Yesterday on the way home my daughter and I saw car with a customized Dallas Cowboy license plate with the phrase

WWJJD

Since I’m not a big Cowboys fan, it took me a while to realize what the extra “J” was doing in there.  Haha, clever.

But then I remembered something I heard in one of the videos I had posted earlier about innovation, and something the speaker said stuck in my head then, and that was WWCD.  WWCD stood for What Would Croeses (cresus) do?  Croeses was famous for his wealth.  In today’s terms, you might think Bill Gates, George Sorros or Donald Trump.  When posed with an intriguing problem, one way to generate ideas on how to solve the problem would think – What would someone with near unlimited resources do to solve the problem?  By going down that road, the act brainstorming can pick up tons of fodder that can be sorted out later on.

It didn’t take me long to turn the focus to where it belonged – on me, naturally – so I asked myself “how could I brand WWWD?”  What Would Wayne Do?  But then I figured – who cares about what *I’d* do? 

What people REALLY want to know is… what do I want?  The important thing is for what THEY can do for ME.

So now I bring you, WWWW – What Would Wayne Want?  A new series on ye olde blog of whall where you can stay in-the-know of things I want so you may do your duty to Whall and to country.

In the first installment, I want you to go wish Miss Britt a happy birthday.  She turned 30 this past week, and a select few of us took the time and submitted happy birthday videos and photos, and some random guy on the Internet went and made a video of it all.  And I made the cut!!!

PS: I think that guy should be strung up.  I mean, he made her cry.  CRY!  As if there isn’t enough pain in this world, he goes and makes the tears fall.  Horrible, horrible man.

I was reading one of the recent Geeks of Dune, er Geeks of Doom newsletters when I hit a quote from the new director of the upcoming new Dune movie translation.

From the article, quoting Pierre Morel:

Like many people, I was not fully satisfied with David Lynch’s movie in 1984. I do respect David, and I think his interpretation and vision was interesting, but not what we [fans] expected. And I thought I’d give it a chance, try to do this, make it faster and more modern. I think that now, in 2010, we have the technology to achieve much more than David could do twenty-five years ago. I think it will be cool to try something different.

Say what?

Who are these “many people” who were “not fully satisfied”?  What’s WRONG with them? Did they not see the same movie I did at 14 years old? 

I MEAN COME ON! LOOK AT THIS!

And that’s just how the movie started.  It proceeded to include awesome alien beings, huge-scale artwork, sound effects that blew my mind, spaceships, fighting (both technological and hand-to-hand), killer beasts in the desert, Ming the Merciless, flying fat bastards, STING!!!!, blue-within-blue eyes and was interwoven delicately with complex overarching concepts I wouldn’t come to understand for many years later.

To say Dune transformed my love of sci-fi cinema is an understatement of pre-folded-space proportions.  I didn’t read the books until after the movie, and I especially enjoyed the books that came later by Herbert’s son (some of them were enjoyed as audio books).

Now I feel like reading the whole thing again.

As if I needed another reason to love this song any more

This guy is great!  Makes me wanna learn sign language.  At least now I know what “Hey” is in ISN.  I’m no dancer, but I sure do move to this song.

PS: Yes, I really do like the song; no sarcasm here, like you might see on other people’s blogs.

PS#2: I didn’t mean the first PS to point at specific people, nor am I sour about it.  Not a bit.

PS#3: I’ll let you decide if I’m using sarcasm in #2.

That was definitely worth 5 mins of my time.

But I still don’t believe in man-caused global warming.

Fortunately for me, my family, my employer and teh interwebs, Ren and I did NOT wake up to the realization that we could not recall the previous #VegasBB weekend and have to retrace our steps to find Adam.

Of course, if my Photoshopping skillz were better, the above movie poster would have been modified with our faces.  As such, I am entrusting you, dear reader, to use your fantastic imagination and help me out.  I want you to envision a perfectly inserted crop of Adam’s face for the bearded guy holding the baby (cringe if you must), Ren as the guy in the back, and put in me with my missing tooth holding some ice.  While you’re at it, also visualize that I expertly removed the extraneous “the” from inside the letter O.

See, if I was better at Photoshop (or gimp in my case), then I could’ve done all those changes in the time it took for me to describe the changes to you.

If you’re really good at this whole creativity exercise, go ahead and put in Poppy‘s face for the baby in the picture.

Why?

Well, if you MUST know, she’s the winner from my last post!  I went through and counted twelve (12) valid entries for people wishing us luck on our trip, then put those names in a list in excel numbered 1-12, and used random.org’s widget on the front page to determine a winner (#4).

See how her face would be perfect for that cover?

As for #VegasBB, we had a great time.  I met some fun folks and widened my blogging horizons a little. 

