Why are you always more sore the second day after strenuous exercise?
A fairly large group of friends played Paintball yesterday in the Georgia woods. I’m a bit sore today, but I am rapidly becoming hooked on the game. I think it reminds me of playing a first person shooter video game, but with the added fun of hunting down and shooting my friends. I wouldn’t say I am particularly good at the game, but I think I would be a lot worse if not for Quake, Unreal and the like.
I haven’t had Internet access for the last three days due to a glitch with Earthlink. I’ve actually had material for your perusal, so it was kind of annoying. However, it was just as well, my brother has been visiting Atlanta from his normal Winter home in sunny Manhattan, and it was nice to spend time with him without the distraction for both of us of the Internet. This did not prevent us from dabbling in the distraction of my Xbox and the time sucking game known as Halo.
A picture of the new me is here. It’s largish, so dialup users beware. It’s cold and rainy here in Atlanta today, but we did not get the expected major ice storm last night. As I understand it, North Carolina was hit pretty heavily though.
I went to see Aimee Mann last night with my brother Chris who is in town visiting from New York. What a great show, she played everything that I really wanted to hear, and they sounded great. Her music has meant a real lot to me over the last couple of years, appealing to the distressed romantic in me through some very rough relationship waters. I doubt very much that I would have come through my situations as well without her music. Her band sounded tight and she has some really talented musicians playing with her. My brother is also friends with Aimee’s guitar player and producer, Michael Lockwood. After the show, we got to hang out a bit before they hit the road for tonight’s date in North Carolina. He’s a really nice guy, down to Earth, and also a Mac and technology savvy person. If you have a chance to see her, I assure you that you won’t be dissapointed one bit.
Oh, sorry to dissapoint everyone on the short hair picture front. I’ll try to take care of that tonight.
There are some things that I did yesterday that I cannot do today. I cannot grab my ponytail, or even put my hair up in a ponytail. I cannot swish my hair back and forth behind my head. I cannot put my hair down and act crazy because it is now always down. I find this liberating.
I did it, I cut my hair, after almost ten years of wearing my hair below my shoulders. It’s weird, I look at the guy in the mirror and I don’t recognize him. At least twice today so far, people haven’t recognized me. I’ll try to get a picture up to go with this post when I get home from the office.
Pretty uninteresting week so far. I had a good weekend. Not much else to add. I’m working on a few different things in my spare time, and trying to log a few extra hours at work this week to make up for the two days off. Not getting paid for the holidays is the one thing about being an independent consultant that I am still not quite used to. Having said that, the benefits of being independent have outweighed the negatives. I like leaving work at the office, not feeling compelled to work a ton of extra hours without additional pay, and the fact that the current office is less than a mile from my house is a big plus.
I am loving my hiptop more and more the longer I have it. Unfortunately, in the basement office I have been given where I am currently consulting, I can’t get it onto the network. Elsewhere, I have found it useful to be able to send email, especially reminders to myself, from wherever I happen to be. I’ve also found that the ability to AIM people from things like meetings is both useful and a pleasant distraction during boring lectures. I haven’t explored bloggin with it, and I’m not sure that I would write my best entries that way either. Finally, being able to check things on the Web from wherever I am is a useful tool that has already settled one argument very quickly.
Well, today is Friday. This week has just flown by on me. Notable music this week included the new Audioslave cd that I had been waiting for. As a longtime Soundgarden and Rage Against the Machine fan, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect from the cd, and I haven’t been dissapointed at all. The songs tend to be a mixed bag, with some sounding to me like they were written by Chris Cornell and others sounding as if they were Rage songs that he was just singing over. Only once in the whole time that I have been listening to the cd have I thought that a song sounded like Zach should have been rapping over it rather than Cornell singing over it. Some of the other artists that I have been listening to quite a bit these days are Neko Case, who’s dark brand of alt-country I can’t get enough of, and matt pond PA, who are playing here this weekend. The surprise of the week is how much I love the new Pearl Jam CD. I hadn’t completely written them off, but I have to admit that while I like their music, I’ve never been their biggest fan. The new CD is different somehow, and I have been listening to it quite a bit while working this week. It may also be that, in my emotional post-breakup emotional condition, that this type of music appeals to me more.
So, my hiptop just stopped working over the weekend. It wouldn’t connect to the network for either phone or data. It kept telling me its sim wasn’t ready. So I took the sim out and put it back in, and reset the device. Still no luck, I did the same thing again, no dice. I started to get frustrated, and finally, I went to the T-Mobile store where I bought it yesterday. They tried the same things I had already done because I clearly couldn’t know how to do such things properly. They then told me to call customer care because I would need to request a replacement device. So I called customer care, and they informed me that someone had made a mistake on their end that had knocked all of the hiptops off of the network. So, if your hiptop is not currently working, all you need to do is find someone else with a T-Mobile phone, put your sim card in their phone, wait for a text message, and then put the card back in your hiptop. I’m annoyed that T-Mobile doesn’t have better communication with their retail outlets about problems like this.
Well, so much for the rumored AMD/Apple thing. This Infoworld article is the only one that I have found so far that mentions the keynote from today.
