Kitty is kind of a bitch.

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I felt kinda bad about it, but Cleo had to learn a lesson the hard way earlier this evening.

We see a lot of cats around our neighborhood when we’re out walking, typically just sitting in driveways, sometimes on top of or underneath a random car here and there.

This drives Cleo crazy because pretty much anything she sees on four legs is a potential playmate in her eyes, and so she doesn’t understand why I don’t let her get closer when she spots a furry creature off in the distance and starts trying to dislocate my arm by means of the leash that connects the two of us.

Tonight we passed a fat, white cat just sitting right in the middle of the sidewalk, and I didn’t really see it enough in advance to walk around or over to the other side of the street.

Also, it should probably be noted that I really hate cats and knowing how they usually spook pretty easily, occasionally I’ve been known to take pleasure in watching them sprint back into the house where they belong when I “accidentally” let Cleo get close enough to unleash her enthusiasm upon them.

That didn’t happen this time, though.

Instead, the cat held its ground and got particularly defensive, which I think just confused her even more.

“If you don’t run away, then you must want to play with me!!!”

She circled him, and sniffed, and then eventually went in for a closer look…

…and jumped right back just in time to avoid a claw right across her nose!

It took her two or three times before she decided that she didn’t want to play with kitty anymore. Again, I felt kinda bad about it, though luckily she never actually got caught hard enough to draw blood or anything. But she just turned one year-old yesterday, so I figured she’s gotta learn sometime.

As we walked away, she jumped up on me and had the most confused look in her eyes, like, “Why was that kitty so mean??? Why didn’t it want to play with me???”

Sure enough, a few miles later we came across another cat right in the middle of the sidewalk, and of course, Cleo had already forgiven and forgotten the last bitchy kitty…

Weekend Fun in Pictures

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D&D Adventuring Fun! – Despite being a man down, we still managed to get ourselves into a world of trouble wandering around the Shadowfell, but hey, any session that ends with the party still being alive on that plane is actually a pretty good one, am I right?!

Saturday Studios Fun! – Spent the day bumming around Disney with Sara as planned – hit a lot of old favorites, not to mention got two passes at Toy Story Mania, plus we watched Fantasmic, where I apparently got some pretty sweet looking photos of the finale! Looking forward to posting those shortly over on that Disney site of mine…

Puppy Pool Party Fun! – Cleo had one of her brothers over to celebrate their birthday, as you can see quite evidently below with their joyful romps in Cleo’s new pool! And people say that we spoil our puppy…  8)

Good times, good times…

a weekend of relaxation and fun just over the horizon…

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Something I kind of hinted at in a post earlier this week – I’m actually taking a break this weekend!!!  :mrgreen:

It was actually supposed to be a well-deserved break for finishing a project that I abruptly started mid-February, but it’s actually taking a little longer than I had anticipated, as just about everything that I’ve ever done seems to end up doing. Nonetheless, Sara and I have both really been yearning to go over to Disney and we’ve missed out on a couple of other opportunities for financial reasons, so it was time to just bite the bullet and put the work on hold for a weekend.

On top of that, Sunday is actually our puppy’s first birthday, so we’re having some of her doggie friends over for her to play with and it’ll end up being a relaxing day to get other stuff done around the house to boot…

Friday Night – D&D
The continuing adventures of the bi-weekly campaign that I’ve been playing in for the last 8 months now – the anticipation is actually kind of high right now because we just recently had a pretty major turning point in that mysteriously as of our last session we found ourselves on another plane, so tonight’s game should be especially interesting as we try to figure out where in the heck we actually are and even more importantly, how in the world we’re supposed to actually get back home again!

