All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

This was my revisit to a photo I took over four years ago. I’m no Brian Auer when it comes to processing photos, but I think it looks much better than the original:

I’d love to hear your opinion! You can comment here or at Flickr.

I’m new at actually processing photos (as opposed to just uploading the original), so I’d appreciate all the help I can get. I’m currently using Paint.NET - because price is a factor - but I’m willing to switch to GIMP.

Since I haven’t mentioned Blockbuster in awhile, I felt that I should update on that - we switched to Netflix.

Reasons:

1. Our local Blockbuster on Live Oak (Arcadia, CA) got closed down. The manager said it was a corporate decision. That one is 0.4 miles away from home. Now, the closest one is 2 miles away. Boo.
2. When returning the Blockbuster DVD mailer for a free one in-store movie rental, I couldn’t think of movies to rent on-the-fly.
3. I like the UI of Netflix vs. Blockbuster Online.
4. I heard customer service is better than Blockbuster.

If I really need a new release sporadically, there’s a Redbox closeby. (4.7 miles from home, but whatever.)

On Saturday, I went to Brian’s apartment in Riverside to kickback. Brian and his girlfriend have this cool place with an, featuring an emergency party button and a dedicated computer for their TV. Their big couch helps, too. (The “emergency party button” can only been seen, not described.)

Nobody was watching anything on the TV, so I pulled up YouTube and went through my favorites list. One of the videos I haven’t seen is the Tourette’s Guy (NSFW, Rated R).

I’m not sure if it’s offensive to you, or if the guy really has Tourette’s Syndrome, but it’s so stupid and hilarious, we were all laughing for 15 minutes straight.

Note: Danny died a few months ago. The forum posts at Snopes about Danny are pretty informative. May he rest in peace.

My point? Setup an account at your favorite video sites and start marking favorites for future reference. You never know when you’ll need it!

• Click here to see my YouTube favorites.
• I know YouTube quality isn’t the greatest.

If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

- Ray Bradbury

When Chris Brogan said this, it really hit me, especially at this time of my life.

Business-wise, what I’m doing is questionable and against common sense. There’s people that’ll call me an idiot for what I’m doing, whether it’s to my face or behind my back.

Fortunately, there’s been some people who say they’re stoked with what I’m doing, as long as I’m happy doing it. With this newly-found energy, I haven’t felt as excited as I do I now. (Except for when we have a show.)

If you understand what I’m going through, at least you can see that you’re not alone.

One of these days, I’ll be able to write about what I’m going through more freely. Our company lawyer says I can’t blog about it yet. For now, that’s restricted to my private journal or one-on-one conversations (e.g. email, phone).

At church last Sunday (2007-10-07), Senior Pastor Richard J. Anderson (SMCC) spoke about being content. Well, at least that’s what I got from it, no matter what tangents he might have taken.

We were studying the following passages:

• Exodus 20:17 (NIV) - “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
• Philippians 4:10-13 (NIV) - ¹⁰ I rejoice greatly in the Lord that at last you have renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you have been concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it. ¹¹ I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. ¹² I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. ¹³ I can do everything through him who gives me strength.
• 1 Timothy 6:6 (NIV) - But godliness with contentment is great gain.

On index cards, I wrote this:

In the [tough] circumstances, rejoice in the LORD.

Don’t be bored! Be content that I have much less to worry about than most of the population in the world. War, food, gangs…

Understanding how many possessions someone really has lies with the observer.

Who’s point of view is it? Do we have a lot or a little?

For me, I can’t complain about food, computers, cell phones, movies, television, radio, or money. I don’t have the right to do that. There’s people out there with barely any food to live off from. Lots of people don’t have a computer. (One example: My mom’s sister in the Philippines.) Some people still have to resort to pay phones. Some people don’t own a television or DVD. (If it’s by choice, that’s a different story.) Even though our paychecks might not be keeping up with inflation, it could be much worse.

I don’t really have anything to follow “or else,” so I’m sorry about that.

Some people don’t know that the second Monday in October is Columbus Day. I only knew because Public Counsel observes it. Some schools do, some don’t.

However, today is completely packed for me. On the schedule? Time to myself, so back off.

We finally setup a Pure Volume account for Phantom Scream: click here and have a listen!

The less data (files) I have to worry about my computers, the better. Amazon S3 + JungleDisk work nightly, backing up the more crucial folders. Almost weekly, I synchronize everything to an external hard drive.

Bookmarks are a different story.

When it comes to saving awesome sites/pages on the internets, I use the following:

• del.icio.us
• Google Browser Sync
• AM-DeadLink

With del.icio.us, I currently have 568 items bookmarked, some of which aren’t being shared because I want to read them at a future date. (That’s a separate post, though.) However, the majority of them are reference items.

I use three different computers: home desktop, laptop, and work computer. To keep Firefox bookmarks synchronized between all of them, I’ve been using Google Browser Sync.

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

If you don’t like being tied to Google, Foxmarks simply does bookmarks.

For those of you who keep a lot of bookmarks in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Opera, do you know which ones still work?

AM-DeadLink takes the guessing out of that. Plus, it’s freeware - how cool is that?

So, why do you save all your bookmarks on your hard drive? Keep the ones you use most frequently in your toolbar, then save the rest to the web.