(queue obligatory Christmas blog post)
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY!
I planned to write more, but the days have been packed with lots of Christmas and New Year's stuff that kept distracting me from my blog. I should have a bunch of new material, especially now that I've got a phone that takes decent pics that I can transfer to my computer without having to pay cellphone data usage to e-mail it to myself at a resolution so low that it doesn't get measured in megapixels...
I've had a very good year, and I hope the same can be said of y'all. I'll share more of my Christmas and my 2009 once the holiday season has calmed-down some.
Giving-up on 'giving-up on baking'
It wasn't too long ago that I said I'd given-up on baking. From then, I had let my baking utensils collect dust (as well as things can collect dust being stuck in a kitchen drawer anyway), and even looked a bit sadly at the silicon muffin tray of mine when I put it into a new drawer with my move back into the city; remembering through a sepia memory flashback of an era long gone.
But this week, hug nazi announced that she was going to the Carols by Candlelight this year, and unable to find anybody else to come with or bring their own baking to complement the scones she was going to bring to it, I thought I'd rise to the occasion. This meant baking...
After a trip to the supermarket for baking ingredients and a trip to a department store for mixing bowls (and a colander I found-out I didn't have when I went to drain the pasta I made last night for dinner; it was a very LOL moment), I arrived at my place with all I needed to make quite possibly the most basic baking recipe I know to do: chocolate chip cookies.
My mum has been baking chocolate chip cookies for the family since the dawn of time, and I didn't need the instructions to put it all together; my visual memory of having watched her make them a million times and my muscle memory from my baking days took over. It didn't take long, or much effort, and within minutes, before the slower thinking part of my mind had the time to catch-up to what was happening in the kitchen, I had 28 chocolate chip cookies sitting in the oven.
So I should renege on my earlier blog post: when I said that I'd given-up on baking, I should've really said that I'd no longer have myself compete against the amazing cakes/treats/gingerbread-houses that everybody else around me seems to be able to pull-off. I'll just stick to what I know and can do, which in this case means going back on silly promises I made, and accompanying a friend to an event, so that she's not all on her lonesome.
Stuff white people like
I've been with my new HP laptop for work for a while now, and thanks to it's huge increase in processing power, memory, and hard drive platters' rotation rate over my old Dell laptop which is not only slow by today's standards, but has also accumulated 3-years-worth of software detritus and e-barnacles, the turnaround time between finding an error, fixing it, and then testing the fix, is significantly faster. In fact, it's made the excuse of 'compiling' a (unfortunate) thing of the past:
One thing I used to do between compiles (besides jousting and sword play on office chairs) was to browse websites like any other non-programmer would. No I wouldn't go to Facebook - I don't have enough active FB friends to create a long list of activity on the Live News Feed so I like to let it build-up over the work day so I have something to go through when I get home - but rather joke sites (eg: Cracked, Digg - yes Digg is just one big joke), comic sites (eg: XKCD, Cyanide and Happiness), or blogs (waaay too many to list). One blog which I've been directed to recently thanks to a referral from my brother, is the site Stuff White People Like - http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/
You don't have to be non-white to appreciate the humour that went into the site - although, like myself, being some sort of ethnic minority in a white-dominated society really helps (lol, who would've thought that could ever be an advantage) - but just going through the list, I've found so much that is funny, because it is all true.
With almost every link I could find at least 1 person I knew who would fit the stereotype presented in each blog post, and I would proceed to post the link on their Facebook wall.
I'm only half-way through the list right now (no thanks to the faster work laptop for reducing the amount of time I have to slack off... damn double-edged sword of having a faster work computer!), and I must've posted way too many links because my friends (read: white friends, the 'white' is assumed as I'm often the token ethnic for their group) have noticed my pattern and are starting to retaliate.
The comments on each post are sometimes lol-worthy, but most of the time it's either someone admitting how white they are (regardless of the colour of their skin) or someone saying just how racist the site is. Odd that last one, because each post is written by a twenty-something white male who admits that he's selling-out his race and writing all of those posts in jest. I guess those 'OMG-this-is-racist' people are just pissed that they're now being subject to stereotypes, and to those people I advise they develop a sense of humour and get over it, but only after I point and laugh at them while rhetorically asking how it feels to be on the receiving end for once.
The sounds of silence
First of all: I'M BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!
And for those of you who didn't understand what I mean by that, I've moved back into the city this weekend, meaning I can get back to watching Home and Away, enjoying showers that have water pressure high enough to actually penetrate my hair and reach my scalp, and not have to worry too much about train timetables. In short, the things I wrote about when I left the city the last time in this old blog post, are back in my life. (Except I may have missed the boat on the Home and Away front since it'll go on a break over Christmas / New Year's, leaving me to watch something else in its stead, most likely The Biggest Loser if last year was anything to go by.)
During the move though, I discovered something quite interesting about my dad: he can't hear some common high-pitched noises.
As we were both waiting in my new place for the movers to come along with the rest of my stuff, we got to playing-around with the glass-top (or maybe it's some kind of ceramic?) kitchen hob. The buttons on it are touch-sensitive, and as I discovered how to turn it on, my dad read aloud the passage in the instruction manual that said that each press of a button is "...accompanied by an acoustic signal." ie: a beep.
"So where's the noise?" my dad asked.
"There," I said, pressing a button, "can't you hear that?"
"No."
"OMG WHAT?"
I continued to press buttons to try evoke some oh-yeah-I-heard-that facial expression from him, but he could not hear the thing! I brought this up with the rest of the family at the next lunch, and my brother was equally shocked. My mum wasn't however, and regaled us with a tale of how he tried to search for his watch while the thing was beeping and driving her crazy, all while he was unable to pinpoint its location with his ears.
In his defence, my dad blamed years of New Year's fireworks celebrations in the Philippines (a valid excuse if you ask me: if you've ever been to the Philippines at New Year's, it sounds like being in a war zone, or at least the war zones that movies and video games have been presenting me).
As for me, I've been reminded just how fragile these ears of ours are, and will be ever-more vigilant with the volume of my mp3 player and computer headphones, so that hopefully, by the time I reach my dad's age, I can still recognize when my appliances are trying to get my attention.
Elevator superpowers
It wasn't too long ago that I tweeted about the time 3 lifts answered my call in the form of a My Life Is Average blurb:
Today, I pressed the 'call lift' button, and 3 of our building's 4 elevators answered my call. I want a better superpower. MLIA.
I've not been able to repeat this feat, but ever since then I've been getting 2 lifts answer my call on a more-than-usual basis. Before, something like 2-lifts-at-a-time happened about once every couple of months. Now, it happens once every 3 or 4 days. Most recently, I got into the lift (the first that answered my call, the second one was 1 second too slow), went to press the button that would take me to the basement exit of my work building, but was suddenly surprised at the brightness of our new lift buttons.
Here's a little backstory on my work's lifts:
When I started-out here, the lifts had a (dirty) white tile-like floor and buttons with black numbers that were fading with time and use. If a button had been pressed, a red light would glow above the number in the button. The floor was getting worn, especially with all the reshuffling of people (building rennovations, corporate takeover, etc) that were going-on over the years, causing extreme wear and tear on the floors.
Once the shuffling had settled-down, they set to fix-up the lift tiles and ended-up replacing them with a nice new black floor. This introduced a new problem though: the black was reflected in the metal surfaces of the lift, including the buttons, thus making the buttons almost illegible: black on black FTW! I survived this time in the lifts' history because my floor's button was in an easy-to-memorize position amongst that grid of buttons, but many poor men and women became victims of spending countless seconds peering closer to the writing on the buttons just to try find their floor.
To combat this problem, they've been installing bright blue backlit floor buttons. Now you can read the numbers much more easily. Heck, they even come with braille for those who could never see the numbers in the first place! But, as usual, there is 1 flaw in the execution: the difference between a pressed button and an unpressed button is a matter of brightness; if it hasn't been pressed, it's bright; if it has been pressed, it's slightly brighter. The difference can be observed, but it isn't glaringly obvious like it was before.
This work to move to the bright blue buttons is still underway, and the lift being worked-on is of course shut down for the lift guy to work on it. So of our building's 4 elevators, only 3 are on at any given time. So this week, when I had 2 lifts answer my call, I was actually taking 66% of this building's lifts with me.
66% is more than half, but I still want a better superpower. At least my superpower isn't in-flight flight, or having SPF50 sunscreen squirt from my eyes.
Socially awkward me
I ran into a lot of people I know over the lunch break today:
- a husband-and-wife couple from work
- the friend of one of my own friend's sisters
- someone from ceroc
- another workmate
- an ex-girlfriend of a friend's friend (lol)
- an old classmate
- and another person from ceroc
Of those 7 meetings, the first 5 were all on my way to lunch. And with the exception of the first ceroc person, all those encounters went smoothly.
We didn't spot each other until we were fairly close, and by then it looked like it was going to be one of the usual wave-at-each-other-as-you-close-the-distance-between-you-then-continue-walking-in-opposite-directions kind of street meetings. We gestured at each other, said hello, and continued walking. Either by accident or on purpose she touched my arm as we went passed each other. I took this as a sign that she wanted to say something, so I stopped and turned around.
She continued walking. So, fixed to the ground and watching her walk away, I was thinking, Huh, maybe she doesn't want to talk. As soon as that thought finished, she looked back and, seeing me standing there, probably started thinking that I wanted to talk. So she stopped, turned around, and walked back towards me.
What was supposed to be a simple street meeting turned into an misreading of signs followed by me awkwardly trying to explain my way out of why I stopped.
I ended-up explaining myself twice, and even then I wonder if she understood what I was saying because nerves and general silliness were running things by then making me talk a bit faster than usual; maybe too fast to understand.
After that incident, it got me thinking about other meetings that should've been simple, but have been screwed-up because I was being myself.
The example that came to mind was something made possible by my short-sightedness (physical, not figurative). Being short-sighted means I've learned to recognize people from a distance using other visual cues than just one's face: their clothing, hair, the way they walk, etc. Despite the additional clues, this method still has a pretty high failure rate.
A few years ago, I was meeting a friend of mine for lunch at the bookstore outside my work. Inside, I spotted somebody who, from behind, fitted the description of the person I was looking for: short girl, long straight blonde hair, skinny, and wears the sleeves of her jersey up to her fingertips so she can curl the ends around her knuckles. The colour of her clothing also matched stuff I've seen her wear before, so I was pretty sure this was the person I was looking for.
To grab her attention, I threw my jacket at her head.
The girl turned-around, my jacket still on her head, and she wasn't the person I was looking for.
I was quick to apologize, explaining she looked like somebody I knew, and it was then I saw my friend... just to my right, watching the whole sad exchange go down.
Because it isn't enough for me to make a fool of myself in-front of my friends, I have to involve strangers too.
Snow globe hunting
Either the approach of Christmas has been very subdued this year, or I've learned to relegate gigantic red and green decorations, ads, and posters, as part of the usual background noise that you're just meant to expect for this season. None of the retail stores I've been in recently are blasting Christmas tunes over their PA or speaker systems, so maybe without the auditory cues to aid the visual ones, the whole Christmas vibe just hasn't hit me yet, so maybe it is too early to think about it.
What it isn't too early for me to be doing though, is to start thinking about Christmas presents, and going about my yearly before-Christmas tradition: snow globe hunting.
Snow globe hunting is something I've done every year since I had some money to spend (ie: after I got my first job). It's pretty self-explanatory: I go out shopping for snow globes. I always start with Kirkcaldies - the city's most prestigious department store, which just happens to have a dedicated Christmas shop - and then work my way to other department stores, then smaller retail and souvenir/gift shops from there.
The success rate is mixed. Actually, I lie; the success rate is depressingly low. In all my years of snow globe hunting, I've only managed to find 1 snow globe that fit all of my criteria for what a snow globe should be... and it became a Christmas present for my mum. I have 2 other snow globes, but I didn't find them - they were presents from my friend the hug nazi.
When you're in a country which goes through Christmas during the summer months - where the typical Christmas scene is a barbecue outdoors wearing sunglasses and shorts, rather than making snowmen in thick jackets, gloves, scarves, and a beanie - snow globes aren't exactly a gift item you'll find on store shelves. The ones that I do manage to find are either really tiny novelty items, or epic large several-hundred-dollar pieces of art that deserve prime position on your mantlepiece. I don't have a mantlepiece, nor am I willing to spend that kind of money on a snow globe. It also doesn't help that my idea of what a snow globe should be has been shaped by the Christmases you often see in American TV and movies.
My definition of the perfect snow globe? The globe part itself should fit in your hands, it should depict a white northern-hemisphere-winter Christmas scene, the base shouldn't be larger than roughly a third the size of the globe itself, and extras such as a music box, electric lights, or a motor that pushes the snow around for you, are not required.
They're not hard to find on the internet. Heck, even the Wikipedia entry for snow globe shows a picture of the sort of thing I'm looking for:
But in this country, you're better-off searching for a cheap pair of socks! (socks for some reason are very expensive in New Zealand, but that's another blog topic altogether)
Given that I search for presents for friends on the internet, I should probably do the same and extend my snow globe hunt to the online realm. That, or if you're someone I know who just happens to be looking for a Christmas present for me, I've just given you an epic hint.
*wink wink* ;)
Before entering October, I told myself that I'd hold-off the blog posts so I could save-up some interesting stories to write a birthday-themed story e-mail to my friends. It's been over a year since I last wrote one, mainly because in place of writing short stories every couple of months I've resorted to writing even shorter blog posts every couple of weeks. I guess if you do a word count comparison on either method, it kinda balances out.
Thus explains this month's lack of blog activity; I don't wanna repeat stories both on this site and in my e-mail, but at the same time I don't really know what stories will make the final cut, so I'm hoarding everything to myself right now.
It does kinda say something about the pace of my life though: it's pretty slow. So much time between fun and exciting things that I have to take an entire month's worth of events to come-up with a decent length story e-mail.
I mean, when I was in primary and intermediate school, one of the first assignments you'd get at the beginning of the school year was to write an essay (with the word count of said essay steadily increasing with your age) about what you did over the summer break, which for us southern hemisphere folk is over December/January, so you always had a lot of material to draw from: Christmas, presents, the special meals, New Year's, visits to/from (extended) family which often meant going overseas... you get the idea.
Of course, when I was younger, everything was exciting and worth telling the world (or your teacher and friends) about. Nowadays, being all grown-up means that you fall into a routine, and things that form a part of the routine aren't always worth telling others about.
In my own efforts to keep the happenings of the grown-up world just above the threshold of boredom, I keep a running thought at the back of my mind to try mix things up at the most mundane of times, eg: thinking with my stomach, writing "hilarity ensues" in my bug reports, spinning in my chair... little things to remind myself and others that it doesn't have to be "same shit different day" all the time.
But it's not my everyday life which will make it into my story e-mail - I doubt my friends want to read about me installing large software packages over the course of a day again. Nor do I think they want to read things like:
Today, I heard quacking from the street. I looked outside my window and saw a lone female duck walking along the grassy part of the footpath of our street. In spring, you usually see ducks paired-up, so I wondered where the male duck was. The thought bothered me for the rest of the afternoon.
A website through the ages
I was doing a Google search at work last week - looking-up "AGM", making sure that it meant Annual General Meaning, which it does, before I used it in a sentence in an e-mail - and in doing so I came across a blog entry from a local blogger where they described attending their apartment's AGM and how it felt like such a grown-up thing to do at the time. I say 'at the time' because it was written in 2004.
Browsing through to the blog's homepage, I saw that it is still actively updated. OMG! I thought, another blogger from NZ who writes about their day-to-day life, who started the site off years ago, AND IS STILL AROUND! OK, so 5 years isn't forever, but my own website only has entries dating all the way back to 2005, despite having had this site up since 2001, and that was before I even called these updates 'blog posts' or that the word 'blog' was common in the English language.
I was excited! Ecstatic! Glad to find someone out there who perseveres with a personal website for years, even with the knowledge that their readership consists mainly of friends and family, with the odd stranger/passer-by. I became even more excited/ecstatic/glad when, after reading through a few of their posts, I could identify them as somebody who might be a workmate of amazing baking girl. (2-degrees of separation FTW! (NZ joke))
OK, so my excitement probably makes no sense to anybody else. Here's some background for where I'm coming from with all this:
The day before I ran into OrangeBlog (yep, that's their blog's name), I was reading another blog entry from one of the authors I read and follow, John Scalzi, who had just written about how his website has been around for 11 years. That's one helluva milestone, I thought.
Not many personal sites on the internet stay around for 11 years. My own friends' attempts at websites or blogs are a testament to that: one guy hasn't added anything substantial to his site in several years, of 2 overseas/travelling blogs, 1 stopped theirs just a few months in while the other hasn't been updated in over a year, and the 1 guy who went so far as to buy a domain name and host his own Content Management System (think website management program), when he stopped updating it it got bombarded by comment spam bots, before getting domain jacked.
And when the New York Times has a slow news day and decides to take a pot shot at bloggers for lacking discipline and staying power, I find myself alone in the fight back, using whatever skills I have on hand (writing, 'your mom' jokes) and whatever weapons I can find on my desk (unsharpened pencils and dead batteries... wait, that can't be turned into some sort of analogy for my life can it?).
I guess it takes certain kinds to continue something that has no real rewards, no tangible benefits; to throw thoughts, words, ideas, out into the digital ether and not worry about them coming back any better than they were when they left the gap between your brain and the keyboard. I haven't received so much as a cookie for what I'm doing with this website, but it's not an entirely selfless thing; every time I hear somebody I know say "Hey, I read your blog" or allude to something I've written, it becomes a real boost to the ego.
So yeah, I knew I wasn't alone in the whole 'maintain and keep updating a personal website' endeavour - the world's way too big for that - but I feel a lot less alone than I did before.
And hopeful too that there are more like me out there when it comes to keeping to things for the long term. Hope, for now it seems, is the colour orange.
Looking back through my previous posts, I'm quite surprised to see that the books I read haven't really been mentioned. There is no Books/Reading/Library category (well, there will be one after I write this up) despite books, reading, and the library being the things I carry most often, the thing I do in my spare time, and one of my favourite places to just kill time in Wellington, respectively.
(Hell, it's books that propelled me to write all the sorts of stuff I keep in the Writing section of my site, which in turn transformed the main page of this site into more of a blog than just updates of my projects like it used to be. And it's authors like Maureen Johnson who got me into Blog Every Day April. Suffice it to say, books, writers, and writing have definitely made things more interesting around here.)
Authors and their blogs do get mentioned here or there on occasion. Today's mention will be Scott Westerfeld, a science fiction author whose more popular works actually live in the young adult (YA) section of the library: the Uglies "trilogy" (4 books, with a 5th as a sort of companion of the Uglies universe to be added), and the Midnighters trilogy.
I actually came across Scott's work when it was just stuff in the vanilla-sci-fi section of the library (The Risen Empire, and sequel The Killing of Worlds). I've been meaning to read his Uglies trilogy for a while - I even had it down as something I might buy for myself last Christmas - but only got around to it now because the popularity of the series means the books are always on loan.
