Here’s the rundown, in mostly sequential order:

• went to a clothing optional hot springs with G.F.
• worked.
• spent night in airport.
• went to Cali to help swap a clutch and visit family.
• left Cali and the still non-functioning vehicle behind.
• spent night in airport.
• worked.
• had birthday.
• had birthday party.
• worked.
• updated blog software.
• went to a postsecret event down south
• spent majority of today buying a ‘cowboy’ ‘outfit’.

So, what do you want to hear about? The nitty gritty details of a successful software update?

It was nice to get a more complete view of her life and achievements at the funeral, but it was also… not fun.

Funerals make me start thinking about the last time I spoke with that person. In this case, how I neglected to respond to her last email until it was literally too late.
And I found out via text message. How harsh is that?

I’ve been more sentimental; spent more time considering relationships.
It’s not fun for me and I’m not even close to being family. Accepting loss. Forgiving self. Maximizing time with those still alive. How is it I lose sight of true priorities so easily?

And notice how all this is still about me. I guess it really couldn’t be about her because there’s no physical entity left.

Anyways, it’s been a downer for selfish me. The only thing I could think of to commemorate her is go find several versions of the song “Georgia On My Mind” and post the playlist here.
Goodbye, Georgia.

I think people posing nude can be very shy or unnatural about the whole affair. That’s why I enjoy pictures that are odd and fun. I’m gonna give you a couple different links to a website with some good pictures on there. I’ll show the ones I like, and you can explore further at will.

And here’s the start of another set:

C’Mon? There’s a man who’s having fun just as he is. That’s just pretty dang cool to me.

For more, go here.

The other thing I’ll put on here is a video of naked men skydiving. It showcases a particular man’s plumbing in extreme oscillation:




Now that, Ms. Josie, is too much information.

As mentioned previously, I removed the ’snooze’ button on my alarm clock in hopes i would get up immediately following the alarm activation every morning. So Thursday morning the alarm goes off at 0800. I reset alarm for 0822. Alarm goes off at desired time, and as I stare at the yelping clock I get the idea to reset it for 0833- 11 minutes later. This process continues- 0844, 0855. I think I continued it into the next hour.

This story proves two things about me. I’m A) lazy and B) odd when I first wake up. I mean, seriously, who modifies their astronomic derived time keeping circadian disruption mechanism based on a prime super-digital integer?

Here’s a LOLcat/Spinal Tap reference to really sink the significance of this number into your skull:

Maybe I’m not strange just when I wake up.

I have spent a frightening amount of time in front of computers today. Started at work this morning until I left at 6 tonight. Went home, checked email ‘n’ such. Got a call from a friend who’s parents were having trouble with their wireless network that I recently ’secured’ ( saying a wireless network is secure is like saying James Frey writes non-fiction). Old reference, sorry. So I went over there until I got those working as I believe they should and now I’m at my house past midnight blogging… that’s over 15 hours of compy time excluding short breaks.

I just wanted to record a few thoughts before they get too far away. They mostly deal with the subtle Mexican influences of my life. For example, my computer speakers are secretly Mexican. You may be asking yourself, “Self, how is this so?” Well, when the computer is off, power still runs to the speakers and the cable becomes an antenna. That just so happens to pick up the only Spanish radio station in the area. And it’s real soft too; at just the right level to make me think I’m going crazy. It’s hard to focus when there’s low-level accordions and horns bleating in the background.

Then there’s my cell phone. I decided I know my phone well enough to change languages to Spanish. Now, I’ve never actually studied Spanish, mind you. And it was working out pretty well for me until I noticed the voice command part is also in Spanish. So my little game now is to try to actually call someone using voice commands. I have to get help from people who actually know the letters and numbers in Spanish. I should record it and post it on here sometime- it would be much more amusing.

Is that really all I had? The immediate answer is yes because my mind is absent. But someday sooner than later you will be treated with a blog that will likely be similar. Go ahead- anticipate. I’ll wait.

