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About the Blog

The thoughts and theories of a guy who basically should have gone to bed hours ago.

I know, I know - what's the point? But look at it this way - I stayed up late writing it, but you're reading it...

Let's call ourselves even & move on, OK?


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I Should Be Sleeping

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

The Gaffe Machine claims its latest victim: Miley Cyrus


OK, seriously? I saw a passing headline on the train this morning about Miley Cyrus posing nude in a magazine, and I couldn't believe it when I saw the actual photo. This is considered a nude photo? This is even considered risque? Or even remotely inappropriate? I realize different people fall at different places on the prude-o-meter, and I mean no disrespect, but seriously - don't we see more of Miley (and just about anyone else) when they're wearing a swimsuit? On a public beach?

What we have here is another manufactured story, churned out by the Gaffe Machine, so reporters can fill their column inches or air time with another celebrity "Gotcha!" Everyone wants Miley to do something scandalous, so they can news catalog her with Brittney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.

Don't believe me? Every news article I read about this so-called scandal contained at least one paragraph that mentioned Brittney and Lindsay. Let's think about this seriously for a minute, shall we? Between the two of them, Brittney and Lindsay have been drunk drivers, on drugs, married and divorced several times, in rehab, involved in legal and sometimes violent altercations with both family members and members of the press, and more. Miley Cyrus posed for a picture by a world-famous, well-respected photographer that exposed her bare back. On what planet is this considered even remotely similar?

The ultimate irony, though, was the quote from Disney Channel spokesperson, Patti McTeague:


Unfortunately, as the article suggests, a situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines

<smacks forehead> Wow. The Disney Channel is criticizing someone for exploiting Miley Cyrus in order to make money. Wow. Just....Wow.

posted by Brian at 12:08 AM | 5 comments

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Bush Conducts More than Just War...


Hat tip to Kushol Gupta for this link: President Bush conducting the U.S. Marine Band as they play Stars and Stripes Forever. Apologies for the outside link - CNN doesn't provide embedding technology (at least none that I could find).

Anyway, is it just me, or does Bush look more comfortable conducting (badly) than he ever has speaking?

posted by Brian at 10:18 AM | 0 comments

The things you find when you're packing...


As some of my loyal readers know, I'm about to move out of my house for 4-6 months to undergo a major home renovation. As exciting as it is, it means this weekend is dedicated almost entirely to packing up every single thing we own, so we can move it into a storage container on our driveway while the wrecking ball has it's way with our beloved home.

It's amazing the things you find when you have to physically handle every single one of your possessions. This one's for Jeff Porten:


(Click image to enlarge)


That, my friends, is the manual for the Fat Mac (now with 512K of memory; hard drive not yet invented). The actual machine itself is in the guest room closet, right next to the ImageWriter printer. That closet is on tomorrow's list - maybe I'll post some updated pics here when I get to it.

Oh, and just so everyone doesn't think I've gone over to the dark side, this was on the same shelf:


(Click image to enlarge)


Ah yes, Windows for Workgroups and MS-DOS 6.2. Man, those were the days... ;-)

posted by Brian at 2:09 AM | 4 comments

Problem Getting into Webkinz World?


If you've got kids, and they're anything like my kids, then Webkinz world is a familiar place. Both of my sons login regularly to feed and play with their virtual pet, and to complete the hourly, daily, and specially highlighted tasks that can earn them KinzCash, with which they can buy their pal anything from food to furniture to medical attention.

So imagine the disappointment when, suddenly and without warning, a visit to the Webkinz URL, http://www.webkinz.com/, started returning an HTML error and wouldn't let them on the page? I mean, it's like the kids' equivalent of Blogger doing down for twelve days!

Anyway, Webkinz technical support here with a solution. Use the following URL:

http://www.webkinz.com/us_en/

Voila! Problem solved.

For the geeky, tech folks out there, here's what's going on: the main URL, www.webkinz.com, is receiving a parameter that tells it what location you're in, for the purposes (I believe) of displaying the site in your native language. But the programming logic that interprets this parameter is not working, causing the "Error on Page" message. By deep linking directly to the United States/English page (www.webkinz.com/us_en/), you bypass this faulty logic and proceed directly to the site itself.