I managed to get a hold of the first book in the series, Uglies, last week, and was so hooked that I used every spare moment I had to read it and finished just yesterday. When I went to return the book today, I looked-up the sequel, Pretties, in the library database to see if it was available. Just my luck - the 3rd copy of the book was available! So I made a bee line for the W authors in the YA section of the library... and couldn't find it there :|
Hmm, must be in one of those special displays or other sections that highlight good books, I thought, so I started going through the entire YA section of the library, searching for this one book.
So that's how I spent my lunch break - looking like a lost soul, travelling many times over the same ground, drawing stares from the seated readers as they watched and wondered why this grown office-working adult male is wandering around the section of the library filled with books mostly aimed at teen and pre-teen girls...
I eventually found it after referring to the library database once again; seeing that the book was just returned today, and finding it in the Recently Returned section of YA. But my discovery-of-the-day award would actually have to go to this new category of YA books that I came across.
On the same shelf as long-running YA series' with categories such as 'detective stories', 'chick lit', 'horror', and the like - each separated by a vivid appropriately-labelled yellow bookend - was a category so specific that I was surprised to find it filled with just as many books as every other category:
The kind of stuff you'd find in there? Gossip Girl.
Just my luck
The Beatles: Rock Band came out earlier this week, which should mean that in the lead-up to the release date I'd be very excited (I was) and that after bringing it home and giving it a go I'd be enjoying the game thoroughly (I'm not).
"I'm not" I say? Does the game suck? Well, I don't know yet.
On the morning of the release of The Beatles: Rock Band (a work day, unfortunately), I got the usual message from the mail room that a package had arrived for me to pick up. Ooooo, exciting! I was thinking, because I knew exactly what waiting for me.
The remainder of the work day was not ordinary, but rather uneventful: picked-up the package, went to lunch w/ dad (although I didn't have to pay for his meal this time), browsed the CD store with him to check out the release of the digitally remastered Beatles albums, worked until all enthusiasm was drained from me, read the local rag on the train ride home, ate dinner, watched CSI: New York on TV...
...and THEN, it was time to play The Beatles: Rock Band with the family.
We were all pretty excited. For me, because it's a new toy; for my brother, probably the same reason; for my parents, because they finally get to play to songs that they grew up with (a change to having to play Boston in Rock Band 2 over and over again - don't get me wrong, I looove Boston, but repetition does remove the mirror sheen on even the nicest things).
So we plugged-in/turned-on all the controllers, loaded-up the disc, and... wait, what's up with my controller? The Xbox guide button on my fake plastic guitar just kept flashing; couldn't register as a controller with the Xbox. Oh F***!!!
I kept the expletive thoughts to my inner voice, conceded my position as 'lead guitar' and let the family play on without me. I went back to my room and sulked by browsing the internet for the guitar tablature to emotion-infused meaningful songs I know so I could learn to play them then and there on my real guitar :(
I've had this problem before (this is actually the 3rd fake plastic guitar I've gone through: the first one having a broken strum bar and the second one having this same flashing light issue) and the guitar is still under warranty, but it means having to send the damn thing back and waiting anywhere from a week to a month for a replacement... again (stupid courier costs associated with returning items when buying from an internet vendor).
Not that I'd want to: I'd rather head for the nearest store, buy a new WIRELESS guitar, and pray the thing doesn't get a bung strum bar. And if it does, at least I'll have the option of going down to the store and venting my frustrations out on the nearest store employee who will likely be some unsuspecting teenager who has absolutely nothing to do with the failings and design faults of my fake plastic guitar.
*sigh*
As you can imagine, I'm not very happy right now. Here I am, blogging about another situation that is out of my control. So, this lunch time, I'm gonna go fill my stomach with tasty fast-food, knowing full well that what I'm putting into me isn't very good for my body and that my patronage is lining the pockets of already-rich corporate billionaires overseas.
At least I still have control over that.
Father's Day this week
As a sort of spiritual successor to previous Mother's Day posts, this time I get to talk about Father's Day, or in this case, Father's Week.
Just like with Mother's Day, the book store I walk through to get to/from work has made it obvious for several weeks now (not many other commercial holidays around this time of year it seems) that Father's Day is coming. NZ likes to celebrate its dads on the first Sunday of September. With that knowledge in my head when I went out for lunch last week, and then while chowing-down on a salad soon afterwards, I thought: Hmm, my dad was right; this place ain't so bad. I wouldn't mind taking him out to here for lunch.
That line of thought then led to an idea for something to do for Father's Day which, with help from the rest of the family, we're putting into effect as of today (Monday). That is, for every weekday this week in the lead-up to Father's Day, one of us will be taking dad out and shouting him lunch.
I've been assigned today and tomorrow.
OK, so it isn't anything super spectacular - it's 5 free lunches, although just 1 free lunch is valued pretty highly in my family - but with the responses I got today from both him and a stranger when I took him out to lunch for one of my designated days, I'm starting to think I've chosen the right Father's Day gift.
Lunch today was at a Chinese fast food restaurant which both my dad and I frequent for their noodle soups (often the wonton roast pork noodle soup). My dad ended-up getting one of the noodle soups, while I went to get a 4-choice meal: fried rice, veges, sweet & sour pork and lemon chicken, nom nom nom. Because we went down separate lines to get our meals, I just handed him some money so he could get whatever while I went and filled my 4-choice plate. The man behind the counter must've noticed me handing my dad some money because when I went to order my meal, he asked me if that man was my dad.
Guy behind counter: Is that your dad?
Me: Hmm? *looks towards where he's pointing* Oh, yup.
Guy: That's very nice of you, taking your dad out to lunch.
Me: Heh, thanks. It's part of his multi-part Father's Day present.
I recounted the 4-line conversation to my dad this as we ate our lunch, and he said that the same guy asked him when he was ordering if I was his son. It elicited a bit of a smile from him as he said this, a sort of "That's right, my boy is taking me out to lunch, bitches!" smile.
I think I also saw some pride in that smile.
Not having been a parent myself (*shudder*), I wasn't very good at reading that emotion. But if the movies I've grown-up on are any indication, I think I've just done something which made him glad that he started a family, and ended-up with this family in particular.
Which, as his son, makes me feel pretty good too, because I've been trying for an eternity to make-up for that awesome sound system of his that I destroyed when I was less than 4 years old :P
My sympathies
2 blog posts in one day?!?! Is that a pig I see flying past my window?
Well, this one is a bit of a plea for help. You see, at work we often pass-around and fill-out cards for others whenever something eventful happens. eg: lady I was working with gives birth to baby boy, we all fill-out a card to send to her, wishing her well on her new job - motherhood.
Often I've been able to get away with writing whatever the hell first came to mind. In the case of the new mother, I think I wrote something to do with sleepless nights and baby vomit. In the case of a recent card given for 30 years of service with the company, I made some remark about how they've been working longer than I've been drawing breath.
But the card I was given today is about a death in a co-workers family for which they're travelling to attend the funeral, and I don't know if my usual wit is really appropriate for the situation.
The first thing that came to mind was "Well, that sucks." Somehow, that doesn't seem like a good start.
So, umm, help? What sort of things would you - Facebook readers in particular, since you're the only ones who can actually comment on my posts on my wall - write in this situation?
(and yes I really need to get around to allowing comments on this site)
"Grow facial hair" they said
As a sort of follow-up to an earlier gripe about the difference between my perceived and actual age, just last week I got ID'd when buying a beer... *sigh*
Upon complaining about it, one person suggested I grow a beard, one person showed some sympathy by saying she gets ID'd at the supermarket (can't link to it as it's on my Facebook profile), and another person suggested growing a beard. See a pattern there?
And over a dinner with friends just this weekend, growing facial hair was brought-up again - although in the context of the recent ski week and the things we did to keep warm.
"So why don't I try growing a beard?" they asked. My response is that, even if it will solve my age issues, it brings with it a whole new raft of problems; if I let my facial hair grow a bit, I start to look like a Mexican car thief.
I don't have any photo evidence of this, but there are plenty of photos of my dad in the family photo album from his facial hair days, and boy does he look dodgy. One photo in particular sticks with me, an action shot taken of our whole family at the Auckland Zoo soon after we moved to New Zealand. In it, my mum and dad are walking together with my mum pushing a stroller, and both my brother and I are running ahead of the 2 of them. Every time I see that photo, I look at my dad and think, Man, I wouldn't trust that guy around my kids or car, and then let the irony of my thoughts slowly sink-in as I realize that I am one of his kids, and that I don't own a car.
I don't really look like my dad, but I tend to see a lot of my parents in myself. eg: musical ability from my mum, my aptitude for chess and choosing cooking meals over baking from my dad, etc. So when I forget to shave for a while and see a 5-o'clock-the-following-day shadow on my face, I keep seeing my dad from that photo...
Since I'm from a country filled with stories about how people dig up and steal phone cables from the ground only to sell them back to the phone companies they stole them off, or about how you can get scammed and stabbed on the buses/jeepneys, or how everyone drives with their doors locked lest somebody open it and steal from you while you're idling at an intersection, I tend to put a high price on my perceived trustworthiness in an attempt to differentiate myself from my crazy little country of birth.
So I'll just have to put up with the young 'un treatment, because given the choice between that or looking like I'm going to jack your car and entice young children with candy, I'd rather deal with the former than hinder my friend/career/life prospects.
Giving-up on baking
As things like lifestyle and circumstances change, I've had to discard many of the hobbies or interests I've picked-up along the way. It's always a bit sad to throw these things by the wayside or put certain others on hold as I make room for the things I want to do or focus on, but if you want to be good at anything, you can't be good at everything.
For example, some things I've given-up:
- origami
- model planes (the glue-together kind)
- rollerblading
- biking
And some other things I've put on a long hiatus:
- piano
- sketch drawing
- and a certain game programming project
Soon, the list-of-things-I've-given-up will grow by 1, and the thing joining that list: baking.
Baking was always a talent from my mother's side: weekly she'd bake something often for her afternoon teas or something my brother and I could use for breakfast, and just as often she'd bake more delicious things, like a cake, simply for the hell of it.
It's something I've picked-up from her and have always been alright at (just alright, no more) as all I see it as is the process of following instructions with a little bit of artistic flair - things I'm both good at. But recently, I've been discouraged from the art. You know that saying "too many cooks in the kitchen"? Well, amongst the people I know, there are too many baking gods and goddesses to compete with.
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First and foremost: amazing-baking girl, who I've mentioned a few times in this blog, is a force to be reckoned with. Her kitchen is lined with jars of truffles and, for some parties, tiny Chinese takeaway boxes full of little treats inside. Raw ingredients overflow from the kitchen counters that, despite their combined surface area, lack the necessary room to hold everything.
Remember that saying about how to never trust a skinny chef? Well, amazing-baking girl would be the dessert equivalent of that saying; she's diabetic. Talk about irony.
Next up: Melissa, aka: hug nazi, who I've also mentioned many times in previous blog posts, is the loose inspiration for one of my story e-mails, and is credited as the photographer to my McDonalds chicken burger review.
I don't know what did it, but she's decided to walk the path of the housewife/homemaker, and in doing so has had several opportunities in recent memory to show-off her new-found skills. These include, a Cookie Monster birthday cake, a Hogwarts spellbook birthday cake, and tiny hamburger cupcakes. "Hamburger what?" I hear you say? Well, I'll let the photos do the talking:
And the final nail in the coffin? A few Facebook photo albums from fellow ceroc'ers showing creativity and baking talent flourish amongst them too:
Upon seeing those last 2, I thought, Fuck it! I'm done with baking! Too many wonderful sugary treats to compete with - I'm hanging-up my piping bag. I can't do this anymore.
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Thus ends the story of my short-lived baking career path. The most spectacular baking thing I ever did? A Black Forest Gateau. Unfortunately I don't have any pics of it (like I've said elsewhere: I have no digital camera of my own), but here's what I gleamed from the internet, which sorta looked like what I made:
An age-old question
For whatever reasons (probably dance classes... yeah, I blame dance classes) this last year has had me meet a whole lot of new people who span a whole range of ages. And for whatever other reasons, one of the things new people like to find out about another person is how old they are.
I often use age as an indicator to figure-out how much silliness I can get away with (older people) or how much restraint and maturity I should show (younger people). (Dunno why it's that way around; if anything I should be sillier amongst the younger like my nieces, and show maturity with those older like my grandparents.) I'm sure others use age to gauge other things, but one thing that happens to me over and over again, and with increased frequency as of late, is that people underestimate my age.
'Everyday' examples include getting ID'd at bars, purchasing alcohol from stores or the grocery, or even the occasional R18 movie. During my recent ski trip, when I hired ski pants from a ski hire shop, the day I hired them I got asked if I was 18 or under. When time came to return the ski pants, I got asked again. I really should've said yes because that second time the salesperson had an item vs days hired price chart in-front of him and I could see the difference in price between 18-and-under and adult hire. If only I had lied, I could've gotten almost 50% off the hire price! Dammit!
But for 'non-everyday' cases, when it's encountering new people who I see often and who get enough time to form all sorts of opinions and impressions about me before I even work-up enough courage to find them on Facebook, things get a bit more annoying.
At a big dance party last year, a friend from ceroc (not amazing baking girl, so that really only leaves 1 other person at that time) and I were discussing our high school years, when she said "That should be easier for you to remember, since it can't have been that long ago for you." I looked at her weird before asking her how old she thinks I am, and then giving her the answer. Signs that my response threw her off could be easily observed: an almost-awkward silence followed, during which time I could see the cogs slowing inside her head and her thought processes coming to a bit of a halt as this new fact didn't seem to coincide with everything else that she thought she knew, and so the operators inside her brain had to take the system down for a while to remove the spanner I had thrown in the works.
The same thing happened again more recently with another new ceroc friend (different topic of conversation, same blank response), and again just last week with a complete stranger who, to her credit, was just asking everyone their age to get a range and find-out if anybody else there is her son's age so she can go back to her son and tell him that yes, people your age do indeed take dance classes.
Then of course there was the door lady at dance class who asked if I had a student card...
As great as it is to learn that everybody thinks I look young, it does come with some caveats: not only does my age get underestimated, but my abilities get underestimated too. In the case of getting ID'd, the bouncer or salesperson doesn't pass any long-term judgement; they only require I pass the age test, and all I have to do for that is throw some government-issued photo identification at their face. Undoing the damage caused by the impression that you've just left high school however, is a little harder - I spend half my time copping young 'un jokes, and the other half trying to prove that I do indeed have a full-time job and a university degree.
The long-term challenge however, is that if the stereotypes are to believed, my Asian genes are going to ensure I look like this until I turn 60 (provided I even live that long), at which point all my hair will immediately turn grey, I'll grow a long beard, and whenever somebody asks me a question, I will stroke said beard sideways, speak in riddles, and in the process give out sage advice.
When you're young, your age is an indicator of the number of years you've been around, the amount of stuff you've seen and done, the percentage of the multiplication tables you're expected to know, and the bigger that number, the cooler you are. When you're older (and heck, you don't even have to be that old before you reach this tipping point) it's an approximation of the years you've got left, the amount of stuff you haven't seen or done, the percentage of mathematics you've been taught and since forgotten, and the bigger that number, the less-cool you seem to feel.
Age sure is a strange thing.
I've been weaned off Home and Away (for now...)
Recently, I haven't been given much of an opportunity to watch the Aussie soap opera that had captivated me during my short stint of living on my own: Home and Away. In that linked blog post I said that the TV station here did a Home and Away omnibus on the Sunday morning so people who come home too late from work on the weekdays (ie: myself) can catch-up on the whole week in one sitting, but given the events of the last couple of weekends (an out-of-town ceroc dance party and a ski week covering 2 weekends), I haven't had a chance to watch the omnibus either.
I've missed so many omnibus Sundays that I find I'm no longer looking forward to waking-up Sunday morning to watch the show, and so I think I've been weaned off Home and Away.
Missing a month's worth of Home and Away will make it hard for me to get back into it; I remember missing a few days once, and when I returned I found myself asking lots of "How did that / When did that happen?" questions. Sure it won't be hard to fill-in the gaps by making assumptions here and there and just hoping that those puzzle pieces fall into place when the characters bring-up things from the past as they often do (that's pretty much how I started-out when I began watching at the end of the 2008 season), but it's my interest in the show that has waned so far into the 'meh' section of my own personal Care Metre that what's left isn't enough to motivate me to do that.
Now this piece of news will delight some of my friends, particularly those who saw my watching of the show as an epic character flaw (one person even decided to wait until we next met to call me a douche upon learning this fact). Oh you guys may be dancing around happily, but don't count this as a major victory just yet; remember I still watch American Idol with an almost religious fervour! I even bought David Cook's album! (winner from the 2008 season) Hah!
But to the others who I found-out also watch Home and Away and with whom I shared moments of conversing about the plot and the people, it looks like we'll have 1 less thing to talk about, and that makes me particularly sad :(
Circumstances do change however; I expect to be in the city again some time this year. And maybe then, just maybe, I'll be back to a place within walking distance of my work, finishing-up at my usual time, strolling home at a steady pace, and just happen to find myself in-front of the TV before 5:30pm on a weekday.
Skiing times
Tomorrow, I catch a bus to a city some 4-and-a-half hours away to stay with friends for the night, before all of us head for the ski fields to enjoy a week-long snowy vacation :)
It's been a long time since I last went skiing, or played-about in the snow. Last time I ever did both was... *thinks about it* ...1999. Damn, 10 years! I've been looking forward to this for a while, and have used it as an excuse to make several sweet purchases in the past couple of weeks: new jacket, beanie, socks, and sunglasses.
However, I'm wondering if my workmates will actually notice my absence.
No, I'm not being emo about things. Rather, I was noticing how embedded and automatic some responses or phrases are in some of my workmates that they either forgot that I'll be away next week, or forgot that we don't work weekends in this country:
Workmate farewell #1: "Enjoy your weekend."
Workmate farewell #2: "See you next week."
Workmate farewell #3: "See you tomorrow." (it's Friday today...)
I guess I'm just reminded of those images of Socially Awkward Penguin when it says something along the lines of: Taxi driver drops you off at the airport. He says, "Enjoy your trip!" You say, "You too!"
If, come Monday morning, my empty chair doesn't remind them, then I hope my out-of-office reply will remind them where I am. Here's what mine's set up to say:
If you're reading this, then I'm out enjoying the snowy slopes of my ski trip... or faceplanting into the snow. Given the winter we've been having, you think it'd be smarter for me to go somewhere sunny eh?
I'll be back in the office Monday 27th July, hopefully in 1 piece, without too many bruises or leg/arm/neck braces.
Very professional, I know.
What I don't know though, is if I'll get internets up there, but I'll try remember to Tweet / update Facebook status daily from my phone with my injury statistics.
