The Column

Motto: So it goes. Sitting alone in my room - at my desk, specifically. Waiting for a witch's broom to take me trans-Pacifically. I will see my girl on the other side of the world. How about that for terrible poetry? Actually, I prefer the term "wordplay" over poetry - "poetry" is supposed to be pretty.  How about that for terrible wordplay? Last night I fell asleep before 10:30 for the first time since... well... I don't know. This morning I woke up with vim and vigor at 6:15. That's been my goal "wake up" time for months and I've never really been very successful. I suppose I did everything right last night. Turned my computer off at 9. Read a book outside for half an hour. Cleaned my place. Flopped like a fish into bed at 10-oh-something. Told Melissa goodnight and put my phone away. It was beautiful outside, by the way. Slaughterhouse 5 on the Balcony of My Building One sentence about consumer technology: The 7 inc...

Motto: Keep It Simple, Stupid (alternatively: Simon) I stumble d across an animated GIF yesterday that I decided to save. You probably have already noticed it looping below this paragraph - it's awesome. Anyway, I clicked "Save image" then navigated to my folder called "Funny (slash) good to post" and tried saving the image with the name "Overzealous". Windows then asked me if I wanted to save over the existing file with that name. I didn't know I already had an internet pictures saved with that name. I checked to see what it was.... it was the same image. I found it so long ago I forgot I had it. The interesting part to me was that I tried naming it literally the exact same thing as I had previously. It's funny how the mind works. Without further ado.... "Overzealous": You have to admit the little guy's spirit. That image actually perfectly segways into the main thing I wanted to talk about tonight - how i...

Motto: I've got nothing to say - but I'm going to say a lot It's been several columns since I've written about Google - so it's probably about that time. I'll end the section about Google with some bold text so you can skip it if you aren't interested. Google announced "Keep", a lightweight notetaking app. When I first found out, I had really really high hopes. They were quickly let down, though. The service is way more lightweight than I had anticipated. There is no options for basic categorization or rich text formatting - let alone any of the more advanced features I was hoping for. After the initial letdown, though, I decided that the service wasn't all bad. Adding notes and looking through the notes you have is SUPER fast. It's easily faster than any other note-taking client I've tried (and I've tried all the popular ones). Basically, I expected a binder with a few neatly organized notebooks in it and got some pos...

Motto: I'm a Creative Cat; a Star-Performing Word-Worm Two Days Ago, March 16th, 2013, marked the 1-year anniversary of my first column on Blogger . I've written a lot about the column on the column. The reason for that is that this is a blog about my life and thoughts - and the column happens to be a non-negligible part of both of those things. Blogger has been fantastic platform for my purposes; and I can see myself really settling in here. I mean, I've been doing it for about 1/24th of my life already, so... I guess you could say I'm settled. I want to make it to a 1000 posts, someday... but I'd settle for 100 for now. One step at a time, yo. My grammar is not perfect, and I know that. I've had a particular weakness brought to my attention recently and it now bugs me... I suck at participles. If you've been reading the column scrutinously, there are surely dozens of examples you could have saw. OH THE REASON I WANTED TO WRITE THIS! ...

Motto: ~145 hours That's how long it's been since I initially thought this: "I'm really really tired... and it's freezing in here... and I'm sore everywhere for no reason...... oh crap." The first 3 full days I was sick. At the time, I thought I was pretty much out of the woods. I'm here right now 3 full days later to tell you, I was wrong. Friday night I acquired cheap tickets to the semi-final games of the Big-12 tournament. I attended them. Felt somewhat tired, but otherwise okay. Saturday I woke up feeling worse... but it was my newphew's 4th birthday and I had already missed out on the official party, so I decided I really needed to go home and see the family. That ended up being probably a mistake. Don't get me wrong, I did get to see them and I am happy about it; but I spent most of the time asleep. I think I may have even fevered up again at one point. I didn't measure. I'm getting a doctor's appointment ASAP. ...

Motto: My health? It's gone viral. I fell ill Monday night. At 8pm on Monday I decided I needed to go to bed because I was tired. Then I realized I was freezing. Then I realized I was sore everywhere. Then I swore silently to myself. I had caught the flu. Or a virus. Or something. Here's the timeline: 8pm, Monday - 8pm, Tuesday: Never left bed. Not to pee. Not at all. 8pm, Tuesday - 8am Wednesday: Used restroom. Refilled my water bottle. Moved from bed to couch because bed was COVERED in broken fever sweat. 8am, Wednesday - 8pm Wednesday: Forced a shower. Tried to work some, huge mistake. Fell back asleep for a few hours. Woke up again COVERED in broken fever sweat. Watched some Community. 8pm Wednesday - 8am Thursday: Ate some Greek Yogurt and a Clif bar - first food in >36 hours. Took meds for the first time (more on that in a second). Woke up, finally feeling most of the way better. About the meds: Why did I wait so long to take them? The answer is that I expe...

Motto: Today was a two-fer I was thinking recently about some of my favorite things I've ever created. This list includes (but is not exhausted by) the checklist of things a good person does every week, the old video scavenger hunts I put on with my friends in high school, the time log that I used to track every half hour of 6 straight weeks, and, most recently, the second-a-day video that has been a time capsule of my life for the past 7 months.  These were all fantastical projects that took many, many weeks of preparation and execution. They took lots of energy and focus. The yielded some of the best results and the most fun experiences I've ever had in my life. They are all things I would suggest for anyone to do at some point in their life. There is also something else all of these projects and ideas have in common - they were all directly and blatantly stolen . Well, adapted, maybe. The list of things a good person does in a week - adapted from an idea by Demetri Ma...

Motto: Google Plus is better It was just pointed out to me that I should make a column comparing Google+ to Facebook, so when people ask me why Google+ is better than Facebook I can just refer them to this. So I'm doing a very very short version of that right now: There are three 3 social networks - Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Twitter is full of short, random tweets about anything. When you tweet, we pretty much tweet to the entire world. When you go to Twitter, you'll see 140 character snippets from celebrities, people that don't actually exist, people you've never met, and rarely, people know and care about talking about stuff you know and care about. Facebook is full. Facebook is full of pictures of the kids of and news about people you kinda sorta used to know. When you post on Facebook, you are sharing not with everyone in the world, just basically everyone you've ever met. Google+ is less full. What is  there, though, is way more directed for you. ...

Motto: Whatever I feel like. That's the whole idea. It's been a little while since I updated. My mind has been on other things. A while back my cousin had me watch a few episodes of Community. I liked it. I told Melissa that I liked it and that she should watch some episodes. Because she's great, she started watching it. She likes it. Because she likes it, I decided to start watching it. It almost sounds like that violates causality... but I think if you follow along with my visual aid you'll figure out that natural order has been retained: Community is great. It's quickly escalated to become one of my favorite shows on TV with some of my favorite character/actor combinations I've ever seen. It's great. Here's a fun fact not everyone knows about me already: I briefly tried to be a cartoonist for the newspaper at the University of Kansas. You see, their comics were terrible. So terrible that I thought - hey, my doodles are equally terrible! May...