I’m not sure who Goose is, but today on my store bought Jack Daniel’s calendar, it lists Goose’s birthday.
Does anyone know who Goose is?

Like many people I have a calendar on my wall at work, and on holidays or other days of note, it marks the occasion for you. Your calendar may also have this feature. Look at Feb 14th, does it list Valentine’s Day? How about the 21st, does it note President’s Day? Ok, now look at today, the 28th. Does yours say “Public Sleeping Day”? What?! Has anyone ever heard of “Public Sleeping Day?” Is this an actual holiday worthy of noting on the calendar? Does anyone have the day off? Are government offices closed? Are the downtown parking meters free? Will my garbage pick-up be pushed back one day?

I should maybe mention that this is a Jack Daniel’s calendar, and so I’m guessing if you own a Jack Daniels calendar, then alot of days might be public sleeping days for you.

Google didn’t really have any good info on this day, which means none probably exists. Although I did learn its also National Floral Design day. Well that will put you to sleep.

Think you know Fjord? Think again.
From the creators of “Hobo” and “Push Mower”, the people of Fjord are on a mission to raise the profile of this oft overlooked and misunderstood landmass.

Go Fjord-Surfing

In the last few months there have been a flurry of old TV shows released on DVD. Last week Miami Vice was released for the first time, and received alot of press. But lost in the hoopla was an especially significant release, The Greatest American Hero: Season 1.

Man I LOVED his show when I was a kid. By the time this show came out, I had already spent several years flying around my house with a cape. This show was the pinnacle, and swan song for this here “pretty-good minnesota hero”. I spent 2 differnt halloweens trying to get my mom to make me a suit, a tall order that was never realized, but man, that would have been SWEET!
I also played the theme song as my piano recital that year. Man I was a geek, how did I turn out so cool?
I haven’t decided if I’m even going to rent or own the DVD. I can’t even imagine how bad the show really is. For whatever reason I don’t have that many clear memories of my childhood, but this is one of them and it ‘s a good one. Maybe better to keep it that way. Funny, I just recently claimed my childhood piano from my sister and found the sheet music for this in the bench. Maybe I’ll pull it out as a tribute, that’s probably enough.

Ah who am I kidding.

OR.. The Day After Valentine’s Day

So far the only card’s I’ve been able to find for this day are the blank ones that I have to fill out myself. Man it’s hard enough thinking of that little extra quip to add to the cards that come with words!

I tell you, I love my wife and I like to do special things for her, but nothing is less romantic to me than an obligatory profession of love. If it were up to me, Valentine’s day would be the one day I DIDN’T say “I love you” to her.

But I certainly can’t just let the day go by and do nothing. I mean, every ignorant self-centered jackass in the country is doing something for their loved-one on this day. And that’s the problem. In order for me to maintain my image and reputation as a guy who is clearly above average in the show-your-love-with-originality department, my display of lust and affection needs to clearly rise above the fray. The fray of course referring to the division-III-college-quarterback-turned-mortgage-broker buying flowers from the grocery store at the last minute for his had-nice-boobs-before-3-kids-caused-her-butt-to-dwarf-them-martha-wannabe wife.

Of course this all leads into the usual rant about my frustration with the people in our culture that simply strive to achieve the cookie-cutter destiny that has been so neatly laid out for them by their family, peers, government and church. They make up the majority of our world and are the largest hurdle in the way of restoring my faith in the notion that I could possible have an intelligent and enjoyable encounter with any random person I meet. And since this is the main subject of my soon-to-be-put-off-until-never autobiography, I’ll save it for the publisher. Anyway, I think you know where I’m going with all this, and if you don’t, I’ve probably got a problem with you.

Ok so I did take part in this annual ritual, second only to Christmas in the tortuous pain department. I ordered my woman some sweet-ass flowers from one of those online places, it starts with 1800…. and ends with flowers.com. I’ve done this pretty successfully in the past, some nice flowers got delivered and what not. I know you’re thinking, “you call flowers going above the fray?”. Hey, I didn’t claim that bigger/more expensive was my solution. Nuance is often the only difference between average and brilliant. My deft as the aforementioned fantastic lover, allows me to give her flowers, and yet somehow she didn’t “just get flowers”.
You see I had her flowers delivered to her work. It’s a pretty miserable place for her. and she probably spends more waking hours there than at home, so this is where the flowers are needed. Getting the art?
Well no matter, the whole thing went to shit anyway. The florist didn’t end up delivering the flowers until after the end of the business day, when she had already long gone home. So she never got any flowers for valentine’s day! Ok, I was really pissed. They know they are delivering to a business, and they know these flowers are for a special occasion which happens to only be occurring TODAY, so why the hell would they even think they could get away with delivering the flowers in the evening?! They did re-deliver the flowers the next morning, some had already wilted. Probably just left them in their truck overnight, bastards.
Well I sent them a fairly scathing email and they got right back to me, about 4 hours later with an automated email, thanking me for contacting them and letting me know it will take awhile for a real person to get back to me because they are pretty busy this time of year. What the hell? Did the Valentine’s day catch them by surprise? I’m definitely done with that place.

Oh but I still came out looking good, I mean come on, you didn’t think I just gave flowers do you? The aforementioned latin-lover? That evening I arrived home with a nicely wrapped bottle of sweet-sweet love, Bailey’s and a card that expressed how I felt about her in a way only she knows. Plus I wrote in a little quip of my own.

