Francisco Daum interviewed me while I was at Vloggercon. I didn’t think much about it when it happened, but he posted my interview on his weblog. I think this is the first interview I’ve ever had on film. All other interviews I’ve done have been for print, so I’m stoked.

I am the second person interviewed. After two days of conference, I look frizzy and tired. I was. It’s funny, but Francisco was able to capture exactly how I felt on film that evening. I was hungry and waiting for everyone to decide where we were going to eat.

You can see more of Francisco Daum’s work here:

• My Road to a Better Smile – Francisco Daum

Until age twelve, I was a Jehovah Witness. I was not allowed to say the Pledge of Allegiance. I was not allowed to put my hand over my heart during the National Anthem.

Today is Flag Day and I’m an adult now. I can say the Pledge of Allegiance whenever I want.

I got home after 11 hours of driving from San Francisco to Salt Lake City. I’m kind of tired this morning.

I’m so excited about everything I learned at Vloggercon. I have to digest it all.

While waiting at the Apple Store for one of the Vloggercon events, I had a zen moment. I thought I’d share it with you.

When Google Maps tells you that it will take 15 hours to drive to San Francisco, but your friends tell you it will only take about 12, believe your friends. I had planned on doing it in two days. I left yesterday, planning to sleep the night in Reno and drive the rest today. Instead, I found myself in Reno at about 1:30 pm with more than enough energy to get myself the rest of the way to my destination. I arrived a day early.

I just realized there’s no cliche for a day early. There’s “A day late and a dollar short,” but there’s no cliche for a day early…

Anyway, Kathleen and Lisa were gracious enough to let me stay a day early, so I took them out to eat at Massawa. I was ready to crash at a hotel if they weren’t ready for me, but they were more than welcoming and I crashed on their most excellent couch.

Right now, I’m tapping away on my laptop. I’m getting Internet access through my Treo 650. I was under the impression that the entire city of San Francisco was under a blanket of easily accessible wireless access, but all the wireless near me has a really low strength, so I’m just getting access through my phone. It’s better that way. Then I don’t feel guilty for stealing.

I’m going to go help the people set up for Vloggercon at the Swedish American Hall and then go to the party later in the day. I was planning on several hours of driving today, instead, I can lazily wake up and write an entry.

What you see here is a plaster representation of ant tunnels. How did they get it?

They poured orthodontal plaster down the holes and then dug them up.

• 5/24/2006: Ant tunnels – The Cellar

Am I the only one bothered that they are destroying the ant’s homes and maybe killing a bunch of ants in the process? I know I poison the ants that get too close to my house, but somehow this bothers me more than that.

I imagine the colony that lived in that ant tunnel and realize that if they didn’t all die, they had to start all over. I imagine someone doing the same thing to New York: filling the open spaces with plaster and pulling it off to make a mold of what the little humans have created. Isn’t it interesting how some buildings are taller than others. The tall ones are grouped together and then the smaller buildings spread out across the city. See the small cars that were stuck in the plaster? They use these to get around town.

I need to stop poisoning the ants by my house. It’s giving me guilt.

Via: Sunspots: the ant nest edition – Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

As I’m writing this, I have a headache. It’s the one pain that seems to interfere with writing for me. I can write with gut-wrenching stomach pain. I can write with muscle soreness. I can write with a broken ankle. I have a hard time writing with a headache.

I guess it’s because my thoughts and my head are the same place. It doesn’t really make sense to me now that I think about it. A headache shouldn’t really interfere with thinking anymore than any other pain. It’s not like a headache means my brain hurts. I should be able to write through a headache just as easily as I write through stomach pain.

When I was suffering from IBS, I wrote with pain ALOT. I was in pain every day for about six years. I wrote regularly during that time. I didn’t every even consider saying, “Oh, I’ve got gas that makes childbirth feel like a walk in the park. I think I’ll wait until it passes before I write.” Nope. I just farted and wrote and hoped I would feel better as the words flowed out of my fingers.

Why do I let a headache get in the way of my writing?

Well, no more.

I’m going to consider a headache no different than any other pain. I’m just going to work through it even if looking at the computer screen makes it worse. I’ll just wear sunglasses and let the words flow out of my fingers.

Dan Russell over at Creating Passionate Users wrote this entry about graphics.

