brykmantra.com

NaBloPoMo Day 10: Okay, I missed day 9.

But onward and upward. Tomorrow is the birthday of The Spook, my old college buddy as you might recall, and designer/maker of this blog’s metal logo whose photograph appears at the top of this page, so today’s post is a series of music videos for his listening enjoyment:

So that’s it! Happy birthday!

NaBloPoMo Day 7:

Winter is coming to an end, and before too long it’ll be too hot to use the stove — in fact, there will be a time in August when even the thought of hot food won’t be appetizing. We won’t want to do anything but sit on the couch and suck on frozen dinners.

But I digress: My wife took advantage of our semi-cool weather today to roast two big trays of fresh vegetables:

And that picture brings up an interesting point: I do most of my blogging on Facebook now, and I notice that I can link to something really interesting, or carefully craft a very clever paragraph, and my FB followers will totally ignore it — but I publish a picture of a particularly eye-pleasing lunch or dinner, and my likes and comments will explode.

I’m beginning to think I missed the boat: I should look into being a food blogger …

NaBloPoMo Day 6:

So as I mentioned earlier this week, we recently got AT&T Uverse, which also means DVR, which also means we can now watch things that are only broadcast in the middle of the night, including a fascinating video art series called “Off The Air”, which is broadcast sporadically by Cartoon Network. I tried to embed a video here, but it’s not working, so here’s a link to all the videos.

Warning: It gets a little weird, so don’t bother if you have a low tolerance for such things. On the other hand, if you’re a pothead, you’ll be happy as a stone little clam with a fresh bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.

NaBloPoMo Day 5: I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this tonight, so, on this month’s topic of “Fresh”, here’s Fresh Prince of Bel Air memes!

NaBloPoMo Day 4: Missed day 3 — OOPS!

Anyway, in keeping with the April topic of “Fresh”, we recently got AT&T Uverse — We’ve wanted it for a long time, but they only recently expanded into our area. Not only is it great, but the whole home package is about $60 less than our previous total for Time Warner Cable and AT&T phone and internet!

Not only are our download speeds 8 times better on this new plan than before, but now we’re getting tons more channels, and most of them are HD — in every room! With TWC, we only had the cable box in one room, and that was the only one that we could get the three-digit channels on, not to mention any four-digit channels at all.

And now, I don’t work for AT&T, and I’m not getting paid for saying this. In fact, Uverse gave us a lot of problems at first, four significant ones, in fact, stemming from the installation (1. No wifi outside of the computer room; 2. After that problem was fixed, one of our TVs stopped getting a signal from its box; 3. The Uverse power supply in the garage was beeping at all hours of the day or night; and 4. Well, that’s an entirely separate post!). But in spite of all that, we still LOVE Uverse.

So, yes, this is a huge new [Fresh!] development in our lives — not just the new channels, but also the easy-to-use DVR system and the extended show info screens.

I highly recommend it.

NaBloPoMo Day 2: Since the topic is “Fresh”, it’s appropriate that on Sunday, the Wife decreed that the annual Purification of the Covered Patio commence, culminating in the ritual Pine-Soling of the Porch. Verily, many leaves were swept that day, and several plastic patio chairs were hosed. To paraphrase Invader Zim, Piney-fresh victory is ours!

Okay! I’ve been meaning to add some fresh posts to my blog, since I intend to kick my career networking mojo into high gear, and having a thriving, current blog would be a huge part of that … and then today, first day of the month, I hear about this National Blog Post Month (NaBloPoMo), similar to NaNoWriMo and NaMoSoAlMo, but not as grueling and yet funnier sounding) — and hey! Just what the “doctor” ordered! [Figure of speech: No actual medical professionals were involved.]

Plus, the theme is “Fresh”, which couldn’t be more appropriate. My only reservation [Figure of speech: No actual Native American lands, yada yada ...] is that the site sponsoring t his is BlogHer, and I am, through no fault of my own, a blogHIM.

Maybe no one from there will read this, or having read, rat me out.

ANYWAY: Whether or not I’m “officially participating”, I have an impetus (look it up — Seriously, look it up, I might be using it wrong) to post daily, plus, I can feel my old blogger-smartassiness raising its unattractive head, and that is a victory in itself.

So keep checking in, and buckle your social media belt. It’s gonna be a bumpy month.

Yes, folks, it was ten years ago tonight that I decided that there might be something to this whole blogging think, and that it would be a hoot to try it.

Since I’ve explained it all in detail on previous blogiversaries, here’s an excerpt from my 2005 post on how it all started:

So this is it: It was three years ago that I first set up my Blogger account and wrote a couple of paragraphs.

Then I packed some wet towels into a laundry basket, and drove to the local laundrymat.

What, that’s not what you did after your first blog post?

