Distance Equals Rate Times Time

For my very last day of classes at BYU, I thought things were pretty uneventful. At least until the day ended and I started thinking about it. It was so uneventful, I'll tell you all about it just so you can get the feel of how things go for me.

Got up at a leisurely pace. Grace spent the night at the Robbins since Emily was at the hospital by5:30 am or something crazy like that, and so I could go into work at 8:00. I couldn't find either sent of our apartment keys, so after some thought, I would just have to lock the doorknob (which is broken) and warn Emily before she tries to get in. We have to use the deadbolt only. If the doorknob locks, the only way in is with a credit card. I'm getting good at it, Emily hasn't got the knack of it yet.

At work, I do my usual routine, read scriptures online at www.lds.org, checked the only Facebook group worth checking: "If this group reaches 4,294,967,296 it might cause an integer overflow" where a whole mess of internet geeks (mainly /b/tards) post funny pictures and invent all sorts of internet inside jokes. It's not for the faint of heart, and sometimes gets inappropriate, but there are moderators who try to keep it okay. At some point, coworkers Scott and Christian come in and someone starts singing a song from Cake's Fashion Nugget, and for the next 10 minutes we all join in performing an a cappella montage of the album-complete with guitar, bass, and trumpet parts. Since Scott and the other Christian have joined our office, we've broken out into random song no less than a dozen or so times. It's really strange to have so much in common with others who I seem to have so little in common with. I'll miss this job, a lot.

As recommended, I looked up the end song to the game "Portal" and found a blog with the video from the game. For some reason, this Youtube video wasn't blocked even though I was on campus. No other videos worked and most attempts resulted in the page from BYU's filter service telling us it is blocked like normal. But for some odd reason, the video worked for me for about 5 minutes.

If you want a mind blowing experience, watch the trailer for the game on the website linked above. Whew. Reality just went out the window. The picture below was posted on the Integer Overflow group.
My boss, Shane Warby (of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir fame) has the game and put it on the computer next today to me to see how it'd run in Windows Vista. So I got to play it for a bit, laughing ridiculously at the incredulity and awesomeness of the game. I'm always a fan of games that stretch your thinking into creative and new ways. Other simple online games I'm a fan of: Bloxorz, Silversphere, Text Twist, and the Teagames.com Motocross Series. Grace loves watching me play 'Bloons and "mo'cycle" (Motocross).

As I left work, I asked Shane what we were going to do with the iBook G4, that Christian and I took apart a few days ago. It was out of warranty and had serious hardware issues. We had to take it apart to get the hard drive out for the part-time faculty who'd been using it. Those machines are Beasts! We lost about half of the bajillion screws and it took us 2 1/2 hours to get machine apart enough to get the hard drive out. Shane decided we'd just declare it junk and cannibalize it for parts. I asked if I could snag the RAM and see if it'd work in my own laptop. Yoink! My laptop now has 512 MB instead of just its original 256!

My last two classes of BYU (ever!!) went without incident. I'll miss both of them. Microbiology and Personal Finance. The PF teacher is an independent financial planner who teaches part time (In my experience, the part-time faculty I've had, are among the best teachers. They do it cuz they like teaching, not for the money--BYU pays them almost nothing from what I understand). It's been an amazing class.

During Micro, I finally decided to read what the textbook has to say about the fungal genus, Malassezia, which causes a few skin disorders including chronic dandruff/seborrheic dermatitis. It didn't tell me much that I hadn't already found out through pubmed.com, wikipedia, and various other sites. It lives off of the oil produced by your skin, especially in the scalp. Hard to kill, but there are ways of prohibiting it's growth. Tea Tree Oil Shampoo isn't working for me, and neither has Head N Shoulders, Selsun Blue, or Extra Strength T-Gel; all with their unique active ingredients for controlling the problem (terpenin-4-ol, zinc pyrithrione, selenium sulfide, and coal tar, respectively). I got some greasy hair (must be all that manly testosterone).

