"What do you do?"

I experienced that question last night for the first real time. Of course I've had people ask me before but this was a group of peers that I had a lot in common with, and basically we went around and asked that. I was at Shwin's bachelor party, with people that I either met last night or hadn't really seen in a few years. I wasn't really embarrassed to say I'm still undergrad and making copies, but I certainly felt a couple of steps behind. Almost everyone else there is in some type of professional career or in grad school.

I actually had a lot of fun though. We just went to a restaurant then went back to the clubhouse at Shwin's apartments and played Texas Hold 'em and hung out. It wasn't a binge drinking fest like my party turned out to be, and I really felt more like I was with a group with similar interests than I have since high school. Actually the crazy part was how much fun Nick and I had. A lot of the time when he and I have talked in the past couple of years it felt like there was an invisible wall, but we had a blast last night. Before he left we kinda promised to each other to take getting together a bit more seriously. This is good.

I keep looking at things I want to change and keep reminding myself that everything is going to change in about 5 months. I'll have a degree, and I will finally have an open schedule to work when I need to. I hope I can develop a routine that involves daily exercise and more stability in what I do. I also hope I will make enough money to get us out of credit card debts quickly and start working on paying off cars.

Liberty Line (In the Sand)

My good friend Glen has just started a blog of his own concerning where our government has gone. He served our country in the Marines earlier on in his life and now is a bit concerned about what has happened to the state of liberty. He's just getting it started but check it out.

Liberty Line

Ducks at BRDD

I took dinner to Zoe tonight at Baskin Robin and there were a couple of ducks in the parking lot. They weren't exactly afraid of humans either.

In the days of my youth I was told what it means to be a man

So last night I was settling in to do some homework and went to put on music. I realized that I had the Led Zeppelin song "Good Times, Bad Times" stuck in my head so I pulled out my box set to find which disc it was on. I quickly realized that it was one of the 2 songs that get fairly regular radio airplay that are not on that set. I then got on my computer and found it on the Early Days CD, which I do have in MP3 format, so I burned it out and listened.

I wasn't looking for a song that said kinda what has happened to me, I was just looking to hear the song that had been stuck in my head, but I ended up with something that is leading me to this blog post.

The lyrics:

Good Times Bad Times
(Bonham/Jones/Page)

In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man,
Now I've reached that age, I've tried to do all those things the best I can.
No matter how I try, I find my way into the same old jam.

*Good Times, Bad Times, you know I had my share;
When my woman left home for a brown eyed man,
Well, I still don't seem to care.

Sixteen, I fell in love with a girl as sweet as could be,
Only took a couple of days 'til she was rid of me.
She swore that she would be all mine and love me till the end,
But when I whispered in her ear, I lost another friend, oooh.

* Chorus

I know what it means to be alone, I sure do wish I was at home.
I don't care what the neighbors say, I'm gonna love you each and every day.
You can feel the beat within my heart.
Realize, sweet babe, we ain't ever gonna part.

So it's really a song about a girl leaving you. But that first part, and I know I'm not the first person to blog about it, says a bit more.

I've had a hard time over the past two years or so. I've dealt with depression for the first time in my life, and I have experienced a lot of changes. Thus far I have viewed this as a very unfortunate occurrence to have happen at the same time I finally have achieved a lot of my life goals. I now have a wife, a house, two dogs, a nice car, my own home office, and I'm going to NCSU. But I started to realize a few days ago that maybe there is something different going on. Right now I'm trying to read Stephen Covey's "8 Habits of Highly Effective People" and one of the things he talks about is paradigm shifts. I'm familiar with the concept, but I think it has become a mainstream idea that I have encountered in the past because he wrote this book. At any rate, a paradigm shift is a change not in the way that something is, but a change in the way that you view something. He correlates this to things like when we realized that the earth is not the center of the universe. I have experienced things like this before in my life, like when I started to view my financial situation in a different way. I didn't change the situation, I changed the way that I saw the situation, which then allowed me to handle it.

