#imported from wordpress

  This one need only speak for itself. It's beautiful, and non-confrontational. I doubt anyone could truly disagree with it.

Courtesy of Esplanade

I just read an article on Guardian Unlimited on how easily the author, as well as another more recent "software developer," was able to win a "prestigious" award for his software... software which doesn't actually exist. I recommend you follow the link for the full details, but he merely submitted information about his software, DBXV, to the site, claiming an absurd amount of sales, they asked him to verify his statement, he essentially verified it by writing back the equivalent of "yep, it's true," and paid the cash for the plaque he was awarded. There was a big awards dinner which he declined to attend, and he was listed as a Million Dollar Guy. All with imaginary software. The more recent case was someone else who won no less than 16 awards for a utility that consisted of nothing more than a TXT file renamed with a .exe extension. That's it. It didn't do a damn thing. But all the sites cared about was the publicity, and the hope that a link would be placed on their site to help generate ad revenue. The author of the page also noted that as with restaurant awards, they hope to get the winner to pay to advertise with the award-giver, not to mention get a few bucks out of them for a table at the award ceremony. This got me thinking about some of my past experiences. Several of my old web sites won numerous awards through no effort of my own. It was almost every other week I was getting contacted regarding a new award my site had won. Wow, did I think my site must have been good in those days. I look back now and laugh at how naive I was, especially when I look at my poor design work. All those rewards always REQUIRED that I post the award link on my site. I never thought anything of it. It all seems so obvious now, though. But it goes further. Back in 1999 I was nominated for a Young Artist Award for my guest role in an episode of Boy Meets World. At the time even I knew that seemed odd, but I was excited nonetheless. I had been nominated for an award; how cool is that? I had to rent a tux, and I had to pay for seats at the award ceremony. The voting was actually handled by, of all people, the nominees, themselves, as well as their agents. Huh? And no effort was made to differentiate who we were or what we were nominated for. Most of the work was guest roles or other parts that were hard to recognize, and no episode or even character names were given. Who the heck knew what I did in a single random episode of Boy Meets World? How could I possibly win? I did my best to figure out who the other nominees were and vote based on the ones I could honestly attest to, but for the most part I had to leave them blank. I doubt most voters made that much effort. Anyway, the night of the award ceremony came, it was a semi-big to-do, my category was called, the nominees were listed, I pretended to think I had a shot, and guess what happened? I won! Yup, that's right, I was voted the best male guest lead in a television sit-com for 1999... right alongside the other four nominees. A five-way tie. Who would have thought that in an awards ceremony voted on by ourselves and our agents that we would all tie? It was pathetic, it was a waste of time, and it never did a damn thing for me. But looking back, they sure made a mint off of all those tickets to the ceremony, now didn't they? I hate awards shows, and now I'm realizing more and more what a pointless waste they are, entirely designed for the benefit of the promoters of the awards. What a sad waste of all of our time. btw, if you liked this post, as well as all of the other fine work on my site, please feel free to submit me to any of the fine web site awards sites on the 'net. I'd be happy to display their worthless beautiful logos across the bottom of my page.

There's certain words that are commonly abbreviated in URLs to simplify matters. Images, in particular, have abbreviations for words like small (s, or sm), medium (m, or md, or med), large (l, or lg), thumbnail (th, or thumb, etc.), and other common attributes. One word in particular, though, is in desperate need of a change of abbreviation: standard. It's very unnerving to stumble upon a photo of a beautiful woman in some pose (whether classy or anything but), and see "STD" in the URL at the top of the page. Think before you abbreviate, people.

I'm still getting the hang of this blog, so for now I have no better option than to link to the video I'm referencing in this post since it's an autoplaying MOV file and not the typical FLV, but trust me, it's worth watching. The song this man, who I was previously unfamiliar with, plays on his ukulele is one of my all-time favorites due to its pure beauty. Unaccompanied guitar is a beautiful sound, and George Harrison knows that better than almost anyone. The Ukulele is an interesting instrument because it can easily be ignored or joked about for its oftentimes harsh, concentrated sounds, but in the hands of a master it's gorgeous. This musician is clearly a master, and I am sure George Harrison would have been more than happy to hear what he did with his work. Please check it out here and pass it along. It's worth a few minutes of your time to appreciate true beauty. EDIT: While the above-linked version of the file is the best quality version, and can be more-easily saved to your hard drive (right-click the above link and choose Save Link As), I did locate a decent-quality version of it on YouTube which I'm embedding here:

Provided by Haftu

Today's the beginning of my real blog. I've had blogs spread out all over the 'net in some form or another, but they've all been attached to specific sites. This is my first real blog dedicated to me. I've tried to pull this off before, but my heart was never in it. This time I'm hoping to do better. Right now, to be perfectly honest, my blog has no real focus. It's going to be all over the map, because that's me. My interests are pretty varied, and this blog will reflect that. I think most of my content is going to be made up primarily of things I locate via StumbleUpon. My StumbleUpon blog will continue to contain the majority of these items, and I'm going to try to keep my X-rated content (photos and videos; opinions on matters of sex are going to be common here) there so this blog stays mostly safe for work. For that reason I do highly recommend checking out that blog, as there's a lot of fun stuff there. But the most interesting and most worthy stuff will end up here, as well as my rants on the subjects that interest me most. In the off chance that anybody actually comes to this blog and returns in the near future, I'll warn you that the appearance of this blog is likely to change frequently for a while until I settle on something I like. And even then, that'll likely be temporary until I'm comfortable enough with my editing skills to design my own layout. So that's it. Onward and upward. Enjoy.

You may remember my post last year about watching streaming hockey via the Chromecast. I wanted to provide a quick update on this, as I've recently been using my Chromecast a lot to watch various things. At the time of the original post, using the Chromecast to stream CWHL games or other streaming video to the television was lagging to the point of being unwatchable, or required either a third-party app. Since then, Google appears to have improved things quite a bit! You can now cast your screen in both the official iOS and Android apps, rather than relying on third party apps, and more importantly: streaming a livestream isn't stuttery anymore! At least in my testing, I was able to cast the screen of my laptop, Android tablet, and iPhone while playing a streaming CWHL game or other streaming video (fasthockey, youtube, etc) and the video on the tv was GREAT. Not lagging, and very nice quality. I'm very excited about the prospect of watching the expanded CWHL streaming on my TV, and looking forward to October, here's a HD highlight video from the Calgary Inferno!