A Little Bit of Mario…

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I thought this was kind of a neat concept – the designer sought to condense each level of the original Super Mario Bros. into a single screen, and let me tell you – some of them are pretty challenging! One word of warning that caught me quite a few times … the piranha plants in this version will definitely still come out of the pipe even if you’re standing on it, unlike in the original … so just a heads up on that particular issue…  😯

A Super Mario Summary (by Johan Peitz)

Also, upon further inspection, apparently Johan created this game as part of a special competition that gives a single-man programming team 48 hours to code an entire game … pretty impressive for two days of no doubt caffeine and Doritos-fueled programming mayhem!

Dream Journal : The People Within the Walls…

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Over the years I’ve seen a lot of different blogs dedicated to people posting about their dreams from the night before, but I never actually sat down to transcribe any of my own. Not sure if this will be a regular thing or just random when a particularly bizarre dream presents itself, but it seemed like it might be kind of fun in a weird sort of way, so here we go…

I was living back at home with my parents.

Apparently we were living in a two-story house, which seemed kind of odd because growing up we only ever lived in our single-story house … unless you counted the basement as a story … which nobody does.

Anyways, I had noticed that overnight some of my toys would wind up missing – not just things lying about, but obscure things like pieces out of games that were boxed up in the closet. I told my Dad and he told me I should stay up to investigate, so I did … and that’s when I discovered that there were people living in the walls of our house.

They looked like they were in pretty rough shape – kind of dressed like hobos, but hunched over a lot … I assumed because, really, how much space can there be inside of a wall, anyways?! They kind of scurried around like wild animals – going through my stuff and searching for just the right toy to take back with them into the wall. I think I was maybe 8 years old in this dream – just a kid, anyways – and so the thought of strange hobos stealing my toys was absolutely terrifying!

The next day I went to my Dad with my findings and told him that we had to get them out. I don’t remember his response, but the next night when they came out again, he was with me, though instead of shooing them away when they went for my toys, he opened up a board game and asked some of them to sit down and play. He told me that they were just looking for something to do and they came here because I had so many toys to play with. They all sat around and we played with my toys out in the open instead of them scurrying back into the walls because they were afraid of getting caught.

The dream ended with me realizing that it was nicer to play games with the hobos than to kick them out into the streets.

How is this still perfectly acceptable???

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TSA Agents Forced Crying 4 Year-Old To Undergo Pat Down After Hugging Grandma
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/grandma-tsa-agents-forced-crying-4-year-old-to-undergo-tsa-pat-down-at-kan-airport-after-hug/2012/04/25/gIQAojLohT_story.html

  • If that child crying keeps thousands safe, I say cry chick cry!!!
  • This absolves the TSA entirely. I do not want ANYONE (muslim or christian or young or old) passing through a checkpoint after making contact with an unscreened passenger.
  • If you cannot control your 4 year old, then do not bring them into public areas, especially in known problematic situations like the airport. I do not want to be held in line because someone’s 4 year old is freaking out, and I do not want to pay for TSA agents with child psychology degrees.

As if the story itself isn’t sickening enough, reading through some of the comments really drives home why we still entertain these demeaning procedures … because people actually think that they make them “safe.” Because it’s impossible to take a step back and realize that the things TSA agents do are completely against what parents teach their children to look out for – strangers, being separated from adults they know, good touches vs. bad touches.

There’s not a single reason in the world why the acts of the TSA, including and especially this one, couldn’t be improved by a single ounce of compassion for the people who they’re allegedly trying to protect. Why the adult and child couldn’t be inspected together seems to be the most obvious one to me. The fact that a 4 year-old ran back to someone she trusted in a scary place should be a pretty clear and reasonable concept for anyone with half a brain, even if you feel like maybe you need to do a little extra checking because you’ve got some retarded theory that “maybe the Grandma slipped something to the 4 year-old to get it past the checkpoint!”