Saturday – Disney’s Hollywood Studios
I honestly can’t even remember the last time we’ve been to this park, which is kind of sad! I know we didn’t end up making it over for the Osborne Lights last year, and it seems like some of the best rides were down when we came before that, so I’m kinda just looking forward to doing everything in the 8 or 9 hours that we’ll be over there tomorrow. The park is open until 10pm with two showings of Fantasmic, so hopefully we won’t have any problems hitting everything in addition to seeing fireworks at the end of the day, too. Should be lots to do – Toy Story Mania (obviously), the new Star Tours, Coaster and Tower, I’d even like to sit down for Indiana Jones … looking forward to a fun day!

Sunday – Cleo’s 1st Birthday Party
I can’t believe that we’ve had this puppy for almost a year already! I say almost because I guess technically we didn’t really get her until  6 or 8 weeks or something, but it’s still crazy to think that there was a time before that when she wasn’t a part of our family because she’s very much loved and feels right at home with us. For me, it’s especially neat to see the personality that she’s developed over the last 12 months … granted, sometimes a bit obnoxious (but who isn’t?!), but also very eager and curious, protective and sometimes sensitive, and generally at least what I’d like to consider overall pretty happy, too. Plus, for the most part she’s completely stopped peeing and pooping in the house, so if that’s not cause for a celebration, then I don’t know what is…  😀

finding humor in the gall of regulating women’s vaginas…

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I’ve never really been a huge fan of Doonesbury, but much like the digs at Sarah Palin that Trudeau took last fall, I’ve also been enjoying the series that he’s been running this week about all of the crazy abortion legislation that the GOP has been spinning around lately because sometimes despite being horrendously sad and offensive, there’s still a little sliver of humor to be found simply in the idea that somebody out there finds this completely ridiculous proposal perfectly reasonable.

I honestly don’t understand how any woman, or even any man who has respect for any woman, could possibly still support the republican party after stuff like this because it’s so over-reachingly offensive to think that a bunch of middle-aged white guys not only have the right to tell women what they can and can’t do with their own bodies, but also force them to undergo invasive medical procedures to protect the potential future of a creature that technically doesn’t even exist yet … it’s all just baffling to me, and it’s also a little concerning that more people aren’t up in arms about this. Because although only men served on the original committee discussing it, there are plenty of women in Congress that still support all of these measures because I guess if their husbands only have sex for procreation and never, ever, ever just for pleasure, then the ladies really have no reason not to support harsh penalties on things that will never really affect their pure and just sexual practices anyways, right?

My view couldn’t be more cut and dry on this one – abortion is the woman’s right (hopefully with insight from her partner, but I’m not going to muddy this post by opening up that can of worms! 😉 ). If a given woman doesn’t believe in abortion herself, then she has every right not to have one with her own body, but at the same time it’s not right to tell other women that they can’t simply because somebody else isn’t ok with it. Do whatever feels right for you, but don’t make it a law where other people aren’t able to make that choice for themselves.

That’s honestly my biggest beef with the religious right in general – I’m very happy for you if you’ve found your way by living your life according to the Bible, but what’s not cool is thereafter trying to make laws based on your religion that the rest of us have to follow, even though many of us don’t actually believe in the teachings of the Bible. People need to be allowed to exercise their own religious freedoms and to make their own decisions based on what they themselves believe – especially when there’s a large group of citizens screaming for “Less government invasion on our lives!!!”

Granted I don’t actually have one myself, but being required to shove a 10-inch wand up your vagina for a mandatory sonogram sounds pretty invasive, if you ask me…

Is good brushing actually BAD for me???

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So I wrote in my humor column this week about the fancy, new toothbrush that my wife and I bought earlier this week, but ironically, it hasn’t all been fun and games … in fact, after actually using it for a couple of days, I’m starting to wonder if it’s possible that in the short term it’s going to do me more harm than good…

Of course, the HUGE caveat to this theory is that historically I’ve really been pretty horrible with regards to taking care of my teeth. I only brush once a day, I never floss, and I’ve been to the dentist exactly once in my adult life. That visit was maybe 2-3 years ago and after an hour of scrutiny and lecturing, I left with a $3,000 repair estimate and just never even bothered going back. And that was with dental insurance!

