ChaosEngine

I don’t mean honor the abstract concept, though a good argument could be made for that as well, but rather Honor, one of my cats. Honor was five years old, a big friendly tomcat that was at least partially responsible for bringing all sorts of wildlife into my home that I didn’t really want there. His hunting prowess however was respectable and he presented me with a steady stream of frogs (partially eaten, apparently they taste better than mice), mice, snakes (often alive), rats and birds throughout the spring and summer months. He came from a litter of kittens one of my wife’s co-workers rescued from a garbage can moments before it destined from the dump. We took a brother and sister pair from the litter and named them Honor and Glory.

Besides that grisly assortment of hunting trophies he brought home, he was a great cat. He didn’t scratch up the furniture or knock things off tables like his sister Glory. He was always ready to sit in a lap and be scratched, and was just overall a great pet.

This morning I found him laying in the garden under my willow tree, a place where he would often nap. But there were flies all over him and it was immediately obvious something was wrong. I checked him over, but it didn’t appear that he had been hit by a car or bitten by another animal. There was no blood or obvious injuries. He had been active and healthy the night before, so I have no idea what happened to him.

It really doesn’t matter, gone is gone. He had a good life, I just wish it had been longer. I’ll miss ya big guy.

Interesting weekend.

Had a long talk with a co-worker and friend that went from a general bitch session to a very positive discussion of what we could do to make the place better and our jobs more fulfilling. Who knows if anything will come from it, but I definitely want to try and stay on that positive note. Usually when I start to get frustrated with a place I just look elsewhere, the idea that I might actually be able to influence the corporate culture never really crossed my mind. I’m not entertaining any great delusions of grandeur here, just thinking that it may be worth the effort to see what can happen if I try to keep a positive attitude and actively promote a few ideas that I think would improve the place. Of course maintaining a positive attitude isn’t particularly easy for me to do, I have a tendency to see the negative bits of a situation, and mock them sarcastically ad nauseum. So this may require a bit of focus and effort on my part. All the more so since some of the biggest obstacles are likely my direct peers. Despite a history of coming to blows in dog parks, streets, and other public venues, I am as non-confrontational at work as I can be. I just do not like situations that call for confrontation at work, there really should be no need for it. The reality though is that there is.

When I was taking To-Shin-Do, one of the core concepts was that it wasn’t just a martial art for fighting, but a method for living. Much of what I learned should be applicable here; methods of conflict resolution and for achieving goals. I think it’s time to start asserting and applying myself a bit more.

Truth is I’m just tired of feeling like a spectator in my own life. Really feeling the need to start taking a little more control. For the last couple of months I’ve been dieting and exercising which has been successful. Feeling a little better and hope to kind of clean up my image a bit. I’m looking way too grungy these days. I’ve passed the halfway mark on my schooling, less than six months until I finish. Not sure what happens then, but I hope it opens a few doors for me, or at least gives me the tools to pick the lock.

At the end of the week I start a week’s vacation. Nominally it is to participate in the Lilies War, a local SCA event. I’m not really active in the SCA anymore though, but my wife will be camping at it and I will be in and out over the week. I actually hope to use the time to set up a recording studio to better accommodate my podcasting and some other projects I have in mind. I’ve been feeling the need for a dedicated space to work with some sound insulation. Space is at a premium here and I don’t have an ideal solution, but I plan on making it work one way or another.

The subject of torture is something that has been in the news a lot lately. I’m surprised and dismayed by the fact that there is actually a debate on this subject. How can a country that has based itself on liberty and justice (perhaps not always living up to those ideals, but still expounding them) try and make an argument that torture is justified.

The author Michael Stackpole has a good editorial about this on his blog, in which he talks about this far more eloquently than can I, so go give it a read.

One aspect of this he doesn’t really delve into though is the use of extreme measures in a desperate situation vs. condoning them via government fiat. While Mr. Stackpole speaks of the ridiculousness of the ticking bomb argument, and I agree, I could imagine situations where one might be driven to do something horrible. I’m not condoning it, only saying I could understand where the ticking bomb argument could come into play.

The difference between an individual making a decision to use torture in the heat of the moment and doing it as part of government prescribed policy are hugely different things. The individual must make a decision. They must look at the situation and say “Yes, this is worth it, I have to do this”. And once they have taken that action they must answer for it. They cannot hide behind policy or bureaucracy, they must defend what they did and face the consequences. Having a policy that says that it is ok makes it routine, common, and removes responsibility from the individual. Any government that officially condones such action is firmly on the road to evil no matter how noble they think their cause is. I sincerely hope mine can reverse course before it is too late.

