Tedrobb.com

A strange phenomenon has been recently occurring as I innocently stroll into various stores. As I step through the doors of certain businesses, I am rewarded with a symphony of loud beeps, flashing lights, and one store even went as far as having an electronic lady tell me to kindly “return to the cashier to complete your transaction.” Now how can this be? I am entering the store for the first time, and have certainly not seen opportunity to buy or even steal something. This happened to me at 4 or 5 different CVS stores, Circuit City, and Kohls.

So I decided to try a little experiment. I left my wallet in the car and walked into the store. Hmm. No noise, no lights, no electronic lady. I walk back to the car to collect my wallet because generally, stores are where you buy things with money, and wallets are containers for money. I enter. Aha. Beep beep beep beep… I exit. Beep beep beep beep… So by now, I’ve formulated a theory. My wallet must have an inventory tracking ID tag embedded somewhere which failed to be deactivated when I purchased it many months ago. I’ve searched through the leather and found nothing. Not having motivation to research RFID or even pop open a Wikipedia search, (strangely enough, I am writing this blog post without hesitation) I turn to you, my readership, whoever you may be. What does it take to deactivate an RFID tag? A strong magnet? Uranium? An AM/FM radio? I just don’t know.

But for now I plan to use this as an opportunity to work on my shoplifting skills. What is the most innocent looking way to walk out of a store with alarms, lights, and electronic ladies announcing that you’re a thief?

Jest keeding!

So, he says, acting as this is business as usual as he re-enters the blogging world after nearly a year and a half of silence…

I’ve been watching a lot of Anime lately, which I enjoy very much.

Some of the series I’ve watched over the past months are Air, Bleach, Cardcaptor Sakura, Kanon, Mahoraba, Nadia, and Sola, just to name a few. I would recommend any of those series highly.

Anyhow, the reason I’m bringing that up is, recently I was searching for a chart of Hiragana characters and their pronunciations. After all that anime, I’ve begun to understand a bit of Japanese and I’d like to start learning to read it. I wanted the chart to be large enough to read, but small enough to print onto a single page. It seems to me that such a chart is a rarity among the top 12 pages of results on Google… Actually I couldn’t find one that fit my needs at all.

So, I sat down and created my own. I think it might be useful to others so I’m releasing it here.

Here it is, world, the Single page, printable, Chart of Hiragana Characters in its 5 color glory. Best viewed in MS Word 2003, but it does appear more or less fine in OpenOffice Writer. You will need Japanese language fonts installed to view it.

I’m sure there are mistakes… feedback is welcome.

さよなら - good-bye

Sleep. Who needs it?

Hey fellow uberweb enthusiasts. So let me tell you about our youth camping trip.

It was a great time. Friday morning through Sunday afternoon. We had a much smaller group this year of 15 people, but nonetheless a good time was had by all.
The food was good, company was good, speaking was good, weather was awesome. We got there around 12:30 Friday afternoon and unpacked. One nice thing about having a smaller group was having so much less stuff to set up. They had enough help so the first thing I did was get out Andrew’s extremely desireable lounge camp chair. I had a love/hate relationship with that chair all weekend. Love when I was sitting in it, and hate because it was stolen as soon as I got up. Everyone needs a chair like that. Yes. Thanks Andrew!

Friday evening we did an interesting activity. We split into 5 groups of 2 and sat with backs to each other. One person was the “artist” and the other had to describe a picture to them one shape at a time using only geometric terms. Needless to say, it was really pretty difficult. It was used as an analogy for our relationship with God, and how we have to trust Him because He can see the big picture, while we may only be able to see one “shape” at a time.

Friday night we did something different… a 7-player game of Monopoly. I was leading for the longest time with houses on Park Place and Boardwalk, but somehow Rachel managed to knock me out at the end.

