Roger O Green

The Giveaway

So this is how it works. For every non-spam comment of at least – let’s pick a number at random – FIVE words left on this blog between May 3 and July 3, you get a ticket. No more than one comment per post will be counted, but you can comment on any post in the past five years. Every ticket represents a chance for a prize.

I decided, in honor of the new blog, or the old blog with the new URL, or whatever it is that I’m doing, to have a giveaway here, based on aspects of my life.

There will be five winners. Among the prizes are:

*Top Pop Albums, 1955-2009 from Record Research, a list of every album that charted on the Billboard charts in the past 55 years.

*Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith by Frederick Buechner. A compilation of 366 brief essays of faith.

FGH

*THE NEARLY COMPLETE ESSENTIAL HEMBECK ARCHIVES OMNIBUS. 900 pages of Fred Hembeck goodness. If you don’t know Fred’s work, it is tricky to describe. It is largely a series of stories about a character named Fred Hembeck and his interaction with comic book characters, which I fell in love with long before I even met my friend. Donated and signed by the artist.

And a fourth and fifth item I haven’t decided upon yet; behold I bring you a mystery. And in each case, I reserve the right to throw in additional stuff.

Comments

It is not the case that the person making the most comments wins. It IS the case that the more comments you make, the more CHANCES you get. So someone commenting five times gets five tickets, thus five times more chances to win. Once I get the total number of entries, I will do the random number generator thing. The first person chosen gets his or her choice of the first pick of the prizes, the second person gets the second pick, etc. All winners will also receive a Millard Filmore $1 piece; the coin of one of the worst US Presidents coin was current when this new blog started, so there it is.

Now if I don’t know who you are, it will be pretty difficult to assign you a ticket, so if you want to comment anonymously and don’t leave your name, it’ll be impossible to assign you a ticket.

Decision of the judge (moi) is final. Winners will be announced sometime before Bastille Day 2010.

Speaking of giveaways, a Coke commercial

Tubes

A visual representation of What do you want from life? (The Tubes)

Well, you can’t have that,
but if you’re an American citizen you are entitled to:
a heated kidney shaped pool,
a microwave oven–don’t watch the food cook,
a Dyna-Gym–I’ll personally demonstrate it in the privacy of your own home,
a king-size Titanic unsinkable Molly Brown waterbed with polybendum,
a foolproof plan and an airtight alibi,
real simulated Indian jewelry,
a Gucci shoetree,
a year’s supply of antibiotics,
a personally autographed picture of Randy Mantooth
and Bob Dylan’s new unlisted phone number,
a beautifully restored Third Reich swizzle stick,
Rosemary’s baby,
a dream date in kneepads with Paul Williams,
a new Matador, a new mastodon,
a Maverick, a Mustang, a Montego,
a Merc Montclair, a Mark IV, a meteor,
a Mercedes, an MG, or a Malibu,
a Mort Moriarty, a Maserati, a Mac truck,
a Mazda, a new Monza, or a moped,
a Winnebago–Hell, a herd of Winnebagos we’re giving ’em away,
or how about a McCulloch chainsaw,
a Las Vegas wedding,
a Mexican divorce,
a solid gold Kama Sutra coffee pot,
or a baby’s arm holding an apple?

P is for Periodic Table

sodium (Na) and fluorine (Cl) hook up to make sodium fluoride (NaCl)

Before I get started, a JEOPARDY! Daily Double from 4/14/2010:
ONLY ONE VOWEL $2,000: Though it has only one vowel in its name, this element’s periodic table symbol is 2 vowels.

It’s been a long time since I took high school chemistry. Check out, if you would, this nifty dynamic periodic table. If you put the cursor over a category, it will highlight those elements in that category. If you click on the category, it will give you an encyclopedic interpretation of the group. This is likewise true for the individual elements.

One finds a similar function for the elements only here, with YouTube videos about how the elements are used, when available, and a brief history of the periodic chart, starting with Mendeleev arrangement of the 65 elements that were then known back in 1869. Indeed, most of the periodic tables I found online has some interactivity.

If these were available when I was in high school, maybe I would remember more about chemistry than this: the alkali metals in group 1 liked to hang out with the halogens in group 17, because the former had an extra electron hanging out and the latter was lacking one; thus sodium (Na) and chlorine (Cl) hook up to make sodium chloride (NaCl), or salt. Conversely, the noble gases (group 18) didn’t play well with others.

One fun representation of the table is the Wooden Periodic Table Table which ended up winning the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with among other features, pictorial representations of some of the greats of science for which some of the latter elements are named, such as Curie, Nobel and Einstein.

But I was confused by the recent news that a new element, element 117, ununseptium (yeah, easy for YOU to say), described in the New York Times this way: “The team produced six atoms of the element by smashing together isotopes of calcium and a radioactive element called berkelium in a particle accelerator.” Wow. I thought the finding of elements would be more – I don’t know – elemental. (Here’s the story in the Christian Science Monitor and the Daily Mail). And only six atoms? There are things I know a lot about; this is NOT one of them.

ABC Wednesday
Oh, The JEOPARDY! question: What is gold? The symbol for it is Au.

Welcome Back, My Friends, To The Show That Never Ends

Because time is not fungible, and because there’s a bit of a learning curve for me – WordPress may arguably better than Blogger, but I know Blogger much better – please be patient here.

So: if you have been blogging for five years, some people are of the opinion that you should either 1) quit or 2) get your own URL. Evidently, I have chosen the latter.

