How to stick to something?

I currently have 2 monkeys on my back that are bothering me more than the others. One is to lose some weight again. I did a good job earlier this year by loosing ~20 pounds, but most of it has been gained back. The other is to try to write, or play music, or something. I started to get serious about the idea of blogging more, in a less personal way near the beginning of the summer, but then I was invited to play in a band, which seemed to sorta fill that "artistic" hole. Then that fell apart about a month ago. I've debated if I should try to start something up since. I used to hate writing in English class, but when I was in high school I started to enjoy it more. I had some great instructors in high school and college, and many of them encouraged me to write more. Then a couple of years ago I ran into Steven King's book called "On Writing", and it caused me to think I should try to write. I am very interested in either being a journalist or novelist in the long run, but I feel like getting a blog going with a strong readership could be great training to get me ready for something more serious. I still feel like music is closer to "my" form of art, and I would love to have a reason to play regularly, but I really enjoy writing.

I told Katy yesterday when we were driving home that I am going to seriously try to work on these two issues, because I have always read that telling people around you that you are going to change causes you to be held responsible. So here it is, for anyone that does ever read this blog. I'm going to try. I'm going to try to get into better shape, and I'm going to try to start up a blog. I'll probably keep this one as a personal blog, but I want to try something more serious.

Matt Damon on Sarah Palin

I don't think of Damon as a great political mind, but he is certainly well spoken and makes valid points. I won't spoil the killer quote for you, but you will catch it at the end.

John McCain

I was a big McCain fan in 2000. Now I'm not, here's why.

The monster under my bed

I don't know why I'm posting this in a public place. But whatever. So I have been reading Jason DeFillippo's blog for a while now, and I guess I'll just link to his post and and paste in my comment I left.

I don't even remember what post of yours got your blog into my feed-reader, but for some reason it's survived many prunings, and it's fun to see you posting again. So, about these past few posts, it sounds like you are on the right track and it will be hard as hell to do, but you probably do need to avoid the drinking. But I'm totally hearing you. It's like if I don't have my distraction, I get depressed. I quit smoking, and I've been fat since, and I spend too much money on crap I get excited about and then drop. If I don't have something new to buy and be excited about, or a new video game to play, or a new TV show to watch, or a computer to build or whatever, I get depressed. What I should be doing is exercising, reading, getting real work done, but instead I keep falling into ruts of doing other crap. The really crazy thing for me was that I was a happy person most of my life, then as soon as I achieved my really big goals for the first part of my life, got married, a good job, bought a house, etc, I suddenly have this monster under the bed. If I don't continually feed him new CD's or books or whatever, he gets me.

I should write more, but I have learned from the times that I do successfully blog or journal that I need to just put what I can, I'll never really sit down and write the long things that I should.

I think I should add that I am super happy about my wife and house and job. There are no complaints, but it's like the fact that I don't have any huge goals to fight for makes me sad. I would rather deal with the downs I have had than not have these things (especially Katy). When I was a little kid I would sit up at night and read the JC Penney catalog. Now I sit up and surf the web. But I remember the first time I walked into CompUSA and didn't really really want anything, then Best Buy, and this past weekend I walked into the Apple Store and didn't really desire anything. It's weird. And I think that makes me sad. I just need to turn that around, instead of continuing to feed the problem.

Quick thoughts on the iPhone

The trigger for this post is using my iPod Classic. I love the thing, when it came out I quickly decided it was the best iPod ever. My previous favorite was the 3rd gen. I used the 4th gen and owned a 5th gen, but this was the best. All of them work well, are fairly reliable, etc, but the interface improvements on the classic are nice little touches. The kind of touches that Apple and IBM make, but no body else takes the time to make.

But as I sit here listening to Porcupine Tree while updating a RHEL server, I keep reaching for the little bud on my headphones to pause or skip a track, like I have on my iPhone. I really thought that the lack of physical controls with a click of feedback would be missed, but they aren't. The only things you could do on the old iPods without looking were change the volume, and pause, but the same things can be done on the iPhone without looking. The other nice things like coverflow, the iPhone method of scrolling, etc, are even better.

I still have my iPod classic for size reasons, 80gb easily holds my (recently slimmed down) media collection, but the 16gb iPhone comes no where close. I also like having my classic because of the biggest downside to the iPhone, battery life.

Right now the only thing I REALLY want for the iPhone that isn't available is a good text editor. I'm getting pretty quick with the keyboard, and I would like to be able to really write and edit text/doc files.