without judging, here’s my impression of a dog owner:
“oh hai, my dog just peed on your rug, stuck it’s head in the trashcan, ate some garbage it found there, and is now barfing and pooping while sliding around on its butt wiping poop all over the floor”
how cute!
i know people think cats are evil and don’t like you (and i agree, they do not like you), but here are some great things about cats.
1. know how to use the bathroom
2. do not bark loudly
3. content to sit still for hours
right now, this very minute, i am flying first class. i haven’t flow first class for over a decade. and i had forgotten all the benefits of flying first class. and it is making me angry about every time i have to fly not first class and be treated like an elementary school student. let’s review:
0. they told me to move things in the overheard compartment to stow my bag.
1. I did not have to stow my laptop before takeoff. i put it next to me in the seat and NO ONE ASKED ME TO MOVE IT.
2. I had to shut off my electronics, but only 10 seconds before we took off. literally the flight attendant asked me to do it as she was buckling her own belt for takeoff
3. free dvd player with bose headphones. i am going to replace my old bose headphones with their newer ones and see if anyone notices.
4. unlimited drinks.
5. an actual meal. a 3 cheese omelette. who knew there were 3 KINDS OF CHEESE? not the best omelette i’ve ever had, but it was by no means the worst or bad or even mediocre. it was a GOOD omelette
6. when they canceled my flight this morning, they rebooked me on another one without having to fly out tomorrow
7. of course, this was after they tried to book me on an 11 hour, 2 stop trip all around the country.
8. and they did cancel my flight, so i guess even in first class you can’t fight the weather.
9. the company of my equals. no kids crying, no one stealing my armrest, just a friendly investment banker. we are discussing Wittgenstein over a game of backgammon. I have mentioned that i went to an ivy league university 4 times so they know i belong here. i have not told him which one.
i will now make it my mission to return to first class as much as i possibly can. sorry 401k! i have to fly like a human, and not be told when i can use my kindle (why the fuck would i have to turn off my kindle? how would that interfere with the plane?) or deal with the guy dipping in the seat next to me or the family of 5 or the woman who won’t let me move her tiny bag that she has put in the center of the overhead because “she has every right to that space”, or the jerks in the security line who set off the metal detector BECAUSE THEY ARE WEARING A BELT or the guy who doesn’t know he has to take his laptop out or any of the other insane things we do to ourselves so we can be stuffed like sardines in a metal tube that then zooms through the air, ferrying us around and around, even though we never really get anywhere.
it is totally possible that i should have declined the third diet coke.
For the past two years, i’ve only been posting here once a month in order to keep up the long list of archive links you see there on the left growing. Last month i finally missed it, and i think that means it’s time to go away for awhile, maybe forever. I’ve had this blog for 5.5 years, longer than i’ve been in SF, longer than i spent getting both my degrees, and it’s been very easy to see that the wind went out of my sails about 2-3 years into it. It isn’t that i don’t enjoy publicly sharing my thoughts anymore, it’s more that… no, actually i think it’s exactly that. I don’t enjoy publicly sharing my thoughts anymore. I don’t want to make a public record of dissatisfaction, and satisfaction is boring to document. “Everything’s fine!” is a boring post and “Everything sucks!” is an interesting post which then becomes a potential nightmare when I elaborate. If I’m going to be spending my time writing on the internet, i want it to be a focused analysis, critique, or discussion about what really drives me: design, music, technology, and all associated intersections. It’s why i’ve found time to answer a few questions a day on Quora, but can barely scrape together one blog post a month about how i’m doing (fine, btw. see? boring).
So, that’s it. I’m not saying i won’t be back, but most likely it’ll be at a new site, with a new goal. Until then…
1. I’m thankful for that fact that i can now sprint up hills 2-3 times in a row without throwing up
2. I’m thankful for my wireless N router which lets me watch netflix movies from the xbox without any wires.
3. I”m thankful for arm warmers while biking
4. I’m thankful that i can still get to work at 10:30AM if i need to, and i don’t ever have to wear anything more formal than jeans and a hoodie.
5. I’m thankful that i started playing music 18 years ago and never stopped.
6. I’m thankful that i rarely get sick, especially when everyone around me is sick (go home!)
7. i’m thankful for great bread a few blocks from my apt
8. i’m thankful that i can focus on little things like my career and my artistic aspirations, instead of things like being hungry or broke.
9. i’m thankful that i still want to learn new things, even if i don’t always know which thing i want to learn in which order
10. i’m thankful that i don’t have to fly this thanksgiving.
