So here are some notable pictures from the site since the last “year in pictures” post (so this collection is from about September 2008 to March 2011). I also tried to avoid just grabbing too many from the Fun With Flickr thread, which always deserves a run back through on its own anyway.

I think I’m a smart enough person, but being good at trivia is a different kind of animal. I know plenty of people who are smart but who are lousy at trivia, and even some people who seem to have a knack for hanging on to random facts but who otherwise don’t seem to be particularly intelligent. I see it sort of like the kids in your class who were good test takers versus the kids who were genuinely intelligent (and yes, I say that on behalf of academic underachievers everywhere). But my point is that success in the one arena doesn’t necessarily imply success in the other — granted, there’s definitely a necessary overlap, but you get what I’m saying. And on a personal note, I must add that it’s especially frustrating for me when I know that I know something but I can’t extract the answer from my head. With my less-than-stellar memory, this seems to happen to me a lot, and so if you happen to be hiding in my bushes while I’m watching Jeopardy! you’ll notice me yelling “daaaah!” at my TV a lot as answers are revealed.

And speaking of Jeopardy!, it’s hard to write a post about trivia and not mention what an enjoyable show that is. I hope it continues to be enough of a moneymaker to remain on the air for another 25 years, and only pray that when Alex Trebek passes the torch it won’t be to someone even more condescending. I do find it interesting though that other networks haven’t put more effort into stealing the idea and airing quality trivia programmes of their own. Sure, there have been other trivia shows — Who Wants to be a Millionaire was wildly popular for a while — but no fast-paced shows with lots of solid, intellectual questions. No need for fluff or heavy budgets, just well-researched questions and answers. This is why In the Know is entertaining despite having the production quality of a discarded junior high A/V project.

Trivial Pursuit is another example of a fun, fact-based success that doesn’t seem to be cloned well, but that exemplifies the simplicity that makes trivia work — it’s a deck of cards with questions that are mostly fairly difficult. And it retails for $30, so why don’t we have a bunch of games like this on the market? Are we short on facts to quiz each other on?

Apparently not. Some people make up their own for others to enjoy (or at least steal them from questionable online sources). For over a year now some friends and I have been doing the weekly trivia night at a pub in town. This has proven most enjoyable, and was an excellent suggestion by Scott. It’s also been fairly rewarding so far, resulting in lots of free food and drink (although I still hate to think about how much we’ve spent there during our weekly endeavors to win these gift certificate prizes). But it’s a good time. There are good questions, some bad questions, lots of chuckles, annoying music and greasy food, and coming up with fresh team names each week is good practice for naming that death metal/polka band I’ve been meaning to start up someday.

(Note: I went ahead and moved various Jeopardy! and general trivia-related comments to this thread.)

• Montreal Expos
• St. Louis Cardinals (the football team)
• Miami Redskins
• Quebec Nordiques (what the h is a Nordique?)
• A crapload of men’s college teams (thanks, Title 9)
• Ohio Glory
• Tidewater Tides
• Washington Bullets (the murder rate in D.C. has dipped significantly since the name change)
• Capital Fighting Lutherans (I don’t really remember that name, but it did exist

To start, here are some more movie clips/cartoons:

Bugs and Gorilla
Axe Murderer  (THE best comedy movie sequence)

And here’s a two-parter cartoon, kinda long but worth it in my opinion.

Disney’s Noah Part 1
Disney’s Noah Part 2

This is Jack Burton in the Pork Chop Express and I’m talkin to whoever’s listening out there…

Now, I’m not saying that I’ve been everywhere and I’ve done everything, but I do know it’s a pretty amazing planet we live on here, and a man would have to be some kind of fool to think we’re alone in this universe.

I grew up maybe five miles from I-70.  It was just the highway we took to town, nothing special.  It went as far west as Columbus and east to Zanesville, stretching the breadth of my world.  We pumped our gas at truck stops and watched for out-of-state plates, listened to truckers on CB radios, and made the arm-pulling “honk” signal to passing semi trucks.  Yes, we had maps, and yes, I knew that 70 went much, much further in both directions, but for my purposes as a kid it was the road that took us one way to the Brown Derby and Children’s Palace and the other way to see family.

