We've Got Nothing Better To Do...

Shooting the picture myself from the other side does little to disguise the fact that I spend far too much time sitting in this same chair, in front of the same notebook, with the same things on TV night after night. However, like drinking, spelunking and philosophical conversations, it's really only troublesome from a behavioral psychology perspective if one does it alone.

Off-Center

I feel a bit ridiculous posting this late, but I couldn't get to sleep feeling like I'd already given up. The picture kind of mirrors the way I feel about this project at the moment... no pun intended, of course. So far I'm not thrilled with the results. It's self-reflective, sure, but it's off-center, out of focus and ultimately the only thing that matters seems to be the camera. Hell, I can't even look myself in the eye. I feel as if I'm standing next to the shower curain of pointlessness.

Er, sorry. Metaphors seem stretchier at this time of night. I didn't mean to break it, really. It was an accident. Jeez. Forget it, I'm going to bed.

Drunken Smile

Made a last-minute decision to see The Monads, Bob Log III and Scott H. Biram at Off Broadway last night, or allowed it to be made for me. Topher was going anyway, and I didn't really have anything better to do, but balanced against Sunday evening laziness it was still a close decision. Eventually I decided that I needed to use a different background occasionally for my daily picture than the chair in the corner, which tipped the scales in favor of going along; it seemed easier than carrying all my crap into the basement.
The Monads were totally not the band I was expecting, but they were pretty cool nevertheless. They're certainly the best local bluegrass punk outfit I've seen. The really impressive act was Bob Log III, a one-man band, death cyclist and born showman. I like to think that under that helmet he looks like David Carradine from a bad '70's movie, but perhaps he just wears it because it drives the ladies wild. Getting two women to sit on his knees while playing the kick drum is not just an impressive feat of seduction but also of rhythm, but the real coup is live Boob Scotch (NSFW video). By the time Scott H. Biram came on, I was going to need something with a stronger beat than his peculiar brand of psychotic hellbilly gospel to keep me moving, so I spent the bulk of the show outside with a PBR and a cigarette.

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Somebody used to tell me all the time, "You have a cute smile when you're drunk." I'm still not sure I see what she meant, unless by cute you mean 'slightly goofy.' The vague look of dementia around the eyes may be due to the shot of absinthe I had, or it may just be the onset of a serious psychiatric problem. I'm also not sure if I'd prefer to believe that my face is that shiny due to the little bit of drinking I did or the little bit of dancing I did. Maybe its just bad lighting, or bad skin care.

Zero Day

Before I looked old and scraggly. After shaving, just old. Of course, waiting to take the picture until moments before bed doesn't help, and doesn't bode well for the success of this project. Gotta be more on top of things.

Still, the goal I set for myself was to get a picture before crashing for the night, and to get it posted by the next night, and I've accomplished that much at least. It's a bit early in the game to start kicking myself over the small failures and near misses. After all, I have to have something to talk about next week.

So anyway, today is Zero Day. This is the baseline upon which I must improve what I can and make peace with what I cannot. Staring at these daily photos will force me to either improve my self-image or work to improve myself. At least, that's my theory. We'll see how well it proves out in practice.

Every Story Must Have A Beginning

Since I first started trying to maintain a blog, way back when I had free time, I've been planning on doing the picture-a-day experiment on myself. I've had a fair number of justifications for this plan, but they really all boil down to the One True Reason for all my internet adventures: I want to learn how to better fake narcissism.

I'm sure that as time goes by, you'll all hear plenty more of my philosophical musings on why I'm torturing myself, not to mention my Loyal Readers, in this most nefarious way. For now, however, I just wanted to warn anyone who happens to still be following my lately-derelict personal blog that they should set their browsers to refuse images from this URL for the foreseeable future.

I'm calling this shot Day -1. It was taken 2008.08.08 by Topher, and showcases what happens when I spend about a month ignoring the basic tenets of personal grooming. Part of the reason I'm starting this project now is so I can have this picture right at the beginning of the set; hopefully I can use it as a reference to remember why I need to take better care of myself.

