If it were “Turkey Day” we would be holding the giant birds in great esteem, praising them for their accomplishments. It would be like Veterans day for birds.

Stop calling it Turkey Day.

Turkeys are dumb, ugly birds. Their only value is as food. Give thanks if you find yourself parked next to a steaming plate of turkey meat tomorrow (I know I will.)

I’ve just started using GIMP, the open source alternative to Photoshop. It does everything I need it to do since I have no use for the advanced features of photoshop. This will make it much easier for me to manipulate photos at work. Here’s a picture of the big clanky Ork Stompa that I’ve been building.

Basically it’s a walking tank built by Orks to use for general stompin’, shootin’ and killin’ purposes.

I was thinking of getting a PS3 but I started to wonder if I could afford to support it. Supporting a toddler (the Wii) and his older brother (the 360) is expensive enough!

If you have to send people messages via mybloglog asking them to digg one of your articles the following things are true about your site.

1. It sucks

2. You don’t deserve any diggs because if your article was good it would have been dugg up all by itself.

The next person who sends me such a request is going to get ridiculed and I’m going to make it a point to digg their article down, not up.

The digg phenomenon has, in my opinion, created a new breed of bloggers that I call the “one hit wonders.” They’ve had an article make it up to the front page on digg at some point in the past and now they feel entitled to repeat that feat. The result? Mediocrity, of course.

Don’t ever digg my articles. The digg effect brings wordpress blogs down faster than a meth head chasing a pickup truck full of Sudafed.

Today is the retirement party for the lady who handles all of our communications and marketing here at work. She’s been here ever since this place opened and during her tenure has served as librarian, computer administrator (a title that later became known as “IT” toward the late 90’s) webmaster, web designer (another title that didn’t exist when she started here) and various other information-oriented tasks.

I believe she’s in her late 70’s so I’m inclined to give her some props for learning a whole buttload of new skills as the technology world changed in the 90’s. I’m pretty sure she learned html from the ground up and made our first website back in the day.

Technology finally started to catch up with her around 2000 when we hired an IT assistant (who, might I add also had no formal computer training.)  As it happened, earlier this year we fired the IT assistant and hired a real IT person with real credentials. He lives in our server room speaking litanies to the server’s machine spirit and maintaining our sacred link to the interwebs. Last year was the year when we finally got rid of the website that our aforementioned retiree had developed in the late 90’s. We replaced it with a new site designed by an external developer.

Through 2003-2006 I was one of the loudest protesters around here regarding our outdated website. I argued that it looked old, was hard to navigate, and was fraught with errors and broken links. It had pictures of people who had not worked here in years. During my protests I often volunteered to overhaul  the site design myself. I’m no web designer but it was certainly within my capability to take a 1999 web page and make it look more like a 2003 web page. I was secretly bitter that we didn’t have an IT staff full of l33t nerds sitting in an office full of broken computers, reading slashdot and silently mocking all of the staff who freaked out when we migrated to XP.

This place still has a long way to go. For a building filled with scientists I’d argue that it’s not nearly nerdy enough. Even the IT guy they hired earlier this year doesn’t seem nerdy at all!

I wrote </career> on the card we’re giving to the retiring lady. If she laughs she will be granted the honorary title of “nerd” in my book (my book is the only one that matters since I’m the nerd leader around here.)

I think the main thing that led to my decision to stop writing here was the overwhelming tendency for my posts to be too positive. My goal was to fit in with a blog community that I think is absolute crap. I felt like every post I made was just making that pile of crap bigger.

Well, I’m going to continue writing here after all. There will probably be a greater emphasis on board, table, and video gaming as those are my primary hobbies. I don’t really care about readership anymore but I’ll keep it entertaining.

Layout-wise I’ve stripped out all of the “attention whore” sidebar items.

Mybloglog recent readers - gone

Blogtopsites counter - gone

Feedburner subscriber counter - gone

Google ads - gone

Mybloglog is a fucking joke. I never cease to be amazed by the sheer number of fake-ass idiots on there. The “I’ll click on your blog so you’ll see that I clicked on it and in turn click on my blog” is possibly the dumbest thing in the history of the internet. Sure I get hits from there. I’m SO sure that “blog4cash07″ clicked over here to intently read one of my articles. Right.

