Headbutt to the Sternum

July 13, 2006

Well, it’s been several days now since the final showdown of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, but the world is still reeling from Zinedine Zidane’s brutal attack against Marco Materazzi. Although many people have been trying to determine his motivation, and whether or not he deserves the prestigious Golden Ball award, I’m just amazed at his method of assault. A headbutt? To the sternum? Now that, my friends, is a signature move if I’ve ever seen one. A move that all the kids will soon be are already doing:

In a world obsessed with sports action replays and funny videos, it’s no wonder why Zidane’s signature move has become a wellspring of hilarious animations. After seeing Anil Dash’s Zidane World Cup Headbutt Animation Festival, and the animated gifs on The Register, I was curious to see what could be found at YTMND. You’re the man now dog (ytmnd) is a place where users can create and rate funny webpages that are built using only a background image (or animation), a tag-line, and some music. Creativity abounds there and repeated themes (memes) often get started as people build off of each others ideas. All it takes to inspire ytmnd creation is an offbeat quote by a senator, or a weird personals ad. I thought that surely, this signature sternum headbutt move has inspired some ytmnd creations. I was not disappointed. Here is a list of my favorites:

10:38 AM/ Meme :: Comments (1)

Tagyurit!

January 23, 2006

Well it’s been almost 6 months since I’ve participated in any silly blog memes so I guess I’m due for one. I’ve been “tagged” by Dustin Diaz and since I’m not quite done with my next Photoshop Basics tutorial, I’ll be a good sport about it:

Four jobs I’ve had in my life …that aren’t on my resume.

  • Grocery bagger at Publix
  • UCF financial aid advisor
  • Accountant and loader for a trucking company
  • Assistant wrestling coach (well, I volunteer for that)

Four movies I can watch over and over

  • Braveheart
  • Pirates of the Caribbean
  • Good Will Hunting
  • Space Balls

Four places I have lived …or, “The ONLY four places I have ever lived.”

  • Vero Beach, FL
  • Orlando, FL
  • Gainesville, FL
  • Columbia, SC

Four TV shows I love to watch

  • The O.C.
  • Rezoned
  • In a Fix
  • I Want That!

Four places I have been on vacation

  • Destin, FL
    (By far the best, but not because of the location.)
  • Italy
  • Key West
  • Washington, DC

Four websites I visit daily

Four of my favorite foods

Four places I would rather be right now

  • With my wife. She just left this morning for a 2-day conference entitled “Engineering the Automotive Future” at The University of Alabama.
  • Backpacking in Italy
  • Out Geocaching
  • At the beach somewhere warm

Four bloggers I am tagging

08:05 AM/ Meme :: Comments (6)

YTMND

November 14, 2005

I have to admit that I’ve been quietly addicted to the complete and udder waste of time that is ytmnd.com for several years now. Although I’ve only been voting on and contributing to the community for the last few months, it’s always been entertaining to see how creative people can be when armed with only a sound file, an animated gif (or even a still image), and a tagline.

What is YTMND?: If you’ve visited the site and still have no idea what it’s all about, try reading the Wikipedia Definition or the The Wall Street Journal Online Article. If you still don’t get it, you probably never will…and don’t even think about Googling “ytmnd”

“A carnival of internet culture and meme humor.” is about the best set of words I can come up with to describe YTMND. Anything that anyone considers cool, funny, weird, ironic, twisted, or trite might become the next most popular ytmnd. Then…when a YTMND site becomes popular, you can bet that it will inspire others to make variation YTMND sites to make fun of, pay homage to, or improve on those sites. If you follow the top viewed YTMNDs for any length of time, you’ll pick up on these memes, which makes the entire site more enjoyable.

Sometimes, sorting through the vulgar and graphic to find genuinely interesting or funny YTMNDs can be annoying. Recently though, some effort has been made to move the most offensive and obnoxious YTMNDs off the main site to a sister site - YTMNSFW. There has been some criticism of this move in the forums, but overall, I think it was for the best.

“What’s so funny about YTMND?” You tell me. Here is a list (in no particular order) of some of my favorite YTMND sites.