It’s later than I would like it to be, and I’m inherently lazy so I would normally not be blogging. However, I wanted to share a few things about this week before starting the next (don’t get technical on me here, okay? Monday works fine for the start of a week). First news first… I helped a co-worker get laid! Yehaw!

My role in this narrative is quite limited, really. It goes like this: The lady across from me is the newest addition to the department that I don’t work with yet physically do work with. She’s divorced with a couple of teenage? daughters. She’s getting cozy with a military guy. He sends her a riddle and says, “if you figure this out, we’ll go to dinner.” She then shows said email to me, who reads about how it’s supposedly associated with both LSAT questions and Einstein. I realize these keywords make great google fodder. Sure enough, I quickly find a forum posting where someone has posted not only the riddle, but a step-by-step solution. I email her this site. Soon, I hear her talking on her cellphone in that unmistakable “flirty voice” women use at such occasions. I later get the results: he knew she ‘cheated’ but because his rules did not exclude phone-a-friend, she still ‘wins.’ Olive Garden it is. Now, details from this point are non-existent, so I hafta kinda read between the lines. Evidence A: Olive Garden is one of the premiere lady-ing spots in town. Evidence B: when I asked her how dinner was the next day, she stated it was quote good endquote and then shared a secret little smile with herself. Using logic and journalistic license we can safely say her night was, according to Tony the Tiger, not just GOOD but GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREAT!

My presumption is that one can’t go to Olive Garden with a member of the opposite (yet equal) gender without sexcapades ensuing. Go ahead and let me know how that’s worked out for you. Strangely, despite this theory I have spent precious little time in this oh-so-elegant restaurant.

I guess the main thrust of the presentation thus far is that if you’re a woman looking to get all watch-your-hands-mister-and-we’ll-see-if-you-play-your-cards-right on a man, I’ll be the man in the middle for you. Not like that, though.

Judging from my last post, I need to quote from The Big Lebowski and link to pics of naked skydiving to get the comments flowing. Interesting readership I have, eh? If I ever find that naked bullriding pic again, you’ll be the first to know. And keep the comments coming.
I re-potted a spider plant today. And by “re-potted” I mean “killed thoroughly.” Let’s just say I’m botanist from my list of prospective careers. The plant might survive, though. I told it that it had better live at least for a little while because I spent a lot of time attempting this risky, majorly invasive procedure. Also, my idea that I could use my stovetop and make nary a mess was quickly proven incorrect. Now I have a re-potted newly dying plant, a clean stove and a vacuum full of fungus-rich potting soil! A threefer!

The major reason I did this tonight was because I wanted to install the new auto-watering device that will do a much better job than me at hydrating this plant. The bad news here is that I set it up incorrectly and it dumped all the water in at once, unbeknown to me. Watching a plant shoot water out it’s drain holes holes is like watching a pet piss on the furniture- you can’t make it stop and get to towels at the same time. The plant, however, doesn’t leave blacklight-visible stains.
For those of you concerned about my ongoing computer problems, here’s an update: sometimes the best defense is a good offense. I just went ahead and took out my hard drive. Right now I’m using an operating system called “Puppy Linux.” The name really is a shame, but it’s great beyond that. To help you, dear reader, appreciate my thoughts on this, please allow me to digress.

