rawlio's World
Suppressing Intelligence since 2004
I don’t really have anything to add…
Aug 27th
I’m a bit out of ideas at the moment. Well, I have lots of ideas, but not the time to do the typing. I’m currently editing some video, which should be up by the time this is posted.
I have one more vid after the Tabbouleh video; Making Peaches.
Ugh.
[updated]
Happy Birthday, Linda!
Aug 26th
It’s Linda’s Birthday today. If you know Linda, email her and wish her a Happy Birthday. If you don’t know her email, just leave a comment, and I’ll make sure she gets it.
I won’t post what I got for her, as Linda hates surprises and has already bought presents for herself from me.
What a wonderful wife. She’s so thoughtful. The best part is that I know it’s exactly what she wants.
If you’re curious, this is her multiple 21st birthday.
Do’s and don’ts at a Wedding
Aug 25th
Going to a wedding, I was reminded of this little list. Again, this is in no means reflective of the wedding I attended, as it was really well done. The bride and Groom looked amazing, the decor was fantastic, and other things. But this list is more for us, attendees.
Do’s:
- Show up on the Time – If you’re generally late, don’t be. Only the bride is allowed to be late on that day. If you think you’re more important than the bride, have your own wedding/celebration
- Make Small Talk – This depends upon your connection to a wedding. If you’re closely related to the wedding couple, you need to make more than small talk. You are required to make Genuine Big Talk. If you’re partially close, then small talk is ok. Topics that are ok are the weather, how you know the couple, history or knowledge of the venue, or other things that are not to intrusive.
- Sit yourself in appropriate places – Sure, we don’t like to sit near the front, as it’s where the Nerds sit. But if you are close to the wedding couple you should be sitting near the front. If you’re not so close to the wedding party, sit near the back. Again, this applies to you and your date. If you’re the date of a distant connection, you’re stuck sitting with your date. Suck it up and smile.
Don’ts
- Reasons for the bride/Groom to not marry – DO NOT respond to this. Yes, it may be funny to say some thing, but do you really think your opinion will really stop the happy couple from completing their Nuptials? In fact, it may get you ejected.
- Over-using the Open Bar – Yes. Don’t get Drunk. Get happy, get animated, but don’t be that sloppy drunk that hits on the bride’s underage cousin and does things that are illegal in many provinces and states across North America.
- Take pictures like your the wedding Photographer – If you’re not being paid, take pictures from your seat, and if you can’t get a good angle, too bad.
- Wear whatever you want – It’s a wedding. I’m traditional in this merit, but dress up. Dress like you’re going to a fancy place for dinner. Yes, some weddings say ‘casual’ or even ‘wear whatever’, but have some decorum and dress slightly more conservative that you think. One person once told me that it’s better to be overdressed than not. Besides, it’s easy to ‘under-dress’ when you’re dressed up. Try that with an old Concert Tee.
- Talk Shop – It’s a wedding. Take the time off, and enjoy yourself. If someone asks what you do for your job, briefly explain what you do, but don’t start networking. Save that for after dinner, during the reception in the privacy of a hallway or out of earshot from other guests.
- Stand up and talk without preparing – Sure, we’ve seen television and movies where people have ‘stood up and talked from their heart’. Unpronounced to you, those speeches have been pre-written and vetted by hordes of writers. You, don’t have have that luxury. Trust me, don’t sound like moron and talk off the top of your head. Which leads me to the next one :
- Say these words : “Bear with me.” “I’m not good at speeches,” “I’m not good at talking to large groups” or anything along those lines. If you have been asked to speak, and you’re not comfortable, DON’T. If you don’t think you’re good at speeches and were asked months in advance (like most wedding planning), PRACTICE! Just because you say you’re not good at speeches doesn’t mean it excuses you from a bad speech. You have the time to get a good speech or to decline the offer to speak. It’s not endearing to fumble your speech.
Being to many weddings, even partaking in the planning and execution of weddings, I feel that I have some knowledge about these. I’m pretty straight-forward when someone asks about their speech or how they did. I’ve even had people not speak to me because I told them the same thing I said here. If you were not comfortable speaking, saying it at the beginning of your speech doesn’t give you ‘carte Blache’ for your speech.