It's been about a week now, and no one at Webkinz seems to have noticed, even though the number of kids logging in has to have dropped dramatically (has everyone figured this out on their own?). As I said earlier, it's like someone decided that customer service and technical support were just going to shutdown around the world, and no one told me...

Anyway, enjoy your Webkinz. I'll accept my fee in KinzCash...

posted by Brian at 1:52 AM | 9 comments

Random Acts of Blogging - 4/27/08


OK, so I've been away a while, and the list of things I've wanted to blog about has grown steadily. So away we go:

1) If you don't watch The Daily Show with John Stewart, you really should. It's funny every single night. But this past week or two, Stewart has been on fire! Here he is after Barack Obama was called an elitist:


The whole thing is funny, but the best part is around 7:25 or so. Here's the money quote:


Doesn't elite mean good? Is that not something we're looking for in a president anymore? You know what candidates, come with me (to a different camera:) I know elite is a bad word in politics; you want to go bowling and throw back a few beers, but the job you're applying for, if you get it and it goes well, they might carve your head into a mountain! If you don't actually think you're better than us, then what the &%*#&@ are you doing?

2) If someone from 1984, having just read Orwell's book, time travelled to 2008 and took a New York commuter train one morning, they'd see more than half of the people with their eyes closed, in various degrees of consciousness, wearing the same white ear phones in their ears, and probably assume we were all being fed the same government-issued doublespeak. What's funny is how wrong they'd be. Sitting on a train with 100 iPods, I wonder what the odds are that any two of them are playing the same song? I'm guessing it's close to zero.

3) A colleague of mine pointed out to me the other day that MIT disproved time travel in 2005 by holding a time traveller's convention, to which no one from the future showed up. Pretty convincing evidence on the face of it. If time travel is to ever be invented, you'd think someone would pop in to say hello, no? Famed scientist Tina Fey, formerly of Saturday Night Live had the perfect rebuttal:


A student at MIT is hosting a Time Traveler Party this week with the hope that people from the future will show up...too bad people from the future already know the party sucked!"

The only thing I know for sure after reading about this is that if anyone does invent time travel in my lifetime, something will almost instantly occur that will give me a killer headache.

4) SamuriFrog, the excellent blogger over at Electronic Cerebrectomy (WARNING: Link is typically not safe for work), recently posted two pictures that sum up the sad state of intelligence in our country today:


Man...there oughta be a test you need to pass before you can write protest signs...

5) Pope Benedict XVI's visit to New York City was capped off by a mass held at Yankee Stadium. First, a quick conversation between my wife and I:


My wife: Wow, the stadium looks beautiful. I bet the Pope is impressed.
Me: Honey, he practically lives in St. Peter's Basillica!
My wife: Good point

Then, of course, there are the New York Post and the New York Daily News, who could not resist the ironic headline:


The Post: "Communion Vendors Bring the Host to the Most."
Daily News: "The Sermon on the Mound."

Gotta love New York...

6) And finally, Britain's Office of Government Commerce, or OGC, recently unveiled it's new logo:


Seems harmless enough, right? But then they started putting it on mousepads, pens, and the like, and people got a chance to see it rotated 90 degrees:



Wow...that's quite the, er...um...well...what's the word I'm looking for? Well, I guess you'd have to say it's quite a boner, now wouldn't you???

posted by Brian at 12:54 AM | 0 comments

Blogger's Back . . . AGAIN!!!


After another 5-day outage, Blogger appears to be back & publishing again. Forgive me for being cynical, but we'll see how long it lasts this time.

And for what it's worth, still no response to my Blogger support e-mail request, nor any mention of it on Blogger Buzz or any of the message boards I've been able to find.

Oh, and lest you think I'm only bashing Blogger here, I went to Yahoo's support page (my site is hosted at Yahoo), filled out the form, and got a Failure to Deliver e-mail back, telling me that the e-mail address the form used doesn't exist in the Yahoo domain.

