[	Tags	|	bits, blah blah blah, blog, butterthug, chilltyme, codethug, comedy, complaining, daydreaming, disappearer, education, el politiko, epundit, excercise, happytime, ponderation, questions, reflectives	]
[	Current Location	|	Elizabeth	]
[	mood	|	bouncy	]
[	music	|	PodFunk	]

·      Hape://Bertha.de

o    BirthDay Funk

§      http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PodOfFunk/~5/209000705/funkpod_30.mp3

§      I have some BirthDay funk, but it’s not like a down feeling. Actually, it’s like a great excitement. Tomorrow, I will be 34 years old. Because my birthday is so close to the New Year, I generally spend the nine days in between thinking of “resolution candidates”. When the deadline rolls around, I usually settle for what I think of as “recent improvements” in my behavior, as I have never been the type to improve my own behavior intentionally.

§      So what’s news?

·      Lots of news, a lot of it is great, and much of it is not for consumption by the general public. Nothing extra special, just not very interesting. For example:

o    Every year, I come up with a new budget and a plan to be debt free by the end of the year. It is usually not very realistic. This year, I actually make enough income to make it a remote possibility.

o    I am fully geeked out. I have two different bar code scanners. One is a light pen, and the other is the light gun type.

o    I just got a degree, and I am going back to school. It is an online college. The future looks bright, but the web sessions that pass for classes are not so exciting. The courses are easy, but the assignments are like an Easter egg hunt. The professors don’t put the assignments with due dates in the syllabus. You have to go looking around for them.

§      What would you want to be asked if you were being interviewed?

·      That is not a rhetorical question. I am actually writing this for my blog and to send to myself on http://FutureMe.org. I like to talk to people, but I can’t stand superficial conversation. When I say this, I mean, I can’t stand conversations about celebrities, or complaints about “the system” or “society”. Needless to say, I often find myself wishing I had better questions to get people to expand on what they think about life the universe, and everything. Thinking more on it, I should probably develop some questions. What would the future me want to be asked about? While I can’t think of anything good, I can put down what comes to mind. Actually, these come from the book “All about me” by Phillip Keel.

o    If you had no commitments to others, what would you do?

§      I would maximize my education and work experience. I would make my dwelling where ever I found the highest paying job. I think the online education thing is good for the lifestyle I live. It is also good for the lifestyle I would live in such circumstances. I would always keep putting in resumes with different firms. When I get a new job, I would stay for a year. This would be long enough to satisfy the apartment lease. When the lease is up, I would start the job hunt again. I would continue to take classes in the field as opposed to classed for a new degree. I would do this because the industry is always changing, and the moves would be costly to perform, no matter how paltry the new dwelling. I would live meagerly. I would not take huge apartments even if I could afford them. I would also not take anything without a washer and dryer. I would invest all I could in traditional investments, and in my own business, which would have a forwarding post office box, if necessary. For my “own business”, I would do application programming, which I have a lot of great ideas for, as opposed to service programming, with which I have a lot of experience.

o    What is a dream you have had more than once?

§      This is a bad question for me to ask, because I don’t have a real answer.

·      I dream often of climbing on something big and moving, like in “Shadow of the Colossus”.

·      I dream a lot about chasing something very small that moves very quickly. The recurrence is the fact that I always move very slowly, if at all.

·      I dream of being lost in a big place, with a series of closed off areas. There always seems to be a choice of which area to go to next, and each area seems more inappropriate than the last. It is not always the same setting. Sometimes, it is like a Wal*Mart, other times, it is like a hospital, other times, it is like a cave. In every instance, there is never any going back, and there are always multiple choices, and there is always someone calling me by name from an unknown direction.

o    List 5 things you would like to accomplish within the next year. This is my own question.

§      Debt Freedom

·      Credit cards are a real pain in the ass, especially when it is so easy to keep using them and paying them off than it is to simply cut them and pay them off. My mother recently told me about prepaid cards, which are not the same as the secured cards. A prepaid card can actually accept money from direct deposit. They look and work just like other credit cards, except for the fact that they appear to have no connection to your credit, and they extend you no credit. They are simply a spending mechanism, nothing more. I thought of this idea years ago. It is good to see that the rest of the world has caught up.

§      A good schedule

·      Many people try to avoid the 9 to 5 lifestyle. I aspire to it. I would like nothing more than to set a schedule, and follow it for two weeks in a row. I would be ecstatic if I could do the same for two months. Time and money are separate commodities, but time, like money is a highly valuable commodity. If you don’t know where it is going, it is easy to waste a lot of it. If you can not account for it, you can count on the fact that you are wasting it.

§      One (1) or zero (0) packs of cigarettes every month.

·      Currently, I smoke One (1) pack of cigarettes every week. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is so hard to not smoke any that I have been considering hypnosis as a method of elimination. If any readers have tried it, please feel free to offer your opinion on the matter.