Soon I will clarify my opinions on blogging by listing the blogs I actually READ and explaining why I read them.

Spoiler warning: If you do not live in Chicago your blog probably isn’t on there.

I haven’t been blogging lately. I don’t think there will be any more posts here.

I have motivational issues with regular blogging. It’s not challenging me enough.
I’d be willing to write the occasional guest article for other blogs. Drop me a comment here if you’d be interested in collaborating on something.

Oscar Meyer, the legendary purveyor of meats currently resides at 5800 N. Ravenswood in Rosehill Cemetary. Hey! that’s right by my house! Montgomery Ward and John G. Shedd un-live there too!

Old Mayor Daley is in Worth at Holy Sepulchure…I’ve driven by it hundreds of times and never known that. For some reason I assumed he would be at Mount Carmel with Al Capone.

Did you know he died mere hours after attending a function in an official capacity as Mayor? (I think it was the ribbon cutting for a park or something.)

Jesse Owens, Enrico Fermi, and a whole bunch of Civil War soldiers (from both sides) are buried at Oak Woods Cemetery near the site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition on the south side of Chicago. I find it odd that Jesse Owens (he grew up in Alabama and Ohio and achieved initial fame on the track team at Ohio State) would be buried in Chicago in a cemetery with thousands of confederate soldiers (they’re there because there was a prison camp on that site during the war.)

If you’re like me you have to know how everything works. To be honest, I don’t understand how some people stumble through life without understanding how everything works. Take Fall colors for example. In many regions the trees change every year yet most people are completely ignorant of the chemical mechanism by which this occurs.

Basically, tree leaves have several color pigments. Most of the time we only see the one present in the greatest quantity, chlorophyll (the green one, duh.) However, in the autumn the trees somehow “know” that winter is coming and it’s time to drop the leaves before they all freeze and become useless anyway. The mechanism by which this occurs actually depends on the length of the nights; not the length of the days as many people believe. In the leaves there’s a chemical that mediates the “color change” response by governing the rate at which chlorophyll is replaced in the cells. This chemical actually degrades in the dark. Therefore as the nights get longer and longer the level of the chemical in the leaves eventually reaches a lower threshold triggering the leaves to replace less and less of the chlorophyll. As this happens you see less of the green and more of the other colors that have always been there but haven’t really been visible.

Temperature and daylight conditions also mediate this response, as the physiological response within the leaf is affected by things like cloudy days, warm nights. A cloudy, warm fall produces drab colors, probably because the leaf doesn’t have to produce as many non-green pigments to maximize its nutrient production before winter sets in.

After reading up on this subject to refresh my memory, I get the impression that this subject is still not well understood. I still see articles that say the color response is mediated by light exposure, which is actually half right. As far as I’m concerned, half right is equal to totally wrong when it comes to science.

I have an old Nintendo Gamecube sitting around collecting dust. Since I also happen to have a Nintendo Wii sitting around collecting dust I have no need for the Gamecube (the Wii plays all the old games.)

So I put an ad up on Craigslist. I’ll let the whole package (cables, controller, memory card , etc) go for $20 as long as the buyer pays cash and comes to pick the thing up.

This morning came the moment of dread when I check my email for replies from the sort of people who are interested in buying the weakest of the previous generation game consoles.  This set made my brain bleed much more so than the emails I get when I sell furniture on there. For example:

HEY I WANT THE GAMECUBE CALL ME 773-xxx-xxxx

Emails in all caps are deleted immediately because I refuse to let people who type in all caps use the internet to make their lives easier. Secondly, I hate calling people and I doubly hate calling total strangers regarding a used gamecube. The entire transaction will be conducted via email or it won’t be conducted at all.

Here’s another example:

do you still have it?

That’s the entire email. It was sent literally 1 hour after I posted the ad.

Out of all the emails I got there was one that used complete sentences with the right amount of capital letters. I gave the guy my address and told him he could come pick the thing up today. Unfortunately he responded to my last email with “JUST GIVE ME A CALL 773-xxx-xxx.” That’s right..caps and a phone number when all he had to do was come to my address and ring the buzzer any time today. Deleted.

Fuck it, I’m donating the thing to the Salvation Army.