brykmantra.com

I’m not much for Halloween, but several of our people at work dressed up for the occasion, so I posted their pictures here. Of course, I have been known to dress for Halloween in the past, but these days, with New Boss in Training disinclined to consider anything I do in a positive light, I channel my energies into blending in with the woodwork.

Still, check out the photos of the brave ones, and leave a link in the comments if you have similar pictures to share …

Here’s an interesting set of Flickr tags …

And here’s a couple of mostly unrelated but still interesting photos in that group: “Yum!” and “In the irish foods isle”.

Enjoy!

… and what a cuter placeholder could there be than little Bristol here:

I’m busy doing stuff tonight, so I’ll just also say that tomorrow I’ve got a CT scan, my first follow-up scan following my surgery in March. Hopefully, they won’t find anything — the last time I talked to the doctor, he said he didn’t expect them to.

Bonus: I don’t have to go to work tomorrow! Woo-hoo! It was like a load lifted off my shoulders driving home today. New Boss in Training was out of town the first three days of this week, so I’ll miss his first day back tomorrow, plus I’ll just have one day to work before the weekend.

It doesn’t get more stress-free than that.

Anyway, I’m talking the rest of the day off tomorrow after the scan, because I’ve had a sinus infection since Sunday night, so I’m going to take it easy and sleep it off.

See y’all on the flip side …

My excuse for not posting this past week — there’s always something — is that I’ve been working on a Flash banner … the one you see near the top of the page! Ha!

It actually didn’t take too long to actually do the animation, and to tweak it, a whole lot, but since then I’ve been bumbling around with actually getting the thing to work on my blog. This weekend, though, I finally pulled my head out and figured out what I needed to do … and tonight I actually did it right … and SUCCESS!

I didn’t really have a craving to have Flash on my blog, just for the status of having a blog with Flash on it, but I did feel compelled to have something to prove that I can actually do this stuff, should the need arise … not that things at work are miserable or anything … SO ANYWAY: I can do a lot with this basic design, like changing out the shamrocks periodically with other holiday/seasonal stuff (probably autumn leaves next), plus this is good experience for my general animation work.

But my point is this: I CAN DO FLASH ANIMATION! Woo-hoo!

And maybe now I’ll actually post this week …

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UPDATE: I’m adding the banner to the text of this post, since I’ll soon be changing it out, and I want people to be able to see the old one …

Rain!

It’s been raining most of the day today, and hopefully it’ll make up for our recent drought. The downside is that it kept me from my daily walk, but at least it give me tendonitis a rest.

Our friend Pamibe has recently lost her collie of 13 years, Tess. Having lost our own little Schotzy recently, we know what she’s going through, so stop by her site and pay your respects.

One of the worst part of my surgery in March was missing the Irish Festival, so I was looking forward to this weekend’s Celtic Heritage Festival. But alas, my ribs still kill me if I stand around any at all, so I decided to pass this time around and just wait until next March.

It’s just as well, though, since I probably would have done something stupid like buy a Utilikilt or something …

Remember the NBC promo contest video I did with my co-workers a couple of months back? No, of course you don’t. Anyway, now PayScale.com is running the Salary Stories video contest, which will have three $1000 winners until the end of the year. The rules and requirements are kind of vague, but it still looks like the kind of thing we could have a shot at again … I’ll keep you updated on further progress …

Okay, so I haven’t posted, so instead of telling you what I’ve been doing, I’m showing you. It should be self-explanatory, but just in case it isn’t, I’ll write more at another time — plus I wrote brief descriptions under the pictures on Flickr, if you just need to know more …
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…. but hey, how about that first 5 minutes of the season opener, huh?! Almost as good as last year’s excellent, excellent opener, and even more revealing.

But I will say this much: “Ben” is probably the first name of the mystery man known as “Henry Gale” …

And who the heck was that, halfway under the front porch, working on the plumbing?? You can bet it’s somebody we’ve seen before, though, or he wouldn’t have been hidden …

Two days into October and it’s still almost 100 freaking degrees, so hopefully this is the late time we have to haul out Mr. Blazing Sun Icon this year … but I doubt it is …

Dane Cook hosted SNL this past weekend, and, in his monologue, he did his joke about how YouTube has videos for EVERYTHING: He said that if you go to the search box and just punch the keyboard — for instance, it comes up “A:F6″ — then click search, YouTube will come up with videos for that, “Some kid going, ‘A-Colon-F-Six! A-Colon-F-Six! ‘”

As it turned out, his joke was a self-fulfilling prophecy: There are now dozens of videos that people have done with A:F6 as the theme (and lots more that lazy jackasses have stuck the A:F6 title and tag on existing videos, but that’s to be expected).

This kind of thing has become the interactive culture of our time — as I got to discover first-hand in July, when I directed my co-workers in an entry for NBC’s “The Office” video promo contest. Any idea that get national exposure can be participated in by anyone.

And sometimes that can be a good thing.

They’ve decided who’s going to play Iron Man in the new movie: Robert Downey, Jr.

Umm … okay …

In the 80s, Marvel made Tony Stark (the guy inside the Iron Man suit) an alcoholic, to generate more character development.

Mabye in the movie they’ll make him a junkie.

Check this out: HD Uglies, a list of the people who look the worst in Hi-Def.

There were some surprises (Teri Hatcher, Ray Liotta)
ans some you’d expect (Rosie O’Donnell, Howard Stern, Mick Jagger).

What, no Kenny Rogers? Probably just because you don’t see him that much these days.

Thank goodness.

But what about the Gargoyle Brigade? Susan Sarandon, Allison Janney, Pattricia Wettig, and Christina Ricci? Those ladies could startle a goat at 50 yards; is the article implying that they’re no worse in Hi-Def?

And how can they have Ray Liotta and not Edward James Olmos? He’s right there on Battlestar Galactica, frightening little children every week.

Fortunately, you can cleanse your mental pallette with the list of HD Honeys.

And notice that this is the second list that Johansson has topped in the past week.

This is going to go to her head, you just wait.

This is what’s been taking up our time this past week: We’ve been puppy-sitting little Pippin here for some friends who were out of town. She’s about the same size as Bristol (although a bit heavier), so the whole week was one big turf war between these two little scrappers, with the much larger Molly just hanging back and murmuring impatiently.

Pippin’s gone back home now, fortunately, so it’s a lot quieter here.

So check out the pictures I’ve posted so far, and I’ll post more in the next couple of days.