After class, I met Em and Grace at the Wilkinson center where a bunch of inflatable jolly-jump things were set up for BYU students to celebrate classes ending. After a few minutes of jumping on an inflated Twister board, Grace pukes up strawberry smoothie all over. Ha Ha. Ohhh boy.

Then, Emily and I watched a few episodes of House before going to bed, and like most Tuesdays and Thursdays when I have late classes, I had trouble sleeping. So I get up and write you all a mini epic about one simple day.

Oh yeah, it was sunny and pleasant this morning while I rode my bike, snowed this afternoon, and foggy/hazy this evening. I wore shorts today. Good thing I decided against the sandals.

Is She Weird

April Fools has taken on renewed strength on the internet. Google has consistently had some sort of prank (last year they advertised Google Paper where they would print all your emails and mail them to you for free). This year they advertised Custom Time where you could decide on the time stamp of your email. In Australia they boasted GDay with MATE where you could search for internet content that doesn't exist yet. Youtube's featured videos all sent users to Rick Astley's video, thus RickRolling millions of people. (Rickrolling is tricking someone into watching a super cheesy Rick Astley 80's music video for "Never gonna give you up." Big-time internet joke). Firefox put out a plugin that works only for the day that does all sorts of random things to the web pages you're viewing. On Digg it added "whatever" to the end of every entry. It abbreviated all sorts of random things. Trying to go directly to a web site sent you on to random other web sites.

Since all but one of us were in our office yesterday morning, we pranked a coworker. We found a desktop background that looks like a cracked computer screen, set it as the only picture for the screen saver and unplugged the mouse and keyboard. When he finally came in at 2:00 it was just myself and the other Christian in the office. When he asked what happened I told him I was tossing a mouse and missed. He was fairly upset although he hid it pretty well. He shut the computer off out of frustration. I tried to get him to turn it back on (thus revealing the joke) saying "We liked the way it looked so we left it on all day." He spits back, "Well why didn't you do it to your computer!" Shane, Christian, and I just about died laughing (quietly behind is back). Eventually Christian turns it back on and reveals the joke. We eventually all got a good chuckle at his expense.

Also, three popular web comics traded sites. XKCD, Questionable Material, and Dinosaur Comics. If you typed one website, you got another comic. If you haven't heard of any of them, don't worry, it just means you don't spend enough time on the internet. They're pretty geeky.

Last night I also saw on Google's home page a link for Virgin Galactic's and Google's combined mission to mars. Web users can fill out an application for being a member of the first human mission to mars. They went through a lot of work for the site, and it's quite impressive with lots of humor.

So, in good taste, here's a link to probably the most popular video on the internet recently. Yesterday, they had replaced the original with an excellently dubbed muppet video of Beaker "singing" the song from the Muppet Show.

Here's an XKCD from a long while back:

Planet of Sound

Sort of a tribute to a great guy:
When I was a missionary in Campbell River, BC Canada, I got to meet this awesome family, the Ricketts. They lived way outside town in the woods. They'd had some hard times. The house they bought had been torched by a fire, so Kelly Ricketts (the dad) was slowly cutting lumber to rebuild it. While I was there they were living in the upstairs, and the downstairs was completely gutted.

This guy was the man's man. I mean, think of anything tough, and rugged, and bad a$$ and he's probably done it. Sometimes I'd wonder if he was just telling us stories, but only occasionally, and after getting to know him I realized he didn't lie about anything. He grew up on a float house at a logging camp and ran away from home as a young teenager, with his guitar. Had a rough couple years, getting into trouble and participating in less enviable pastimes. As a young adult he married a woman who already had three young children. This marriage fell apart, something happened to the woman (I can't remember the details) and in the mean-time he worked as a bouncer, logging truck driver, logger, hunting and fishing guide, taxidermist, coal miner, and professional boxer, and he's played a fair bit of hockey through it all.