So... see y'all in a week-and-a-bit :)
I've just come back from watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince with some friends. I organized the get-together and screening as a birthday present for one of those friends, Claire (the same Claire as previously mentioned in this old story e-mail), and wow, much better than all the previous Harry Potter movie adaptations that came before it.
I give it a thumbs-up for the story-telling: where all the previous movies had a rather disjointed method of telling the story (eg: the 5th movie using those newspaper-esque montages to advance the plot, yet still relying on your prior knowledge of the book to fill-in any gaps), this one cut-out the right bits from the book such that what was left was a good enough story it's own right.
So Happy Birthday Claire! I hope you enjoyed it - I certainly did :)
Anyway, today turned-out to be an interesting and fun day. Not just because of said movie screening to end my day, but also because of the way the day started...
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I visited my doctor this morning! Yes, exclamation mark! It's been years since I last saw the family doctor - whenever I get one of those run-of-the-mill illnesses (winter cold, the flu, SARS) I tend to just let the illness run its course and cheer my body's defences on. I'm still familiar with the whole process of visiting the doctor, but with the swine flu scare gripping the country and wringing every last modicum of usefulness from the national health system, today's visit was a bit more... interesting.
It started like any other early morning visit to the doctor. I entered the building to the reception and waiting area, a little surprised to see that there were many others here already. It may only be 8:35am, but it looks like things are already in full-swing. I made my way towards reception to let them know I've arrived.
Me: "Hi, I'm here for my 8:30 appointment [yeah, I'm a bit late] with Dr Watson."
Receptionist: "OK, I'll just add that in here..."*receptionist types/clicks a few keys/buttons*
Receptionist: "Now, have you been experiencing any flu-like symptoms?"
Well that's new. I don't remember having to answer questions like that, or any questions at all actually, when signing-in before. When I rang-up to make this appointment last week, it was about some itchiness in my joints. But in the weekend between then and now I developed a headache and sore throat. Headache's gone, but sore throat is still there.
It makes sense they'd ask that, being worried about swine flu and all. I better answer the lady's question.
Me: "Well, I have had a sore throat recently..."
Receptionist: "OK, I'm gonna have to ask you to wear a mask then."*receptionist brings up a box of disposable mouth/nose masks*
For a sick person being condemned to wear something that would advertise my sickness - I might as well have worn a sandwich board with "Swine flu party right here!" written on it - I didn't actually mind complying. In-fact, I pulled the mask out of the box with too much enthusiasm, and then proceeded to ask the receptionist for instructions on how to properly wear the thing. Sure, I knew how it works, seeing all those pictures on the news with people wearing the masks, but I was so stoked at the idea of actually putting one of these things on and joining the millions around the world who also have them.
So I took a seat in the waiting area and put the mask on, wearing it a bit too proudly - probably just as well that it covered my mouth so that nobody could see the stupid grin on my face. I looked around at the other patients in the waiting room, and found myself somewhat alone; the only other person in the room with a mask was a small boy who didn't really wear it, but had his mother put it up to his mouth when he was coughing.
I turned to look at the the children's playpen which was situated next to me, only to find it devoid of all books and toys. A sign above the pen stated that: "Books and toys have been removed for the duration of the flu season." They're really taking the whole flu thing seriously.
I wasn't all by my lonesome for very long. No, the next few incoming patients didn't declare any flu symptoms, but one of them turned out to be my friend and sort-of neighbour (she lives up the street from me) Clare (not the same person whose birthday it was and who I'd be watching Harry Potter with later tonight). After she told reception that she was here for her appointment, she looked around the waiting room for a place to sit, and overlooked me... twice! The damn mask has made me all but anonymous, reducing me to a member of the generic group of Sick People Who Need To Wear Masks.
I pulled down the mask, said her name, and waved at her. Then she noticed me and sat down in the chair across from me.
Neighbour Clare: "Hey Em. I didn't notice you with your mask on."
Me: "Heh, I'm actually finding it a bit too fun! I'm expecting news cameras to show up any minute."
Neighbour Clare: "Haha, yeah. I wish I had my camera here so I could take pictures of this."
Me: "I already tried to do that with my cellphone, but the battery's low. And to think, I got this mask when I was just coming in for an itch!"
We talked for a bit until the doctor came out to find me. I followed him into his office where I immediately noticed that he was wearing a mask too, albeit much cooler looking than mine: his looked to be made of much tougher material and had what I'm guessing is a filter (a small cylinder that jutted-out the front of the mask just a little).
After seeing the doctor, I made my way to the pharmacy about a block away to get my prescription medicine. Not only did the doctor get me something for the itches (turns out it was some pretty weak eczema) but also the sore throat (tonsillitis, whoop whoop). I handed over my prescription to the pharmacist, and as I was killing time by browsing the products at the pharmacy, I came across something called "mp3 gel douche".
When time came to pay for my medicine, I was expecting to have to fork over epic amounts of money for each of the meds. I was just taking out the credit card when the pharmacist said, "That'll be $9".
NINE DOLLARS! NINE NEW ZEALAND DOLLARS!! I quickly stuffed the credit card back into my wallet and paid in cash instead! Looking at the invoice, the government subsidy on prescription medicines reduced each item to $3. Yay for state-funded drugs! :D
For just 9 bucks I was able to transform my backpack into my own personal medicine cabinet, with supplies to fight bacterial infections and skin irritation for a month! Just like when I bought a McDonalds Apple Pie to discover they had cut the price of it in half, the $9 price tag for all this medicine made me feel like I had just won something. And to top it all off, I managed to get away with a souvenir: when I was paying for the visit to the doctor, I asked the receptionist if I could keep the mask.
She said yes.
I think my mp3 player is alive
These 2 weeks have been a bit of an emotional roller coaster for me: lots of highs, lots of lows, and not enough time for things to sit still so I can take stock of everything that's happening.
Example of high: ceroc weekend / dance party at Palmerston North and probably everything associated with it: I got to put on a waistcoat and bow tie, visited the Tui Brewery as an aside, and the road trip to/from the event put me in a car with 3 beautiful girls - and no, I'm not just saying that because there's a good chance that at least one of them will stumble across this post (damn Facebook).
Example of low: having a talk with my folks about my apartment-hunting situation and then it dawning on me that I may not be being honest with myself about what it is I really need.
So the low as described above doesn't have a paragraph as large as the good thing I listed, but it really sewed some doubt into me; not just over the apartment-hunting, but over every other shitty little thing which has gotten to me since the dawn of time. Some of those things were really stupid complaints (like this damn itch behind my knee that refuses to go away) but once the doubt crept in, it opened the flood gates behind it and I took a downward spiral into emo-dom.
Throughout this whole ordeal, it feels as if my mp3 player - a Creative ZEN (I got the black 16GB model, not the pink 2GB that seems to show-up by default) - has been able to gauge my mood and put on the appropriate songs to match.
At the beginning: Michael Jackson's Leave Me Alone (yes, I, like everybody else, broke out their old MJ collection), Lifehouse's Simon, Four Letter Lie's A Place Called "Further".
Yesterday, from when I posted "Doesn't know what to do anymore." on Twitter: Lesley Roy's Thinking Out Loud, Maroon 5's Makes Me Wonder, Gary Jules's cover of Tears for Fears' Mad World.
And just this morning: Queen's Under Pressure.
You can of course argue that depending on your mood, you can attach any meaning you want to any song - I'm certainly having that little debate in my mind right now - but I was more surprised at that my mp3 player didn't need any prodding or song-selecting-button-pushing from me to find something that worked at the time. Usually the shuffle function on this thing is really annoying in that it picks the same songs in the afternoon that it played in the morning, making me question just how 'random' the shuffle really is.
You could also argue that maybe my music collection is just so full of songs that cater to a crappy mood that my mp3 player had no choice but to play seemingly appropriate music... which is a worrying symptom of a potential closet emo.
Regardless, I'm working my way through things, mainly thanks to good people who have noticed my mood, shown concern, and have pointed me in the right direction. It's also just as well that I've got a ski trip coming-up in a week: just me, some friends, the snow to break my fall, and a mountain that won't talk back.
The mp3 player will be coming along too :)
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On a side-note, I should really start listening to the lyrics of songs - only this week did I discover that Queen's Save Me is about a breakup!
Leading by example
(The first real test for my can-update-this-blog-from-anywhere update. Fingers crossed...)
I've just come back from a ceroc weekend in a city not too far from my own. I was going to write a bit about it, but I noticed I had the stuff below on backlog. I thought I posted it before I left, but it seems I didn't. Silly me.
Well, I'll get that one out of the way first, then maybe write something about "making it big" in Palmerston North ;)
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On my way to work on Friday morning, I was walking alongside a little girl and her mother. As we approached a crossing at an intersection, the little girl pressed the button to light-up the Walk / Don't Walk lights on the opposite side of the road. The girl was then reminded by her mother to wait by her side until the "green man" (Walk light) lit up.
The traffic in either direction was non-existent at that time. I could've walked lazily across the road without encountering so much as a gust of wind, but I stood my ground. When several others who were walking behind us reached the intersection, they continued forward, jaywalking onto the path of incoming nothings. Tempted to follow them, I continued to hold my ground.
I was rooted to the footpath by a resolution I made with myself several years ago...
During my high school years I often walked with some of my friends after school - they had to board a train at a station which was on the way home for me. After one such walk, I said goodbye as their train was approaching and continued on to a crossing some hundred metres away where the railway barriers were down and the bells were warning of an incoming train. Across the tracks from me were a bunch of kindergarten children being held-back from the tracks both by the loud bell noises and by the instructions given to them from their kindergarten teacher.
Now the train was visibly stopped at the train station, so I thought it safe to cross the tracks. So I did, in-front of all those little kids, in obvious defiance of what their teacher just told them.
After crossing, I looked back at the train and was surprised to see my friends walking my way. Curious as to why they weren't on the train, I half-ran back across the tracks to meet them, then we all ran across the tracks again before the train had a chance to accelerate.
"Geez Em," one of my friends said, "you just crossed the tracks 3 times, and in-front of all those children! What kind of example are you setting?" he joked.
Not a good one I reckon. There I was, blatantly defying what the kindergarten teacher had just told her charges. Their little minds must've been brimming with the unfairness of the situation. I could imagine their questions to their teacher:
Little kid: "You said we shouldn't cross the tracks. Why did that guy just cross the tracks over and over?"
Teacher: "Because he's a bad person and he's going to hell."
OK, so immediately jumping to calling some stranger hell-bound might be a bit of a stretch, but it's the simpler choice when the alternative is having to explain to sub-5-year-old minds the concepts of depth perception, velocity, and perceived risk.
Still, I felt guilty. One of the last thing I want on my mind is the knowledge that some of the numbers in the next generation's pedestrian injuries/fatalities statistics may have been caused by my terrible example.
As an episode of Joan of Arcadia once taught me, "it's not enough to feel guilty. The guilt has to be accompanied by change." And so my change was this:
At designated red/green man crossings, and when children are present, to not cross the road until the green man is lit.
It's not exactly New Year's Resolution material, but it's stuck with me for years; so long now that some friends and family think I'm coy when it comes to crossing the road and are actually getting quite impatient with me.
So there I was that Friday morning on my way to work, waiting for the light to turn green and being responsible for young lives, simply by being more responsible with my own. It made me feel very grown-up.
Internet exposure
The other day I was talking with somebody who had very recently joined Facebook (yes, seems some people don't have Facebook, I'm shocked too). Not having been a big user of social networking websites until that moment, she talked about feeling very exposed: having photos of yourself up there for the world to see, and how the social aspect of your life is now visible to work colleagues or potential employers (as many people do like to keep those sides of their lives separate).
This isn't the first time I've heard these topics brought up when it comes to the social web - one friend in particular mentions these points as arguments for not joining Facebook, which kinda sucks because that person lives in Australia, so the keeping-in-touch stuff is all done through e-mail. Maybe it's time I gave these subjects a bit of thought, I said to myself.
Personally, I haven't had too much fear of putting myself out there on the big bad internet. I run a personal website with my name plastered all over it so that Google can index me, and my e-mail address is just 1 click away from potential spambot loving.
My Facebook profile isn't any better either; everyone on my friends list sees the same thing: photos of me being stupid at parties of weekends past, my sometimes-personal Twitter-sized status updates, and work mates can just as easily read my posts about my latest work-related gripes.
Maybe it is time I started taking the face I show to the internet - which is the face I wear in real-life - a bit more seriously by putting some leash or restraint on it, because throughout my online life (some 14 or 15 years now) it's probably only dumb luck that has protected me from the consequences of being this open. Or maybe, I'm just not a good target: I'm not a big company, I'm not a famous person, I don't have lots of money, I don't wield any power, nor am I any combination of the above.
And I'm definitely not an Attractive Young Female.
OK, let's be realistic: I'm not even 1 of those 3 key words in the paragraph above, but because of what I'm not, I reduce the size of the pool of potential people I could be afraid of on the internet. Creepy old men don't want me, I'm too old for paedophiles and cradle-snatchers, and straight-guy stalkers ain't coming here for their fix.
As for my current employers or anybody in my future to whom I look to for work? Well, lets just hope that they not only want to add some programmer / web designer to their teams, but also want to inject some personality and honesty into their company (because with my ugly mug, those 2 traits are all I've got going for me now).
French chameleon
I was at work just a moment ago - grabbing my headphones (which I left there Friday evening because I had other things/people on my mind) and sending status reports to team leaders (also forgotten for the same reasons as the headphones) - and the city is noticeably full of Frenchies, or at the very least supporters of the French rugby team.
There's an international rugby match going down in the city in just a few hours - New Zealand vs France - and supporters of the away team are doing a good job of letting everybody know they're there. Bright red/white/blue wigs, face paint, clothing, flags and capes are standard fare. So are loud French songs which I can't understand, although I think that's mostly the point.
One group in particular was heckling anybody, in a friendly (ie: non-soccer fan) way of course, that obviously looked like a New Zealand supporter. And, for those who didn't at least look like a supporter of France, sung to loudly and in their general direction. As I headed to work, this group's and mine paths were going to cross.
Ah crap, I thought, I may not look NZ enough to be a New Zealander, but I'm definitely not a Frenchie. So as I neared them, I prepared myself for some form of undecipherable sports chant.
The chant however, never came. Instead, they looked at me approvingly, like a fellow Frenchie, hands raised in greeting to what they must've thought was a fellow France supporter. Hmm, maybe they reached a gap between the verse/chorus of their song I thought, except that the group proceeded to sing to the guy immediately behind me.
As I reached work and sat down at my desk, I was still thinking about why I had been skipped over by that group of France supporters. So I set my red/white bag on my chair, took its contents out, then took off my blue/off-white jacket and draped it over my chair. And when as I had these 2 items in-front of me, it finally clicked.
I am a big fat walking French flag.
Walking through the city for the rest of the day felt a bit weird. Where previously my new winter jacket told all polar winds and sub-zero temperatures to fuck off, it and my bag were now in cahoots, broadcasting my treason in 2 different languages. I guess I should be glad that I didn't run into any groups of NZ supporters, or that I'd be going to the game tonight - a speck of red/white/blue in a sea of black...
Personally, I didn't feel too bad. I'm not a big rugbyhead, but I know NZ has lost all the major games to France in the last 8 years (ie: 2 World Cups). So no guilt on my part for accidentally supporting the team that beats NZ when it matters.
Go France! :P
(a sort-of sequel to my BEDA post, Mother's Day ahead)
Mother's Day (and my mum's birthday) was over a month ago, and what I ended-up getting my mum was a 2-part present to cover both occasions:
The first part was a book, The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger. The second part of the present will be that, provided she likes the book, I'll take her to see the movie adaptation of the film coming out later this year.
I've never read the book myself, but have been meaning to for a long time; it's just that it's always on loan whenever I visit the library. Now that there's a copy on hand, I'll be sure to borrow it from my mum when she's done reading it.
So what should I happen to see when I made my way to work last week? As I walked through the book store from which I bought the book to reach the lift I needed to take to my work, I saw an entire shelf of The Time Traveller's Wife for sale at 50% off...
F*!@$!
When I got the book so many weeks ago, it was the last one on the shelf! It wasn't overly expensive or anything like that, but this has happened to me so often: I buy something, only to find it at a reduced price a week or so later! Most often this happens with clothes, which sucks because I just bought this sweet new jacket for an upcoming skiing trip at full price.
If history chooses to repeat itself - which it often does just to mock me, probably because I never took it seriously as a subject during my high school years (lesson learned: don't shun your studies lest they come back and taunt you later in life, especially physics which will find very mathematical and cold-hearted ways to screw with you) - then I should see this exact jacket on sale a week or 2 before my skiing trip.
The other types of products this happens to me a lot with is computer stuff. Although with the speed at which technology evolves and the prices drop, a certain amount of "it'll be cheaper next week" is to be expected.
I guess it's the world's way of getting its money back off me; because I don't spend a lot or buy things very often, the economy finds some way to take it all back, thus evening-out my semi-frugal nature.
So around the time I was coping with my own battle against swine flu, I spent a lot of time just sitting at home and doing nothing. I tried to do some programming, but thinking on that level became tiring. I thought I could give my art a go, but I wasn't feeling particularly creative. All that was really left for me was to vege out on video games, so at my brother's recommendation, I played Dead Space on his Playstation 3.
To summarize, Dead Space is a sci-fi survival-horror action game set on a large spaceship that seems to have been overtaken by grotesque alien monsters. If you need comparison materials, think Doom 3 meets Event Horizon.
Anyway, as is expected of games in the survival-horror genré, you see a lot of blood, strange writing on walls, undecipherable symbols on walls, said writing/symbols drawn in blood, and any other combination of the above. When the blood on the walls started showing-up in Dead Space, I didn't really think much of it. But when the blood-soacked writing and strange alien symbols started showing-up, I began wondering: "Where are the pictures of dicks?"
As gay as that sounded, let me take a step back to write about an observation I made several weeks before.
The internet is notorious for its childishness. Given the chance, people will create usernames which allude to sex or dicks (case in point: my brother has registered the username 'PhallicThunder' on some forums), create banners depicting dicks (eg: first time my friends took Mario Kart DS online, they competed against others with dicks on their banners), or creatures shaped like dicks or boobs (eg: Spore Creature Creator).
This obviously isn't an internet-only thing. Just the other day I walked past a construction site with grafitti of dicks on the walls. And when taking the lift up to my floor at work where the covers used to protect the walls against scratches are installed, those covers have their fair share of phallic pictography (same thing at my mum's work I've learned).
When I saw our elevator covers with their dick pics, I started to wonder, who in this building would do this? I mean, this is a workplace where the average age of employees is somewhere in the late 40s. If I had to accuse anybody of drawing those, I'd quickly point the finger at myself because a) I'm one of the youngest there, b) I'm pretty childish myself, and c) I really have a hard time imagining my middle-aged managers taking out a pen and scribbling pictures of dicks on the elevator wall covers while they giggle childishly.
