Clapboard - Full Frontal Nerdity

Beach day today rather than hunting down more work was probably a mistake, but since there are friends in town, it was pretty much unavoidable.  I'm making up for it a bit now, as well as having worked out a bit of (expensive) business this afternoon.  Gotta get some bills paid, too, which is priority one after writing this minor update.  Today was the first sunny beach day I've yet seen, so it was nice to be there, even though it ended up only being for an hour or so after driving all over western LA.

Tomorrow is back to real work, finding more work, and trying to push forward some projects (anyone remember the import company?  yeah, that's stalled in the works, huh?).  A lot of my projects can't go anywhere till I get myself some more money, so it's work, THEN projects, complete with working in between, or at least I hope that's the case.

You know, someone should change up a school system and make it so the elementary school kids go to school early and the high school kids go late.  Like 7, 9 and 11 for the three levels, with corresponding out times.  Later sports and games would allow more parents to go and show their support, too, which could be cool.  Maybe this can be implemented once the retardation of NCLB gets wiped from the record books.  Keep homogenous grouping, though, and add Farsi, Japanese and Mandarin as language options to the middle and high schools.  Make a romance language mandatory in elementary school so kids can at least count in a couple languages before they're 10.

No idea why I bring this up.

I made 5 jars of strawberry jam, though.  Yum.

So I've been on the teleprompter beat all week and it's been tiring.

Well, the 7am calls have been tiring because I've been chasing girls or staying up late inexplicably, but I blame the work.  I'm headed off to Vegas this weekend to get yet more tired, which should be fun, but very stupid.

I'm getting antsy about how little work I've been getting done recently on my personal projects, too, and it's really taken a week of "real" work to push me over the edge into doing something about it.  My work with MWS has been very sporadic because I'm neither taking charge nor really taking direction, so there's very little going on there that I can really self-direct or follow directions on.

Next week I also want to focus on how I'm eating, too, because I'm eating badly and have been for about forever.  I'll never be able to hike the million-mile trip that Andrew wants to do in October without getting better sleep and eating well, at least.  I need to set a baseline for myself, and that's gotta start next week, too. At least figuring out where the baseline should be.  I don't really live a lifestyle that lends itself to consistency, nor is my personality the type to let me believe that turning down present pleasure for future reward is ever a good idea.  It makes me a bad investor, that's for sure.

Tired!

Broke!

Scatterbrained!

These are the ways I'm feeling right now, and that' just stupid.  I have too much to do (ask me how much RoR I've learned or how many pages long my script is or whether I'm any closer to setting up the Virtual Server box in my server rack) to be feeling like this, but such is life.  I know it's because I'm staying up late and getting up early and that I have to quit doing one (or both) of these things if I'm ever going to get anywhere, but I'll be damned if 9pm doesn't come around and leave me looking for something to do.

I've agreed to hike some impossible trail with Drew in a few months, so I also should be at least working out my plan for working out, right?  Meh.  Maybe next week.  I have been eating a little better, which is good, and I have been working on the redesign for iwasbranded.com (I've been working on content for it, anyway), so that's good.  I ran a bunch of Mechanical Turk projects (HITs) yesterday and got a bunch of transcriptions done, which I like.  I think I messed up the process a little bit, but I'll be damned if I know how to do it right.

Anyway, today is for more server shit, and I've got two shoots scheduled this weekend already (none for BRANDED somehow, but still), so I'm honing skills, albeit the wrong skills.  I'd also like to point out that if you're going to write a review of CloudFlare, you should know the phrase "for all intents and purposes" and not write "for all intensive purposes" because it makes you look like an idiot.  More properly, it shows the world that you are an idiot, and begs the question of why we'd take your advice on anything.

I don't know why it bothered me, but it did, so there you are.  Also, rain still?  Indian food for lunch in Glendale? Weird.

Easter came and went already, and Pris' dinner party was a hit.  Here's a bullet-point list of some of the things I've done since I've last written:

• Written one page of my screenplay
• gone to the West Side for Alyssa's birthday party
• celebrated BootieLA
• gone to a new bar down on fairfax
• gotten an insurance quote for my bike
• done headshots for Emily Music
• hatched another harebrained scheme

And I'm sure there's more, but I'm not in any shape to think about anything more because I have some work to do and errands to run.  This afternoon is writing time, probably after nap time.  And less drinking this week.  Much less.