When computing first appeared as a bright beam of hope in a dark world of data oppression (hyperbole, anyone?) programs were written to deal directly with that specific hardware. So a program would have to talk directly to that specific keyboard and then read from that specific harddrive and so on. Nothing was portable- programs would work only on a single computer unless another shared exactly the same components, which was unlikely. Even if the keyboard were switched from an English to, say, a Russian keyboard the program would choke and die. Then came the concept of a operating system. This acts as a layer between the hardware and software. Now it’s the operating system’s responsibility to figure out how speak with that hot-off-the-shelves 8″ floppy drive (bad time for a yo mama joke?). Programs written for that OS now become portable and powerful and soon it becomes commercially worthwhile to market them for each home. This is also the story of how William Gates became very rich.
So the point is that there are other OSes in the world besides Windows Vista SP3 and Mac OS X Leopard or whatever they’re at now. SP5 and Liger for all I know. Another popular OS is Linux, which is based (like so many OSes) off of Unix. A big reason for it’s popularity is that the source code (human readable code that, when compiled, gives commands the computer understands) is available freely. So if someone understands what the code is doing, they can add/delete/modify to their heart’s content. This my friends is a very powerful concept. Some of the most innovative and popular software today has been created not by a well-paid team from a large organization but by volunteer geeks scattered about the world doing a little coding between supper and bedtime. Of course, each person has different wants, so many forms of the same basic OS are created. These are mostly referred to as ‘flavors’ of Linux. This flavor is “Puppy Linux.” Here’s why I’m using it: it’s designed to run entirely in RAM. The OS your browser is running on is so large that it pulls the bits it needs from the hard drive into RAM and uses those until it needs another bit. All this hard drive activity slows down performance noticeably. Puppy Linux gets every part of itself into ram at the same time which means it responds quickly. When I say jump, this OS says ‘how high?’- your OS says ’smoke break?’ Actually, it’s probably not that noticeable to you so sorry if you’re getting defensive about your computer. The other cool thing is that I’m running this from a flash thumb drive. So while most people are using their 2 GB flash drives for school work or perverted work emails, I’m running an entire OS complete with everyday programs.

Well, it’s cool to me anyways. That computer thing turned into quite the little rant. And I still haven’t touched the surface of the open source issues. I guess I’ll turn in for some rest before that big day of data entry and picking the pimples in my beard while trying to hide my pained facial expressions from scaring the women in the department I am attached to.

I’m working on a project to take over a report being generated outside the company as of now. I just found out that they pay significantly more for this than I thought. If all goes well, I could use this as bargaining leverage because the company saving would be great huge.

That’s all folks. I’m outty like your mom on a Friday night. And I ain’t talking ’bout nobody else’s mama but yours. Unless you my sibling. Then it’s just awkward.

Ralph Nader is now running for president, and that could have major implications for the major parties. The other thing is that hd-dvd is now dead.Blu-ray is now the “future-proof” video standard. There you have it- one crazy week.

Let’s see here… I spent this afternoon doing my taxes. A couple more things and I’ll be done tomorrow. If I created and/or itemized deductions I think I could get much more back but I’ve been too scared/uneducated/lazy to do this. I have 3 different W-2 for last year and the final sum is pretty small. Weird. Guess I should be a naked art model more frequently.
We went into the Christian bookstore a couple days ago. Haven’t been there for years. Maybe over a decade. And you know what? It doesn’t feel like it’s changed at all. Which means I didn’t like it one bit.

The weather here has been “nice” which translates into upper 30’s/low 40’s Fahrenheit. There were a bunch of motorcyclists out today- bikes, babes and bundles of clothing to stay warm. Hey, I almost got that to work.

As stated in previous blogs, my hard drive is shot. Well, it could be my OS installation or my motherboard, but it’s most convenient to blame my hard drive. I’ve got a few fixes in the pipeline. Part A of my master plan was completed when I successfully resized my nfts partition. Part B will be to order an 80 GB drive online because nobody has anything that small around here. Part C will utilize a live cd with open source software ( Clonezilla ) to transfer all data to new hard drive. I’ll be going from 300 GB to 80 GB, which would not be possible with most software tools including commercial versions. And here I am paying nothing and still doing better. Amazing.

Here’s a link to a funny picture that’s not safe for work or for anyone not wishing to see other people naked.

Here’s a link to an article related to free software that has 8 points of differentiation. Very interesting. To me at least.

If you want to see the fall and rise of man in 6 forum postings, here it is.

Fuck it, Dude- Let’s go bowling.

Anyways, as a person in the technical/creative crowd, being asked to run sound is this big deal because it’s easier to do wrong than right. When people need a tech/creative person, the process is straightforward: find someone who will show up and is willing and has a brother that’s done something similar before.

