HerdingChaos

We have a DVR in our cable box. It is a bit like a VCR without all the tapes. We record the few shows that Becky and I watch and a ton of kid shows for those rare times that they want to watch TV.

A couple of mornings ago I was sleeping in and Tracy came up to the bedroom. She had the cable/TV remote in her hand. Andrew started school and I think she was a little lonely. She wanted to watch her favorite show, Dora the Explorer.

The remote for the cable box is the universal kind. And the TV is setup to send all the sound through an amp and not the TV. So I was showing Tracy that she needed to hit the CBL button, then POWER, then TV then POWER, then AUX then POWER. She watched all of this closely, then turned to me with a smile on her face and said, “That sure is a lot of power just to watch Dora!”

When Loren is doing something a bit crazy my wife says things like “You are my little nut.” or “Loren is just being a nut.”

Today while driving in the car with the family I hear Tracy from the backseat.

“Loren is just a peanut! Sometimes she is so funny and she is just a peanut!”

Well, Becky never was specific about which nut she was….

I am such a nerd. I just had a random thought that I should have named the kids using names with spellings where every other letter was on a different hand when typing into a QWERTY keyboard. It would have made it easier to type their names.

The internet has been buzzing with anticipation for the new movie Snakes on a Plane. I have seen the FARK comments and other internet references related to Snakes on a Plane so I knew about the movie. I was not really planning on attending the flick. But something really fun did happen a couple of days ago. I got a call from Sam L. Jackson. He started with “Mike! This is Samuel L. Jackson…” He proceeded to tell me to go to the movie with one of my friends who he also named. Mr. Jackson also had details about my life that he used in the conversation like “stop playing around with your computers at work, and stop obsessing about your kids and go see this movie”. Turns out all of this is one of the best executed marketing campaigns I have seen. The guys at varitalk have setup a site where you can send a partially personalized message to a friend via Sam Jackson’s voice. In order to customize the message you provide market information like what type of job, what type of hobbies, and the email or phone number of the receiver. But to offset all of this marketing-big-brother-type-stuff they made something that is fun and really quite cool.