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| Saturday, December 27, 2008 |
| Mandatory New Years' Resolution Post |
Will Take Work on a Daily Basis
- Finish organizing my photo collection (~17,000 photos). Get at least 1/4 of the way through tagging, rating, and eliminating duplicates.
- Get a real start on organizing my old design/writing work files.
- Create a good organizational system for ITP work files.
- Rate 40 days worth of music.
- Average one blog post every 3 days.
- Stay on-budget every month.
- Make some babies~!
- Use my 'power tower' (ugh hate the name) Christmas gift. I have yet to determine actual numbered goals. Get more sexy! This involves about 45 minutes of workout per day in 10, 10, and 25 minute sections.
- Eat well (almost no corn syrum, limited sweets, good snacks like carrots and nuts, more but smaller meals, drinking 2.5 litres of water a day).
- Take 4,000 photographs, including 400 5-star photos. Post the best to Facebook/Flickr.
- Consistently shoot 80% on freethrows.
Will Take Work on a Weekly Basis
- Create a home inventory for insurance purposes, including all photos, reciepts and serial numbers.
- Finish Ignition. This means professionally mastered and with a new website to promote it.
- Start re-learning piano and/or theory (haven't set up specific goals for this yet).
- Go on at least 25 hikes or other outdoor excursions.
- Consistently (at least 2x a month) do little things for my wife that would make her want to date me if we weren't married.
- Stay connected to friends via Facebook. Use it to get together with friends while we're still young and sexy.
- Get a good, highly-productive routine going at work that encourages me to take carpal-tunnel saving breaks and keeps me alert through the day (this relates to the eating and exercising).
Will Take Work on a Monthly Basis
- Begin to learn PHP in depth, preferably through classes that work pays for...
- Set up a long series of doctor's appointments to check for just about everything one can be checked for, to deal with any problems I might have before they're problems. That is - abuse the fact that I have a job with semi-decent medical care.
- Work on some way of respectfully resolving some core differences of belief between me and the in-laws.
- Get out of town 8 times (including at least 5 to family).
- Read a book a month.
- Reaquaint myself with all the outdoors knowledge I had as a Boy Scout.
- Learn to properly tune up my car.
One-Time Events:
Winter:
- Pay taxes by Valentine's Day.
- Visit my co-workers in San Francisco (I work from home 700 miles away and have yet to meet them).
- Use our new toboggan.
Spring:
- For the Prius: Replace scratched rear turn signal assembly.
- Redo my homepage/portfolio again in such a way that it all actually works.
- Create "A Ninja Wedding"
- Create the Impulse Nine TF2 frag video
Summer:
- Get to a water park.
- Write a short (20-page) religous-political treatise.
VW Work:
- January: Scrape off all the tar board from the floors and put down rust-preventing primer. Install aluminum side panels.
- February: Install floor drains. Put down floor lining. Install side brush bars. Install larger brake fluid reservoir.
- March: Create map pocket and cup holder in side panels. Install fire extinguisher holder.
- April: Install Dynamat (weather permitting).
- May: Buffer time.
- June: Begin working with simple fiberglassing by making rear trunk covers.
- July: Replace all the wiring with Jordan, adding circuits for all the new stuff to be installed later. Add gravel guards. Replace turn signal. Install air horn.
- August: Powdercoat rims, bumpers, brush bars, gravel guards, and door panels.
- September: Buffer time.
- October: Replace rims and tires. Raise rear suspension.
- November: Install new headlight system.
- December: Replace door and window rubber.
Labels: basketball, doctor, exercise, food, hiking, holidays, Internet, Leelu, money, mp3, music, organization, photography, Rachel, resolutions, team fortress 2, To-Do, work, Yoshimi |
posted by Steve @ 9:38 PM  |
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| Thursday, November 20, 2008 |
| A New NeurosIs |
PTCD -- Postal Tracking Compulsion Disorder.
The act of obsessively refreshing the tracking page when you've bought something (usually something expensive) online.
ex: "I've spent the last half hour refreshing the UPS tracking page for my wife's Christmas present. It's supposed to get here tomorrow, but I can't stop refreshing. What the hell are they waiting for in Fresno???"Labels: Christmas, holidays, Internet, obsession |
| posted by Steve @ 10:35 AM |
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| Friday, October 31, 2008 |
| The In Box |
There's something truly gratifying about clearing out one's email in-box. The one I have at work hasn't been emptied since I got the thing (it bottomed out, once, at 30 emails; it usually hovers around 70-80), but my own personal in-box doesn't see as much action anymore.