PersonalDNA

I'm not a huge fan of these personality tests, but PersonalDNA has the coolest interface ever. And I'm totally behind anyone that calls me an Advocating Artist, too. Plus they have this cool little PersonalDNA Map gizmo, and as everyone knows I think gizmos are cool. If you really just think I'm so cool that you need to know everything about me, or if you're an FBI Profiler looking for data on me, you can read the full report to find out what makes me tick.

The Obligatory RSN

It feels like it's been weeks since I've done the blog thing, and I'm kind of ashamed to admit that I missed it. Unfortunately, the spare time that I burn here has been stolen by variously deadlines at work, the moving/unmoving process and the Inexorable Hand of Fate. The work thing has been the most frustratingly soul-crushing, overall. The two-week advantage I acquired by burning through the holidays working 60 hours a week evaporated quickly in the face of additional feature requests and early deadlines. This is the first night I've come home in a while that didn't have a set agenda, usually consisting of a single item: "redesign code furiously to fix problems uncovered in testing during the day." What did I achieve in the last month of activity? Well, I added a bunch of features, cleaned up both the code and the design significantly, and finally (and most importantly) demonstrated that the problem was definitively in my boss' code. The moving process is now complete, and The Mansion is history. I'm sad to see it go, and a bit overwhelmed by the prospect that all the problems with this place are now my problems, but January is a good month for new things and that place was killing us slowly anyway. Of course, we still have the vast and unconquerable unmoving process to complete. The Brat puts a ton of pressure on herself to put everything in the house into its Designated Away Zone immediately, but I'm pretty happy to just have the network up and running. I can even play my iTunes upstairs and downstairs at the same time. Walking up the stairs and hearing to the music shift between the stereo downstairs and my computer upstairs feels so ridiculously good that I think I may have discovered an Eighth Deadly Sin. Meanwhile, the Inexorable Hand of Fate (not to be confused with Manos, which had multiple Hands of Fate) has been mucking with my life again, pushing me closer to some people and further from others and just generally making it hard to take the impending permanence of the house and impending disaster of the job too seriously. I figure that if I can't even predict whose floor on which I'll be passing out or what might inspire me to write multi-line haiku emails, there's not much sense in worrying about the future. I'm reasonably sure that I won't understand it once it gets here. Tomorrow is the day that I have officially designated as New Years Day 2007. I wrote off the month of January, but I have big plans for this year and I'm looking forward to finding the time to execute them. It's All Coming Together, and in addition to the normal life-plans I've got a few things lined up for the blogs in the next month that I've been anxiously anticipating. I've scheduled a beginning-of-the-year clean-up and review of my bookmarks and linkblogs, so expect a major link-dump of cool stuff sometime in the next few days. If this goes well I'm going to make it a monthly blog event, so any feedback will be appreciated. I also plan to blog a house-tour once The Brat is vaguely satisfied with her work, for those of you unwilling or unable to come see the new space. Topher suggested that we should write a Safe Free Pr0n Download Tutorial, which seems like a good idea given the frequency with which our friends seem to pick up spam-ware. I've got a few iTunes smart playlist tricks up my sleeve that I've been dying to write about. And don't forget the impending 8,742-part Rebuilding Firefox series that I've been promising... I know everyone is looking forward to that. Extra-blogging activities that will probably get mentioned here in the New New Year include excitement like buying a new car and the inevitable discussions of which music festivals to attend over the summer. I hope to have a weekly(-ish) podcast up and running by mid-March, and sometime around then we'll start finishing the basement as well. I've also promised myself that more live poker is in the cards for me this year, and if that works out as well as internet poker has I'll have plenty to say about it as well. So, that's the obligatory Real Soon Now list. There's also a half-dozen requests I've had for various posts - software development and testing using VMWare, syncing bookmarks with del.icio.us, Google Reader posts in both basic and advanced flavors, etc - which I hope to get to RSN as well. Plus I've got a few new Coolest Things Ever currently in review. And I'm taking suggestions, so if you've got any geek questions or your looking for a step-by-step on something that I actually know how to do, let me know and I'll add it to the list.