Thankful Thursday: My Dad

Sure, its a few days late but being Father’s Day last week I needed to surprise the internets after the fact. My dad and mom are probably tired of me thanking them for the things they did growing up. They’re probably tired of me telling them that they have influenced me indelibly, but they’ll just have to deal with it.

My dad has been a tremendous role model for me.  He’s been a godly man, a humble man, a loving man, and as many of you can imagine he’s been a humorous man.  My dad taught me about puns, spoonerisms, play on words and various other silly things from an early age on.  I’m thankful for the laughter that he has brought to my own life for coming on three decades.  Outside of the list above my dad has dealt with pain and suffering well, too.  In his own life he’s dealt with a chronic disease and not made a big deal of it other than to share silly stories where that disease caused something funny or amusing to happen.  There are many events I could retell as events that I’m very thankful for, but I will share two.

The first landmark event was when my dad gathered the family around the kitchen table and humbly apologized for having worked such long hours as we were younger.  His admission to not spending enough time with the family was an act that redirected the family moving forward.  He made adjustments in his life and began spending much more time with us.  I knew my dad in High School unlike almost every single one of my friends and acquaintances.  He was my dad, and he was my friend.

Another critical series of events for me was right around when I turned 20.  My dad began to disciple me and teach me some important principles in the Bible that for some reason never showed up in Sunday School or Church for the first twenty years of my life.  Those times were rich with value, great in fellowship and important because of the content and things I would learn.  Some of those very things I’ve been trying to pass onto Sunday School students of my own for the last decade.

I’m very, very thankful for my dad, he’s been an incredible influence on my family and I look forward to the future as his adult son.

Creators Syndicate: An Old Model Shows Off Its Old Assets

I just got an email from Creators Syndicate this morning.  Some woman (I’m assuming its a woman) by the name of Andrea Fryrear (which is an unfortunate last name if you break it up as a compound word) sent me an email (with a from name of only ‘Andrea’ which is a good way to get tagged as spam Ms. Fryrear) asking me to take down a farside cartoon that I had posted on my website.  A single cartoon that I had found on the internet and copied onto my site.  I immediately complied because I want to be a law abiding citizen.  However, I had some questions for her: 1) How could I legally re-use the cartoon (could I pay a license fee) 2) Could I link to a Far Side book on Amazon.com and then the cartoon could potentially be a revenue generating advertisement for them?  I haven’t gotten a reply yet, but the whole thing bugged me.

Gary Larson apparently has written about the subject and you can read about it on the syndicate website.  It strikes me as a problematic solution to the real issue: the interwebs is a new model for publishing businesses and they must deal with the change.  There are tons of ways they could go about making the new model work for them:

1) Require all comics that are republished by independent publishers (like bloggers) link to their site where they sell the books, mugs, shirts, cell phone wrappers, bumper stickers and collectible enema boxes to people who link through

2) Require the images to be linking to amazon.com with their associates ID so that they get to make money on Amazon.com selling their stuff

3) Give it away realizing that the more exposure they have the more likely people will seek out the funny/good content in sources that pay them (such as newspapers, paying websites, and again, Amazon.com)

4) Give it away and just say, “Gee, this interweb thing will hopefully be a passing fad.”

But sitting around hiring people like Andrea (who I am sure is really nice and probably makes a killer vegetarian salad when you come over to her house because she wouldn’t even hurt dead meat) to send out emails and seek out places where their old model is leaking and stick her finges in them is not an ideal method.

A New Story Wherein Randy Smells Like Burning Wood for Days

So about two (2) weeks ago I saw an episode of Good Eats called ‘Q’.  It was about smoking pork butt (which is actually the pig’s shoulder).  I lost site of any other Fathers Day Weekend (FDW) goals and determined to burn wood at such a slow rate that no flames were detectable, yet smoke would emit from the wood and make the meat and everything within a 15 mile radius smell of smoke.  It worked.  Too well.  The smoked pork with an espresso barbecue sauce was finger-licking-good (without the geriatric chicken guy), but everything still smells smokey.  I was at church, rubbed my nose and “poof!” smoke smell on my skin, in my nostrils and causing me to want to try smoking meat again in the middle of the street with a space suit on.  Then the smokiness of the meat would be less smoked Randy and more smoked flavor on the meat when we bring it in from the smoker.