I was going to go into the gory details of this particular instance, but I’ll go ahead and bypass the part about showing before everyone except the pastor and wife who knew nothing of me or my task and the part about the guy (there’s always one) who never, in a total of 20 minutes of announcements figured out how to properly utilize a microphone. Please, if you ever find yourself speaking in front of an audience with a microphone, place it close to your mouth and keep it there. Unless of course the sound guy tells you otherwise. So the pastor just stares at me while I try to invent sign language that says “Dear Pastor Bob, I regret to inform you that Elder Bob, who is currently making announcements related to the possible building site among other announcements, quite possibly doesn’t have the wireless mic on. Even if he does it is placed at such a distance from his mouth that it wouldn’t help. Quite sorry, good chap.” I tried though.

The experience got me thinking about a few things. I’ll start with the freshly coined “geek tweaks” and move to “retrograde knowledge” and finish strong with “data summarization.” Now, to figure out a system (this applies to many things, but we’ll stick to sound boards for now) I find it necessary to play around with some educated guesses to understand the setup. Once the main settings are in place, it’s time to tweak the little stuff to really make it high quality. This is the ‘geek tweak’- basically little things that probably won’t be noticed or missed by anyone else except in overall perception but which the geek does simply because they are proud of their ability to do so. I do this often with software development (makes it sound high level that way- don’t be fooled). I’ll throw in some error checking or some atomic explosion sound when a button is pressed just to impress me. When I demonstrate the tool to someone else, they just push a few buttons and say, “But why doesn’t it do this?”

Before I forget, the rule is that everyone knows how to do technical things. For example, many people comment freely to sound technicians about how they should do their job. To use an example from my job: At a meeting where I was assigned the task of creating a tool that generates a 100+ page monthly report, my various bosses all concurred that it should be a pretty trivial task for me. Nice, guys.

Data summarization: I asked my bro the sound pro (nice ring to that, eh?) for some real quick tips on running sound for the church. His sharp intake of breath before the pregnant pause before he started searching for a starting point spoke volumes. This is funny to me because I do the same all the time. For example, people ask me if buying a computer part (RAM, for example) will fix their computer problem. Then, while I try to discover what the actual problem is, they’ll say, “What does the RAM do, anyways?” So I stop, take a deep breath and try to summarize at the appropriate level of detail required to explain the complex interaction of millions of digital data particulates. My bro did good, though. Everybody was happy enough with the sound the next day.

Finally: retrograde knowledge. I brought up a couple sound concepts I’m pretty sure I learned from or around my brother years ago. When I brought them up, he took a deep intake of air, paused and politely indicated that those methods were not good ideas. He’s been learning all this time and I’m still using old knowledge, essentially.

It’s the same with S- and computers. I developed a pattern of computer usage in high school that I no longer subscribe to; S- still uses, to some degree, those methods. It’s not bad really, it’s just that there are probably better ways.

Anyways, maybe next time some you hear feedback in a church you won’t turn around with everyone else and just stare at the sound booth until it stops. Or turn and stare at the door that just slammed when someone re-entered.

And when someone presents you with a piece of software they created, maybe you’ll find a couple of compliments about it and indulge their desire to brag about some feature you’ll probably never use before asking them “But why doesn’t it do this?”

I’m writing this on my home compy - the one with the hard drive that likes to freeze and crash. I’m gonna get a new hard drive, but I will probably upgrade also. That’s the trend we started years ago with crappy bmx bikes- when it breaks, upgrade. The advantage of this is that when your bike finally gets pretty good, someone steals it.

Took a walk in the park yesterday. We’ve had a couple warm days and I didn’t wanna miss out on some vitamin d. Of course, warm in this case meant 30 degrees Fahrenheit. The obvious bonus here is that I didn’t have the mothers-of-children-playing-assuming-me-to-be-a-pederast syndrome. The other bonus was that several months of accumulated shit had defrosted for my nasal enjoyment.

