The J. Bradford Dillon Journal

As I’ve mentioned previously, in an article about fictional feline back-stories, I’ve been thinking a bit about life, relationships, and fatherhood lately, as I steadily approach the latter. My life is about to change, with the entry of another, and I find I’m becoming very introspective, wondering what kind of world my wife and I are bringing this baby into. One of the things I’ve been focusing on lately is communication. Specifically, the communication between myself and my wife.

Allow me to digress into something that only a small number of my minuscule readership will find interesting. I’m about to become a father, which makes a man reflect on a lot of things. Not necessarily deep or wise things, just life in general. Cats have really strange habits, and far more personality than any other pet. In order to make sense of their idiosyncrasies, my wife and I have come up with back-stories and explanations for each of them. They are almost as creative as the names we gave them. Here are a couple.

Scrubs is one of my favorite shows of all time. I miss it. Not the show itself. I miss when it was good. I definitely started to go down hill as it’s impending end came nearer. The series finale was pretty much an attempt to see how much of their budget they could blow in one episode, but they seemed to neglect their writers. Anyway, a simple Google search found my favorite scene ever. This quote from Turk makes me laugh every time. When my pregnant wife and I play poker, Uno™, or egyptian rat screw, I make sure to mimic this scene when I win (which is, quite frankly, very rare).

My wife and I are just a few weeks away from parenthood. Nevaeh will be here sometime around August 1st. We’re anxiously awaiting her, but have pretty much resigned ourselves to the fact that she’s just never coming out. I’ve seen the ultrasounds, and it looks like she’s laughing at us. At night, when Jenn is asleep and I’m up playing my DS, I swear I can hear her, building tiny Ikea shelving units for the long haul. The other day, we received a Sharper Image catalog addressed to her, by name. Come on, kid, you’re freaking me out. Just get out of there already.

Webpage rendering has always fascinated me. These videos depicts how Gecko (the rendering engine Firefox uses) renders the Mozilla homepage, and a Wikipedia entry, respectively, from start to finish. It’s mildly informative as to the processes that go on, but it’s mostly beautiful to watch.

I want to download Firefox 3 in support of their Download Day, which aims to break a world record for number of downloads in one day. I really do. I want to show my support for the Open Source community. I want to be using the newest and smartest browser out there. I want to do my part to further the flame that is Mozilla’s Firefox. I really honestly do. But all of their webservers are down due to the ridiculous amounts of bandwidth usage. That’s what you get for asking everyone in the world to jump at the same time, you knock the planet off it’s axis.

A video I found on the Maniacal Rage tumblog. Sound and video clips of Bill O’ Reilly spliced with video from the game Battletoads. O’ Reilly gets a little explicit (but you probably knew that already). This made me laugh out loud. I have to completely agree with Garrett, too. This video is hilarious, but the memories of trying to beat this godforsaken level are chilling. Just chilling. The music in the video made me cringe. I’m serious.