2007.12.31
Ouch
Pop Quiz (Hot Shot), which of the following colors was not on the middle toe of my right foot after I carelessly spent too much time barefoot outside helping to clear up a clogged rain drainage system and misplaced my foot and consequently jammed the bejebus out of said toe:
The correct answer is: none of the above (they were all on there). Yes, it hurt. A little ibuprofen and a couple days and it seemed to be almost fresh as new. Just be glad I didn't upload the actual picture of my foot for you to stare at. Imagining the colors is ugly enough. ;)
Despite this being my third blog post in one day (and you thinking I might have nothing better to do on New Year's Eve), I wanted to take a look back at the best entries of the year, by month. Limiting myself to just one post per month is tough in some cases, so I've slightly cheated:
- January - In Memory of Mr. Cup Noodle - This started a little spree of mine of writing haikus on this blog. I've probably had more Cup Noodles in the past year than the previous 5 combined. No correlation.
- February - American Idol Delusion - I feel like I've wanted to talk about that one ever since I saw the show the first time. Yes, much to my male coworkers' embarrassment (and a little to mine), I watch it still and look forward to the new season.
- March - Give 'em a Call - A new guy start at work and in his first few days somebody warned him of this quality/tendency of mine… months after I blogged about it. Go figure.
- April - Picky Eaters - Continues to be one of the most perplexing things to me. I think I fairly categorized them though, which is pretty good after all this time.
- May - Mousecapades - Had I known how much this would impact/bother me later in the year, I might have moved then. I still really like our home. Despite being born this month, she doesn't really get blogged about until late July.
- June - Superstitions - My only entry for this month. I was busy because I was almost….
- July - Done with School - A horrible post to have to actually read, but a significant thing for me to accomplish.
- August - Site Revamp… Again - Mainly due to my upgrade to Movable Type 4, and also because I was bored with how it was before. Too bad I never really finished all the stuff on these lists, but I made significant progress.
- September - Recipe Collection Revamp - This took a bunch of work on my part to get this up and going. Similar to the mice, had I known what would happen the next month, I wouldn't have spent as much time on it. Oh well.
- October - G2 20071012 - Just a finishing piece to various musical adventures this year. This double disc compilation for Maria turned out to be quite a success - better than the previous G2 this year.
- November - Unique to the Taker - I had a number of <a href="http://longboredsurfer.com/blog/2007/10/new_forms_of_interaction.php>of more thoughtful (as opposed to humorous or mocking) pieces this year, and this was probably one of my weirdest to most of you. I've thought about this post since I wrote it, and I now see a small flaw in my theory. Oh well.
- December - Ouch - An instant classic for me. Looking at the colors I provided, it's little wonder to me why make-up colors are what they are… if people want to look bruised and battered. Go figure.
Although I'd love to go through and pick the best pictures of the year and best events, I'm going to be honest here – I know most of you don't care. Thanks for making 2007 what it was. Here's to 2008 being even better, both as a dinky blog/site as well as for each of us personally.
We recently sent out our Christmas card for this year, and I wanted to talk about the making of it. Most, if not all, of the Christmas cards should have arrived at their destinations. If you didn't get one… don't feel too bad, since I'm about to tell you all about it, and you can print one for yourself if you'd like. That saves me the cost of printing/mailing, and also the need to come up with something to say (if anything) on the back of your card. Consider this the easy way of doing Christmas cards.
Read more...
The Longbored Surfer just got a little face-lift. If you're using a feed reader (I love Google Reader) and haven't stopped by since I last posted, it might be worth your time. This isn't the full redesign I talked about before, but it's something with which I'm satisfied, especially considering the time investment. I'm not going to bore you all with the details of my plans – I did that before. I think this is a very good/solid starting point. I anticipate moving all my old remaining content off of the old format soon. Ever since I upgraded to Movable Type 4, I feel like I haven't done as much on this site as I wanted to, and I intend to change that. I enjoy doing this sort of stuff too much.
On another note, if you do read this site through a feed reader, you may notice that I fixed the formatting issues I was having. Previously all the text was bunched together for a reason I didn't know. Well, thanks to a tip on how to fix that. It took me how long to make such a simple fix? Shameful, I know. That's all.
I just finished reading Einstein, by Walter Isaacson. Einstein, as a person, to me is even more fascinating than he was before. My mother gave me the book for my birthday, and I was a little slow in reading it (it was my right-before-I-go-to-sleep book). As a book it was a little slow at times. I don't think it was the topic of the book that caused that, but probably the time of day/night and the amount of incomprehensible physics. I'm not an official on Einstein, nor am I well versed on many historical figures. Much of who Einstein was and his ideals spoke very clearly to me. There were two things (among others) that I feel really did it:
“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.”
I couldn't have said it any better.
One other thing that made me smile was that Einstein named his boat (which he loved to sail), Tineƒ, which is Yiddish for a piece of junk. I loved that. I used to have a car which I fondly referred to as Shania, since the car would (once it hit about 72 mph), shimmy, shake, and make the earth car shake (don't get it? It's about 3:20 in.). I've named things “dajunx”, “The POS PC”, told people I drive a 1990 POS, and named something “Chibola” (El Salvador slang for "thing"). I'm sure there are other names I've given that are similar. Every one of those names is given with affection.
Anyway, I enjoyed the book and understand that it won't do the same for everybody else. Einstein was truly a fascinating individual.