What gives? Did the world agree to abandon all tech support while I was asleep one night?

posted by Brian at 12:51 AM | 0 comments

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Democratic Politics Enters the Realm of Ridiculousness


(NOTE: Blogger went down again, right after I made my previous post. It's been down one two three four five more days at this point. The following post was written on 4/22)

I document this today, the day of the hard-fought Pennsylvania primary, because I know people have short memories, and once the media changes the national conversation, others will call me crazy for suggesting what is common knowledge right now. And that is this:

On April 22, 2008, Barack Obama has already been called unpatriotic, racist, unqualified, unprepared, inexperienced, beholden to lobbyists, elitist and Muslim. Hillary Clinton has been called a liar, a hypocrite, a war hawk, over-emotional, contrived, out of touch and willing to rig elections with changes to primary rules and reliance on super delegates. His healthcare plan has been criticized for leaving millions uninsured. Her position on NAFTA has been criticized as being inconsistent with her previous votes on the subject. He's been accused of a willingness to mollycoddle world leaders. She's been accused of fear mongering.

And all of it, every single bit of it, is coming from within the Democratic party. There's no conceivable way to blame any of this on John McCain, Karl Rove, or the RNC. They have wisely stayed on the sidelines and watched the Democrats feast on each other, well on their way to throwing away an easy victory in November for the third time in a row.

Come September/October, though, when the same questions are still being asked, many of the people who are responsible for the above will be in front of cameras, condemning the Republican Attack MachineTM for it's deplorable treatment of the Democratic candidate and it's willingness to distract Americans from the "real issues." And what's worse, those of us (and yes, regardless of who I vote for, I will be among them) who point out that the candidate did the very same thing to his/her opponent in the primaries will be accused of irrationally endorsing the failed policies of George W. Bush. No, I don't know why. But mark my words, it will happen.

For the record, I think Hillary has been more guilty of this than Obama. If you read the above lists carefully, you'll notice that his attacks on Hillary have been at least tangentially (and sometimes directly) tied to politics and policy, whereas her attacks on Obama seem to suggest that this man, who has a long history of public service, has secretly harbored racist, elitist, anti-American tendencies that are just now coming out as he's running for President against Hillary.

It was the most recent exchange, reserved for today, the day of the Pennsylvania primary, that made me finally blog about the topic (hat tip: Power Line). Here's the campaign ad currently running for Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania:



Note the imagery of FDR, JFK, the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl harbor, Soviet aggression, gas shortages, Osama bin Laden, Hurricane Katrina and home foreclosure. In 30 seconds. From a woman who has consistently accused the Bush administration of governing by fear.

Obama's response shows video of Bill Clinton speaking at a 2004 campaign rally:


Now, one of Clinton's Laws of Politics is this: If one candidate's trying to scare you and the other one's trying to get you to think, if one candidate's appealing to your fears and the other one's appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope.

Now tell me John McCain isn't on the sidelines taking notes...

posted by Brian at 12:45 PM | 0 comments

Monday, April 21, 2008

Oh Blogger, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?


Yes, world, the long and horrible wait is over.

On the afternoon of April 14th, after posting a humorous entry on the Plainview Library's schedule of events, I went to edit my recent post & found that Blogger wasn't letting me FTP files to my server (the specific error, so the Google Gods pick this entry up, was "Your publish is taking longer than expected. To continue waiting for it to finish, click here"). That happens from time to time, and given that they interact with hundreds (thousands?) of third party hosting services to do FTP publishing, I can imagine that fixing it would be a complex task. But this time, the lights went off for SIX WHOLE DAYS!.

The message boards lit up with people complaining about the problem and threatening to migrate to WordPress or the like. This particular thread got particularly vitriolic, especially after a Blogger Employee suggested that users 1) Read the help file on FTP publishing, 2) clear their browser cache and cookies, and 3) "Head to the kitchen, grab some comfort food, and then try again a little bit later." Poorly worded post, to be sure, especially given that this was the only response from Blogger itself on the whole thread (or on any other thread I could find). Even the official Blogger blog, Blogger Buzz, didn't mention the problem - not even in their most recent post entitled Updates and Bug Fixes for April 18th.

