Preserving Memories

Ok, jump in your time machine and pretend that this post was written and published last night. I would've done it last night, but after a long day of tests and vacuuming I decided to have dinner at my brother's place and he was busy setting up things for his new house on his computer. Anyway, I decided to take the only home movie we have to his place so that his girlfriend could see what he and some of our cousins looked at age 7 or 8. It made me realize how important holding on to stuff like that is. That tape has four people in our family who have died since. If they had camcorders back in the day maybe I'd be able to meet more than just one of my grandparents. I urge you all to keep in the back of your mind the purchase of a video camera whenever you have your first child. You don't have to film every little thing, but make sure you get the important stuff. It's funny to see myself at such a young age, and especially my brother. His girlfriend got a real hoot out of it, and of course I was much cuter then than I am now. You can even see me saying "Dada" and you hear my mom in the background complaining that I still hadn't gotten to saying "Mama" yet. I'm working on transferring it to DVD and I think I have a couple of friends luckily who can help me out there.

I do have some real technology news today though. CNet did an awesome feature about the top 10 web fads though, and it would appear that they got most of the big ones on there and a few I hadn't heard of. My favorite was the All Your Base one, which starts out as an actual scene from a Japanese video game that was translated to English to be sold here. I reported on Microsoft's Blue Hat event a while back and SecurityFocus nabbed an interview with Dan Kaminsky, who attended the event and provides some great insight into M$'s aims and what-not. He's one of the few security experts who truly seem to take an objective point of view so it's a really worthwhile read. You may or may not care, but Google's month-to-month query volume has dropped a bit while gaining unique searchers since last year and I think it all amounts to slight volatility in the search market. Is it possible that web surfing is costing businesses (as a whole) $178 billion a year? This is a perfect example of a biased study that is overblown to show what they want to show where the reality is that it's not an accurate account of wasted hours or of the actual cost given that no person is ever productive 100% of the time regardless of whether they surf. To help out the troops in Iraq the Pentagon has been developing a riot control ray gun that could output a microwave beam causing enough discomfort to force participants out of the way. What if this could have indirect health effects though and what if they can't move out of the way? Lastly, I wish more kids were like a group of Utah high schoolers who have won an award for developing a way to save tons of fuel.

I have a little bit of movie news today. There's actually an uncensored trailer for The 40-year-old Virgin out there complete with curse words and a nipple, and I highly recommended it because it actually made me laugh out loud. I'm getting good vibes from this one. If you're more interested in a serious trailer though, Yahoo! Movies has one for the biopic on Johnny Cash, Walk the Line. It's amazing how close Joaquin Phoenix can get to Johnny's voice and while I don't think it'll be a Ray it should be enjoyable. The weekend is almost upon us and a detailed review of The Island may help you to decide whether to see it. Basically, it sounds like it's only good for some mindless fun. I kind of wonder how mindless The Devil's Rejects will be, too. Lastly, a couple of good websites went live. One is for The Transformers movie complete with a lot of stuff for a movie so early in production. The other one is for Harry Potter, which isn't all that notable except that it's Harry Potter and you just have to get excited about seeing anything you can for it.

Now for the 3x Thursday:

1. How tall are you? Do you think it's 'tall' or 'short'? Does it matter to you? What are the advantages/disadvantages to being your height?
I'm about 5'5" and I consider myself pretty short. My friends tease me about it sometimes, but it doesn't bother me all that much. The disadvantages are looking so young that I have to be carded, the limitation of not being able to get too tall a girl (I wouldn't reject a girl for being taller than me, but it does look a bit weird), and having to make embarrassing adjustments at the gym to correct for it after a bigger guy uses it. The advantages are that the youth factor may come in handy later on and I'm still taller than my brother so that's kind of cool. Plus, I don't think I'll ever be too tall for a girl.

2. Do you consider yourself to be better than others? Why/why not?
Not really so much. We all have our strengths and weaknesses and though I have a lot going for me other people possess talents and abilities that I don't excel at though they may not study or program or something like that as well as me.

3. Do you think you're good at your job? How/how not?
Right now I just babysit, and I think I'm alright with it but having had an odd childhood (not bad, just odd) I don't think I have that inner child as much as most people do. Oh well, my forte is coding anyway.