Many super sets of immense thanktitude to the hosts and all the people who helped put it on – Erin (@Queenofspain) & Megan (@undomesticdiva) in particular.  The drinks never ran dry, the @Vdog snorts never stopped, the laughter never died down and most importantly, the blackmail video never stopped rolling. 

Oh yes, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to retire on the digitial arsenal I captured. 

Let the bidding begin.

As some of you know, Ren and I embark on Ren & Wayne Road Trip 2.0 today

We both have our birthdays this month, and why not celebrate by going to Vegas?  As I mentioned before, it seems a lot of other people have the same idea.   Our first road trip was TequilaCon 2009, where we actually did a ROAD trip (as in, we drove).  This time, we’re taking a flight.  And, I just realized, we’re not renting a car there.  So actually we’ll have very little going on in terms of roads but I don’t think that matters much in the spirit of things.

The whole “VegasBB” (Vegas Birthday Bash or Vegas Blogger Birthday Bash) thing is doubly cool because we’re all Sagittarius!  Sagittarians are very lucky, of course.  However, I’m not going to hog all the luck to myself.  I’m deciding to share the luck with you.

That’s why I’m giving away something.  TO ONE OF YOU!  For mostly nothing.  All you gotta do is leave a comment for me or Ren on this blog post, wishing us luck, by Monday night, 7pm Central Time (12/14/2009), and you get a chance to win something. 

What can you win?  Well I happen to have an extra copy of BioWare’s Mass Effect for the XBOX 360, brand new & still sealed.

I realize that many of you might not even have an XBOX 360, but hey, it can make for a Christmas gift for someone you know that does.  Or you could sell it on eBay.  I don’t care. 

Rules:

• While you are free to leave multiple comments wishing us luck (we can take all the luck we can get!), each person only gets one entry into the contest.
• You need to leave a valid email address in the comment form (not in the comment itself, of course).
• I’m not selling anything or driving up traffic for any reason, so tweets or subscribing to blogs or other things like that do not get extra entries. 
• I’ll use one of them thar randomizer thingies to determine the winner.
• Only comments received before 7pm central on 12/14/2009 are in the running.

Watch us on Twitter (hashtag #VegasBB) for all our exploits and winnings!

I received notice recently that one of my all-time favorite performers is once again coming to Austin.

See there?  It even says that he’s one of my “favorite performers”.   Here’s the bio write-up from the eventful site:

Jonathan Coulton is the Contributing Troubadour for Popular Science magazine and the musical director for John Hodgman’s Little Gray Book Lectures. His songs about vengeful nerds, ennui-afflicted clowns, partially-imagined historical figures, and devotees of a certain Swedish prefab furniture store are insanely clever without ever being too clever for their own good. They repeatedly lure you into laughing before suddenly breaking your heart. And the sick part is, you keep coming back. Coulton’s is the voice of every spooky elementary school kid who could never quite keep his shirt tucked in or shoes tied; every lovelorn mason and mad scientist; every one of us who has ever sat despairingly on the floor, surrounded by parts of an Ikea endtable, weeping over our allen wrenches. He is ready to soft-rock your socks off.

My interest and involvement in JC has waxed and wayned over the last year; I even wrote a parody song of a parody song of his, sang & recorded it and started a video but then I dropped it for no apparent reason.  I also have footage of me interviewing him DITL-style (along with Paul and Storm as well) and I have yet to incorporate it into one of myDITL’s. 

Yes, I am that potentially famously procrastinatorial.

I’m even slightly interested in the Summer Cruise he tempted everyone with on his blog. 

If you want to meet up for the show here in Austin in February, drop me a line.  You know I’ll be live-tweeting the whole thing.

It’s official.

Ren and I are going to Vegas for our birthdays this December. 

If I had the time and inclination, I’d photoshop our faces into this apropos movie poster.  I’m still trying to figure out which of us would be which actor. 

Both of us have birthdays in December, and we were chatting it up during pool league how we need to do another road trip. You know, like our TequilaCon 2009 road trip where we took video but I never made a DITL, er I mean RITL (Roadtrip In The Life) for it?  *THAT* kind of road trip.

Then it hit us that we should go to Vegas. 

Turns out there’s already a big blogger birthday bash going on during my actual birthday (Saturday the 12th), and there are a million or so bloggers going.  So after comparing flights, holiday vacation travel for the Halls (what I like to call Hall-iday travel), vacation time from work and hotel options, we made our plans.

Friday the 11th to Monday the 14th.   Join us!

What makes the accommodations especially cool is my RCI membership – we snagged an entire week at a resort for pretty cheap.  We’re not staying the whole week, but it ended up being cheaper than a hotel would have cost per night during the days we’ll be there, AND we get a full kitchen.