A couple of things I thought I would point out about using the Wii Fit as an exercise program.

1. I’m not using this as a replacement for going outdoors and doing stuff. I don’t go out and do much in the first place. I do however still take the dog to park and go hiking around the lake a few times a week.

2. I’m replacing going to the gym with staying home and using the Wii.

In some ways #2 is not a great trade off. I’m sure equal time spent at the gym would produce much better results. However, if I replace an occasional trip to the gym, with three to fours times as much time spent during the week on the Wii, I think I will come out ahead.

One thing that has led to much of the general derision of the Wii fit is the focus on the balance board. In an attempt to justify the cost of the balance board they have created lots of silly exercises that use the balance board, but don’t really need it. Like push-ups and sit-ups. If you only look at what you can do with the balance board, then it is indeed very limited and silly. Wii Fit is not the only exercise title for the Wii though. There are several out there of varying quality. I picked up a couple of others that had received good reviews, My Fitness Coah, and Gold’s Gym Cardio Workout. My Fitness Coach does not use the balance board at all, and Gold’s Gym uses it only in a cursory manner which is completely optional. What these titles become is more of an interactive workout video. They don’t allow you to do anything you couldn’t do on your own or with a traditional video. They do offer a little bit of variety and interactivity that will allow you to tailor your workouts and hopefully not get bored as quickly as you would with a simple static video.

The other side of the fitness coin is of course healthy eating. So I’m am embarking on yet another diet. My history with diets have been rocky, but I have managed to lose in the area of 30 lbs several times before in my life and keep it off for a year or more. True, I eventually always seem to gain it back, but I like to think that if I hadn’t made those attempts in the past I might weigh a lot more than I do now. I may not be winning the war ,but I’m at least executing a formidable holding action.

So this time around I’m trying the Mediterranean Diet. Now, I don’t think there is a dietary magic bullet out there. Diets work on one principle, taking in fewer calories than you expend. Any successful diet works on that concept. In reality a diet shouldn’t even be needed. Just eat less, exercise more, and weight will be lost. Unfortunately, overweight people generally have a history of making bad choices when it comes to food, and sometimes a little guidance is needed to help keep you focused. It is really about putting yourself in the proper frame of mind and setting some limits. The core of the Mediterranean Diet is not radically different than Weight Watchers, South Beach, or any other reasonable diet plan. Eat a diet high in fiber, low in fats, and with lots of fruits and vegetables, and limit your consumption of meats and processed foods. This isn’t rocket science. Each plan has its own slant on things, but they do not differ radically. I am giving this a try because I like the kinds of spices and flavors it uses, and it encourages the idea of really enjoying food and experimenting with different recipes. Keeping the meals tasty and interesting is one way to feel less deprived when cutting back.

So, who knows how far I will get this time around. I’ve lost 4 or 5 lbs in the last week, which is about normal for when starting a new diet. The first couple of weeks usually see a significant drop before leveling off to the 1-2 lb per week rate.  I doubt that I will ever be thin, but I hope to avoid being someone that is so fat they need a handicap license plate so they don’t have to walk so far to the all you can eat buffet.

Back in December I joined a gym. It was a drastic action, for I had no real desire to work out. I did however have a desire to stop growing fatter and to reverse my increasingly sedentary lifestyle before it was too late. Since moving from Maine to Kansas I have been steadily going downhill. I have lots of excuses/reasons as to why this has happened, but in general it has to do with being lazy and not really liking where I live. In Maine I loved the little town I lived in and surrounding countryside. I walked/hiked/canoed/did yardwork/worked out at the dojo, etc on a regular basis. Here in Kansas, I just can’t seem to get motivated to do much. I had some success taking martial arts lessons for awhile, but the dojo I was at moved, moved again, closed down, reopened, then disappeared off the face of the earth. I could try to find another dojo, but truth is my heart really isn’t in it anymore and I would likely just make excuses as to why I couldn’t make it to lessons on a regular basis. I’ve also made some incursions against the battle of the bulge with Weight Watchers and the South Beach Diet. The South Beach Diet was the most successful; I lost 30 lbs and kept it off for over a year. However after changing jobs and starting back to school, I gained it all back, plus a couple more. I am now the fattest I have ever been in my life and find doing a lot of things I use to do difficult or impossible.

