Miscellaneous rambling, and bragging about my kids.

THANK YOU SO MUCH. I'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR THIS SONG (WINTER) SINCE I FIRST HEARD IT. I THOUGHT IT WAS I REMEMBER BY PERISH RUBY. NOW I KNOW. AND NOW I HAVE THE SONG.

Hi Everybody,

Over at my real job we've just launched our Facebook application, Connect At College.  The idea is to bring social networking to the college planning process and allow students (past, present and future) to choose the schools that interest them, and then compare notes with their friends, ask questions of alumni, stuff like that.  These days your "friends" go well beyond the kids you see in the halls every day.  Some of them you may have never even met!  Going to college together could be that opportunity :).

The application works primarily for high school students, but it's also setup to handle college students past and present who set themselves up as advisors to offer suggestions and answer questions. 

Future plans for the app include the opportunity to speak directly with representatives and admissions officers from the colleges themselves.  Personally I'm not planning on stopping until we've completely transformed the whole going to college thing.  My oldest is 5yrs old right now, so I figure I've got a good 10 years to change the world! 🙂

Hope you get a chance to check it out!  Thanks for indulging me.

– Duane

scrubs is amazing! dont dis it. best episode eva!

Bobby Fischer has died. I don't think that people today can imagine exactly what Fischer did for chess back during the Cold War. He kicked Russia's ass in 1972 by beating their champion, Boris Spassky. And he was damned smug about it.

Perhaps the best part to that story is the second half, that not so many people know about. 20 years later he came out of his seclusion to play a rematch in Yugoslavia, and again kicked Spassky's ass. That's when the problems really began, because the US had told him not to do that for one reason or another (there was some sort of embargo at the time). But if I remember this part correctly, after he won the match, the US Dept of Treasury was happy to say, "Great, when you come back into the country we're gonna take your money, you realize. What you did was illegal." So, what's Fischer do?

He never comes back. He's even filmed spitting on the US order not to play.

He renounces his US citizenship and disappears off the face of the earth. Turns out he went to live in Japan. I remember the story of when he was discovered a few years ago, trying to use his revoked passport to get on a flight. There was a bit in the story about the Japanese woman he was with, and how he was using her for citizenship, and Fischer's claims that all the Japanese women loved him because he was hung like a horse. I'll have to dig up that reference. 🙂

Of course he had his detractors. He was a well known anti-Semite (despite the fact that his mother was Jewish), and after Sept 11 he made some comments to the effect of "Good, that makes me happy." Quite a colorful man indeed.

For a presentation we're doing at work, I need the image of a mystery behind a door.  And the first thing that came to my mind is an old movie poster that shows this big dark, mysterious door, and there's light peeking out around all the edges from the other side.  Standing in front of the door is a little kid in his pajamas, like he's trying to decide whether to open it.

Anybody have any idea what I'm talking about?  My first thought was Poltergeist, and others have said that too, but I can't find this image associated with that movie.  That movie is famous for the girl sitting in front of the television screen.

Another thought was Close Encounters, where the door is open and the kid is watching the space ship land, but I don't think that's what I was thinking of.

Anybody know what I'm talking about?  It's killin me!

It is fun communicating with someone so young that they don't really understand the rules of communication yet. My 3yr old's favorite expression lately is "last day". This is used as in "Today I would like cereal. Last day when I had the red chocolate berries I didn't like them."

It's just her generic for "previously." Like a cross between "last week" and "yesterday."

"Red chocolate berries", by the way, are raspberries. We recently had blackberries in the house, which somehow started being called "chocolate berries", and she liked them. This week we tried raspberries under the guise that they were "like chocolate berries, only red." Maybe not.

I wonder if I'll last for this show, especially as it appears to be going against Grey's Anatomy. When I start getting consistently new episodes over there, Trump is dead to me.

This week starts our with Pierce, apparently drunk, tearing into Omarosa. That's entertaining, but it also makes him look pretty foolish.

This week is make a tv commercial week, and Gene Simmons is the producer. Stephen Baldwin, citing 20 years acting experience (in Bio-Dome, though…), gets to be director. On the ladies' side it is Nely, one of the celenbrities I've never heard of.

This episode is all about how much of an arrogant ass Gene Simmons is. But we knew that from last week's trailer, since it's all supposed to lead up to him insulting Trump's daughter. What happens is that Ivanka comes to check up on the guys and Gene, who has been in "no time to lose" mode from the word go, tells Baldwin that "She'll wait." And then adds, in case anybody didn't know that he's obnoxious, "You're probably gonna go tell the girls team what we're up to, out of that whole sisterhood thing."

The women, on the other hand, are wholly uninteresting. They have a little meditation exercise, which Omarosa calls bullsh*t, and then they visit with the customer for a "Just tell us what you want and we'll do that" meeting – something that the guys skip altogether. The most interesting part of the women's part of the show is when Nadia forgets to order lunch, and you can just tell that she's going on the chopping block because "We would have won if there's been food!"

During the presentations both teams are lousy. The women oversell it, saying they brought a whole Internet campaign as well as radio, when all Trump wants to see is the tv spot. Gene Simmons for the men is equally offensive, telling Trump he doesn't want to talk, he just wants to show his product.

In the end, the guys win. The women got screwed a bit this week as Trump immediately goes to the "Why didn't you use your celebrity to sell it?" thing, but they offered that to the sponsor, who said that he wanted real people with read dog stories. As I guessed, Carol calls out Nadia for firing because she forgot the food. Sure enough it is Nadia who goes, not necessarily because of the food but because nobody sees her as a business leader.

Next week is apparently going to be a spotlight on Simmons again, according to the trailer. I'm beginning to think that he's not getting fired for a long, long time.

EXCLUSIVE: Police Found Bite and Bruises on Jayden James Upon Arrival at Britney Spears' Home, reports US Magazine.

Oh my god! Crazy Britney bit her kid? Wow, she must be nuts! Wow, they're gonna take them away from her for sure!

Now, breathe.

Get down to, oh, the…let me see…1 2 3…4th paragraph. The one where it says, "police were then told by Federline's bodyguard, who had been at the home to pick up the kids, that the injuries were on Jayden before the child had even arrived at Spears' home earlier in the day, and that his older brother, Sean Preston, had actually bit him."

Gossip magazines suck.

Two men arrested wheeling a dead body across town so they could cash his social security check.

I'm tempted to call shenanigans on CNN, as I don't believe that anybody could be this stupid. They wheeled the guy to the check cashing store, then went in without him to give it the first try. When the cashier said the guy had to do it himself, they went back out to get the body. Of course, a crowd – including police – had already formed around the body. So we'll never know exactly what they were planning to do next. An officer with more of a sense of humor might have stepped back and let them give it a shot. Were they planning to tie the dead man's wrists and ankles to their own and marionette him through the front door?

Should have taken him golfing.

I made a HUGE mistake before Christmas. Last night was a big one, even if I was only on the computer chatting. I woke up this morning to it, and I caught the name, so I looked it up. The reason is, it really means a lot to me. I love it so much.