The Power of Positive Thinking
25 November 2015 • by Bob • Ponderings
I saw a would-be motivational poster today with the following quote from Norman Vincent Peale: "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."
I don't mean to be nitpicky, but if you fall short of the moon, you're still going to be light years away from the stars, although you can ardently admire them as you burn up on re-entry.
But if you really miss the moon, and by that I mean hideously overshooting your intended target to an exponential degree, your long-dead corpse might one day make it to the stars, although that will still be thousands of years after you choked to death due to lack of oxygen.
UPDATE 01/20/22:
I recently had the opportunity to weigh in once again on this failed attempt at motivational thought, and the following text was my updated version.
I have often seen the statement that you should shoot for the moon, and if you miss, you'll land among the stars. However, have you ever considered what that actually means? If by some quirk of poor navigational skills you manage to miss the relative safety of the moon, then you're doomed to a miserable existence; drifting terrified and helpless through the cold expanse of empty space as you journey across millions of light years on your way to the nearest star, at which point your lifeless corpse will be incinerated as it descends into a chaotic maelstrom of burning gases and thermonuclear radiation.
Cool Towns Around The World
12 November 2015 • by bob • Travel, Humor
I'm not sure what it is, but there's something cool about the street names in this tiny town outside of Eindhoven in the Netherlands... I can't quite put my finger on it...
Work/Life Balance
03 November 2015 • by bob • Humor, Work
Some people I know should read this... not that I'm naming any names, of course. 
Political Changes
03 November 2015 • by bob • Politics, Humor
Here's your election thought of the day from the good folks at www.despair.com...
The Italian Job VIII
02 November 2015 • by bob • Humor, Bicycling
My friend and fellow cycling enthusiast Keith shared the following security camera footage from the good folks at Woodinville Bicycle which captures the hilarious antics of a would-be thief attempting to steal a bicycle... I think we have a future Darwin Award recipient in the making.
Say Hello to My Little Friend
04 August 2015 • by Bob • Arizona, Humor
I found this little guy hiding under my desk as I started my workday... I think I'll be wearing socks today.
Actually, I first noticed this scorpion running across the floor in my office from west to east in order to hide behind my computers. As I attempted to root him out of the cables so I could squash him, I lost sight of him, so I moved around my desk to get a better view. As I did so, I noticed a scorpion running across the floor in my office - from west to east. So then I was thinking, "Did I see only one scorpion or two?" Well to tell you the truth, in all the excitement I kinda lost track. But seeing that this is a probably a bark scorpion, the most venomous scorpion in North America and known to cause numbness, tingling, vomiting, and death, I've gotta ask myself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do I, punk?
(Obvious hat tip to "Dirty Harry." 
)
Living with Adult Children
13 February 2015 • by Bob • Family, Humor
There was a brief period when all three of our adult children were living with my wife and me in Seattle. Our youngest was starting college, our middlest had just returned from a year living in Peru, and our oldest had relocated from Texas to Washington following her graduation from college.
Things are different now; our children have all left home, married, and started lives of their own.
However, when I was recently going through several folders on my computer with collections of old files, I discovered a Word document with a note that I had typed up for my children during that short boomerang season when they were living with my wife and me as adults.
Notice to Everyone in this Household:
- You will wash your own dishes immediately after you are done with them.
- If you have friends over, you will wash their dishes immediately after they are done with them.
- You will carry any dishes from your room (or your car, or wherever) back to the kitchen immediately after you are done with them.
- If the dishes in the dishwasher have not been run, you will put your own dishes in the dishwasher.
Contrary to Popular Belief:
- It will not hurt you to periodically empty the dishwasher as a favor for the dish person.
- It will not hurt you to periodically cook dinner.
Do you think this note this made any difference in their behavior?
Code Monkey Save World
26 January 2015 • by Bob • Art, Humor, Ponderings
OK - I have to make a shameless admission: I really like Jonathan Coulton's music. Jonathan's style is sort of like modern-day-Internet-geek-cyber-folk-pop, as if that's a real genre.
Anyway, years ago he wrote a song called "Code Monkey," which became something of an Internet hit. (Hey, I'd call over one million downloads a hit.) If you're curious about the song, you can browse to http://youtu.be/MNl3fTods9c in order to see it with the lyrics.
That being said, fans of "Code Monkey" might not be aware that Jonathan teamed up with Greg Pak and a few additional artists, and together they converted "Code Monkey" and several of Jonathan's other songs (like "Skullcrusher Mountain," "Re: Your Brains," etc.) into a weird little graphic novel.
Truth be told, I'm not a graphic novel kind of guy, but I love the song - so I ordered a copy through Greg Pak's online shop.
My signed copy of the graphic novel just arrived, and it was a great read; it was fun to see the characters from so many of Jonathan's songs brought to life, even if it was just for a hundred pages or so.