Seriously, though: Our clothes dryer had stopped drying a couple of days earlier and I was in the process of trying to figure out which parts were defective and replace them; in the meantime, the show must go on, and by “the show”, I mean “my wife’s beauty shop”, and by “go on, I mean “dirty up a lot of towels”, which, it follows logically, have to be washed, and — here’s the crucial point for purposes of this post — dried.

Thus, after I did a quick “Hi-how-are-ya-I’m-new-at-this-blogging-thing”, I did my husbandly duty (no, not that one) and lugged a basket of laundry to the nearest dryers, much as men have done since the time of the caveman.

But don’t worry, my new blogging fever was still burning hot, and I took a legal pad with me, and in spite of almost debilitating carpal tunnel syndrome, I wrote an 800-word blog post, which I typed up the next day and posted.

That’s right: I composed my second blog post on paper — again, just as men have done since the time of the caveman.

Seriously, though: There was something very artsy, very Hemingway, scratching out a post with a brace on my wrist, and on that rickety table, and with the washers and dryers rumbling all around me. I think that intense creative immersion gave me a great jump-start to maintaining a blog; after all, work is easier when the vision is there …

So anyway, here I still am, three whole years after that initial set of primal experiences.

Who would have thought …

And here’s another observation I wrote at the halfway point, five years ago, which sums up the entire thing pretty neatly, plus gives some perfect examples of how blogging digresses into miscellaneous topics:

Today is my Five-Year Blogiversary! Yes, it was on this day in 2002 that I figured I had nothing better to do with my life, so I might as well waste it nattering away about nothing to people who don’t care.

And so far, so good.

Which is to say, I can’t believe I’m still at it.

But since I am, let’s get down to a big old pile of that nattering away about random personal things, just like we used to blog when it was still old-school:

Sure, this blog (and domain) only goes back to April 2005, but my first three years — my Blogging Glory Days! (BGD) — were on Blogger, with mutiple posts every day. Unfortunately, Blogger/Blogspot somehow ate that old blog, but I was able to save all three years, and I’m making it available in a zipped-file format. Just right-click here then click Save-As. A lot of the layout doesn’t work like it should, since you won’t be accessing it on the same server on which the links were written, but it’s still all there.

Ah, those were the days, when not every fourth-grader and their pet lemur had a blog, when blogging was new and exciting, and when everybody, bloggers and civilians too, spent several hours a day checking out other people’s blogs.

Yes, it was a veritable Golden Age of lost productivity.

And I made lots of blogging friends then, many of whom are still around and still checking in here occasionally: Yay Kim, Pamibe, Gigglechick, RennyBA, The Presurfer … but back then I had several dozen blogfriends, all of whom checked out my blog (and I theirs) daily. Everybody was always frantically searching for fresh content to post, and that led to more and more blogs and sites to have to monitor, and more friends, most of whom don’t stop by here any more, just like I don’t stop by there.

But blogging has cooled a lot since that heyday, and most of us are just casually posting now. I guess it’s the nature of red-hot trends to burn brightly until they finally burn out.

So why am I still doing this? Here’s why: It’s a map of my 100 latest visitors, according to SiteMeter:

Pretty cool, huh? Look at that: Two in the Russian Federation! Turkey! Hong Kong! The Philippines! A veritable squadron of visitors from Germany!

People in Egypt are reading about me cooking a big pot of beans for the first time in two years!

Somebody in Taiwan knows about Bristol tearing up my wife’s barley-hull pillow!

My accounts of my pointless goings-on are boring somebody in Italy! And the Czech Republic! Brasil! Israel! Thailand!

There’s somebody checking me out in The Netherlands! (That’s The Presurfer, of course, which doesn’t make it any less amazing.)

Of course, the bulk of my readers are right here in the good old You Ess of Ay: Several wise-guy types in New Jersey and Jamaica, New York, have checked in today, as well as a half dozen or so people in Florida.

And I can’t figure out who is out there in Gouldbusk, Texas, apparently getting here from typing in the URL, and not from a link or search engine. The town is close to where my old college friend Terry lives now, and I think it’s also not far from where The Spook currently resides. (It might also be close to where Mollie is …)

And for that matter: If you’re the person out there in Louth, Ireland, who visits here fairly regularly without hitting a link somehow — leave a comment and let me know how you got here, how you found out about me. If you’re shy, just send me an email at checkerspeech[at]gmail.com.

And for that matter, whoever is out there reading this, leave a comments!

This post wouldn’t be complete without some boring nonsense about my personal life, so here goes:

Today I raked about half the leaves in our back yard; I quit there because I had completely filled up our entire trash tote, as well as a 30-gallon paper leaf bag. Plus, if I overdo the squatting and lifting, I can really overdo those thigh muscles.

We finally got around to watching Casino Royale tonight. Daniel Craig takes some getting used to — he looks like some scruffy version of Kevin Costner that a cat dug up in the back yard — but I like the new Bond character better than all the old ones. This one has to actually work for his pay, and he gets pretty roughed up. This version of Bond is much grittier and down to earth; it just might work out pretty well.