So there I was, playing Dead Space, staring at a wall of blood-soaked words, wondering where the hell the dick graffiti was...
I imagine that, with your dying breath, writing warnings or hints to potential survivors about 'cutting off their limbs' or how to survive certain alien attacks takes precedence over posting phallic imagery on the walls of a spacecraft. But then again, when you're on your last legs, why the hell not?
(slightly unrelated, but my favourite example of vandalism has to be the one where they removed some letters from the sign PUBLIC PARKING, such that it read PUBIC KING)
Blog on hiatus
It's only been 3 weeks since my last post, but already I feel as if I haven't written as much as I should have. What's been happening is that I've been working on some behind-the-scenes site updates (ie: programming) to make the blog much easier to update, and updatable from a computer that isn't my own.
All this time I've been updating the site using a rather manual process which can only be done from my own PC. It's worked for me so far, but throughout BEDA and the last month I found myself in situations where I wanted to write something but was very far away from my computer. Other computers were on hand which I could've used, but the way things were, it just wasn't possible.
I had hoped to implement these changes rather quickly, but as history has proved again and again, any updates I want to make are never completed quickly. Some of the updates are in effect, but there are still a lot of kinks that need to be worked out. So for this seemingly-apologetic post, I've continued to use the old way of posting.
And, for the remainder of the week, I'll write-up several posts about the many things I wanted to write about from the last couple of weeks, but kept holding-off on doing because I wanted to write them after I had updated the site.
BRB
What came first: the sickness or despair?
A cold southerly chill straight from the antarctic - and maybe even the cold vacuum of space - is currently blasting my poor little country into submission. As an avid fan of cold days, I've prepared myself to handle the temperatures. Right now I'm wearing with my usual attire, socks, another long-sleeved tops, fingerless gloves and a just-purchased-today beanie, with my legs resting on my 9-fin oil heater while I chow-down on chips and chocolate biscuits. On any other day, this moment would exist in some permutation of my own personal heaven, but there's one more details which puts a big fat dampener on whole situation: I'm sick.
It is approaching winter, it is getting cold, and it just happens to be the month when my sick leave gets reset, so of course I would get sick. This particular sickness has been lingering at the back of my throat for several days now, waiting for the perfect opportunity to rear its ugly head. It started-off as a pretty weak thing, but I think it's been fueled into the major annoyance it is now because of my state of mind this past week.
You see, on Wednesday morning as I was reading the paper while eating breakfast, I came across an article which said the Dymocks on Lambton Quay is closing down (for those who don't know, Dymocks is a chain of bookstores throughout New Zealand, and Lambton Quay is a street name). There have been a lot of retail closures throughout the country because of the recession, but Dymocks, "The booklovers bookstore" (as their motto goes), came as a major surprise to me. Dymocks has been as much a part of Lambton Quay as blue is to the sky and as far as I'm concerned has existed in that spot since the English settled this country.
Not only is it a landmark, but it's also a bookstore. While I'm no bibliophile, my love of writing is fueled by my enjoyment of reading and the feeling a good book gives me that is the urge to go out and start telling my own stories. I don't even buy books that often (I'm more of a library slut, and my last book purchase was from a competitor), yet to hear that this particular bookstore was closing down was like a stab to the book-loving part of my heart, and so without the kindle for my writing fire, I began to despair.
So there I am at mid-week, both sick and sad, one possibly the cause of the other, but I have no idea which one it could be. On the one hand, I become more susceptible to illness when my mood is particularly negative; it's like being emo allows my immune system to become more porous and thus permeable to bad bacteria and viruses. On the other, being sick causes me to feel worse and tints my entire world and outlook with a drab palette; unejoyable days at work feel longer, every wind chills to the bone, and even my favourite foods can lose their taste. One paves the way for the other and vice versa, creating some sort of feedback loop that decided mid-day Friday to explode.
Friday night had a dinner with friends to use-up 2-for-1 dinner vouchers we had accumulated before they expire, and a sort of well-wishing for one of us who is headed-off overseas to represent New Zealand in some sport I still don't completely understand. I was looking forward to it the whole week, but around lunchtime on Friday everything started to go downhill from there.
Lunch didn't feel all that great because my throat started to feel like it was swallowing sandpaper, and the shopping afterwards for a new beanie, gloves, and jacket for an upcoming ski trip left me noticing how cold it was getting outside and how useless my jacket was to protect me from the elements.
Back at work, the new project I'm currently assigned to just didn't hold the same excitement as it usually does, and so the afternoon dragged. When work ended and it was time for dinner, I didn't head straight to the restaurant. Instead, I took a bit of a wander in an attempt to lift my mood before I had to face everybody. It wasn't a complete success.
Long story short: I managed to muster enough energy, sarcasm, wit and one-liners to last dinner without looking too ill, but after that I had to take a back seat to proceedings lest I collapse or something.
That, and told myself I had to get home and let whatever sickness I had run its course. I've already been nicknamed 'ebola monkey' at work for my ability to be the most cold/flu-stricken person and the most likely vector for infecting others with said cold/flu. I didn't want to give this group a reason to continue the nickname here.
So I'm looking for a scapegoat, but it's like asking about the chicken and egg situation. Now I've just been told that I should get some more sleep because I look like a zombie. That compliment just made me notice my throat flare-up again.
It's a vicious cycle...
Slipping under the radar
"Before you sue me for defamation, in my defence, teasing or joking is one of the ways I show my affection. It's only with my friends that I joke about their mothers, so the fact that I just joked about yours, and written about you twice in the past 2 weeks, goes to show how much I like you."
And those were my last words before dial-up girl - tired of being misrepresented in my blog - killed me with her cold hard stare. Yup, I'm blogging from the afterlife which, oddly enough, looks a lot like work, so I must be in hell.
So what do you do when you're in a temporarily ethereal state? I dunno about you, but I start thinking about the hard questions: Why are we here? If you were given the opportunity to travel back in time and talk to yourself when you were much younger, could you go through with it? What would you say? OK, so I never really thought about that stuff, but instead I thought about how I've slipped under the radar.
All this reflecting was started by a dream I had a few nights ago about my dance classes.
Come the end of May I'll have attended ceroc lessons for a year. In the dream, everybody whose name I know and is still attending classes (which isn't a lot) is going to some private dance party that I didn't know about. When I went to ceroc last night, several things hinted that my dream might actually be true; a couple of people asked me if I was going to some dance party that I had never heard of. I intended to ask my ceroc friends about it, but just forgot. So when I got home I did a bit of Facebook stalking and it turned-out that yes, my ceroc friends were going to this previously-unheard-of dance party.
I didn't really feel surprised - not getting blindsided by surprises is a skill that comes with age - but I did kinda feel left out. It also reinforced a slight 'on the outside looking in' feeling I've had when I see some of the groups at ceroc.
My 2 ceroc friends have managed to make a big impression with many of the others there and so are very much a part of those groups. I guess it helps when you have some redeeming or memorable traits: one of those 2 is the ever cheerful hug nazi, the other looks like the spitting image of Edward Cullen from Twilight. As for me, I don't exactly do anything to draw attention to myself: I dance well enough, I don't look like any actors, and I don't grope my dance partners or stare at their chest all day (I've been told of some creepy guys who do).
That's not to say I haven't been a total social failure: I've made another 2 solid friends through dancing (one of whom is amazing baking girl), and maybe twice that number in acquaintances who'd I'd stop to talk to if we ran into each other on the street. But the rest of the time, I'm just another familiar face.
I'm not really complaining here - just stating facts - as I do bring this upon myself: I don't go to every event on my calendar, I tend to stick with the people I know, and I do enjoy a quiet night at home. I'm more of a 'go where I'm needed' type.
I think I do this because I focus so much on the few friends that I do have. It's this core bunch that I will travel long distances for, re-organize my schedule to meet with, or go to a movie or exhibit again despite having seen it myself so that they have company when they go. Sometimes it requires a lot of effort, which is probably why I keep the number of friends I do have to a low number lest I get gray hairs or other sign of aging from trying to make too many people feel like they're worth their weight in gold.
So yeah, I think about them a lot. I try not to give them too much to worry about when they think of me, but I can't really stop that when it comes to it. The last time I ever think I worried them was several years ago when I had a seizure. My friends were organizing some get-together, and when they were unable to reach me, one of them tried ringing my house:
*phone rings*
My dad: Hello?
Friend: Hi. Is Em there?
Dad: Uh, no. He's in the hospital.
Friend: Oh...
The thing was, my dad never elaborated on why I was in the hospital, letting my friends' imaginations come up with all sorts of possibilities. The truth of it was that in my flu-induced state, my temperature reached an almighty high (40C / 104F) to which my body responded by shutting-down and resetting itself, a by-product of which was the seizure.
I tended to downplay the seizure because, well, it wasn't that bad. Before the seizure: my head hurt, I felt warm, colours and lights were swirling in my vision, and I couldn't even guide a spoonful of food into my mouth properly (the seizure occured over breakfast). Afterwards: my head was clear, my body felt cool, my vision was restored, and I could tie my shoes - the seizure was the best thing that happened to me during my flu!
I'm not suggesting everybody who's sick go out and have a seizure. A few years after that incident, I witnessed what a seizure looked like from the outside when a lady at my favourite bakery (which I have dubbed 'The Pie Shop' for having won a Best Pie In NZ award) collapsed and seized-up while making an order. It didn't look pretty - it was actually quite frightening - so it's not the sort of thing I'd be encouraging people to go out and experience.
I like to show I care by making jokes and sharing a laugh - I basically live by the motto "the day your friends stop making fun of you, is the day they stop caring about you." But to prevent myself from imploding, I only extend this philosophy to a close-knit bunch of people.
So I'm one of those quality over quantity freaks; sue me.
In a previous post I talked a bit about the concept of Three Thirtyitis. After that, you should understand what I then mean when I'm suffering from 10am-itis.
My Twitter update sums it up rather well:
Woke-up early to meet friends for breakfast, is now fighting sleep by blasting American Idol tunes through headphones d(O_O)b
So this morning I woke-up a lot earlier than usual (1 whole hour! *gasp*) so I could meet-up with friends for breakfast before work, and on a Monday morning too! The attraction of such an early-week early-morning get-together was to see people we don't often see. Well, that was the premise from the point-of-view of the organizer. For me, I'd been lucky enough to actually see the others rather recently.
Despite that, I made it through the cold, the rain, and the soul-crushing darkness that is the overcast cloud cover which has blocked sunlight from the city for several days now. I and one of the other train-riding guys caught the same train and made it in early. The next to come along lives a couple of suburbs away. The last person was actually the one who lives in the city and is the closest to the breakfast venue... typical. It was good though: breakfast was alright, company as always was great, lots of lols were had.
But wow, I feel so drowsy right now: my eyelids are being drawn to the ground by more than just gravity and my concentration is so far detached from my mind that it's almost like having an out-of-body-experience. I would normally eat something sugary to keep my consciousness afloat, but this doesn't feel like a blood-sugar thing. If this were after lunch, maybe I'd try sneak-in a power nap, but that's not gonna look so good having just gotten into work. So instead I've settled for playing tracks from this seasons American Idol contestants a bit louder than usual through my headphones.
Surprisingly the volume therapy is working wonders. The only downside was when a phone call came through and I picked up and put the receiver to my ear while my headphones were still on.
Unfortunately for me, I'm one of those people that needs about 8 hours of sleep a night to function at 100%. I'm not somebody who can either operate on less sleep or supplement rest with coffee or a wide variety of energy drinks. I came across several of the latter kind at university, or at least discovered that a lot of my friends could also fit into that category. One of the guys always kept a 6-pack of V energy drink at their workstation and ended-up collecting them to create a massive tower. Wandering around my floor at work, I see one of the older guys doing the same thing with his takeaway cofee cups.
All that's left for me is to catch up on lost sleep tonight. I only fear that I'll fall asleep on the train home - gently rocked by the moving carriage, lulled by the sound of the electric engine - and miss my stop. I've done that before...
m(_ _)m ZZZ
The economics of friendship
First of all, I have a Miley Cyrus song stuck in my head because after watching this parody, I went and watched the original, before watching the parody again. So technically I have a parody of a Miley Cyrus song stuck in my head. Hmm, still doesn't help my case.
Secondly, I was walking to work yesterday morning with a friend - the same friend who has dial-up and mocked me for writing about My Feelings on this blog - who found even more reasons to divorce herself of my friendship. Last week she said my life wasn't scandalous enough to warrant us hanging out. This week, as a consequence of my non-scandalous life, she complained that our walks together are so draining that she needs to grab another coffee afterwards to wake her up for the second time for the day (she feeds on scandal like a plant feeds on sunlight. My presence obviously starves her). "What, is there not enough caffeine in my breath to keep you awake?" I joked.
So along the way, whenever a coffee shop passed us by I offered to buy her a coffee. She refused of course, knowing that I was only doing this to annoy her, but after maybe the 3rd coffee joint she came up with an excuse for her refusals: "I can't! Because if you spend money on me, and I haven't got any money to spend on you, then it creates an imbalance in the bank of friendship." (OK so that's not the exact quote, but it went something like that).
In response I asked if she wanted to apply for an overdraft, or hear of various loan repayment schemes (I would have taken payments from her mum, but I kept that line to myself), but it got me thinking about whether or not there was something more to her choice of metaphor; whether there is some sort of economic model I could apply to this situation.
I looked to the internet to see if somebody else has tried to do a similar thing, and several people had. Some were more philosophical than others, some were very technical and I even came across a few scientific papers on the subject. One page seemed to sum it up best with our good friend, the law of supply and demand:
One of the first things they teach you in introductory economics is the law of supply and demand. A price equilibrium is reached at the point where supply and demand intersect. All that means is that both parties are getting what they want for what they think is a fair price.
I guess you could say friendship is established at that equilibrium point where both parties are happy with whatever they're getting from the other person.
The kind of relationship between dial-up girl and I is simple, but there is a mutual equality to it. We don't really organize to see one another but talk when we do, usually at friends' parties or when our paths happen to cross. Dial-up girl however has a tendency to feel a tremendous amount of guilt at the smallest infractions, and so my joke of buying her a coffee to make-up for the boring-ness that is my life was perceived as throwing a little - but just enough by her standards - imbalance into the equation.
[L]ooking at friendship as an economic transaction might seem a little cold and callous, but really, it's what we were all taught when we were younger. Life is about give and take. You can't just give give give or else you'll burn out. It's also the trademark of a sucker. And if you take take take, eventually people are going to realize that they're not getting anything out of your friendship. We should always be aware of what we're offering to other people. If we look at it like that, it'd be easier to understand why people interact with us in a certain way.
http://qnzalvin.xanga.com/624082638/economics-of-friendship/
I can think of a few people who could learn a little from watching what they offer. Hug nazi in particular used to give too much, and then started feeling bad when people stopped accepting her generosity, thinking that people didn't want her help anymore - she failed to understand that those on the receiving end started to accumulate some guilt at having taken so much. Several younger siblings of families I know often take too much, and then become ungrateful when the charity comes into question or stops - they fail to realize the effort being made by the gift-giver.
So what did I learn? 1) I shouldn't have joked so much about the coffee. 2) I totally should've said I'd take repayments from her mum. 3) No more coffee for dial-up girl :P
Static shocks, my online diary, and the end of Blog Every Day April. OH MY!
For my final post in Blog Every Day April, I give you this multi-part epic; a reward to my readership (all 2 of you) to digest and (hopefully) enjoy.
Static electricity
On the way to/from work is a public access elevator located at the back of a bookshop that can take me up to the street level that has my work building. I don't often take this lift, I instead take the stairs beside it (I only have to climb/descend 4 stories) as walking to/from work is the only real exercise I get. On the occasions that I do take this lift (eg: am full from lunch so don't feel like going up 4 stories worth of stairs in-case a wrong bend somewhere causes it to rupture), I approach the moment with dread.
There's nothing really wrong with the lift (OK, I lie, the lift often breaks down and the 'out of service' sign is an all too familiar sight) and on the days that it works it works as expected. But it's not the lift I'm afraid of; it's the 'call lift' button that scares me.
The call lift button is a small plastic button embedded in a large metal plate, with a woollen carpet on the floor leading up to it, and thanks to the air conditioning system the atmosphere is always dry. If you don't hit the button directly (which is every time because of it's size) it's a perfect recipe for getting static shocks.
Static electricity frightens me.
When I was about 6 or 7 years old I had a slot car set. It had a pretty basic figure-8 track, nothing fancy, but it was what I had so I made do with it. One day I was playing around with the cars on the track, trying to see how fast I could make them go. Their top speed was OK, but I wanted to make them go faster.
My mind made the connection that the speed the cars went was proportional to the amount of energy (current, if you want to get technical) it received that flowed through the controller; the harder my finger was squeezing the trigger, the less resistance was being applied to the current going to the car, and the faster the car went. Somehow I got the idea that if it had More Power, say, from an additonal electrical source like a second power point, then the car might go even faster. And so I acted on this idea with all the reckless abandon of my age.
Details escape me at this point, but the result was that I was holding something conductive as it was shoved into the power point. The power point bit back and gave me the most painful shock I have ever felt. Tears were shed, and from that day on I had a very healthy respect for electricity.
Several other events since then have reinforced this notion: at age 9 or 10 during a school trip to a farm I got zapped by an electrical fence, and at age 17 our physics teacher got us all to wash and link our hands to create a human circuit hooked-up to a hand-crank generator under his control.
While not on par with the shocks of mains electricity, getting jolted by static electricity is a braincell or 2 away from the memories of the slot car experiment, which in turn are a braincell or 2 away from memories of extreme pain, and so it's something I avoid if at all possible. I often keep a cautious distance from the static electricity balls that you find in science exhibitions in museums, and I would rather climb 4 stories than risk getting shocked by the call lift button. When I do have to press that button, I pull out my cellphone and use the protruding aerial to press the button for me.
Yesterday I did just that and drew an odd stare from one of my workmates. I told him about how that button keeps shocking me, and he started talking about it in a "Me too!" sort of way - reinforcing the notion that that button is to be avoided at all costs. I doubt that getting himself zapped by mains electricity is somewhere in his past, but it was good to know I wasn't the only person becoming wary of that button.
My online diary
Despite all the Facebook-stalking that goes on, only a handful of my friends have caught-on to the fact that I've been writing to my blog every day for this entire month. One of them didn't even know until this morning when, as we were walking to work, I told them. "I did notice the extra blog activity," she said, "but I never clicked on the link because I'm on dial-up."
Getting passed the obvious shock caused by the comment about dial-up, I had to recount a few of the things that I blogged about over the previous month to let her know what was going on. "Awww, is it like your online diary Em; do you write about Your Feelings?" she asked in a mocking tone.
I thought long and hard about that question, before coming to the conclusion that yes, it has turned into my online diary and yes, I do talk about my feelings.
