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There are no comic book shops in Juneau. I came to this depressing realization after living here for a few months. The grocery stores are the only places in the city you can go to and get comic books. The Selections at the grocery stores are minimal and poorly handled by the staff that stocks the magazine racks. You just want to slap some comic book edict into every store employee that walks by.

Last Saturday I forgot about all of that. Last Saturday, everything changed for just one moment. I was at the “Friends of the Library Book Store” by the airport with Hannah. This is a store where people donate old and used book to be resold. Just as we had finished browsing and started to walk out the door I gasped.

“What” said the old lady clerk, startled.

“You have comics?” I said pointing to an old bin with haphazardly placed comics books.

“oh yeah, just that one bin though” she replied.

Transformers Comic Issue 10 - Dawn Of The Devastator

I gently dug through the bin while Hannah waited. Inside I found what was to me, a small treasure. Comics like the first issues of “The Crow” and “Marvel Universe” and “He-Man”. I could not believe it. I kept on digging and found the first few issues to the “Marvel Saga” and “Rawhide Kid”. But then I struck pay dirt.

Transformers! In the bin where a couple of issues of the original Marvel Transformers Comic. One of them was one I did not already own! Issue number 10. Dawn of the Devastator! I have not found an original Transformers comic that I did not already own since my trip to Maui several years ago. I have been trying to complete my Transformers collection forever, and now I am one more issue closer to that goal.

I believe that for day-to-day getting things done, print is a better form of handwriting then cursive. Print is easier to read and I think when you see notes or directions in a format that is easier to read your less intimidated by them. It is so frustrating to be given hand written cursive notes and spending the next half hour trying to interpret them. People write down notes in cursive so fast that the end result is illegible.

If people slow down just a little bit to make sure their writing is legible to anyone who reads it, there is less of a chance of miss understanding notes and directions. The same could be said of cursive hand writing. Slow down and anyone can read it. But my argument is more related to the fact that Print is easier to read then cursive.

This also lead me to think about fonts used on a computer. By default there are very few (if any) cursive style fonts on computers. Can you imagine how strained your eyes would be if the Macintosh Finder or the Windows start menu used cursive fonts instead of print fonts?

Cursive has it’s place in society. I just think it’s home is in typography art.

One of the things I was shocked to find out when I moved to Juneau Alaska was just how common porcupines are. They are in the trees and crossing the street. They are just about as common as stray cats are. You just don’t want to pet them of course. That would be a new kind of pain for me that I am not ready to experience.

Like BigFoot and the Loch Ness Monster, my pictures of local porcupines have not been the best. They always seem to jump out of frame just as I get ready to snap a picture of them. But last Friday that all changed. Hannah was out walking her dog when she found a porcupine hiding in a near by ditch. She snapped some pictures of it and here they are.

You can save Google news, as well as any Google news search as an RSS feed. This is hands down a very useful feature for people who visit their local newspaper website everyday because they don’t offer an RSS feed.

Living in Alaska, I have found myself wanting to read more about the local happenings and goings on. I am not a fan of visiting the Juneau Empire news papers’ website. The website has a horrible design that is hindered by the fact that I actually have to go visit the site and not just subscribe to an RSS feed like so many other websites these days allow.

I was just playing around with Google news the other day and saw the RSS icon show up in the URL bar of my Firefox browser. So I thought “Wouldn’t be cool if you can rss your searches?”. So I searched for Alaska in the google news search bar and sure enough, after the page loaded I saw the RSS icon. I click on the Icon, selected the RSS feed, and added to my Google Reader. It worked!

For the last few weeks I have become very entertained with Chuck Norris Facts. These facts can be found on the internet if the tubes are not to backed up.

An example of one of these Chuck Norris Facts would be: There is no ‘ctrl’ button on Chuck Norris’s computer. Chuck Norris is always in control. or Chuck Norris counted to infinity, twice.

With zingers like these I can’t help but laugh about it. Other people around me can’t help but laugh about it either.

My boss and I will be having a meeting about a client that needs us to address an issue with their computer systems. When the meeting gets to be just a little to serious I will drop something like, “Did you know, Chuck Norris can eat just one Lay’s potato chip?” That would be followed with a short pause before we both brake up laughing.

Hannah and I would sit down for dinner and she would ask me “Hows dinner?” and I would look up at her and say “Did you know that Chuck Norris once went into a Burger King and ordered a Big Mac, and he got one.”

Now I have been doing this for the last few weeks. At first Hannah thought it was funny and I would get a chuckle or a smile out of her. ( Really? I mean, who knew that Chuck Norris new the what the last digit in Pi is?) But now I just seem to get an immature look from her when I tell her a Chuck Norris fact joke.