01:14 PM/ Meme :: Comments (3)

Book Baton

July 21, 2005

Just when I thought we were done with this whole meme thing for 2005, I get hit with another one from Marko. Thanks buddy, thanks a lot! You know, in order to stop these things, somebody has to refuse to do it. That is the only way…amputate the branch before it becomes a trunk. (Pardon my nerdy anology…I was up way too late last night, and I’m working on nested code this morning.) I would take my own advice, but doing so would suggest that I don’t listen to music and don’t read books. So…in an effort to not come off as an uncultured, illiterate jerk…I’ll keep the Baton moving.

Number of Books…in Boxes

All of our shelves have been dismantled and packed up for the move, and all of our books are in boxes. My best guess is that we have 5 or 6 boxes worth, or about 3 tons.

Last Book Purchased

Three at once back in April - Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines, Business and Legal Forms for Graphic Designers and The Zen of CSS Design

Book Reading Right Now

Well, most of our books are in boxes right now…but I’ve been reading a lot of Mastering 3ds Max 4 (co-authored by Chris Murray, one of my college professors) - Yes, it’s old, but I needed to brush up on some things for a 3d project that Amy and I have been trying to wrap up.

Last 5 Books Read
  1. 100 Questions Every First-Time Home Buyer Should Ask by Ilyce R. Glink Actually, this was my latest book purchase…later in April.
  2. Usability Return on Investment by Nielson Group (For Work.)
  3. The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea & Molly E. Holzschlag
  4. The Art and Science of Web Design by Jeffrey Veen
    Because he just made it available a a free download!
  5. Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
Meaningful Books

The Bible…and Wild at Heart by John Eldredge. Even though Tycho (Penny-Arcade) had a field day bashing this book when he received it as a Christmas present from his mom, it had a pretty profound influence on my life when I was in college.

Those to Whom I Bestow this…Sentence
  1. Nathan Bird
  2. Brian Reese
  3. Ray Williams
  4. Justin Perkins
  5. Ryan Salerno

11:57 AM/ Meme :: Comments (11)

Baton Meme Madness

May 18, 2005

I was thinking about the musical baton meme, how it spread, and just how quickly it spread. If this were a virus, it would have been a very efficient one as it made its way through the entire web-development community (at least from my perspective) in less than 2 days. That says a lot about how adept we’ve become at propogating news and information via blogs and RSS. I’m sure Birdman could probably come up with a much better way to present this as he’s been raving about a book he’s been reading entitled “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”, but I wanted to make a quick list-style display of this viral epidemic.

For my list, I started with Richard Rutter, the first person in the chain of blogs that I read that picked up a baton and started chucking them out. Each of the 5 people he infected passed on the baton to 5 other people as well. For the sake of brevity, I followed one branch a couple branches of this tree (Jon Hicks). I continued to expand one branch from each of Jon’s contacts, then expanded one branch from Jason’s contacts and so on and so forth.

If you don’t get the Legend, try refreshing a couple times. I have a different style of bullet for those who haven’t played the game. More details in the comments.

10:31 AM/ Meme :: Comments (19)

A Musical Baton

May 17, 2005

Update: So, I was invited to play the game yesterday by yesterdayishere.com (Bojan Janjanin).

So everybody in the web-design blog community is jumping on this Musical Baton meme…but where did it all start? Heck if I know. I first heard about it on Monday when Richard Rutter, Jon Hicks, and Jason Santa Maria all started playing the game. I followed the “who tagged who” links all the way back to a Live Journal user who claimed not to have been tagged, but was playing anyway. I thought I’d stop looking for origins at that point and do the same. It’d be interesting to see some stats on how many gigs of music the average web-designer has, since so many of us are participating. Anyway, here goes:

Total volume of music files on my computer: 12.1 Gb
…the music server at work has 66.4 Gb
(mostly rips of everyones cd collections)

The last CD I bought was: “Believe” by Big Dismal

Song playing right now: “Yakitori” by Yoko Kanno
(don’t ask…I didn’t enque it.)

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

  1. “Right Here” by Mark Wills
  2. “Float On” by Modest Mouse
  3. “Tutti Vogliono Viaggiare in Prima” by Ligabue
  4. “Better Together” by Jack Johnson
  5. “3x5” by John Mayer

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:

  1. Ray Williams - (Did It. - May 18th)
  2. Brian Reese
  3. Nathan Bird - (Did It. - May 26th)
  4. Ryan Salerno - (Did It. - May 24th)
  5. Russell Tyndall

12:33 PM/ Meme :: Comments (6)