Happy Halloween!

Ah, the nostalgia of childhood lurks inside of me during the Holidays. Doesn't it for you? From right about now until the New Year, a smile from my face is a much easier obstacle to overcome. Smells of wet plastic and the taste of salt bring me back to 'the good ole days'. Actually that was the sweat dripping from my head into my Halloween mask and running into my mouth. What I would give to return to those times. Our biggest problems lied somewhere between who got the most candy and where I laid down my ninja sword to never be found again.

I remember in middle school (junior high for those not from around here) I was the most popular dressed "halloweener" . My father had lent me the clothes from his "I might wear that again collection". I had the biggest afro in town, the coolest flowered shirt ever made, the most pimpn'est sun glasses around, the largest bell bottoms you had ever seen and the coolest name ever given - Moondoggie! All the kids adored me that Halloween. One of my fondest memories….

So yesterday some friends came along bearing gifts - 3 big pumpkins! We made a night of carving templates into Jack O' Lanterns while 'Big Trouble in Little China' played in the background. I chose a scary mummy, my wife did the Martha Stewart 'pumpkin nose' on a pumkin-mini, my buddy Drew, well, he ended up hacking away at his, and his wife made a cool Trick or Treat pumpkin. It was a great night.

Here we are whacking away:


The finished products:



The week before with just the family:




Happy Halloween!!!

Birthday Wishes!

Well my daughter's birthday was yesterday - she turned the big "7". I just can't believe she is that old already. It seems like only yesterday she was running around the house with her binky in her mouth and drool down her chin.

For her birthday she receied tons of stuff (she alwas does) and being in two households, she gets 'twice the tons' of stuff. We got a her a new bicycle, a cutesy little outfit, some new winter boots, and Shrek 2. We decided to let her pick any place in town to go and eat and she went out like a king! Burger King that is! You just can't beat the indoor play area to a kid. Topped off the evening with a free Hersey Pie and a smile. Hapy Birthday Sweetheart. Daddy loves you.

Stick "Mondays" up your...

Ask me how my day is so far and I'll politely tell ya where to go! Here we go again (no, not the Whitesnake song). After forgetting

EDITED BY USER: Sorry, I got paranoid...

almost a month ago... getting chewed... finishing up the design... ripped apart... give a mouse a cookie and... take the whole gallon of milk.


Happy friggin' Monday!

For you who have $15,000 laying around...

Buy the ALL NEW QUAD POWERMAC G5!!! This thing is the most advanced piece of equipment I have seen come from Jobs & Co. Three new models have been released, but the quad stands out far above the rest. At $3,299 base price, it isn't a bad deal. Although, if you wish to max it out with 16 gigs of RAM, it will cost you and extra $11,000! Hope you've been buying Powerball tickets! Now I've just gotta talk the wife into opening up the checkbook a bit further.

A celebration is in order!

Carter, my son, slept from 11:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m.!!! This is the first time it has ever happened. Thanks little buddy for giving your mother and I some rest. Zzzzzzz's......

The Thinker.

I wonder what goes on in there?

Oh, almost forgot.

I have begun a new blog just for my cretive side. Another Photographic Experience; My Pathway to the Get-a-way... It will be full of my photograhy, first and foremost, and then maybe some artsy fartsy crap such as quotes and sayings or some of my design creations. Enjoy.

I, um, have a friend...

And this friend was wondering about something. That something is, well, he downloads music and software with P2P (peer-to-peer) software such as LimeWire or Poison, and uses software like MacTheRipper to extract the CSS encryption from DVDs that enables him to burn movies like Batman Begins after he rents them. I mean, in honest to goodness truth, he has probably downloaded and "gotten" literally 10's of thousands of dollars worth of "stuff" by hacking and social sciencing (its a geek thing) his way to get things. It's great! Well, um, I guess it is. Here's the thing.


His father and mother, like most parents, taught him it was wrong to steal. Now he has saved thousands of dollars by doing this, but what does he tell his children when they grow up? He doesn't want them to steal, but he not only enjoys, NAY, loves what he is doing, it saves his family money. Plus there is just this weird feeling of enjoyment that is hard to explain unless you have done it.