So I spent a few hours sorting and deleting about 1,100 emails today. Wow. Now, of course, I have a list of things to do that a bunch of those were supposed to remind me of (checking the electric bill, sending stuff to people, checking in on old friends, and so on), but at least the in-box is clear.
Well, the electronic one. My physical in-box has all sorts of things in it, but thankfully not 1,100 things in it. Tougher to ignore when it is right there on my new awesome desk.
For now.Labels: computers, Internet, obsession, organization |
| posted by Steve @ 12:29 AM |
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| Wednesday, April 30, 2008 |
| A Relationship Complicated by Heartbreak |
The Phoenix Suns have become one of the best first-round exit playoff teams in NBA history, and notched yet another 'great' series (along with many others that were usually lost), and afterwards my wife and I sat down and had a talk about the Suns. In particular, she pointed out that during the playoffs she would constantly ask her co-workers how the Suns were doing on a game day - not because she especially cared about the Suns (she likes 'em fine but not the way we do), but because she knew that when the Suns lost big games, she had to go home after work and do some psychological damage control on her pissed/frustrated husband.
Put it this way: I have drunk alcohol to comfort myself exactly twice: once because I was wrongly fired from a good teaching job out of malice, and once just after Game 1 of this playoff series, which was a thriller, but ultimately was a loss.
This is no way to treat your wife, or yourself, and it needed to change.
I've determined that in order to be a Suns fan, you have to have a bit of emotional distance from this. This is true of anything that one can be emotionally invested in, but can't do much if anything to actually control: politics, pro sports (i.e., not ones that you're actually playing in), the accomplishments of others, etc.
Games can be exciting, but I have to learn to let it just wash away, after every disappointment. I'm 27 and I've been following this franchise since I was seven or so (1987) - and at this pace I'll have ulcers by the time I'm 30.
The truly maddening thing about the Phoenix Suns are always an A-minus team. They're consistently an exciting, playoff-bound team with realistic hopes for a title. In fact, the Suns have the 4th-best all-time winning percentage of all active teams:
- Los Angeles Lakers (.618)
- San Antonio Spurs (.595)
- Boston Celtics (.587)
- Phoenix Suns (.556)
Of course, there are 34 championships between those four teams in 62 years - a little over half - and none of them belong to the Suns. I suspect that the Spurs very recently overtook the Celtics because the Celtics just plain sucked for about the last 10 years until Kevin Garnett's arrival this year. The Suns hold the record for most playoff appearances without a championship (26 of 40 seasons). In fact, they're in the sixth place (of 30+ teams) for how often they're in the playoffs, and the newest team on the list:
- Lakers 54/60 (90%)
- Sixers 44/59 (75%)
- Celtics 45/62 (72%)
- Spurs 28/41 (68%)
- Pistons 40/60 (66%)
- Suns 26/40 (65%)
The lack of an NBA salary cap for a long time is a big reason that the teams from L.A., Philadelphia, Boston, and Detroit have such high percentages. San Antonio and Phoenix were born within a year of each other and went through similar growing pains to post very similar winning records, except of course that San Antonio is a bunch of assholes. (I'm bitter, but I'm not alone.)
Although my wife doesn't agree, I argue that the "A-minus" syndrome is actually much worse than being a Chicago Cubs or Arizona Cardinals fan. With those teams, any foray into the playoffs (if they make it into the playoffs at all) is a huge and great thing. Hope rises for a championship, certainly, but to an extent you can be happy just knowing they got as far as they did. Suns fans can't take much satisfaction in being a playoff team because they're always a playoff team. They've missed the playoffs twice in the last twenty years. Even the years they they were out, they weren't terrible (36-46 and 29-53, the former record being good enough for this year's Eastern playoffs). For fans of perenially mediocre teams, there's also the added bonus of having a community of loser-lovers that has grown up around the team. With the Suns, every year has high expectations. It's emotionally untenable.
That's not to say the Suns haven't done me some good, in the NBA, in the Phoenix community, for basketball in general, and even for me personally.
