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.

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.

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?

So here’s another installment of How Lucky Is Wayne, Anyway? (a less successful but more interesting offshoot of Whose Line Is It, Anyway?)

For Round 1, we display his recent winnings at Avitable’s Avitaween raffle contest.  (Don’t you dare click over there if you still have decency and wholesomeness on your soul’s business card.  You’ve been warned.)  The Universe saw Wayne eyeing Ren’s recent Invaded! T-shirt purchase and knew that he wanted not one, but TWO of these shirts.  Universe also knew that although Wayne would have loved to go to Avitaween this year, it wasn’t to be, so The Universe saw to it that someone else won the actual plane trip to go to the party.

So now I’m a winner* and have to choose my shirts.  Naturally, I have to get one of Dave’s

I’m not sure on the other one yet, but it will probably be the splatter one. 

Stay tuned for my next post, which will probably be some additional bragging about how lucky I am, such as the job I just landed.

Thanx!,
Wayne

* see how I switched from third person to first person?  Winners do that.

WHOA.

Did you guys love all these guest posts as much as I did? I’ve half a mind to stop blogging myself and just get 20-30 people to commit to one guest post per month and just have them write for me.

Who’s with me!!!!!??

The side benefit to this master scheme is that, as you probably have noticed yourself, these bloggers end up writing BETTER material when they guest post than the stuff they normally put on their own blogs.

What? Isn’t this a reverse roast?

As LeSombre would say, Quel Frommage.

Let’s recap a little.

First, Dave2 from Blogography teed things off by actually making a BAD WAYNKEY!  He cleverly embedded it into a intolerance-based liberally biased anti-establishment fascist piece of propaganda disguised as a comic, and for that, I’m eternally grateful.  He even published an extended Behind The Scenes edition, only this time, with less New Kids On The Block shrines.

Then BlondeBlogger came by and deposited into the bank of whall a series of 10 questions and the readers were to pick which 5 were true.  The winner, Ren, supposedly gets “have a date with Whall at the LOLCat headquarters.”  I’ll pre-emptively accept his withdrawal from the contest.  I got another true statement: BB is hot.  Just look!

After BB came Hilly, aka snackiepoo.  She was able to conform to the strict Puritan values my blog espouses (yeah, right [bleepitybleeper!]) and bring on the Weird Science for us all.  She also pointed out all of our differences.  Thanx for that (WTF Hilly, you ride donkeys?!?!?).  But she did point out our commonalities- I do love the 80′s, I do have a great heart, and I LOVE TWEETING AND BLOGGING.

Then it got all serious-like.  Miss Britt infected my blog with Obamfluenza H1N1.  I had to go into quarantine and everything!  Usually, any given type of flu has an incubation period anywhere from 72 hours to 7 days, but evidently if one drinks the kool-aid fast enough, he or she can be overcome within minutes, afflicted with such symptoms as incredulous mysterious adulation towards public figures, radical socialist views, and a shrieking voice when debating (or so I’ve heard).  After watching 15+ minutes of Funny Obama, even *I* started experiencing my own symptoms of tolerance, acceptance and open-mindedness.  Fortunately for me I was able to purchase a new copy of Atlas Shrugged while on vacation, which is a common antidote for apathy-inducing liberalism.  WHEW!

And then?  YES!  YESSSSSSSS!  OMG YES!  No, I’m not having an episode. I’m still reeling from the awesome YES-laden guest post from Mr Shiny.  Here’s what I don’t get about Shiny – he’s undoubtedly one of the top 3 funniest, wittiest, smartest bloggers I’ve ever had the pleasure to read.  He’s absolutely brilliant.  I mean, there are bloggers out there I enjoy to read, but Shiny’s posts make me laugh out loud.  But he hardly gets any comments!  Even his guest post for me had the fewest comments out of all the guest posters.  I just don’t understand that.  It’s almost as if his posts are so good people find themselves unworthy to comment.   His LOLyes pictures were awesome, especially for huge YES fans such as myself.   And Shiny? I’d love to hear the Leave It track… I’m thinking of doing one too so maybe we can team up on that idea sometime.