For those of you who are familiar with the song, you're probably wondering to yourself, "Does Code Monkey finally tell his manager to write that @#$% login page himself and win the heart of Matilde, the girl of his dreams?"
Well, you'll just have to order the book and find that out for yourself.
(FYI - The graphic novel was a Kickstarter project in 2013 which was fully-funded in just 12 hours; it eventually reached $340,270 of it's original $39,000 goal.)
All Spiders Must Die
14 November 2014 • by Bob • Ponderings
One of my cousins posted the following chart to Facebook, and I think that most people would tend to agree with it:
Growing up in Arizona, I learned a simple rule for dealing with spiders: kill them all. Seriously. They all must die.
My philosophy for dealing with spiders was formed when we moved into a house on the northeast side of Tucson in 1978. At the time, our house was on the outskirts of the city, with little more than desert beyond our neighborhood. As a result, we had lots of creepy, crawly things roaming about. Between toxic spiders, toxic scorpions, toxic millipedes, toxic lizards, etc., we adopted an easy-to-remember motto for what was poisonous and what wasn't: "If it crawls, it kills." With that in mind, we generally killed anything that resembled an insect.
However, the worst of our lot was: an infestation of Black Widow spiders. I make no exaggeration - our house had hundreds of Black Widow spiders crawling about. As a paperboy, that meant checking very carefully when I exited the front door of our house around 5am every morning, because there were almost always 3 to 5 Black Widows hanging from webs in front of our door. If I didn't survey the area with due diligence, that meant that I would be wearing those Black Widows.
At first I used Raid or some other insect killer to dispatch my arachnid antagonists, but I eventually decided to use a can of Lysol and a lighter to create a miniature flamethrower. (Note: Do not try that at home.) Just in case you were wondering, Black Widows simply melt when you attack them with a flamethrower. (Which I found savagely gratifying.)
Jumping ahead a couple of decades, my wife and I moved to Seattle, Washington, where we purchased a house on a hill which backed up to a small forest. Part-way down the hill on our property was a small storage shed. We didn't need it for storage, so we decided to give the shed to our young son as a club house. With that in mind, one misty Seattle morning my son and I headed down the hill to the shed to clean it up for him.
As we pushed open the door, the musty odor from years of neglect and rotting debris was strong enough to force a hasty retreat from the average explorer. But we were determined, so we soldiered on. As we were cleaning out some of the accumulated rubbish from the shed, I noticed that the aging edifice had a drop ceiling, which was odd. Since it looked like the shed had been wired for electricity at one point, I decided to remove the ceiling panels and see what lurked behind them.
As I removed the first ceiling panel, I made a startling discovery: spiders. Millions of them. All shapes, sizes, and species. Some were crawling around, but most seemed to train all eight of their eyes on me as if to say, "Well, biped boy? What are you going to do about it?"
As I continued to examine the situation, one alarming fact became painfully clear: our storage shed was obviously the breeding ground for every spider in the Pacific Northwest. Recalling my years of childhood training, my immediate thought was - they all must die.
With that purpose in mind, I headed down to my local Home Depot to pick up some spider killer. Much to my amazement, the Home Depot does not keep spider-killing chemicals in stock in Washington state. I could not locate any, so I asked a salesperson, who was quick to remark, "We don't kill spiders in Washington; we like them. They eat the other bugs."
This answer was unacceptable to me, so I resolved to make do with the best that I could find: I bought a case of industrial-strength fumigation bombs and I brought those home. I placed the first bomb on the floor in the center of the storage shed, pressed the release button, then I hastily exited the building and closed the door. On the next day, I repeated this process. On the following day I examined the carnage: as I removed the remaining ceiling panels, the corpses of millions of dead spiders spilled past me and littered the floor of the shed.
After sweeping up the remnants of my fallen foes, I checked behind the walls to make sure that no spiders were hiding behind the drywall and planning their counter-offensive. I found no spiders, but I discovered that the shed was infested with black mold, so I was forced to inform my son that the shed was off limits for health reasons.
Throughout my years in the Seattle area, I continued to deploy a fumigation bomb every year, and by the time we moved away I seldom saw any spiders near our house. I guess they learned their lesson. Or perhaps they simply relocated to a more spider-friendly house down the street. Either way, I was happy to never see them.
My wife and I moved back to Arizona this past year, and the former owners of our new house failed to take care of the property. As a result, I saw a few spiders loitering about the place when we moved in. This is obviously an undesirable situation, so I headed down to my local Home Depot, where I was thrilled to see dozens of different products which proudly displayed their ability to kill any species of spider.
As I was reading the labels and making my choice, a salesperson asked if I needed any assistance. I replied no, but I felt obliged to share the attitudes of his Home Depot colleagues in Washington state. We both laughed out loud with incredulity that anyone would actually try to save their spiders. Once I had selected my weapon of choice, I brought home my new-found arsenal and proceeded to dispatch my eight-legged tormentors to the arachnid abyss.