Last night I was reading to Hannah from a book title ‘Shantaram‘. I had just finished up a paragraph when she leaned over to me and said “Did you know that Chuck Norris has read the end of the ‘Never Ending Story‘?” I was just like, “Whoa.” and sat stunned for a moment before we both busted out laughing.

“That has to be the greatest Chuck Norris fact ever! Did you make that up on your own?” I asked

“Yeah.” she said still laughing about it.

That whole thing thing just gave me the giggles and made reading the rest of the night near impossable. I eventually put the book down and said that she should submit that to the Chuck Norris Facts website. But today I have not been able to find any links on the site for submitting your own Chuck Norris Facts. How sad.

Sucker Hole

When I first moved to Alaska I kept hearing the term “Sucker Hole” all around me but had no idea what it meant. I finally asked one of the guys I worked with and he told me that a sucker hole is when the clouds over head brake apart enough to let some light through and all the suckers in town follow the light around for as long as it lasts.

Wikipedia describes a sucker hole as:

A colloquial term referring to a short spate of good weather that “suckers” sailors into leaving port just in time for a storm to resume at full force.

I thought i might share this with everyone since the weather here has been so bad and as I looked out of my office windows I was treated to a bref shower of sunlight.

Bruce Campbell As Wayne Weinsider On The X-Files

Last night Hannah and I were at home and watching season six of The X-Files. The episode we started watching was titled “Terms of Endearment” and to our surprise the guess star on that episode was Bruce Campbell of Evil Dead fame.

You gotta love it. We laughed and really enjoyed that episode.

The weekend has come and gone with little change in the weather. This however did not keep Hannah and myself inside the whole weekend. We went outside anyway to try and make the best of things regardless of the fact that mother nature clearly has a vendetta against Juneau right now.

We took ourselves out to Mendenhall Glacier in hopes to see some of the Sockeye salmon making their run up stream. When we got there we were lucky to find a decent parking spot because the park was packed with tourists from the cruise ships docked in town. We manage to see a few of salmon and take some pictures of them, but over all the rivers where pretty bare of fish compared to other times we have gone to see them run.

Looking out into the glacier bay we saw kayakers paddling in front of the glacier. It was quite the site to see. These people in their little boats with the glacier towering over them.

Just another day in Juneau with people making the best of bad weather.

It's Gon' Rain!

Has Juneau Alaska became the rain capital of the world? Ever since Hannah and I got back from our vacatin in Washington it has just been either overcast, or rainy. It was really starting to get to me for a minute, but then I just started taking some viteman D and all is better.

I really am starting to miss the sun though. Last summer was kind of like this too. The first summer we spent here was great, but that was 3 years ago. Seattle Washington really has been unfairly called the rainiest place on earth thanks to a little movie called “Sleepless In Seattle“. I have lived in Washington for several years and it’s true it is rainy. But Seattle has nothing on Juneau for rain right now.

I do hope this is not a trend. Maybe it can be blamed on El Niño, or the butterfly affect.

I truly hate cable television. There are so many shows that are on T.V. that do little more then act as a tool to keep the masses parked at home on their asses. Cable T.V. is such a waist of time and a mental mind suck. This newly found hatred for the shows that I have no interest in seeing has been brewing for a while now and I’m slowly learning how to deal all the wasted time that goes with turning on the television. (see my post on Cognitive Surplus)

Yes, there is the occasional show that is worth watching. Shows like Heroes, How I Met Your Mother, The Dean Martin Show, Family Guy, and South Park, are all great shows. But are they worth planning your week around just to see them with commercials for products you really don’t care about jammed in-between the show every 15 minutes?

I think not.

To avoid this, I just wait till these shows come out on DVD. I am a big fan of buying shows on DVD. You can then watch them anywhere you want as time allows without having to interrupt your life or planning your day around when it airs. You also don’t have to deal with commercials when you by the DVD which to me is a HUGE plus to me.

Since my hatred for television program has been gowning, so too has my liking for podcasts. Podcasts consist of audio or video programs that you can download onto your computer or iPod and be played back whenever you like. There are programs on just about every thing imaginable and in my experience not just mind numbing tripe that seems to occupy 90% television today. It makes me wish I had an Apple TV to watch them on.

I am a big fan of tech news podcasts like This Week In Tech, Webb Alert, Tehzilla, and g4tv’s ‘The Feed’. I also enjoy a podcast on cigars call “The cigar Nation” and X-play’s gaming podcast. I want to encourage everyone to check out some of these podcasts. Especially those you who have a long commute to work. Podcasts; even audio books are a great thing to listen to.