Ren from Renagerie.com followed up the Amazing Mr Shiny with a clever new take on LOLcats, my blog and made something unique – WHALL-anti-cats.  He took photos he had of me over our 10yr friendship and captioned them with actual blog post titles from my blog.  And WOW.  He did nineteen (19) lolcaptionblogtitlethingies!  I think my favorite in the series is “an’ you’ll be poppin, lickin and breakin in no time…“  And yes, it’s all about the dorkiness of Wayne.

*content sigh*.  Then Poppy came to my blog and made it aww bettaw.  It wuz so pwehshush!  She whalljacked my blog and made an eccentric vlog with one of the sexiest coolest overdub narration voices you’ll ever hear.  And I think some rap.  And something about “Dirty Wayne” which is almost as nice sounding as I expect “Naughty Wayne” would sound like.  Thank you Poppy.  Thank you for the YES tie-in, the voiceover and the awesomeness you gave my blog.  And something about a lollipop in it or something.

What guest post whallstravaganza would be complete without a fatwha?  Faiqa from Native Born, aka Supreme Magistrate of All Things Wise, Prudent and Being Generally Better Than Everyone Else Without Even Trying of the NBLA, unleashed the NBLA’s demands on the world when they actually DID whalljack me with normal and just atypically terroristic and extremist demands.  I’m so glad they did. You will pay for your insolence.  I have seen the error of my ways.  Chuck Norris is gonna go all up in your face and roundhouse kick every turban off every extremist muslim head.  I’ve corrected my behavior and even built a time machine, went back in time, and put in TWO votes for Barack Obama just to make sure.  With just one roundhouse kick. I’m so glad my eyes have been opened. Blindfolded.  Please forgive me for my past.  And then LOLcaption it.  Sincerely, Marmontiansese Nbyuti Barack Hussein Obama (tongue click) W. Hall whall.  PS: May I express my fondness for your aesthetic qualities? My lord, you’re hot.

The final instwhallment of the guest post gala was performed by Mr Avitable.  From Avitable.com.  His last name is Avitable.  He doesn’t like it pronounced Avitable, he prefers it Avitable.  It can be a littable difficult to fittable the right syllables befittable such an iminitable Avitable, but it’ll make the fiddle knittable, said the quittable riddle in the middle.  I think I need to make this whole thing DITLable.  Now does everyone know how to pronounce Avitable?  Good. Now to his blog post.  He copied Faiqa.  End of story.  NEXT!

All in all, I think it was a quality showing.  I don’t know about you, but I’m already looking forward to my next vacation!

PS: Who was your favorite? I’ve been looking to start up some drama around here to drive up traffic, so which one did you hate and which on pwned the others?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

PS#2: The “Part V” in the title is a little secret.  Can anyone guess what it’s in reference to?

Yesterday, Faiqa wrote an excellent guest post. She brought up some great points, even if she was a bit lazy by using bullet points and neglecting to mention the similarity between her newly created organization and NAMBLA. I was annoyed that I had to write a post after hers, because how could I outshine her, even though I’m smarter, more attractive, and a better person than she could ever be?

I know! I’ll just build on her already impressive work product, steal her ideas, put my own name on them, and voila!

Faiqa said:

*Even More Multiculturalism. Mr. Hall will spend the rest of his life creating LOLCats that exhibit a broader appeal to humanity. His first creation could be, for example, a Tabby with a dot on its forehead happily encouraging you with the knowledge that “I Gots Teck Sahpport.” Or a Persian cat getting waterboarded screeching, “But Ahm Jest Heer Awn Ah Stoodent Veesa!”

And Miss Britt said in the comments:

Now, I want to see some of these LOLCats…

And Avitable listened and He saw that it was Good and He created 7 LOLCats and then He rested:

Windows 7 Beta

As I believe I’ve mentioned before but am too lazy to go find the link, I upgraded my primary work laptop to Windows 7 Beta, build 7000.  I’m still loving it.  The standard OS at the company I work for is still XP, so this kind of jump is like 1.21 gigaparsecs in a kessel Mr Fusion run.  I was on Vista for about a year before that, so I was mostly ready for the user interface changes.