Taking a quick tally of the things I have written about, here's what we find:
- meeting my neighbours
- getting fooled on April Fool's Day
- how it irks me when some people talk about healthy eating like they're diet pros (or maybe it was my repressed jealousy at, no matter what I do, statistically I'm going to die long before they do)
- how my lips dry-up when the seasons change
- how flu makes me emo
- that my IT job is nothing like 24
- Outlook's out-of-office reply
- Tips for business bloggers x4
- BEDA buddies x2
- how I learned I'm not that great of a singer
- how buying CDs makes me feel old
- my unique approach to hugging
- my love of cold days
- Mother's Day
- my unique approach to small talk
- Blogger's block
- how I make a fool of myself by eating too much
- the impact BEDA has had on my sleeping patterns
- the things I miss from city living x3
It gets pretty personal in places, and you could learn more about me from reading this blog than taking the time to befriend me in real-life before I finally trust you with this sort of information. So I don't know why I'm entrusting the internet with this sort of information. Then again, nothing in there is particularly damaging to me (except maybe the electricity-is-my-kryptonite thing, and I've just given you a tool to use against me if you were planning to kidnap and torture me).
Re-telling a few of those stories to her though, she wasn't all too impressed by the lack of scandal that takes place in my blog. Then again, this is a friend who rates real-life against Gossip Girl. So, as a fan of Gossip Girl, I asked her what would I have to do to compete? The answer:
Her: Develop a drug habit, after you were on rehab for a previous drug habit, and then sleep with your teacher, who you thought wasn't your teacher anymore because you think she's going to be fired, and so does she, except that neither of you know that she actually won't get fired.
Suddenly my life becomes insignificant and doesn't compare. I think this friend will have to divorce herself of me once she learns that I'll never be able to do, equal, or exceed the expectations she has set above.
The end of Blog Every Day April
I did it. I finally did it. What started out as something I stupidly thought would be really easy to do has instead turned into a writing challenge which has both punished and rewarded me at the same time.
The punishing parts:
- I have had to organize several of my days around blogging so that I can meet the daily deadline. Quite often I would find myself blogging from as early as noon so that I could get it done before whatever event I had scheduled in the evening. Sometimes I would think about it in advance, quietly letting the potential threads of each topic be born, strech, and die in my head. In short: my days sometimes revolved around the blog.
- I have had very few good nights of sleep since taking up this challenge. Particularly weekdays, but this is mainly a time management thing. The bags under my eyes have had an entire month to puff up and leave me looking like a zombie most days.
The rewarding parts:
- Blogging every day has increased the speed at which ideas can more easily flow into a readable form, and writing has become easier for me.
- I've found out that my friends actually do read what I write. For those not of my Facebook ilk, I have a Facebook app that duplicated this blog onto Facebook, or posts summaries with links to the full stories here. I've had several of my friends write comments to these posts over the month, and I've learned a few things about them in turn.
- I've become more observant of the things around me and at the same time more cynical of the most mundane things. When sarcasm supposedly flows through your veins like it does mine, this is actually a plus.
- I've made some new internet acquaintances: my BEDA buddies! :D We read each other's stuff and comment on them from time to time.
- I participated in a community activity, and at times it really felt like I had things to contribute to other peoples' lives.
So there's no gold star, no certificate of participation, not even a piece of cake as a reward for what I and other BEDA'ers have done. It was something cool we could do, a commitment we gave ourselves to illustrate a number of points about our abilities. Not all of us made it for the entire month, but if you came out of it feeling pretty good about yourself, what more could you ask for?
Will I do such a thing again? Maybe. At least the next time I can draw upon this experience to make a much more informed decision, instead of accepting the challenge with a smug 'I can do this easy!' attitude.
Will I continue to blog about inane things on an if-not-daily-then-semi-regular basis? You bet!
OH MY!
And that, as one of my BEDA buddies likes to say, is the end of my story :)
Three thirtyitis
Those in the Australia / New Zealand part of the world are likely to be familiar with the words three thrityitis. It's a term used by the Continental cup-a-soup ad campaign in these countries to promote the drinking of their soup products at 3:30pm - the time of day when concentration in the work place hits a low.
It may not be the exact time of day for everyone, but it's in that mid-afternoon slot where things just seem to slow down and mistakes are often made. One time I saw it in effect was a few years ago when I was getting my degree framed.
It was a Thursday afternoon and I was at my desk when my cellphone started ringing. I answered and was greeted by the voice of a young lady ringing to let me know that my degree had been framed and I could pick it up from their shop.
Her: Oh, but we'll be closing early in the afternoon on Saturday, so don't come in tomorrow."
Me: Tomorrow? Tomorrow's Friday. You're still open on Friday right?
Her: Huh? Oh whoops, yes you can come in tomorrow. The closing stuff was meant for Saturday.
After that phone call was over, I took a look at the time: 3:38pm. Roughly 3:30-itis time.
I went to pick up my framed degree the following day. I was so excited about it I almost went to buy the person who called me some of that Continental Cup-a-soup stuff, as both a thank you and a joke.
Nowadays I face a different sort of battle at around 3:30: staving-off sleep.
We learn that eating large meals can make you sleepy. I learned this lesson during my university years, where I would eat lunch on campus. I never brought my own food, so I would eat from the places that were on campus, which weren't always serving the healthiest food options available. Most importantly (but I didn't know it then) was that it was the stuff that I was choosing to eat and the amounts of it which made me fall asleep faster.
So there I was, eating too much of the kind of food that would in lesser amounts still easily knock me unconscious. During my first year at university, I was lucky enough to not have too many classes too close to lunch time, but when I did, I was often drowsy and using all of my remaining concentration from keeping my eyelids from closing. All I needed was a 15 minute nap, and on the occasions that I did succumb to slumber, at the end of it I would feel great and refreshed. The problem lay in the lead-up to the nap where I sometimes spent 20 minutes trying to not fall asleep.
20 minutes fighting sleep + 15 minutes sleeping = most of the lecture gone.
To fight this problem in second year, I went to my friends' psychology lecture which was sandwiched between lunch and my afternoon classes. It was a big class, so 1 more person - particularly one who doesn't take psychology - wouldn't be noticed. There, I would sit with them, lay my head on the desk, and fall asleep.
This didn't always work however. I often found the psychology lectures quite interesting and at times stayed awake throughout the entire thing to learn a little. One time, they even brought in a hypnotist! That was cool. Suffice it to say, this wasn't my most successful solution to the sleepiness problem.
In my 3rd year, I tried to get a nap on the couches in this common area where my friends would often hang out. It was a bit noisy, so naps weren't always easy to come by.
In my 4th and final year, the 4th year BIT (Bachelor of Information Technology) students had their own computer lab, and there I would eat my lunch, and then take a nice nap afterwards. It was a relatively quiet environment, so sleep was easy to come by. It was the best solution I had come up with.
Unfortunately, I can't replicate this solution at my work. If I happen to make the silly mistake of eating too much for lunch and then have an afternoon with either not much to do or with a task that really isn't all that engaging, then the drowsiness starts to return, and I find it hard to fight back. Once, I had been caught-out by my team leader, and on a few occasions my work mates have jolted me awake, either by coming up to me and saying something loudly, or ringing my phone.
If I do eat too much sugars (carbohydrates and what not) I can get hypoglycaemic quite easily due to the over-abundance of insulin my body makes. I'm like an anti-diabetic according to my diabetic friend, but am still susceptible to the same problems she faces if she doesn't watch what she eats. The thing is, she's the one that takes the insulin shots; all I have to do is alter my diet - smaller meals more often, don't chow-down the carbs at lunch, etc - so I feel quite bad when I make the mistake and eat too much at lunch and then start feeling drowsy afterwards.
Now that I do know a diabetic, I feel I'm not doing the best I can with the luck I've been given, and so berate myself every time this happens. I really have to fix this and stick with it; if not for the approval of my diabetic friend, then for my own well-being.
Hello low-speed internet
My last and final gripe with having moved back to the suburbs: the slow slow internets.
I always suspected that the kind of broadband we were getting out in the suburbs was slow, but I never really knew how bad it was until I moved into the city. On a good day in the suburbs, if you wanted to watch a YouTube clip that was 1 minute long, you would have to load the page, then pause the clip at the beginning, and return to it 4 minutes later so that you can get smooth playback from start to finish.
That was the general formula: multiply the video length by 4 to get the average loading time. We didn't even bother with high-quality or high-def clips, for streaming anyway; we always downloaded those with some multiple-connection download manager.
Anyway, when I made it to the city, one of the first things I had organized was the broadband (I actually had it set up before I got a fridge in... priorities, I know) and once the computer was set up, did a YouTube test. The difference? I could stream low-quality YouTube video!
I could load videos left and right, download podcasts, and have a torrent running in the background, all at the same time. I had finally caught up to technology as at 3 years ago, and it was great.
So what self-respecting IT guy would be caught with a slow internet connection? Unfortunately for me, that's kind of out of my hands, and no amount of shouting from the citizens of this country at the national telco has done any good to get it sorted.
And although it's not my problem, the slow internet thing got me thinking about other kinds of IT guy myths which I've been doing wrong. I mean, I don't have a digital camera, I don't have a smart phone (my cellphone doesn't even do + code dialing...), I'm not an early adopter (I only got the Xbox360 a couple of months ago) and I don't have a USB flash drive. I was probably the last of my group to get onto Facebook (a year of peer pressure finally got the better of me), I don't have any shirts which make references to internet fads, and I got a Twitter account only 2 months before Oprah did.
I think I'm just too cautious in my ways. While that doesn't explain the lack of digital camera, I often take the 'wait and see' approach to things such that by the time I've waited and seen, the thing in question has already hit the mainstream. Now that I'm looking for an apartment to buy in the city I just left, I think a cautious approach is a good thing to have. Who knows, maybe a cautious approach could've averted the subprime lending collapse.
So, I've taken my time, I've thought a lot, thought of everything I got and apart from blatantly ripping Cat Steven lyrics I've learned enough about what it is I am looking for in my own apartment. Amongst those things: high speed internet and a high-pressure shower. Everything else, as my favourite quote says, is negotiable ;)
Hello low-pressure water
Following on the back of yesterday's blog post, here I thought I'd mention a couple of other things that I'll be missing from my time in the city (and looking forward to when I return).
High-pressure water for showers
This was something I never knew I had until I moved into the city: shower water that can cut through my thick mop of hair and reach my scalp. At first I thought the water pressure at my old apartment was too strong, but, as with everything else, I got used to it. Then, when I spent a weekend with the family soon after moving out and had a shower, I was surprised at how weak the old shower was.
For years I had been showering with this water pressure, but only in that weekend did I notice that the rain does a better job than this! The water just hit the top of my hair and then slid away as my slightly oily hair built a protective shield over my hair which this low low low pressure water couldn't penetrate. No wonder I like rainy days; it's because only then am I properly washing my hair!
No more trains
No longer having to schedule my life around the train timetable was probably the biggest plus of city living. It meant I could spend more time out when I was with friends, most of whom live in the city too. Dance classes were also something I could extend without the trains; previously I'd cut the classes a bit short so I could catch the train home at a reasonable hour of the night. Although one thing I learned was that soon after the time I would normally leave to catch a train, my dancing would start to deteriorate. So maybe it was a good thing I caught the train when I did.
I could also enjoy other events held in the city a bit more when I didn't have to think about how long it would take for me to get to the station.
Home and Away
If you told me that I'd end-up getting hooked on a soap opera if I left home, I never would've believed you. But that's exactly what happened.
I normally leave work just after 5pm, and with a 20 minute walk to my former apartment, it positioned me perfectly to watch the pre-news show, which happened to be Home and Away - before that it was The Biggest Loser. After work, sometimes I just wanted to vege-out in-front of the TV, and given the timing of my return, Home and Away became the show I wound-down to.
With the train schedule, I can't watch this show without leaving work early, but I don't exactly feel like going to work earlier to make up my hours. Luckily for me the national TV station has a Home and Away omnibus on Sunday morning which plays all the previous week's episodes back-to-back, so I don't have to miss a thing!
Hello hay fever
So I'm out of the city - back with the family in the suburbs as I make my next move for buying a place - and having now spent 2 nights back in my old bed and room, I've noticed something here that I've been missing during my time in the city: hay fever.
The family house isn't like some sort of rural setting surrounded by rolling hills without a neighbour for miles; it's a pretty average suburban setting, but the house has it's own Lawn in both a Front and Back Yard, as well as Bushes and Trees around the back. When you wake up you hear Birds and can see Trees out my window. Whereas my now-former-apartment was a massive concrete block with just 1 big tree outside (probably only there because it was there before the building was built and so resource consent couldn't be obtained to cut it down) and the sounds of chirping have been replaced by the sirens of emergency vehicles. But in the city I never really get hay fever.
It's kind of sad to think that my body is better suited to an environment where the air is full of cigarette smoke and car exhaust than it is with whatever stuff nature throws into it. It wasn't always like this though: I remember when cigarette smoke used to make me physically ill. As a child when I spent too much time around smoking adults (like when my parents went to a friend's house and brought me along) I'd spend the next day vomiting into a bucket. Now, the only consequence of spending time with smokers is that I have to send my clothes to the laundry because the smoke has infused itself into the fabric.
It's too bad my body can't do the same thing with pollen or whatever it is in the air that throws my immune system off-kilter.
Short blog post tonight as I should get some sleep; I have to get used to catching the trains into the city again O_o
Oh, and I have, in just this month so far, surpassed the the most number of posts I have made to this blog in a single year (26 posts this month now, 25 posts in 2006).
One more week to go...
...of Blog Every Day April.
While I've never written it here, I've admitted to several people face-to-face that this blogging thing is a lot more difficult than I first thought. How hard could it be to come up with something to write every day? I thought, and it was that attitude that I had when I went into this thing. Now, I'm looking at the light at the end of the tunnel that is the month of May and anticipating that month greatly as it creeps closer towards me.
Just because of this blogging thing, April has felt like the longest month in a long time.
Before all this, when my routine was pretty much dictated for me - wake up, eat breakfast, go to work, eat lunch, do more work, come back home, eat dinner, sleep - the days passed by faster than ever and it was days like that which felt as if they were being wasted. Now, with the days seeming to pass much slower, it doesn't feel like I'm wasting so much time.
So what has BEDA injected into my routine that has caused this perception of the slowing of time? I can't really pinpoint what it is, but I'm going to make some guesses.
Firstly, it's caused me to lose a lot of sleep.
Often I find myself typing into the wee hours of the night as I attempt to get the next post for the day out before the clock strikes midnight. I upload it to my website, and then go make sure the blogging application I use on Facebook has picked it up and then I manually post it so that it shows up as part of my activity for my friends to read it. Then I duplicate it over to my blog on the Maureen Johnson Ning network so other members of BEDA (most notably my BEDA buddies) can read and comment on it. By the time this is all done, it's probably just after midnight, meaning I cut my sleep short by maybe an hour. Multiply this by the number of days in April thus far (excluding the rare occasion when I write it ahead of time because of other commitments in the day) and that's a lot of hours of sleep lost.
So there's the possibility the days seem longer because I'm sleeping less.
Secondly, I'm taking the time to observe the world around me a lot more than usual.
Taking the time to notice more so that I might use it as material for this blog has got me thinking more about those things. I dissect and disseminate everything that might at first seem blog-worthy and maybe try to write a few sentences on the subject in my head to see how the idea will play out. This gets me wondering and using my internal dialogue a lot more, and I think it's this kind of active thinking that has time slow down some. Idle wandering thoughts tend to take me out of the moment such that when I return, it's several minutes later and I've forgotten what I was doing.
So there's also the possibility that active thinking is stretching the time I have available to me.
Lastly, BEDA has a clearly defined end goal.
When working towards a goal, I tend to feel that a lot more time is spent in the present, the now. Say you've got a job that isn't doing it for you today and all that you want is for your shift to end or for the clock to hit 5pm. The moment seems to drag and that ending is always too far away for your liking. I'm not saying that Blog Every Day April is like a crappy job, but looking forward to something always makes it seem farther away. A more light-hearted example might be of children waiting for Christmas morning to come so that they can see what Santa has left for them under the tree.
So maybe it's just one of those things, or maybe it's a combination of all of the above. All I know is that BEDA has been good for me: my friends (and maybe random passers-by) have gotten to know a bit more about me, I've gained BEDA buddies and got to feel like I was part of a larger community in the process, and I feel as if this month has not been wasted.
All this guesswork as to my changing perception of time has reminded me of this quote from Einstein - a man who at least knew what he was talking about:
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity.
Given that, BEDA is more akin to a hot stove than a pretty girl; a hot stove that has made me feel good about myself.
Too. Much. Food.
Yesterday my dad and I were going to have lunch together, but we didn't know where we were gonna go. My dad suggested we try a place neither of us had been to: a place called Burger Fuel. So we met up, made our way to Burger Fuel, and having never been there before, I used my knowledge of other popular burger places to make a guess as to what might be a good lunch for me.
Big mistake.
What I ended-up doing was underestimating the size of the burgers they served, so was very surprised when I was given one of the largest burgers I had ever seen. I only just managed to eat it all, before walking ever so slowly back to work. OK, 'walking' is the wrong word for it; 'waddling' is a better description of the movement I used to get myself back to work.
Suffice it to say, I didn't feel hungry again until moments before a planned dinner with my friend... where I made the same mistake all over again.
This time the place was called Lone Star. Like Burger Fuel, I had never been here before, so it was a good day for me to try new places. And just like at Burger Fuel, I underestimated the size of the portions they served here. Despite being warned by my friend who sounded like a Lone Star veteran, I only had myself to blame when they placed in-front of me the largest plate of food I had ever seen.
This time I never finished my food, nor did my friend finish hers. It didn't seem possible for any normal human being (that is, a person with 1 stomach) to complete the meals they served here in one sitting. I must've made it only 1/3 of the way through my meal before my insides just gave up.
Enough! Enough! I could hear my stomach say. You've already had 1 huge meal that almost killed me, now you want to do it AGAIN in THE SAME 24 HOUR PERIOD!!!??
During the walk home I poured all of my concentration into not throwing up. I was probably waddling again, but I didn't care; I would have used any movement, no matter how ridiculous, that had the lowest chance of puncturing a hole in my stomach, and the highest chance of getting me home. If it's good enough for the penguins, it's good enough for me.
So that was pretty much the recurring theme for yesterday. What makes this whole ordeal even stupider is that this isn't the first time this has ever happened to me.
Rewind to almost a year ago. I was being invited out to a group dinner by someone I had recently met through the ceroc dance classes I had just started attending (I've called this person 'amazing baking girl' in a previous post, so will continue to call her so here). Amazing baking girl took us all out to place called HK BBQ which I haven't been to before (seeing a pattern here? New restaurants must be a precursor to gluttonous behaviour). But it wasn't HK BBQ that killed me. You see, everyone wanted dessert afterwards, which HK BBQ doesn't do. Down the road however, was a place called Strawberry Fare - a place that had earned almost legendary status with me after hearing so many great stories about it from so many other people - and that was where we went next.
