senseless waste o' time

My ears are burning!!

According to Nothing To Do With Arbroath, two record producers made a bet to see who could get the worst song possible into the charts. The result was No Way No Way by Vanilla.

Delayed April Fools Day Joke

Unless I'm mistaken, both Boing Boing and Neatorama just got taken in by an 8-month old April Fools Day Joke for a Mario 1up mushroom growing kit.  Go to the actual product listing at ThinkGeek.com, then click the "Add to Cart" button to see what I mean.

ThinkGeek.com does have some really cool items, but this ain't one of them.

powered by performancing firefox

I'm an idiot.

Okay, I'm an idiot.  A few months ago, I installed a bunch of Firefox extensions without having any idea what they were for.  So today I was in Google Reader looking at the latest articles in LifeHacker and I ran across this one.  As it turns out, one of those Firefox extensions was for Performancing.

Now that I know what it's for, I'm giving it a test drive to see how I like it.  In fact, I used it to write this entry.

powered by performancing firefox

Bloglines claim

This is kind of a "dummy" entry to allow bloglines to claim my blog.

An entry about nothing

I found this great joke over at JumboJoke.com: High Tech Natives.

A car in every pot and two chickens in every garage

I'm now in the official order of succession to the United States Presidency:

Get your position here

WalkAmerica 2006

I'm going to be walking on April 29, 2006 for the March of Dimes WalkAmerica. It's a great charity and their work is (reason enough to support them), but I also have a personal reason for making this walk.

katie, my youngest daughter was born in September, 2004, 7 weeks early. She only weighed 3 lbs. 3 oz. when she arrived, so she had to spend about six weeks in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) before we were allowed to take her home.

Even after we took her home, we had to isolate her during her first winter to minimize her chances of developing RSV (Respiritory Syncitial Virus), the most common cause of bronchiolitis and pneumonia amoung infants and children under 1 year of age. RSV can cause all sorts of problems during someone's life and preemies are especially vulnerable.

Luckily, Katie hasn't had any real problems as a result of her early birth. But others aren't so lucky. During Katie's stay in the NICU, we met many parents whose preemies were having a hard time. Many of them will have major medical problems for the rest of their lives.

If it wasn't for the March of Dimes, we many of these children (including our Katie) probably wouldn't live at all. For many years, they have been at the forefront of research into the causes of premature births, and they have done a lot to help those who are born prematurely. In fact, they are directly responsible for the existence of NICUs.

So now I support them by participating in WalkAmerica.

If you'd like to sponsor me, please go to my
WalkAmerica website and make a pledge.

Thanks!

The Best Blonde Joke I've Ever Seen

I've heard and read a lot of blonde jokes in my time, but this is truly the best blonde joke I have ever read.

You've been circled!

Now hit yourself in the arm.

You've been circled!


Originally uploaded by Senseless1.

Spam sucks!!!

You know, it's not like I have a lot of people reading this blog. And it's not like I've been posting a lot of stuff. But somehow, the trackback spammers found me and have been generating inappropriate trackbacks to my blog.

So far, I've only gotten a few of these trackbacks. I suppose I could just ignore them and hope they stop. But I really, really, REALLY hate spam, and I know it'll just get worse if I don't do anything about it. So, until I can update to the latest version of Movable Type, I'm disabling trackbacks.

Ice, Ice Baby

This morning, I received an email from my wife:

East Anglian Ambulance Service have launched a national "In case of Emergency ( ICE ) " campaign with the support of Falklands war hero Simon Weston.

The idea is that you store the word " I C E " in your mobile phone address book, and against it enter the number of the person you would want to be contacted "In Case of Emergency".

In an emergency situation ambulance and hospital staff will then be able to quickly find out who your next of kin are and be able to contact them. It's so simple that everyone can do it. Please do.

Please will you also email this to everybody in your address book, it won't take too many 'forwards' before everybody will know about this. It really could save your life, or put a loved one's mind at rest.

For more than one contact name ICE1, ICE2, ICE3 etc.

Normally, I'm pretty leery of messages like this. After all, it looks an awful lot like an email hoax. But Stacey is not the kind of person to forward an email hoax, and it really does sound like a good idea, so I went over to Snopes.com and checked it out.

It turns out that the message is actually legitimate -- there really is and East Anglian Ambulance Service and they really did come up with this.

