Annoying Ads

Let he who has an ear to hear listen to my words that they may not be scattered by the winds before they can take root in fertile ground. Advertisers, read:

I have nothing against advertising on web-sites. In fact, I think it's a Very Good thing. It allows web-sites to be supported by chosen sponsors, or even a big group of sponsors. Great, that! It encourages people to build web-sites that provide real value. I'm all about real value.

Thus I do not arbitrarily block ads. I do not seek to eliminate all advertising from my web experience. But I do use selective ad blockers.

There is one thing and one thing only that causes me to add a new rule to my ad blocker. ANNOYANCE.

• If your ad prohibits me from seeing the web page I'm trying to view until I pay attention to it, I'll block it.


• If your ad blinks or flashes in a epileptic-enducing pattern, I'll block it.


• If your ad pops up another window that I then have to manually close, I'll block it.

These are a few examples, and the most common causes of blockage. But that doesn't preclude other annoyances from winning an ad a slot on my block list. And one single ad can cause me to axe an entire ad service.

I don't relish my ad blocking capabilities. I don't flaunt them or swing them around my head like a morning star ready to take out any who come within arms-reach. I'm just a bit selfish. I just want to be able to get at the web-sites I'm trying to get at. Is that so wrong?

. Topher

Angel's Camp

A few weeks back we wandered up to Calevaras County with my parents. We stayed in a nice little time-share condo in Angel's Camp. It was pretty nice, that time-share thingy. Better than I expected anyhow.

Samual Clemens (nom de plum, Mark Twain, yes that guy who wrote about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn) apparently stayed in Angel's Camp for a few months on a personal pocket-mining adventure. He wrote a story about a jumping frog which was based in Angel's Camp. Now the town is a living, breathing tourist shrine to Mark Twain and the Jumping Frog's he made so famous.

There's even now an annual Frog Jumping Contest. Yap. They call it the Frog Jumping Jubilee. They put the frogs on a launch pad in a circle, then try to get them to jump in any direction. The one that jumps the farthest wins. I'm not making this up!

All in all, we had a good time. We went up to the Big Trees forest. We went to the Stanislaus river. We wandered around Angel's Camp and Murphy's and Columbia. We saw a play. We went wine tasting. We descended into the Moaning Cavern. We ate, drank and were merry.

Pictures ensue:


The Pine Cone of DOOM!


Big Pine Cone, Big Pine Cone Maker


Topher Viewing Trees


Mom Hiding in Trees


Serene Making the River Look Good


Father and Son Getting Ready To Empty Them Barrels


Mom and Dad Slightly Tipsy


Serene in My Hat Va-Va-Va-Voom!

"Video Games Ate My ..."

Last weekend I accidentally gave a chubby Mexican kid who couldn't put more than 2 words together at a time $10 in quarters to play a video game in a laundrymat because his curvacious mom was wearing a low-cut top. It's ok because the quarters weren't mine.

Serene laughed for about 20 minutes then gave me a big snuggling hug that made me blush all the way up to the top of my bald head. I think she likes doing that, but I haven't figured out if it's because of the bright red blush or the snuggling.

. Topher

Whiteboards Whiteboards Everywhere But All "Do Not Erase"

Ight, this just kills me. Are you ready for this? Heh heh.

Yeah, so, in this one building I frequent there is a conference room with a VLW (Very Large Whiteboard). On that whiteboard are all kinds of boxes and squiggles with little blurbs that must be significant to somebody scrawled near, around and over them. Standard fare for a VLW, don't you think?

Yeah, so, splattered over all of this scrawling are 20 or 30 post-it notes stuck to the whiteboard with more scrawlings on them. Yes, post-it notes stuck to the whiteboard.

And of course, just to add that finishing touch, a nice "Do Not Erase" in the middle.

Ha! That kills me.

JUMP!

So, Leigh had an "Oh My God I Get To Go To Singapore For A Whole Month" party a few weeks back. As usual, she was in hot pursuit of jumping pictures of all sorts.

She's there now. In Singapore, I mean, wandering around, taking pictures, I dunno what all.



It seems I can't jump without making a really dorky face.


My Superman Moment. I FLEW! For about 1/3rd of a second.


Katie and Serene performing the Kick Out and Bonk Heads Amidst Raucous Laughter Jump.


"Yeah. I'm coo. So coo. I'm gonna land right here."


Cutest. Thing. EVAR!

This Honky White Boy

I often refer to myself as a "Honky White Boy." Thus, my ass is, quite understandably, often quiped as my "Honky White Ass."

I attribute my fond embracement of my Honkiness to my father. See, my dad was born a poor white boy in Texas, working the farms and praising the Lord. I guess you learn to value those unique qualities that get you razed in some circles, because no matter how much we teased him, he has never lost his fondness for cowboy boots. (Though we have managed to get them gallon hats toned down to a fedora or a John Deere cap.) And he often referred to himself as "just a poor honky white boy."

So there I am, thirty-something years along in life, thinking I'm the definition of "Honkiness." I'm sitting in some cheesey rice place (that is to say, a place which serves rice covered in cheese) under the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, a happy honky white boy. My oh-so-lovely girlfriend, a Chinese-Malaysian who speaks English better than many Americans, points out a table of rather loud and racous Chinese and says, "See them, they're all Honky's."

"Ruhr?" I elloquently grunted. "They're what?"

She giggled, "We call them Honky's because they're from Hong Kong."

And there I was, amazed again at how ego-centric I so often am, and realizing that Americans often are. Which, of course, made me realize that I'm the definition of "American." ... Woe.

Yeah. For those of you thinking about elk, burritos and other such things, just keep on thinking.

Smile :) Summarized

Alright. Enough of my babbling. The short of this whole smile business: The single, most impactful, most significant thing you can do to make you a better person is to smile. Smile to be pretty, smile to be smart, smile to get girls and smile for your heart.

Smile :) part seven: Live

They say laughter is the best medicine. Well it may not be the best, we have some pretty good stuff these days, but still. Did you know that laughter actually boosts the human immune system?

After exposure to humor, there is a general increase in activity within the immune system, including an increase in the number and activity level of natural killer cells that attack viral infected cells and some types of cancer and tumor cells, an increase in activated T cells (T lymphocytes) [...], an increase in the antibody IgA (immunoglobulin A), which fights upper respiratory tract insults and infections, [... and it keeps going!]

[ source: Holistic Online ]

The Archives of Internal Medicine recently published a study by a team of Dutch researches which found that being optimistic significantly reduced the risk of demise by heart disease in men. A blurb from a brief of the report:

Among men ages 64 to 84 who were free of cardiovascular disease and cancer, those who consistently looked at the bright side of life and had generally positive expectations had a 55% lower risk for cardiovascular mortality compared with gloomy pessimistic men.

[ source: MedPage Today ]

"Just the facts, Ma'am."