We also watched lots of movies over the Christmas weekend: Die Hard 4 (eh — same old stuff), The Bourne Ultimatum (superhuman guy is three steps ahead of the entire U.S. intelligence community, with lots of formulaic foot- and car-chases in stock urban and exotic locales; this is the epitome of a color-by-numbers movie) , Transformers and Superbad. Those last two were okay, but nothing special.

Oh, and we also watched Ratatouille, which is excellent and hilarious, and which is serious about being about food. We definitely recommend it.

Okay, that’s all for now. Thanks for checking in on my Blogiversary, and please keep checking back.

I’m often asked why I named my “band” (that is, my musical project consisting of just myself) The Checkers Speech. First of all, everything else in the entire world is taken. But mostly, it’s because I’m a bit of a Nixon hobbyist — he was the President that came along just as I was gaining my political awareness — and because what I’m doing with my music is, politics aside, the same thing that Nixon was doing with this famous speech.

In 1952, young Senator Nixon had been chosen by General Eisenhower to be his running mate, but the opposition was were accusing him of improper financial dealings, and Ike and the GOP bigwigs were having second thoughts about his place on the ticket. Nixon took a look around and noticed this fresh new medium of television, realized that he could use it to take his message directly to the public, persuading them to convince the political powers that he be kept on the Republican ticket.

Not only did it work, but the speech, which takes its name from the cocker spaniel puppy mentioned toward the end, quite possibly won the election for the GOP.

When it came time to choose a band name, I realized that I’m doing conceptually the same thing: Using cutting edge technology (digital music creation and distribution) to end-run the powers that be (the music industry) and take my message (music) directly to the people.

It’s still an odd band name, but like I said, I can’t be picky.

Anyway, for more information on this historical moment, check out What was the “Checkers Speech” and why is it so important?

G4TV has posted what they feel to be the Top 100 Video Games of all times. As are most mass media lists of this sort, it’s about 25% trash, but still it’s an interesting trip down video game memory lane:

The reason I haven’t posted about this until now is because the site posted the games in the ridiculous slideshow format — that is, one game per page, and if you want see all 100, you have to click 100 times. But tonight I found the list in some gaming forums (geeks are an persistent, enterprising bunch!), so here it is!

100 Pong
99 Words with Friends
98 Pitfall
97 NBA 2K11
96 Guitar Hero II
95 Burger Time
94 Braid
93 Star Wars: TIE Fighter
92 Galaga
91 The Sims
90 Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn
89 Left 4 Dead
88 Double Dribble
87 Mass Effect 2
86 OutRun
85 Silent Hill 2
84 Wii Sports
83 Ninja Gaiden (2004)
82 Super Smash Bros Melee
81 Resident Evil
80 Gears of War 3
79 Psychonauts
78 Spy Hunter
77 Excitebike
76 Blades of Steel
75 Fallout 3
74 Star Fox 64
73 Mega Man 2
72 Mortal Kombat
71 Wing Commander II Vengeance of the Kilrathi
70 Star Wars
69 Double Dragon
68 Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
67 Minecraft
66 Assassin’s Creed II
65 Unreal Tournament
64 NBA Jam
63 Wolfenstein 3D
62 Civilization II
61 God of War III
60 Contra
59 Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle
58 Ultima Online
57 Pokemon Red Version
56 Super Street Fighter IV
55 Kingdom Hearts
54 Gauntlet
53 Deus Ex
52 Rock Band 3
51 Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando
50 Sonic the Hedgehog
49 Angry Birds
48 Tecmo Bowl
47 Myst
46 Red Dead Redemption
45 Metal Gear Solid
44 Grand Theft Auto IV
43 Quake III: Arena
42 Ghosts ‘N Goblins
41 Super Mario 64
40 Space Invaders
39 Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
38 Super Metroid
37 Halo
36 Batman: Arkham City
35 Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
34 Counter-Strike
33 Final Fantasy VII
32 Punch-Out!!
31 The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
30 Super Street Fighter II Turbo
29 Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
28 Super Mario Kart
27 Chrono Trigger DS
26 Ico
25 Grand Theft Auto III
24 Madden NFL 2005 Collector’s Edition
23 Halo 3 Collector’s Edition
22 Panzer Dragoon Saga
21 Resident Evil 4
20 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
19 Diablo II
18 Ms. Pac-Man
17 Starcraft
16 Half-Life
15 Donkey Kong
14 Uncharted 2
13 Portal
12 Doom II
11 Legend of Zelda – Ocarina of Time
10 World Of Warcraft
9 Shadow Of The Colossus
8 Goldeneye
7 Super Mario Bros 3
6 Legend of Zelda (original)
5 Tetris
4 Asteroids
3 BioShock
2 Legend of Zelda: Link To The Past
1 Super Mario Bros.