Bottom line, folks: Normal social rules apply with some added stress. A wedding is happy time, actually for you, not the wedding couple. A wedding is truley for the guests to enjoy themselves. If you don’t believe me, would you ofen invite everyone you know somewhere and feed them out of yoru own pocket? If so, Please invite me!
By the way, I’m available for Weddings and Bar-mitzahs, if you need.
Golfing with Steve
Aug 24th
Steve took me Golfing to a small golf course in Ottawa. Click on the vid page, and see us golf!
Or, you can click this to go!
Driving traffic to my Site
Aug 24th
I’m always curious to what drives traffic to a website.
Having a website that is about a specific topic is one. But also having certain tag words that drive people to the site to see and read is another way.
Expanding the target audience is very important, so with some of my posts, I try to be as informative as possible, but I am by no means, an expert on any topic.
With some basic research skills, a discerning eye and a curious mind is what drives me.
Watching and observing sites that have lots of hits and are very popular have a formula that they follow. The formula isn’t difficult to understand, but finding your own version is the hard part.
Here are some tips that I have realized that bring Traffic to your site:
- Have a topic that people what to know about – if your content is useful, when people search for that information, your site (hopefully) will come up.
- Key Words – This is the key (words). Hee hee hee. But seriously, if you have good key words, search engines (or the meta-crawlers) will find your site and for some reason, your site will appear on different sites. I’ve found that with certain keywords, I had a lot of traffic. With my old blog, I had some key words that brought people all the time. I was surprised what they were. With that, I would sometimes just add the key words to bring traffic
- Information – Can you see a trend with my points? You need to have things that people want to know about. If you’re knowledgeable about something, and people trust your opinion, you’re Gold. If you’re like me, and have no clue, then no one will really care what I say about a wine, or something fancy-Schmancy.
- Get your name out – Yeah, you gotta market yourself, baby! I don’t really do that, but often wonder what I would market myself as. My blog is just what I think but that’s really it. I could do some Social Networking, but I’m not really into that. Maybe I should?
- Billboards – If you can afford it, get a billboard. Again, I’m not going to say that this works, but hey, try it out.
So, understanding that, good luck! Link me. And help drive traffic here!
Things that Suck…
Aug 23rd
Well, not really. It’s more of a blog about what we call the pacifier. Linda and I debated whether to use a pacifier or not with Tiiu. There are as many pros as there are cons, so we’ve decided to use it sparingly. We’ve noticed that on evenings, Tiiu gets cranky which 
is pretty normal for babies. Apparently it’s a normal thing, as babies have pent up energy that they need to get out, and this is how they do it.
So, we’ve been given a pacifier that is BPA free, made of 100% medical Grade Silicone, which has many fantastic uses. It is the Gumdrop Pacifier, which is pretty neat. It’s once piece, and comes in many colours. It’s supposed to be the better pacifier for babies, but hey…it works.
So, using the pacifier, we didn’t want to call it the names that most people do. Binky seemed strange to us, so did Sookie and other names. Instead, Linda and I brainstormed a few things that we thought sucked and we came up with some things.
Vampires. They definitely suck. They suck blood, and they suck the life out of people to which they grant eternal life. Calling it a ‘Vampire’ was kinda tough…
“Hey Tiiu, want your vampire?”
“Where’s your Vampy?”
Again, I was getting ideas for Buffy, but she’s a Vampire Slayer, and defiantly does not suck.
The Dyson Vacuum – With Cyclone Technology. It sucks. It sucks large and never stops sucking. 
James Dyson worked on many modes to make sure his vacuum doen’t stop sucking. But calling the Pacifier, the Dyson, Linda wasn’t down with it.
“Hey Tiiu, want your Dyson? Where’s your Dyson?”
“Are you cranky? Did you lose your Dyson?”
I liked it, But Linda didn’t. So, we kept looking.
Telemarketers. They defiantly suck. But a name that was appropriate didn’t quite work either.
“Hey Tiiu, where’s your Telemarketer?”
“do you want your Telemarketer? Yes, you do!”
No, didn’t work. On a separate note, if the telemarketer looked that this, I think they would not be as hated. (I’m just saying.
Finally, we came up with a name: Linda holds this opinion, but I don’t.
Doogie Howser – Neil Patrick Harris. Linda hated the show Doogie Hoswer. She thought Doogie Howser sucked so much, she still remembers it. She thought it was one of the worst ideas for a show ever. She wanted to call it the Doogie, but I suggested that Doogie Hoswer was really Neil Patrick Harris. There was a movie (Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle) where they refer to him as NPH. She was quite happy with that, so we’ve been calling the Pacifier, the NPH or The Neil Patrick.