When I was 20 I drove to Colorado.  By that time I’d traveled a bit in both directions, but on this trip it really set in just how far I-70 could take you. (Driving the entire width of Kansas has a way of making you see distance with new eyes.)  But you get on this one road, and west (young man) is a reachable destination.

Well once again I live close to 70.  Probably within a mile or so, I’d say, if the crow were wont to fly there from my house.  And I thought that I should take advantage of this proximity, so I asked Santa for a CB.  Santa did, indeed, bring me a nice model (thanks, mom and dad), and last week I installed it in the kitchen so I could listen to the banter of the professional truck drivers who pass through my strip of I-70.

As you can imagine, this is proving to be an enjoyable pastime for me.  I’m a man who appreciates his upbringing and the finer things of rural living, and I enjoy myself a conversation with the good ol’ boys.  But I also like to poke fun at pretty much everything, and I suspect this will be a rich opportunity for me.  Hence this thread.

But in order to get my operation up and running, I needed various accessories, and the local CB Shoppe proved most helpful, although more pricey than I expected.  But sometimes it’s good to pay a little extra for input and advice (and shop talk), and of course it’s always a good idea to get your foot in the door with the local “ham”ateur radio enthusiasts. I haven’t found a good way to mount the antenna onto the roof yet, but for the meantime I have it attached to a post I stuck in the side yard. I’d run the cable into the house temporarily last week, just to make sure everything worked properly; today I finally got down into the crawlspace under the kitchen and ran the cable permanently and tied up the loose ends real good.  I am set to transmit and receive.  Well, mostly receive.

Already I’m reminded of the rich lexicon in use by the men and women of the American Trucking Association.  For example, I now know what a “pickle park” is, and will therefore never quite be comfortable in a rest station bathroom again. And already I’ve listened to many great debates, with topics ranging from sports to health care to race relations, and much of the time with arguments sounding like they were chewed out between tobacky spits.  I’m looking forward to more, and I intend to share the highlights here.

I do appreciate all of the poking and prodding though, and I’m sorry I’ve been so remiss. Thankfully, some of you have continued to post comments in existing threads, so despite my silence and the world’s obsession with Facebooking and Friendsters and Deja News and other avenues of online discussion, this site has managed to stay alive, and we’ve continued to have some interesting contributions.

But I think my blogging inactivity is mostly due to the lack of obsession. I tend to bounce through periodic obsessions as I focus intensely on one or two interests and then change gears hard when something else catches my fancy. It’s not that I’m spastic or fickle, I just really immerse myself in whatever I’m into at the time, and so I usually move on and come back to the things I really love only eventually.

As a result, often times the tools of my hobbies lay dusty until my interests cycle back.  For example, over the years this has very much been the case with me musically.  At the moment I have a room full of toys sitting, time quickly stripping away their innovation, but forcing that sort of thing never works for me.  Likewise, although I’ve had a number of new threads in the works for a while, every time I’ve sat down to expand on them I just haven’t felt it.  What do you do?

But this summer and fall were rather obsession-less for me.  In fact, until November, I hadn’t really been consumed by anything since I’d pressed to finally get my site revamped in the spring.  Luckily, the release of Modern Warfare 2 proved to me that I still know how to beat something into the ground, so maybe I’m just waiting for my next big interest or my focus will naturally swing back toward writing or music or what have you.

In the meantime, I’ll try to work more on getting some new posts up, even if I’m not necessarily itching to sit down and muse and write and generally be brilliant.

This Man

So all things Liz Lemon, Jack Donaghy, Tracy Jordan, etc. shall go here, with a special emphasis on quotes, clips, and pictures of Tina Fey looking brainy and cute. And if you don’t know who those people are, now’s your chance.

I really do think this is a show for all you who appreciate good writing. In my opinion it’s the best written comedy on right now. So if you’ve never given 30 Rock its fair shot, I suggest you check out the DVDs from the library before the branch near you closes due to massive budget cuts. With some hard work you can be caught up in time for the season 4 premiere this fall.