• Creating Passionate Users: What a graphic can tell you

He was playing with dots. Each dot represented a day. He filled the screen with enough dots to represent a sixty-year life. It looked like this:

What if you were given a graphic like this that represents your life? What if you KNEW that you had exactly 22,500 days in your life? Where would your dot be right now, today? How would you spend today if you knew that you only have ten dots left? I think we would live a lot differently if we visually realized how short our time on earth is.

Man, I think I’ll print that thing up an put it on my desk. It will remind me that I don’t have forever here and I’ve got to get going.

It was cold in the house the other night. Maggie had rolled herself into a perfectly round ball. I was able to get a quick picture of her.

The interesting moments of our lives are so fleeting that it’s difficult to record them with anything but our memories.

Every day I brush my teeth. My eyes wander as I perform this mundane task and they inevitably fall to these vitamin bottles. Every day I notice that my vitamins are “expired.” In reality they’re not. Those bottles are OLD, but the vitamins within them are from the huge bottle that I bought at Costco only a month or so ago. The vitamins aren’t expired; the bottles are.

Still, my mind panics every time I see that expiration date on the multi-vitamins. In a couple of months, even the calcium will be “expired.” Every day I will have a tiny jolt of worry while I brush my teeth.

I should take a Sharpie and mark out the expiration dates…

Mike and I were driving home from Mt. Hood, Oregon. At the Utah/Idaho border, we saw this SUV being towed. It had obviously been in a fantastic wreck.

I thought it was ironic that affixed to the left side of its bumper was a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker. All I could do is watch the Jeep be towed away.

How fitting…

The presidency has been such a car wreck that all we can do is crane our necks to watch…

“Maddy sold her house for $235,000!”

Our neighbors across the street give us the low-down on Madison’s house. She put up a For Sale By Owner sign and flyers. Mike and I looked at the flyer and were shocked to see that she was asking $250K for it. Now, we’re even more shocked that she got $235. Three more houses have sold on our small block: another FSBO and two with Coldwell Banker.

Maybe to big wigs in California or New York, $235,000 doesn’t sound like a lot of money for a 1000 square-foot house, but in Sugarhouse, this is a definite jump in prices. Just last year, Rick sold his place next door for $150,000. Is Maddy’s house that much better than Rick’s or have prices gone up without me noticing?

Why do I care?

Mike and I are renting the house we live in. We love it and fantasize about buying it, but house prices in the area really have nothing to do with the amount of rent we pay. Why do I care? I don’t know. I guess the old real estate agent in me likes to keep tabs on the neighborhood.

The guy who bought the house from the motorcycle-riding hippie is going to use it as a rental. There is a team of two men taking shingles off the roof as I type this. The new landlord drives a silver Prius and parks it in front of the house for a few hours each week. The purple irises remained uncut until they died on the vine. I was tempted to go over there and cut a bunch for myself, but Mike wouldn’t let me trespass. I don’t think the new landlord would have cared. He has no renters and he’s not cutting them for himself.

All of this real estate activity makes the neighborhood feel like it’s changing. Are there new people in the house yet? No? When will they come. What about the people who paid so much money for Maddy’s house? I haven’t noticed yet. All I know is that our neighbors from across the street are coming over for dinner tomorrow. They are staying here until the end of the week, at least, so there is some semblance of stability in my life.

I got the laugh of the day today at Momentshowing. Jay and Raynne are teaching their cat to use the toilet. Unfortunately, she has also learned how to use the toilet paper.

The amazing part of this video is that Jay isn’t laughing his head off behind the camera. I can hear him breathing, but I wouldn’t have been able to keep quiet. Good work!

Sid knows that when I finish eating a Jello pudding cup, he gets to lick the disposable plastic cup clean. We both get a treat. I watch his long pink tongue clean the cup so well that I’m able to throw it away in the recycle bin instead of the trash can.

Little moments like these bring me more joy than an entire week at Disneyland.

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of The Tipping Point and Blink. They are non-fiction books that I found incredibly entertaining. Lee Siegel has decided that it is his mission to crusade against Malcolm Gladwell.

• Lee Siegel on Culture – MY MALCOLM GLADWELL PROBLEM, AND YOURS

Now, I have some problems with Gladwell. He’s not actually a scientist, but he quotes their findings all the time. It’s kind of like getting your medical advice from an actor who plays a doctor on television. If you want good science, you really need to read the abstracts quoted by Malcolm Gladwell. If you want entertainment, you read Malcolm’s books. He’s bringing an introduction of behavioral science to the masses. It’s not perfect, but it brings the basics to a larger audience.