- I have learned to evaluate my own likes and dislikes through this team. In the mid-nineties, I had a huge falling-out with someone who was a Bulls fan. He liked Chicago because he was from Chicago. I decided that was a stupid reason to like a team: what if everyone on that team was a jerk? I thought about this for years; pondered the nature of how where you were born can influence your behavior and how stupid that is. I decided I like the Suns because they're a class act. Not only the current team, but historically the Suns have valued good people, who care about their communities, and even the rebels - Barkley, Shaq - were only bad boys because of their passion and the game. Barkley was acutely aware of it: "I am not a role model." You'll never find a Dumas or a Bowen on the Suns for long, if at all.
- The Suns inspired me to play basketball once during high school, and now again in my adult life. Steve Nash in particular has inspired my current run, knowing that he has roughly the same body type as I do, but has worked on his body and his skills with maniacal intensity. His work ethic inspires me, in practicing my free throws, and also in my music and work.
- I suspect Suns' Charities is one of the reasons the NBA Cares came about in 2005. I don't know if the Suns organization was the first NBA franchise to make charity an integral part of its existence, but I do know it was a good model for the rest of the league to follow when it wanted to clean up its image. Kevin Johnson and A.C. Green, in particular, come to mind as extraordinarily community-minded people. Both are still doing community work and I heard Johnson is even running for mayor in his hometown.
- The Suns have been a point-guard franchise for about twenty years, now. We've had roughly half of the truly great point guards in the last twenty years on our team at some point or another: Kevin Johnson, Jason Kidd, Stephon Marbury (in his prime), Steve Nash, Joe Johnson, Dennis Johnson, and Sam Cassell have all been Suns. I'm a big believer that the game of basketball is best when it is about movement and flow. I believe in my core that things like hack-a-Shaq, intentional fouls, dominant centers, and 70-point games are antithetical to what Naismith wanted: an athletic, skill-based game.
- As a web guru, I appreciate the absolutely ludicrous amount of work that the Suns put into their media. They post thousands of hours of video on their site, have players and staff blog occasionally, and even created a MySpace-like fan community site called Planet Orange. That willingness to explore technology - and spend money on it - in the name of the fan community is impressive.
Ultimately, I'm glad to be a Suns fan. It's a relationship complicated by heartbreak and disappointment but made healthy by the sense that the organization keeps its head up. It continues to have faith in a pure vision of what basketball is and should be; it has faith in its community and despite the escalating cost of games and inaccessibility of the players, makes real efforts to connect to its community.
They have strength of conviction in their work and in what is right; in small ways, through that, so do I.Labels: basketball, community, heroes, Internet, life, sports, Suns, zen |
| posted by Steve @ 4:09 PM |
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| Sunday, April 13, 2008 |
| Far-Right: (Still) Obsessed with the homos |
I looked about six months (maybe a year) ago at Conservapedia, the right-wing answer to Wikipedia, that "is free of corruption by liberal untruths," such as science or reason.
It's still going strong, though of course they've expanded slightly - they have 22 thousand pages now. I'm sure at least one or two isn't about God, liberals, or gays. Which sounds great until you realize that Wikipedia has roughly 10,000,000 (at a glancing guess; count if you like), and in about a hundred languages. The conservapedians also love trashing Wikipedia itself, claiming that the entry for "conservatism" is "over 4500 words of confusion without any mention of marriage, gun rights or personal accountability." I guess Wikipedia's authors lost the mouth-breathers when they started quoting Hobbes.
Ironically, Wikipedia has a fantastic entry about Conservapedia that tells the whole story about how it was created, why, and other things that are laughably terrible.
Anyway, the reason I check in every so often is because they have a wonderful "top 10 articles" thing that comes with Wiki, the code engine that runs the site. Once upon a time, it was the subject of an auto-clicker bot, but the numbers have shifted... towards different homo articles. And Hitler. In that article, Jews are mentioned twice, and homosexuals don't even merit a mention. Instead, there's a long section about how the Nazis liked to espouse evolution.
Wow.Labels: Conservatives, idiots, Internet, Nazis, school |
| posted by Steve @ 11:27 PM |
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| Saturday, April 05, 2008 |
| Do I really want TV? |
As I blogged waaaay back in October '05, I have a European TV set that doesn't pick up TV signals and instead of a coaxial input, it has a SCART input. This total lack of functionality is good for me because I don't watch TV, but can still watch movies, 'cos it has RCA inputs).
