Saw 2 movies over the last couple of days.
Sweeney Todd
Johnny Depp and that other crazy white chick. I didn’t know it was a musical going in, but I still enjoyed it. Very gruesome and weird.
Juno
Best movie I’ve seen all year! I’ve been waiting for months to watch this, the trailer for it was excellent. A character driven comedy/drama with excellent acting and screenplay. The human element in movies; sappy love plots; have been getting to me more and more and this is a great example. Lots of high school comedy realism and awkwardness that I totally relate to and some good questions about love. Definitely go see it ASAP!
It’s a typical Christmas post. Merry Christmas and whatnot. My heart just isn’t in it this year though due to a combination of factors. Whether my family situation or my personal situation, I’m not sure which, but I’m just not celebrating too much. No tree at home, no snow, no heart. The one redeeming element were the presents of course!
I was extremely happy about finding a local knitting shop called Knit One, which seems to have a great community attached to it. I purchased a book for my mom from there and got the shops card, hopefully I can get her out of the house and making some connections. I hope she follows up on it.
My main gift was a great cashmere scarf, I don’t think I can get enough cashmere. A few gift cards to B&N and iTunes also. I really don’t need much anymore, I’m trying to slim down my physical connections as much as I can due to all the moving. Simple is better now-a-days. Also had a nice honey ham dinner with some great wine. I can’t really ask for more. Hope your Christmas was just as good!
Again, a re-occurring theme in my life as I mature, I think about what makes me happy and what I want out of life. I’ve defined it before with money being the roots for happiness. That still stands, but I’m aiming deeper now, with what I want to do with my life. My happiness comes and goes, generally I’m positive overall, but what do I want to do? What makes me happy?
I was absorbed reading a short novel yesterday called The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect about the technology singularity, an event when similiar to Skynet or something when humans build a computer smart enough to think for itself, improve itself, and the consequences as the computer takes over. As all technology improves exponentially, eventually we might reach that point very soon. A scary thought, but the main point I took away from that novel was what people did once the computer took over. Imagine that it could grant you any whim you pleased. No more food, no more need really, no worries, so what would you do? What would make you happy?
The interesting thing I took away was that people would still chat and interact. A person is unique and ultimate. We control things ultimately. When I loosely relate that to my life, I came up with traveling as being one of the most important things to me. Meeting new people, learning new things, experiencing as much as I can ultimately makes me happy. I need to travel more.
A friend of mine has created a blog for his dad as a christmas gift. If that isn’t a great gift, then I don’t know what is. If the though is what matters most, then this is definitely up there.
Now to keeping looking for gifts for my mom, someone I can barely relate to! This will be fun.
As the title summates, tonight I went to a yoga class that RIT offers and it was excellent.
When I discovered last week that this quarter was going to be “easy,” I was excited. More free time for projects, more time to relax, more time to do what I want to do, because usually what I’m doing IS the right thing to do be doing. Once this weekend hit however, I just hit a wall and couldn’t focus at all. I’m very much a swing person, back and forth between periods of high productivity and focus to periods of complete lethargy and non-activity. This weekend was a big on the lazy side and I hated it. Once I got to the gym on Sunday morning, it set me back in motion and then I sent out like 7 resumes in the afternoon and got most of my work done! In that time while I was at the gym, I realized that the gym is where I get my focus and center. I enjoy burning off energy because I have so much. It’s part of my life and I can’t change that anymore.
Once I was back from the gym, I looked around and then signed up for the next Yoga class that was still available. I’ve done yoga, pilates, mixed cardio, and focused training classes before, but yoga has something simple and peaceful about it. The best class I’ve taken was in completely darkness and just had Enya playing in the background. Not what people would expect for me, but I love it none-the-less. It gives me time to focus and relax. I push my body hard and doing a focused stretching session is excellent for my muscles as well.
I went tonight and it was great. I ran afterwards and felt great doing that. I’m home now, tired and loose. Yoga is definitely worth the time.
One of the interesting things I’ve noticed thanks to having a Blackberry now is how OCD I’ve become, checking the device constantly. I have it set to gently blink whenever new email comes in and only vibrate for an incoming phone call, but sometimes I find myself looking over to the device almost every 10 minutes, just expecting something to happen. It’s a bad habit to get into, getting dependent on this device.