Lee Siegel can have his little crusade, but the strangeness that I noticed was this sentence:

“But the really sneaky thing about Gladwell is the way he constantly contrives to present himself as a socially conscious liberal, rather than the capitalist tool in journalist’s clothing that he is.”

I find it strange that he believes that a “socially conscious liberal” to be mutally exclusive of a “capitalist.” It’s possible to be socially conscious, liberal AND a capitalist. There is overlap. Not all liberals think that we should be communists. That might have been true back in 1963 (which apparently is the time from which Mr. Siegel has formulated his opinions), but it’s not true now.

That sort of thinking sets up a sort of simplistic rivalry where anyone who believes gays should have the right to marry, anyone should be allowed to immigrate to our country and women should have the right to choose what they do with their own bodies are automatically labeled as commies. Capitalism and Communism deal with the economy, not our social construct. The two influence each other, but they are both different views of the world.

It’s possible to be a liberal AND a capitalist.

Just thought Mr. Siegel might want to know that the world is a little bigger than his view of it.

Via: kottke.org

Man, I don’t know what to think about this. Some group of kids did some crazy stuff in Toronto and made a homemade DVD about it. The kids were passing it around to everyone they knew. Suspiciously, an ad company in Toronto made a similar ad campaign for Coca-Cola.

You can see the comparisons there.

• No Media Kings » Take Our Taste Test

The kids went to a lawyer who was so convinced of the similarities that the firm took the case pro bono.

Me, I don’t know what to think anymore. There are several similarities between the videos, but can you defend a copyright on the “be yourself” feel-good mentality that has been shoved down our throats since kindergarten?

Considering the publicity, this might be the best thing that ever happened to those kids. Isn’t that why they were handing out DVDs of their exploits to everyone they knew?

Via: videoblogging : Message: Re: [videoblogging] Current Contradiction

I am strangely happy with these musical balls. I love the Chromatic Prime Numbers Only variation.

• whitney music box var. 12 – chromatic – prime numbers only

The explanation for it is here:

• KrazyDad » Blog Archive » Visual Harmony

This is one of those situations where it seems that someone has thought a lot more about an author’s work than the author himself. John Whitney was an experimental filmmaker, but Jim has taken John’s experiments one step further by making the visual harmonics affiliated with musical notes. He has created something entirely new.

Via: Rocketboom

When I talked about living in a small home (873 square feet), I talked about how such a small house can feel so roomy. Now, I feel like I live in a mansion. 100 homes, each 100 square feet, all photographed for your enjoyment.

• MICHAEL WOLF | PHOTOGRAPHY | HONGKONG 100 X 100

Almost every home uses a bunkbed, either for extra storage, a couch on the bottom bunk or some of these units house two people. Another commonality is a fan. The rooms must get hot. After looking at all of these photos, I realize that I am living in the lap of luxury in my 873 square foot home with a huge yard in the back for Sid to run.

It’s amazing to me the different storage ideas that people use in these homes. Some units feel roomy and comfortable. Some feel claustrophobic and depressing. Others seem filled with hope. I loved looking at all the homes in the slideshow.

These are my favorites:

Via: kottke.org

It took me a while to decide whether I was going or not, but my tickets are paid for and I’m driving to San Francisco to attend Vloggercon.

• Vloggercon

Ever since I attended the How To Add Video To Your Blog panel at SXSW, I have been actively filming and adding videos. The panel was helpful in an inspirational way more than a technical way. I knew nothing about adding video to my weblog before and I was using YouTube.

Now, I can add video easily to my weblogs and it’s all because of the guys at that SXSW panel. I’m excited to mix with other people who are doing this regularly.

I’m going to Vloggercon!

P.S. A special thank you to my friend, Kathleen Bennett, for letting me crash at her place while I’m attending the convention.

This year, we made our own Mother’s Day cards. I have such a trouble finding anything that even speaks to me for Mother’s Day cards. They try, but is a card that says, “You’re not really my mother, but…” as loving as I want to express? I like the creative aspect of it and I like to show off my artwork to my mommy.

I just want them all to be proud of me.

He always comes when I call him unless he knows he’s in trouble.