Granted, most of the crap he 'gets' is stuff he never would have purchased in the first place, but he still got it.

I guess it all started when he "hacked" his PlayStaion to play games that he downloaded (which means rented and burned) he got from Movie World with the GoldFinger Game Enhancer. Then he heard his buddy hacked his Xbox and could download games directly to it. My friend actually has the system now watching the entire first season of LOST! Whoa! Talk about opening up doors!


The thing is, I must wonder what his father would have done in the same situation. Now there was no such thing as the Internet back in the 60's (we all know Al Gore invented the net) but that was a time of rebellion and "down with the man" type of time. So he never had the chance to do these things, but would he have? Maybe. Maybe not.

So back to the original casting of this post - What about the children? What do we tell them? What do we not tell them? Kids seem to be learning faster with the tons of new technology in the schools and the net - so they aren't oblivious. I want to tell them it is so cool just to know HOW to do this stuff!! I want to jump up and down and say, "Damn, your dad is the coolest dad ever! He can teach you so much stuff! He's (sort of) a hacker!!"

His daughter actually sits with him, in his office, in front of LimeWire and shouts out Disney movie songs she wants to hear on his iPod.

It is such a hard balance being a gear-head, a geek, a social scientist and a good citizen all at the same time.

Lost treasure.

Minutes after all new iPod was released, millions rushed to the nearest iTunes music store to view and purchase the newest editions and accessories to the newly released iTunes 6. The Eminem commercial for the new iPod was deleted only moments into the thrust of $1.99 cha-chings for new videos.



The deleted Eminem video was found! For your viewing pleasure.

Apple does it again!

Apple has released the all new iPod with video capabilities. This thing is a real beauty!! You can even buy Pixar shortfilms right through the iTunes store for a buck 99. PLUS the episodes of LOST I always seem to miss!!! Genius.



Along with that, Apple has released an all new, beefier, faster and better iMac G5!!! This baby comes in either 1.9GHz or 2.1 GHz models with a built in iSight and a remote.

Somethings are just priceless.

Of course, I am referencing the look on my son's face and the gums behind his smile as well as the feeling it gives his ole dad (aka: me).

Randoms tests.

Well, I decided I like doing fun things with my blog like going to Blog Things and playing their little games and posting them, but they are ugly. I am a designer, I can't have ugly stuff on my blog! I decided to test teh waters and manipulate the html code a little and make them more sleek. Wasn't certain how much html editing blogspot would take, so I decided to play around a bit it just to see what else I could do.

My buddy Scott hates marquees - calls 'em amature droppings. He's sure to get a kick out of these!

scrolling amature droppings!
scrolling amature droppings!
scrolling amature droppings! scrolling amature droppings!

Intelligent Lifeforms.

My brain's pattern.

JBK's Brain's Pattern

- You have a dreamy mind, full of fancy and fantasy. - You have the ability to stay forever entertained with your thoughts. - People may say you're hard to read, but that's because you're so internally focused. - But when you do share what you're thinking, people are impressed with your imagination.

What Pattern Is Your Brain?

Liam Nathaniel Perry

Here he is folks, via camera phone, weighing in at 8 pounds, 4 ounces, measuring 21 inches long... Liiiiiiiiiiiiam Nathaniel Perry!

Suplemental post.

This goes along with my first post of the morning (didn't want anyone to think I made that stuff up).

Expectations of achievement
In another study published in the same journal, sixth-graders' self-concept--how effective, attractive, and valued they felt--was related to the desirability of their first names. Moreover, children with desirable first names scored higher on a standardized test of academic achievement. One possible interpretation is that teachers expect children with more popular names to do better and so, over time, those positive expectations translate into actual higher levels of achievement.

Full Article

Subconcious?

It's weird how sometimes things creep up on you, isn't it? No matter what you tell yourself during the time-being, one day you just finally realize "it" happened. I did it with smoking (among other things). Maybe you have done it with your finances or your marriage. It is normally a bad "it", I think.