I originally got the blackberry for work email and after realizing how useful it was, added my personal email to the device. It’s great being able to have one mobile source for juggling everything, but it does need a lot of attention at times. I expect things to happen, I expect a certain amount of email to arrive every day or hour. It’s a good thing for the most part, but sometimes I just stare the blackberry and shout at it to do something. Entertain me! Why won’t you entertain me?
The most annoying element is the “phantom vibrate,” when swear you hear or feel the device vibrating. It could be the bass from the music vibrating something or a car driving by, but you swear your phone was going off, and then it wasn’t. It’s very disconcerting and messes with your mind. Overall though, mindfuck is definitely worth it for the abilities the Blackberry brings!
The state of affairs in OSX with Blackberries is pretty sad. RIM offers a free program called PocketMac, which amazingly works, but sucks very badly. It hasn’t been updated in a long time and is not a Universal binary.
As part of my organizational work, I’m getting my contacts all in sync with Address Book in OSX, then dumping them to Gmail and my Blackberry. I have a PC with the RIM syncing software, which works fine and is a well developed piece of software, but i don’t want to add an extra middle man to my syncing.
Overall, the software has a shitty installer, terrible Mac interface, slow performance, and lack of options and documentation. However, it does seem to work. I tried just doing a 1-way with my contacts, dumping them on the Blackberry, and syncing my Notes on the Blackberry to Stickies on OSX.
- Contacts sync 1-way fine, but it is a complete 1-way sync. It deletes all contacts on the Blackberry first, then overwrites your contacts. I have to try a 2-way sync, but I’m cautious because I don’t want the Blackberry deleting info on the Address Book.
- Notes lose their title, but they transfer fine to Stickies. 2-way sync works fine.
I’m keeping it simple and not gonna try Calendar sync or anything. Overall, this is a very negative review, but I can’t complain too much because it does work. Oh well.
Well, it’s been another long while, but that won’t stop me. I write here as an enjoyment, although it’s also a bit of a luxury to find the time to write. The last two weeks have been a mix of activity: finals and then Thanksgiving break travels. Finals weren’t that bad all things considered, I passed my classes and am incredibly happy to be done with that godforsaken quarter. As for my travels over the last week, I spent some time in Buffalo, NY, Pittsburgh, PA, Point Pleasant, NJ, and Philly, PA visiting friends and relaxing. It’s been a tough quarter, I can take a break, right? I wound up driving around 1400 miles, which gave me a good deal of time to reflect. I arrived home Sunday night with this week left empty, so I can focus and get some work done.
I’ve already spent Monday watching movies, so perhaps I will start working today. For the rest of this week, my rough agenda is as follows:
- Get back on track with the gym and running
- Read up about 2 specific new programming languages: XNA, Obj-C or something.
- Refresh my basic programming skills: Java
- Organize my contacts and get them sync on Google, my Blackberry, and my address book.
- Organize my photos and release my “background collection.”
- Find an internship! Send out more resumes.
Well, time to get started. No need to procrastinate anymore.
I guess it’s a big deal to me when I legally purchase software, because I just don’t do it very often. Piracy and other methods aside, most applications I use are actually open source or free. Free software is nearly as good or better than other software out there, for what I need generally. Coda though is a professional web designer solution that is totally worth paying for.
Coda basically gives you one simple interface for everything you would need as a web designer. Check their site, it has a nice design worth checking out purely for the visual effects, but it also explains its abilities better than I can. I basically love the ability to create a profile for a project/site, storing FTP and SSH passwords for easy access, then just focusing on the project, keeping everything combined and balanced in one window. You can have the remote server on side, ready to FTP files using the powerful Transmit engine and files ready to edit on the side side, using the likewise powerful SubethaEdit engine. You can visually edit CSS files and using Regex search for functions. If you want to really change things, you pop open an SSH window without having to login and you can just work.
Overall, I find it has a great interface thanks to Apple’s beautiful design and it enables you to work very quickly. Worth the money!!