Not only was Strawberry Fare another place I had never been to, but it had one of the best cheesecakes I had ever eaten. Yes, I ate ALL of my cheesecake against the advice of my stomach.
Stop eating! it would say, You've reached capacity! We'll have to store any further food in your throat if you don't stop!
STFU stomach!, I would tell it, After all these years of hearing about this place I am FINALLY here so I am going to enjoy it and let this magical cheesecake flow through my veins!
Well, you can guess what happened next. Waddling was involved, as was concentrating on breathing in, breathing out, and entering the PIN for my card between breaths, so that I wouldn't collapse from the shock that my body was undergoing in reaction to my new weight.
It's a story that amazing backing girl remembers well to this very day. I remember it too, yet I never let the lessons learned that night guide my choices at lunch or dinner yesterday. It's like a blindspot in my knowledge, and something I may well repeat and may well be the death of me, provided my statistically short lifespan doesn't kill me first.
So why do some lessons stick with us and alter our behaviour to prevent us making those mistakes again, while others get missed no matter how many times we repeat the mistakes?
Blogger's block
Well, it had to happen sometime.
Today I thought I'd be one of those awesome Time Management types and get a little blogging done at work. That way, I could get to a dinner I had planned for tonight, enjoy the dinner because I wouldn't have my BEDA commitment nagging at the corner of my thoughts, and then after coming home and posting my pre-written blog, get some sleep.
Well, that was the plan. But as I got my blog out in front of me and sat down to write to it, nothing happened. That is, no words started appearing on the screen, because my fingers weren't pressing keys on the keyboard, because signals from my brain weren't being forwarded to my fingers, because there was nothing going on in my brain.
I was hit with blogger's block.
Oh noes, I started to think, now I'm not going to get anything done, which means I'll have to get something written after the dinner tonight, and that'll make me stay up really late again and then I'll MISS OUT ON MY SLEEP! NOOOOOOOOO!!!11
I'm not the fastest writer in the world, mainly because I spend an disproportionate amount of time thinking about what it is I want to write about. It never was the typing that was the problem - reaching 70, maybe 80 words-per-minute if I want to risk RSI, is not hard for me - the challenge is thinking at 80 words-per-minute. I'm sure that the human brain is capable of 80-somethings per minute, but those somethings are often brain noise that go off on strange tangents.
All this thinking about blogger's block and my failure to come up with anything to blog about reminded me of this picture...
...which in turn reminded me of that saying about how given a room full of monkeys with typewriters and an infinite amount of time (plus some other variables that would make this possible like making the monkeys immortal and having the typewriters never wear-out etc etc) the monkeys would eventually type the works of Shakespeare.
So I continued to follow my failed train of thought like a bored person would follow Wikipedia links, and I stumbled across a page that summarizes a study which tried to do the above: get some monkeys, give them typewriters, and then see what happens (http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2340).
Obviously an infinite amount of time was not possible, nor was lengthening the lifespan of the monkeys indefinitely, so the scientists just did what they could: 6 monkeys, 1 computer, 1 month. The result: the monkeys attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word. Other notable observations:
- the lead male got a stone and started bashing the computer
- the monkeys were more interested in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard
The monkeys eventually did produce 5 pages of text (for very broad and loose definitions of 'text'), but it mainly consisted of the letter S, along with random sprinklings of the letters A, J, L and M. The scientist's response: "obviously English isn't their first language".
I wasn't aiming to write the works of Shakespeare, I was just aiming to write one coherent blog post so that I could enjoy my dinner and catch-up on lost sleep! I'm just 1 monkey, with 2 computers (work and home), and a commitment to blogging every day. Surely that counts for something?
Then I blinked, and realized I had written a blog post. It may not have been my usual fare, but it was a blog post nonetheless, about my attempt at managing my time better, my fear of failing my commitment to BEDA... and pooing monkeys.
I guess that 80-somethings-per-minute of brain noise is good enough for writing a blog after all.
Changing the standard response (or, how I learned to think with my stomach)
Small talk: it's an obstacle we all have to overcome. As a member of the workforce in an office environment, small talk is the precursor to all work-related face-to-face conversational threads for the day; it's as if it's not possible to get John to complete those reports until you ask John how he or his kids are doing.
The most common small-talk-initiation question is "how are you doing?", and the most common response is one of "good" or "fine". Not wanting to be the one who follows this pattern (I seem to have a habit of doing things differently just for the sake of doing things differently), when it comes to initiating the conversation I'll get straight to what I want to say - none of this "how are you doing?" business (you could be coughing up your internal organs and I'll still get straight to my question first). But when it's me being asked about how I'm doing, instead of answering "good" or "fine" I opt for a different tactic altogether: I think with my stomach.
So, conversations at the office with me usually start like this:
Workmate: "Hi Em, how are you?"
Me: "I'm pretty hungry actually; it's almost lunch and there's nothing in my snack drawer 'cause I finished it all yesterday."
Depending on how comfortable I am with the person, responses will range from the general state of my hunger (just acquaintances) to whether or not the shrimp from last night's meal is causing me to visit the toilet at regular intervals (good work mate, must have shared several drinks or meals with them thus far).
It's a very simple change from the standard responses that everybody just expects, but it makes a big difference to the type of conversation that takes place. What would normally be very strictly-business conversations now turn into more friendly chats, and what could normally be very mundane meetings turn into story and experience-exchanging sessions.
I've since expanded my responses to include other aspects of eating, and put it into practice at a meeting today.
Before we started, we were all asked how we were. The usual "good" or "fine" was uttered around the table, until it got to me, where I replied by saying how I had burned my tongue on a hot chocolate this morning and so the tip of my tongue is feeling a bit sensitive right now. It got a round of laughter, and then everybody started pitching-in with their own stories about burning their mouths on hot food (or why is it that we constantly do it despite learning the lesson several times), or what things to look out for when you don't want to burn your mouth (like tomatoes in toastie sandwiches because they retain their heat better than other fillings).
And it's not just work where I do this; small talk is prevalent in any social situation.
Tonight, at dance (ceroc) class, when we changed partners and the girl asked how I was doing, I complained that my left foot was itchy beneath my shoe and then acted-out using my right shoe to try and scratch it. There isn't much more time to say anything beyond that, but after laughing at my predicament, my dance partners became visibly more relaxed, especially those who were here on their first night.
I haven't really figured-out why this is: why complaining about how hungry I am, how I burnt my tongue, or how annoying it is that I can't scratch an itch beneath my shoes, is such a good ice breaker. Maybe it's because the person asking how I am doing keeps hearing "good" or "fine" from others that they never really expect a frightfully honest answer. Maybe it's because upon hearing my complaint, they know exactly what I'm going through - we've all been hungry, had burnt a part of our mouths on scalding hot food, and had an itch that we couldn't scratch.
What I say is pretty boring stuff. I mean, you don't measure your life by the number of times you've burned your tongue, but it's a story that everybody can relate to. Exciting stories are those about going to far-away lands or doing risky things, but they don't make us laugh. Boring stories are those about everyday occurances, but they make people giggle, open up, and sometimes build connections.
So maybe we're all going about things the wrong way when we accuse ourselves of being boring such that others couldn't ever get attached to us. I mean, telling stories about how you saw Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower doesn't make me feel closer to you; telling stories about cuddling-up on a cold day to a mug of hot chocolate that subsequently removed several of your tastebuds does.
Suddenly, being boring doesn't sound like a bad thing. You just need to be ready to tell the world how boring you are.
Mother's Day ahead
If you ever needed a good indicator of up-and-coming holidays or events, just take a good look at retail and what the shops are doing.
For the months leading up to Christmas, stores will advertise the fact that it is coming and flood their shops with decorations of red, green, and silver.
Then, come the day after Boxing Day, and all these colours are quickly stripped away as if Christmas never happened, only to be replaced by 'Sale! x-percent off!' signs for the next major milestone on the retail calendar: New Year's.
The cycle repeats and continues: after New Year's, Valentine's Day.
After Valentine's Day, Easter.
After Easter...
You get slight variations depending upon the local holidays, but this is generally how it goes.
I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, because it keeps me informed of what's coming next.
And today, it reminded me that Mother's Day is just around the corner.
For some reason, Mother's Day is one of those holidays in which I really try to come up with something for my mum.
Maybe it's because my mum's birthday is only a handful of days in proximity to the event, thus guilting me into doubling my efforts (although when I think about it, my dad's birthday is only 2 weeks from Christmas, yet I never seem to try any harder for his birthday... must be a bias or favouritism).
My earliest vivid memory of having done something for my mum was when I was somewhere between 10 and 12 years old.
It was a Saturday morning because we were having eggs for breakfast - a long running family tradition, I still cook eggs every Saturday morning since moving out - and we were trying to figure out what to do for the weekend.
Mother's Day was the next day (always the second Sunday in May in NZ) and we had been complaining that our current cutlery holder wasn't doing a very good job.
So, I offered that my mum could go out and buy a new cutlery holder, and that I would pay for it, up to the value of $30 NZD.
Back then I was on an allowance of $7 NZD per week, so I was effectively offering a month of my money.
That was a lot to me at that age.
The next memory is a bit more recent, I was maybe 20, when my brother and I started to notice that there's one thing missing from our house when compared to houses of others: family pictures.
You could go through our family home and not find a single portrait of us on any wall, desk, or bedside table.
We decided to rectify that come Mother's Day / mum's birthday by taking a photo of ourselves, her 2 boys, framing it, and giving it to her as a present.
Now it's only 1 of 2 framed pictures in the entire house (the other one being a picture of my brother on his own bedside table... vanity be thy name).
And so it goes.
At the moment, I'm idealess for Mother's Day '09.
If I do anything, it'll probably be small or low-key.
But thanks to the bookstore I have to walk through every day to get to/from work, at least I've been given fair warning.
I heart cold days
I really like cold days.
When people learn this little fact about me, I get a very narrow range of reactions. For those who know me well-enough to have learned that I was born in a country just 15 degrees north of the equator with only 2 seasons - 'dry and hot' and 'wet and hot' - they give me a strange look and question my heritage. For those who don't know the previous fact, they just give me the strange look.
This doesn't mean that I hate the hot days, but my habits and choices are those of a person with a bias for colder temperatures:
- my favourite pieces of clothing in my wardrobe are all long-sleeved shirts
- I don't own any shorts, not counting the pants that can unzip into shorts or my togs / swimming trunks
- I like curling up into a ball on or beside my couch, even when I'm the only one on it
- I like the feeling of a light breeze on my cheeks or the gentle rain on my hair during long walks
- and I like that effect when you breathe out through your mouth and it's visible as a fog for a few moments
I got to experience (or wear) all of the above today.
I had work today, so it's a given that I'd wear a long-sleeved shirt and pants. As I left my apartment building for work on this cold almost-winter morning, a light rain started which was enough to just pat my hair down and not so heavy as to make me worry about getting my recently-replaced-under-warranty headphones soaked. And on the walk back from work in the afternoon, the rain was replaced by a gentle southerly chill to accompany the already cold temperatures that made my breath fog-up in front of me.
All that's missing now, which we don't get where I live, is snow.
I often complain that if the temperatures are going to reach the single digits (celsius), then it should at least be accompanied by a nice sprinkling of snow. And because it never delivers, I often joke about going to live in countries that do snow; countries like Greece, Denmark, or even Alaska, just so I could get one of those white Christmases that are mentioned by our northern hemisphere cousins.
Looking at that list of countries however, it reads like another list that I have, of places that I'd like to visit for reasons other than snow. Greece: I'd like to visit the sites/ruins of an ancient civilization. Denmark: I'd like to go to Legoland, ever since I did that project back in intermediate school about it, and it's the country of a family I befriended over the Internet. And Alaska: it's also the home of some met-over-the-Internet friends, the first really-snowy place that came to mind when I was thinking of experiencing a white Christmas, and it's got yaks (inside joke).
Maybe that's the reason I enjoy the cold days; because they're reminders of the things I'd like to do/see someday.
So as I type this blog - curled-up next to my couch with my legs in a sleeping bag, a large blanket over my shoulders, and a warm cup of soup next to my keyboard and mouse - I'm reminded of all the places I'd like to see, and some of the things I'd like to experience.
I really like cold days.
Emanuel sandwich
1 day with my new BEDA buddies and I've already embarrassed myself: here's me saying I buy girly deodorant. What will tomorrow bring? I don't even want to know.
Speaking of looking forward to tomorrow, today's post is going to be about hugs... that, and I need to work on my segues.
Over the years I've developed a reputation for not being the most hug-giving person; I didn't hug my friends for regular things like meeting up for the day, parting ways after a party or other event, or saying thank you. I'd often save it for things like birthdays (even then, only hugging the birthday boy/girl), or, as we grew up and some started doing overseas travel, for seeing friends off / welcoming them back. But one friend in particular, I didn't hug AT ALL.
This friend was a hug Nazi and would hug somebody for any reason: hellos, goodbyes, saying one of her magic words like 'amazing', wearing something that she liked the look of, sending said friend more than 2 text messages, etc etc. When she'd try to get a hug out of me I would either walk the other way, or if there weren't any readily-available exits, just stand there and not hug back. It made for a good laugh amongst our group, but it was this behaviour that got me that reputation.
I remember the reasoning I used back then to tell myself why I was doing this: by reducing the frequency of my hugs, it would increase their value. It's a bit similar in the way that commodity prices are set (rare = higher price), but I think it has worked-out exactly like that.
Fast-forward to the hug nazi's 21st birthday. Having withheld hugs from her for about 5 years, it became a part of my speech when it was my turn to say a few words about her. Something was brought up which had her try to hug me while I was talking - I probably said the word 'amazing' - but of course I didn't hug back, to which she said out loud to everyone listening to my speech "And Em never hugs back!". She started recounting a time at university when she ended-up chasing me for a hug where I kept on walking away. It was funny, and it made for the perfect lead-up to what I was about to do: give her a hug for her 21st birthday.
It got an "awwwww" from her parents, aunties, uncles, and the older crowd. It also got an "awwwww" from our friends, accompanied however with gasps of surprise (OMG Em's giving her a hug WTF!?).
Several years on and while I've loosened-up the hugging criteria, it still gets the occasional comment from the recipient. Sometimes they're even called "Em hugs", used in sentences such as "Yay it's an Em hug!", or in the case of man hugs, "Holy shit it's an Em hug!" as if they were something special.
I was thinking about all of this because last night at a friend's 25th birthday party there were a lot of hugs going on:
- when I arrived I gave the birthday boy a hug
- shortly afterwards I hugged my friend the bride-to-be after learning that she and her boyfriend had (finally) set a wedding date
- later on another couple (this one already married) arrived and, with no more room for them on the couch, the wife sat on the arm rest to my side, gave me a great big hug which pushed me into another hug with the aforementioned bride-to-be (hug sandwich #1)
- and as we parted ways (I and some others were headed home, the rest were going into the city to continue the party), I got caught in another hug sandwich that started with one of the guys surprise hugging me from the front, followed by a girl I had only known for a week hugging me from behind, and then hug nazi came and finished us off with an epic hug from the side (hug sandwich #2)
With that last one, I think another of the guys jumped in on that hug bringing it to a 5-person group hug. I do know that we were cheered-on by those driving by. And I also remember girl-I-have-only-known-for-1-week licked the back of my neck... or that could've been the mystery 5th guy...
So now I wonder: did withholding my hugs when I was younger really pay off? Was I really trying to increase their value, or was I just trying to be different? And have I sold-out with my own hugging criteria, or are my friends just becoming more persistent when it comes to stealing an Em hug?
BEDA buddies unite!
I thought today was going to be another struggle to come up with something to blog about, but as I sat down in-front of the keyboard to write my post, the RSS reader popped-up a new item. The item: our matches (BEDA buddy assignments) were ready.
Despite being only 3 days ago, it feels like a long time since I talked about the BEDA buddy system and threw my name into the proverbial sorting hat in the hopes that in groups we'd be able to help each other through our Blog Every Day April commitments. Now that we're grouped-up, I went in search of my BEDA buddies to learn a little bit about them.
DeCoolz loves American Idol. That is, loves with a <3. I don't think I've ever talked about American Idol, I mean REALLY talked about it. A search through my previous posts reveals that it gets a passing mention in The BEDA Buddy System post, and the post where I talk about breakfast (WTF?). My friends probably already know I'm an American Idol fan - and have been since last year from the Top 10 onwards - but the only other people I can really talk about it with are my family. So, DeCoolz, I think we'll get along just fine :)
Ephiphany Renee is a fan of rock music, in particular, The Used (which may not feature prominently in my music collection but it's there nonetheless). She also recently bought a copy of Devilish, which is the first Maureen Johnson book I read that in turn got me hooked on the author. There's certainly enough there to start a dialogue.
Kaitlyn (from the university of Michigan) - I'm finding hard to put into words what our common ground could be. There's nothing immediately obvious in her bio, but as I read through her blog posts for BEDA I started feeling like I could relate as they were mostly about her transitioning to university life. OK, so university is far behind me, but I have a good memory of those days and experiences which in turn shaped me into the person I am today.
So, to my BEDA buddies if you're reading this, here's to hoping that only good things can come out of our grouping, and here's a semi-relevant picture to go with it.
Spending habits
With New Zealand and several other countries now 1 year into the recession, a lot of recession-related articles have started showing-up, or at least have started being displayed more prominently than they had before. Daily browsing brings to my attention a lot more links to articles about finding great deals or savings on items, about massive discounts on travelling, about updating your CV/resumé and giving job interview advice, about how to save money, and of course about which big business was most recently bitten by the bankruptcy blues (alliteration FTW!).
With curiousity getting the better of me, I've followed several of these kinds of links in the past months to see what they have to say. Most of them are pretty US-specific, but I came across one 'how to save money' article which had some advice that could have helped anybody trying to save a buck or 2.
I wouldn't consider myself a frugal character (FFS I just shelled-out for Rock Band 2), but I lead a relatively low-maintenance lifestyle, and can be quite content with what I do have instead of going out to buy everything I don't. I turn off lights in rooms that I'm not in, I turn off the oven and microwave at the wall when I'm not using them for cooking otherwise they're just glorified time pieces (if I could even be bothered resetting the clocks on them). And I give all of my games several play-throughs, squeezing as many hours of gameplay out as cents that went into buying them.
So I went through that article's list of things one could do to save money, grinning as I mentally checked-off each item like some smug yes-I'm-already-taking-these-measures git, until I came across 1 item that kicked me in the financial region of my gut. It said something like:
Don't buy CDs. Purchase music online instead.
It doesn't take a mathematical genius to figure out that it is cheaper to download an album via iTunes or Amazon than it is to buy the CD - especially when you're in a tiny country and your musical tastes are only sated by non-mainstream overseas bands where the price of importing an album causes the price of the thing to jump about 50%. I'm no mathematical genius, but for some reason this just never occurred to me.
