about

The Thinker, by Rodin	The Thinker (me) at cranial borborygmus

My name is Steve, and I am the Man Behind the Curtain here at cranialborborygmus. I live in Santa Barbara, California, with my wife and two kids.

Cranial Borborygmus is my personal website. I also have a business website and a business blog, but I started this website many years ago as a place I could "goof off" and post whatever I wanted, like a list of random thoughts inspired by a chain email I got from my father-in-law, and a collection of Chuck Norris sayings that I though were quite funny. Some of the stuff I posted here hasn't survived the passage of time and is now gone. Although I cover seemingly random topics like emergency food for Monarch caterpillars, lately I've started to review things I like, based on the unexpected high amount of traffic I regularly get to an old post I wrote on trying to replace the Motorola BR50 batteries in our old Razr flip phones.

About me: I'm cheap. Not cheap in the modern negative sense of the word meaning a stingy miserly person or shoddy inferior goods, but in the really-old-school 15th Century old English meaning of the word when cheap literally simply meant, "a good bargain". I don't like to overpay or get ripped off. I like value. I want something that works and expect to pay a fair price (though I don't mind the occasional deal, as long as the product does what it's supposed to do). If you read some of my reviews, you may get a sense of my "old school cheapness".

I admire companies that provide value, and work to save their customers money, instead of trying to make more money off of their customers. This is why I am a fan of Tello Mobile. Tello Mobile saves us money. Tello makes money by saving us money. Most companies aren't like Tello. I am reminded of our internet service provider, Cox Cable. Cox regularly tries to sell me more than I need. Cox customer service reps have always recommended that I should subscribe to their more expensive high speed internet package, instead of being honest and admitting that their least expensive starter internet package provides more than sufficient bandwidth and speed for what I need. Against their recommendation, I "downgraded" to their most basic internet package a while again, and works just fine. Bottom line - until I did my own research and downgraded, I was overpaying for more bandwidth and speed than I ever needed or used.

Why isn't this website a Wordpress blog (like almost everyone else's personal website)? I don't necessarily jump on the bandwagon and follow the crowd. I don't mind an old-fashioned (some might even say "last century") plain html website. As I mentioned above, I also have a business blog that I set up years ago. The problem I have with a blog is that it's fairly obvious when new content isn't regularly added, and thus there is pressure to "update it" and add new posts. I don't like that pressure. With this website, one can't easily tell how long it's been since I've added to it. I like that. I also just like being a bit of a Luddite and working with HTML instead of a CMS.

Why the funny/strange website name? Good question! I wanted a website name that was unique and memorable, but that also wasn't actually specific so it wouldn't tie me to writing only about some specific topic or subject (since I wanted to be free to write about anything that struck my fancy). In addition, if you've tried to come up with a new website domain name recently, you'll understand how hard it can be to come up with a domain name that isn't already taken. When I was trying to come up with a name for this website, borborygmus was a "word of the day" that I had just recently learned. I liked the funny sounding word "borborygmus" and actually had experience with it, because sometimes my stomach "growls" and makes "interesting" noises. In any event, I was looking forward to using this new word in a conversation some day, though I'm not sure if I even actually did. But when I was trying to come up with a unique website name, I remembered the word "borborygmus". I then thought of using a play on words to describe (figurative) rumbling sounds from my head instead of (literal) rumbling sounds from my stomach, and came up with "cranial borborygmus" to mean random thoughts, aka rumblings, from my head/brain. I'm confident my website name is at least unique, though the jury is still out on if it is memorable. In any event, cranial borborygmus is just my little personal slice of the world wide web.

Comments & Feedback:

Comment by John on Thursday, April 06, 2017
Borborygmus? Borborygmus! First and last time I heard or read that was about 40 yrs ago when I started my career as a medical asst in a big group MD practice. It came from a old comic strip called Shoe and I couldn't wait to show it to one of the 3 transcription ladies (the white haired old hen with the infectious laugh who knows every word in the galaxy). Yes, we had a laugh about it.
I got here as a RingPlus refuge looking at your great cellphone reference which I will keep and share. Thanks.

Reply by Steve (Cranial Borborygmus)
Hi John, Thanks for your comment. I learned of the word borborygmus a little more recently than you. I can't remember where I saw it, but I liked the funny sounding unique word. Thanks for sharing your story about the word. By the way, I remember reading the comic strip "Shoe" in our local paper when I was growing up. 

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