In 2008, though, the U.S. is changing its broadcast TV to be digital. This means that analogue television sets will need converter boxes - and many of those boxes sport RCA outputs. Suddenly, the market is being flooded with cheap converter kits made just for me.
At the moment, my lack of broadcast TV is a blessing. It probably saves me a lot of time. I like just using it for watching the DVDs I have, which often are TV shows anyway I also have it attached to my computer for watching YouTube videos or, more recently, Obama's speeches and debates. Yes, partly I watch them on the TV because I'm a fan, but also because they're often 45 minutes or longer, and I'd rather sit on the couch for that.
Still, it would be nice to catch the occasional Suns game, now that the playoffs are coming up. And there are some good TV shows out there...
God help me.Labels: Internet, Obama, procrastination, technology, TV |
| posted by Steve @ 12:20 AM |
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| Monday, February 18, 2008 |
| The Advocate Government |
There are a lot of little government programs designed to help people out. The Federal Trade Commission has a department and a response center designed to educate the public about identity theft, and a must-do list for people on debt management programs. The Department of Health and Human Services has a site that outlines tips to prevent medical errors.
Ultimately, the government manages a trust of money - taxes - to help support the people live lives that will yield success through work. And in many ways, it does that. But it seems that most of these programs languish in obscurity. I hope that the government continues its modernization, and that the public will be able to actually use the programs.
The idea of searching that sort of thing, presidential YouTubes/podcasting and other similar innovations may not be so far-fetched, if we have a president who's willing to actually talk to us plebians.Labels: government, Internet, power, technology |
| posted by Steve @ 3:59 PM |
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| Wednesday, February 13, 2008 |
| Irritating Media Hiccups: Where's the Beef? |
"At the end of the day, you want someone who knows what they're doing on day one"
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend on MSNBC with Brian Williams, 12 Feb 08 (video).
"What he doesn't have is the old, you know the old Mondale: "what the beef?" What are the details, and what is it going to cost? Which I assume one day we'll learn." Bob Dole on MSNBC with Brian Williams, 12 Feb 08 (video).
This is beginning to irritate me. When Barack Obama was initially criticized for having too much content, a tone too professorial. People have noticed his soaring rhetoric in the last six months not because nobody cared before, but because he didn't use it as much before. When he made the shift, the New York Times devoted an entire article about the shift to more pointed rhetoric.
I don't know why this is the case. Obama has posted an absurd amount of information on his campaign website. Take environmental and energy reform. Senator Obama's page has twenty pages in PDF format detailing environmental and energy reform, and several very specific plans to cap carbon emissions, solutions for green energy, and so on. Senator Clinton has a little less, and it's not as well-presented, but the plans are equally robust.
Thankfully, this is beginning to get some attention. Just a few days ago, Matt Yglesias (who's working for the Atlantic just like my favorite blogger Andrew Sullivan) posted a great rundown of why it's ridiculous, and Carpetbagger followed up, although I think he Googled the wrong thing: he should've been looking for all the Hillary proponents who parrot the meme.
On the other hand, John McCain's website has a video of his stances on the environment (great Republicans were environmentalists, his belief in global warming, his concern with China and India, and oil independence). These are sensible stances, and ones he shares with Obama. Compared to the Democratic side, it's paltry. Even on issues that McCain ought to have a world of information (such as national security), there are no numbers. His positions are clear, but the means to accomplish them are not. That's not to say McCain doesn't know or understand his own positions, but how am I as a voter supposed to find out, if he doesn't put it on his own website?
So John McCain has some work to do, if he's going to try to convince the American people that Obama truly is trying "to encourage a country with only rhetoric rather than sound and proven ideas [and offering] not a promise of hope, [but] a platitude," well, he better get his own ideas out there.Labels: Internet, Obama, politics |
| posted by Steve @ 4:05 AM |
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| Sunday, February 03, 2008 |
| First! |
The curious phenomenon of people feeling gratified about making the first post in a popular comment thread (such as this example on Barack Obama's website) always weirded me out a little. Those people would have no trouble on my little blog, since I hadn't had any comments posted on it since early 2006. Since it's mostly a means of getting ideas down, and cataloging things that I think are awesome, I don't mind yelling into the black hole that is the blogosphere. I've been keeping a homepage for similar reasons since 1994.
