"Tyler likes to"

I've been quite lazy in updating this little baby the last few weeks. I've got loads of things that I'd like to post, but I find that I'd rather read, budget, work or sleep than blog. Funny how that works out.

I saw this on facebook and found it quite funny. To play, Google "(your name) likes to" (in quotation marks) and report back on the first ten items.

Googling "Tyler likes to" returns:

1. Tyler likes to flaunt his body. (this is true)
2. Tyler likes to run and play. Tyler likes to be in my backyard. (Whose backyard?)
3. Tyler likes to play McDonald's: Meal Hunt, in which he searches for lost McNuggets. (Tyler is also known for eating food and candy that he finds in strange places)
4. Tyler likes to rock the kitchen with big, bold flavors and sophisticated yet accessible fare. (Tyler also likes to rock the office, the casbah, and the bed, if you know what I mean. Oops, lets leave that last bit out. Tyler has issues with too much information)
5. Tyler likes to relax sewing for her girls and tending her... (this one is up to your own imagination)
6. Tyler likes to play baseball, go fishing. (Both very true in my younger days, now I can't even run to first base)
7. Tyler likes to strew parts of herself in all of the characters, like the fragments of real objects that Jeremy embeds in his collages. (This must have been lifted from my journal, back in high school, when I thought I was a girl)
8. Tyler likes to pour it on himself with a smaller bucket. (referring, of course, to warm Peach Fresca)
9. Tyler likes to masterbate to food by Cody. (I'm really not sure where to even go with this one)
10. Tyler likes to smoke corncob pipes. (This is hindering his dream of becoming the next Eminem or Frosty the Snowman)

Just for fun, I looked at what the first picture returned was on Google image search. You never know what you're going to get:

Winner!

I totally won the pictured Wiimote charging station today. There was a contest on Crunchgear for these babies but you had to send them a picture of your Halloween costume. I didn't do that and they saved one prize for just anybody that e-mailed them. This morning I received the following e-mails:

My entry
On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 4:32 PM, Tyler <dont-taze-me-bro@hotmail.com> wrote:
pretty please.

His first reply (this morning):
On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 12:43 PM, Peter <haha@crunchgear.com> wrote:
Send over your address, Tyler.

His second reply:
On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 12:44 PM, Peter <haha@crunchgear.com> wrote:
Wait a second. You didn't win, Tyler.

Ouch. His third (and hopefully final) reply:
On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 12:45 PM, Peter <haha@crunchgear.com> wrote:
Oh no. You did! Oops.

Hopefully, I'll see those babies on my doorstop in a few days.

The Audacity of Football

I just finished reading Barack Obama's most recent book, The Audacity of Hope. I won't give a review here, for that check out my book review blog. I did want to point out a few things that I found interesting though.

• After Bush's tax cuts, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his receptionist or most average Americans. Copying the quote from my book review blog:

"(p. 190 - Opportunity, Obama recounting a conversation with Warren Buffet) "I did a calculation the other day," he said as we sat down in his office. "Though I've never used tax shelters or had a tax planner, after including the payroll taxes we play, I'll pay a lower effective tax rate this year than my receptionist. In fact, I'm pretty sure I pay a lower rate than the average American. And if the President has his way, I'll be paying even less."

• I don't actually remember the other items. Oh well. I'll just keep going with other random tidbits.
• In the Colley Rankings (used in the BCS calculations, not to be confused with Austin [shoot your mouth off] Collie), the Utes are the #1 team in America (due to their incredible win over perennial powerhouse UNLV). If the season ended today, Utah would be playing Wisconsin for the Colley National Title.
• According to the Massey Ratings (another one of the 6 computer algorithms used in the BCS rankings), Utah is just a little behind USC for first place. Regardless, if the season ended today, those two teams would be playing for the Massey Title.
• Are we really sure the season needs to continue? Playing Weber State isn't going to help those rankings...
• There's been a wootoff the last few days. While I didn't score a bag of crap (I tried though. The crappy servers were too bogged down) I bought my parents a computer and I got a cheap bluetooth headset.
• YouTube broke when I was watching a video earlier today. You should really check it out. Really, I mean that.
  
