February 2012

Exercise.

I was walking up to my favorite Dunkin’ Donuts when the voice in my head started in on me.

“Remember that dream you had the other night where you were running so fast that you were running in slow motion?”

“Yeah, what about it,” my curious side asked.

“Remember how good you felt when you were running so fast that you were running in slow motion. Remember how streamlined and how healthy you felt when you heard those ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch sounds in your head?”

“Yes,” I confessed. I didn’t want to pursue the conversation any longer because the fact that I was running in slow motion and hearing ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch sounds at 43 years old was a little disconcerting.

“You should skip the cookie today, just like you did yesterday.”

“But yesterday after skipping the cookie at Dunkin’ Donuts I ended up eating pistachios at my desk and they were really good,” I countered.

“You should skip the pistachios, too.”

“I want to ride my bike but it’s not bike riding season yet,” I silently remarked, using whatever telepathic means was necessary to shut the voice up inside my head. I don’t like it when that voice reminds me of ch-ch-ch-ch and healthy eating.

“Riding your bike will be much easier this spring if you watch what you eat during hibernation season.”

“I want to sleep if it’s hibernation season,” was my simple reply.

“You can’t. There’s too much to do. Why don’t you ride the exercise bike tonight as a way to celebrate the fact that you’re not going to order a cookie when you get to the counter?”

I was entering the front door of Dunkin’ Donuts when I muttered out loud, “Fine.” I wonder if people think I have tourettes.

I didn’t have to place an order for the unsweetened iced tea because the order was already in the process of being assembled. Yesterday I had encountered a new person behind the register and she asked what I wanted as the other person behind the counter handed me my already assembled beverage of choice.

“I’m predictable, I guess,” I remarked to the new person behind the register. Apparently this translated to “my UFO has cruise control” because she gave me a look like I was an alien.

I started my journey back to the Jeep to write this blog entry when the voice started up again.

“See, you did it, no cookie today. You’ll thank me for it later on.”

I better find a way to make the ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch sound.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

14 February 2012 by Fitness. Ponderings and Musings Quirky. 3

Bestest Friends.


So yesterday around 5:30 p.m. Earl and I returned from our trip-that-never-happened to Virginia Beach, Va. After a lovely drive from State College, Pa. to Corning, N.Y. and then up through the beautiful Finger Lakes to the New York State Thruway, we were home safe and sound, all relaxed and ready to take on the challenges of this work week. It was a good feeling, and one that afforded me a good night’s sleep last night. That’s a rarity on a Sunday night for me. Quite enjoyable.

It’s been a long time since Earl and I went “on a ride”. One of our first rides of this sort was 14 hours non-stop in my old ’94 Hyundai Excel. I think that was the acid test to see if Earl could handle my idea of a road trip, and he passed with flying colors back then. These rides are kind of like those summits you read about where the CEO of some big corporation goes and hides in a cabin in the woods for a while and comes out with brilliant ideas. Earl and I talked about our finances and our retirement and where we see ourselves at various milestones that lie ahead. I would say that we reconnected, but the connection was never absent to begin with, so I guess we just continued and strengthened the connection that was already there.

I keep hearing that gay marriage isn’t appropriate because you’re not suppose to marry your best friend, you’re suppose to marry your spouse. Spouse != best friend (that’s geek speak for ‘does not equal’). I think that’s ridiculous. The couples that last are the ones that married as best friends, regardless of whether they’re a gay or straight couple.

I’m lucky that I found my best friend and that he said ‘I Do’. The road trips would get lonely without him.

** If you follow my Twitter and/or Foursquare, you probably know the route we took just as much as we do.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

13 February 2012 by Fun and Games Dept 2

State College, Pennsylvania.

For the past two weeks the plan has been that on Friday Earl would meet me at work and we would leave on a weekend adventure. The target destination has been Virginia Beach for this particular weekend. We have done is weekend jaunt in the past; it’s a good way to get away from the chill of Central New York that is so prevalent this time of year.

Earl met me at work on cue Friday afternoon. It was then that he informed me that he had received word of some major changes at his work that would be taking place on Monday. We needed to stop at his office in Scotia to pick up some binders. No worries, we did just that and continued the ride.

As he perused the binders as I drove, I could sense that his business wheels we turning. He made a few calls and got things in order for Monday. At our first stop I said, “you’re concerned that we’re going to get home too late on Sunday.”