It's a great idea and I urge anyone and everyone with a cell phone to go ahead and do it. It might even save your life.

Music for Babies

Keith McDuffee over at Blogging Baby wrote an interesting article about some of the alternative songs he and his wife sing to their little one. We've had similar experiences with our oldest daughter Avery, so I thought I'd share my take on the subject.

When Avery was a baby, we wanted to make sure she was exposed to a lot music. So in addition to the usual baby songs like Itsy-Bitsy Spider and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, she also got to hear more contemporary stuff, i.e., stuff that Stacey and I like to listen to. Here's a small sample of the songs we used to sing to put her to sleep:

• I Will -- The Beatles. This one is still one of her favorite songs.
• American Pie -- Don McClean. I used to sing the full version to her because she'd usually fall asleep before I got to the end.
• Silent Night -- Traditional. Stacey sang this one to her year-round to calm her down.
• Twist and Shout -- The Beatles. When the slow ones didn't work, this one usually did. Go figure.
• Desperado -- The Eagles.
• Wishing -- Buddy Holly and the Crickets.

She's almost five, now, and she loves to sing and listen to songs. She only has to listen to a song two or three times before she's able to sing it, and when she sings, she almost always hits the right notes. She can recognize similarities between songs and she recognizes when two different songs have the same tune. In fact, she recognized that the Barney Song has the same tune as Yankee Doodle Dandy after hearing Yankee Doodle Dandy one time. She also makes up her own songs.

Early exposure to music worked so well on Avery that we've been doing the same thing for Quinley since she was born last September. The only real change I made was to throw some Eric Clapton in the mix since she seems to like his songs. I have no doubt that she'll benefit as much as Avery has.

You Know the Darkness Always Turns into Light

A couple of days ago, I picked up X&Y, the new CD by Coldplay. I really like every song on the disc (even the extra, unlisted one), but the one I can't get out of my head is What If:

What if I got it wrong,
And no poem or song
Could put right what I got wrong,
Or make you feel I belong?
What if you should decide
That you don't want me there by your side,
That you don't want me there in your life?

- Berryman/Buckland/Champion/Martin (2005)

Today is the anniversary of the day I first met my wife. In the 8 years we've been together, I've certainly known this feeling once or twice. But through all of the ups and downs, we've stayed together, and our marriage has actually grown stronger. I would not be who I am today without her.

Stacey,

Jeff

Ole!

Today, we drove down to St. Petersburg, FL and visited the Salvador Dali Museum.

I used to think of Salvador Dali as that guy with the funny moustache who painted The Persistence of Memory (the melting clocks painting) and who created the dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound. I had no idea how prolific he was, how much he influenced Surrealism or how, in later years, he incorporated Baroque elements into his paintings.

Before I visited the museum, my favorite piece was The Persistence of Memory. There was something about the melting clocks that just appealed to me. But after visiting the museum and seeing many of Dali's works, I'd have to say that my favorite is The Hallucinogenic Toreador. Taken at face value, it's an extraordinary piece of art. However, like in many of Dali's other works, it also contains hidden images and is full of symbolism. For instance, take a look at the Venus De Milo that's wearing a green and a white skirt. The green skirt also looks like a tie and the white skirt looks sort of like a shirt. Once you see the shirt and tie, it's easy to see that her abdomen, waist and left breast look like a man's face, with the abdomen becoming his chin, the waist becoming his mouth, and the left breast becoming his eye. Look a little more and you might see the outline of a hat brim just above the face.

After leaving the museum, we drove back to the Gulf Coast and stopped at a seafood restaurant for dinner. By the time we were finished, it was almost time for sunset, so we found a good spot and watched the sun set over the Gulf. Sunsets over the gulf are exceedingly beautiful and are not to be missed.

All in all, it was a lovely ending to a lovely day.

White, Sandy Beaches

After almost running out of gas and many wrong turns, we finally made it to Clearwater Beach, FL. We're staying at a place called the Surf & Sand, which kinda looks like a dump from the outside. Our apartment, though, is well-kept and much bigger than we expected (two bedroom, two bath, kitchen and den). They even have wireless Internet access!

After two days of Walt Disney World, we just needed to relax, so we didn't really do much today except drive around Clearwater Beach to check out the area.

More tomorrow...