Good meats 🙂

Happy Father’s Day Dads in My Life!

Happy Fathers Day to my real/biological Dad!  Happy Father’s Day to my Father in Laws John & Clair!  Happy Father’s Day to the surrogate (can men be surrogate) dads that I had in Texas and in other situations!  Y’all have taught me much in my first thirty years and I’m looking forward to the rest of what I get to learn from you.

I’m Bringing Sexy Backup

Sorry for the Justin Timberlake reference.  I’ll confess to not actually having heard his ‘hit’ single, so if that reference makes you want to throw up in your mouth, I’m even more apologetic.  That being said, please backup your hard drive today.  If you don’t have an external hard drive that gets backed up to on a regular basis, please stop what you’re doing, even at the risk of getting fired, and get one.  Get the external hard drive, copy your files from your internal hard drive onto the external hard drive.  Do it now.  Do it today, or if you must put it off, do it this weekend, but don’t put it off or else you could lose critical things like those blackmail pictures you have of your [insert being/entity/person/senator reference here] in their [insert some awkward piece of clothing here] while [insert embarrassing or illegal activity here].  Or you could just lose important documents like papers for school, papers for work, papers for church, or even worse, papers for the government.

If you’re running Windows XP you can tell it to backup all of your files automatically!  Just go to Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Backup.  Then follow the wizard.  Figure out if all of your valuable files are in your My Documents folders or if you want to backup the whole system and then set up a schedule.  Have it backup once a week or daily, but have it backup your computer or valuable files regularly.  Once that’s done you can rest knowing that unless your external hard drive fails you’ve at least got things preserved.

I setup a network wide backup at my house this week using an Airport Extreme USB connected external hard drive so that all computers backup onto one drive every night.  If I were more clever once a week/month I’d take a second external drive to my parents or some other ‘safe’ place and keep one there, too.  Just in case.

Sure, backing up data isn’t sexy, but its smart.  So listen to Justin Timberlake and backup at the same time, then you can be both.

Thankful Thursday: My Bike

I’m glad my bike was given to me as a graduation present many years ago when I graduated from High School.  My grandmother gave me a large sum of cash (well, for me it was a large sum of cash at the time) and my dad and mom picked up the rest of the tab.  Together they bought me a green GT mountain bike.  No shocks, no frills, just many gears and a bike frame that was meant for men and not boys (like my old bike which was a BMX bike with 21 inch tires).  That bike has been through many accidents with me and survived the Texas heat.  I’ve broken or bent the forks, the rims, the sprockets and blown out tens of tires on it, but its still hanging in there.  I’ve gotten more bruses and scrapes from that than any other activity and its been a hoot!

Most recently I’ve hooked our kiddy trailer up to the green monster and been pulling the girls around the neighborhood.  Hearing them laugh behind me and having them yelling at me to go faster is also a blast.  Of course eventually the fun wears out about the time my legs do, but its still a blast.  Thanks Grandma (though she’s in heaven and not earth-dwelling any longer)  and mom and dad for the bike.  Its been great.

For the record the fastest I’ve gone on it was 45 miles per hour going down the road at King’s Canyon in Carson City, Nevada.

Draw the Line

I’ve posted before about hating ‘The WalMart’, and I don’t like ‘The Blue Shirts’ [Best Buy], but one store I haven’t openly beaten to a pulp is Circuit City.  The company has an ex-employee who has posted information about the corporate policy and employee deception.  Don’t read it unless you want to be very angry at Circuit City.  On the other hand, don’t shop there unless you have read it.  Or in my case its just another reason not to shop there.

Evie-isms

Evelyn’s speech is improving and she’s starting to construct sentences and use phrases in context.  They’re not long sentences, but they’re more communication than single words demanding an immediate need be met (well, at least some of the time).  Therefore I am creating the Evie-ism category for this blog.  I don’t have the first one to post, but just a moment ago I was running after her to tickle her and she yelled, “Away!”  Which I hope is short for run away which her big sister says in the same situation.