spugbrap’s blog

I’m not going to go into detail about last night’s episode. Just going to post a few observations and make fun of a couple people. :)

What was up with Simon having his hand up by his head like 1 moose antler all night? Lacey and I kept seeing it and cracking up, and both kept thinking “Nanu, nanu”. We realize that the hand sign was different, seeing Simon Cowell doing that over and over reminded us of Robin Williams’ quirky behavior on Mork and Mindy.

Next we come to the boy that Jena and Lacey have been referring to as “Vampire Boy” all season: Jason Yeager. I didn’t understand why, so Lacey tried to show me last night. She said he had very pointy canine teeth, but I kept watching and could not see what she was talking about–until she paused it at just the right time:

Don’t see the sharp, pointy fang? How about a closeup?

I was sold at this point. That tooth is a bit pointier and sharper than normal, and the one next to it (towards the back) looks a bit fang-like as well. But Lacey is good with the remote. Real good. She managed to pause it at just the right time again, a minute or so later, so we could check out the other side of his mouth:

…and another closeup, if you’re not convinced:

Okay, enough about Vampire Boy. If I remember correctly, his performance was “just aiight for me, dawg.” Most of them have been that way, so far this season, and last night was no different.

Our next victim is the boy who Lacey and Jena have nicknamed “Man Cuddy” (or something like that), after Lisa Cuddy on House, M.D. (one of our favorite TV shows). I have to agree, there is some resemblance.

I was going to link to a picture of Cuddy to prove this point, but when I looked at their pictures side-by-side I didn’t really see it. But from memory, if you’re a fan of House, you may see a younger, more masculine version of Cuddy in the following 4 pics of Jason Castro:

Lacey thinks Cuddy’s much cuter as a guy. She liked his performance last night, too. I was fine with it, but not blown away.

The kid at the end, though (David Archuleta)–the one who sang John Lennon’s Imagine–he was definitely the best of the night and maybe even the season so far. If I wasn’t confident that he’ll get a TON of votes, I would have voted for him (haven’t voted yet this season, probably won’t for a while still).

Well, I lived up to the promise I made when I posted about the 7-Eleven + The Simpsons Kwik-E-Mart promotion — I visited the Kwik-E-Mart in Bladensburg, MD on 7/27/2007.

I almost didn’t get around to it, but I really wanted to go! Earlier in the month, I even tried to get my team, at work, to go as a combination weekly status meeting / team building exercise. But, I wasn’t able to get everyone on board with the plan. The main drawback was that it was over an hour away, under normal traffic conditions.

It was getting towards the end of the month, so Lacey and I drove up there with our 3 kids (Matthew, Skylar, Nikki), our friend Jena, and her son Xander. We didn’t even think about the fact that it happened to be opening day for The Simpsons Movie, until we were about half-way there. We were wondering if there would be anything special happening at the Kwik-E-Mart that day. As it turned out, there was…

When we got there, we took a bunch of pictures outside, then went in and took pictures of everything Simpsons-related that we saw. It was fun taking pictures of some of us standing next to the life-size Simpsons characters. There were lots of other people there, doing the exact same thing, too. It’s a good thing they had extra staff working during the Kwik-E-Mart promotion, because it enabled them to handle the high volume of customers pretty smoothly. We bought a few Squishees, half a dozen pink sprinkly donuts, and a bunch of hot dogs for lunch.

While we were taking pictures of everything, we ran across a man holding a large video camera, who was recording all kinds of things. We talked to him, at one point, and found out that he was recording video for Fox 5 News! He recorded us in several places, including Matthew and Xander getting their Squishees, Skylar and Nikki looking cute (I don’t remember exactly what they were doing), and me getting my 6 donuts out of the display case.

When we got home, I programmed the Tivo to record the 10 o’clock news, and the 11 o’clock news on Fox Channel 5. We actually watched the 10 o’clock news in realtime, hoping to see ourselves on TV. At around 10:55pm, they finally did a Simpsons segment, which was about 5 minutes long. We didn’t quite get the face time that I’d kinda hoped for, considering how much he actually recorded of us, but I know they had to condense their footage to fit within the 5 minute segment.

In any case, it was fun for us to see ourselves on the news on TV! I was looking into ways to get the video clip from my Tivo to my computer, but ended up finding it posted on the Fox 5 DC website. Woohoo! To watch it, yourself, see the links below.

Pictures:
Pictures from our trip to the Kwik-E-Mart

Video:

There are two ways to watch the Fox 5 News coverage of the Simpsons Movie opening/Kwik-E-Mart promo (in which we made brief appearances):

1. Download the 10MB .flv file to your computer (to view with your favorite media player application, if you’ve got the right codecs)

OR

2. View it in your web browser (from its original location, on myfoxdc.com)

If you look carefully, and especially if you pause at just the right moment, you can see all of us in this video clip. I have yet to find an easy way to extract just those frames from the .flv file, but hopefully I will get that done at some point.

