Sometimes it is necessary for parents to embarrass their children. I am a firm believer in this philosophy. I plan to be one of the most embarrassing dads ever. But it will only be embarrassing because I will be so awesome that my kids minds will be blown.
Even though there are currently no kids coming our way, (I never see storks flying near our house.) it is still important for me to think of ways to expand my awesomeness for the sake of my children. I just discovered a dad who brings awesomeness to a whole new level (and thus embarrasses his children.)
This guy dresses up in a different costume every day so that he can wave to his son as his school bus passes by on the way to school. Apparently it started out as a fun thing to do at the beginning of school but he continued it all year long with different costumes. The coolest thing? He only lives a few miles from me. I guess people in Utah are just awesome (or embarrassing, depending on your perspective.)
Check out this news clip about him.
Here are a few examples of his costumes.
Unfortunately, we live pretty close to the elementary, junior high and high school so if we are living in this same house my kids won't ride the bus. I'll have to come up with something else equally as clever. Meanwhile, you can see all of this guy's costumes at his website at http://waveatthebus.blogspot.com/
Let me know if you have any awesome ideas that will properly embarrass my future children.
What do you want to do before you die? What do you want to accomplish? Who do you want to become? What do you want to see? What do you want to experience? How do you want to serve?
Sometimes it's fun to reflect on what you want to accomplish. Hopefully, we will all live long, full lives. But are there certain things that you want to be included in that long full life?
A while back a movie came out called "The Bucket List." It was an okay movie, but it introduced the idea of a list of things to do before you kick the bucket, and I really liked that idea.
I think too often we live life day to day without thinking about the big (or small) dreams we have for the future. I recently decided that I needed to compose my bucket list. I started doing it in notepad on my computer but I decided that strategy was seriously lacking in awesomeness.
I did some googling until I found a recently launched website that I really like. It is at http://bucketlist.org. It is super awesome. It allows you to create your own list, browse other people's lists, follow lists that you select, copy other people's items, and even add videos and pictures to any item on your list so that you can show off your awesomeness after you complete an item (or use pictures to better show what you're going to do before you do it.)
Since making my own list I have begun evangelizing friends and family so that they too will make lists on the site. I already have a few converts. (okay, I'll admit two of them are my wife and my mom who are both required to put up with all my craziness)
So the next step in my evangelizing is this very blog post. So what are you waiting for? Why don't you go to the site and make a list of your own? Your list can and should include things that are practical, fun, easy, hard and some things that are downright crazy.
Even if you decide not to do it on the site, I encourage you to think about it. Have fun with it. Dream about what you'd like to do, see or accomplish. If you need some ideas for your list feel free to check out my list. Let me know if you join the site so I can follow you. Also, feel free to comment with some (or all) of your bucket list items.
Okay, I just have to share another awesome website. XKCD is a web comic that focuses on many geeky subjects. Many of the jokes are about physics, mathematics or computer programming. I have referenced many of the comics that apply to my life here on my blog.
Many others will not find this comic as amusing as I do. It just doesn't apply to their lives as often as it does to mine. I mean not only am I a computer programmer but the comic also often features cool things like dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are awesome! That is an eternal truth.
At any rate, I just wanted to give a shoutout to xkcd and its awesomeness. Also, I wanted to share the below comic, it doesn't apply to my life nearly as much as some other of the comics but it is flowing with awesome.
Well, there was the time I was on a space station that was crashing towards a dinosaur infested planet, but I brought plenty of tranquilizer that time so you can see how this comic doesn't apply to me.
P.S. As much as I love this comic there are occasionally some sketchy ones. I take no responsibility if you come upon one that offends you. I would like to share the disclaimer that is on the site though:
Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).
Okay, so I have to tell you about another awesome website I recently discovered. It apparently has only been in existence for around a month, but it has already changed my life. Anyone who knows me well, knows of my love for Wikipedia. I've always thought of Wiki as the sum total of knowledge of the users of it. It's a great place to go for in depth information on any subject. Well, recently WolframAlpha came along to fulfill a different but similar niche. WolframAlpha is perfect for gathering any kind of numerical data or anything that needs to be computed.
I'd like to share some examples with you. The other day at work, we were discussing TVs. I won't get into the details of our discussion, but we wanted to know the dimensions of a TV given the length of the diagonal. My brother is thinking of buying a 32" TV so we needed to know how tall and wide that is exactly. Well, I started doing Trigonometry on the white board and my office mate, Tyler, thought I was quite insane. I needed to do an inverse tangent and I didn't have a scientific calculator, but lo and behold I had WolframAlpha!
But it's not just for things like that. Let's say you are on a diet and you want to know how many calories are in your apple and your orange. You can input 1 apple 1 orange into WolframAlpha and it will create a nutritional content label for the two foods. Did someone say awesome?
Or maybe you're curious about a random city. You could input Orem, and if you are living in Utah, it will detect that Orem, Utah is the closest Orem and it will give you facts about Orem, Utah. (I don't know if there are other Orems or not, but it works with other cities as well.)
One more example: You can put in any date and it will tell you if any celebrities were born that day, it will tell you how many days ago it was, how many weeks and so on. I entered my birthday, May 27, 1981 and found out that I am 10,237 days old. (I am totally old.)
For your convenience, I have created this handy WolframAlpha control that will allow you to type in your input and automatically query WolframAlpha. Give it a try, it's uber awesome.
I've been meaning to share my love of Hulu for quite some time. This is the second in my amazing website series. It used to be that if you wanted to see any shows on the internet your best bet was to hope that someone posted them on youtube or some illegal site. The problem with illegal sites is A)By watching them you're supporting illegal behavior and B)They tend to get taken down so they're not super reliable.
Hulu solved both of those problems because they actually have legally contracted with the different networks and are able to show all sorts of TV shows and movies totally free. They do attach commercials to them but they are much shorter and more tolerable than if you were watching your shows on TV.
Not to mention that Hulu has awesome advertising as well. Check out this Hulu ad below:
Head on down to http://www.hulu.com and see what those evil aliens have to offer.
The title of today's post comes from an episode from Season 1 of The Twilight Zone where there is a character who sells everyone exactly what they need. He enters a cafe where he first gives a woman a vial of cleaner. Then, he gives a down-on-his-luck ex-baseball player bus tickets. The ball player receives a job offer in the city the tickets are for; and the ball player needs his jacket cleaned, which the woman just happens to have the cleaner for. The episode continues until he is harassed by one man who continually wants him to let him know what else he needs. As is often the case, the episode ends with a chilling twist that I won't spoil for you here. If you'd like to watch it sometime, come over to my house and we'll watch it together.
Why am I telling you about this episode? Well, today's post is about my thoughts on a fabulous website that has the same powers as the little old man in the twilight zone. It has the magical ability to tell me exactly what I need on a daily basis. Of course, the website I speak of is W00t! and its sister website sellout.woot. For those of you unfamiliar with these websites, they sell exactly one item each day and when it runs out you just have to wait until the next day to see what they are selling. Every day, it seems that I need exactly what they are selling. For example, just the other day they were selling a memory card that would go perfect with my phone. Or when I saw a really cool power squid at Bed Bath and Beyond and no one got it for me even though I registered for it, soon thereafter one appeared on W00t!. Since being married and having a more restricted (and more sensible) budget I've had to convince myself I don't need everything they sell. But someday when I'm uber wealthy I'll just be on standing order and they will just automatically ship me the item of the day.
I just wanted to express my appreciation for such a great website. And I want everyone to know that anything on W00t! is free game to purchase for me for Christmas, Birthdays, Thursdays, We love Jeff days or any other day that you may buy me something.
