mike says things sometimes

1:33 PM

i like meatloaf

 

Chris 1:34 PM

I like meatloaf

 

Mike1:35 PM

i don’t like it with gravy though

1:35 PM

i never have liked gravy

 

Chris 1:35 PM

I like gravy

 

Mike1:35 PM

its icky

 

Chris 1:37 PM

you’re icky

 

Mike1:38 PM

oh yeah?

1:38 PM

well

1:38 PM

WITTY RETORT

 

Chris 1:40 PM

comment about your mom

 

Mike1:40 PM

BARBED REPOSTE

 

Chris 1:40 PM

questioning your sexuality

 

Mike1:41 PM

query regarding familial sexual relations in your lineage

 

Chris 1:43 PM

discussion on you listening to dashboard confesional.

 

Mike1:43 PM

confrontation regarding your britney spears listening

 

Chris 1:51 PM

damn it!

 

Mike1:51 PM

i win

Is it normal to hate life for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week? I am finding that it feels rather pointless that I even show up at my job as no one listens to what I recommend, no one cares about what we do, and everyone just complains over things we have no control over.

Seriously, what’s the point?

Is it normal when you approach 30 that you realize just how utterly ridiculous and pointless your employment is. How much no one would notice if your job or company just *poof* disappeared. It wouldn’t really effect anything at all.

Is it too much to want your job to mean something, to have some sort of impact on the world around other than promoting straight greed?

Am I asking to much?

W00t, a quick post. Last night I officially past the 10 pound mark that I’m down. Yay me!

Well, as some may know I’ve started to try and reduce my weight a bit. As a nerd, its pretty easy to understand that weight loss is just math. What I’ve found so far is that even small changes in the amount of diet and exercise you do can have results.

I’ve reduced (but not eliminated) the amount of red meat I eat, and reduced soda intake from several a day down to just a couple a week. I also use some of the diet tv dinner type things (healthy choice meals et al) as I know that I have an issue with portion control. After I meal, I’ll wait 10 or 15 minutes and if i still feel hungry maybe have some fruit or a veggie snack pack to curve any remaining hunger pangs.

Combining these dietary changes with maybe 60-90 minutes of exercise on my wii fit per week has already had me lose 8 pound in the last 25 days. Its not crazy weight loss, but what the graphs and math shows is steady sustainable weight loss, and thats whats important. None of the changes I’ve done are so drastic that I can’t live with them long term.

Also, I like it when my little wii balance board is happy with me :p

So that’s where it’s at right now, and I’ll post updates as I go I guess sometimes, if I remember. Cause I’m lazy like that.

Why yes, I am playing with it, and no its not done yet.

-written while i was flying to florida last month, never posted it cause i’m a lazy bastard-

Upon listening to net@night recently, Amber McArthur made a statement that struck a chord with me. To paraphrase the conversation, essentially someone showed her the “Macbook Wheel” Onion video, and she told her friend “oh yeah, that’s old”, then stopped and realized that it was really only about a week old. But the constant stream of data we are now immersed in made it old after the first 5 tweets about it, let alone before it even hit any blogs, then the “old” new media of Digg or Reddit.

And now I’m sitting on airplane, completely unplugged for the world, and it makes me antsy. I want to know whats happening, what tweets did I miss, did I miss a meme because I was offline? When I hear about what happened, will it already be “old” news?

As I come crashing towards 30 this year, I find myself thinking about the age of things more and more. I’ve a few more gray hairs in my beard, a few more pounds on my waist, and a bit more crotchety “get off my lawn” impatience with things, specifically those damn kids today and their crazy musics. And I keep thinking “is 30 really that old?” I mean, man when I was 16, 30 was freakin’ ancient. Like, old people were 30. But now, all of a sudden and quite by accident I assure you, I’M gonna be 30. What the hell happened? Where did those years go? How did my daughter suddenly turn 9 on me? SOMEONE SLOW THIS DAMN TRAIN DOWN.

But I don’t think it’s just me. I see A LOT of nostalgia these days. Remakes of movies barely 20 years old, our childhood cartoons come to life on the big screen, with a big budget and an adult storyline. Are we getting older faster, since there is so much going on, all the time, that we feel we must be clued in on? Is it because of the unending stream of NEW information in the RSS feeds and twitter and Digg, that we long more than ever for the comforting embrace of the old and familiar? Is it because now nothing stays around long enough to even BE familiar, because by the time the masses know of it, it is already old news and we’re onto something else?