• I've been working late the last couple of evenings helping my boss finish a big project. No sweat though, I still love my job.

How Fast is Your Connection?

I loved the speed of the internet at our old apartment in University Village. I even bragged about the speed of it a while back. Lucky for us, now that we have to pay for an expensive internet connection we get more than double the speed. At least Comcast no longer practices traffic shaping. Can anyone beat it?

(The fastest I've seen is from a buddy that works at L3. 30,000+ kb/s download speeds!)

woot.addict

I'm a woot addict (or as Alison claims, a wootaholic). I've known about woot for a long time but I've been afraid of signing up for it because I knew that it was something that I could quickly become addicted to. For those of you that aren't aware, woot is a website that sells new and refurbished items at bargain prices. Every night at 11:00 PM (mountain time) they list a new product which remains on sale until it sells out or a new product is listed (the next night).

I'm excited because it's almost 11:00 PM. Alison is cooking herself some French toast and I'm patiently waiting for a new woot to appear. Here are the woots that snagged me:

1. Toshiba 1080p Upconverting DVD Player with HDMI Cable - $39.99
Our DVD Player has started to refuse to play our discs. While we don't have an HDTV we know that we will someday and this was a great price on a name-brand player. I wasn't going to buy one unless it could upconvert so we got it.

2. DesignerVision 1 GB MP3 Player - $9.99
This woot was for Alison. She actually got a pink one though.

3. Kodak EasyShare Z1275 12MP/720p Digital Camera w/5x Optical Zoom - $99.99
There is nothing wrong with our digital camera. Its biggest faults are that it only takes pictures at 3.2 MP, has a tiny viewing screen and is quite bulky. So far we have been really impressed with this new camera. When I post pictures of my recent trip (forthcoming, I swear) then ya'll will be able to see how sweet a deal it is too.

If you're in the market for some new electronics, keep your eyes tuned to wooters and you just might get lucky.

Save the World

Take that Paris.

Maggot Dreams

I rarely remember my dreams. Last night though, I had one that was unforgettable. I've had a bit of a sinus infection, which just drains all of my energy. In this dream, I still had the sinus infection and I was going to take some Dimetapp (why Dimetapp? I'm not sure, I haven't had the stuff in years - but I love its grape flavor). I took a couple of teaspoons of Dimetapp and then I looked into the bottle and it was full of maggots swimming inside (they actually might have been mealworms. Is there really a difference though?). I had already swallowed one of the teaspoonfuls but the second was still in my mouth. I then proceeded to pull four maggots out of my mouth, carefully in order to not let any of the delicious grape Dimetapp spill out and I threw them, one-by-one, out the door. I have no idea what I did with the rest of the medicine but I sure hope that I threw it out. Gross, eh?

On another note, here are a couple of interesting websites that I've found recently:

Vote what Marc Ecko should do with Bonds' home run ball #756. He paid more than $750,000 for it and now he's leaving it up to the public to decide what should be done with the thing.

I'm thinking of signing Ada up for this service when she turns 13. What do you think? (Of course I would have to ask for $65,000 at the least).

Potpourri

Potpourri was always my favorite Jeopardy category. There's been a lot going on that I haven't had a chance to write about. This weekend was a busy one. We had a birthday party Thursday night, wedding reception Friday night, wedding, wedding dinner and baptism Saturday, baby blessing Sunday and we went the Bees game tonight.

My niece Maddie got baptized on Saturday. She's my parents oldest grandchild so every milestone that she reaches is obsessed about more than any other. It was exciting to see her take this step and then try and remember some of my baptism. I don't remember much. I was baptized while my family lived in Ohio. I do remember getting a candy bar from my Grandpa Squire though ;).
Tucker and Rachelle's little baby boy was blessed on Sunday morning. Keaton Tucker Steed was born just over a month ago and was blessed while Kevin and Alysia Bischoff (my sister and her husband who live in Las Vegas) were here. It's always nice to see them, but they were probably a little stressed because their 3-year old daughter suffered a concussion after falling off of her bike on Saturday.

