Wayne D's Blog

For the fourth time since I have become a homeowner I have a raccoon, This is the first time in this house but in my previous house I had raccoons in the attic twice and in the chimney once.

I was going out to the car last night and heard the sound of rending metal, by the time I found a flashlight the raccoon had ripped through a corner of the soffit and was staring down at me from it's perch in my eaves, eyes shining in the darkness. I ran the garage door up and down a few times, this only made it move deeper into the garage. Previous experience has shown that the appropriate application of mothballs will cause the raccoon to vacate the premises. An important side note, if you don't want your house to smell like mothballs for months they should be secured in a nylon stocking or other suitable bag so they can be removed after the raccoon leaves.The hard part this time was finding mothballs. The neighbourhood hardware store on my side of town closed down years ago. I stopped at a supermarket and a Rona home centre on the way home and neither of them had mothballs. The guy at the Rona store tried to sell me a raccoon trap but I don't really want a box of angry raccoon, I'd prefer it leaves under it's own power. I finally found some mothballs in one of my local dollar stores. Instead of the big cardboard box they came in a plastic envelope. They look like the round peppermints and their weren't very many in the package so I bought three packs. I climbed up the ladder and looked for the raccoon and unlike last night I couldn't see it anywhere. I tied the mothballs in a stocking and put them in the back corner of the garage up in the rafters where I thought I heard some noise. I'll give them two days to work their magic and ensure that the raccoon is gone and then I'll patch the hole it made. Updates to follow.

A few weeks ago now one of my Twitter friends started a conversation about branding. I meant to post it sooner but twitter has been quite unreliable over the last little while and I have been unaccountably lazy busy. I hadn't thought much about the branding mania until her brought the subject up. It went something like this:

sbspalding: Do you consider yourself a brand?

wdawe: @sbspalding Absolutely I am a brand. Also a force of nature and an agent for change. 'nuff buzzwords or should I add more?

sbspalding: @wdawe Follow up. What does being a "brand" mean? (stick with me now, I'm going somewhere with this. )

wdawe: @sbspalding A brand is a label for something i.e. restaurant that provides a generally consistent and predictable user experience.

sbspalding: @wdawe So would a famous actor/actress that is deeply type-cast be a brand?

wdawe: @sbspalding No, typecasting is not required to be a brand. A brand is a corporate representation of a personality.

sbspalding: @wdawe The core, marketable "personality"

wdawe: @sbspalding Correct, your personality, the way you present yourself to the world is your brand.

wdawe: @sbspalding I think you may find this panel discussion on microcelebrity interesting http://tinyurl.com/2tg259 Audio is half way down the page

sbspalding: @wdawe Thanks for the link, I'll take a look later.

The lightening bolt hit me, a brand is nothing more than a corporate personality. We want our brands to be predictable juts like we want our friends to be predictable. Little surprises are OK, big changes aren't. I think I'm a pretty consistent brand, a bit irreverent, a little bit unpredictable but not too much so. I'm not too worried about my brand image because I believe that you get what you pay for and since nobody pays in something other than time your investment in my brand isn't very expensive. I do appreciate my consumers though, you put up with my pontification and in the end find something of value in what I write. I know that most of my blog visitors come her for specific articles they find in the search engines but I also know there is a small core group of people who read everything. To these hearty few I salute you.

I wrote this post because one of the first thing people familiar with linux who buy an EEEPC want to do is to open a terminal window and Googling for open eeepc shell terminal window or open eeepc terminal window didn't show the answer other than using a convoluted method using the file manager.

If you want to open a shell terminal window on the EEEPC running the stock Xandros install you type CTRL-ALT T and you get a bash shell prompt on your EEEPC. That's it, there is no more.

I wrote this post because one of the first thing people familiar with linux who buy an EEEPC want to do is to open a terminal window and Googling for open eeepc shell terminal window or open eeepc terminal window didn't show the answer other than using a convoluted method using the file manager.

If you want to open a shell terminal window on the EEEPC running the stock Xandros install you type CTRL-ALT T and you get a bash shell prompt on your EEEPC. That's it, there is no more.

The CFL has a new promotional video out and when I went to Youtube to view it I was disappointed with the quality. Then I saw the small "watch in high quality" link. That's neat, a little bit of Googling led me to how to embed high quality Youtube videos on mydigitallife.info. Below are the high quality and low quality versions of the CFL This is YoOur League promotional video. Can you see any difference? I'm suprised that Youtube doesn't offer the option of high or low quality video in the embed code.

High Quality

Low Quality

(June 2, 2010) Almost two year's after the original post I realized that the CFL promotional video was entitled This is Our League not This is Your League. Oh well, it's fixed now.