I started smoking at church, of all places, with an older buddy. Just once a week, on Sunday. I told myself I wouldn't do it elsewhere nor would I ever buy my own. I remember buying (well paying for since I was merely 14) my first pack. I was in Dover, TN at a little gas station with the greatest chicken in the world. I told myself I needed to buy smokes because each Sunday I bummed a smoke from my buddy and it just wasn't right. Normally I would only smoke on Sunday's but over the course of time, I would do it other places and then more and more and more and more... It was a habit, wasn't it. "Hell no", I told myself! Riiiiiight (my Dr. Evil voice).

Ha! Looking back, it is impossible for me to decide why exactly I told myself these things. I don't believe I was in denial. For God sakes it choked me and gave me the hiccups nearly every time I inhaled. What is it that made me lie to myself? An evil subconscious? Maybe it was denial. Either way, it simply crept up on me. Out of nowhere, I was buying cigarettes on a regular basis and "needed" one every-so-often.

So now that I have rambled about something I didn't even me to, I am now going to write about what I wanted to; my job and how bad it has gotten since its inception nearly 9 months ago. If anyone saw my blog before today, you would have seen a very long and upsetting post I blogged about my coworkers. It was deleted for fear of someone actually reading it. Whoa, did I really say that? I deleted it because I didn't want anyone to read it? I actually get excited when I see comments placed on my blogs. Huh. Weird. Maybe that's another one of those subconscious situations breaking through.

That's enough for now - I'll talk about my job later....

A new discovery.

A simple, "I'm here for you if you need to vent" really goes a long way. That was a comment by one of my buddies this weekend. Thanks for the support, Scott. I would normally just email him and say thanks, but if he gets on here and reads this it will sort of be like a surprise. Haha!

Pouring it out.

For the past 5 years I have wanted to journalize my feelings, emotions, thoughts, etc. about my daughter and our "situation". I have went back and forth on it since the thought. Not sure why. Fear, I guess of how I really feel? We are a broken home (actually, we were never a non-broken home so it can't be broken - her mother was simply a party favor at all the parties and I got stuck with the bill - so to speak.)

I always swore to myself I would tell my daughter everything about how she came into this world and into this certain situation of bouncing back and forth between bipolar ends of the universe. I assume that most children with two sets of parents or a split family are at least in the same setting at both houses. Not this one. As shallow as it may sound, I am a better person than "the others". You see, I feel it isn't the best idea to take my daughter to see The Incredible Hulk, a PG-13 film, when she is 5 years old, at the 9:45 p.m. late show, with wet hair, the same day she stayed home sick from school.

We disagree on everything! I am a big supporter of helping my kids through school. There are certain things we all know that are good and bad for our children to do and not do. It is extremely sad, but it is true. We want them to be popular, we want them to be liked. We want them to play sports. We want them to be attractive. We want them to be smart. We want them to hang with the "right kids" and do the "right stuff". If you disagree, I bet you are lying to yourself. Who on earth wouldn't want to be popular and liked? Now I am not talking paparazzi-liked, just well-liked. So there are certain paths you take to do this. There are many paths that lead you to the same place, but at our school the girls cheered and the boys played soccer. Instant popularity! The teachers look at you differently and you do better in school. Did you know there was a study on grades solely on kids names? (crap, I am rambling - I have actually started 5 posts now and haven't finished one because of my mind-wondering nature - we'll talk about that later). Look at the statistics. I have little to no control over what my daughter does as I only see her about 8 days a month. So she races four-wheelers. She hates it. She has told me. They make her do it because she said; AND I QUOTE "This could turn into something big one day and if she gets good enough she'll be able to take care of us". WTF??!! Isn't that a parent's job? To take care of the kids, not the other way around? She eve has to hang out at her step-dad's work and gets all oily and greasy playing around/under cars. Her mom and step-dad cannot have children and they are turning her into the boy they can't have.

