Ryan, Debi, and Toren Cragun's Blog

There’s no stopping this kid now!

I just received an email from YouTube inviting me to apply for “revenue sharing” for one of the videos I posted on that has quite a few views (about 15,000).  I followed the link to apply for revenue sharing and clicked through as much of the process as I could.  But I got to one screen that wouldn’t let me continue.  Basically, you need to select a radio button that will trigger another box to pop up for you to enter additional information (probably javascript).  I clicked on the radio button and nothing happened.  I figured it was a browser issue (despite the fact that I was using Google Chrome), so I fired up Firefox and tried the same application process with Firefox.  Still no luck.  My last recourse for browsers is always Internet Explorer.  Since I run Linux, I had to start up Virtualbox and then launch Internet Explorer in a virtual machine.  The result – it worked.  You can see the side-by-side photos of the two browsers here:

Google Chrome is on the left; Internet Explorer is on the right (in Virtualbox)

Why is this funny?  Well, Google owns YouTube.  Google makes Google Chrome.  Ergo, one of Google’s websites doesn’t work with Google’s browser.  Instead, you have to use Internet Explorer, from Microsoft.  Ooops!

A two word summary of the last three weeks for Toren and I: World Cup!

Unfortunately he's not as interested as I am.

One of the organizations with which I’m affiliated, Equality Florida, had an entry in the St. Petersburg Gay Pride Parade on Saturday.  They were looking for volunteers to march in the parade.  Since Toren had never been to a parade, I thought it might be fun to have the whole family march for equal rights.  So, we marched!

Toren figuring out how to throw beads to parade visitors

he was excited to throw some beads

Toren's souped up stroller was a hit

Equality Florida's truck in front of the few protesters who showed up

you can see some of the throngs in the background of this shot

We were out in the killer Florida sun from about 9:00 until about 12:30 and all managed to avoid serious sunburns (Debi got a little burned on one arm, but otherwise was fine).  We were pretty liberally coated with SPF70.

What we didn’t catch in any of our photos were the, um, more exotic floats.  There was a Tampa Bay Bondage float (mostly guys dressed in strips of leather) and a number of floats with drag queens.  Quite the scene!

Toren even seemed to enjoy himself, though he fell asleep in his stroller as soon as we finished the parade route.

My university did a little write up about one of the articles I published recently: http://www.ut.edu/Professor-Explores-Religion.aspx

It’s a nice summary of the paper and the picture isn’t half bad either.