Straight Edge Life

I was too busy to think about TV today. Didn’t watch a minute. I like being busy. The day went by in a flash. It was hot though and I wasn’t all that productive. I never am when it’s hot. I just space out a lot and stare at my keyboard. I slip into temporary insanity on days like this. I revert into this sub-human animal on a primal, single-minded, instinctual search for ways to cool down. Shade, water, even a cold floor to lay belly up on. Nothing else much matters. People call me on the phone and I barely remember the conversations later.

I have to remember that my goal isn’t just to quit watching TV as much, but to realign my life towards a better all-around balance of work, play, distraction and rest. I managed not to watch TV today but didn’t do so well with the other stuff. Oh well.

I spent the entire day fighting spam on one of my servers. When I finally got around to eating some dinner at 9:00 I almost stopped by Hollywood Video to score another Buffy the Vampire Slayer disk. See how bad it was getting??? Didn’t do it. Held back. Stayed strong. I utterly failed at my other goals for the day. I tried to schedule things, tried to get some exercise in, tried to eat well. Actually, if Gabe didn’t bring over those damn Skittles I would have eaten well. Work has a way of mucking up my plans.

Ok, so it’s not quite noon yet and I don’t miss TV. I started a list of my bad habits in a shockingly honest journal entry (paper) last night while not watching TV. What a depressing way to fall asleep, with a list of reasons why I am a slacker in my hand. To be fair I did try to make a second list of ways to fix my bad habits. Just a bit ago I finished reassembling some of my fitness equipment. Step one, right? And right now, while waiting for another possible house mate to stop by and view the room, I am scheduling my upcoming workweek as to help overcome my habit of doing work marathons rather than 8 hours a day. Long sentence. In a nutshell my bad habits include food, exercise, lack of sleep, work patterns, recreation, vacation and scheduling. All easy enough to fix I suppose, but it was tough to see how much I’ve let each of these slide, if only just a bit. Paints a bad overall picture of my health.

“Vladimir Putin unsubscribes the way we all want to.”

Poster on Slashdot in regards to a story about a russian spammer who was beaten to death in Moscow.

Just got back from seeing Land of the Dead. I always enjoy a good zombie flick. Unfortunately this one didn’t seem that good to me. Might have been the monster headache I was trying to fight off. That always gets in the way of enjoying zombie horror. It’s been a long weekend. Lots of work on the house, a bit of real work. And lots of trying to relax. It’s hard to relax when I’ve got so much on my mind. Things are definitely easing off a bit. The house is almost kinda under control. I finished a major project recently (leaving only two major projects to finish) and I’ve already got a few folks on the line as possible house mates. For some weird reason though I keep feeling like I want to spend Christmas alone this year. Things are suddenly different and I kinda want a bit of time to either completely forget about all of it or to think it over by myself.

I decided today that I’m going to seriously cut back or eliminate my TV watching for a while. Not permanently, but for a while. TV doesn’t get a damn thing done. Neither does reading the brain candy Dean Koontz books I read either. I have committed to cutting back on those as well. I’d like to cut back on computer time, but with work I’m only going to be able to cut back on non-work computer time. Which I’ve been doing already. Anyways… point is that I feel like living a bit more well-rounded life. If I replace even half of my tv or non-work computer time with working out, even for only a month, I’ll be in good shape pretty quickly.

A couple of my friends are doing multi-day show-shoe trips and 24 hour races. Others are climbing Cathederal Peak as I write this entry. And it’s not that I’m jealous of their endeavors. Personally, I’d rather be lugging a full camera bag into the hills for a few days of photography. I don’t need to climb 5.12 anymore… but I do want to be fit enough to go the places I want to go, to shoot the things I want to shoot and not be burdened by poor fitness. I’ve done a hell of a lot of work to become stable as my own boss. I need to start taking advantage of it. Otherwise all the annoying sacrifices of becoming my own boss will be wasted.

