The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I love Christmas! Not as much as my wife, but still plenty enough to always be looking forward to celebrating the Saviours birth! As this is our first year as a married couple, I figured it would be fun to really ramp it up with some fun activities to indulge in while some of our favourite Christmas movies play along in the background.

We started on Sunday by putting up our teeny-tiny Christmas tree, covering it in gold and red baubles and then setting up our little ornament table (consisting of a couple of bits and pieces we bought on sale last year when we were engaged and some recent acquisitions) and finally finishing but putting decorations [essentially] anywhere we could fit them in our tiny two-person flat. We even hung up our stockings and a fabulously awesome advent calendar mother dearest bought for us during a recent visit. It was a blast! A blast containing more holiday cheer than you could poke a stick at!

Then on Wednesday, we went about making us some gingerbread dough for- yep, you guessed it- a gingerbread house! We watched Christmas with the Kranks for that one and it rocked!

However, the big challenge came last night- putting together our house. I'm not going to lie, I didn't think it would work. I had a gut feeling the roof would cave in with Home Alone blasting in the background. For starters, we were using a dough recipe from one book and then a house template from another one. At first it looked like the two wouldn't match and we would run out of dough. Instead, we just rolled our dough thinner and hoped it would have the strength to bear weight. On top of that, nobody I spoke to seemed to have ever made one that stood of its own accord. It seemed a deliciously doomed enterprise.

However, nobody else I discussed this Christmas adventure with had my wife, and my wife is magic! She rolled the dough to perfection, cut it all our with the precision of some alien robot and sluced thick royal icing over the back of the thin walls as reinforcement for additional supporting power.

All in all, and much to my delight (and surprise), it worked! Mid way through Home Alone 2 we successfully fixed our roof and chimney to our scrumptious walls.

Lo and behold our first Gingerbread House:

So now we wait until tomorrow to decorate our delicious dwelling! Will it stand under the weight of countless candies? Will the roof stay up another night? Find out in the next update of Nate Radio!!

In the mean time, talk about Christmas and how awesome it is!

Magical What?

I was (as I often do) browsing NBA.com yesterday when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted this amusing headline:



Unfortunately, I then realised that the story was only talking about a cheerleader who works (or cheers...) for the team Orlando Magic, and that a cheerleader who can perform magic was not actually involved.

Then again, I guess if it was REALLY a magical cheerleader, surviving a fall wouldn't be such a big deal thanks to her supernatural powers and therefore probably wouldn't have made news anyway.

So I figured I'd call it a tie.

Milestone!!

Nate-Radio reached 5,000 page views today. Which isn't many in the scheme of things- especially on the internet- but it is a solid number followed completely by 0's which I thought was rather impressive.

Now if only Halo 4 would arrive in the mail and Miami would beat Brooklyn, my day would be complete!

Hashtags on Facebook

Recently, I have noticed a trend of people ending their status updates with hashtags and I can't help but feel a little sorry for them. More on that later though, first, lets address exactly what a hashtag is.

The hashtag, is simply  a hash symbol (#) followed by a word or phrase combined without spaces or, in some cases, separated by full stops (e.g. #yolo, #iamswaggy, #hashtagging.is.hip). Hashtags were initially used in Internet Relay Chat as a way to categorize phrases for ease of use later when searching for that particular phrase.

The hashtag made its way to Twitter as a simple hack to group together posts under one phrase or topic until company heads noticed it catching on and wrote a nifty little software script that would recognize any time someone tweeted a phrase starting with a “#” and turn it into a link that would direct whoever clicked on it to  every other post out there containing that same hashtag. Suddenly, if you were #havingagreattime, you could click on your own hashtag link to see who else in the world was also #havingagreattime.

At its most basic level, a hashtag is simply a search- a label for a topic or a filter for a discussion.

Twitter isn’t the only site that uses hashtags though, additionally, hashtags are functional on YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+ as well as few other lesser known social websites.

You know who doesn’t use hashtags? Facebook.

And that is exactly where my sympathy for the poor souls hashtagging on Facebook lies. The poor folks who don’t understand what they are doing or why they are doing it. The poor kids that think it looks cool to fail at technology. It’s like watching your parents type “h-t-t-p-:-/-/-w-w-w-.” before every url. Watching the technologically challenged try to post status updates from their email. Listening to hipsters complain why they can’t have a profile song on their instagram account.

Basically, it represents a failure to understand technology- which wouldn’t be so bad if it was kept private, but the fact that these people are broadcasting their ignorance to everyone online….

...Well, that makes me sad.

Bad Luck Brian

On the subject of memes... I totally forgot about this one:

Memes Are Fun

When most people hear the word 'Meme', the think of a funny picture with a hilarious joke- the set up on the top of the image followed by a hilarious punchline along the bottom. Memes are the things your friends text you so that you can have a laugh in the middle of work hours, the things you 'Like' on Facebook but don't actually comment on. Memes are the profile pictures of people that love to share hilarity.




However, memes are actually much older than the age of digital sharing. In fact, they are older than the Internet itself.

A little history: The phrase 'Meme' was coined in 1976 (a good thirty six years back) by Richard Dawkins as he described evolution. Dawkins concluded that evolution doesn't simply operate on a chemical level, it it also required some self replicating form of communication. In the chemical world, a gene is self replicating, it duplicates on and on and on and on. It's the reason a baby goes from a tiny thumbnail sized ball of tissue to a 6'11 NBA center. However, outside the chemical world, there are ideas or information that do the same thing. They duplicate and travel through society the way small pox travelled through the newly discovered Americas. These information packets, self replicating units of transmission, are memes.

Enter the Internet Meme we all recognise so easily. These are information packets- whether it be something as simple as using the word 'teh' instead of 'the', or 'moar' instead of 'more', these are all little packets of information that travel through huge amounts of people at incredible speed. They evolve and adapt as some genes do too- what is funny one day is parodied the next. Companies are spending thousands of dollars daily to analyse what makes them funny and what makes them spread, they are an advertisers holy grail.

And occasionally they are pretty funny.

Much funnier than genes.

Interesting and Funny

I think we could all do with a rehash here:

Interesting (Adjective)
Arousing curiosity or interest; holding or catching the attention.
It will be very interesting to see what they come up with.

Funny  (Adjective)
Causing laughter or amusement; humorous.
The play is hilariously funny.