First impression – FAST.  Second impression: WHOA THIS IS SO FAST.  Fourth impression: What happened to the third impression?  Wait, I know!  It must have gone by too fast.

Windows 7 performs faster, looks better, backs up great, is more intuitive, is more easily managed, has cooler tools built-in and crashes left often.  All of my drivers worked (except for a Canoscan Lide 60 scanner; still working on that).

I tried upgrading to the latest leaked version, 7057 but I encountered errors so I’ll wait a while to see if another one gets leaked.  What’s exciting about this is that typically, beta software is slower than the actual release because developers usually work on stability rather than performance.  So I expect the actual release to be even faster than the one I have loaded.

That’ll do, Microsoft.  That’ll do.

I’m totally blogging this

I’m a sucker and I can prove it.

Your all-time-favorite NSFW blogger Avitable made an irresistible t-shirt and I snagged me one.  Yes, it has “whall.org” on the back.  I’m completely advertising myself for myself on myself.

Judge not, lest ye be flogged.

Utterz you may have MISC’ed

Best of LOLcats

(DITL = Day In The Life)

This DITL is a little dog-centric.

(Direct Youtube link for iPhone users)

Episode #14 contains these tidbits:

• Tigger hides in the bushes
• Wayne’s new camera button
• Beautiful tree
• Public Service Announcement!!!!
• Candle-lit bubble bath with Kenny G
• You better run
• Spazmatroid / Dogs just wanna have fun

All in 3 minutes or less! (excluding introductions, credits and bonus footage).

Note: background music supplied unknowingly by the fantastic duo of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, key stalwarts that make up Steely Dan, off their latest album Everything Must Go. The track I used portions of is Lunch With Gina. Pick this music up if you can – it is amazingly good.

One of the things I noticed when I started this blog was my lack of comments compared to “the big guys”.  There are all these sites out there with dozens of comments every single day, and some of them get over 50.  EVERY DAY!  I barely can even blog every day much less go out and comment on other people’s blogs to drum up interest.  What I REALLY need is a dictation / transcription system that lets me listen to blogs and comment on them with my phone.  Jott and utterz seem to be a good step in the right direction, but it’s just not there yet.

Then I got to thinking – maybe I can check Google Trends to see how popular I am compared to the big guys.

So I did a quick check of “wayne“, “dave” and “adam“.  And was I suprised!

Looks like Wayne (in blue) is gaining popularity, Dave (in red) is on the down trend and Adam (in yellow) has no change.  Yay google!

I don’t want Dave to feel bad about this, though.  I mean, when I track the relative popularity of his Arch Nemesis, Ann Coulter, it’s just about no contest whatsoever.

Ann coulter, down there in green, just can’t compare to the power of Wayne, Dave and Adam.

So look on the bright side, Dave.  At least you’re a million times more popular than Ann Coulter.

Two readers have sprinkled a little blog love on me.   There’s a “I heart your blog” theme going on and Kapgar of kapgar.com and Marty (aka ChillyWilly from comments) from Banal Leakage are both secure enough in their hetersexuality to issue a hand-drawn pink puffy heart love note so delicately drawn on notebook paper to yours truly.  I’ll assume for the time being that they actually like my blog and aren’t after something else, like my DITL.

Being the astute (and incredibly waynal) reader that I am, I noticed that both of these gentlemen put my name and blog link LAST in their list.  I can take this in one of a few ways:

1. I was put last due to a random fluke (what is this, a 1 in 49 chance? more? less)
2. They decided to put people alphabetically.  It would seem the facts help this particular option, but this is Election Year – why would I start caring about facts all of a sudden?
3. I’m their least favorite blog on the list (hey, it could happen)
4. I’m their favoritest blog on the list, saving me for last.