When this URL – www.rogerogreen.com – was available, and I got it two months ago, I did almost nothing with it. Then, pretty much in the past two weeks, I said, “Oh, crap, my blog anniversary’s coming up. Wouldn’t it be really cool if I switched at that point?”

But of course, life gets in the way. This site isn’t really ready yet. If it weren’t considered so déclassé, I’d have a great big construction sign sitting smack dab in the middle of the page. Among other things, I haven’t gone through my blogroll on the old site to bring them to the new site. If you were on my old list, and you are blogging regularly (once a week or more) or if you’ve blogged recently or if I’ve met you personally, you’ll stay. I suspect this will take the better part of the month.

Because time is not fungible, and because there’s a bit of a learning curve for me – WordPress may arguably better than Blogger, but I know Blogger much better – please be patient here. I should be settled in by June. Well, I HOPE so. All advice accepted, though not necessarily acted upon.

Also, if you would be so kind:
1) if I am on your blogroll, please change it to www.rogerogreen.com; I know it’s a pain, but I don’t expect to alter it EVER again
2) if you get a chance to mention in your blog or Facebook or Twitter that I’ve changed my URL, that would be swelligant, elegant.

Here’s an odd thing: this blog, with virtually zero content, was in the 120s for my name last week in Google, whereas my old Blogger blog, with five years of content, was invisible. One of the factors, I’m sure, in actually making the move.

Karn Evil 9 – Emerson, Lake & Palmer
LIVE
on LP.

Any observations or questions are appreciated.

Five Years

Stealing the idea from Bacardi, here’s Five Years by David Bowie.

Printed on April 29, 2010 at 2:30 p.m.

Frankly, I’m surprised I made it here. Five years of blogging every day, at least once a day. I have to work REALLY hard NOT to blog MORE than once a day, but I was reasonably successful; only 367 blogposts in the last 365 days, and I’m sure one of those was a prominent death that JUST COULDN’T WAIT.

But the other reason I’m surprised I made it is that last summer, I got REALLY discouraged.

I’m not one of those people who care about having hundreds of hits a day. When my monthly numbers dropped from 4109 in May 2009 to 3041 in June, it didn’t bother me over much. But when it sank to 1575 in July, THAT was really bothersome. What did I do wrong? I started posting notices of my blog posts on Twitter and Facebook, which actually did help a little, but I am not great at doing that regularly.

BTW, #1: I signed up with some service on the web to automatically post my blog post links to Facebook and Twitter. Instead, it was posting annoying advertising stuff to my Twitter account. So I canceled it, as soon as I saw it on my blog sidebar. Sorry about that.

BTW, #2: two people asked me why I have two Facebook accounts within 30 minutes when I went to the comic book show in Albany last Sunday. It’s easy: I started one, using my work e-mail, then I couldn’t find it. so I started ANOTHER one with my home e-mail. Now I know what both of them are. If I had the time, I’d just cancel one, but since there are people on one who aren’t on the other…well, it’d be work. Someday. When I retire, maybe, or take a long vacation where I actually just play on the computer. That is to say, not any time soon.

Then I noticed something: this blog, which had been on the first page of Google, disappeared from Google. It didn’t just fall off the first page; it seems to have vanished altogether.

Now, I can be found on a Google search. My Twitter and my blog on the Times Union can be found in the top 10. One of my Facebook pages and even my seldom-used Library 2.0 account – check out the vintage of the picture – are in the top 30. Even comments, articles I’ve written for other blogs, and specific pieces from the TU blog show up. But not this one.

This has pretty much forced a momentous decision.

You just can’t have too many computers

I had the idea for my presentation for the Underground Railroad conference months earlier. But on long-term projects, I procrastinate. (Or, conversely, I do it right away, because I know I tend to procrastinate.)

So it’s the Monday before the Saturday of the conference. I’ve taken the day off from work. The plan: in the morning, finally watch Hurt Locker on DVD. In the afternoon, go to the library and work on the presentation. Neither of these things happen, though; the daughter is home sick for the 10th time this school year. and as usual, she’s not SO sick that she’s sleeping, but rather needs regular attention from daddy.

So it’s now the Thursday evening before the Saturday of the conference. I blow off Bible study and choir, stay at work until 8 pm and actually get the presentation into some sort of narrative shape. It’s not finished, but it’s quite far along.

So it’s now the day before the conference. I dig out the thumb drive I was given which I had never used, and copy the program. My intention is to finish it up at home on the wife’s laptop. Except the wife’s computer doesn’t seem to have a cursor anymore.

So now it’s the morning of the conference. I still cannot get the laptop to work. As for my desktop computer, not only is it slow, it is so old that it actually doesn’t have a compatible slot for the thumb drive. I’m thinking I may have to go to the downtown branch of the library; the local branch doesn’t open until 1 pm, and that’s too late.

Then I play with the daughter’s new Netbook that her aunt and uncle just gave her for Valentine’s Day. I can’t get the Internet to work on it, but the word processing is fine, and the presentation is finished Just In Time.

Eventually – I have no idea how – I’ve gotten the cursor to work again on the wife’s laptop. I mean I’m a Luddite, but not as bad as this guy, at least most of the time.

So here’s the question: do you consider yourself technologically savvy, or do you go around screaming when technology fails? I’m not a screamer, but…well, let’s put it this way: DON’T hire me for IT.

ROG