I realize Blogger is a free service, and you tend to get what you pay for in this world, but this was truly frustrating. And I say that as someone who was just going through the normal blogging withdrawal. Others on the messageboards were complaining about lost business, missed media opportunities, difficulty communicating with their customers/business partners, etc.. Blogger (and Google in general) have historically been very responsive to problems, both within the company and by making use of the "Army of Davids" that their user base represents. This time, though, they acted as if they weren't even aware of the problem. I even went to the "Contact Us" section and filled out a problem report, for which I was promised I'd get an e-mail response. I'm still waiting...

In any case, the problem seems to have subsided - at least for now. If I vanish for another six days, though, you'll know why.

Oh, and if you've arrived at this page because you're having the same problem and you were hoping I'd shed some light on how I solved it? Well, I waited for it to go away and eventually it did. How's that for entirely unhelpful?!? If anyone has a better idea, please leave it in the comments? Thanks...

posted by Brian at 10:17 AM | 3 comments

Monday, April 14, 2008

Library Schedule Hu-Hu-Hu-Humor


Big ol' tip of the hat to Mike Starr, who passed along today's schedule for his local library, the Plainview - Old Bethpage Public Library. Here's a quick summary (emphasis mine):


10:00 AM-SENIOROBICS
10:30 AM-SENIOR BOOK DISCUSSION
11:00 AM-SENIOROBICS
3:30 PM-Girl Scouts Troop 3051
3:30 PM-Hospice of New York
6:30 PM-NATIONAL OVARIAN CAN COALITION NY LI DIVISION
8:00 PM-National Stuttering Association
8:00 PM-National Stuttering Association

You can't make up stuff like this...

posted by Brian at 11:09 AM | 0 comments

Yankee Stadium Construction Espionage


This has to be my favorite baseball story of the year so far.

It seems that a construction worker from the Bronx, Gino Castignoli, who is also a Red Sox fan, took a job on the construction team for the new Yankee Stadium, with the express purpose of burying a David Ortiz Red Sox jersey in one of the stadium's concrete slabs in order to jinx the stadium and the Yankees. After that one day on the job, he quit, stating that he would never set foot in Yankee Stadium even if they "gave him free tickets" and "let him sit in George Steinbrenner's box."

Alas, two anonymous co-workers ratted him out. On Saturday, a team drilled for five hours in the offending concrete slab and found the jersey under two feet of concrete. The shirt, tattered from the jackhammers but still easily recognizable as a Red Sox jersey, will be auctioned off by the Jimmy Fund to raise money for Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The Yankees will contribute a Yankees Universe T-shirt as well, which will benefit Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Here's the best part, though (you have to watch the embedded video in the article to catch this). Hank Steinbrenner, George Steinbrenner's son and principal owner of the Yankees, had this to say about the incident:


I hope his coworkers kick the [expletive] out of him

And Mr. Castignoli, who has no remorse about the incident whatsoever, responded thusly:


Tell Hank he can come meet me if he wants to try - and tell him to bring [catcher Jorge] Posada, because he's the one Yankee I can't stand.

This is the kind of stuff that makes the Yankees & Red Sox one of the greatest rivalries in all of sports. As for jinxes, well, Boston fans know all about jinxes, now don't they? Not to mention, as long as there's stuff like this in the building, the Yankees will be well protected. As Derek Jeter said in a recent interview, "the ghosts don't have far to go - just across the street."

Go Yanks!

posted by Brian at 6:58 AM | 1 comments

Thursday, April 10, 2008

More Song Graphs


This post about graphs that represent well known songs has quickly become one of my more popular posts, so I figured I'd pass along a link to a few more song graphs. These are cute, although there are not nearly as many as the first link...

Enjoy!

posted by Brian at 11:05 PM | 0 comments

Saturday, April 05, 2008

A-Rod Attacked in Fenway Park


Tip o' the hat to Ilya Burlak for pointing out this unbelievable story. Seems a Bristol, CT middle school took their kids on a class trip to Fenway Park in Boston. A red-tailed hawk, who nests in an overhang near the stadium's press booth, suddenly decided it didn't like one of the students very much. It swooped down, talons extended, and scratched the scalp of this innocent, 13-year old girl, drawing blood but not seriously harming the girl (see picture).