Three things I’m ocd about: aligning bic pen caps with the writing on the pens; putting cd/dvds into their cases perfectly vertical; arranging the stack of toilet paper rolls so they’re always symmetrical.

I decided I would experiment with referring to people in blogs like translated Russian books sometimes do- with the first letter then a hyphen.

So the major reason I consider my blogging buddy S- to be a successful is that he enjoys an online community. People read his blogs and comment; he does the same for them. And so he has a reason to blog. Also, he has a knack for making anything interesting.

On the other hand there is blogging neighbor J-. J- pretty much blogs when he’s unhappy and only started back up recently. There are some super thoughts and observations included in there, but he has no community and therefore it becomes more like a diary. Kinda like mine.

The topics I could cover include: work, relationships, or randomness. Looks like you get door number three. Even if I cared about what I’m writing, would you? I could tell you about the recent series of dream with the boot camp/ visiting family and friends theme. Thus far I’ve seen my sister in law, J- and a best friend’s gf (R-) naked in my dreams. As an aside, the best part was that they were happy, proud and not ashamed. Wow, if that doesn’t creep you out then what will?

I wrote a song recently and submitted it in a contest. A couple different bestest friends commented that it’s the most open emotionally they’ve known me to be. Seeins how they’ve known me for years, I guess that’s lame on my part. I just don’t see a big need to go into great detail about feelings. I view not being open as a bad thing, but don’t really feel a need for change. That’s an awkward spot to be.

Hope life is good for you.

I just got back from California where we had a mini family reunion. It was sweet. Since I returned “home” I have been doing everything but work of any sort. My eyes and wrists are starting to really hate computers. My scholastic apathy grows strong within me. In the past I was burnt out because of the sheer volume of work and school. Now I have intentionally slowed down and things are getting worse in some ways. I just don’t care anymore, which is bad.

I can’t really take a break from work, even though it’s the largest transgressor of my soul. That’s just common sense. I shouldn’t leave for a new job because I just started this one. I shouldn’t quit school because it would push me so far back that it would be that much harder to complete any real degree.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve been pretty stressed recently. I can gauge my stress levels by the rate at which a “cuss word” pops into my head (or mouth) following an unfortunate turn of events- my ‘cuss-o-meter’ if I may. I refer to this metric as ‘zero to fuck’ speed.

Also, I don’t like talking about anything too personal because I’m a slight privacy freak. Other bloggers in this l’il online community drop names and places, but not me. Not that it’s that difficult to find me; I have a landline in my name so it’s pretty darn easy- several folks have found me recently online. Anyways, if I have something personal to rant about like sex, drugs or rock and roll then I don’t think this would be the best medium for that. Here again, people close to me have disagreed.

Here’s a concept that is a bit hotter and debatable than I thought: praying and cussing. Here’s my reasoning- if God knows what’s going on in your head/heart then why intentionally cover that up with some religious garbage? Here’s a side example- I only use strong adult language around those I trust to understand me and are ‘ok’ being around strong adult language. So I should be much more open around any entity who knows me better than I do. If my instant reaction to an incident is “Fuck, God. Why?” then should I try to communicate some elaborate prayer filled with Christianese and King James? Answer: no. I guess it’s my own version of WWJD. God is so much more than a language cop. He created humans and language so I’m pretty sure he figure out the intentions of any communication spoken or otherwise. So I figure, just be open- it’s good for the human.

Recently, a female blogger wondered if guys ever just randomly get emotional and tear up. I just thought I’d share this little story- I was reading the public school newsletter the other day and was looking at an article about how the Wyoming governor gave one of the new Wyoming quarters to every student. And I just went ahead a teared up a little. I’ve always said this peculiar behavior was a sign that I was past due for a good sob.
Random thought: Sheryl Crow called for people to use, on average, one square of TP per bathroom visit so as to conserve paper. My average is around 6 to 8 and even more in public restrooms.

Somewhere in here, if you look where I wasn’t typing, is why I don’t blog anymore.