I was in NYC last weekend and at dinner with two of my close friends from ITP days, Alex and Karen, and we were discussing health and current diet/workout programs. As you may or may not know, i stopped eating beef, pork, chicken, and other meats (not fish) at the start of this year both to reduce my chances of gout attacks (which were coming once a week from Jan-March) and also because I watched Food Inc. and got disgusted by the meat industry and the practices involved with the raising and production of the meat that we eat on a daily basis. Between those two, i figured it was time to stop eating meat for a few months, and just see how it went. It went pretty well, and i can’t say that i really miss it, though occasionally i yearn for a salami and cheese sub from ricci brothers in philly, but i feel like that is more of a memory fix than a real food fix.
Regardless, Alex said something along the lines of: “now that you’re not eating meat, it makes me want to try not eating meat to see if i can do it”. I personally have tried never to think of health in terms of competition, because i know that my own body and metabolism is different enough from everyone else’s that if i try to compete with other people i’ll ultimately end up being disappointed by what i can or can’t do. a few years ago i realized that i could eat exactly the same diet as some of my friends, exercise more, and while they would never gain or show more than a few extra pounds, i would blimp up. It’s “unfair”, but eventually i took responsibility for the fact that i have a slow metabolism, and a body type that tends towards obesity (all the males on my dad’s side of the family are short, squat, and obese).
I guess what i’m saying is that motivation for health is great no matter what the source, as long as you remember that we’re all different and will have different ceilings and pitfalls. If you want to compete with me over who can not eat meat for longer, go for it (I personally couldn’t care less if you eat meat or not, i just know that my toe swells up when i eat too much). I personally am competing with a few generations of genetic history and my own fitness charts which i’ve loosely kept historically (i’m in remarkably better shape than i was 5 years ago, and even 10, i have to go back to when i was a 20 year old gym rat to find a time that i was as fit as I am now). For me it’s just about getting up each day and making the small decisions to be healthier, and continuing to try and make those decisions every day, no matter what you did the day before.
Recently, my job has insisted on a fairly large amount of hours of my time per week. Something like 80 hours a week. And the funny thing is, that while that seems like an insane amount of time to me, it’s still not near the 100 hour weeks that I always her about from lawyers and consultants and other serious people. I mean, I easily put in a 12-14 hour day, every day, which gets me to 60-65 hours. Saturdays are a full work day but usually only 8-10 hours, which bring us to around 68-73, and then inevitably there’s one really late night a week, which adds on another 5-6 hours, so, we’re around 74-78… see, i can’t even get to 80 hours! how do people work 100 hours a week? i’m doing nothing but working and coming home and i’m only working 75 hours a week. i suppose if i added sundays as a full day, that would be a good start, but good god! anyway i now think that pretty much all success comes from the willingness to put in at least two to three times more work than the other guy, and it sure helps if that time isn’t spent re-doing the work you did in the first 40 hours.
the only other thing that i’m doing is getting up at 6:45 to work out 3 days a week. tomorrow is our final assessment, where i will run 1.5 miles and hopefully do it faster than my original time, which was 12:57. I’m pretty sure i can shave at least 30 seconds off that, my goal is 12:30 which i think should be totally achievable. my long term goal is to get that down to 12 even, which will probably require losing the 10-15lbs i’ve gained by being at work 12 hours a day in a place with endless snacks. sigh. endless snacks.
I was talking to a potential SF citizen last night on the phone, and he asked me to sum up the pros and cons of living out here vs the east coast. I said the following:
Pros (for me): Weather, Outdoors, Tech Careers
Cons: Public Transportation, Cost, Distance
I think this is a bit of a tired topic, but that’s basically the trade-off for me. Recently i’ve accepted that i’ll probably be here for awhile, or at the very least I have no plans to move. Of course, the last time I said something like that, it was about my car and the transmission died 2 weeks later.
Also, electronic drum kit! tap-tap-tap-boom!
I have absolutely nothing to say. I work. I sleep (too much). I try to make it to the gym. I play drums loudly and with fierce passion. This is my life. It’s easily in the top 1% of lives worldwide, of this I am absolutely positive. And sometimes I get bored and think about what it would be like to do something totally different, and then after awhile I go back to working, sleeping, and drumming.
from http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Location+bar+autocomplete#Removing_autocomplete_results
i’ve been looking for this for a long time. my work computer always ends up with a myriad of sports and geek BS on it. it’s terrible when my boss or a co-worker is looking over my shoulder, tells me to launch a browser, and as i type in the address, the wikipedia entry for “Tomax and Xamot” comes up as a suggestion. Now i can geek out in glorious secrecy.