Well, let me think – I may have actually went back once to fill a single cavity or something, but that was about it. Seriously, the list was atrocious – maybe a dozen cavities of varying degrees, and also a couple of crowns and other things that were really expensive, and of course, when I asked about priorities, he said that the most important things were also the most expensive, so I could just rank them according to price. Needless to say, my budget didn’t exactly jive with that particular logic, so I promptly cast the quote into the garbage and didn’t really give it a second thought.

My concern now, though, is that I’m curious if somehow this awesome, new toothbrush of mine is somehow exacerbating those problem areas in a way that my traditional, half-assed brushing never really affected in the years past. The head of the new brush is very much like the one a dentist uses when he cleans your teeth, or so I vaguely remember, and thus I’m wondering if there’s a chance that it’s somehow irritating my gums that are probably already damaged when it’s down there giving them a deep cleaning that they haven’t felt in years.

The reason that I wonder all of this is because for the last two days, I’ve been fighting a mild headache that just tonight started to hint that it was stemming from around my jaw and throat area. I’m a little swollen down there, just on one side, and so in the back of my head I started wondering, “I wonder if this is a freaking root canal that’s just now coming to light…”

Other than that, I actually really like the toothbrush – it really does feel like it does a better job than I would with those cheapy, vibrating brushes in the past, and I like that it’s rechargeable so I don’t have to worry about the battery dying out a month later. Plus, I have to do less work and it actually tells me when I’m brushing too hard or I’ve stayed in one place too long, so that’s kinda neat! I’m just hoping that this $100 toothbrush doesn’t lead to me having to revisit that $3,000 dental plan to boot…

Recommended by the American Dental Association … crap.  😳

The importance of quality downtime…

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I came across this interesting article today that really resonated with me regarding productivity and the idea that more time worked doesn’t necessarily translate directly into more work completed on a one-for-one basis.

It’s a problem that no doubt anyone in the professional world has had to face – bosses pushing people to work overtime more and more regularly instead of hiring additional workers to keep up with demand – although I can say without a doubt that I’ve seen it with my own personal creative work just the same. And if you strictly look at the input and refuse to consider the ultimate output, it seems like it should make sense – more time that has already been paid for (i.e. salaried workers don’t get overtime) results in more work for the same cost to me!

Or in my case, I’m only one person, so my own time is the only currency that I have and the more that I pump into creating my work, the better … right???

Up to a point, yes.

The studies cited show that for pretty much any type of work (but even more so for knowledge/creative-type work), one’s productivity steadily decreases after you surpass about 8 hours per day/40 hours a week, so as to say that if each day in a week is worth 20% of your work, adding an extra workday on the weekend doesn’t automatically result in 120% productivity for that week. In addition, if sustained over longer periods of time, the overall productivity in general starts to drop, in that 48 hours of work might only yield 60-80% of what a standard, 40-hour work week once gave you in the past because, well, people are only human and most of us need things other than just work in our lives, be it family time, exercise, recreation, sleep … and if you deprive a person of those other things for long enough, his overall quality of life starts to suffer and as a result, the piece that you as an employer actually care about takes a hit, too…

In particular, the two that I run up against with my writing most often are #1 – sleep, and #2 – family time, because I have a ton of things that I need to get done trying to get my business off the ground and thus it just eats up ridiculous amounts of my time, although after reading this study it almost makes me want to re-evaluate the pacing of my strategy just a bit to see if ultimately I would end up being more productive by spending less time actually working. Re-reading that sentence, it sounds absolutely bonkers, but it actually kind of makes sense – if I spend 4 hours spinning my wheels trying to solve a problem one night that on a clear head I could’ve tackled in half the time, it’s actually a net gain for everybody because my problem still gets solved and my wife and puppy get a few hours with me instead of me staying locked in the office all night by myself running on empty. Of course, it’s tough to quantify those types of gains even in hindsight, but just recently I can think of at least a couple examples where I was fighting a problem literally for hours on end, only to come back later with a fresh look and realize that I had actually solved it long ago and just didn’t realize that my results had actually been correct the whole time!

