Brent Hathaway…in my own words

Just say no to negativity – don’t surround yourself with it. There are better things to do with your time. Build something, instead of tearing it down.

Maybe this will help someone else who wears contact lenses.

With my my saline solution and glasses left at the office, I was stuck. It’s late, and I need to take out my contacts. They are not the disposable kind.

I normally store them in saline solution, because most disinfecting solutions bother my eyes, even after neutralizing the solution.

I was forced to put them in a multi-purpose solution overnight. “No rinse needed.” Yea, right.

The next morning after putting the contact lenses in my eyes, the eyes quickly turned red, itchy and burning.

I read the ingredients on the back, and saw it only had a small amount of cleaner it. So, I tried splashing some water on my eyes. Normally this bugs the contacts, but I had nothing to lose.
It gave me instant relief. After a couple minutes, I splashed more water on my eyes. It felt much better.

I was able to go work without them bugging me too much. Rinsing them with saline there did the final trick.

Thank goodness – my eyes just needed a sip of water.

I stopped in my local Best Buy in Windsor, ON, Canada, and they reduced their cd area to roughly two aisles. It previously was about four aisles. This eliminated around twelve thousand cd’s according to someone there.

What are they going to do with the extra space? They are going to display big screen tv’s with gaming systems, such as the Wii, Xbox, and PS3 to push more gaming systems. This appears to be Best Buy finally responding to trends, although it is a little sad to see.

I happened to find a pretty addictive site.  By now, a lot of people are familiar with the Google car that has a camera on a tripod, attached to the roof of the car.   The site contains photos of oddities and random things, but there is a lot to look at.  I finally had to pull myself away from  it, in fact.

As the Google Street View car passes by, it is constantly taking pictures (and until recently, collecting wireless information).  So… it is pretty obvious when you see this vehicle that you know what is going on.  It’s been through the city twice here.  It appears that even people in Portugal know what the vehicle is.  Keep on the lookout for the Google Street View bike – which I hadn’t known about before.

There are a ton of photos in this site’s collection.  There are photos of  people waving, people flipping off the camera, but the funniest ones are when people don’t notice the vehicle.  There are multiple photos of people caught urinating in bushes or alleys, photos of guys checking out women, a drug deal, a fight, and people pulled over by the police. There also is one of a very pregnant women smoking, and (believe it!) a mother holding her baby daughter above a storm sewer to go to the bathroom.  This collection is from all over the world, so that in itself is pretty interesting.   People can submit their own findings on Google Street View also.

Cool stuff.

http://www.streetviewfunny.com

One of the nicest stories I had heard in awhile…

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Buddy the German shepherd was hailed Friday as a hero for guiding Alaska State Troopers through winding back roads to a fire at his owners’ workshop.

“Buddy is an untrained dog who for some reason recognized the severity of the situation and acted valiantly in getting help for his family,” Col. Audie Holloway, head of the troopers, said Friday at a ceremony for the 5-year-old dog, who stood quietly before an adoring crowd.

Buddy, whose good deed was caught on a patrol car’s dashcam video, received a stainless steel dog bowl engraved with words of appreciation from troopers for his “diligence and assistance.”

Buddy also received a big rawhide bone, and his human family got a framed letter documenting his efforts.

“He’s my hero,” owner Ben Heinrichs said, his voice breaking. “If it wasn’t for him, we would have lost our house.”

The dashcam video shows Buddy meeting the trooper’s vehicle, then dashing to their property about 55 miles north of Anchorage on April 4.

Heinrichs said he was working on parts for his truck when a spark hit some gasoline and ignited, lighting his clothes ablaze. The 23-year-old man ran outside to stomp out the flames by rolling in the snow, closing the door to keep the blaze from spreading.

Heinrichs then realized Buddy was still inside the burning building and let the dog out. Heinrichs suffered minor burns on his face and second-degree burns on his left hand, which was still heavily bandaged Friday.

Buddy was not injured.

“I just took off running,” Heinrichs said. “I said we need to get help, and he just took off.”

Buddy ran into the nearby woods and onto Caswell Loop Road, where the dog encountered the trooper, Terrence Shanigan, whose global positioning device had failed while responding to a call about the fire. He was working with dispatchers to find the property in an area with about 75 miles of back roads.

Shanigan was about to make a wrong turn when he saw a shadow up the road. His vehicle lights caught Buddy at an intersection, and the dog eyed the trooper and began running down a side road.

“He wasn’t running from me, but was leading me,” he said. “I just felt like I was being led … it’s just one of those things that we’re thinking on the same page for that brief moment.”

The video shows Buddy occasionally looking back at the patrol car as he raced ahead, galloping around three turns before arriving in front of the blaze, which was very close to the Heinrichs’ home.

The workshop was destroyed and a shed was heavily damaged, but only some window trim on the house was scorched.

The Heinrich family said they knew Buddy was smart ever since they got him six weeks after he was born to a canine-officer mother and that he was brave, twice chasing bears away while Ben Heinrichs was fishing.

But saving their home beat them all.

“Downright amazing, I would say,” said Tom Heinrichs, Ben’s father. “Maybe there was some divine intervention.”

Associated Press, By RACHEL D’ORO , 04.23.10, 09:42 PM EDT