Honestly, how did I survive childhood? I bicycled without a helmet, which, in hindsight, was moderately unwise considering the number of makeshift ramps I jumped over. (However, that one tree trunk in or front lawn was pretty sweet — I almost made a full 360.) I climbed any tree in the neighbourhood and fell down my fair share of them (to my credit, only one ambulance ride). I ate whatever foodstuff I received from trick-or-treating without pause or surcease.

But the thing that really shocks me is how much time I spent making bows and arrows.

Let me repeat that: Homemade bows and arrows.

My recipe for missile-attack bliss:

1. Find a tree limb small enough for a child of 7-to-11 to bend but big enough to “shoot real far”.
2. Attach a string of dubious heritage to one end of the aforementioned tree limb with an even more dubious knot. (Extra points if you use something as advanced as a “reef knot”.)
3. Bend the limb by bracing one end on the ground with a Battlestar Gallactica sneaker and pulling the other end directly at your face. You’re not really trying if you don’t use your chin or teeth to assist in this process.
4. Start to place string around end of limb. At this point it is customary to realise that a loop was not fashioned into the end of the string to assist in the stringing of the bow stave.
5. Rather than return to step 2 to fashion a loop in the other end of the rope (as that would take TOO MUCH TIME) create a knot the end of the string in the best manner possible (considering you are holding a bent tree limb inches from your face and it’s getting really hard to hold in place considering the most muscle strength you usually need is the power to carry your box of Legos from your bedroom to the living room).
6. Bonus: Tie some cool feathers or a Micronaut action figure from the top to be cool.
7. Find “straight” sticks to fashion into crude arrows. Don’t fret too much — anything with a curve less than the bow itself should suffice.
8. Glue/tape/tie/wedge an “arrowhead” on the end of the arrow. “Arrowhead” stands for any object of any type that can be argued to properly weight the arrow tip or, alternatively, stick into things.
9. Do NOT attempt to add fletching to the arrow — this is unnecessary and will take precious time away from you shooting at stuff.

Enjoy! Your functioning and completely safe-by-the-standards-of-the-day bow and arrows are complete! You may now proceed to aim and fire it at a multitude of neighbourhood objects including, but not limited to:

• a rock!
• a tree!
• a tire!
• a tire on a car!
• a tire on a moving car!
• a balloon held by your friend!
• your friend!
• yourself!
• bad guys!

In the end, not a single bow-and-arrow-related injury on my watch. (Not out of trying, obviously.)

1. saturday morning cartoons
2. good new Star Wars movies
3. really dangerous playground equipment
4. an omnipresent fear of nuclear annihilation
5. lawn darts

OK, so some friends and family have been asking me how I keep up with so much stuff online and still get anything done.

(I do get things done by the way.)

So I would like to offer…

Jason’s Shack ‘o’ Browsing Tips!

• tip the first: Mozilla Firefox! This is the most important step you can take towards a speedier and more productive online experience. The majority of the following tips will not help you without Firefox as your browser. Believe me, you will not regret it. Firefox includes built-in pop-up blocking and an integrated search bar (which defaults to Google), and has a vast number of extensions available for further customisation. And for those few sites that only work in IE, the number of those sites is decreasing every day — the very small amount of time that you need to spend using IE to access these sites will be more than paid back through the time-savings you will have through using Firefox. Go download it. Right now.
• tip the second: Tabbed browsing. No more clicking back and forth between pages as you try to read a page and follow the links in the page. Simply open the links in a new tab and continue on. And being able to save a set of tabs as a single bookmarks, or even set your homepage to be a whole set of bookmarks, is just dandy. Flip between tabs using the mouse, or even better by hitting ctrl-tab. To open a link in a new tab with your mouse, either press ctrl as you click the left mouse button or click on the center button or scroll wheel. Using your keyboard, press ctrl as you type Enter.
• tip the third: Keyboard shortcuts. Learn them and use them. Your mouse is only slowing you down. The ones that I use the most are ctrl-l and ctrl-k . ctrl-l moves the focus to the location bar (sometimes it’s a whole lot faster to just type the address of the site you are looking for rather than mouse through all your bookmarks). ctrl-k moves the focus to the search bar. Alt-left-arrow moves you back to your previous page and alt-right-arrow move you forward a page.
• tip the fourth: RSS and Bloglines.com. More and more websites are publishing their content through RSS feeds, which is an XML format that allows content to be syndicated and viewed through a variety of services. The medium that I use the most is Bloglines.com, which is a web-based feed reader — you create a free account with Bloglines and subscribe to the feeds that you want to read. Bloglines then periodically checks the feeds for your subscribed sites for updated content. Then, when you go to your Bloglines page, you are shown the sites which have new content and can view the new content directly in your Bloglines page. This works best for sites that are primarily text-based content, but there are feeds for photo galleries, comic strips, and many other forms of content. This is a huge time saver — rather than checking each individual site in your list of bookmarks for new content, you only have to go to one site for all updates. (Further info available through RSS feeds)
• tip the fifth: SuperDragAndGo. SuperDragAndGo is a Firefox extension that allows you to select a piece of text or a URL on a webpage and “throw it” (drag it slightly). Once “thrown”, if the text is a website address or a link, it will open a new tab to that site. For all other text, it will do a Google Search on the selected text. So if you find a phrase that you want to do a search on, you just select it and drag it slightly — voila! a search is initiated. (And throwing an image will open up a dialogue box to save the image to your computer.)
• tip the sixth: Find-as-you-Type. In Firefox, go to Tools > Options > Advanced. There, under the Accessibility tab you will see a checkbox next to “Begin finding as you begin typing”. Check this box. Then, when you are on a page, just begin typing the word you are looking for and it will begin an incremental search throughout the document. Type “j”, and it will go to the first word beginning with “j”. Type “a”, it will move to the first word beginning with “ja”. Delete “a” and it goes back to “j”. And so on. It makes searching within a single page a single-step process and far more intuitive — you just type what you want to find. What could be simpler that that?
• tip the seventh: Keywords. One last Firefox tip! In your Bookmarks, if you select Properties, one of the available properties of each link is a keyword. This keyword can be whatever you want it to be. So if you are regularly heading over to lifehacker.com for a dose of lifehackery, set the keyword for your Lifehacker bookmark to “1″. Then, you can simply enter ctrl-l to move to the location bar, type”1″ and then Enter, and you’re on your way!

While these are not all of my browsing secrets (I can’t give away all the magic), you will definitely find these will enable you to make your time online much more productive.

(i.e. You’ll have more time to look at cute pictures of cats.)

• Fafblog! : “It’s not really so bad after the zombies take over”

You ever have a day that feels like a zombie day? Everything’s draggy, you can’t get motivated, you crave human flesh…

Yeah, me too.

However, I do draw the line at brains before sundown.

Went a little crazy when I heard commentary last night putting the Tom Cruise microphone squirt at a small step below John Lennon being assassinated by Mark David Chapman.

It could have been a cheesy little prank pulled by what will most likely be a pretty weak comedy show.

But now? Now, it’s getting funnier and funnier every time I see it.

Look at that picture again. Now picture Tom Cruise getting mad. See? Funny.

Now look again. Even funnier!

And now he wants them prosecuted! Funniest!

(Image courtesy of Defamer)