I received a notice from Flickr that they’re doing system maintenance tomorrow (Thursday 7/24/13) between 4 PM PDT to 10 PM PDT. That would be 7 PM and 1 AM for those of us on the right coast. A lot of my images on the Eyebrow are hosted by Flickr, so you won’t be seeing them during this time. All will be well.
Here, have a picture of a mountain. If you can see this, then Flickr is up.
While the alert has gone out for all royal baby watchers to converge on London, Baby Boy Ruhsam is still waiting for his moment. We are four days from the official due date, but the standard deviation off the delivery projection is ten days, so he could come any time. Or wait a week. Or two.
I freaked us both out last night when we were discussing this week’s calendar and remarked, “So, we’re going to have a baby this week.”
On another note, I was going to make a PBR clone to welcome BBR, but laagering is too much work. I guess I’ll just have to bring some forties to the hospital.
Artemis gets a lot of play time here at the Eyebrow. Apollo decided to Occupy a bag therefore stood still long enough for a couple snaps.
Because I’m sitting in a chair, waiting for my oil to be changed, here are some recent cellphone snaps.
This phenomenon is known as goat-track, also known as footpath-without-sidewalk. The fascinating thing about this, and a call for citizens to be active with their local DOTs is that this unpaved section was about 100 feet long and could easily have been filled. There isn’t any engineering issues with going out and paving it. Why hasn’t it been done? No one pushed for it.
I renewed my GA drivers license yesterday. I’d heard horror stories about the hassle having to upgrade to RealID standards. Going on a Friday afternoon in Norcross, with a Passport, a social security card, a utility bill, and my existing license, I was in and out in 38 minutes. Excellent.
It’s been raining like Noah’s Bad Day for about two weeks. We get the occasional rainbow.
Jenn and I celebrated our tenth anniversary last night! We went out to Chops in Buckhead and entertained ourselves by timing her contractions.
I’ve been taping, and at least skimming, all the Tour de France stages since stage 7. It’s (of course) making me want to ride, which I can’t do because of my back. Sad panda.
They put the craziest warnings on baby products. What lawsuit made this company apply the warning, “KEEP AWAY FROM FIRE” on their bath towel? How about, “DO NOT INSERT IN TOASTER”? Seems about as likely.
Ten years ago today I married my best friend. We were married outside on the coast of Maine attended by great friends and family. Since then we’ve lived and worked together to make a wonderful home for ourselves (and now for a new addition). It’s been a wonderful ten years and I look forward to celebrating our 20th, 30th, and further anniversaries together.
Jenn and I met at RPI when I was a sophomore and she was a senior in high school. She came for a weekend attending a Society of Women Engineer’s recruitment event. She stayed with our friend Kristin and I’m happy to say that I didn’t entirely freak her out either that weekend, or the next year after matriculating at RPI. We started dating in February of 1995 and have been together in one form or another ever since.
It’s been a great time and she’s the love of my life. I can’t wait to see what happens next!
Other pictures from the course of our relationship can be seen at this older post. The pictures on today’s post were taken by our friend Brian Richardson.
The official due date is July 26th. That’s two weeks from yesterday.
The Atlantic capitalized on the online furor surrounding the Syfy Channels “Sharknado” which hit the air last night at 9:00 PM. The premise of the article can be paraphrased thus: “Uhhh…Twitter? Facebook? Sharknado wasn’t very good.”
The thing is, no one thought this movie was going to be good. We didn’t watch it because of any anticipation of excellent acting or great story (although I was a bit disappointed by the lackluster special effects). No, we watched it because the very concept was so ridiculous that it required us to sample it. It’s just like the, “Wow, this stinks! Here, smell it!” that happens frequently. We (or at least, I) will never watch that movie again but I will certainly say that yes, I stayed up drinking while watching Sharknado with some friends, because how is that different from spending time at a bar with the same people? It’s not really. It’s the social thing. Which is exactly why the social medias went bonkers over it last night. This was a movie of epically bad proportions which had to be shared with the rest of the world. But again, no one is going to be talking about this next week.