I was right.

“Why don’t we just go for a ride this weekend and see where we end up, with an earlier target time for home on Sunday?”. I assured him there would be no disappointment.

We spent the night in southern Jersey. I’ve never really been a fan of the congestion along the east coast, so this morning we turned westward and started following the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Now I love America’s first superhighway because of its historical value. Driving along the turnpike does not give you the same feeling of disconnection from the rest of the world like the rest of the interstate system does because of the narrow right of way of the highway. Plus, the tunnels are wicked cool.

We made a few stops here and there but had a pleasant drive all the way to Bedford, where we decided to turn north so we’d be about five hours from home for our drive tomorrow.

We are in the lovely city of State College, Pa. I always add “P A” to a Pennsylvania destination; this is a holdover from my days of living along the border in Jamestown. It’s just what we do.

We went to a local pub and brewery tonight where I had a couple of draft “Red Mo”s, well, because I am a red ‘mo. It had been a very relaxing day.

I’m going to sleep like a baby tonight.

11 February 2012 by Fun and Games Dept Ponderings and Musings 0

So Emotional.

So sad to hear about the passing of Whitney Houston this evening. She was an incredible vocalist with an amazing talent. It’s such a shame that she fell off her path and didn’t find her way back on it.

She will be missed. RIP Whitney.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

11 February 2012 by Why. 0

Controls.

I open my eyes and notice that I have jeans on. I feel younger than I actually am. My right wrist has a calculator watch on it. Trying to ascertain as to my location, I look up and see nothing but blue sky and white, puffy clouds. I’m looking through a skylight. Actually, I’m looking through the top of an airplane. Once my mind figures this out, I can hear the engine of the plane.

“Give ‘er a rip.”

I know that voice. Instinctively I put my hands on the controls and my feet on the rudders. I’m sitting in a rented Piper in the co-pilot seat. Dad is sitting in the the pilot’s seat, urging me to take control of the plane. He’s got a huge grin on his face, one that you would only see when he was in or near a plane. My dad grinned a lot, but the grin was different when he was flying.

I glance at the instruments to make sure I’m level with the horizon and then I decide to make a slow turn to the left. We are somewhere over a hilly, wooded area. I start to bank to the left a little bit. Dad is helping with the controls a little bit but letting me do my thing. As I gain confidence, I start to descend just a little bit. Well, I try to keep the change rather slight, but I push too hard on the controls and we start to go down more than I expected. I get dizzy from the change in altitude while turning at the same time and feel a moment of disorientation. The hills start to look closer and more menacing because we are headed toward them when we shouldn’t be.

“Whoa!”

Dad grabs the controls and pulls the Piper level. I gain my senses and am allowed to give it another try.

“You gotta work at it. Easy.”

He’s still grinning.

I decide that I have had enough of heading toward the hills and bank to the right.

“Well, we can’t go too close to the base. They don’t like it when we get into their air space. Gotta do it by the book.”

I level off and decide to head straight ahead. I squint as we head toward the sun, Dad is wearing his aviator sunglasses. He was always prepared like that. The sky is clear, the ride is smooth and the warmth of the sun coming into the cockpit is reassuring. A beautiful Sunday afternoon.

Dad takes the controls and banks us to the left with much more confidence than I displayed when I was trying to turn earlier and became disoriented. Urged to try, I do the same. I do much better and I successfully head us off somewhere; apparently I’m headed in the right direction. He continues to grin.

And then I jump, as I wake up and realize my alarm is going off, telling me it’s time to start my Friday.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

10 February 2012 by Ponderings and Musings 0

Rest.

Last night I got 7 1/2 hours sleep. That’s not bad for the current, chaotic circadian rhythms I have going on lately. I awoke only once during the night and that was around 3:30; I was so giddy with excitement that I had actually slept from 10 p.m. straight thru to 3:30 a.m. that I jumped out of bed and did some sort of groggy lap around the bedroom and then went back to bed. I think the only reason I woke up was because I had wrapped the cord to my headphones around my neck and I was depriving myself of oxygen. After the impromptu lap around the bedroom, I promptly fell back asleep until my alarm went off at 5:30.

Good times.