They all (both) suck.

Digsby has been my client of choice for a long time.  I've put up with their shitty Facebook connectivity by telling myself that they're better than the alternatives, but let's face it, they're terrible.  The developers aren't smart enough to figure out how to get the client to connect to Facebook (News Feed or Chat) reliably, and it's sort of embarrassing.

Trillian has sucked about forever.  It was like 2002 last time Trillian was usable, and then they promised the shining Astra client which became the Duke Nukem Forever of IM clients.  Now they've got a shitty, ad-ridden, naggy, ugly free version, but at least it connects to Facebook.  Don't ask it to stay still, though.  Every time I come back from screensaver it's somewhere else and the notifications can't figure out which of my 6 monitors to display on.  Trillian's version of my monitor numbering scheme is all its own, and inconsistent at that.

Don't even mention Pidgin and Miranda. Ugly-and-Not-Improving, antiquated, no support for News Feeds, Twitter or any of the also-ran social networks out there, which isn't really optional in a 2012 IM client.  Hell, 2010 would have been a stretch, and neither of these have improved since then.

That's it, except to say that ATI's latest driver (something 0.0.0.0.0.950, I think) is a complete disaster and their "VISION ENGINE CONTROL CENTER" (yes, it's all in caps) is an absurdist joke.  It's taken to crashing every time my computer goes to sleep, and just now blue screened as i was writing the first version of this update.  Yes, for those keeping score, it's been 2 days in a row with updates.  Also two days in a row with completely rewritten updates.

Oh no, there's one more.  Spotify looks like one of those websites from the 90's that's so desperate for cash that they've thrown all usability, design and attractiveness consideration out the window.  they have banner ads that SWITCH POSITION. they have a huge overlay ads for their own fucking product.  It's ridiculous, but if your design ethos is to copy Apple's ugly-ass iTunes, you've got bigger problems, I suppose.

Okay, enough tech complaining for the day.  Happy Tuesday.   I still don't know what screenplay I'm going to write.

I just wrote a whole vaguely-interesting update that I erased by thumb-spazzing and hitting the back button on my mouse by mistake as i grabbed for it like a retarded monkey.  I'm not re-writing it now, but soon.

It snowed at least 18" on Saturday and Sunday up in Big Bear Lake, meaning that the skiing got both better and worse.  It was better in the sense that it was a mite colder and there was fresh snow on the ground, which made the ice/slush thing manageable with a couple inches of powder or crystals (a lot of what came down was ice balls), but worse in the sense that when it's actively snowing (or sleeting or whatever), it's hard to see, and it was windy as balls up there - hella gusts making skiing tough.

Anyway, i survived. We didn't do much, really, went out for dinner on Friday and cooked steaks on Saturday, had a couple Guinness on Saturday as the calmest St. Patty's celebration ever.  Overall, I'd say it was a successful first outing.  I laid the groundwork for going again and doing it right-er next time. I now have a dual-mountain season pass, which will help me get some skiing in regularly, finally.  It'll be especially good if I dedicate myself to getting my legs in some kind of shape again - they're infuriatingly weak, and it really shows when I try to ski.

It's nice to see you from this side!

Usually if I see 4am it's a decadent night of drinking or whatever, but today it was because I woke up at 330 and couldn't get back to sleep for some reason.  I could barely stay awake long enough to get home from San Diego last night, went to bed and sleep by 1130 and then BOOM - it was 330 and I was up.  If Chris wasn't coming, if I didn't have a lot to do, and if I thought I'd get the chance to sleep before like 10 tonight, this would all feel less awful, but all of those things are true and I'm just going to be tired today.

Anyway, it was a good visit to Drew & April's in SD.  The motorcycle and mirror arrived in great shape, we drank some wine in Temecula on Sunday and I actually got a good night's sleep on Sunday night, which in no way makes up for last night's debacle, but made yesterday bearable, at least.  Made plans with Drew and April to get out of town again next weekend to go skiing - nothing like lots and lots of travel to make life interesting, right?

So I'm sleepy.  At least it's Tuesday, right?