I received my undergraduate degree in Biology.  More specifically, I studied Biotechnology & Genetics.  It’s a subject that I still love but it took me my entire BS degree to figure out that I absolutely hated doing it.  It finally dawned on me my first semester in graduate school that my least favorite part of all of my classes were the labs….ummm duh!…that would be what I would be really doing for a living.  Time for a course correction!

Anyway, the rest is as they say, history.  I taught myself software engineering and eventually went back to school for business administration years later.  Quite a strange combination, I know.  It took many years later for me to realize, but I came to understand that academic science and I were oil and water anyways.  Let me explain – what I really wanted to do is what I heard called result-oriented science…which is fancy way of saying that I was always an engineer…I wanted to create things, using science, to solve problems and make money – not just ask questions for the sake of asking questions.  For example, I could care less about the “Phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial and nuclear sequences supports a close relationship between Acantholingua ohridana and Salmo salar” (in other words using genetics to trace how related different species of fish are…..yawn)….besides, where’s the money in that??

I was thinking recently about a problem that needs to be solved (for me anyway) and could make someone a lot of money.  OK, are you listening Monsanto?  Someone needs to spend research on inventing grass seed that grows in low water, high sunlight and high heat, can withstand frost and low temperatures, grows rapidly and then very very slowly after reaching 2 inches so it needs less mowing and naturally produces toxins for broadleaf plants and weeds.

Think about it, we’d all have more leisure time.  We would spend less money on gas for our mowers and we would spew less crap into the air (no I don’t care about the “global warming” aspect but the smell and the noise are not good so let’s knock it out if we can), we would use less water and pour fewer chemicals on our lawns.  I’m sure I’ve read about some companies (Scotts maybe) that have already started down this path – but not to the extent I’m talking about.  If the only things growing in my yard are weeds then why can’t we infuse those hardy properties into grass?

Would you use my “Franken-Grass” in your yard? MuHAHAHAHA It’s ALIVE!!!! LOL

I thought this was strange, so I decided to ask myself why?

You know what? I think the answer is that if I don’t write it when the idea strikes, it wont get written. Period. Once the idea has gone and I’ve written down the core of an idea and then left it…the love it gone. When I come back to that post title or core idea later, it feels more like an assignment, like work than it does something fun to write to about.

That really sucks because there’s a lot of good stuff in there…disjointed ideas not fully formed and birthed, waiting to be given life and shared. But if I leave it when it’s fresh and don’t run with it, it dies….usually.

This post is one of the exceptions…I had the thought and I’m typing it out as I work through my thoughts in pseudo-real-time (I mean sheesh, I’d like to think that I can think faster than I can type).

Since I vowed that this blog had but one metric for success – me enjoying it/having fun, I fear that these seeds of ideas may never see the light of day ::taps slowly plays:: ::sniff sniff::

The new word is

smuffle…noun = a belch that is not fully ‘vocalized’ by straightening one’s trachea during the act such that the sound of the belch is muted and muffled. Usage = that wasn’t a belch mommy, it was a smuffle.

Where does he come up with this crap?

I’m driving home from work last night and I’m in the proverbial stop-and-go traffic.  I’ve left work early and I’m heading for my son’s soccer game.  It’s a beautiful Carolina fall evening – high 80’s and a slight breeze.  Naturally, I’ve got the windows zipped down in the ol’ Jeep.  I turn on the radio and listen to some tunes.  I have to keep turning the volume up and down so that I can hear the music over the wind noise.  Whenever I come to a stop, I turn it down.

Why do I turn it down?

Well a couple of reasons I guess – my stereo isn’t that good so it just sounds distorted at high volumes and besides…it’s a Jeep…things tend to rattle and vibrate too much .  More importantly is common courtesy.  The other drivers around me don’t necessarily want to listen to the same music I am, right?

It never fails.

I always grab the shopping cart with the screwed up wheel and I always get stuck next to rolling subwoofer.

You know what I’m talking about.  It’s the car with the THX certified stereo system that’s worth more than the car it’s rolling in.

I suppose that it make sense…if your entire net worth is tied up in your car’s audio system, you feel compelled to use it.  By use it of course I mean operating it at a volume level so that whales in the Pacific are break-dancing to the beat due to the ELF induced signals your car is pumping out. We’re lucky that Snoop-dog over ELF doesn’t incite a nuclear missile launch from some submarine halfway around the world.

Some people dream of ordinary things they might buy if they were rich…big houses, nice cars…

Me?  If I had no end of funds, I would build a car stereo to end all car stereos.

If you’ve never tried active noise cancellation headphones, let me tell you that they are nothing short of amazing.   What they do is “listen” to ambient noise and actively produce anti-waves of sound through the headphone’s speakers.  When a sound wave encounters an equal but opposite sound wave, the result is silence – they cancel each other out.  How Stuff Works has a cool explanation here.