He'd boxed professionally (and never been beaten in the ring, he could take hits forever and it only took a few of his to knock the other guy down), and would've gone to the Seoul Olympics in 1988, but had his hand smashed by a sledge hammer a few weeks prior (or maybe it was a motorcycle accident?). He also was a professional country music singer for some time (remember the guitar I mentioned earlier?). He even performed on the Canadian Country Music Awards show and has a picture of him and the other performers (including Shania Twain) along with a few professionally made music videos. Something went down with the publishing of his CD and his career was short lived. I have to tell you, listening to him play sitting around his table or in his living room was an experience I'll never forget. I added a few of his songs to the playlist above. He gave us copies of his CD. His music's not necessarily country by nature, but they made it that way on the CD. His stage name was Kelly Randall. Just listening to him and his guitar was an experience.

At some point in the late 80's, he met two sister missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the story of their meeting is funny, but not for here), and eventually joined the church. He met another convert to the church, they married, and now have several children. When we were around him, it was obvious they didn't have much money, but they were happy. They owned a rental home on the mainland (while I was in Campbell River, they discovered that the house had been turned into a marijuana grow-op and trashed). He also had some property in Northern BC he was thinking of logging. He'd been working at the coal mine, but the economy fluctuates quite a bit up there, and he lost his job along with many others. Shortly after I left, he moved to Kamloops and farmed there for some time before moving out to Neudorf, Saskatchewan. Check it out on Google Maps. His oldest daughter found me on Facebook and we got to catch up with each other.

I hope things are going good for him and his family. He was a great guy. He cared a great deal for his family and neighbors. We would help on projects occasionally out at his place and I've got some good pictures somewhere of us working with his portable lumber mill he had behind the house. One time, we were pruning trees to make them sellable for Christmas trees in the winter, and I remember we knocked down a robin's nest with eggs in it. It surprised me he had such a soft spot as he tried to put the nest back in place, almost heartbroken over the fallen nest.

A few funny memories: A friend we visited regularly in Campbell River was at his daughter's swim meet in Port Alberni to the south. He got to talking to another dad there and it came up our friend was from Campbell River. The other dad exclaims, "Campbell River? I knew this guy up there. He was crazy! Used to go bow-hunting for grizzlies. His name is Kelly Ricketts."

He also tried some Danish salt-licorice I'd received from my family- the Pirates kind. Kelly tried and tried to chew it up and swallow it, but couldn't do it. He was in pure agony trying to brave the black poison for several minutes before spitting it into the fire place.

He took us fishing with a friend and the missionaries from Comox, and stopped to get some Timbits (Tim Horton's donut holes) and inhaled some powdered sugar and starts choking while driving. The four of us in the back of the van just about panicked as the van starts swaying all over the road and his friend starts slapping him on the back. "Geez, Timbits as hard as rocks! What, are these 4 months old??" A great memory, still makes me laugh. The four of us missionaries had a great time that day.

Oh My Golly (Part II)

One of the coolest things I've seem is Google Analytics. I set up an account when I started this site and would check it frequently, but haven't bothered to in a while.

Google Analytics can track the traffic to your website showing location, number of visitors, how long each visitor stays, what sites they came from (referring site) and even which parts of your site they looked at. Not having looked in a while, I found a few surprises.

Almost 20% of my traffic is referred from my sister-in-law's website: talesofanordinaryhousewife.blogspot.com Thanks Cristin!

Another 14 comes from my oldest sister's site: kkjjkent.blogspot.com
11% comes from my good friend and his wife's website: theadventuresofambogweg.blogspot.com
8% comes from my mom's site debilassen.blogspot.com
The rest comes from google and a few other sites. It even shows which keywords help others find my site from an internet search.