So, deciding that I had to do something I joined a gym. I went to it regularly for a couple of months and was feeling pretty good about it. I didn’t lose any weight, but I hadn’t changed my eating habits so that wasn’t a huge surprise. I then got sick for a few days, and used that pathetic excuse to stop going to the gym for about six weeks. I went back last week at a little past 11pm on a Friday night. I had a good workout and there were only a few other people there. This was one of the reasons I had joined a 24 hour fitness center. I’m pretty self conscious about working out. It’s always kind of embarrassing to be the one fat guy in a room full of healthy young attractive people. Just makes me feel really out of place. So I tend to go at times when young healthy attractive people our out enjoying themselves. On Monday however I decided I should try to get over that problem and just stop by on the way home from work rather than having to drive back later. So I stopped in to find the place absurdly crowded with no open cardio machines and about half the weight machines in use. So, once again presented with the flimsiest of excuses, I decided to just skip the workout and go home.

Now, my wife had just bought a Wii Fit that weekend. I wasn’t initially interested in using this, as I didn’t see how it could be that helpful. However, deciding that doing something would be better than nothing, I pulled it out and gave it a try. It starts by doing an assessment of your general health. This involves you telling it your age and height; it then weighs you and has you perform a number of balance exercises. From there it calculates your BMI and your fitness age. I don’t really care about my “Fitness Age”, because I don’t think the silly little tests really mean much, however, weight and BMI are numbers I’m interested in. It cheerfully exclaimed that I was obese, no surprise there. I was actually a little disappointed that it was so happy and polite. I think it would be much funnier, not to mention more productive, if it was much ruder. When I step on the pad it should scream “Get off me you fatass!”. Alas, the Japanese politeness does not seem to permit this. It does however change your Mii, your little cartoon avatar, to a size to reflect your BMI. I now appear as the Michelin Man with a beard.

You then go on to perform a number of different exercises; Yoga, Aerobics, Strength Training, and Balance Games. Some of the exercises have a trainer to help you. This is an extremely generic person with washed out white features and wearing typical health nut spandex gear. You can choose either male or female, but both are rather androgynous and both are irritatingly cheerful. Totally devoid of emotion these spandex albino androids lead you through exercises, telling you that you are doing great as you struggle not to pass out.  I hate them.  A lot of the exercises don’t use the board at all, like running in place. Some use them in a ridiculously tangential fashion, such as resting your feet on the board during sit-ups. It keeps track of how much time you spend working out, and unlocks new exercises and games as you go.

I’ve only been using this for a week now, but I think it may actually be relatively effective for general health and fitness. It shows your workouts on a calendar, and graphs your weight, BMI, Fitness Age, and workouts for you so you can get a good representation of the progress you are making. I tend to think of it more like a Yoga/Tai Chi type of experience than bodybuilding. The strength exercises will undoubtedly work, but I don’t think they will come anywhere close to matching the results from weightlifting. The other exercises all seem to have some benefit as well. If you can get past the silliness of some of the exercises and the cheerleading from the Wii the Fit seems like a solid low impact workout. It has enough variety to keep it from getting too boring, and the graphing of your progress with accompanying praise or admonishment is good for people that like clear feedback on their progress.

I’m thinking I’m going to give this thing about a month and see how I do with it. If I’m showing improvement I may well cancel the gym membership and see how far the Wii can take me.  There are a number of other exercise based games for the Wii, and surely more to come.  This should help with the variety and hopefully keep it from getting boring.  In the end it will be like any other workout plan.  If you do it consistently it will work, if not it won’t.  I’m really just hoping the fact that it can be done at home with no need to go anywhere will remove a number of my excuses.  Not to worry, I’m sure I can come up with more.

Well, I decided that I liked the old theme better than the new one, so I tried to revert back to the old Snoods theme with its Black and Orange simplicity.  However, it turns out that theme seems to have issues with WordPress 2.7 and Internet Explorer.   After quite a bit of rooting around in the html I found the problem was formatting characters that get copied over when I use MS Word 2007 to write my posts.  So, moral of the story, do not use a Microsoft Product to produce content that will be viewed in a Microsoft Browser. I think I have it fixed, though a couple of posts had to be deleted and rewritten and a couple of comments lost.

The switch back to the old theme seems especially apropos since my old pal Yukari sent me this pic:

Apparently she liked the butterfly from the Snoods theme enough to get a tattoo of it.  Very cool.   Wish I could claim to be the artist, but that is not where my talent lies.

In other news:
My wife has been working in a town sixty miles away for the last year. Due to the long hours she often worked and the cost of gas at the time we decided to get her an apartment to stay in during the week rather than having to commute. This arrangement got old pretty fast, as despite my grumblings, I actually do miss the woman when she is gone. She is starting a new job in a few weeks, back in KC, so the last week has been spent getting her moved out of the apartment and back here. It is amazing how much stuff someone can accumulate in a year. We live in a pretty small space, and there simply isn’t room for all of it, so things are still a bit of a mess here until we get it all figured out.