Just some simple courtesy and understanding could do wonders for half of the negative headlines about the TSA that we see in the papers. Acknowledge that nobody likes the things that you do, and then do everything you can to put your best foot forward to try and lighten that perspective despite the process still being uncomfortable. “Please” … “Thank you” … “How are you today?” … “Have a nice day!” – again, things that we teach our kids, and yet completely oblivious to these appointed authority figures to serve the public.

How long are we going to keep accepting anything less than what we instill upon our children from the people who’ve been selected specifically to protect them???

SpaceX Dragon Plans Its First Trip to the International Space Station

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As much as I’m still disappointed that our own government doesn’t really seem to have very good plans for space exploration in the future right now, this announcement of the first private spacecraft to visit the ISS next month is still kind of cool…

SpaceX Plans Historic First Flight on May 7
http://news.yahoo.com/spacex-plans-historic-first-flight-may-7-032605200.html

Admittedly I didn’t realize on the first pass that this is a cargo-only mission – no astronauts will be traveling in the Dragon at this point, but the plan is essentially to carry 1,149 pounds of space stuff up to the six astronauts currently in residence at the ISS. The capsule itself has a much different look than we’re used to from the traditional space shuttles, so it’ll be interesting to see what it actually looks like on the inside once it’s actually ready to haul both cargo and crew … maybe more closely resembling sort of a Space Taxi than the shuttle was!

So I guess that would make this version a Space UPS or something???  😉

It still seems a little weird to now see private industry taking over what NASA has driven thus far, although the more I read into things apparently private companies have been used to toss satellites into space – both their own and for government agencies that don’t have the means themselves – for a while, so hopefully this will still somehow turn into a step in the right direction and the end result will be more space stuff coupled with the assumptions that private entities should be able to simply do things faster and cheaper than our government has in the past. I’m already finding a lot of really interesting info on SpaceX’s website and they seem pretty enthused about the whole project, so I suppose if this is the future of space flight and at least it means that we’ll still be doing something other than arguing about whether NASA is even a good investment, then I guess I just need to accept the past for what it is and instead learn to embrace the next step into the final frontier.  8)

Seriously, though – some of this stuff does look pretty freaking sweet. Maybe space tourism actually is closer than we think!

Thin Post : Rewarding Good Behavior

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I’ve tried setting up something like this before, but honestly I’ve never really been very good at it.

I’ve been thinking lately that I need some sort of incentive to help get my diet back on track because even though I’m doing pretty good with keeping up my exercise, I’ve still been splurging a lot and I get the feeling that I’m pretty much reversing all of my hard work with a few uncontrollable spoonfuls of peanut butter in the middle of the night! I need something to help me focus better on the now – i.e. a single day’s 2,000-calorie limit – something that I can look forward to when I’m passing by the cupboard before bed or even just lying there unable to sleep, its sweet, sweet nectar taunting me invitingly from across the house…

I wish I was making this up, folks, but I guess this blog is all about honesty, both for better and for worse! 😳

Anyways, the most obvious idea that came to my mind – though in hindsight, I’m not sure that we can afford it – is some sort of monetary incentive. Say $5 / day to save towards something completely frivolous for every day that I’m able to meet my caloric goal for that particular day. And while I have a tendency to just buy cheaper stuff if I want and see it in the store, some things come to mind more in the $100-200+ range that I could save up for over the course of a month or two.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like our budget can really support that right now with other things that we currently have on the horizon.  🙁

But I guess I just feel like I need something to focus on for today – not an incentive that I might get once I lose X pounds or whatever because at the point I’m at right now, it feels like I need more focus on the things that will help me lose weight as opposed to just the concept of losing weight in general. Plus, in a way just looking down at the scale to see the pounds actually lost is a reward all by itself, so I don’t think I really need anything else at that point … where I really need the help is something a bit smaller to help push the day-to-day along.

Any ideas??? It seems like everything I’ve read is both a) always based on pounds lost instead of smaller steps; and b) involves more expensive things like new clothes and massages and so on and so forth. Is there something else that I could shoot for on a day-to-day basis, or do I somehow just need to carve out a small amount in our budget for incentives, even if it’s a smaller amount like $1-2 instead of $5/day? At first glance I have a hard time believing that I’ll be able to get excited over $2/day, but if it’s the best we can do right now, is it still worth a try???