Maybe that’s why I dress up as a stormtrooper on the weekends, and keep trying to find torrents and DVD’s of old cartoons. Maybe we’ve paced ourselves to death, where if we’re not into the newest of the new, we’re already old and useless. And who wants to be old and useless? We all want to be young, right?
However, the problem with all this looking back, is we do in some respects stop looking ahead. We crave the new in our data stream, but the old just keeps coming back in our entertainment. How many new movies are ACTUALLY new movies? They are either sequels, or remakes. TV Shows are beginning to follow a similar trend, with both positive and negative results. It is possible to take we loved and reimagine it in new and creative ways, to tell a story a different way (re: Battlestar Galactica). But this tends to be the exception, and not the norm.

What all this makes me wonder though, is will our kids go through the same thing when they are 30, or will they even have much to remake at all, since so much of today is remakes of OUR past. Will they be making the new new Battlestar Galactica? Or will someone finally remake Jem?

Or maybe these damn kids just need to get off my lawn.

@Veronica spread the meme.

Here are the rules:

“It works like this: if you use Flickr, go to the sixth page of your photostream and pick the sixth picture there, then post it to your blog.”

This is a picture I took while I was in San Francisco this last January, as we were setting up our new office.  This is the site of our new tower we’re building which will be a condo tower.

I find it odd that this election has stirred the feelings it had.  Over the course of the last 3 years, I’ve done alot of soul searching about how I am, and what kind of person I am, and this 2 year election cycle has seen me bouncing between candidates as I found that path.

It’s sort of an story, and I don’t know that anyone will care that much, but I feel like putting it down right now.

I joined the Air Force under Bill Clinton, and things were pretty good. Sure he made stupid mistakes, and did some things that weren’t the greatest to the military, but I never really felt the repercussions of that as I was just coming into my own as an adult at the tail end of his presidency.  What I saw when I joined the Air Force was a Military that had its issues but overall treated its people well, gave us regular pay raises, and didn’t work us to death.

During the 2000 election, I frankly didn’t even care that much.  I was still a kid really, only just barely 20 years old.  All I really knew at that point was Bush was son of Bush, and Gore “invented the internet”, and his wife was Tipper who I hated from the old PMRC stuff, so I couldn’t be bothered to vote for Douchebag or Turd Sandwich.

In my time in the USAF, up till shortly before the ’04 election, I became more liberal as I watched my pay not keep up with inflation, our military hospitals close, our housing become more difficult to get and our hours get ALOT longer post 9/11.  I got lucky getting transferred to a training base in ’03 right before the war kicked off, and I got my butt out of the military in ’04 under “Force Restructuring”.  Basically, this was the government saying “We can’t afford all the people we have, so who wants to quit? Oh BTW, whoever is left gets to work longer hours kthx.”

I remember going back and forth with my dad during that 04 election cycle, and I ended up voting Kerry, basically to vote AGAINST Bush.  I really didn’t like Kerry much better, but he wasn’t Bush, so that got him points.

After that, I started on a sort of spiritual journey, and found myself becoming more conservative during this time.  I gave a listen to Jerry Doyle, Michael Savage and Glenn Beck.  I found myself leaning to Giuliani and McCain during the campaigning, as I struggled to find my own path in the world.

And then I discovered Skepticism, and found who I was.  Rational thought, intelligent conversation, and a world view not based on superstitions.   And I listened. And I learned.  And I regained my appreciation for Science, and the wonders the real universe has.  Who needs Gods and Superstitions when reality is so cool without them?

At this point, I had registered Republican, as I appreciated the concepts of fiscal conservatism, but the social implications of being a Republican begin to weigh on me.  I stayed with McCain, supporting alot of his ideas, as I couldn’t deal with Hillary in the White House.  When Sen. Obama gained the nomination, I looked at what he was saying, and it became an even more difficult choice.

Both men are fine men, honorable and respectful.  But McCain’s next move became a disastrous one, and I feel it was his downfall.  Governor Sarah Palin.  Her radical anti-science stance, her end-times doomsday religion, and her open prejudice against gays and lesbians sealed my vote for Obama.

At first, it became a vote AGAINST her.  I could not in good conscience vote for someone who supported her, and this still saddens me about McCain.  But then I started to really listen to Obama, and I don’t believe I’ve ever been more proud and hopeful for this country.

Listening to his speech, I was moved nearly to tears, proud for the direction we are now headed in, and proof that our democracy DOES work, believe it or not.

I don’t know if this really had a point, but I just had to say that I’m extremely happy for this new path we’re on, one of rationalism, diplomacy, democracy, and hope.  Good show America.

Regardless of who you vote for, get out and vote. It’s the only voice we have left.