Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The happiest man in the world

...is a man named Alvin Wong.

Really.

According to this article in the New York Times, Gallup compiled some statistical data to determine what attributes contribute most to happiness. They found that people are happier when they are:
  • male
  • tall
  • Asian-American
  • at least 65 years old
  • married
  • has children
  • is a practicing Jew
  • lives in Hawaii
  • runs his own business
  • makes at least $120,000 per year
After a few phone calls to synagogues in Hawaii, Gallup found a tall, Asian-American Jew who fit all the descriptions.

Too bad I only have three of the nine qualities...

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Friday, March 11, 2011

Laws of Attraction

What's a Bobalagooch Handle?

The bobalagooch handle (pronounced BOB-ah-lah-GOOCH) is something that my brother David made up. We used to play the game as kids where you had to say "safety" if you ... passed gas. If you didn't, someone else could yell "doorknob" and then they could punch you until you touched a doorknob. If there wasn't a doorknob nearby, you could get punched for hours until you found one. We naturally added some more things you could get punched for, such as burping (you had to say "protection" or else someone could say "door handle") and picking your nose (you had to say "shield" or else someone could say "cupboard knob").

Because of this triple threat, David made up the bobalagooch handle, which is a doorknob, door handle, and cupboard knob all rolled into one. If someone yelled something and started punching you, you had to sing the bobalagooch song, which means the tooter/burper/picker had to sing "Bobalagooch! Bobalagooch!" over and over again to the tune of Winnie the Pooh. Once you finished the song, you had to go through the motion of rotating the the imaginary doorknob, turning the imaginary door handle, and pulling the imaginary cupboard knob.

Then you're safe.

So why did I name my blog this? Because I write about a variety of different things, all of which arm you against the pounding blows of ignorance and boredom.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

If...

Noteslate = want

I found this the other day and I really, really want one. I'm not sure if it is real or not...


It's called a Noteslate, and it's a $99 eInk writing tablet. You just take your notes on it and then it will save it to a SD Card of USB drive for you. This would be perfect for school. I would just take the Powerpoint slides made by the teachers, convert them to PDFs, upload them onto this, and then I could just take notes right on this without having to carry a bajillion papers around.

I could also scan in images of my text books and then carry around digital copies of those, too. I actually tried this out the other day. I took an old copy of National Geographic (thanks again, Kathy!) and had the binding cut off. Then I took it to the Genealogy and Family History Library in the BYU Library, where they have a book scanner. The machine scanned the whole magazine in a few minutes, and then I had that whole issue on my flash drive. A bonus feature was that the book scanner was able to read words, making the whole issue word-searchable. Imagine how cool it would be to be able to have your handwritten notes word-searchable!

Anyway, the site says that the Noteslate should be available in June. A lot of websites are doubtful, though. I guess we'll see.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Google searches

I was looking at the "Stats" icon on my Dashboard just now, wondering how many people look at my blog when I don't write. I still get a lot of people looking at it, but it is all from random Google searches.

I guess that comes from writing about tons of random things for a year. Here are some searches that brought of links to my blog.

"sparklines"
"oat sample questions"
"jack nelson logan utah"
"play hnefatafl"
"baby names 2015"

That baby names search has been extremely popular. I'm not sure why.