So, I started day-dreaming of constructing a huge car stereo version of this same concept.  I would then drive around looking for these annoying jerks with their sub-sonic irritants and laugh my butt off when I create a sudden “cone of silence” and they can’t hear their “music” anymore.  They continue to turn it up in an effort to hear it until POP – they blow their speakers out. Mu-hahahahahaha

Silly, I know – but a guy can dream right?

I’m planning a post to share some of my all-time favs, but while in there, noticed that a lot of the old articles that were lost on this blog were still there. So I will also be re-publishing those articles (and probably updating them a bit before hittin’ that publish button) as well! Yeah me!

It’s like getting a do-over…I only have to republish the stuff that doesn’t make me wince

I didn’t need any of it. I needed to just get started.

Now that I’m into them, they’re really a lot of fun to do and I keep coming up with ideas of more things to do training classes on. They won’t be relevant for everybody, but like Brian pointed out today, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”. This is along the lines of what I’ve begun to realize more and more this year and it’s kind of a ‘well, duh!’ thing.

There are people that know more than you do about any topic.

Let me say it again.

There are people that know more than you do about any topic.

But what I’ve discovered is that the REVERSE of this is also true…

There are people that know way less than you do about X. But it’s hard for you imagine that there’s people that would value the really “basic” information you take for granted.

a lot of what I know how to do with the internet and computers and software is literally freakin’ magic to a startlingly large portion of the planet.

The video ideas I’m coming up with are simple crap – how do I get my own www.mycoolwebsite.com thing? How do I get my own email address thing? Is it hard? Is it expensive? Now for most of us here in the blogosphere, these are insanely basic and stupid things to be asking….but step outside the blogs for a while and talk to real people and you’ll find that a massive amount of folks literally HAVE NO FREAKING CLUE about any of that stuff.

Thus, I am the one-eyed man amongst the blind. So are you – don’t underestimate your worth.

A couple of folks have complained to me offline about their comments not showing up. Let me explain.

Comments are held in a queue until I approve them. Once I approve them, then they will show up. If you have commented here before, then additional comments will show up automatically without me needing to approve them.

I think the issue at hand however is, why does one comment get approved and another not? Here’s my current criteria….

• If Akismet catches it as spam, there’s a big chance I wont ever see it…if it was legit, email me and let me know and I’ll try to fix it.
• If you provide an obviously bogus email or website, it’s getting spammed – period.
• If you provide a comment of questionable value PLUS the web address you link to is obviously not a blog and is primarily a commercial site, then my conclusion is that you are after a free link to a website, so you’re gettin’ spammed dude. Example of questionable value…”With interest I pursue here those always well and understandable written contributions.” along with a URL of www.crazy-realestate-scams-you-can-buy.com…uhhh what do you expect?
• If you are a first-time commenter and only say “great stuff” or something, I’m assuming that you’re trying to get approved with something innocuous so that you can post a different one later linking to an online gambling escort service or something. I don’t mark these as spam, I just delete them. They add nothing to the conversation anyway. Sorry.
• If you attack another person, you’re getting deleted. You can attack ideas all you want “that point of view is stupid…blah blah”, but the moment you say “you’re stupid…”, don’t expect to see your comment show up and if you’ve been previously admitted on here, I’m going to delete it as soon as I see it.

Folks tend to have this view that the internet is supposed to be anarchaic and that I’m somehow violating basic human rights by denying you a voice, blah blah blah. As soon as you start paying for my hosting, contributing articles and paying for my domain name, etc….then you can say that….until then, get your own blog and say whatever you want and have you’re own comment policy of anything goes. That’s still my name in your URL

OK, grumpiness fading…feeling better now. Comment away, but don’t scam, don’t spam and be nice, please.

Forget world hunger, forget peace in the middle east…these problems pale in comparison to the world-wide shortage of porn, the millions of sad people that have to wear geniune Timex watches instead of replica Rolexes and don’t even get me started on the sad, sad statistic that 99.87% of the male population is just too small resulting in a world-wide epidemic of very depressed women.

Well, if you believe my spam folder anyway, all this must be true.

Has anyone else noticed that spam seems to come in waves? For a while, it will all be about prescription drugs…then that will fade and replica watches comes up, then that fades and something else seems tobe the focus.

I just don’t get spammers. I’ve often wondered if the popular thought that they keep doing it because it must be working is true or not. I’m beginning to wonder if instead we’re seeing an almost endless stream of suckers that are paying someone for some get-rich-quick scheme and in return they teach them or enable to spam or something.

I wonder what the next streak of spam will be…………..?

I spelled Lens as Lense??????

::shakes head back and forth while bowing in shame::

And this after posts like this one… http://robneville.net/random/wow-epic-spellcheck-fail/

and this… http://robneville.net/random/honestly-who-doesnt-use-email-anymore/

wow…. humility…..nom, nom, nom….tastes good!

PS no I’m not going to change it as a reminder to myself not to throw rocks in a glass house.