Personal

Design.  Every day I surf the web reading articles and trying new services. As I proceed on my journey I see sites that have amazing design.  Sites ranging from crazy, cluttered and creative to bare bones simple.  Every time that I cross paths with great design it creates a burning desire.  I want so badly to have the knowledge to mold my site how I see fit.

I love the theme I have.  It does a great job and my eyes don’t bleed when I look at it, but it isn’t mine.  I didn’t create it and it doesn’t satisfy my wants.  The problem is that I lack the knowledge and creativity to build my own.

My personality drives me to learn new things and tackle new problems.  Some day I hope to learn enough to create something that will satisfy my wants.  As of right now I just have too much on my plate* and must settle with a simple blog post.

* If you don’t believe me, you can ask those who are: waiting for my photos, wanting to hang out, suggesting I work more, etc.

Most of us have heard the phrase “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” We sometime fail to realize that there are other things we can make with these lemons. We can make lemon pie, lemon flavored italian ice, lemon smoothies, lemon cookies, etc. The point is that even when you get hit with tons of problems they can be turned into many different good things.

There is a limit to the conversion. There are only so many problems, or lemons, that one person can handle. After a certain point it just gets ridiculous. You can keep making delicious treats but lets face it, nobody would like an entire lemon flavored meal. I don’t want to sit down and eat some lemon cookies with my lemon pie and have lemonade while I prepare my lemon basted turkey.

So remember, when life gives you lemons create delicious food but fix the problem before you create a meal.

Come this December, I will have been a Mac user for 6 years. I got my first mac (a sexy little iBook) for Christmas. My uncle was working at Apple in Cupertino which provoked me to look into Apple computers.

After my first visit to apple.com I got intrigued by the veil of mystery that surrounded the Mac. At the time I didn’t know anyone that owned one. This presented me with the opportunity to be the first to learn about the technology. I could safely fiddle to my hearts content without anyone telling me a better way to do things. It gave me a chance to take the longest way possible to arrive at the simplest solution and learn new things along the way.

I had plenty of friends that knew about Windows. I even had some that knew about Linux. Due to this fact, I would always be second best. I wouldn’t have the chance to learn as much. If they asked what I was working on it would eventually lead to just giving me the answer. As long as there were others that used these operating systems, I would always be second best in my mind.

With the Mac I had free rein to explore until I saw fit. I could come up with my own weird ways to do things without anyone telling me to do it differently. I developed my own opinions on software and created new habits.

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I love being a geek. It keeps me entertained for hours as I fiddle with endless gadgets, software, and websites. My geeky nature also gives me the urge to fix things that are broken, even if I don’t know anything about it. I will fiddle for hours trying to learn about and fix new things. Although my geekiness is great most of the time, there is a downside. This is what I call the curse of the geek.

The constant fiddling is great most of the time.  That is until I have a lackluster yet important task to accomplish. I have no problem accomplishing the task and am perfectly capable, but my fiddling nature can quickly derail me. The other day I had to start writing a paper for one of my classes. It wasn’t a large and unbearable task, just less interesting than some other things. I had allocated more than enough time to accomplish the task and write an amazing paper. I had a full day of writing and then a couple of spare hours to revise. All was on track, until the curse.

I was knee deep in the research aspect of my assignment when I took a break for some food. I decided to take this extra time to check on my blog and maybe polish up some posts. Then it happened, my site was having problems. I logged into my blogs admin panel and tried to load up the main dashboard. It would start loading, then stop a quarter of the way. Worse than that, it would take down the rest of the site.  I would get error after error that the server wasn’t available.  If I waited a few minutes, I could regain access to other parts that weren’t the main dashboard (like plug-ins, posts, or comments.) If I went back to the dashboard, it all went down again.