For those of you who haven’t seen Sunny, it’s rather funny, quite offensive, Charlie in particular is a great character with a ridiculous voice, and “Sweet Dee” is in the running for kitten names. That’s all I’ll say about it right now, and you can check out the existing comments for more details. Keep in mind that you can say and do more on the FX network, so you may wanna turn it down some if you’re watching clips at work or if you’re somewhat pious with your TV.

But first let me give you some highlights on what’s new, improved, different, and missing…

Improved Functionality:

Faster — First off, the site should be much faster. This is mostly due to database changes, but also in some part due to a change of venue. Before this, the site was always hosted on my own server, which of course is now horribly out of date, coughing and wheezing, begging for death. The server ran out of my basement for the first four years when I lived in town, but for the past year has been running out of Josh’s house since I’m still waiting on that rural broadband initiative to come my way. But between the paid hosting and improved backend, hopefully you’ll notice faster load times.

Avatars —  Changing your avatars is simpler.  Directions are on the FAQ page, but essentially if you edit your profile the spot for uploading and applying your own avatar is more obvious.  As always though, please keep your avatars at a reasonable image size, like 110px square.  If you don’t know how to crop and resize an image get an 8 year old to help you.

Images in comments — Comments have always been able to handle images, but you are now being entrusted with the ability to add pictures to your comments yourself instead of having to get me to do it for you. Again, please use common sense and don’t go adding murals to your comments. If you have a large picture and don’t know how to resize it or don’t have time, just paste a link to it in your comment like you used to do and I’ll take care of it.

New Functionality:

Comment cross-referencing — In my opinion, the biggest piece of new functionality is the comment cross-reference feature. At the top of each comment, beside the user’s name, is a link to view that user’s other comments. If you click on that link you’ll see a list of comments made by that user, sorted by thread. You can then choose to view the other comments in context if you wish. This feature is also available from the new Users page, which lists users who have contributed to the site and links to their content.

Edit comments — You can now edit your own comments. You have a specific window of time to do so, and this is due to the fact that someone else may quickly reference your comment and I’m sure they’d like their words to remain relevant. But you should have plenty of time to fix little things like spelling mistakes and to add links you forgot, etc.

Subscriptions — The new version of the site allows you to subscribe to threads and to the site itself. You can receive an e-mail whenever there’s a new thread posted to the site, and you can also subscribe to a particular thread so that you receive notification when new comments are made in that conversation. You cannot subscribe to everything, meaning you can’t get notifications for all posts and all comments, and I don’t think you’d want that anyway. But you now have the ability to opt in to new posts (from the front page) and to certain threads that you want to follow (from the bottom of individual posts).

Social media stream — The Stream page is gravy, and likely of no real interest to anybody unless you just want to giggle at what I’ve been up to. When it’s working correctly, it logs my activity on things like Facebook, Xbox Live, Netflix, Last.fm, etc. This page is only viewable to logged-in users, and not available to the world. It’s nice for me to have compiled and in front of me, but again, probably not too interesting for you unless you’re stalking me, but I decided not to make it private because some of you still might like to see it.

Missing or Deprecated Functionality:

Picture galleries — The photo galleries are offline again. I’ll be working on those very soon, but they were low priority for the launch. They’ll be back soon though.

Polls — The polls are gone, and at least for now, even the polls archive is gone. I don’t know if these will ever be back, but it’s at the very bottom of my to-do list. And no, you don’t get a vote on that one.

One more thing to note, and that’s about your recent comment links. Chances are this is not working correctly here at the launch of the new site, meaning the site may be indicating that there are more unread comments for you than there really are. This is just the nature of the transition, and if you go through the comments once you’ll find that it will work from then on. So sorry about that, but seeing some comments again is probably better than not seeing some at all.

I have no doubt that there are mistakes and problems lurking somewhere, as will always be the case, so I’ve also started a bug tracking page. If you find something that isn’t working right, even if it’s something simple like a spelling error or something’s not displaying properly in your browser, please leave a comment on that page so I can keep track and hopefully fix the issue.  Maybe it’s nothing, but maybe it’s something, and I appreciate your help. Any other comments or opinions on this version of the site can go here in this thread though.

Thanks everybody for your patience and your feedback, and I hope you enjoy the new site.