Unthinkability

• 286 days left before analog TV broadcasts go dark.
• 287 days left before your grandma notices.

Not sure if I care enough to blog about it.  I’m just trying to figure out how to ‘game’ the government’s “digital converter box voucher system.”

According to a story from our local NBC affiliate:

The coupon looks like a gift card and is worth forty dollars towards the purchase of a converter box.

Digital converter boxes start at $49.99.

Maybe this is another (albeit covert) attempt to restart the economy!

Home, sick with the kids, watching Dora Puppy Power and havin’ some chicken noodle soup.

Speaking of chickens, I’ve been doodling a particular chicken at work.  He has become a kind of developer mascot at work, and the rest of the staff has grown attached to it.  Why a chicken?

The chicken story is this:

While I was leading the dev team through a design of an intermittently-connected network data scenario, we were outlining the development steps involved.  My handwriting can get out-of-control at times, and I wrote one of the steps on the whiteboard a bit too sloppily;  I meant to write “Patrick Check in” [his source code], and the team thought that I wrote “Patrick Chicken.”

When the senior developer asked “Does that say ‘Patrick Chicken’?” I responded by saying “No, THIS is a Patrick Chicken” and I drew a chicken on the white board, wrote Patrick’s name, and then drew an arrow from “Patrick” to the chicken to remove any doubt.

The [Company] Chicken was born.  I’m considering starting a web comic.

I made my first [and probably last] web comic today while laying on the couch recovering from this crappy head cold.  It’s clear to me now that doing a web comic is not as easy as scribbling some lines on the screen with Microsoft Paint, posting it to your Blogger account, and raking in the merchandising moolah.  Scott Johnson sure makes it look easy. 

I make it look easy, too, but for a whole different reason.  My comic style has a very “Doonesbury” feel to it, if Doonesbury was drawn by Garry Trudeau when he was 8 year-old.  Now, without further ado, here is the first and last installment of…

“Unthinkability- A Web Comic by Scott Fletcher”

 
(Click for a larger version)

So, I can definitely see the appeal of doing a web comic.  I had fun using my Wacom tablet again, making a template and setting up tool presets in Photoshop, arranging layers, etc.  In the end, I have two emotional responses to this experience:

1. I should give this a try, give it an honest chance, have fun, and
   — OR —-
2. I am old enough to resist the allure of drawing web comics.  This is just another escapist hobby, and it can kiss my shiny metal ass.

Being a responsible adult with no experience in this realm, I’ll leave the full-blown comics to the professionals.  I might resurrect my bar napkin drawings as a comic as time permits… heck, who am I kidding?  I’ll change my mind tomorrow, and then change it again next week.

UPDATE: I’ve already changed my mind.

My wife and I took the kids to the local zoo on Saturday, and a volunteer at the zoo gave my 3 year-old a sheet of shiny gold star stickers.  It wasn’t until we got home when my daughter gave me one of the gold star stickers that I realized the power contained in each one of those stickers.

Ah, the gold star… placed by your name, on a list of names.

I sat there at the dining room table, staring at my 3 year-old’s sheet of 100 gold star stickers and I tried to absorb the fact that “they were just stickers.” I almost giggled when I realized that I could now, as an adult, go buy 100,000 of those gold star stickers and place them on everything I own and everything I make. 

Why, I could put one on my Zune and say “For the world’s best music player.”  I could put one on my refrigerator and say “For the world’s best food-keeper-colder.”  I could put one on each of my software design memos and put an “A++” with a circle around it, with a handwritten “Nice Job!” next to the gold star.  I would have the ultimate power!

My mood turned sour as my ethics awoke; The Gold Star is not a toy.  The Gold Star is an honor, bestowed upon you by a higher authority.  Just because you are now an adult does not mean that you can bestow it upon yourself.

The fact that just anyone can walk in to a store and buy a sheet of Gold Star stickers troubles me deeply.  In my opinion, buying a sheet of those stickers should be as difficult as buying a roll of U.S. currency paper on which you could print any amount of money you wished.  If you had a sheet of those Gold Star stickers, you could fool yourself into thinking that you actually did a good job, and you could probably find some other people to share in your self-congratulatory circle jerk. 

You could start a new religion by convincing people that the important part of feeling happy was the “feeling of accomplishment” and not the actual accomplishment itself.  You could teach people how to remember the “gold star feeling,” meditate for a bit, and have that sense of accomplishment without actually accomplishing anything!  You could call your new organization “The Association for Gold Star Stickers for All Mankind,” open a ‘retreat center,’ and you could teach each others how to fool their brains into getting gold stars without actually earning them.

Blasphemy.  Gold Stars are special because of the effort and sacrifice that they represent.  They are the “Purple Heart” of our adolescence, and I will not let my children merely play with gold star stickers.  They can play with blue, red, and green stars, but never gold.  They’ll have to earn those, and when they do earn the gold stars, the stickers will be affixed to each item for which they earned the gold star.  That is my way of delineating the boundary between ‘pretending’ and ‘deceiving yourself.’

When my wife reads this, she will think that I am crazy to fixate on such a small thing.  She will wonder why I want to torture the kids.  When I describe these ideologies to her, her eyes just glaze over and she quits listening; she just waits for the noise to stop and then she says “Ok, honey.” 

Enforcement of this “Gold Star Edict” will be my burden.  Mine, and mine alone.

I just started exploring the latest version of the Zune desktop software.  The “Social” feature is new to this version, and its presence in the user interface is quiet and understated.  But after clicking on the button… I say ‘wow.’

First of all, the Zune Social Network and the XBOX Live social network are linked. Click the two links to see my two profiles in the two networks.  I suspect that they are the exact same network driven by the same technology and infrastructure.  In fact, see my XBOX and Zune ‘badges’ in the margin of this blog.

My XBOX Live friends are displayed in my Zune Social friends list, and I can view their libraries and favorites, and hear samples of their songs with links to the albums and artists and [of course] a button to buy the music.

I will admit that only one of my eighteen twenty-five XBOX Live friends actually own a Zune, but that one (hi h00d00!) has friends with Zune devices, who have friends who have friends who have friends.  I just spent 20 minutes diving into other peoples music collections and listening to generous 30 second samples.  I finally grok what Microsoft has been up to for the past few years. This feature alone makes the purchase of a Zune a no-brainer.

I have harshed on the Zune software in the past, but this latest version of desktop software and firmware is solid.  More than merely usable, it has become… dare I say… easy.  Easy to find, subscribe to, and listen to podcasts.  Easy to find, share and buy music.  Easy to rip CDs and manage collections.  Combine all of that with their “Sync” automotive media platform and the XBOX/Media Center initiatives, and you can see their plan coming together. 

I’m no Microsoft fan boy, and I took a gamble when I bought my Zune two years ago.  The gamble has paid off.

Microsoft is always fashionably late to the party, but they always go home with the hot chicks.

Now… if they could just bring some more ’sexy’ to the devices.

I was working my regular late-night shift on the “Google Earth Citizens Global Patrol” and I found something suspicious: a giant patch of land in Saudi Arabia on which [it appears that] they are growing enormous compact discs, 45 RPM records, and LP records. Each circle measures 2,300 feet across! Check out this view that I captured: (click the image to make bigger.)

Coordinates:

See it in Google maps by clicking here.

The Saudis are allies with the United States, so I can only assume that the Saudis are either a) storing their oil reserves in classic vinyl, or b) building a massive defensive shield out of mutant Bee Gees records.

Either way, I’m keeping my Shaun Cassidy albums next to my bed in case the shiznit hits the fanizzle.