As you can imagine, I just had to try and get this working again.  I couldn’t leave my precious blog struggling to stay alive.  The thing is, I am pretty new to hosting my own blog.  Up until a month ago I have used wordpress.com or Blogger.  So when things went bad, I wasn’t exactly sure how to fix it.  After messing around for awhile to make sure it was a consistent problem I contacted support.  Things got more difficult because they couldn’t recreate the problem.  It seemed really odd that it only happened when I went to one specific page.  After 12 hours, they had given up and told me that I needed to upgrade to a Virtual Private Server because I was using too much of my servers resources.  That is ridiculous considering I get 16 or 17 visitors on a good day.

Eventually I ended up reinstalling wordpress and restoring my database from an old backup.  The site worked fine for about 10 minutes and then the problems happened again.  Cutting to the end, I finally isolated the problem to my theme.  After disabling a feature of the theme, everything is working fine for the most part.

The point of this long drawn out story is that my fiddling can get the worst of me.  I did end up writing my paper, but that was after 8 hours were wasted trying to revive my blog.  The paper turned out to be great, but I had to make sacrifices.  I didn’t get as much sleep and I had to postpone other projects.  Overall it just wasn’t a good thing.  This is what I call the curse of the geek.  It is the ability to get distracted and derailed from more important tasks by something that requires fiddling and has to deal with technology.

For Good People Day 2008, I wanted to recognize my girlfriend.  She is probably one of the funniest and smartest people I know.  She is genuinely nice to every person she meets.  Right off the bat she notices all the good things that they offer.  She gives everything her 100% and has a great attitude in general.  She enjoys everything she does and never has a boring moment.  I honestly couldn’t think of anyone else that deserves more praise than her.  If you want to read some of her content, I suggest checking out her blog.

Who do you think deserves to be recognized today? Leave a comment or even start your own blog.  There has never been a better time.

Thanks Annette.  You inspire me.

One of my favorite things at this moment is a delicious cup of tea. It is great to be able to relax with a fresh cup of tea.

Personally, I get my teas from adagio.com. Some of my favorites right now are: earl grey green, white blueberry and pear, love child, executus, and gunpowder. Adagio also has a new section of their site where you can create your own blends and try those of others.

Now go out and start steeping a delicious cup of tea. Oh and enjoy all those health benefits.

In our increasingly busy lives, there is less time to do everything that enters our life. This forces us to make choices. One of these choices deal with entertainment.

I am having an internal struggle over the decision to choose a form of entertainment. Currently I’m a total TV junkie. I love TV shows and have 23 season passes set up in my TiVo. I have intense loyalty to my TV shows, I mean I am still watching Lost after the numerous let downs and frustrations.

At the same time, I love to read books. Books are one of the greatest sources of entertainment. It is great to be able to picture the story in my own way and be immersed in the world. The problem is my stack of books that need to be read is large and growing.

I have a limited amount of time to devote to entertainment, and currently TV is the winner. TV isn’t as rewarding as a book, but is much easier to absorb. You can have TV on while doing something else and still enjoy your show. TV is the low hanging fruit that is easy to grasp but contains the occasional worm.

TV can be extremely entertaining, but can leave you with endless unanswered questions (LOST). This helps the networks boost future ratings, but is very frustrating. You can also get involved with a show that ends up being cancelled due to low ratings. Now you are stuck with a story that was never finished properly. Also, TV shows are developed to run on for a long time, this can lead so a series finale that is unsatisfying. It can feel unfinished, like it should go on.

Books on the other hand are high up in the tree. They are difficult to obtain, but twice as large and extremely juicy. Books entertain you for a longer period of time and feel more rewarding. After a book, you feel a great sense of accomplishment.

Although books are more rewarding, they require a lot more energy and devotion. When reading a book, you need to devote all your attention to the book. Unlike TV, you cannot read a book and do homework at the same time. Also, it is hard to determine whether a books is going to be good off the bat. Sometimes you will be one third of the way through before it really turns good.

With so much of my time already invested in TV, I am having a hard time giving more of it to books. I need to find a way to get off of TV and onto books and feel good about it.

TV is the low hanging fruit that has the occasional worms. Books are the hard to reach, yet plump and rewarding fruit at the top. This is my battle through the tree to get the good stuff on top.