I am finding that I often do not do a good job of composing email for the particular person that I am writing that email to. I was thinking about this subject this morning. Thinking that I spend a lot of time writing each email message, crafting the sentences, and then reading and re-reading the message to make sure that I have been clear in what I am attempting to say and that there is little chance of misinterpretation. I was then mentally complaining to myself that people do not read nearly as carefully as they should. It seems every day that someone misreads something I have written in an email, and I am forced to send additional email messages attempting to more clearly explain what I was trying to say. A couple of hours later I realized that I was composing each email as if I was writing it to myself, not to the particular person to whom the email was going. It’s my careless writing, not your careless reading. Sorry everyone.
- Ninjas are mammals.
- Ninjas fight ALL the time.
- The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.
Mac Observer is reporting that TechTV reported that Apple and AMD are going to make some sort of announcement today last night. They also point out that Darwin x86 does not currently run on AMD processors, and that this may be an announcement that Apple is going to start supporting them. Of course, if that is the announcement, it could also be Apple hedging their bets in public to send a message to Motorola.
The rumor I am hearing this morning from Comdex is that Apple and AMD are going to make some sort of announcement at this morning’s keynote address. I guess you could speculate somewhat as to the nature of the announcement, but with the obvious processor differential between the current line of PowerPC based Apple hardware and stadard Wintel PC’s, I can only think that this means Apple will be releasing machines based on AMD’s Hammer processor line. I’m surprised, based on how I heard about this, that I haven’t seen any coverage in the Mac OS community yet. Perhaps it is because Comdex is not normally an Apple event. Update: AMDZone has reported that there is a large Apple presence at the event. This is the first other report about this topic I have been able to find.
Yesterday, I went and played paintball with a large group of people. I really enjoyed it, and I think I will be playing on a semi-regular basis in the future. My team played well throughout the day, and I think I had about a dozen kills.
They were playing Christmas music at Starbucks this morning. For some reason, this depressed me. It’s only November 15th.
Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of the start of this site. You can go back and read the original postings up on my Radio space. My life has changed in a lot of ways in those five years, and throughout those changes I have been sporadically posting about them here. A thank you to my family and friends, to the weblog community, and to everyone who has read this site in the five years it has been up.
The Play of the Year. There is hope yet for sports in our country. For every crybaby superstar poser, there is a story like this somewhere else. It’s easy to forget that sometimes.
I fear to close my eyes now,
Entering that realm of bliss,
You stand there smiling,
And I see it all before me,
Forgetting for that moment,
That lasts for days,
Awaking,
You are still gone.
Well, I got my Danger Sidekick on Friday, and I have had a few days to evaluate the pluses and minuses of this device versus a Palm OS based Device or my PocketPC. Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of the stellar deal that Amazon was offering on the device, that is definitely the way to go currently if you are considering buying one. In short, I really like the device, with a few minor things that I would like to see changed in an update. First, I will not be able to get rid of my regular cellphone because the current plan that is available for the device is very sparse on minutes. Of course, it makes up for the lack of minutes with unlimited data. The device is very easy to use and to learn how to use. I still haven’t gotten the T-Mobile Web Interface for the device to work properly for me, which means I’ll have to write that up another time. While it is larger than a regular cellphone, it is still smaller than I thought it would be. Using it as a phone, I had no complaints about clarity or reception using it either as a regular handset or with the provided hands free attachment. I used AIM on the device extensively from various Atlanta locations this weekend, and I found the keyboard to be very usable for this purpose and for typing email. The Web browser works well enough with the limitations of the small screen, but it seemed to have a much harder time working with CSS loaded pagesthan regular table layouts. Overall, the data service experience of the device was very good. However, I live inside the city of Atlanta, and it seemed that the coverage for the data network was very spotty. Your mileage may very there depending on the city you live in. More later….
I went to a T-Mobile store near the office I am currently consulting out of and checked out the Hiptop that they are now offering. I have been thinking about getting a device like this for a while now, and the only real options are this device and the PocketPC Phone Edition, which is much more expensive. After playing with it for a little while, I wanted to purchase the device there and then. However, in accordance with my new policy about technology purchases, I then entered the one day waiting period that all purchases less than $500 require. (If it is more than $500, the waiting goes up to 5 days.) So I believe that, unless I change my mind, I will be purchasing said device after work this afternoon. My first impression of the device was that I wanted it to be a color one. I guess they are going to come out with a color version at some point, but who knows what the price will be, and what the implications for battery life will be.
Out yet again last night. I really have to stay in tonight because I am just exhausted. Some sushi as per the normal Thursday night routine, and then pool playing with friends of my family who were passing through town on a cross country journey. Today, I’m mostly musing about my current recovery status, and pecking away at work. It’s very hard to judge where I am at in terms of my healing process. I’m very impatient to get through the negative part of this, but I think I understand that it’s not a good thing to rush in order to heal myself properly. I think that I also am sort of struggling with what to share here and what not to share. It definitely helps me sort things out when I write about it here, but I also run the risk of alienating you folks reading and of having the wrong person read this stuff. Then again this is my site, and these are my feelings, which are valid.