And while I’m happy she is back, I am feeling my style a bit cramped. I’m considerably neater than she is, and I also don’t care much for having the TV on all the time. I find it too distracting when I’m trying to do homework, get some writing done, or do much else that requires any concentration. I’m actually considering following in the footsteps of Scott Sigler and setting up a workspace in a closet. Tonight the need for this was really driven home as I had to record an introduction video as part of a school project. I got started late because there were simply too many distractions, and between random noise and activity from the pets, and multiple coughing fits from the wife, it only took about 50 takes to get it right.

So things are kind of back to normal.  The wife is back home and my sight is mostly back to its old self.  A little cleanup and editing left to do as some things have changed with the more recent versions of Wordpress, but nothing too major.

Tonight I went and say the movie Fanboys. As the name suggests, it is a about a group of fanboys, friends since their school days, which hatch a plan to break into George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch and steal a copy of Star Wars Episode 1, the Phantom Menace before it was released.  It was a silly premise, but a fun show that any geek or fan that can laugh at themselves a little should enjoy. There was a some funny stuff about the supposed rivalry between Star Wars and Star Trek fans, lots of cameos, and plenty of fandom in-jokes.

While there was lots of humor that only people that have been part of the sci-fi fandom scene will truly appreciate, it was really a movie about friendship and following one’s dreams despite what the rest of the world wants you to do. Even so, I doubt it will gain much traction outside of geeky sci-fi fans. As with all of these kinds of friends on a road trip type of shows, it really does make me want to just break away from the norm and do something fun and outrageous once in awhile. It is way too easy to lose track of what is really important and forget to take time to enjoy life a bit as you get older. I certainly hope that I manage to do more with this year than I did with last.

All in all it was far to easy to see a little of myself in the characters in the film, and perhaps a little sad that I didn’t see more.

After a month with the new Zune, I’m still relatively pleased with it. At first the battery life seemed pretty abysmal, but if I remember to turn the wireless off it’s serviceable. As I said in the first post about it, I didn’t really care about the Zune Marketplace or its “Social”. However I was curious enough to check them out. The Marketplace is decent, and actually sells DRM-free music, though usually in a WMA format which I’m not interested in for reasons of future compatibility. I’m still looking to the Amazon MP3 store and CD Baby for my music.

The social could have some potential to be interesting. It shows a mix map, showing the artists and songs you play the most then linking to other users that have played the same songs and artists a lot. Following the links you can find other music you are likely to be interested. It’s a nice idea with a nice interface, but it really breaks down because it only links music that is available from the Zune Marketplace. So since the top bands I listen to are not available for sale by Microsoft, they don’t show up as part of my mix and the links that come up aren’t from my most listened to bands. To further muddy the waters, Zune has decided since it doesn’t recognize the artist, it will just pull up a match from its store based on other things, like the album name. So Tullamore’s “One for the Road” shows up in my mix as Willie Nelson’s “One for the Road”. Not that I have a problem with Willie Nelson, I have a couple of his CD’s, but I haven’t played them on my Zune.

My original impression holds up, nice player with a nice interface, but the marketplace and social are really only good for people that listen to top 40 type stuff from major labels.

Spent another great New Year’s at O’Malley’s Pub in Weston, MO. Tullamore and Bob Reeder were performing, though we never did make it to the upper pub to see Bob since we were having such a good time downstairs. We spent New Year’s three years ago at O’Malley’s and Bob made it a very memorably night with his singing and antics, but it was crowded last night and we didn’t want to lose our stage side seats so we stayed put.

They put out party hats on all the tables, and I took to wearing a plastic bowler, that pretty much resembled my head except that it was blue and had a brim. It caused a few humorous moments as it was warm and I sweated a bit which caused this hat to form a vacuum like seal on my enormous noggin making it damn near impossible to remove and sounding something like a champagne cork popping when I did finally pull it off. I half expected my head to look like one gigantic hickey by the end of the night.

Took a number of pictures with my cell phone, but for the most part they didn’t turn out very well. I need to acquire a camera that works well in low light conditions since my Canon A700 never works well in the shadowy cellar that O’Malley’s lives in either.

“You’ve sold out, you’re nothing but a number in the machine now…”. This was the reaction of a friend of mine when I told him I bought a Microsoft Zune to replace my dead iAudio XL5 mp3 player. Not that he had any investment in me not buying a Zune, only that after I’ve railed against Apple and iPods for so long, he couldn’t understand why I would buy something from Microsoft that is just as closed and proprietary. It was a fair question.