Tonight Alison and I went to the Bees game with her parents and brother's family. It was an exciting game that the Bees won 11-4. We had to leave after the 6th inning for Ada to go to sleep but we saw the majority of the offense from both teams. The starting shortstop for the Bees (Casey Smith) had 3 errors in the first inning. The Bees are lucky to have only gone down 1-0 during that time. He also went 0-3 from the plate when Alison and I left. Needless to say, he wasn't having a very good day.

My Windows Live Hotmail account was upgraded to 5 GB today. Take that all of you gmail users with 2888.426690 MB and counting and all of you yahoo mail users with a measly... ok, I just checked and yahoo mail users get unlimited storage. I take back everything mean that I said. For a while there, I was feeling pretty good about myself.

Alison and I rarely watch anything except sports, news, The Colbert Report and American Idol on TV. Last Tuesday we were just flipping through the channels and we stopped on ABC. There was a show called Just For Laughs on from 7:00-8:00 PM. We were both laughing so hard that we were almost crying. It's a candid camera type show that was obviously filmed in another country. There is no dialog, only music to cover up whatever language was originally spoken in the show. We both highly recommend it to anyone looking for a laugh.

School starts a week from today - yuck. I just found out a couple of days ago that one of the classes that I was looking forward to taking has been canceled. What a joke. Maybe I'll take a Poly-Sci class or something.

Family Names

While running an analysis I had a few minutes and I made this sweet plot using the interesting data on the Social Security Administration's website. The plot is of the popularity of Alison's, Ada's and my name over the last 126 years.

(I guess the plot is a little backwards because the more popular a name is, the lower the line and the popularity of Alison is a little misleading because even just this year there were two spellings of Alison (Allyson and Allison) that were more popular)

Link Dump

Here are a few random links (yes, I posted this earlier, but I made a few changes):

• The coolest site for basketball stats. Check out this gameflow chart of the Jazz game from last night. The +/- column on the far right shows you who was the most and least productive players of the night.
  
• Something like this could only happen in Utah. Enjoy an FM100 traffic report.
• The homeless get a lot of pizza.
  
• Track a flight or see all of the airplanes in the air right now. Visit http://flightaware.com/.
• For those of you bloggers that want millions of visitors, here's 101 steps to becoming a better blogger.
  
• Learn about any country in the world (at least what the CIA thinks about them). The Central Intelligence Agency's "The World Factbook" has the answers.
• There are a ton of good radio/music sites but one I've been enjoying lately lets you pick your music according to your mood. http://www.musicovery.com/.
• Set up a temporary e-mail address for use when you have to give out your e-mail address on a website. http://spambox.us/ (I use this for free Redbox rentals).
  
• 15 Firefox tricks.
  
• E-mail files of up to 100 MB using http://www.mailbigfile.com/.
• And as a climax, Cows With Guns.

Improv Everywhere

I got an e-mail the other day from Jason Whinham (a friend from High School, studying Health Administration in Richmond, VA) telling me about the website improv everywhere. He directed me to a "mission" that they went on in New York City. Their mission was to go into a Home Depot store and shop normally for a few minutes. Then all at the same time, they would start moving in slow motion for 5 minutes. After that, they would shop normally for 5 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of standing perfectly still. It sounds like a pretty funny concept, especially considering that there were more than 200 people involved. You can read about that mission here.

After reading about Slo-Mo Home Depot, I was browsing their website and came across the mission Rob!. I found this mission especially entertaining, so much so that it was bringing tears to my eyes as I read, I was laughing so hard.

If you ever find yourself in New York City and something strange happens (because nothing strange ever happens in NYC), check out their website www.improveverywhere.com to make sure that you weren't a victim of improvisation.