So as for the song, and how it relates to the last two years. Like I said, I have seen the last two years as a very unfortunate time period in which I had a bad section that just happened to occur when these great things in my life happened. I'm starting to see it as a phase shift. There was a very definite phase shift that occurred for me when I went from childhood to adolescence. It wasn't overnight, but it was over the course of about 6 months. My ways of seeing the world changed drastically. I went from being the nerdy kid that I was growing up to being someone more interested in music, socializing, and had my first interests in art. I wasn't a completely different person, I still had a lot of the same personality and interests, but a lot did change. And there was a catalyst in this, actually two. My parents got divorced, which kinda meant both of them were more lenient and my dad married Beth, who did a lot to help me loosen up from my geeky past, and I became friends with Nick, who also helped me loosen up. The two of them could have been considered bad influences, but I hate to think what I would have become if I didn't go through those changes then. I think what has happened in the past couple of years has been another period of change. And its not that all this stuff happening in my life is being enjoyed less because of my stress level, nor that they are the cause, but that they are the catalysts in another life period starting. As I leave that adolescent period and enter adulthood I'm already starting to see things differently. Probably the biggest difference is that I am now very interested in leaving a positive mark on the world. I never cared about this in the past very much. I thought it would be nice, but it wasn't a priority. Now I am fairly sure that I want to do something in some sort of church outreach, or missionary, or educational way. My family is still the most important thing to me, but I'm more interested in who I help than what I have. This all sounds very sappy, but it's less of an altruistic dream and more of a need to do something. There is also this urge to be kinda artsy/hippy. I've always been very into art and music from a distance, but now I really want to live more of a Carrboro/Asheville/San Fransisco weirdo life. I still find the majority of those people to be pretentious, and the ones that aren't to be weird, but that is the direction. Also, I don't see the more recent period as bad. Even though it was fairly self-centered, I think it was needed. It made me a normal person. It taught me a lot about how to socialize with others. This not only helped my self-confidence and self-image, but also has allowed me to develop some charisma that I think will be important to achieve what I want to do in life.

A big part of what I hope to do is to be an influence on people as a christian. I was raised in a church going family, but when I was a teenager I developed this idea that religion was a crutch that the stupid used to explain what they didn't understand. Throughout history we have thought everything was magic, and then we eventually realize the science behind it. The big change for me was one time talking to my maternal grandmother. She was one of the most intelligent people I have ever known, and I thought that she basically was a Christian in practice only, not in true faith. I thought she was scientifically minded enough to realize it was a farce, but went through the motions just because she was raised that way. But one day we were talking about God and what I would do with my life and she told me in a very genuine way how important it was to her that I lived my life as a Christian and I realized that she wasn't just going through the motions. I think people at least see me as a fairly intelligent, reasonable person. I want them to see me that way, not as some weirdo, and then see that I really have a faith in this stuff, and hopefully influence them in the same way my grandmother influenced me.

So this different paradigm kinda gives an explanation for the depression from two points. One is that I am yet to achieve much in helping people, and to be quite honest I'm scared to. I see the beggars on Hillsboro St. or around New Hope Commons and I want to help them, but I'm not quite ready to deal with them. I think what I really want to do is influence unchurched people that it is not a joke, and hopefully later on have the money and influence to help people through organizations. I want not only to help people with faith, but also in opening up education, censorship, and art. The other hard part goes back to the influence of Nick. I haven't really had someone to walk me through a lot of this. My Mom's boyfriend John has helped me a lot with the art stuff, and has been a great confidant. But I haven't had a Nick. I have a good friendship with my wife, and I have a good friendship with my brother-in-law, Jeff, Maggie, and my parents and in-laws, but there isn't really anyone that I have connected with on the same level that I connected with Nick. And of course Nick and I have really drifted apart since he got married. I struggle with the loss of that bond, and perhaps even more with the total lack of replacement. Before now I thought it was really just the loss of Nick, but now I wonder if a lot of it is the loss of that slot.