Highlights of Saturday included volleyball, swimming, tinfoil dinners, and s’mores. And in the true spirit of good old fanishioned, primitive outdoors camping, several of us stayed up and watched 24 on my laptop until the wee hours. Good times, good times.
And of course what would campout be without the late night pranks? Last year we put Hans’ tent on the pavilion roof while he was brushing his teeth. This year, Darrell and Naomi’s tent zippers were tied together. Good fun, and no revenge was dealt due to their great mercy. Thanks

Another mandatory experience was having a some form of great water/shaving cream/sand fight right before leaving on Sunday. So I grabbed a Super Soaker someone had kindly left on one of our picnic tables, filled it with hot water, and set off to make several people’s bottoms very wet. Unfortunately this act was not as well received, and revenge was freely dealt out. Luckily I had expected this and brought an extra change of clothes.

All in all a good experience. Tim’s speaking was really a blessing and gave me lots of things to think about.

One unfortunate consequence of said late night pranks was the lack of sufficient hours of sleep. At home, I took a 4 hour nap, got up for an hour, and then slept through the next 12. 16 hours of sleep, I’m pretty proud of that fact.

Today I got a new cellphone. It’s an LG VX8300 and I’m very happy with it. I was able to connect to my laptop using a virtual Bluetooth serial port and then use the excellent, open source BitPim to transfer wallpaper images and ringtones to the phone. So much better than paying 2 bucks to download a 30 second clip “ringtone.”
More on the phone, the disgustingly orange Verizon color scheme is finally not the only option. You can select some very nice, animated menu themes, and change the colors of the status bars. This is what sold the phone for me. I played with phones at the Verizon store for about 45 minutes and found that I absolutely despise their default theme, and how changing it was impossible on most phones. So I highly recommend this phone, not just for the scheme options, but it seems to be very well designed and full-featured. Woot!

So I learned something new on the way home from camping. My car gets significantly better gas mileage on the highway. Last time I filled up after a week of driving to work and around town, I got 26 mpg. Filling up after driving home, I found it got 36 mpg. A pretty amazing difference I think. It doesn’t really make sense to me. I was going anywhere between 70 and 85 mph for 2 hours. Seems like those higher speeds, which equal higher engine RPM and increased drag would be detrimental to mileage. Anyone care to explain?

In other news, I registered for the fall semester today. My list of required classes is diminishing rapidly. Looks like I’ll be taking 6, which leaves me little spare time. 4 are regular 16 week session, 1 is during the 2nd 8 weeks, and 1 is online. Joy. Oh well, I take comfort in the fact that it will all be over soon.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!

Perhaps you would enjoy scrolling through (and reading) my recently authored About page. Possibly the greatest of its kind in the known universe.

Later:
Another page is up, Current Projects. So check it out too. I promise you won’t be dissappointed. Unless you simply don’t care. In which case, go away.

So my birthday is this Wednesday. I’ll be 19.

It seems to me that 19 is a tremendous waste of an age to be. The only purpose it serves is to seperate 18 and 20. 19 is not even something to look forward to.

With 18 you somehow automatically gain a greater level of maturity and privileges. The world now sees you as an adult, whether you deserve it or not. With 20, you finally have the great exit from the teen years, and the adventure into the double digit ages beginning with 2.

These are all things to anticipate. Whereas 19… what is 19? Nothing.

19 has to be one of the least exciting ages ever. Do you ever hear stories begin with.. “Back when I was around 19…” No, you hear “around 18″ or 20. 19 is so useless it may as well not even exist. Why not just skip from 18 to 20?

Certain ages are obviously more important than others. Such as:

1 “The First”, 5 “Age Five is Just Cool”, 10 “Double Digits”, 13 “Teenager”, 16 “Sweet Sixteen”, 18 “Adult”, 20 “Out of the Teens”, 21 “Can Do Pretty Much Anything.. or something like that”, 25 “You Can Drive a Rental Car Now”, 30 “Getting Old”… etc.

So why not just ignore birthdays unless you’re turning one of these “important” ages? You could say you’re 16, until you turn 18, and 18 until you turn 20.

Seems like a good idea to me.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is… give me lots of birthday money, because 19 is a pretty depressing age.

This post is a placeholder until I decide to regularly use this as my blog.

Bubbled is still available for download, if that’s what you’re looking for.

p.s. Jesus loves you.