I’ve been a pro-Linux anti-Microsoft guy for a long time. However I can’t really maintain that without becoming a hypocrite. I love Linux, I prefer it for my work computer. The Linux desktop has many features I like that are lacking in Windows, and there are many open source applications that I feel are far superior to their Windows counterparts. For all that, I still use Windows at home most of the time. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get the games I play to work under Linux, to get all my media files to work, and I’ve had some success. However it is usually a lot of effort to get something that works not quite as well as it did under Windows. This isn’t even Linux’s fault, if anything it is a testament to the power of Linux that I can take a program designed to work under a Microsoft OS and get it to run at all. However, when I get home at night, I really just want things to work. I don’t want to have to spend a lot a time configuring things to get an experience that isn’t quite what I had hoped for. So it’s hard to keep bashing Microsoft while grudgingly using it because it just works better for what I’m doing. I will continue to explore and promote Linux, but I also have to be honest that it just isn’t quite what I need it to be right now. Linux definitely has the power to do everything I need, but the rest of the world has to get on that bandwagon if software, drivers, and codecs are going to be developed for it and make it truly competitive. After nearly a decade of preaching the good word, I don’t think I’ve created a single convert. So yeah, I’m selling out and accepting the fact that it might just be nice to have a full featured device that just works without a lot of tweaking.

As far as continuing to shun Apple, well, it’s the principal of the thing. Apple is every bit as much a closed, proprietary, bully of a company as Microsoft. But they get away with it. The tech press fawns over them, ignoring every flaw and transgression in hopes they may be the next one fortunate enough to place their drooling lips on Mr. Jobs’ backside. Anything Microsoft attempts gets reviled and criticized, while Apple can do no wrong. Don’t get me wrong, the iPod’s are nice pieces of tech, but they aren’t the only ones and don’t deserve the overwhelming hype. There is also more of a mandated obsolescence with them. Microsoft has actually done something really cool with their Zunes. They update them. They roll out new firmware and OS revisions that add all kinds of new features. They make these available for the previous models so that the Zune you bought two years ago can do pretty much everything the latest model they roll out can do. The Zunes also appear to be a little cheaper than similarly featured iPod’s, you don’t have to pay the “I’m part of the cool crowd” tax. Beyond that, there isn’t much to recommend it over an iPod. I haven’t used a iPod much, but looking at my brother’s iPod touch it is a pretty awesome interface. The Zune does a pretty good job as well though and I have no complaints with navigating it yet. It also features wireless sync which is a nice feature. Of course both iPod and Zune require proprietary software to work. I’m not happy with that, but it’s just kind of the way things are. In the case, the Zune made more sense to me. I don’t like iTunes. Of course I haven’t tried the latest versions of it so it may have gotten better. However Apple software has several times now loaded components and updates I explicitly told it not too, so there is no way I’m loading it on my system. There are also lots of compatibility problems being reported with iTunes and Vista 64. So I’m guessing that running an application from Microsoft on a modern Microsoft OS I will have fewer problems. So far so good.

Both players have a number of features that deal with buying music from their respective stores. This isn’t really a feature I care about. I don’t listen to much in the way of popular music. Almost everything I listen to are from small independent groups with no major label affiliation, so the iTunes store or the Zune Marketplace aren’t likely to have what I’m looking for. I get a fourteen day free trial with the Zune Marketplace, so I will probably try it out, but I’m not expecting to be excited about it. My biggest complaint with the Zune, is that it uses a proprietary cable to charge and transfer files. I just don’t understand why you can’t use a standard usb cable for this. All I need is another cable that if I lose or damage my device becomes useless. And if I want to have the ability to charge my player at work, I either have to take the cable with me, or pony up another $30 to have a spare to keep at the office. Of course, this would have been a problem with the iPod as well, and many of the other players out there.

The other issue I’m having with the Zune is the fact that it manages your music library by ID3 tags. I knew this was going to be an issue when I got it, I just didn’t realized how messed up the tags on my collection were. My old player did everything by folders, it didn’t sort by tags, you just organized your music in a logical way in different folder. I kind of like this actually, but most modern mp3 players and software like to use tags, and there are good reasons to do so. Since my collection is eclectic from many different sources though, there is no real consistency to the tags which makes it hard to manage. In fact I found many of my Celtic music albums tagged as Reggae, so eMusic of CDBaby had some weird ideas of genres going on when I bought these. So, I have a lot of work ahead of me, but its not that big of a deal, something I should have done to begin with.

Anyway, call it selling out if you will. I’ve been tilting at windmills for a long time, now I just want to sit back and enjoy the breeze.