To ramble on a bit more… I feel like one of the greatest disciplines in my life is to fight the power of distraction. There are a lot of distractions out there, and when things are going just well enough that none of your problems are especially threatening it’s easy to get lazy and push them aside. I never realized that when I was younger most of the things I did, climbing, traveling, photography, design, and drawing were there to help me figure stuff out. Tools. And that was exactly what made me love them so much. It wasn’t an inherent love for drawing that made me draw, it was a need that could only be fulfilled with pencil, pastel or ink. And I loved the sweet relief a night of drawing could bring. The solution. Now… I’m finding that I miss a few of these things. Maybe it’s because I’m truly in love with photography. Maybe it’s because my life isn’t as together as I want to make myself believe.

I just looked at my collective stats for search engine traffic on this site. Windows: 92%. Mac: 5%, Linux: 1%, Other: 3%. The only change between this and last month is that the collective percent for Mac visitors went up 1% and Linux went down 1%. Windows is steady. I wonder if Mac OS X is actually hurting linux a bit. Interesting.

Sounds like some kind of kinky sex thing, right? Bedroom Hell. That game where you dress up in leather and grab the devil horn hats? Might be fun… Unfortunately, this is the other kind of hell. The hell of sorting thousands of books, vhs tapes, receipts, term papers, awards, photos, bits and pieces of electronic equipment, adapters, ancient phones, and just about any other kind of household junk you can imagine in an overheated dusty room at the end of a very long day of programming. Alone. I’m on the verge of just calling Junk Be Gone and saying bye bye to all of it. Am I really going to miss that crap? Will my dad? My sister? They haven’t seen it or used it for years. I doubt they would even notice anything was missing. For that matter, if after calling Junk Be Gone, I sold the house? Would they notice that I had a different address? That I also had a little ‘92 Toyota pickup truck instead of my ‘05 Jetta GLI? Or that I was working full-time as a photographer again instead of programming? Maybe we’ll find out.

I’m working on a major redesign of the Pixenter Stock Photo Engine. This is the fourth major redesign of the Pixenter system and my 11th or 12th major project overall. It’s a bit strange to think of how much time I’ve spent and how much I’ve learned in that time about how to build database driven websites. But building isn’t really all that impressive. As I’m taking a 10,000 foot view of Pixenter I’m trying to design it, to architecturally design the system to perform elegantly and flexibly. It’s different than just sitting down and making things happen with code. With a few years practice anybody can do a good job of coding a complex database driven site. And for all that I do know about building sites (which really isn’t that much) I am an toddler when it comes to architecture. I think about guys like Duncan Cameron, my hero and master Lasso developer, and the way he can apply an intelligent design to programming (see dCore) and it just blows me away. It’s the difference between a craftsman and an artist. One has a skill, the other knows how to use skill to apply meaning and purpose to his work. And it’s not that I don’t know the purpose of Pixenter. I do. I know exactly what it’s supposed to do… it’s just a matter of seeing the design in my head, on paper, and finally in code. It’s the next level of programming. I’m glad to be breaking into it. Necessity is the mother of invention, right? Truth is, this time I have to build Pixenter, right, really right… And so an architect I become.

I took this shot while in DC last week. I think I’d like to go back to DC and shoot the monuments at night. Seeing them in the day doesn’t really do them justice. This isn’t a great photo or anything but you can see the care they’ve taken in designing the lighting. I was actually trying to catch lightening when I was taking this shot, but it was heat lightening and didn’t really have any bolts. Anyways… the memorial is nice. Moving even. All of the monuments are really well lit.

Made significant progress on the house today. Ann and I filled 10 massive garbage bags full of recyclables, trash, and goodwill stuff. The upstairs hallway, loft and my office are almost presentable. The back deck is swept even. The living room and the two upstairs bedrooms aren’t doing so well. Neither is the kitchen for that matter. But it’s all good. One step at a time, right? I think I could have the middle bedroom ready for a roommate fairly quickly. I have NO idea how I’m going to get rid of the stuff in the living room and bedrooms. I’ll have to borrow a truck or something. I can sort it quickly enough, it’s just a matter of hauling it.

I think once I get the place emptied out I can decide what to do with it, or, more to the point, in it. Right now it’s feels like more of a burden than a home.