Thin Post : My Exhaustingly Long Walk!!!

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So tonight we took a wrong turn, as it were – I made a knee-jerk reaction to take an alternate route for part of my nightly walk with Cleo because a guy with another dog came along and was walking at our same pace in the same direction as we were, meaning that I would’ve had to deal with her pulling like a crazy dog for god knows how long! She hasn’t been doing too well with encountering other dogs on our walks lately – she used to just pull a little and then refocus once we walked past, but now she starts growling and barking and pulls in the opposite direction until the other dog is completely out of sight … not fun in the slightest, so if anybody happens to know how to break her of this horrible habit, I’d love to hear any and all pointers!!!  😯

Anyways, so to sum it up…

Intended Duration of Walk: 3.5 miles (65 minutes)

Actual Duration of Walk: 6.6 miles (120 minutes)

By the time we had completed our bypass, I guess I was feeling up to pushing myself a little farther and I had plenty of podcast left to listen to, so I added in an extra side loop and then took the long way home on top of that! I couldn’t believe until I looked up the ridiculously similar to spaghetti-looking route on Google Maps that we’d actually gone that far, although now my legs are starting to feel it and I can only imagine how I’m going to feel come tomorrow morning…

And to think tomorrow our plan is to spend the day walking around Disney World! Maybe I can just get one of those motorized chairs or something…  😐

Facing the Challenges of Married Life

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So this year for my annual anniversary of our first date post, I thought I’d talk about challenges because it seems like Sara and I have been going through an awful lot of them lately. I don’t really want to publicly go through the details of them, but they’ve definitely had a very profound affect on our lives in the last couple of years, to the point where we’ve found ourselves having to rethink some of our plans for the near future to accommodate these problems that we’re facing. In the last couple of weeks, in particular, all of the chaos has really been taking its toll on me and I’ve been trying to figure out how to deal with all of these issues without resorting to arguments and fights…

I was kind of surprised when I came across an old copy of our wedding ceremony from a few years back … because part of it even specifically made mention of the kinds of challenges that we find ourselves facing today:

[excerpt] Charge to the Bride and Groom
Know that you will be tested by the routines of daily life, by chance and circumstance, and by the full cycle of the seasons of life.

Know that together you must encounter life’s sorrow no less than its sweetness, its frustration along with its grace and ease, its disappointments along with its fulfillment.

Enter your marriage confident in the love and trust you have already created between you.  As you go forward in your journey together as husband and wife, devote yourselves to living according to the vows you share today.

Sometimes it’s easy to get so caught up in the challenges of life that you forget about the foundation that you have beneath you and you find yourselves fighting against each other instead of fighting against the problem that you’re supposed to be facing together. Life certainly isn’t always fair, and it’s easy to get frustrated about your own problems that so many other couples are fortunate to never have to face … many without ever even realizing it … but at the end of the day, it’s of the utmost importance to remember that last night – be confident in the love and trust you already have – to let that carry us through the hard times.

Right now it’s hard to tell if the problems that we’re currently facing will be solved a year from now, but I’m learning that it’s important to take a step back every now and then to remember that marriage is a team sport and the challenges that we face are ours to share, not a burden for one or the other to carry alone.

Corporate Congress, Internet Edition

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I thought this site was pretty interesting – sopatrack.com

I mean, we’ve known for ages that Congressmen make quite the bank from political contributions by corporations looking to buy themselves the upper hand, but just how bad does your Congress person listen to his or her wallet rather than the voices of his constituents???

Essentially what Sopatrack does is match up political contributions with Congress’ voting history to paint a pretty vivid picture of how closely aligned any given politician is with the issues that just so happen to be in favor of their own sponsors.

Certainly not surprising by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it just drives home the fact even more that we need to get the almighty dollar out of politics if we ever want the general public to get its money’s worth from this group of corporate sellouts…