Here's the kicker. The girl's name? Alexa Rodriguez!

As Ilya says, you just can't make this stuff up...

posted by Brian at 11:24 PM | 1 comments

Thursday, April 03, 2008

The New, Volatile Stock Markets


If you follow the financial press, or watch a financial news network like CNBC, you've heard a great deal lately about how volatile the stock market has been lately. Every day, it seems, the Dow Jones Industrial Average seems to either jump more than a hundred points, or dip more than a hundred points. People who, well, let's just say, people of a certain generation have been waxing philosophic about how a hundred point move on the Dow was unheard of in their day, and now it happens all the time.

This got me thinking: are we just enamored of large numbers? The DJIA is, after all, an average, so the number of points it moves on any given day isn't as important as the percentage change that move represents. And, when the Dow was 6,000 (late-1996), a 1% move only represented a 60 point shift. Today, with the Dow over 12,000, the same 1% move represents 120 points. Perhaps there were lots of 60 point shifts twelve years ago but no one remembers those as clearly as the triple digit shifts they see today?

Here's a telling graph:


The above trend lines represent the average daily shift in each of the three major indexes for each month over the last ten years. In January, 2008, for example, the average daily move for the Dow (up or down) was 1.27%. In the same month, the S&P500 moved an average of 1.31% each day, and the NASDAQ moved an average of 1.40%. As you can see by the trend lines, these numbers are higher than they've been for around five years, so there is some justification for all the bellyaching of recent months.

That said, it's not nearly as bad as it was back in 2000-2003, particularly on the NASDAQ, where average daily shifts regularly topped 2%, sometimes even 3% or 4%.

This graph might be clearer:


It's the same data, but the daily averages are grouped by year, rather than by month. Here, we see that averaging together all of 2008 so far (January through March), this year is indeed more volatile for the Dow and S&P500 than any year in the last 10, except for 2002. For the NASDAQ, though, it still pales in comparison to 2000-2002, and is even slightly more stable than 1999. Comparing the two graphs, we see that 2000-2003 had some high (>2%) months and low months, so while the peaks were worse than what we're seeing now, the year-long averages balanced out. This is telling as we remember that 2008 still has 9 months to go, so the overall annual average might settle down quite a bit before it's done.

Bottom line: yes, the markets are volatile. But no, this isn't some calamitous event that we've never seen before and, in fact, in some cases it has been much worse. Also, my point from above still hold some water, I believe. Larger ordinal numbers create a bigger psychological impact than the changes of years past. Our memories are short enough as it is, and a constant stream of triple-digit changes help to cloud those memories even further.

At any rate, I hope you're all enjoying the (bumpy) ride...

posted by Brian at 6:13 PM | 0 comments

How People Found Me - March Edition


The Categories

CategoryMarch CountFebruary Count
Technology250220
Billy Joel122181
Celebrity Look Alikes5458
DSL4439
Overrated Films4026
Family2320
Accent2217
Adult/Porn-Related2115
Bill Moffit160
Disney159
Politics1521
Pizza154
Sleeping126
Cal/Stanford1013
The "I Should be Sleeping" Song910
The Simpsons910
Penn711


Queries were once again up slightly this month (768 vs. 733). The category list is pretty much the same as well - technology, Billy Joel, Celebrity Look Alikes, etc.. The only surprises were Bill Moffit (one post on his death from me yielded 16 queries, and quite a few top Google results), a 67% increase in Disney-related queries, and a 300% increase in Pizza-related queries (because of Este Pizza's re-opening).

The Referring Sites

This month's Referral site of the month award goes to burlaki.com, who was responsible for 18 pageviews all on its own. Also, I got 19 pageviews from something called playlist.com, which I believe has indexed the one and only MP3 that's on my site. Popular month for the Muppets, I guess...

