My name is Jeff Gordon and I build websites. When I'm not working, you can probably find me daydreaming about things like space ships or dinosaurs. Maybe a dinosaur flying a space ship. That's awesome.
Those who know me usually think I am "hip" and "with it" when it comes to web related stuff, which is why it surprises most people when I tell them that I don't use RSS feeds. It wasn't even until maybe six months ago that I started even bookmarking websites. I didn't think it was that odd, I just kept a mental note of those websites that I visited often and would check on them when the thought crossed my mind. You know those people who curse new things and refuse to accept changes in technology? I guess I am those people. But not anymore.
Today I decided to try out Google Reader, which lets you store and organize multiple feeds. It even has stats for nerds, like most read feeds or most viewed tags. I went through my list of (recently created) bookmarks and a few other sites I still type in manually, and I found out there are roughly 20 sites that I visit regularily. Some more often than others. They range from general news, music news, webcomics, friend blogs and other miscellaneous blogs.
One neat feature is a "shared" page. You can mark your favorite feed articles as "shared" which can then be viewed by anybody by visiting a public URL. Here are mine. I may replace the recently dugg articles on my homepage with the articles from Google Reader. That way I won't be limited to sharing strictly Digg articles.
Cool. COOL.
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A friend of mine directed me to this handy website. If you ever suspect a website of being blocked or otherwise inaccessible, you can give it a test by entering its URL into this site and it will let you know if the site is down, or if you are just being paranoid. It is pretty neat.
In other news, the National Do Not Call List (DNCL) is now active accepting registrations. This means you can submit your phone number, and (hopefully) within a month, you will no longer receive phone calls from telemarketers. Growing up, my parents always had an unlisted phone number. We never received a single call from a telemarketer that I can remember in the 19 years that I lived at home. So I guess that is another option if you want to protect yourself from telemarketers AND stalkers.
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I've heard about quite a few cases where you can sync up otherwise unrelated songs and movies resulting in a piece of film that seems completely and eerily intentional. The most famous of these sync-ups is called Dark Side of the Rainbow, which syncs up Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz. I've always dismissed these kind of things as people just looking too deeply into it, like this one interpretation of Fight Club and Radiohead's The Bends:
Track One on "The Bends", "Planet Telex", is referred to at least three times within the film.
(a) "'Planet Xerox' was this song's original title, but because Xerox was a copyrighted name, Radiohead changed it to 'Planet Telex.'" Jack: "When deep space exploration ramps up it'll be the corporations that name everything: the I.B.M. Stellarsphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks..."
(b) The pay phone that Jack uses to call Tyler is made by a company called Telnex.
(c) When Tyler disappears and the house is run by his army, Jack refers to the place as "Planet Tyler", a mere two letters away.
Anyway, I ran into this sync-up of a scene from Fantasia 2000 and Tool's 10,000 Days which I feel is pretty neat. I've never seen the original Fantasia nor this remake in 1999, but I basically have to now because it looks really cool. The song isn't bad, either.
I may be more interested in these kinds of things now, but I'm sure it helps if you are familiar with at least the song or the movie. That is probably one reason why I've never been too curious about Dark Side of the Rainbow.
So I guess that means tell me some that you might know about, and I will watch them. Or I won't.
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In an attempt to justify all of the stupid domain names that I buy, I've forwarded two of my more recent purchases to my blog. So if you are really sick of typing iamthejeff.com, or you don't have it in your favorites by now, you can also visit my site by using jeffgordon.name, or if that isn't 1337 enough for you, j3ffg0rd0n.com. I only recently switched over the DNS entries, so if you are getting a parked page, just give it a few more hours.
In related news, I sometimes google my domain names after buying them to see if they appear anywhere on the web prior to me owning them. While doing so for jeffgordon.name, I came across an auction where somebody is trying to sell it with a buy-it-now price of $5000. I emailed GoDaddy about it, so now I am forced to play the waiting game. Update: GoDaddy has realized the mistake and closed the auction!
Also, I don't think anybody noticed, but since I switched to a new webhost, I had to transfer over Totallies as well. As a result, it was offline for a couple days. Everything is back online as of this morning, however. Thank goodness.
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Ever since 1995 when Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls was released, I went around saying "bumblebee tuna" under the impression it was an original part of the script. I couldn't have been more wrong.
This startling fact was brought to my attention by Taylor at work, after his mom gave him a can of Bumble Bee brand tuna (as seen to the right). Further investigation showed that the brand has been in existence since 1899. They also sell Bumble Bee chicken, salmon, crab, oysters, clams, and sardines.
Youtube is full of Bumble Bee tuna related advertisements, including this vintage one, and all sorts of other theme songs. My girlfriend and I use "Bumblebee Tuna" as our guild name in WoW, but I had no idea it was such a huge phenomenon.
My life will never be the same.
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