous mutual links you get across domains.

In the future I will have to visit and list with other Blog sponsors as I (in Slashdot lingo) Karma Whore, but for today I am done blog-surfing. This post really should have been labled "Bobbing for Blogs: Part II," since I did this exercise once before with Slashdot Journals. The Original (early 2004) Bobbing for Blogs

Excerpt from Larry's Slashdot reply to: Lucas To Redo Star Wars In 3-D

... Maybe the 3-D will be good, maybe not. I have wondered why Disney/Pixar haven't re-released their films in 3-D. Some have been presented in IMAX (though not 3D IMAX as far as I know). Here you know the 3D re-rendering will be spot on. Technically it would have to me 2-orders of magnitude easier than converting 2D photographs. Disney will be Making a Toy Story 3 (alone), I'll be very surprised if it isn't Toy Story 3D.

That said, my viewing experience at home on HDTV is often better than what you see at the Cineplex (especially stuff shot directly in digital, rather than converted from film). I would gladly pay full ticket price to watch my stuff at home while in recent release if I could get it. The point is Cinemas will increasingly have to compete with a viewing experience in the home that rivals that of the theater. Just going wider (Cinemascope) like they did in '50s (and wider yet in the late '60s with Cinerama) won't cut it. People will increasingly start to wait for Movies to come out in Blu-Ray or HD-DVD if the industry doesn't do something to augment the viewing experience. Start looking for things like Sensoround to make a comeback, introduced for the 1974 disaster flick "Earthquake." Also expect several variations of motion simulation, some quite cheap like tilting chairs, and other that require individual pods with 6 degrees of freedom and everything in-between.

I've just realized my new accronym BNL (Bare Naked Larry) can be pronounced Banal.

Hopefully I will rarely be this.

Roughly in order of most frequented

Slashdot.org
CNN.com
Google.com
Google News
SPACE.com
Merriam-Webster OnLine
Late Night Top Ten Contest
FOXNews.com

And here is a website I designed and webmaster,
Canopy Club
(also the Club I moonlight at)

I am actually shocked how small a list this is. However I use Google and Google News with high frequency to randomly roam mostly news and technical information oriented sites.

Current most Googled items (through news.google.com)
Nuclear Fusion
Blu-Ray
HDTV
Cell processor IBM
SETI

Currently looking for good Political News sites, especially if they have a good Slashdot.org like comment moderation mechanism.

Coming Soon:
Noteworthy Blogs
Noteworthy Websites

Larry’s Humor Pages updated
Be sure to checkout the new Top Ten Lists:
Top Ten Ways They're Making The Academy Awards More Fun To Watch
Top Ten Ways To Make The CBS Evening News More Exciting

New Essay in DumbSwede’s Slashdot Journal:
What do we want? Fusion! When do we want it? Now!

No feedback yet on Slashdot Journal entries:
Piety By Proxy
or
The Bells, The Bells

I’ve just gotten fresh back from McDonalds, and today I was almost driven to leave early rather than finish my McRib meal at a more leisurely pace. About halfway into my meal I became aware of a cell phone ringing, except nobody would answer this cell phone -- it continued to ring and ring and ring. I gradually become aware that it was some device in the kitchen area. I sat there growing more and more irritated, wishing someone would empty the fry basket or open the microwave door, or do whatever needed to be done to silence the wailing device. Lunch hour was peaking, and other various beeps and chimes started in as well. Add to this symphony of restaurant equipment chimes the shouts of workers trying to communicate over the din. You might have thought you were in Three Mile Island’s nuclear reactor control room during a meltdown. Now I’ve seen days at this McDonalds when the crowd surged to overflow, but today the wait was reasonable with lines of only one or two deep.

After about 20 minutes of this confusion, things settled down, and the lunch line was gone, bells and whistles only intermittently going off. I neither exaggerate nor underreport the length of time this confusion persisted. Since I was against the far wall, I was as far away as I could get from the kitchen, but was in line of sight of the counter and kitchen. I’m sure I will eat there again, but will make sure to sit on the far right behind a wall that completely blocks the serving area.

Still I can’t help but wonder what the decibel level is for workers in the counter area. I would estimate about 80-90 db for where I was sitting a good 50-60 feet from the counter, and this being partially obscured by the Coke machines and condiments. I also can’t help but wonder how the main cell phone like ringing could be ignored for the entirety of the lunch swell.

Once you focus on the noise it almost too much to bear. Even so, I think we have become so acclimated to this kind of rude mechanical noise assault that we largely ignore it until, as today, it becomes so loud and continuous that we can’t ignore it.

My advice to McDonalds would be to quiet their kitchens and provide better sound baffling into the seating areas. Perhaps cooking equipment should emit their ready chimes to radio headsets that the workers wear. This way the devices could be assigned to individual workers, increase efficiency, and lower overall decibel levels the workers are exposed to. Truly important need-attending-to-immediately (still audible) alarms would then be more obvious also.

It’s very quiet where I work. The few, who listen to music, do so kindly with headphones. Today I have a new appreciation for this.

Sitting at work, thought I'd fire off an Email to Blogger.com to see if it really updates my blog from Email now. Assuming it does, then my Blogger.com blog will probably get a lot small frequent posts, whereas my Slashdot.org Journal will remain for longer articles and editorials.

Blog on my wayward son!

It's been a one-year hiatus, but I'm back. I've been posting comments to Slashdot.org as DumbSwede, but I hadn’t been posting much to my Slashdot Journal, which to be honest is more my Blog than this one is. Larry’s Humor Pages on JayTV.com have been updated as well with a few new Top Ten lists and the addition of number eight in the humor page series.

I plan for my journal to take on a higher percentage of editorial entries this year, though I have had an amusing experience in my recent life, so expect another chapter in “Larry’s Life” soon. In the mean time check out “Piety by Proxy” an editorial entry and “DNA Incrimination by Extrapolation” an AskSlashdot submission begging for discussion.

I guess I was little ahead of the curve in January 2004 -- I had to create my own Feedback application since Blogger didn’t have user comments. I now see they are touting their new Comments mechanism. I wouldn’t call it easy to get them up and running, but I did manage after a few trial and errors. My Feedback links will be left in place for Global Comments, but now you can comment away on individual posts. Since Blogger.com is free, I shouldn’t complain too much, but Slashdot Journal had individual comments when I joined in 2001 and probably well before, but then Slashdot is about group discussions. Slashdot is also way, way easier to enable comments. Of course Slashdot Journals are not customizable in layout. You always pay for flexibility with complexity.