Where The Atlantic seems to run off the rails is the idea that SyFy might leverage this social media barnstorm into better contracts and deals with cable companies. I suppose that is possible, but this Sharknado thing is a one-hit wonder, unlikely to be repeated any time soon. For example, SyFy has put out the following shark-themed movies in the past: Dinoshark, Sharktopus, Shark Swarm, Swamp Shark, and more. None of these had the grip of Sharknado because their basic concepts weren’t turned to a ridiculosity level of 11. SyFy is not going to be hit by the lighting of Sharknado again anytime soon. Business deals that bank on that sort of social media storm will founder, and business people aren’t stupid.
I tweeted this yesterday, and I’m not the only one who thinks this:
SHARKNADO may be this decade's Snakes on a Plane, although I doubt it will be nearly so good.
— Bill Ruhsam (@bruhsam) July 11, 2013
Yes, Sharknado may be the latest version of Snakes on a Plane (2006), which got traction solely because of Samuel Jackson being quoted shouting, “I’ve had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!” Without that line, no one would have gone to see that movie. With that line, it seems like everyone did. And yet, there hasn’t been an equivalent movie since then despite studios knowing that if they can generate the groundswell with a gimmick similar to Sam Jacksons, we will go and spend our money.
Sharknado has certainly given us something to talk about and marvel at. Thankfully, we’ll all be done soon.
I’ve been less prolific on the Eyebrow of late. Many reasons, of course, such as BABYBABYBABYBABY and etc.
However, I’ve also detected a strong trend toward microblogging in my current work/life/phone/fun balance. With a few exceptions such as posting some good images (which I haven’t been doing much recently) and the occasional longer piece, I’ve just not been feeling the need to open up the computer when I can just hit the phone and throw something up on the twitters.
(There’s something to be said for compressing a thought into 140 characters. Or it says something that most of our thoughts can be compressed into 140 characters.)
Part of this lack of blogging recently has been due to the BABYBABYBABY thing because I figure you don’t want to be overwhelmed with baby stuff. Another reason is because with my back issues still ongoing, I’m often worn out at the end of the day and just not in the mood to dump stuff out of my head into a browser. While blogging ain’t hard, it does require more oomph than MONKEY HITS RT ON PHONE. Also due to the back issues, I’ve found myself parked on the couch more often and Twitter just naturally occupies time when I’m not reading a book or watching Le Tour.
So, in case you’re not following me on Twitter, I’m @bruhsam. A lot of my stuff is there.
Jenn and I haven’t been “nesting” ((A friend introduced us to this term. He asked, “Have you been nesting?” I answered, “What?” This seems a negative term for something that probably everyone does. I mean, it’s a pain in the butt to entirely strip a room, repaint and redecorate. I need a good reason to do something like that and a transference of ownership is one of them, but I wouldn’t call it “nesting.” Hmmph. Rabble rabble.)) very much. The one thing we’ve done is convert my office into the nursery. Here is a before after set of pics.
So I’ve been displaced until such time as we can get the downstairs finished up. Knowing this was coming is one of the reasons I bought the Chromebook last month.
The colors we picked were bright green and a pale color for the trim indistinguishable from “off white”. The official Behr color names are “Crisp Green” and “Mist Yellow.” I’ll just call them green and off-white.
The letters on the wall in the picture above are the short-list for first names that Baby Boy Ruhsam is being fitted for: Zachary, Griffin, Sidney, Orion, and August.
More pictures from the nursery change-over are here.
We are three weeks and counting until Jenn’s due date. That’s a bit freaky.
Last weekend, our good friend Jessica threw us a Baby Shower here in Marietta (this complements the one we already had in Maine). An interesting twist on this shower was that we had given Babys-R-Us the boot for purposes of shower registry. To replace it, we used Amazon’s shower registry service, which meant we had a big stack of brown Amazon boxes waiting in the hall. One of those boxes contained a pair of Super Soakers! Someone gave us Super Soakers for our baby shower!
We were a bit confused. Especially because there wasn’t any gift information telling us who sent them.
This was forwarded to me yesterday from my friend Rachel.
Dear Ms. ******
Thank you for your purchase. After reviewing your order we noticed that our shipping department made an error by sending you Nerf Super Soaker Scatter Blaster – 2 Pack instead of Lambs & Ivy Safari Express Bedding Collection.
Oops.