The reason my eyes were really drawn to this item was because only a month before I purchased 2 albums on CD, and maybe 3 months before that I bought another 4 albums on CD!
What recession?
I can't seem to locate the article anymore, but Googling "don't buy CDs" gives you a lot of pages with arguments similar to the one I read. One blog even citing a recent LA Times article that said teenagers don't buy CDs anymore.
The link to the LA Times piece is broken - so there's some FAIL that needs to be fixed there - but the blog, on top of the 'save your money' article, made me feel a little out of touch. Not that I'm trying touch that age group (there I go again, writing down something without realizing how paedophillic it could sound) but it did make me feel a little older.
If there's any age group I'll be trying to understand, it'll be my 7-year-old niece's. She's already got an mp3 player, and will likely grow up "obtaining" all her music online and not even touch a CD in her life.
As for myself? The CDs I buy don't even get a lot of play in a CD player of any sort. It's maybe a couple of runs through the PC or Xbox, before burning it all as mp3s to chuck onto my mp3 player.
So whether I'm just sticking to an old habit, keeping it old-school, or just keeping it old, I'll continue to buy CDs for many years to come; I'll just convince myself that I'm doing my part for the recession.
The honesty of Rock Band (or, how I learned I couldn't really sing)
I made it pretty obvious in a post this month that I got Rock Band 2 and was loving it. Several days on, I'm still loving it, although I have left it and the Xbox back at my family's place since I couldn't be bothered bringing all those fake plastic instruments back to my apartment.
Yes, I'm Xbox-less right now :( The removal of said gaming machine has given me a lot more time to work on PC-related stuff (ie: this blog and other ongoing website developments) and general responsibilities (eg: cleaning, cooking). Without the Xbox the TV is only used to watch broadcast television, so I went and hooked-up my PC to it so I could watch my videos and have music in the lounge again.
So yeah, I'm blogging from my lounge today, and will be for several days to come while I continue life Xbox-less. I'd take photos of the PC-next-to-the-TV setup, but I don't have a digital camera. Yes, you read that right: this tech-savvy IT guy DOES NOT HAVE A DIGITAL CAMERA (and I'll probably turn that into a blog post for another day in April).
Anyway, back to Rock Band 2
So I was introduced to the world of fake plastic instruments through Guitar Hero 3. Being a (fake-)guitar-only game, it got me pretty good with the 5-button guitar side of things, and it also got me really excited about the evolution of the music & rhythym game genre when it turned into Rock Band (or Guitar Hero: World Tour if you wish to stick with the GH franchise). So when Rock Band came out, and my friends brought it around one night, I instantly loved it.
That night I stuck to the guitar part, but when I bought Rock Band 2 I resolved to try out the other parts: drumming and singing.
My family isn't the most musical kind out there but it's musical enough; my dad doesn't play any instruments, so any music genes must've come from my mother's side. She plays the classical guitar, my brother plays drums and some guitar, and I play piano and some guitar. We can all keep pitch, can keep in time, and sing to some degree.
Finally, all those years of singing in the shower and walking down the street as I hum the tune to what's blaring out of my MP3 player would come to fruition. RB2 would give me all the reason I needed to sing my lungs out. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened; I sung my lungs out (and my throat and voice too).
When I decided to tackle the singing component of RB2, I went straight to the Hard level (I can keep pitch right?) and picked a song that I enjoyed but didn't really realize was way out of my range until that very moment. The result: I was often flat or sharp, and ended-up shouting my way through choruses. At every step of the way, RB2 was there critiquing my progress after every major phrase with words like 'Good' or 'Awesome', except what mostly popped-up was 'Weak' along with a loss of my score multiplier and integrity of my throat.
Even after picking songs within my range, my throat and voice started crapping-out on me, and as I slipped below the 80% mark at the end-of-song score, even RB2 decided to stop heaping its hollow praises on me. I sucked, and RB2, myself, and my brother - who was unfortunate enough to be in the room - knew it.
So what now seeing that 1/4 of the Rock Band experience is locked-away from me? Well, I always have the fake plastic guitar to fall back on, and the drums are pretty fun (so at least I wasn't wrong about my ability to keep time). But it looks like 'learning to sing into a mic' is now on my to do list. That's right, the singing part has become my white whale and my sheer stubbornness - and the fact that I've spent hundreds of dollars on this game and I'll be damned if I'm not going to squeeze every last penny out of it, especially during the recession - is going to propel me forward.
Hopefully I'll have more luck than Captain Ahab, and won't destroy my voice in the process.
The BEDA buddy system
Mentioned amongst one of the tips for business bloggers was an item about getting a blogging buddy. My comments on it were that it was a very good piece of advice, one that I would do well to follow. Well, looks like I've been given a chance to make good on those words.
On the blog of the Blog Every Day April (BEDA) progenitor, Maureen Johnson, is an item about organizing us into small groups in which each of us will get a BEDA buddy. Reading that post, you'll find a link to her Ning forum and BEDA Buddy thread. There, I and every other BEDA participant can post a little bit about themselves and Maureen will then put us into groups (I don't know what criteria she'll be using to put us together, but I hope the formula doesn't aim to create the most volatile combinations possible). When assigned our groups, we're to encourage other members of the group by commenting on their blogs, asking questions, giving ideas, etc etc.
One thing that became immediately apparent to me, was that most participants are the target audience of Maureen's books. That is, teenage girls.
I immediately felt old, very old. I even mentioned in my reply to that discussion that, comparitively, I'm something out of the jurassic period. There was the odd sprinkling of 20-somethings, but good God I felt like the far end of the bell curve.
Yes, my favourite female author is the writer of books aimed at teenage girls. Now how you think that makes me feel whenever I go to the library to see if her back-catalogue of books is available?
There I am, an adult male, perusing the young-adult fiction section of the library for a book (or books) written for the opposite gender of an age group I passed-through with several bruises a long long looooong time ago. All I need now is a trenchcoat in the middle of summer and my creepiness would shoot through the roof.
So let's see where this BEDA Buddy thing takes me. It might be like the group round in American Idol: we're either gonna prop eachother up supportively for the remainder of the month, or together we'll turn into a beautiful disaster.
Here's to hoping.
Tips for business bloggers - part 4
(continued from Tips for business bloggers - part 3)
Today, we reach the final part of the Tips for business bloggers series as part of Blog Every Day April.
7. Use plain English and a conversational style.
For blogging, I don't think any other sort of style could work. Here's me talking about the ride home from the air balloons light show I saw over the weekend:
I can't remember whose iPod was currently attached to the car kit, but Umbrella by Rihanna (no, I'm not leading-up to a Chris Brown joke) started playing. What was a quiet ride home turned into a car-wide sing-along that was enjoyed by all. Well, all except our newest travelling companion, Nele, who either had an aversion to Rihanna, R&B in general, or the idea that everyone else in the car was enjoying themselves. Either way, her dislike for the situation only added to the our enjoyment, and had us singing even louder.
Now here's me talking about the same thing in a manner similar to that found in an instructional manual:
- someone's iPod was playing through the car stereo
- Umbrella by Rihanna started playing
- we all broke into song
- except Nele who didn't like Umbrella
- hilarity ensued
I'll have to admit the concise nature of the numbered bullet points has a certain appeal, but it's not really story-telling. When listing just the facts, an image of the situation doesn't really form in my mind.
That's not to say that an instructional style doesn't have its uses. Here's me adapting a conversational style from a point-by-point recipe for brownies:
I pre-heated the oven to 160C so that when the brownies go into it they'll start cooking. But that's not yet. First, I got one of my saucepans - a hand-me-down from my parents no less - and set that to the '2' setting, which I assume is the low heat setting, because the highest is 5. Gotta make sure it's a low heat, otherwise you might just cook the butter and dark chocolate which is next to go into the pan. I learned this lesson the hard way because I got a bit impatient with the speed at which the chocolate was melting... big mistake. I ended-up burning a little bit of the chocolate, and I did not feel good.
6 sentences into the actual recipe, and it's already got everything into the mixing bowl. 6 sentences into my story, and I'm ranting about how a pan that used to be my mothers' had burnt some dark chocolate.
"There's a time and place for everything" they say. Writing style is no exception.
8. Link to others and give them credit for ideas.
And on that note, I'd like to thank Melissa (the same Melissa who helped bring you my review of the McDonalds Seared Chicken Burger) for sending me the blogging tips e-mail which in turn gave me 4 days worth of blogging material.
Goodnight internets. I'll see you again tomorrow.
Tips for business bloggers - part 3
(continued from Tips for business bloggers - part 2)
5. Be useful, be fearless or both. Simply being useful is a worthwhile goal.
This one doesn't seem like much of a tip to me. It reads more like a very brief soul-inspiring speech - "being useful is a worthwhile goal" - to rally the business bloggers together and advance for their cause.
It's probably a much-needed pep talk for some because maintaining a constant barrage of blog posts can quickly become tiring. Looking at my own progress and adding-up all the hours spent typing into this blog, I must've lost about 10 hours of sleep thus far in my desperate attempts to get a post completed before the day is done.
So what's in it for a blogger if the only reward awaiting you is bags under the eyes and a stronger addiction to your favourite caffeinated beverage? Well... I don't think I have the answer to that. If you're a writer and need practice writing, then blogging usually helps. I mean, the only way to get better at writing is through practice, err, writing.
But hey, you're not just doing it for yourself. Whatever the subject matter of your blog, somebody out there could find it useful. Maybe you're writing about the process you went through to build that new deck for your house which other DIYers out there could find handy. Maybe it's a blog about your pet and experiences with taking care of said pet which another potential pet owner could find pointers in. Or, if you're blogs are subject-less like mine for this month of April and are just doing it for the lols, then maybe somebody out there will find it funny, appreciate the attempt at humour, and it could put a lol in their day.
And without knowing it, you've suddenly become useful, and that's always a worthwhile goal.
6. Ask your blogging buddy to check each post, and stop you from being too personal, leaking company secrets or breaking the law.
Blogging buddy... gotta get me one of those. But if they're there to prevent me from doing any of the above, then it might be a little too late for that.
I've been pretty shameless when putting my own life stories up on the internet, and the only reason I haven't already disclosed all of my personal secrets is that I don't blog enough (and this month is going to cover my secrets-revealed quota for the year). And while I don't think I've leaked company secrets, I have revealed enough about my work environment such that you could easily guess as to who my employers (or as I sometimes refer to the upper-most of management, our evil overlords) are.
So this tip is a pretty useful one, and one which I would do well to follow. The closest thing I have to a blogging buddy are my Facebook friends who read this, and then point out my myriad spelling mistakes, or write on my wall that I'm going about it (ie: life) wrong. Of course by then, company sekrits have already been leaked, personal stories have already become public, and my evil overlords are contacting HR, giving them another reason to tap my phone or track my IM conversations.
Website redesign 2009 - part 4
Gonna take a break from the business blogging tips for today to just mention some site updates that have finally kicked-in.
Firstly, the SEO-friendly URLs are now in place. That is, no more URLs that look like: Content?Page=Blah&Thingy=Blah. They now make a bit more sense to both people (more human-readable) and search engine spiders/bots that crawl the web.
Secondly, I removed that fancy overlay effect from the Artwork and Writing pages because it actually prevented someone from middle-clicking the links to open them in a new tab. Whoops. So a big fat usability blunder on my part.
So what's left on the 2009-redesign-to-do list? Automatic updates.
Updates to this blog are actually reflected in Facebook, but for me to get them to show up I have to go to Facebook and give it a kick in the guts to let it know that a new blog post is up. It's a small annoyance, but one that I've been meaning to remedy for a while now.
Tips for business bloggers - part 2
(continued from Tips for Business Bloggers - part 1)
3. Follow your organisation's guidelines - or create them!
If by organization they mean ME, and by guidelines they mean My Writing Rules, then I believe I follow this tip quite faithfully already.
I don't have many rules for writing. They basically all boil down to making sure the reader knows exactly what I'm saying. eg: proper spelling, and no silly text or internet speak.
Actually, I've broken both of those rules already. I do try to spell correctly, but having been raised amongst both American and British spelling conventions, I'll do British things like spell colour with a U, but then do American things like spell organize with a Z. And while I do avoid text speak (ie: you won't see me write things like 'hv a gd weeknd'), I will occasionally throw in the acronyms like LOL and WTF.
Text speak somewhat irks me. For example: today I hung out with some friends to watch a hot air balloon light show. Amongst us was a person I hadn't met before, who had received the most cryptic text message that made sense to none of us. The cryptic part of it read:
d b a gd weeknd
d b a? W T F?
We bounced around several ideas (database administrator? don't be a good weekend? douchebag a good weekend?) but none of them made sense. She finally asked the sender of the message what the hell it meant, and got the reply that the d meant either 'should' or 'would'. I don't know what dimension or ass-crack they pulled that from, but there's a good example of miscommunication for you right there.
So I guess my guidelines would be that I don't stick to one spelling convention, but I spell consistently, and I don't use text speak, but I like to use internet acronyms.
4. Focus every blog post on a single topic: it's not a newsletter.
Oh fail. Just like when I talked about having a focus or strategy in point #2 in the last blog post, I definitely don't have a single topic in mind. But I don't think this point could apply very well to what I'm doing now anyway.
Sure you have your topical blogs which only post news relevant to the topic being covered, but when it's a blog about my life, I don't think I could ever confine myself to a few defining topics, or just my hobbies, or just my job. There's a whole lot of funny things that can happen to me, and I think it would be unrepresentative of life in general if I didn't talk about the comedic side.
This reminds me of back when I was a 7th former (US equivalent would be a senior) in high school, and one of 3 7th form students who were assigned to a 4th form (freshman) class. I never knew what the exact reasons were for this arrangement - maybe we were there to act as role models, maybe we were there to keep them off drugs - but there we were. One day, the teacher was berating one of the 4th formers for laughing at something (I didn't catch the joke) when then the teacher turned to me and said:
"Life isn't all that funny, is it Em?"
Side with authority, or side with what I believed? It was one of the easiest decision I ever had to make. My reply:
"I'm gonna have to disagree with you there miss."
That little remark got me into the good books of the 4th formers. And having funny things to say or talk about has got me into the good books of a lot of people ever since.
It's just how I roll.
(more to come in part 3)
Tips for business bloggers - part 1
Now that I've pulled myself away from Rock Band 2 (not an easy task), I have time to write about what I was supposed to write about yesterday.
The other day, a friend of mine forwarded me an e-mail entitled Tips for Strategic Bloggers (with a subtitle of Tips for Business Bloggers somewhere in there). Despite being business-oriented tips, I decided to give it a full read and see what tips applied to me.
1. Don't start unless you were born to blog or need to blog. Very few people can keep up the pace month after month, year after year, having something original to say, something worth saying. (However, a competent and persistent blogger can have fun and influence people.)
I don't think I was born to blog, nor do I REALLY need to, but I do have a lot of uninteresting yet honest stories to tell (because all the interesting ones have already been written). But since I decided to join the Blog Every Day April challenge, I guess my 'need' is my drive to prove that I can follow-through on long-term goals. Hmph, funny how close to stubbornness that sounds.
I don't think my long-term commitment/stubbornness is really in question here. For example, a couple of years ago I decided to play a long-term joke on one my friends.
You see, he was sufferring from ongoing pain in his knee, and like any concerned friend I would ask him how his knee was. But I didn't want to be just concerned, I wanted to be a dick. So every day, whenever I'd see him, I'd ask him how his knee was so that my 'concern' would eat into his patience in little nibbles until he'd go insane.
This went on for about a month until he was talking about it with another friend. For the next paragraph's sake, let's call my knee-hurting friend 'Simon', and the person he's talking to 'Janna':
Simon: "Em keeps asking me how my knee is."
Janna: "Yeah."
Simon: "It's... starting to get annoying.
Janna: "You know why he's doing it right?"
Well, let's just say that after that, the next time I saw him was the last time I asked him how his knee was.
So if I can be a dick for a month, then blogging every day for that length of time shouldn't be too difficult, right?
2. Think first about strategy: what do you hope to achieve with this blog? Focus sharply. Explain your angle or topic in your tagline or description.
Strategy? Angle? Topic? Tagline? lol wut?
OK, so it's obvious I didn't enter into this thing with a strategy in mind. Looking at the categories I file my blogs under, I'm neither here nor there, and the topics get around (kinda like your mum) and I talk about whatever comes to mind (eg: your mum). There's no focus, but neither does the mind have any when it needs to come up with something new every month.
I guess my 'strategy' is to take any ordinary thing that happens to me and turn it into a multi-paragraph blog post, which is exactly what I've been doing so far. I mean, look at what I've talked about: my neighbours, April Fool's Day, ice cream, breakfast, my dry lips, how often I get sick, my work, my work (again), and Rock Band 2.
It's not paperback fiction stuff, but it's what gets me by.
(stay tuned for part 2 where I go through more of the blogging tips listed in that e-mail)
I've left today's blog a bit too late to write something approaching the average number of paragraphs I've had for every other entry thus far of Blog Every Day April, but I was held-up for good reason. That reason: Rock Band 2.
So I'm gonna leave it at: I just got Rock Band 2, and OMG it's awesome :D (proper blog coming post tomorrow)
Out-of-office reply
And as work ended for the day, my holiday officially started :D
As per the suggestions of upper management, I (and several of my workmates) will be taking the this Thursday, and next Tuesday and Wednesday off. Couple that with the Monday and Friday already being public holidays thanks to the Easter weekend, and we're each gonna have a week-long break!
Now I can guess as to why the big wigs were encouraging all of us to take our leave as a cost-cutting measure during the recession - something about how leave not used is costing the company money - but despite their agenda, if they're encouraging me to spend extended periods of time away from my desk, I'm not going to say no. So as the office quietened down and people started leaving for their long long weekends, I got my own stuff in order, including the automated out-of-office reply.
I never came across the out-of-office reply until I started full-time work. I believe Gmail has an equivalent feature with their On Vacation automated reply e-mails, but it's a very handy thing that lets anybody who e-mails you know that you're away. Some people often say whether they're on leave or sick, when they're returning, and sometimes a secondary contact is mentioned who is available to help should they want to seek somebody else who kinda knows your job. Many out-of-office replies I've encountered are very professional: quick, concise, and straight to the point. Others however, like mine when I first started work, tend to beat around the bush.
I often liked to include a little backstory. If the leave was around a major public holiday, then I ended-up personifying the holiday and saying how it coerced me to get out of the office. If the leave was some kind of personal vacation, then I liked to write about the sorts of things I'd be doing.
It was all great fun coming up with these mini stories, but over time I did get told that they were a tad inappropriate, and not at all informative. With the assignment to my current project in which the client is a rather serious government department, I've had to compromise.
So no, I never got to talk about how the Easter bunny had swept me away (in a non-paedophile manner) towards my leave, nor did I get to say how it left me a trail of chocolate egss to lead me out of the building and into a dungeon of my own making in which I'll be stuck for a whole week. Instead, the first line reads:
The Easter Bunny has kicked me out of the office, and so I begin my Epic Easter Leave.