Now I know kids will do as they wish. But, we must steer them to the path that will help them through life. That is our jobs as parents. Why would anyone wish to make their children' life harder? The thing is, I can't blame "them". The have no clue. *sigh* (I sigh a lot, btw). They are clueless to any and everything we talk about. They are high school dropouts, my wife and I are nearly finished with our Master's. We live in a house we bought by saving our money, they rent because they aren't sure what the word asset means. We put back our tax refund for our kids college, they get rapid refund and buy crap until it is gone. I talk with my friends about life, computers, movies, music, technology, education, politics and they talk about NASCAR, WWE, chaining a motor to a tree and tattoos.

I think of myself as a selfless individual. I work hard. I work very hard so my wife can stay home with our new son and he isn't raise by strangers. So she can see his first smile, his first steps and get his first real hug. I will do everything I can to mold him into a great man. I will give him the knowledge, the drive, the inspiration and the integrity to make something great of himself. My only wish is that in the 8 days a month I see my daughter, some of that will rub off on her.

This really wasn't meant to be my first post. I guess all this mind-wondering and emotion will cause me to be unlike most bloggers an post multiple times a day instead of once a week. Happy Monday!

My rejected Crayon color.

I needed a some fun...

JBK's color is

What Rejected Crayon Are You?

The nature of the beast.

Glad I got that out of my system - post deleted...

Good God it's finally Friday!

What a week, eh? Let's recap, shall we.

Monday: I dressed up for a meetng that never happened (big surprise there) in my extremely limited dressier-type wardrobe (that's a good story, well, not good, just an explanation) There are lots of good stories that accumulate from other comments, huh?. OK, I will explain this one. My decided I should quit smoking. With her help (meaning she threw my smokes down the garbage disposal) I quit on January 1, 2005 midnight sharp. Since then, my lean, mean masculine machine figure has gradually slipped into teh depths of Hades. Sixty pounds later, my wardrobe has gotten limited.

Tuesday: Had 'the meeting' but spilled coffee on my shirt that morning and my iPod battery went dead on the way to work.

Wednesday: Was running terribly late, didn't make it to my car pool buddies house in tiem and he left without me.

Thursday: My 2-month old son was stabbed three times in both legs with goat blood and battery acid (ie: vaccinations) and the wife and I fought about excessive gift-giving from my parents.

Friday: So far not so terrible... yet, that is. But I do have to deal with my daughter's mom and her belligerent step-person (I refuse to refer to him as any tupe of fatherly figure) tonight at the cheerleading dance clinic. Wish me luck and let's hope teh 'S' Days are much better that the others.

Quick note.

For those of you who actually have posted to my blog with a genuine reply, I am sorry. I had to add word verification to anyone who wishes to post becuase I have already received comments on; Enlarging my penis, printing posters, exercising my rigths to vote, etc... *sigh* Thank you for understanding.

Who am I?

Considering this is my fourth post, people may actually wish to know whose desperate attempt of writing down emotions they are reading. Hmmmm... Here is an easy way to do this; I'll post 10 random things about me that I like or dislike *although, I'm not certain if I believe there is ever anything random. Did you know iTunes and other "shuffleized" music players actually cannot randomize? Now that was sort of a random thought...

The List:

1. I love my family more than anything. I would give up my house, my cars, and even my life to ensure their safety and well being. Here are three of us at a recent photo shoot.



And here's mom and daughter...



2. I love my pets; 2 dogs Apollo (pitbull - top) & Annabele (100% mutt - bottom); 1 cat Charlie.





3. I love photography! I should be posting some of my favorite photos I have taken soon. Here is a freshy broken open magnolia I shot at the University where I attended (MSU).



It's lunch time - I gotta go 'cuz I was invited to lunch for making a lady in my office some business cards (which goes along with my next "love" #4)...but I'll edit this post upon return.

4. I love graphic design. I've been doing it for around 7 years and now work for a very prestigious outdoor magazine.

5. I love Apple Computers. I work on a Dual Processor 1.25ghz G4 PowerMac with all the bells and whistles (my buddy Drew heled me install dual DVD drives last week) and own an iPod boasting with 3700 songs.