"No matter how I try, I find my way into the same old jam."

PicoPad

I found a nifty new tool today. In my constant productivity quests one of my bigger hangups has been carrying pen and paper with me. I found something today at a local bookstore that seems interesting.


I typically have my messenger bag with me, and in it a number of different surfaces to write something on, along with plenty of writing utencils. However there are a lot of times that I have something occur to me when I am somehow away from my man-bag. This new tool comes into play for that. It is called PicoPad, and its such a simple concept that it could pretty much be done in a homemade style, but cheap enough it's just as easy to buy it. It's a piece of plasticy cardboard folded in half, with what is basically the top half of a post-it pad inside.

The part that is perhaps most ingenious though is the pen. It's pretty much a short pen refill with a small piece of the same plasticy cardboard attached to it that creates wings you can hold onto, and in the cover there is a slot to hold it. The whole thing is about the size of a stack of a half dozen business cards, so if you throw away some of the crap in your wallet you know you should throw away anyway, it will probably fit.

Simple, elegant, and ingenious.

The Elements of Style

I love this book

I found it from reading about writing, and more specifically people blogging about Stephen King's On Writing, and later reading the book myself.

It's a great handbook on what to and not to do when writing. To start, it's short. It is around 100 pages and is significantly longer than it was when William Strunk originally wrote it. EB White (yes that EB White) was a student of Strunk who wrote a very terse text for his class. Years later White added to it, and with a little bit of modernization, the book exists today in it's fourth edition. It's to the point, and perhaps could be considered a bit rude, but most good English teachers are. The first part, which is what Strunk wrote, is pretty much a drill sargent issuing orders. These are simple points like

"2. Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas."
"6. Do not break sentences in two."

The later parts, mostly written by White, highlight issues related to overall form, like using paragraphs, using the active voice, be clear, and one of the most important, omit needless words. Good writing is simple.

I'm still not sure why none of my English instructors have ever told me about this before.

And the old skool just keeps comin'!

How bout some Transformers action? Quite possibly my very favorite of the franchises I grew up with.

Some pics for the new movie

^I gotta give Brian credit for showing me that one.

A funny but NSFW fan clip

And some trailers

OMG!!! OMG!!! OMG!!!

First and foremost, and the real reason for the post:

TMNT Trailer

SA-WEET!

Second off is the trailers of a new Ghostbusters game that have been floating around, such as:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Yo__g_5sdsI

You know you want this

The 80's stuff is coming back hard. In my time I've seen the 60's and 70's stuff roll back around with hype, and only now that stuff I lived through is rolling back through do I really understand the nostalgia. The kids I see on campus all Risky Businessed out with khaki shorts, laconte polo, and big cheap sunglasses with the elastic band. The Transformers movie coming out. And now, the updated Lasonic Ghetto Blaster. Check it out here.

Exams

It's that time again!

Arg.....

I'm having so much trouble focusing. I'm not used to really NEEDING to study. Like, if I don't study a lot for Ag Markets it will not be good. But I can't focus, I'm freaking out. My Dad and his wife are coming to stay with us this weekend, which I'm really looking forward to, but we need to clean up a lot. We have to finish Christmas shopping, the dogs are pretty nuts, Katy is sick, and we now have a Nintendo Wii, which is of course a distraction. Then just plain, old-fashioned, ADD-induced, Jason procrastinating. Doing things like, oh, I dunno, posting to my blog.

Again I say:

Arg.....

The Decline of PC Gaming

There was a time when most households did not have a computer. Many of them did however, have a Nintendo. Then the PC's started to become more popular. With Windows 95 it became common, and by the early 2000's and Windows XP, they were in almost as many homes as a telephone or a TV. We saw games for all platforms, but there were a lot that weren't really doing as well on the consoles. They didn't have the graphics and processing capability, they didn't have the controls, and perhaps most importantly, they didn't have the Internet. I actually started to think that the PC gaming was going to eat away at consoles enough that they would fade. But instead it started moving the other way. I had friends tell me they didn't worry about what their video card was because they used their XBOX or PS2 for games, not their computers. One of the biggest changes was Halo. Suddenly someone figured out how to make a First Person Shooter work with a game pad.