I hadn't had any comments from people I didn't know until a few weeks ago, on the 24th. I had my first 2 comments posted by people I didn't know in person. It took me almost two weeks to even notice.
The first post was in response to my short riff on responsible feminism, which also applies to most activist ideas. A very nice person named Cate basically posted an agreement post, which I appreciate in bewilderment at the frightening idea that people might actually read what I write.
The other one, amusingly, was in response to my Will Rogers anti-consumerist quote. It said that the best way to save money was to get coupons and provided a link to a coupon website; this is possibly the best bit of spam I've ever seen.
The prospect of people actually reading my work prompted me to re-design the blog's look for the umpteenth time. I hate using templates (I'm a web designer, after all), and I take nice pictures sometimes, but I've had a terribly difficult time getting a good photo to work. So I am eating a lollipop, and notice it's very green... and there you go.Labels: blog, feminism, Internet, true, writing |
| posted by Steve @ 4:57 AM |
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| Saturday, February 02, 2008 |
| Hive Mind vs. Groupthink |
In general, I like Microsoft Vista. They made a lot of changes that obviously needed to happen, added a bit of chrome, and generally it works for me. Now, I realize this is because my computer kicks ass: two dual-core 3GHz 64-bit processors, 4GB RAM, two RAID arrays totaling 1TB, and a pair of 512MB video cards connected to a pair of flat monitors.
Yeah, I know.
The trouble with Vista, though, is often that it's new: compatibility and configuration are a bit harder. I had this problem when I couldn't figure out why my video card wouldn't display higher than 1024x768 (I prefer 1280x1024). Thankfully, there was this little article on softpedia, describing the symptoms exactly and how to get around it.
Apart from the incredible convenience of the article, it's remarkable how specific the article is. This is an example of how the Internet allows for group thinking that isn't hampered by "groupthink." The first time I saw this potential was way back in 2001 when the movie A.I. had the first really successful alternate reality game (later named by its participants The Beast). The game was impossibly difficult for any one person - it required people to work together. Unfortunately for the developers, their own puzzles (which required knowledge of dozens of languages, expertise in chemistry, physics, philosophy, programming, and other sciences) would be solved within minutes by the thousands of people who worked on the solutions. Inevitably, someone in the Cloudmakers (as the participants named themselves; the website is down but the link goes to the Wayback Machine cache from 2002) knew how to solve the problem.
I love this concept: the Internet allows communication between people. People are generally inherently capable. MIT created "Fab Labs" that were able to create most anything (3-d printer, circuitboard printers, etc.). 3 students at MIT are doing their theses on the work of six year old villagers in Africa, who had better basic designs than the engineers in the U.S. Harnessing the total knowledge of a huge group of people is something that, if it can be done efficiently (i.e., with a minimum of groupthink), would be as massive a step forward as the Industrial Revolution.
I'm pretty glad to be alive sometimes.
This dissemination of information isn't limited to merely solving technical problems or riddles. It has also been suggested by Scott Adams (who writes Dilbert) that if a massive e-mail pen pal initiative among all nations would make it vastly more difficult to go to war:
"You might support your government in a war against a country full of people you don’t know. But would you support a war that has a good chance of killing your e-mail friend Phlubanakawahaha and his entire family?" Also, if that family helped design your super-cool phone/lamp/radiator, you might think twice if you wanted to upgrade anytime soon.Labels: blog, cartoons, computers, government, idiots, information, Internet, life, people, politics, power, random, reason, technology, war |
| posted by Steve @ 5:46 AM |
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| Monday, June 12, 2006 |
| So much going on... |
So much going on...
Current mood:  busy OK just as a general hello to those who look, I have not, in fact, dropped off the face of the planet. My cable modem has finally perished. She was a ripe old age - indeed, much older than most electronics. I hold a moment of digital silence and blankspace for... My Moto (1999-2006). Uh, and as soon as I can afford one I'll be back online. I'm redefining busy. Seriously. Bees have nothing on me.  Currently reading :
The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1)
By Philip Pullman
Labels: electronics, Internet |
| posted by Steve @ 4:12 PM |
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| About Me |
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Name: Steve
Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States
About Me:
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