The Keywords

All told, 768 queries resulted in hits to Familygreenberg.com in March (35 more than were used in February). Here are some of the more entertaining samples:

We start with our most popular category, Technology:

QueryRank / # of ResultsComments
anheuser busch powerpoint templates>500 / 14,900Someone's working a little too hard on their party favors, no?
how would you position microsoft to compete with ibm13 / 831,000Well, Microsoft makes software and IBM makes hardware, so I'm not sure I would. Also, both companies seem to be doing pretty well on their own, no?
is there a hidden moon in excel spreadsheet>500 / 9,370A hidden moon? Maybe they're talking about Excel, the 1980's adventure video game?


Next, we move to our second most popular category, Billy Joel:

QueryRank / # of ResultsComments
billy joel good night my angle>500 / 1,240,000If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times: I Should be Sleeping - best friend of the poor speller!
billy joel sucks in concert4 / 139,000This is notable because it's the first out of thousands of search queries that was decidedly negative. Needless to say, this person's query result disagreed with his implicit assumption.
when the curious girl realizes she is under glass bill joel2 / 151,000I can say with a fair degree of certainty that I know the lyrics to every song Billy Joel has ever written. That said, I have no idea what this person was looking for. . .


And then there's always the weird & wacky:

QueryRank / # of ResultsComments
whens the world series2 / 54,600The baseball season started on March 31st. Here's a guy/gal who really likes to prepare ahead of time. . .
what is the longest wait for a ride at magic kingdom13 / 43,400The one in which your 5-year old needs to go to the bathroom right as they approach the ride. Trust me. . .
baby greenberg.com11 / 17,100Heh. . . this person definitely wound up at the wrong web site. . .
jimmy buffett lyrics and bicycle>500 / 153,000<Scooby-Doo 'Huh???' sound> Bicycle? Got me . . .
air force bloopers12 / 134,000Oh yeah, gotta love the air force's blooper reel. Hey, here's the one where the pilot accidentally flies right into the plate glass window. . . Bwah, hah, hah. . .
awareness test bear suit; bear doing moonwalk>500 / 178,000These are both directly related to this post. I just find it funny how the queries look if you haven't seen the post.
cost of new addition to house18 / 29,100,000This is more strange than funny. We're currently undergoing a significant home renovation, but I haven't blogged about it at all, so it's strange that this query would have suddenly led to my site. Maybe a new Google Mindreading feature?!?
pontificating platypus6 / 1,010Coolest. Query. Ever.
este pizza14 / 611,000My favorite pizza place in Salt Lake City (note: I've never been to SLC) re-opened this month, and my site came up in 15 different queries just like this one. . .
balanced argument about war>500 / 1,720,000I'll take that as a compliment. So thanks, whoever you are. . .
were tic tacs ever 1.5 calories?>500 / 22,000Man, I hate it when the things you thought you knew turn out to be false. Disillusionment sets in, 1.5 calories at a time. . .


Our regular "Adult/Porn-Related" feature almost didn't make it this month, as the queries are getting, to be frank, rather repetitive and boring. Only one caught my eye as even worth mentioning this time around:

QueryRank / # of ResultsComments
caught wearing mother in law lingerie>500 / 379,000Once again, someone out there has problems that Google just isn't going to solve. . .

posted by Brian at 1:55 PM | 2 comments

Familygreenberg.com Health Check - March Edition


MetricFebruaryMarch% Change
Visits1,4361,486+3.48%
Pageviews2,0592,079+0.97%
Pages/Visit1.431.40-2.43%
Avg Time on Site0:450:37-17.04%
Bounce Rate83.36%83.92%-0.67%
% New Visitors86.28%89.43%+3.65%


March was basically the same as February, albeit with two extra days to make it happen. I consider this a good result, given that I took the entire last week of March off for a family vacation. When I did that in December, the numbers dropped off dramatically, and took two months to recover. So hopefully, there's some momentum around here going into April.

posted by Brian at 1:54 PM | 0 comments

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Fashion Tip


A quick note to people who wear a tiny diamond chip about halfway up their nose (a la last year's American Idol winner, Jordin Sparks): unless the light hits it just right, it looks like a zit.

That is all...

posted by Brian at 9:15 AM | 1 comments