Now with this generation it gets even better. The Wii has what perhaps could be a better system than keyboard and mouse for things like first person shooters and point and click systems like command and conquer. The online setups are in place. Nintendo's online system lacks the ability to find people that people probably want, but with the consoles connecting to friends will be consistent among different games. All three new systems feature wireless controllers. Another huge pointer to the shift is Call of Duty 3. This is a major FPS, and so far they aren't planning to release at all for the PC. At this point it's hard to argue as much cause to stick with PC games. The big MMORPGs are still on PC, but that will change with time.

Time will tell which one of these three systems will rise to the top, but I certainly think the Wii will do better than the Gamecube did against its competition, and I think we will see less focus on PC gaming.

Back to blogger

So I created a Blog at Wordpress, but in my recent phase of "must perfect my computing enviroment" I decided that Google=good. I thought it would be smart to use google services when possible, so I pointed laydros.org back to blogger. It has been a good service, and they have a new beta with some extra features. The old posts are still at Wordpress, including a big article on pencils. Later I may try to move some over.

Justice is served.... to an alligator

What happens when a Florida druggie gets cracked out and decides to go seduce an alligator? Well, it's pretty funny, if you are as cynical as me.

Adrian Apgar was heard yelling for help at about 4 AM and when police arrived they found the man, naked, on crack cocaine, and partially digested by an alligator.

Best line of the article:

Judd said Apgar told deputies he was smoking crack-cocaine at the adjacent park, but it was unclear why he was naked or why he was attacked by the alligator.

Link

History of Zelda

This is a great video for the Legend of Zelda fan. It's certainly not short or for the non-geek, but it is quite tastefully done. I'm pretty excited about the Wii and hope they drop a bit in price soon so I can excuse picking one up. As many people my age I have a soft spot for Nintendo and wouldn't mind seeing them take the lead in the "next-gen console wars" or at least get a bigger presence than they have had over the N64 and Gamecube eras.

We take a look at the humble beginnings of the boy dressed in green, and the adventures he found on his quest for greatness It continues with a look at Link’s return to his roots, and his first handheld outing. Then we find Link riding his way onto the Nintendo 64, and becomes the ultimate master of disguise. After that Link brings us back to the handheld market where Link meets a few new friends. Lastly, ventures onto the GameCube where he undergoes an extreme makeover, and meets a talking cap that’ll change his world perspective. As our retrospective comes to an end, we try to make sense of the history of Hyrule and it’s ever-present green-clad hero. There is a free DVD download of this here: http://wiinintendo.net/?p=1932

Flock beta

Flock is a "social browser" built on the Firefox code base, which integrates blogging, photo sharing with Flickr or Photobucket, "favorites" (a.k.a. bookmarks) using del.icio.us or Shadows, and other collaborative features. Last November I took a look at an early Flock release, and found it to be interesting, if a little bit rough. The Flock folks have been hard at work, and the new Flock beta release looks solid enough to be a must for users who spend a great deal of time blogging, sharing pictures, or using services like del.icio.us.

NewsForge | Flock beta rocks

When the original Flock developer's preivew (which meant alpha) came out I tried it and didn't think it really did anything that I wanted. I had seen a little bit of praise for the new beta when it came out so I decided to try it again. I haven't really had a good chance to take it through the paces yet, but so far I like it alot. I'm using the blogging feature right now to make this post, and all I did was highlight the text in that newsforge article, and then right click on it and choose "blog this" and it popped up a nice window for me to work in. It will now, at least in theory, just send this right to my blogger account without me needing to do anything. It also interfaces your bookmarks with Del.icio.us, and your picture with flickr. I'll see how things go.

Blogged with Flock