The Column

Fact: I've tracked 35 days Motto: Know Thyself A little over one month ago I put into action a plan to better understand and manage my life. Thirty-one days ago I wrote : The goal of the LTS is to audit my life in the four distinct areas I've determined have the greatest significance or impact. I want to track the following: Diet - Garbage in, garbage out. What you eat is what you are. Exercise - If you don't use it, you lose it. Money - I'm spending how much on what?!? Demetri - My list of 25 things a "good" person would do every day. In doing so I hope to gain a greater sense of self, a greater handle on the important things in life, and use this knowledge to make intentional and positive changes in my life. And for the past month I've done just that. Here's what I've learned about myself: Diet: My three favorite things I eat better than I would have expected. Of course, I have altered my eating habits drasticall...

Motto: 3 Day Weekends are the Best I have several things on my writing docket. This is the first paragraph of the update and I'm still not sure which direction I'm going to take it. I'm as far on the edge of my seat as you are. I think I'm going to write about something that isn't on my agenda. I have just realized one major disadvantage of living a healthy-ish lifestyle - at my current rate I will never be able to say "I just made this one little change and I'm so much healthier!". This question on Reddit got me thinking, "man, I couldn't ever just 'walk some' and see any benefits. I already walk. That's crap."  I can't quit smoking because I never started. My life is so hard. On to something I had planned to write about: As seen in recent posts, I am trying to more and more utilize the Column as a final resting place for my creative projects. I want to focus a little more on videos I've ma...

Motto: Don't be an Oxymoron The entire body of this update between this sentence and the picture to go out on will be a poem I wrote today. Yesterday I drove to the park. There I met a new old man and had this conversation. It started when I told him life seemed deathly hard - it's simply too difficult. He said - "You should think a little bigger. You aren't failing to succeed, you are working to success through failure. It's alright to be all wrong; because once your fails pass, you'll find what's left is what's right." What he was saying sounded awfully good. "Let me tell you a true story - Originally, I just copied others. I had been a minority in a major way. Then I was stuck in the same quest to be different... and it was pretty ugly. My attempts were really fake. I felt like everyone hated me. I was even at odds with myself..." He paused to watch some kids play. He only stopped to continue. "Now then, the past ...

Motto: HTML Stands for "Hard To Make Look (Good)" The column doesn't format well. I've noticed consistently throughout the year that Blogger often introduces its own formatting decisions between the "edit" and "publish" phases of my column writing. This post employs an intentionally new typeface throughout. The headlines are Arial. The body Verdana. I used to use Droid Sans. It was a very Googly thing to do. Today I wrote some poetry. I used to write poetry fairly often, but I quit a while back. I thought I left poetry at the right time. Was it wrong not to write anymore? I wanted to fill a tall order in short bursts. When I was down with what was up, I differed being different to be similarly similar. Now I think a little bigger. That's a poem. This is a short column. I hope the formatting looks the same after the publish as it does here in the editor. I don't want to do all my columning in raw HTML. If it comes to that, I will d...

Motto: Float On Before I get started recapping my recent adventures, here's something to think about: How are you? Really, how are you doing right now? You okay? Not angry, at least. Not doing terrible by any means. Right? Now stop and remember all those times in your life that somebody did something that just really made you mad. Think about all those days were you just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Your day was bad and you just couldn't get over it. Think about every time you've been so cold you never thought you'd warm up, or so hot you thought you were on fire and couldn't ever cool off. All those times you've been so sick that you forgot what it was like to feel healthy.  Now, realize that all of that stuff is in the past . They don't matter any more. They are not important . They came and they went and you are just fine. Next time you are upset at something or someone, ask yourself if it is really worth it. This w...

Motto: 3.5 hours of completely undivided attention Before I write about Google I/O I want to say one thing I've noticed about myself time and time again - I am capable of an amazing, almost superhero-like level of focus. After I got off work, I essentially ran home. The first and only thing I did for the next 3.5 hours was watch the Google I/O keynote address. After Larry Page closed out the keynote, I finally broke concentration. I assessed my situation for the first time in 210 minutes and realized some things that I definitely should have already known. I was sweating. I was starving. I was still wearing a shirt. Two shirts, actually. For those of you that know me well, you'll know how strange it is for me to be wearing a shirt in my own place. This is just one example of a phenomenon that happens every time something truly sparks my interest. Example from Column #81 : Sunday I sat down at my desk chair at ~3-4pm to work on my Life Tracking project that I wrote ...

Motto: 10PM and all is well! I'm publishing this update over lunch but it's been written since last night. The video rendered overnight and loaded to YouTube this morning. I'm going to post this and then watch the Colbert Report like my usual lunch. This weekend was good. Here's an outline of what I did: Housewarming party Tailgating Royals game "Hole in the Wall" Mom & Dad's house Build a treehouse Basketball game As everyone who reads this should already know, I'm making a video that shows one second from my life every day for a year. The project is going very well, honestly; but there is one thing that I've found frustrating time and time again. Some days you struggle to film a single interesting thing, and you end up with a boring shot. Other days you film several great shots, and you can't use them all. You end up with one good shot, and several other possibilities that don't make the cut. There are days that I...

Motto: "I/O" stands for "I CAN'T BELIEVE IT! OH MY GOD!" In seven days (May 15th) Google's annual developer's conference starts. The conference is called "Google I/O" where "I/O" stands for "Input/Output" (despite what the motto might say). It is the event during which Google unveils their big projects and products for the year. Last year, I/O gave us the Nexus 7 and Jelly Bean (among other things) - I wrote about my predictions last year in Column #9 .  The column I'm writing right now exists solely to get my Top 5 online before the conference so I can look back and see how good of a guesser I was. Also, I'm writing it just to say HOW EXCITED I AM FOR THE CONFERENCE . I am planning on watching as much of it live as possible - although I wish I were just going there. In other news - a while back I was given a SQL database backup of one of the iterations of my old column. It was from back before college -...