Mar 2006, 262 entries

erikbenson posted a photo:

erikbenson posted a photo:

They lost their lease. I'm trying to eat everything.

While a few of us were in Austin for SXSW, the Google Current people asked to interview us, and it’s finally available online. I got to say “poop on a dolphin” on television and Daniel got to be articulate about everything else. Doing this interview was super fun… we got to hang out with Daniel Freed (he was behind the camera) and Kinga a bit more later in the week and they’re awesome.

Check it out! Yay 43 Things!

erikbenson posted a photo:

While a few of us were in Austin for SXSW, the Google Current people asked to interview us, and it’s finally available online. I got to say “poop on a dolphin” on television and Daniel got to be articulate about everything else. Doing this interview was super fun… we got to hang out with Daniel Freed (he was behind the camera) and Kinga a bit more later in the week and they’re awesome.

Check it out! Yay 43 Things!

erikbenson posted a photo:

It's on the Current channel and available online here.

It happened to be a “kick off” meeting that Daniel and I went to during the lunch hour on Seattle U’s campus. So we got to learn a bit about the program thing. It’s an interesting program… the meeting we went to was at the local university so it was filled with a bunch of college kids (and free sandwiches and drinks!), but the general idea is that every meeting has four or five speakers (maybe 5-10 minutes each?), each of whom are evaluated on the spot for a number of different things (they count your “um”s and “ah”s, they grade you on body language, voice projection, etc). If you do 10 speeches then you become a CTM (Competent Toast Master). Then you go to Bronze, Silver, and finally Distinguished Toast Master (DTM). There are area competitions and all kinds of other things. It’s half way between a video game, a support group, and a cult. It’s right up my alley, really.

For each of the 10 speeches there are areas to focus on, but you can choose the topic. To me, I think it’s just going to be another kind of blogging. It’s the full circle of content creation and self-expression: talking to people in real life, writing people letters in real life, writing email, writing on a blog, recording voice directly to a blog, recording speeches and posting them to a blog… pretty soon I’m probably going to start talking to people in real life again!

If you have a Typepad blog, you can now add 14 different widget types from 43 Things, 43 Places, All Consuming, or Lists of Bests. Here’s Typepad’s announcement of the widget feature, and our widget detail page. Try it out and let us know if you’d like to see any other kinds of widgets. They’re quite easy to make.

erikbenson posted a photo:

For some reason I’m thinking about a series of questions that will work similarly to a series of lines of code, that are parsed by the human brain and produce some kind of predictable and desired result. This is because I am a huge nerd.

I lived on a cul-de-sac in Chino and a half dozen or so neighborhood kids and I were all sort of a pseudo kid gang. The leaders of our gang were two brothers named Todd and Steven and they were great tour guides into all the “bad” things a kid might be tempted to do.

They taught me how to swear. We would walk up and down the block and they would tell me to yell individual and chains of cuss words and then laugh. Only later (when they had a new kid to teach them to) did I learn that the chained cuss words were actually ordered in such a way as to make the screamer even more ridiculous than he already was.

They taught us which windows to peek into. One window was into our neighbor’s work out room and he would do these bird-like arm-flapping motions and we’d mimic him behind his back. Others were into various bedrooms and bathrooms which, though potentially promising, never really amounted to much.

They showed us where the Playboy stashes were. A half block of houses had been destroyed by a mudslide and these houses were extremely scary and forbidden to us kids. But Todd and Steven could brave it, and somehow procured a stash of Playboys that we’d check out every once in a while, folded up and hidden under a rock.

They taught me how to break off the antennas from cars. Bend, bend, bend, bend, bend, bend, bend, BREAK! I spent the three longest weeks of my life saving my allowance and paying for the three dollar antenna I broke.

Todd or Steven (forget which) once stole my handball. It had been missing for a week or so when suddenly THEY had a new handball. I looked at it closely and saw where my name had been rubbed off (it had been written in sharpie). I stole it out of their bedroom and ran home and had to defend myself when their mom called my mom. They also stole a cup I had made at a neighbor’s house with ceramic. They were total jerks.

I remember one time we were arguing about whether or not there was a hell, and they said that there was and I (growing up atheist) knew there wasn’t. We bet something like a quarter and I shook their hand and then proudly went inside my house and took down the book I had on planets (it was dark blue and part of a series of science books for kids… others were on animals, weather, plants, rocks, etc) and came back outside and showed them the illustration of the inside of the earth. It was solid rock and lava… no room for hell down there! Haha, where’s my quarter now dorks!

I remember when I learned that I was moving to Irvine (the polar opposite of Chino), we were hanging out on their front lawn they asked me if I was going to miss our neighborhood and friends, and I distinctly remember saying no. Well, except for Brandy… my cute 2nd grade crush with blond curls and great tetherball skills.

On either side of my driveway in Chino Hills was this egg-shaped green bush. For some reason, every year the one on the right (when facing the garage) would blossom forth with hundreds of little green caterpillars. And every year I would HARVEST them into little jars and try to keep them alive long enough for them to cocoon up. I only have one tiny memory of a jarred coccoon actually hatching (which makes me think that there are a lot of repressed dead caterpillar memories I don’t have access to). It was a magical crazy moment of crazy proportions. I remember believing that caterpillars turn to liquid in their cocoons like soup and legs and brains swim around in the soup until the soup re-solidifies into a brand new butterfly. Now that I think of it, I do remember peeling cocoons apart, frustrated that they were taking so long. Imagine being 5 or 6 and having to wait WEEKS for a cocoon to hatch. It was pure bloody torture.

The left bush was BORING and never had anything worthy of note. Or, maybe it had invisible caterpillars that had had more time to adapt to the natural selection pressures of curious kids.