On the map, a lot of traffic comes from Camarillo and Newbury Park (there's probably a large routing center in Newbury Park that a lot of Camarillo traffic goes through). A fair bit from Tehachapi. A good amount from Utah and Madison, Wisconsin. There even seems to be a regular visitor from Vancouver (they could be anywhere in BC since I'm guessing most traffic is routed through Vancouver). I'd like to find out who that is. Plus a few visitors from all sorts of other states. Poor saps who mistakenly find my little blog hoping to find some useful information. Heh Heh Heh forgive me a cruel chuckle.

Google Analytics is good fun. On the whole, I get about an average of seven visitors per day. Too bad I don't write more often to reward them.

In other news, spring is coming, yesterday after class, I took Grace to the botany pond on the south side of campus and fed the ducks some old bread. Two weeks ago, there was a great deal of hormone going through those ducks, and yesterday I found several nests on the hillside. One nest had over twenty eggs in it. I bet that momma duck felt better after getting all those out. We've always enjoyed taking Grace to see the ducks at various spots around campus. Last spring we saw a momma duck with a brood of 12 ducklings following her everywhere. Crazy. I'd add a picture of Grace with the ducks, but blogger is being dumb right now and won't upload it.

Last night, Emily spent the night at her parents house to spend time with a good good friend visiting from St. George. I stayed here since I'm pretty sick and wouldn't be appreciated as company. I told Emily she could go as long as she makes me lots of cookies. Mmmmm. She won the 1st Prize ribbon for chocolate chip cookies at the Utah State Fair in 2004. And me, despite having a number of assignments and tests due next week, I spent the evening watching a couple downloaded episodes of Man Vs. Wild and reading friends blogs that I only discovered last night (through Google Analytics). Today, I'm playing hookie from work (under Emily's orders). I'd probably go, except that the 2 mile uphill bike ride in the drizzly weather would probably make me more sick.

Enjoy the music I added. A coworker has got tons of good stuff we listen to at work and I've been getting a lot of it from him. Another Dane, Christian Wiggo Axelgard. His name is almost as cool as mine. Funny, my brother worked with his brother at the same job over four years ago.

I'm feelin spacy and I'm having a harder time putting together coherent thoughts the longer I sit here. Later

Trompe Le Monde

Trompe Le Monde

Dead

So, a few months ago, Emily and I used some generously given movie passes to go see I Am Legend in the big theater. The movie was pretty well done, some really intense scenes and some good thought provoking happening, but when the movie ended, it became real dumb. I didn't mind the overuse of CGI, and some plot tricks used purely for dramatic effect, but overall a good movie until it ended.

The released ending was overly dramatic, unnecessary, and mega lame. So much so, that we told anyone we thought who'd be interested in it to not pay to see the movie. But, while perusing the internets today, I came across this site that has a video clip of the original ending. It's like closure to a badly ended relationship.

Oh man, if they'd put that ending into the film you get an entirely different focus to the story. The production ending resorts to the "big budget blaster movie" lameness that attracts people to pay money just to watch big explosions. The original ending reinstates the critical thinking you started using early into the movie (only to be dissapointed by the thoughtless ending).

If you want to watch it, go here. If they include it in the DVD release, I'd buy it and show it on Halloweens with our teenage children and their friends. Make it a tradition. Then, when the kids are like, "that was so lame!" we say, yeah, but check out the real ending... then they'd say, "Ok, old folks, that was a cool movie, we'll give you props." Word.

(In case you decide to check it out but haven't seen the movie, I'll spoil it for you: Will Smith is the last person in New York living among zombies. He kidnaps zombies to study, usually killing them. The zombie disease supposedly strips "everything human" from those infected. Eventually, the zombies figure out where Will Smith has been hiding at night, and raid his place, led by the zombie who just wants his girlfriend back. You'll have to watch the movie for any other explanations.)

The warehouse scene is THE SCENE of the movie, though. Nuts. That one gives you the hibbly jibblies. After that, the movie is not so bad. So yeah, with the original ending seen, the movie rocks.