Since I clocked 7 1/2 hours of sleep last night, I don’t think I should be feeling as groggy as I do today. The only thing I can deduce from this is that I am working way too much and I have too much on my plate for any one person to handle. The launch of the Big Project at work has been delayed due to circumstances beyond my control and this morning I was told of a bunch of changes that need to be made to the application I have been building. That stuff doesn’t bother me all that much because that’s how these things work in Corporate America, but it’s still one source of stress that I have on a list of things that are stressing me out, and that list is getting too long.

This weekend Earl and I are doing one of our getaway weekends so that we can enjoy a change of view, a good meal or two and some together time doing what we enjoy doing. I’m hoping that the weather will cooperate so we can enjoy ourselves a little bit.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

9 February 2012 by Fun and Games Dept 2

Thoughts.

I am sitting in the Jeep in the shopping center parking lot like I usually do at lunch time. It’s a fairly nice day for mid February and I’m doing my usual people watching as I play along on the iPad here.

On the end of the shopping center is a locally owned Italian restaurant that isn’t too bad. It’s a popular spot at lunch time, though the economy has noticeably slowed down customer traffic since I started this routine nearly two years ago.

Because the restaurant is in the shopping center, there is ample parking in the vicinity of the front door. Today I see four or five spots that are just one spot away from the end of the row closest to the door. One spot in from the end of a row means maybe six or seven extra steps to the front door.

Can someone please explain to me why a woman with the license plate BZX-4257 decided to park her car outside of all marked parking spots and instead opted to parallel park her car so that it blocked the thru-traffic lane?

I can find no logical reason for doing this. None at all. I can’t even come up with a way to imagine why she would do this. I know it’s a trivial thing and it in no way changes my life at all (other than this blog entry) but for the life of me I just can’t figure out the thought process behind this.

It’s like these people that are spotting UFOs. Now I fully believe in UFOs and I fully believe that they are visiting here and I fully believe all of that. I get that and I really hope to have positive proof of their existence someday, but on the other hand, why would beings from another planet travel trillions of miles to get here and then just float around and blink their lights. Why would they do that? “I know, I’ll invest faster-than-light travel so I can blink my red and blue lights.” I don’t get that. There must be something better than flicking a switch up and down to get the natives all worked up.

I swear I sometimes don’t know what planet I came from.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

8 February 2012 by Fun and Games Dept 2

Path.

A while back I talked about a new iPhone app called Path. It’s actually version 2 of Path, called, appropriately, Path 2, (wow that’s a lot of commas; I apologize to anyone that’s allergic) and it is a pretty nifty app in that it creates something like a hybrid twitter or Facebook stream/Foursquare check-in notification/Instagram photo sharing space for your closest friends. The idea behind Path2 is that you only connect with your closest friends and family so you can be a little more intimate with the details of your life. After all, there are some things in life that you shouldn’t share on Twitter. For example, I’ve seen people share the time, place and method of their latest sexual escapade on an unlocked Twitter stream and to me that’s just freaky. I know that I live my life pretty openly on the Internet but there is no way that I would ever proclaim to a random group of millions of people the specifics of how, when or where I just had sex. There a couple of reasons that might lead to that sort of proclamation, for example, if you want to share the boundaries of your creativity or if you want to advertise your abilities so you can get a higher rate.

I think I digressed.

Anyway, Path2’s design through it’s gorgeous app was to urge you to be a little more personable with a select group of people with your internet life. I used it and liked it for that reason; I only followed a half dozen or so people on there and it was kind of nifty. If I want to go for the full-on broadcast of details, I could by just telling the app to push my details to Twitter or whatever.

Now, the Path2 app and service is free. This always leads me to taking pause, because you can hardly ever get something for nothing so there has to be some sort of catch. Well, I haven’t figured out the mechanics to figure out how the folks at Path2 were making money. Actually, I didn’t invest enough time to figure out how, but when there’s little to no money involved there’s usually data-mining so that it can be sold to an advertiser. It’s kind of like my feelings about Google; as a Google user you’re not the customer, you are the product and the applications are the factory that build the product base. I figure I was just another Path2 product.

Now here’s where it gets wonky and it makes me angry. I read on Daring Fireball this morning that Path2 has been uploading the ENTIRE ADDRESSBOOK on your Android or iPhone to it’s servers, WITHOUT your consent. That’s right, data that can be linked back to you is being stored on Path2’s servers and nowhere did you agree to that sort of thing.

