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My one and only brother Matt will be heading into the Navy starting Monday. He will be traveling to the Chicago area for boot camp and then eventually transferred to A-School for his education. As far as naval terminology is concerned he will learn code words (or Navy speak) for things like the bathroom (the head) and candy (geedunk).

“GEEDUNK - To most sailors the word geedunk means ice cream, candy, potato chips and other assorted snacks, or even the place where they can be purchased. No one, however, knows for certain where the term originated, but there are several plausible theories:

1. In the 1920’s a comic strip character named Harold Teen and his friends spent a great amount of time at Pop’s candy store. The store’s owner called it The Geedunk for reasons never explained.

2. The Chinese word meaning a place of idleness sounds something like gee dung.

3. Geedunk is the sound made by a vending machine when it dispenses a soft drink in a cup.

4. It may be derived from the German word tunk meaning to dip or sop either in gravy or coffee. Dunking was a common practice in days when bread, not always obtained fresh, needed a bit of tunking to soften it. The ge is a German unaccented prefix denoting repetition. In time it may have changed from getunk to geedunk. Whatever theory we use to explain geedunk’s origin, it doesn’t alter the fact that Navy people are glad it all got started.”

(source: www.sgaus.org/hist_fac.htm)

I wish the very best of luck to my brother and wanted him to know that he’s been my closest friend for years and will always be. Honestly, I couldn’t have asked for a better sibling if there was a Suggestion Box for it. Many years of memories including pretending to be the knights from Medievil Times to recording puppet shows, it’s all locked up here in the files of my memories.

I know he will enjoy his time in the Navy and have plenty of adventures and experiences to share when he is relieved of his duties someday. From those that I’ve talked to who have been a part of the military very few share experiences that deviate from making them a better person. From their very first wakeup call at 3am to watching the sunrise to forming new friendships, learning about themselves and their nation the military is an experience that deserves recognition.

Good luck, I love you brother. You’re grown up to be a great person and I can’t wait until you come visit us.

The animated series ReBoot was the first television series “produced entirely with computer graphics. It premiered in the [United States] September 10, 1994 on ABC. It has been shown in 70 countries including the U.S., Canada, South Africa, Australia, and those in western Europe and South America. The show has been dubbed in several languages, among them Spanish, French, and German.

Freed from network censorship, ReBoot took on a much more serious look and feel in season 3, which began airing in the U.S. March 15, 1999. AndrAIa and Enzo underwent major upgrades, Enzo now calling himself Matrix. The relationship between he and AndrAIa developed from puppy love into a serious romance, and Megabyte and Hexadecimal became brutal — even ruthless — in their attempts to conquer Mainframe.”

The character Phong was my favorite. I even attempted to create an alternate version of Pong with Tiki masks as the paddles and named the game “Phong” after the ReBoot character. A few years back a ReBoot game debuted on Playstation (original flavor) and while it wasn’t groundbreaking like the show it did manage to entertain me for a few weeks.
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According to CBS News:

“Righteous Brother Bobby Hatfield, who with partner Bill Medley pioneered “blue-eyed soul” with hits including “Unchained Melody” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” has died of undetermined causes at a hotel in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Hatfield was 63.

“It’s a shock, a real shock,” says Cohen, adding that Medley, who teamed up with Hatfield over 40 years ago, is “broken up. He’s not even coherent.”

Rest in peace, Bobby. Thanks for sharing your voice and talents, you will be missed.

It’s understandable why some artists or writers for that matter will come to a halt in their creative thinking. The process of outputing ones thoughts to pencil and paper (or the computer) can sometimes be a stressful one. Not stressing in the “My parakeet is stuck in the toilet” way but rather a “creative block” that puts a cork in the creative process.

A team from the University of California Berkeley have created a piece of useful software called Denim that helps streamline the process of creating websites by allowing the user to sketch out “interactive web sites” and ultimately flesh out their ideas.

According to Wired.com :

“Although the software is three years in the making, the first really stable, usable version was released last month. It is already becoming an underground hit with designers. Denim has been downloaded about 15,000 times, with almost no advertising except a couple of academic papers, Landay said.

In addition to websites, Denim is being used to design interfaces for desktop software. Carson Reynolds at MIT’s Media Lab used it to sketch an interface for some Linux software.”
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