I found this postcard on PostSecret.

I noticed. And by the way, it DOES make me love you more. Every day. You ARE my SuperMan!

PostSecret‘s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a 24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.

I’ve been writing all day, trying to get all caught up so that I can go camping this weekend. I don’t like to let the weblogs “go dark.” I think of them as plays or performances sometimes. The shows in Las Vegas will say Dark Tuesdays. That means that on Tuesday, they don’t perform. The stage is dark.

I don’t like any of the weblogs to go dark, so I keep on writing. I write enough in one day to cover the rest of the week and the entire weekend, even for the weblogs that have only a few hundred readers a day.

The sun is coming in the window. It now comes up between Madison’s house and Rob & Mindy’s house. When I opened the blinds, I thought to myself, “Who put the sun there?” It has been so long since I’ve sat at this desk while the sun came up that the sun is in an entirely different position now. It’s all high in the sky instead of slinking toward the southern horizon. I’m not used to seeing it there.

Spring has taken me by surprise.

We got home Saturday evening. We went to California and went to amusement parks for five days straight. That’s too long. I thought three days at Disneyland might be too much, but after we added Sea World and Universal Studios, we were exhausted. I’ve spent the last three days just resting.

It’s good to be home. I forgot how comforting and enjoyable a purring cat on my chest can be. I forgot how fun an excited dog that loves me is. After spending so much time in artificial reality, it was nice to come home to a kitty litter box and dirty dishes.

Why does Tropicana care how I drink their orange juice? I don’t want to use the straw. I just want to open the carton and drink. Why is it so important to them that they not only have to waste a fourth of their carton to tell me how to use a straw AND print “Please Use Straw Hole” at the point where I want to open the carton?

I wonder what went wrong at Tropicana that caused them to print the phrase, “Please Use Straw Hole” on their cartons…

“It looks like the subjects in Marketing Research just opened up the cartons instead of using the straws again.”

“Even with the ‘Click and Sip’ explanation printed on the side?”

“Yep.”

“What else can we do to make them use the straw? They’re supposed to use the straw, because it’s like, you know… it’s like you stuck a straw into an orange and just started drinking. That’s our logo.”

“Yeah… about that… have you ever tried doing that?”

“Yeah. It tasted horrible. Our orange juice is way better than that.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Maybe if we put a warning on the carton right where they would open it up, then they’d use the straw…”

I have been crocheting since I was a kid, trapped in Billings, Montana with nothing to do all summer long. I can also knit and sew, but crochet beats all for me (no dropped stitches and the most portable). Knitting seems to be a really popular hobby right now and crochet is riding its coattails. I don’t care whether my hobby is popular or not, but it’s nice to see cool patterns and ideas more often.

• diesel sweeties: pixelated robot romance web comic

Diesel Sweeties is right. Yarn is VERY expensive. It’s always cheaper to buy a sweater at Wal-Mart than to buy yarn and knit the sweater. It didn’t used to be like that, but now, I have to look at my hobby as just a hobby. I get a lot more entertainment per dollar out of yarn than anything else.

Umm… Click on this link.

• I Love Egg – egg-song-korean.swf

Could someone explain this to me?

Is the Egg a mighty morphin’ superhero or is it really just a tribute to eggs?

The website links are all in Korean, so I can’t figure out what’s going on. I’m strangely uncomfortable with an egg superhero…

My current craft project right now is this bath mat. It’s about half-way done right now and I’ll probably be finished with it in a couple of days depending on how much writing I do and how much avoiding writing I do.

This is a pattern of my own making where I’m really just working in rounds, but I got the stitch from a book called Crochet Your Way. It’s a book full of UGLY patterns, but there are so many different stitches, it’s a great reference book. Think of it as a stitch bible with a bunch of ugly patterns distracting you.

This is the Twisted Loop Stitch:

I work the row twice. First I go around the round doing a double crochet in each loop. After that, I go back over the double crocheted stitches with these loops (chain 7, single crochet around the post of the double crochet).

You end up with a thick and bouncy mat that is perfect for stepping out of the shower onto.

By the way, I wasn’t kidding about the insanely ugly patterns in Crochet Your Way. Here’s an example. I feel so sorry for the model in this picture. Fortunately, no Muppets were murdered to create this jacket. It’s made from Faux Muppet Pelt using your mad crocheting skillz. As much as I’ve hated the patterns from this book, I have used the stitches in my own creations many times over. I have such a love-hate relationship with this book that I feel funny even writing about it. I don’t want to seem like I’m recommending it, but I AM recommending it.