Anyways, my hands getting donuts out of the display case, and my bright green shirt, can be seen at around 1:20 into the video (NOTE: if you’re watching it on the myfoxdc website, start timing *after* the horrible local advertisement).

From 1:27-1:31, you can see me, all 3 of my kids, Lacey, Jena, and Xander; we’re in the background, behind the kid who’s talking.

We received an ad in the mail, recently, which immediately disturbed Lacey and I. It’s a service that lets you create real, usable postage stamps with a picture of your choice. Sounds kinda cool, right? But take a look at the ad, and see if you can find what’s wrong with this picture:

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It seems like a cool concept, at first, to put whatever picture you want (as long as it’s yours/legal/etc) on stamps. But this ad is proudly showing a picture of a cute little kid, on a stamp. That would be cool if you’re just sending mail to your friends and family, and nobody was going to handle that mail in between.

But the reality is that several people are going to handle each piece of mail, and you’re probably going to send some to billers/rebate warehouses/misc. companies as well, and multiple people will probably handle the mail within those companies. If any of those people happens to like little kids, in a NAMBLA sort of way, then you’ve just given them your cute kid’s home address via the return address on the other corner of the envelope.

In other words, you’re announcing, “Hey, pedophiles! Here’s a picture of my cute kid, and here’s where to come get him/her!”

I remember Lacey talking about some online moms’ group forums where there was some controversy, a while back, when people posted their addresses (for swaps/co-ops/etc) publicly and had cute pics of their kids in their signature blocks. These stamps aren’t quite as bad, I think, because at least their exposure is limited to a few people handling snail mail, whereas the online message boards are googleable.

But, still, stamps.com might want to consider this before enabling proud, naïve parents to advertise their children this way. Art would be fine. Maybe even the family pet. But not children.

Ever since Lacey and I saw a 2-page spread in a magazine, back in 2002-2003, showing a red Infiniti G35 coupe (with a spoiler), I’ve been in love with that car. When we went and test drove one, back then, we were very impressed. Ever since then, I’ve been wanting one, but they’re rather expensive, so I couldn’t justify it. Back in 2005, I bought my Nissan Altima, with the express purpose of reselling it in a couple years when I was ready to buy my G35. The idea was that I would be in a better financial position than I was at the time.

Well, I’m definitely not in a better financial position, but somehow I got it in my head, recently, that now was the time to buy my G35. I started researching prices and options, and decided I definitely wanted the coupe with a manual transmission, and it be either black or red, with a spoiler. For some reason, most of them are some shade of silver/gray/blue/goldish, and Lacey and I agreed that it had to be black or red. After doing some drives, researching how much I could reasonably get for the Altima, working the numbers to try and see if/how I could afford it, etc. I finally found a promotion that pushed me to go ahead and buy it (and fast!). A 12% off deal, which was about to expire. I talked to 2 different dealerships, and did some negotiating, and bought the car that day! It didn’t have a spoiler yet, but I paid for them to put one on. Here’s a picture before the spoiler:

Here it is with the spoiler, it really makes it look hotter to us:

While checking my email this morning, I noticed something interesting about gmail’s “show snippets” feature. It wasn’t something that jumped out at me or anything. In fact, it didn’t really register in my mind until after I’d already clicked to view the message. The words “Bank of America Customer using a laptop” seemed a little strange. So, I went back and looked at my Inbox again, and saw this snippet:

This seemed like an odd bit of text for an email notifying me that a direct deposit just posted to my account. Sure, I am a Bank of America customer, who usually uses a laptop to access Online Banking. But they shouldn’t know that, so I clicked on the message again to see what they had to say about using laptops.

Well, the message, itself, showed no signs of the word “laptop”, but the large header image in this HTML email had a picture of a laptop in it. That’s when I realized that gmail was probably showing the ALT text for the header image! To verify this, I used gmail’s “show original” option, to view the full message source. Sure enough, the header was made up of several images, each of which had ALT attributes, and the header images appeared before any of the actual message content. The ALT text for the laptop image was, as expected, “Customer using a laptop for Online Banking”.

Apparently, to generate message snippets, gmail strips the HTML out of the message, leaving behind the ALT text from any IMG tags that appear in that code.

That makes some sense, since the ALT attribute provides a textual representation of the image content, for accessibility purposes. However, I’d bet that most of the time, images in HTML emails are not meant to be part of the content… Most of the time, they’re probably things like company logos, navigation bars (linking to different parts of a company’s website), list bullet icons, pictures of your [family member/friend]’s children, etc.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining about Bank of America’s email header, or gmail’s snippet generation method. I just thought this was interesting behavior. I have a few ideas for who might benefit from this information, and how they might use it, but I’ll have to save that for another post, tomorrow.