The Column

Motto: Right about now, the funk's your brother. Several years ago I was asked the question "What would you do if you were given a year to do anything you wanted and you didn't have to worry about money?" Before I go on, I want to comment that doing that a wonderful thought exercise and I highly suggest you answer that question for yourself. MY answer was something along the lines of "split that year up into six 2-month sections, spend each of those 2 months operating in an entirely different mode. Live in different parts of the country/world, work different jobs, take up different hobbies. I was and still am satisfied with this answer. I bring up this thought experiment I did because it just occurred to me that my 30 Day Challenges are like miniature versions of that same idea. Every month I'm intentionally exploring new habits and, to a lesser extent, new places. Making that connection was a bit of "aha!" moment. I thought that was cool. ...

Motto: You Can Never Achieve Perfection, You Can Only Get Closer Transitional periods are difficult. Nothing will mess up your daily routines like knowing they will be changing soon. Since Melissa and I signed a lease on a new place, we've up-ended the usual routine. I look forward to moving not only because our new place will be much nicer than our current one, but also because it means we're hitting the reset button on a lot of things. We're starting from scratch. Establishing new habits. I'm a huge proponent of setting up healthy habits when you first enter a new environment. I think location drives behavior moreso than any other factor. A review of February's "30" day challenge: No TV No Videogames (except on Thursdays) We did a great job of abiding by this rule until about halfway though the month. Then we started taking additional cheat days. By the end, the goal may has well have said "slightly less TV and videogames". I'm ...

Motto: This Turned Out Longer than I Expected Conventions that make no sense bug me. 10 pm 11 pm 12 am 1 am 2 am Why does am/pm switch over before the numbers switch over? Why not simultaneously? Why do we start the day with an hour named "12", then go to 1? I'll tell you why. It's because people are dumb, and dumb people wouldn't understand a "0" hour. Here's another, very confusing convention: 2/25/2015 It's the 25th of February in the year 2015. Why do we go (medium length), (short) (long)? That makes no sense. You can't sort by year. It's hard to parse out the day on which something happens. Why is it not 25/2/2015? Or, better yet, 2015/2/25? The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) created a convention for date and time: 2015-02-25 T21:00-06 2015, February 25th, at 9pm, 6 hours behind UTC. It's a perfectly self-contained, absolute time reference. Why can't we use this? It...

Motto: Your Projected Projects Project Your Identity Writing this in a coffee shop. I'm so hipster*. *according to Jon, who lived in Seattle and thus knows "hipster". Melissa and I found a new place, as my last post said. We move in 20 days from now... but you wouldn't guess that was the timeframe by looking at our current place. Melissa packed up 50% of our place already. It's impressive. I wrote this Column mostly just to write down my Top 5. My Nexus 5 died. The hardware power button was going bad on me starting around a month ago. 3 days ago it stopped working all together. I pulled the phone apart, unscrewed all the screws, unclipped the electrical connections, pulled out the circuit board, cleaned out the electrical component power button, and put everything back together. Then it booted up and ran fine. It was a cool experience. So it's working now* , but I'll still be in the market for a phone again pretty soon. *except for th...

Motto: Bill Plates - President of Macrohard My 30 Day Challenge for this month was to remove television and videogames from my life for 6 out of the 7 days of the week. As it turns out, I write most of these posts while watching television. I never really realized that until now. Take out time spent watching The Office and you take out the number of posts I'm likely to turn out during any given period of time. That's okay, though - I've got tons to talk about. The past two weeks were very, very full. I'm going to approach this in sections. The part you can all skip! I made this short video of Battlefield "highlights" from January - again, this is me playing, so there's nothing all that great in here. Upcoming Media Releases for Which I am Excited: March 17 - Modest Mouse's album "Strangers to Ourselves" April 10th - Marvel's Netflix series "Daredevil" May 1st - Marvel's "The Av...

Motto: Get Over It, Dude January 2014 Melissa and I did the Paleo + CrossFit 30 Day Challenge, which was a resounding success all around. January, 2015 we were going to do the same challenge, but really only the Paleo part because we already have a gym we like. We kind of forgot about the whole thing... pretty much immediately. January 2015 will now forever be known as the month of "The Faileo Diet". Luckily, failure is an option with these things. It was never a solid commitment. We didn't talk about it enough going in. This month will be better. February 2015: No TV*, no videogames* *Except for Fridays, which we will utilize as cheat days. This way we can still keep up on our currently running shows and maybe I won't lose anything I have going for me in Battlefield. So, that's the deal. Now, for my second and last topic, I'm going to revisit something I've written about again , and again , and again . Friday when I was leaving work...