6. I love my 1970 Mustang. 302 cubic inches of American-made muscle.

7. I used to hate cheesecake.

8. I stil hate/loathe one of my co-workers.

9. I am a Harry Potter fan.

10. I love how Southpark takes the stupidest things in the world today and makes fun of them.

There I am in a nut shell. But there is so much more to me. I promise.

EDIT: PS: here is a pic of me for my profile - since I use an Apple Computer, I cannot use Picassa to display it.



EDIT: PSS: My new banner (maybe, if it works)


EDIT: PSSS: here is anohter pic of me for my profile.

Grrrrrr!

Women! What's up with them? Raging hormones causing mood swings? I just don't get it! There is nothing worse that getting into an argument at work over the phone. You do what you can to keep your cool and choose your words carefully but you know everyone around you realizes what is going on. And the one at home (ie: the wife) can say whatever, however, as loud and mean as she wants 'cuz no one is there to embarrass her!!

So today Carter had his 2-month shots (by the way, I would rather be punched in the face than half to watch that again) and maybe that is why my wife is so emotional today, but his this has been happening for a while now. I wish she would just chill. We can't even discuss this like two adults because we don't agree. And agreeing to disagree only works until the next incident. *sigh* Oh, and this is Carter.



PS: Happy Thursday!!

Full speed ahead!

Alright - two posts in one day within one hour. Just needing to clear up some of the random crap from post numero uno (in case anyone actually reads this).

AP Style - The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, usually simply called the AP Stylebook and nicknamed the "journalist's bible," is the primary guide of style and usage for most newspapers and newsmagazines in the United States.

Hence I work for a prestigious outdoor magazine and use AP Style. I am actually a graphic designer and the editors are the ones who normally use it, but...

Why, actually, is the wife trying to make me less stressful and have a new outlook on life? HellifIknow... Just kidding. no really, I'm not sure. Well, maybe it is the fact we just had our first baby boy and if I have a heart attack i would be hard for her to raise him on her own. No, I am not some 50 year old koot. I am 27, just turned that in September, actually (boy, I sure do say actually a lot, don't I?). But I am of sorts a temper-tandrum throwing for useless reasons kind of guy. Well, not for just any reason. Like this morning, see, I was nearly late for work. I just started my, well, I thought it was my dream job, about 9 months ago (anohter story in itself) and I have never been late. So of course I cussed and screamed at the 27 school busses and flipped off the 7th graders ahead of me until I was red in the face. When in all actuality I should show up late tomorrow and then the first time is gone and it won't be a big deal anymore.

And I'm finished with this guy! (quote from My Cousin Vinny)

Off to a great start.

No. Not really. I'm lying. This is my first blog post and I am already lying. Ok, maybe not lying but definetly being sarcastic. It's my own fault I guess. I started late. Blogging that is. I have been meaning to, I promise. It is just extremely tough finding the time and all. I am actually disappointed it has taken me so long to board this train of electronic emotion pasted across the internet by anyone with five spare minutes and access to a keyboard. Oh, I forgot what I was trying to say before. The sarcasm. By the way, I will do that many times - run amock ranitng and forgeting where I was headed, that is. I guess I could keep my mind straight if I weren't having to go back and take out the extra space after my periods (.) since it is AP style not to do that. *there I go again* (darn periods). Oh yeah, the sarcasm (I should have called this blog "random thoughts that mean absolutely nothing"). Ok, so obviously there are at least 10 blogs with the name(s) www.______.blogger.com (_____ is some variation of my name) because I tried nearly every possible array of my name and grew tired of the popup telling me my url was unavailable.

That's ok, though. It's no big deal. That's my new line. You see, my wife is in the process of instilling me with an outlook on life that things are ok; it's no big deal. Ha! Whatever.

Ok, post #1 is down and about to be published. Oh, and be forewarned, I am a very, um, opimionated individual who will most likely use this blog to rant and rave and whine and moan (as well as speak of my wonderful family - even though there is a good chance I will place a new blog for family to see pictures and what-nots of them). I am sorry I cannot offer great and wonderful inspiring stories of 82 year-old women going back to college and becoming valavictorian (that's a story I will have to tell you later). So farewell oh virginity of unbloggedness. May the force be with me. *damn periods*