“Where’s your NPH? oh, did it fall on the ground?”
“is Neil Patrick Dirty? we can get the Pink NPH for you?”
For some reason, it works for us, and we now call it the NPH.
I like Neil Patrick, so my apologies to You, Neil…if you do read this. Take it as an honour that you are pacifying our daughter.
Other names that didn’t make it was the Alex Trebek. All because Linda wasn’t a fan of the SNL episodes where Sean Connery would yell out “Suck It, Trebek“….
Again, I like Alex Trebek too. You too, Kebert Xela!
I’ve had 1000 Hits!
Aug 22nd
I have a counter, and Apparently I’ve had 1000 hits….
Look at me! I’m popular!
What’s a Hipster?
Aug 22nd
Again, am I just old or just out of touch? Is my lack of a facebook account caused me to not be aware of this the term “hipster?” I came across an article, which is based from this article about how the New York Times has realized that it has overused this term.
I have to admit, I’ve never really noticed that this word has been overused in the papers or the news I’ve read.
So, consulting [the] Wikipedia, they have an entry about the Hipster. So, their definition is from the Times, which goes as such:
“Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They’re the people who wear t-shirts silk-screened with quotes from movies you’ve never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don’t care.”-Times, 2009
Seriously? That’s what a HIpster is? A hipster is someone who frowns upon the conventions of the norm? Isn’t that most Teenagers? Or maybe not? Was I a hipster? I remember choosing certain things because everyone else wanted the other. That’s a hipster?
Is being a hipster good?
Are you a Hipster? how does one become a hipster? is having a blog take me out of being a hipster?
And more importantly, am I a few years behind the term, hipster?
Am I lazy?
Aug 21st
By this, I mean: Do I take the lazy way out of most things in life?
I know of people who seem to choose to do things, but in the most difficult way. I’ve chosen a path that did have a few bumps along the way, but for the most part, I’m quite happy. I
Growing up, I wanted to have a family, and a decent job that I enjoyed. With hard work, I got a job that I love and then I met a wonderful person who I can share a life with. Through that, we’ve obtained a house, and ‘stuff’ that most people collect. We’ve travelled, we’ve experienced different things, good and bad; we’ve grown and we’ve even added, by bringing Tiiu into the world.
But I think this path was generally easy. I mean, i followed the directions and for the most part I got what I wanted.
Now, reflecting upon what I have, I see people who have the same thing, but have worked really hard. Again, that’s good. But some of the paths they have taken seemed to be more difficult.
Is it that I’m lazy or I have Linda to help? Or, maybe Linda is doing all the work, and I think it’s easy.
I dunno.
Y’know, I don’t know where this entry is going.
The 3-second Rule – An Update
Aug 20th
According to Sean, the study wasn’t exactly forthcoming with the results of a brief exposure of food to the ground. According to Wikipedia,
In 2003, intern Jillian Clarke of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign found in a survey that 56% of the men and 70% of the women surveyed were familiar with the five-second rule. She also determined that a variety of foods were significantly contaminated by even brief exposure to a tile inoculated with E.coli.
The Article is here, if you’re curious. But with the further inquiry, the Wikipedia article goes on to say,
A team from Clemson University conducted a study measuring the bacteria levels on classic 5 second rule locations such as outdoor soil, the sidewalk, kitchen counters (especially porous counters – this doesn’t include granite), and kitchen floors. It may shock you to find out that it might be MORE dangerous to eat food that you just dropped on your floor in the kitchen than on a sidewalk.
Also, a similar explanation can be found on the Snopes website, but it’s suspiciously similar to the Wikipedia page.
Hmm…which came first, Snopes or Wiki?
and from a link from the Wiki Page, here are some facts:
Here are some figures from the report:
100 billion: The number of bacteria in our mouths.
100 trillion: The number of bacteria in our gastrointestinal tracts.
2.5 billion: The number of bacteria found in one gram of garden soil.
7.2 billion: The number of germs in the average kitchen sponge.
25,000: The number of germs, per square inch, on an office telephone.
49: The number of germs, per square inch, on a toilet seat
You’re safer eating food off of your Toilet Seat.
Yikes.