§      Successful completion of all classes I am taking.

·      This is less of a hope and more of an expectation, as long as I don’t get the rigorous travel schedule I had last year at this time.

§      An initial release of one of my applications.

·      I have a lot of good ideas; some of them might even be considered good ideas. All of my applications are 75% complete, as far as a release is concerned. I write these applications for myself, and that 75% represents what I need them to be to be functional to myself. That last 25% would represent my confidence in the fact that others would find them useful, if I were to move them to completion.

[	Tags	|	blah blah blah, blog, butterthug, chilltyme, comedy, communism, complaining, el politico, el politiko, epundit, friends, liberals	]
[	Current Location	|	Elizabeth	]
[	mood	|	accomplished	]

• 09.13.07 What's News?

• Pimp My Calculus

  • Tonight, Aaron and I went to Barnes & Noble. I studied a little in the Algebra book to bring myself up to speed for Calculus, he studied chemistry.

• So much of what has happened in the news recently is worthy of comment. I almost feel like i am crazy to not mention it. By the same token, I feel like it crazy to not be involved (or at least interested) in such important events.

• I wrote a letter to Tim Kaine on his website. I told him that I was in the process of organizing voters to un-elect the group of morons who passed the laws that put such heavy fines on drivers. I needed to know if it was him alone, or if there were others to be included. I got no response.

• I am thinking of doing a bumper sticker with Tim Kaine's face on it and the words #@%$ You! I have a chauffeur! If you Really don't like my new traffic fines, you can call me at ###-###-#### to tell me all about it. You can also vote me out of office on ##/##/####.

• Note to self: get the date and the phone number.

• Sometimes, I feel like all of my political efforts occur in a vacuum. I guess that's the nature of being a conservative. Liberals will gladly take time off from not working to advance an agenda that they feel will be to their benefit. Conservatives think of work, and the rewards of being responsible as being in their benefit. Liberals will gladly spend money on T shirts and Bumper stickers. Conservatives try to pay their bills and maybe keep a little out for something nice when the 3 paycheck month rolls around.

• I don't know much, but when it comes to Liberals, I have made a few observations.

  • Liberals complain about the government, but want to see its powers expanded.

  • Liberalism is both a religion, and a mental disorder.

  • A Liberal is one who feels that rights should be distributed freely, but a responsibility is something to be saddled upon the shoulders of another.

  • There are patriots and there are Liberals. The two are mutually exclusive.

  • A Liberal is a fan of mob rule. This is evident in the tendency to want to protest, or shout down opposition.

  • Liberals were pro choice on Slavery, also

  • An American Liberal can recognize no enemy other than an American Conservative.

  • A Liberal is one who would make logical connections that are not plausible, but ignore logical connections that are apparent.

  • To a Liberal, ECONOMICS is spelled TAXES

[	Tags	|	acerola, blog, codethug, comedy, daydreaming, el politiko, family	]
[	Current Location	|	Elizabeth	]
[	mood	|	contemplative	]
[	music	|	The couple upstairs smoking pot and coughing	]

1. In life, conditions are always changing. We can live our lives in small towns, and surround ourselves with close family and friends, but any time there is interaction between humans, variability is introduced. In our own minds, we go from needing variability in our youth, to needing more stability as we age. The part about the youth is evidenced by the fact that teens so often have an insatiable desire to go to the same place. Where exactly is 'out' located, anyway? Once I had ventured so far as to ask my stepdaughter where the mythical land of out was located. She looked me as if I had just sprung a new appendage from my forehead, and said, 'out there, and not in here'. Needless to say, I slept much better with the mystery solved. In a way, I like having teens around. Teens remind us that we need to get out and see the world around us every now and then. As a software developer, I am constantly trying to balance the structured and changing concepts. In real life, we can't stop to debug our errors. In a way, I think that part of the appeal with video games has to do with the ability to 'do-over' when a fatal mistake has been made. In real life, I think that the majority of the fatal mistakes we make don't happen in an instant, they take time to manifest. I am not discounting the power of the catastrophic disaster, there are plenty of these to be aware of. My point is that, because the catastrophic disasters are catastrophic, they are the ones we are more likely to pass along to each other. When I was in the service, we were once out on Bivouac. We found ourselves so bored that we resorted to playing an odd game. We got out a map, and took turns finding the location specified by a spotter. The spotter would give some set of letters from the location (usually the three closest to the middle), and the rest of us would try to find the spot. After some time, we noticed that the smallest names were not the hardest to find, it was the L A R G E names that would be sprawled across the map. In similar fashion, I think that the hardest dangers to spot are not going to be the most catastrophic, the catastrophes are advertised, as evidenced by the VA Tech shooter. The hardest dangers to avoid are the ones that mope along, because you can never outrun them.