The blogger bash is going on at Planet Hollywood and place we chose to stay at is just a couple blocks from there.  Ren’s not on Facebook, but so far out of the 40+ people confirmed attending, I only recognize two faces, and one of them is mine.

So I will finally be able to meet Adam. 

I wonder.  Is the blogosphere ready for us to meet?

Here’s the official (is it official? it LOOKS official) link and picture that includes the obligatory Elvis, coming from the folks I’ve never heard of at Room 704.  All I know about them is that they are women and drinking is somehow involved.  What more can you ask for?

Pessimists suck.

I was thinking today how… if I wanted to, if I *really* wanted to, I could be unhappy. 

I thought – if I concentrated hard enough, I could find a ton of things to be upset about.  Things to complain about.  Things to ruin my day or my week.  Things that could ruin my life if I let them.

Have you heard of gratitude journals?  I believe Oprah is a fan of them.  You’re supposed to write down the things every day that you’re thankful for.  I’ve never tried it myself, but have heard the wonders it does for people who are depressed or unhappy.

Since I’m so happy all the time, I wonder what would happen if I decided to start a complaint journal.  You know, for balance.

I could dwell on the fact that I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life.  Two hundred and seventy-five pounds of blogging muscle.

I could lament that I’m not at #avitaween this weekend like all the cool bloggers.

There are personal issues that could seriously weigh on me if I let them.  I don’t disclose them on the blog.

I owe a lot. In many ways to many people, and not just financial.

My feet itch.

There’s more politics to rile me up than ever before in my life, and it feels like the entire news media, the government, the blogging world, and most of my friends are against me and my principles.

I went without internet at our new house for a full week. Also, AT&T’s 3G coverage at our new house is horrible compared to our old house.

I forgot to set FastForward to record for my wife.  Now we’re weeks behind.

We still don’t have jet packs.

There are at least 3 jobs in my past that had I taken them when offered, I’d be a millionaire now.  I have 2 jobs in my past that I took a year too late and missed out on a million dollars.

My car’s muffler / tail pipe scrapes the bottom of our new driveway because of the incline.

I have health concerns. 

I’ve had to spend > $1000 on our two cars for maintenance, and I have at least another $1500 that needs to be spent, but we can’t right now.  $320 of it was for a leaking gas tank, and they just had to replace one little rubber grommet, but it costs that much anyway.

I still don’t have the game room TV cable hooked up, and we’ve been in our new house a week.

A road I drive every day will be moving from 2 lanes to 1 lane for 19 months while the government spends unneeded TARP stimulus money to pay workers to rebuild a bridge that doesn’t need rebuilding.

Speaking of driving every day, I used to work from home.  A LOT.  Now I have to go into work with 0% teleworking.  That means an additional $100-200/mo on gas expense.

I took a new job where I’m not the man in charge any more.  No clout, no history, no old-timer’s advantage.

That’s a lot of stuff, and I’m just disclosing or hinting at things that I’m comfortable saying on my blog.  If you know me and my blogging style, then you know there’s a lot more reality behind the scenes.

These were complaints off the top of my head.  Yet, I can easily come up with ten times as many things to be thankful for.  And it’s easy for me. 

In fact, it’s usually all I think about.  I keep being amazed at how lucky I am in life.  Everywhere I turn, I’m impressed with something.  There’s always something to make me smile.

Why don’t others have an easy time with it? Is it just perspective?

Despite all those things I listed above, I’m having one of the best days of my life today.

Here’s one of the reasons.  I found this on Iron Fist’s blog and I love it.

I’m so easy.

I bet you thought I meant DM as in “Direct Message” didn’t you?

No.

I mean Demitri Martin.

I’ve really come to love more and more things on my iPhone and one of the most recent ones is the AOL Radio app.  AOL Radio is like XM or Sirius or a radio station but goes over this magical thing I like to call “the Internet.”  It streams in different stations, like Rock, Pop, All Beatles, Sports, Talk, Politics, Country, or whatever has a station.  There are millions of stations (sort of). 

There are a couple of stations in my AOL Radio “favorites” list that are Comedy specific – AOL Comedy Classics and AOL Comedy Attack!

Now, Faiqa, Avitable and you other liberals, please don’t get all freaked out about the AOL Progressive channel. It’s *not* what you think it is.

Here are some videos for your enjoy to see if Demitri is up your alley or not.  I’m giving you two options because you might be busy and want a shorter one.

(and yes, the 2nd one has a couple bad words in it, and has a couple repeat jokes from the first one.  I consider this the extent of my responsibility in warning you since my blog is PG-13 rated.)