It's pretty tame, but I don't imagine anybody else mentioning what the Easter bunny did to them, let alone mention the Easter bunny at all. And for that, I can still claim the prize for originality amongst my peers.
Real-life isn't like 24
While I'm no longer an avid viewer of 24 (I haven't seen seasons 6 or 7, but was glued to the TV when 24: Redemption just happened to be on) I have taken several things away from that show which, on occasion, cause me to be disappointed in real life. One of these things is the speed at which the crew of CTU, or whatever rag-tag bunch of techies Jack Bauer has to help him now, seemed to operate.
Whenever Jack Bauer needs the details about a certain suspect, all he has to do is give maybe the first couple of characters of said suspect's plate number, and within minutes (REAL-TIME minutes) he will have all the info he asked for. Things like aliases, addresses, phone numbers, political views, the place their credit card was used last, the neglect they received from their parents, the lasting psychological effects of that neglect leading to the number of Chris Brown's they've pulled with current and past partners... No information is out of reach of CTU.
I even remember one episode where they get their hands on a laptop with encrypted contents. The level and method of encryption is pretty reasonable such that trying to crack it would take much longer than 24 hours, yet they did, somehow, because CTU is that awesome. (although XKCD has already shown that encryption is virtually useless against a determined opponent)
Unfortunately, real-life (or at the very least, my work) doesn't operate like this at all. Here's how a quest for information went down at work today:
- request for information was made to our client
- client then e-mailed my project manager with the request for information
- e-mail is then forwarded to me 2 HOURS after the first bullet point
- I start work on the request by running several queries on the database, some of which take up to 5 minutes to complete
- all members of our team attend a scheduled team meeting which took about an hour
- we return and I run more queries to double-check my results
- I send a reply e-mail with my findings to our client
At the end of all this, it's 6pm, it's getting dark outside, I'm pretty much the only person left on our floor, and the person I sent the e-mail to will have probably gone home already meaning they won't get to forward the results to the original requestor until tomorrow morning. How's that for information turn-around time?
OK, so if speed was needed, I probably wasn't the best person for the job; I'm still becoming familiar with the system I've been assigned to, and I'm far from any kind of programming genius. But by the end of it, I just wanted to get back home as quickly as possible, and I was both disappointed in 24 for setting unrealistic expectations on programmers (just like how CSI has set unrealistic expectations of clear-cut forensic evidence in court cases) and maybe a little envious of people like those in CTU who could've done my job in mere minutes (REAL-TIME minutes). Provided such people existed.
If they did, then I totally understand why 24's Chloe looks pissed-off all the time.
Negative sick leave
So I mentioned several illnesses in yesterday's post - the common cold, winter flu, and tonsillitis - all of which I do nothing about as I let my body just battle it in its own time. In the case of the cold and flu, there really is no cure, only several medications to alleviate the symptoms and the general feeling of crappiness. Regardless, the result is that whenever I get one of them, I'm knocked out for several days.
The common cold is, by definition, the sickness I get most often. I can tell it's upon me by the stuffy nose and sore throat that usually accompany it, and I usually get about a day's warning before it really hits.
The flu is like a super-charged version of the cold, which is probably why several work places have free flu vaccinations every year... which I never participate in. As I said, it solves itself given enough time, so I never bother doing anything about it. That, and it hasn't killed me yet (which when I think about it is a rather stupid philisophy because of the Catch 22 in that sentence). Flu usually knocks me out pretty badly: all the cold symptoms are there - stuffy nose, sore throat - and sometimes a headache, but the worst part is that it causes me to despair and feel like nothing is right in the world. That's right; flu makes me emo.
So I said that, given enough time, each of the above will resolve themselves. The problem though, is the amount of time needed to do just that: a cold can knock me out for 2 days, whereas a flu can take me out for 5. Calculating the frequency of either multiplied by the number of days, and I end up with a number that is much larger than the 5 sick days work gives us every year.
Falling ill over a weekend helps dampen the blow to my sick leave (at the cost of making my weekends suck), but every year since starting full-time work, I have blown my 5-day limit out of the water. Our team leaders have the ability to sign-off on additional sick leave from a small pool of it given to each person, but recently I learned that I've used-up all of that too and have gone into NEGATIVE sick leave. Nobody else I know at work or in my team has done this, so from a management perspective I must be some sort of statistical anomally. I bet HR is keeping a close eye on me as well, making sure I'm not faking my sicknesses and using the days off to sell company secrets to the competition.
To HR, if they're reading this (which isn't easily possible because this site is blocked from work): I'm actually being sick and I get sick a lot. Please double my sick leave allowance so that I don't spend 4 months of the year waiting for my work anniversary to roll over so I get my sick leave reset.
Seasonal changes
When I woke up this morning, a few things came to mind: First, why am I up so early? My clock said it was only 9am, and I was out all night and didn't get back until 3:30; I expected to be knocked-out until 11. Then I remembered I rewound my clocks back by 1 hour for the end of daylight savings. Second, what am I going to blog about today?
The Blog Every Day April challenge has given me something to look forward to every morning. When I wake up, I wonder: what exciting/mundane activities am I going to do today that I can write about for all the world to read? This morning I thought I'd write about things that happened at the birthday party last night, but many of the funnier things that happened then - embarrassing moments being caught on camera and then posted to Facebook or the slideshow that's on the TV - have been pretty well covered elsewhere on the Internet. Then when I turned on the computer and saw my brother's tweet about how he has "mastered information" by getting the TweetDeck app and organizing his follows, I thought I'd be writing something about Twitter. Every other media outlet seems to have said something about Twitter in the past month, so I might end up writing something about it later just so I can join the bandwagon.
But instead I settled on writing on something that's been plaguing me for the past week: dry lips.
Dry lips are a pretty easy thing to remedy - just get yourself some chapstick. However, I never did because it's one of those things I've put into the it-will-go-away-by-itself-and-so-I-don't-need-to-do-anytyhing-about-it category. Things I've also filed into this category are: sore throats, the common cold, the flu, and tonsillitis.
These are the sorts of things that happen so often that I can accurately plot my progress through these illnesses for the week after the first symptoms appear. I get a cold at least twice a year, three times if I'm unlucky, the flu at most once a year, and while I haven't had tonsillitis since turning 20, I used to get it about four times a year - another reason why my teenage years weren't exactly great.
So how often do I get dry lips? Exactly twice a year: once when summer ends, and once when winter ends.
My lips have become a barometer for seasonal change.
"But it's April now!" I hear you say, "Summer finishes end of Feb!" I don't know what it's been like in your country, but in NZ we had ourselves a late summer which felt like it ended just last week. We've actually had several late summers for the past couple of years and every time my lips were there to let me know.
I wouldn't start thinking about adjusting the seasons, set by decades of climatic data, just because my dry lips said so. They're definitely not on par with the kinds of instruments used to measure whatever forces are adjusting our seasons. Heck, I can't even use them to whistle properly! But they're good enough for telling me when I should start wearing thicker or thinner clothing on the walk to work.
So whenever I make it to work with a jacket as we change seasons, and one my workmates didn't bring one because they think it's still summer but then it starts getting really cold, I like to break into a little smile - but only on the inside, otherwise my lips might crack.
Breakfast
Coming up with something to write about today is gonna be difficult: I wrote yesterday's item very late at night, then went to sleep, woke-up at about 10am this morning (yay for the weekend), had breakfast, watched the American Idol top 9 and the results show (yes I'm a fan, quit hating on me), and after a bit of cleaning-up around my place, have only 2 hours before I have to go to a birthday party which won't see me in-front of my computer to do any blogging for the day. So I have to come up with something now, and as you can see the number of things for me to draw upon is very slim.
Since I was talking about food in the last post, I might as well follow it up with more talk about food, which brings me to the topic I've chosen for today: breakfast.
Now in spite of hearing my friends go on about healthy food, one thing they often fail to get right, is breakfast. We've all heard the age-old saying about breakfast being the most important meal of the day. My parents drilled this fact into my head from a very young age, this country used to have an ad campaign about it in-case your own parents forgot to do the drilling, and whenever a report comes out that a statistically significant amount of children aren't eating breakfast before going to school, it makes headline news. So with all this talk about breakfast, I would've thought the advice had been heeded and is one of the things that every diet-talking person I know would follow and take to heart. But oh not so.
I most often used to hear my friends complain about crappy days because they missed breakfast during high school and university. Yet with both of those eras long behind us, the number of missing-breakfast-related complaints hasn't subsided.
Understandably, some of these people have demanding jobs with strict working hours that see them operate on the weekdays with minute amounts of sleep that have to be offset by popping back-alley pharmaceuticals. But others with the most flexible work-whenever-they-want-and-can-even-work-from-home hours still miss out. It's not as if they're being hypocritical of all the dieting advice they like to spout, but rather that they've mis-prioritized the advice and poor little breakfast has taken a back seat to sucking down omega fish oils or counting vegetables.
My own experiences with missing breakfast have always been bad, understandably, I feel CRAPPY for the entire day if I skip breakfast; I can't concentrate, my head aches, my stomach complains because it's schedule is all messed-up, and I'm much more likely to fall asleep at around the 2:30/3pm mark. Having skipped breakfast maybe once or twice during my university years was all the lessons I needed to remind me to never do that again. Nowadays, even if I'm running late for work, I will make a detour to the nearest McDonalds or Wholly Bagels and grab something from there before beginning my day. Everything else can wait; people rely on me to be focused when I do my work, and combating head and stomach pain while I'm comatose on my desk in the afternoon isn't going to help.
Healthy eating
Now if only something just as cool can be said about greater/increasing age. No, I haven't started feeling the pinch of the years on me, but some of my friends definitely have, and it's their conversations on things like nutrition and fitness that make me think it's having an effect on them.
As we creep towards (or in the case of my older friends, pass beyond) a point that is equidistant with both 20 and 30 years of age, I've noticed they have an ever-increasing need to talk about their diets or their choice of food, or the number of kilometres they can run. Not that any of these things are particularly bad - putting healthy food into your body is always a plus, as is testing the heart rate - but they never really talked about these things before. It's like a switch has gone off in their heads that, now they have to tick a different age group tick box on surveys or censuses, an extra and conscious effort has to be made to cling to youth.
Suddenly, everybody is an expert in kilojoules, carbohydrate intake, the types of vegetables to eat, and the perfect weight-to-repetitions ratio on certain gym equipment. Should they be worried? Maybe. Should I be worried? Most likely yes.
A majority of my friends are of your white western-civilization type, whose chances of reaching a very old age increase with every year and every advance in modern science. Whereas I'm from a country where the average life expectancy will see me through my 50s if I'm lucky. But either through genetics or culture, despite being almost half-way through my natural life, that switch in my head hasn't gone off.
I feel no extra compulsion to eat any more healthy than I have already been doing, nor do I feel the need to supplement my existing activity with trips to the gym. I'd like to think that I have pretty good tabs on my body; that I can understand the signs of a past weeks worth of bad food or of not getting enough sleep, than I can predict how my health will fare in the following days when I'm struck with illness, and that I know the distances I can run or the number of stairs I can climb before collapsing on myself (hint: it's not a large number).
With good weeks in terms of the above, I tend to reward myself with a trip to McDonalds or a large thickshake (if I haven't had either in a while). Today I decided to have an ice cream after lunch, but made the mistake of underestimating the size of the scoops of ice cream when I ordered a double. The result was huge and looked to topple any moment if I didn't keep a close eye on incoming people or gravity.
Once I made it back to work and to my desk, I relaxed and thought now I can enjoy my ice cream. Yet just as I started to, all I could hear were voices of my friends talking about bad desserts, or the number of calories that might be in this ice cream. One voice, that of my diabetic friend, was rather prominent. I imagined her looking at the ice cream saying "Oh my God" in that "what the hell are you thinking" manner, and shaking her head as if I hadn't learned a vital life lesson.
Since when was eating ice cream supposed to suck?
Extended April Fools
While today is technically the 2nd of April in my timezone, it's only just begun to be the 1st of April on the Internet.
Every year, I tell myself to be wary of news posted on the 1st, taking everything that comes my way with a questionable look and a raised eyebrow, so that I won't be so easily fooled by jokes that, when played to a much younger version of myself, would have had me emotionally crash in disappointment after the initial excitement when I was being fooled.
And it's not only the 1st, but when you're roughly 20 hours ahead of where the majority of the Internet lives, then you gotta prepare yourself for a 2-day onslaught of 'creative journalism'.
Why is it I can get fooled so easily by the Internet when it's already full of pranksters desensitizing my funny bones with their remarks that are ever so full of wit and sarcasm? I guess it's because, for these 2 days on the calendar, the news finally tells me what I want to hear.
Yes I want to hear about Obama abandoning companies like of AIG, yes I think it's awesome that StarCraft 2 will have a gigantic transforming robot, yes I would love to get double the bandwidth on my internet connection, and yes I would like bacon sauce with my fries thank you very much.
So slowly, April Fools is becoming more and more a day for me to dream on how much more awesome life could be.
Not-so-nameless neighbours
And so we enter the first day of Blog Every Day April. Like Maureen Johnson, this'll pretty much be a day-by-day account of my life this month.
So what exciting things happened to me today? Well, today I walked to work with my neighbours.
I was late to work as usual, waiting for the lift to get to my level, when I heard the door opening to the only other apartment on this floor. Out came my neighbours, also ready to go to work.
There are 2 of them: a girl who I've encountered several times and keep calling "neighbour" since moving in to this apartment, and her boyfriend who I have seen before but never really met until today. I gave them my usual greeting - "Hey neighbours" - and we all walked together to our respective jobs.
We spent the walk talking about things that people who don't know a lot about each other talk about: work, work hours, being collectively called girls by one of the girls' friends as we passed-by, having my brother mistaken as a girl on his plane ticket, etc. The guy and I properly introduced ourselves to one another, and once they went their separate ways, I walked the rest of the way to work thinking, WTF, I actually don't know her name!
I tweeted that thought during the day (you can probably see that item in the Twitter feed to the right unless you're reading this via RSS) and found I wasn't completely alone when it came to nameless neighbours that you frequently encounter. One respondent referred to their nameless neighbour as "#12".
So I resolved to find out her name the next time we met, and as fate or co-incidence would have it, while I was waiting for the lift to take me back to my apartment this evening, I heard the lobby door open and in came my neighbours, also ready to get back home. After greeting the unnamed one - "Evening neighbour" - I found out her name.
Blog Every Day April
http://maureenjohnson.blogspot.com/2009/03/blog-every-day-april.html
^ from the blog of my favourite female author, a challenge to write something to your own blog for every day in the month of April. When thinking about taking up the challenge, I looked at the number of times I have posted to this site over the past years. If I do this, I will have written more stuff in a month than I have in any previous year. Yikes.
Some people need something to do. I'm not one of those people - in fact, I'd likely be happier with less to do - but my gut was telling me to do it, and my gut has been pretty good to me over the years.
So April 1, here I come. Unless the Conficker virus screws-up the Internet first.
Website redesign 2009 - part 3
More site updates:
- JavaScript effects are now in place
- Twitter feed is now displayed to your right...
...or so it should be if you're using Firefox.
I've recently installed the Google Chrome browser to see how my site fares using it (and because of some 'OMG Google Chrome pwns' rants from my brother), and let's just say that the site experience isn't exactly great in it:
- background images at times were missing
- PNGs with CSS opacity don't display correctly (this is a known bug with Chrome)
- and Scriptaculous - the JavaScript library I'm using for the effects - either runs slow or not at all
Although if one of my earlier posts is anything to go by, cross-browser compatibility isn't my greatest concern at the moment. I'm really just having fun messing-around with all this new stuff!
Website redesign 2009 - part 2
Some minor site updates:
- splash page removed for now, tracker moved to main layout
- CSS fixed up on some buggy pages (but still not IE tested)
My hosting service does provide me web statistics, so I really should get rid of that old site counter, but I noticed that the hosting service stats don't include URL query strings - the stuff after the ? character in a URL. Since my site is kind of built around the query string, this kind of skews the stats and doesn't give me a very good picture. It's been on the To-Do list for a while to get rid of ?-based URLs on this site, 2 reasons:
- having URLs like artwork/name_of_artwork seem to be more the norm around the internet
- URLs like that are more SEO-friendly
And we all like being SEO-friendly so that Google and the like can put us at the top of everybody's search results ;)
In other news, the last couple of weeks have seen some Red Horizon related queries *gasp* Yes, that's right, stuff has happened on the old Red Horizon front, but not programming progress I'm afraid.
Firstly, Nyerguds (Google his name, it'll come up in a lot of C&C circles) asked for the latest Red Horizon: Utilities stuff so he could refer another C&C modder to it - YAY, people are using my stuff!
Secondly, rm5248 (another C&C fan who frequented the now-defunct CNCTechCenter site where I used to put the development thread of this project) asked to take a look at the code to see if he could do something with it. The idea that I'm losing a tiny bit of ownership on my code did make me hesitate in his request, but it's not like the code was doing anything better sitting on my computer and not going anywhere. I will continue the project, but with the way things are with me now, not anytime soon. So I gave him the code in its current state - which is to say error-ridden and doesn't compile - and I wish him luck in whatever he wants to do with it.
Website redesign 2009 - part 1
So I've finally finished the site redesign... almost. What you see now is a fully-functional version of what the final product is supposed to look like... provided your browser renders it a lot like what Firefox 3 does. Yeah, I haven't even tested it in IE yet.
Over the next couple of weeks I'll be adding the fancier features like showing display items (like artwork, stories, etc) as overlays instead of going to a whole new page which had the potential downside of losing navigation. I might also have to change the splash page to match the new look - or get rid of it altogether.
Welcoming 2009
I haven't written anything up here since before Christmas '08, so I felt compelled to put something up here just to fill the silence and pre-emptively dispell any rumours about my death. Now it's pretty much Valentines Day... cripes.
So what have I been up to in the month-and-a-half since my holidays? Working on a website redesign.
It's a new year, it's time for a new look I thought. And so, what was supposed to be a new look for 2009 which was supposed to come out in mid-Jan, is now looking at being more of an early-March thing. Or, if I wanted to be more sarcastic (or more realistic), an Easter thing.
I've been trying to add a bunch of new tricks I've learned since the last makeover (circa 2007). One of these things is something fairly new to me: Twitter. OK, so that thing has been around for a long time, but only recently, through listening/watching other podcasts of other members of the IT industry plugging their own Twitter URLs, have I felt compelled to join up. I'll be working on adding my tweets to my website (another sidebar?!?!), likely integrate it with my Facebook as well, and start getting into the micro-blogging habit.
So you can find me at http://twitter.com/u1traq (note the 1 instead of an L. 'Ultraq' was already taken, under the guise of ultraQ... bastards), and apart from updating the world with whatever inane activity I'm doing at certain points in time, I think it might actually be useful for site-related mini updates, particularly when I get back to working on Red Horizon.
Tweet tweet.