Ah, I made it, and today I celebrate.

Today is a day for love.

So I’ll bitch about it tomorrow.

Tuesday 1/18/2005 – The independent documentary “What America Needs: From Sea to Shining Sea” was released nationally on DVD thanks to distributor Secretly Canadian.

I’m especially excited about this news because I was given an opportunity to be part of this film. Mark Wojahn is the Minneapolis film-maker responsible for creating this documentary, and the film was edited by my good friend Nick Nichols. I was brought in to do the audio post production. All audio for the film was captured via the camera microphone. I also recorded all the narration, performed by Mark himself, at my studio “The House Plant”. It was quite a challenging project, and my first feature-length endeavour. But in the end I think the sound complemented the film style.
The film has spent a year traveling around to different film festivals, and has shown overseas in Prague. I just learned last week that the film has been requested by a film festival in Switzerland, sweet! Maybe Mark needs me to make an appearance?

If you’re interested in picking up a copy of the movie, it’s available at Amazon.com. First, check out the trailer.
Pick up a copy, support inpendent film and Insight Galactic!
Thanks.

I was pretty close to getting the Insight Galactic design complete, but still having trouble completing the last 5%. Ok, for the first time in my life I’m going to release something before it’s perfect.

So today, the new site is LIVE!!!

It’s not done yet, so you can watch me finish it. Should start getting real content up a in the next few weeks. Ah, some sort of progress, tonight I drink!

Let me know what you think.

I’d heard about it a little, to the point I knew they existed. I was pretty sure I stumbled across a few while finding my way through a deep dark goggle search on character encodings and reading double-byte characters from an xml file. Of course I’m talking about the current blogging phenomenon.

For awhile I didn’t really care to understand it. The ones I saw seemed really disorganized, hard to grasp. I didn’t even know why they existed. Sort of like webrings, still don’t know what the heck those are or what purpose they serve, except to drive traffic to your site so you can get hits on all your banners. I just avoid em, smells like network marketing to me. No, I don’t want to buy perfume that smells just like my favorite name brand. Good luck selling those out of the trunk of your car.

I love forums though. Well organized content and threads, well defined topic(purpose), easy to determine if I’m somewhere that may have the answers I’m looking for. Ah, I just answered my own question. I’ll come back to that.

Lately I’ve been on a mission to redesign (or finally design) the Insight Galactic site and bring it back to life. There were a few catalysts for this sudden inspiration, but one was the discovery of RSS feeds. This solved a long standing problem for Insight, generating enough fresh content. Now I could fill my site with self-updating content from throughout the web. And it was all delivered in a standard format, making it easy for me to integrate this content into my site.

I could feel it coming on, the sort of inspiration that would throw me into a madly focused quest, consumed by a need to understand all that is RSS. And that lead to foray’s into online photoshop tutorials and trists with CSS and DHTML . But really, I don’t have an addictive personality, just an occasional thirst for knowledge. Well alright, how about if ignorance is bliss, I’m pretty miserable.
Ok let me get back to blogging, well almost back. So I was looking around the internet for RSS feeds highlighting alternative music, when I ran into my next great inspiration, Podcasting. Oh yeah, now this was sweet. Subscribe to old school newsfeeds but they are really mp3 files that I could have an aggregator download overnight, and in the morning they would magically sync into my iPod and off I go with my day’s content. Very cool. Except I don’t have an iPod, but that’s another post.
But I saw the possibilities and off I went into my incontrollable spiral in search of all knowledge that is podcasting. And as it turns out, podcasting is just an application of the RSS2.0 spec that allows enclosures. Think email with attachments. Sweet, RSS feeds that allow mp3’s to be attached. Ok this is starting to come together for me. I’m getting ideas again, uh oh.

But how did this get me to blogging? Well it turns out that many of these RSS feeds and indeed many podcasts are extensions of blogs. And in researching the folks who were providing the rss content and podcasts, I invariably landed in their blogs. I started getting into their conversations, then following the comments to their source which led me to other blogs, gaining more understanding of the blogging culture in general and soon I was deep into this dark unknown subculture of the digital world.
So it finally caught up with me, I could no longer ignore blogging. Well by now you can see the pattern, and off on another knowledge bender I go, this time its all about the blog. I’m actually still very new to it all, I’ve found SlashDot.com which is one of those must reads for all who even think for a minute they know what’s up on the web. Well I’m not sure any official organization has bestowed a title of interweb greatness upon them, but I’m sure in the legal world they would certainly be referred to as “precedent”. My first day reading slashdot, someone posted some info about Peter Jackson doing video blogging during the filming of King Kong. Very cool, I would have never known about it, I am enlightened. See how easy that is? Well eventually my wife would have found it, she usually beats me to that kind of stuff. But not this time!

So now I’ve got the itch to blog myself which leads me to the logical starting point for a newbie blogger, here, blogger.com.

Actually, I haven’t gone anywhere. Which means, you, have arrived. Well thank you for hanging out then. This is where I’ll be hanging regularly, I’m a good regular to have, I tip well. If you happen to be a server I’ll take jack and coke, thanks.
When we hang I’ll probably be just spoutin’ off, sharing stuff I want you to know about that I’ve found or figured. Maybe we’ll get lucky and one of my brilliant, yet instantly lost ideas will get captured here.

I’m trying to figure out a way for us to shoot some darts while we’re here.

You ready?