That’s bad.

Now, I know that Google and Facebook and a ton of other services and applications do the same thing, but they let you know that in the very, very small print of their Terms of Service. I completely abide by the “don’t put it on the network if you wouldn’t want it on the front page of the New York Times” rule I learned back in 1988 when I worked for DEC. When I put my address book on iCloud, I know that I am doing it and I know where my address book is being stored and I know the possible ramifications from doing so.

It is not cool when a company does it without my permission. Not only does that damage the reputation of the company in eyes, but it damages trust in Cloud computing in general. And that’s not good. Because we wouldn’t be able to do the millions of nifty things we do with our smartwhatevers if we didn’t have the power of cloud computing behind them.

Path2 was deleted off of my iDevices this morning at approximately 5:40 a.m. They’ve lost my trust. And getting back my trust would be damned near impossible unless they completely opened up the source code for their app so that the world can see what they’re doing.

In a world where honor and integrity seem to be less important, it’s unfortunate when elements of today’s technological niceties seem to reinforce that fact.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

8 February 2012 by Geek Ponderings and Musings Why. 3

Lucky.

I thought I’d give your mid-week a little kickstart with some Kylie.

From 1988, here’s “I Should Be So Lucky” (the alternate video) by Kylie Minogue.

8 February 2012 by DJ 0

Audience.

I enjoy reading blogs. Heck, I enjoy reading, period, and with the technological surge of the 21st century, there is always a blog right at my fingertips worth reading. I enjoy all sorts of blogs; I read techy blogs, political blogs, news blogs and personal blogs. Of course, I have my own personal blog here and one of the reasons I read the personal blogs of others is because I like to see how others are living their life, which is along the same reasoning as to why I write in this blog. I like to write and I like to share about life, so it makes sense to do both sides of this sort of thing.

It’s no secret that the likes of Twitter and Facebook and similar sites have taken over the personal blogosphere. It’s kind of like the way computers and email took over sitting down and writing a letter by long-hand, it’s a lot easier to belch out a witty one liner in 140 characters or less instead sitting down in front of a computer and actually composing something that involves multiple paragraphs, multiple sentences or even multiple syllables. Nevertheless, a 140 character tweet is not going to solicit the same level of emotional response as a well composed blog entry that utilizes descriptive prose, colorful phrases and the time and effort required to convey a complete thought. This is one of the reasons that I believe society now applauds mediocrity as if it was something brilliant. We expect less.

I have been slowly watching the personal blogs I follow fall by the wayside. I used to follow nearly four dozen blogs back in the middle of the ’00s. Occasionally I’ll see a blog entry from someone that hasn’t written in months and then I’ll realize that someone has hacked into their blog account and is sending out random nonsense. Occasionally non-Alphanumeric characters will be used. I don’t know why but I find a blog entry composed in Arabic characters to be whimsical looking. It’s probably because I have no idea how to read right to left or any way of knowing what the characters mean. Sometimes ignorance can be whimsical.

There are still a dozen or so personal blogs that I enjoy reading and that I have an interest in. I look forward to crossing paths with those that I haven’t met in person yet. A few years ago Earl and I went to a blogger gathering in New York; it gave us the opportunity to meet others that liked to write and more importantly, it let us experience Bear Hill in Central Park, complete with roller skating grandma. That was a cool experience. I really like connecting with others, though I can be shy about it at first. (Once I open my mouth, though, I’m hard pressed to shut up.) I have to admit that I would rather meet a regular reader of this blog in person instead of some random person that friended me on Facebook.

Speaking of Facebook, I’ve been pulling back on my participation there again. It’s mostly because I’m more of a Twitter guy than a Facebook guy, but it’s also because of that SchoolFeed thingee. I’m suddenly getting notes from people that I don’t know that I didn’t go to school with. Some woman in Idaho sent me a box of chocolates through this SchoolFeed thing. This was disappointing because: a. I have never been in Idaho, b. the woman was in her 70s and c. there was no real box of chocolates, only the virtual kind. I don’t enjoy virtual chocolate. It’s like the way I like my men; I want to be able to lick them in person, I don’t want to have to settle for a lick of the screen and visualize something.

That’s just weird.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

7 February 2012 by Fun and Games Dept 8

About J.P.

Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.

Weird? Eccentric!

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