30 May 2011

dark and broody or smiling

Hmm, maybe according to science... I am not dark and broody enough.

Trying Dark and Brooding

Normal Look

28 May 2011

What I've Been Reading

Killer Instinct, Zoe Sharp (2001) I dearly love badass women and Charlie Fox certainly suits that bill. A self-defense instructor in Lancaster England that gets that gets caught up in the mystery surrounding a serial killer. Killer instinct is straight forward mystery and action that reminds me of the kind of fun that I had reading Lee Child or John McDonald. Killer Instinct is actually the first book in the series which has only recently been released in the US. I am pretty sure I will be reading the rest of them.

Pygmy, Chuck Palahniuk (2009) Pygmy is narrated by a foreign exchange student who has come to America as part of a covert plot to strike a blow against America. The language and the cadence of the narrative was initially a little off-putting. But once I got past that I found the book an increasingly funny look at our modern American society from the perspective of someone coming from a completely different ideology. A number of Pygmy's observations were uncomfortably spot on.

Choke, Chuck Palahniuk (2001) I didn’t like this one nearly as much as I enjoyed Pygmy. The humor was there, but a little more uneven and the story seemed to wander a little bit towards the end. There were elements of Palahniuk’s best work present; they just never seemed to come together. I think Choke was my least favorite Palahniuk book.

23 May 2011

Jo Nesbø

Having millions of readers is not dramatically different from having a few thousand; you still have to write books and you still wake up in the morning being your own boss, deciding whether you want to get up. -Jo Nesbø (cnn)

07 May 2011

The Weekend Finally

I took this picture of the sky yesterday as I was sitting in traffic on the way from from work Friday afternoon. It was gourgous out, but I was not feeling any lifting of my spirits from those beautiful blue skies.  It had been a long week. I was hoping to come home and get some things done, but was just too tired and frazzled. I settled for cooking some burgers, eating, then laying down and listening to the Braves game. I am not a big baseball fan, but I do find listening to games on the radio very relaxing. I certainly did last night, I fell asleep almost immediatley. (Hey, they won!) I don't even think that I feed the cat last night, she was looking at me fairly indignantly this morning when I woke up.

A friend posted this link on Facebook this morning, a TED video of performance poet Sarah Keyes which got my mind started on the right note. It's a little uneven, but there are bits of it I really like. A few clicks later I found an even more talk on TED, Steve Job's Stanford University graduation speech on How to Live Before You Die where he talks about having the faith to follow your heart and how you should wake up everyone morning, look in the mirror, and ask yourself if what you were going to do today would be what you would do if you knew if it was the last day of your life, and if your answer to that was no too many days in a row you had better make changes. He talked about how dropping out of school freed him to learn and how being fired from Apple opened up so many other doors. It's definately worth a listen.

I've had coffee with friends this morning to get the weekend off to a good start and have been spending most of the day relearning CSS and XHTML and have started delving into ASP.NET and C#. I'm thinking of making it a goal to become a training and educational web guru. And if that doesn't work out, maybe I can just become a web lackey, sell the house, move to Seattle, and spend my life biking between coffee houses.

Tonight I'm looking forward hearing my extremely talented friend Rheba perform at Ragamuffin Hall's during their open mic night tonight.

I have a couple of hours before heading out for dinner and music. Think I will spend it hitting the book again or maybe brushing up on my Gratuitous Space Battles skills.

focus

I am not saying that I am easily distractable, but I was having some yogurt and thinking that I needed to write an entry about budgeting my time and attention because I not making near the progress on several projects that I want. I had gotten as far as typing in a title and had a bite of Fage Greek Yogurt. I thought to myself the Acai Berries flavor was pretty good so I went out on the Internet to see what kind of plant Acai Berries grew on and if you could grow them in Georgia and it was not until several minutes later I realized I had started this entry and immediately abandoned it. For the record, no you cannot grow them in Georgia or anywhere else the temperature regularly gets below 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

So with the overload of projects both work and personal I realized that I need to be pretty serious choosing what I am going to focus my brain on at any given moment for the foreseeable future and budget my time carefully. There is so much I want to do, to learn, to explore, and experience and time seems so limited!

Cloning seems like an approach, but I think there are a couple of cautionary sci-fi stories out there about that.

03 May 2011

Jonathan Lethem Writing Quote

Waking up every day totally baffled, that's the condition of the novelist. I don't know what I'm doing today, I must be doing the right thing.Jonathan Lethem