Ask a Stupid Question Day

Tomorrow (Friday Sept 28) is "Ask a Stupid Question Day". Yes, there is an entry in Wikipedia, so it must be so (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask_a_Stupid_Question_Day )

And for those of you keeping track:

September 29 is... Poisoned Blackberries Day
September 30 is... National Mud Pack Day

Got any stupid questions? (or was that one?)

On my wall at the office, there is a picture from the movie "Sixth Sense". It shows Bruce Willis and the "Sixth Sense" kid. The caption is "I see stupid people...they are everywhere. They walk around like everyone else. They don't even know they are dumb."

A relic from my days on the Help Desk.

Happy Birthday to :-) !

The 'smiley' emoticon is 25 years old today, invented by Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman.

Wikipedia says "The two original text smileys, :-) to indicate a joke and :-( to mark things that are not a joke were invented on September 19, 1982 (at 11:44am) by Scott E. Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Computer Science. His original post at the CMU CS general board, where he suggested the use of the smileys, was retrieved on September 10, 2002 by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x) as proof to support the claim."

Here's the original message:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon )

...

More Fake Web Pages

One of the silly things that I do is make fake web pages for the morning show host on a local radio station. They don't get much traffic, but they amuse me. I have fun trying to come up with a page for the unusual products that the radio host (Paul Robins on KGBY Y92 www.y92.com) comes up with.

There's some funny ones in there, at least I think so. You can get almost any picture on the Interweb. (They are all safe for work, although the muscle man one is a bit disturbing to look at.) Most of the pages are done in Adobe Fireworks, with a bit of work in Photoshop Elements as needed.

I've been doing those fake web pages each week for over a year, so there is quite a collection. So I came up with a 'Random Fake Web Page" button that picks one out of the list. Some of the pages even have the audio file for the fake commercial.

So if you are really bored, you can start here (http://www.digitalchoke.com/paulshow ) and use the Random button to get started. To see other pages, just hit Refresh in your browser.

I'm easily amused.

No Labor on Labor Day Weekend

Smack dab in the middle of the US Labor Day weekend, with Monday as the holiday. Here in the States, we celebrate Labor by taking the day off.

The weather here has been warm (OK, hot), but not as bad a Phoenix (AZ), where there have been many days over 110F. (For you two readers that speak Centigrade, that's hot.) Earlier this week, the humidity was higher than normal, in the 35% range. And the low temps at night were in the mid-70's, about 10-12 degrees higher than normal.

Yeah, I know that 35% humidity is nothing to many of my four readers. But it's unusual for us here in the Sacramento (CA) valley. So, we get to complain. But probably not much sympathy from others.

Not much planned for the weekend, other than some surfing of the Innertubes, some computer work, and goofing around with various web sites I own.

Hey, it's a holiday weekend. Goofing off is what I do during holiday weekends.