Son of Bits of Randomness

Yes, I’m a geek: Sometimes I just can’t help myself. Not a day goes by that I don’t read about some cool new application over on Mashable and then immediately have to look it up. Well, it happened again Friday when they were pimping the new CardStar application for the iphone. The whole point of the application is to rid yourself of all of those damned discount cards hanging from your key chain. All you have to do is find the merchant and enter the numbers below the bar code on the back of your card. The app creates a bar code on the face of your phone that the cashier can scan. So, now you’re never at a store without your discount card – assuming you haven’t also forgotten your phone – and you don’t have to have forty of them messing with your keys.  I dowloaded it, set it up and gave it a go.  It worked like a charm. The funniest part of the whole thing was trying to convince the cashier at the grocery store on Sunday to just scan my phone.

Is that REALLY the best you can do? I use Zemanta on my blog to help find related articles, tags, links and public license images for my posts. For some reason I was hyper productive on Sunday and got a lot of writing done in anticipation of our family trip in two weeks. As I was preparing a post, I searched the term ‘Father’s Day’ and was floored with the images I got back. After making it through all the album covers that had the word ‘Father’ in them I kept seeing this same woman all dressed in black.  After trying a number of other terms like ‘Dad’ and ‘Father and Son’ to no avail, I finally Googled this woman’s name to see what the deal was with her. Turns out the pictures were from her leaving the funeral of her two young children who were killed via carbon monoxide poisoning by her estranged husband on Father’s Day. Now, obviously, this is a very sad and tragic situation, and my heart breaks for this woman, but are these REALLY the only images out there in the public domain for Father’s Day? These are my choices? Album covers or unspeakable tragedy? Come on Zemanta, you can do better than this!

Waiting for the Burn: Since my son was born the time I spend watching TV has decreased significantly, but I do enjoy unwinding with my wife and watching the few shows we still record. With all the major network shows on hiatus my DVR is currently empty. I despise ‘reality’ television, football is still months away and I’m not about to watch old episodes for the umpteenth time, so our TV has pretty much been off lately. However, that is all about to change thanks to USA Networks who brilliantly will be airing new episodes of one of my current favorite shows on June 4th. Someone over there gets it that their audience craves new material and started scheduling their original programming around the down time of the other major networks. Maybe this happened because they are owned by NBC. I’m not sure, and, frankly, I don’t care. I’m just happy that I’ll have a show or two to watch each week that I haven’t seen before.

The Great Sippy Cup Debate: After spending the GDP of Guam on different kinds of sippy cups – ones with soft spouts, hard spouts, flexible straws, no straws – we appear to have a resolution.  For a while our little man really seemed to like the ones from Nubi that have a silicon straw and appeared to be impervious to leaking, which we appreciated.  However, in order to get the water flowing he would have to bite down on the straw to open up the valve.  As a result, his interest waned in these sippy cups.  Finally, my mother had bought one from Munchkin that also had a silicon straw that popped out of the top, but didn’t have the same valve contraption that required him to chew on the straw.  Success!  After seing him pound fluids like a man just out of the Sahara we purchased two – one for milk, one for water – to have at the ready at all times.  They do leak a little, especially when little man turns them upside down and shakes them like he’s Jack Bauer interogating a witness