Strange…

I found this video on MySpace the other day. It reminded me of the dwarf hamster Mike and I used to have when we lived at Stonehedge Apartments. She was the best hamster anyone ever had. We used to open up the little door and she would hop into our hand. She would take the food and put it into her cheeks and then happily hop right back into her cage.

She used to run on her wheel just like this and she would get so excited that she would end up flipping around just like this little guy. Seeing this video makes me happy with memories.

I’ll never forget the night that Mike woke me up,

“Laura, if you want to say goodbye to the hamster, you better wake up. I don’t think she’s going to live through the night.”

After three years of happy life, it wasn’t surprising that she might die. That night she was having seizures. I said my goodbyes. I was so grateful that Mike woke me up so I could.

I can’t remember her name…

I am accessing the web using my Treo. Nevada Landing is a great hotel, but they don’t have Wi-Fi. They want me to go downstairs and gamble instead of eating clementines in my hotel room.

Dooce snapped a picture of the totally awesome book about Armageddon from the LDS church.

• dooce: The great and dreadful day of the Lord

She totally missed out on The Golden Plates, which is an LDS comic book documenting the trials and tribulations of the Book of Mormon. I find the steroid-Nephites a little more scary.

Even more scary, these things are in the book section at my grocery store. I stare at them while I wait for the pharmacist to fill my perscriptions and I am amazed that there are enough LDS people to make it profitable for them to sell these books in a grocery store. It makes me feel alone here in Zion.

And even scarier, you can buy that comic book at Amazon, not just Deseret Book and Smith’s Food King.

I remember the last Easter that we celebrated before we became Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was so excited, I woke up early and looked around the house. I opened the curtains to look outside and found a little colorful toy on the windowsill. I realized that I shouldn’t do Easter without my parents, so I left it alone on the windowsill and lay back in bed, waiting for my parents to wake up.

In my mind, I waited a long time, but it was probably only a couple of minutes. I woke them up and they sat on the couch while I looked for “what the Easter Bunny left me.” I headed straight for the front room window and moved away the curtains. My mother said, “It’s like she knew it was there.” I did, Mom. Sorry I never told you.

After the divorce, Mom always gave us Easter baskets. They were beautiful creations with plastic Easter grass. I always had enough candy to last me for weeks, saving the best parts for last. The chocolate Easter bunnies that we sold in junior high to earn money for choir became the focus of the baskets. I always ate the solid chocolate from the ears down. They suffer less when you eat the head first.

Now, as I walk down the Easter aisle with Mike in the grocery store, I am untempted. He stocks up on Robin Eggs and Cadbury Eggs and even eyes the Peeps, but I’m unphased. I had enough Easter candy as a child that I never feel deprived. I let Mike fill the cart with his treats and none of them tempt me because I am full.

Apparently, some folks think feet first are better.

• The Joy of Tech comic… laughter is the best tech support.

Barbarians…

My friend Braidwood posted this lovely picture of me that she created herself for my birthday. It just made me SO happy to see it!

• Braidwood’s (B)log: Happy Birthday, Bella!

I think this is the first time anyone has drawn a picture of me except those few times Stacey included me in her drawings during childhood and that one time I caught Chris Hamblin drawing a picture of my legs.

We had some nice weather, so I did my video in the backyard, which brought to mind all my duties. Time to cut the grass…

The strangest things come out of my mouth when I video tape myself. I don’t even remember talking about this.

“That’s always the funnest part of Spring: finding what the snow was hiding.”

I have long been a fan of Bob Ross. When he died over ten years ago, a little piece of him stayed alive with me. I am continually trying to find ways to make acrylics act like oil paints so I can keep doing the Bob Ross thing without burning down my house.

It seems that a lot of other people have been equally inspired to keep Bob Ross alive.

• !!! Happy :-) Afro !!!

• YouTube – Bob Ross doing his thing

• Bob Ross Victory – Google Video

• YouTube – bob ross

• YouTube – Bob Ross – Lovin’ You

• A Little Flash Video with Bob’s Voice

When you have the time to truly enjoy these videos, take a few moments and enjoy the Bob Ross Cult.