I should also note that I’ve actively seen this ring true specifically when I’m trying to write things, too – the creative part of my brain doesn’t do well at all on little sleep … until it reaches a state of fuck all and decides to just crap any old thing out for the sake of letting me go to bed, anyways … but as for real quality work, I not only need to be rested to be able to write well, but it also actually helps when I’ve spent some time recently doing other fun things that aren’t work because it actually makes me look forward to writing as a release instead of just seeing it as another tick on my checklist of things to do. Besides, if I stay locked away too long, chances are I start to run out of things to write about altogether, which is really no good, either…

Granted, it’s an unfortunate truth, both for the creative entrepreneur juggling to do everything all by himself and for managers the world over who’ve got budgets to meet and find it easier to tell Johnson he’s working over the weekend than tell his boss that they can’t meet such-and-such arbitrary deadline, but at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding and if your workers are still face down in said pudding when you come in the next morning, I suppose that’s probably a sign that something somewhere needs to change! 😉

Home Server PC, Revisited

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Over the weekend I decided to take a little break from the creative project that I’ve been buried in lately and enjoy a little change of pace by taking another look at rebuilding my home server that has been sitting dead for well over a year now. I honestly wasn’t really even sure what to expect after having the thing sitting dormant for so long, but unfortunately it looks like whenever I do resume this project, I’m kinda going to be starting from scratch…  🙁

The original reason why I had this box was to act as a home file server for media, backups, and also as a test server for web development. Nowadays we could still use the centralized media server – in fact, the thought came up again this time because I’ve been entertaining the idea of storing digital copies of all our DVDs in one place for easy access via set-top boxes; the backup proposition is still quite valid (and a huge necessity, too!), though the test environment, not so much now that I pay for webhosting elsewhere.

Anyways, the hope was that I could re-use as much hardware as possible and maybe even get away with only buying a new hard drive or two to replace the one that crashed years ago … but now it looks like I’ve got a lot more work to go!

For starters, I couldn’t even get the thing to boot … well, it might’ve been booting, but the video output wouldn’t work so I had no way of telling. And I tried to use a video card from another computer, but it wouldn’t take it.

Next, I tried just moving the hard drives over to an even older PC that used to be Sara’s long before she got her laptop. First it wouldn’t even recognize them, and then when it did, it claimed that they were unformatted and only a fraction of their actual size. I finally gave up after remembering that I had used a special feature in Windows XP to span multiple drives into one (i.e. one 800 GB drive instead of 2x 400 GB) because I didn’t want to risk wiping the data altogether.

Definitely a bummer because I guess I was kinda hoping I could just plug the thing back in, turn it on, and all would be right with the world!  😳

So my next steps are … money. I basically need to replace everything – new motherboard and CPU, which will then warrant new memory, and at least one new hard drive, too (I still have one random 1.5 TB SATA drive that I bought a long time ago but never used). And if I’m buying new hardware, I kinda wanted to see about getting stuff that will be both low noise and more efficient for cooling (?!) because I’ve kinda gotten used to a minimal amount of fan noise in my office … boy, do I miss the days when my office had a walk-in closet with a door that I could close! For a while I was running Sara’s PC as a print server, which is so old that it doesn’t even have a CPU fan – only the power supply one – and that was really quiet, so I’ve been trying to search for more modern versions that rely on heat sinks instead of fans and found a few options.

I really wish that I had a separate room where I could just leave it, but we really don’t unless I run wires across the entire house, which is inconvenient at best! Plus, closets and back bedrooms are still going to be bad for air circulation, which is another concern because I’m sure I’ve lessened the lifespans of hardware in the past by cramming 4-5 hard drives in a small, poorly ventilated desktop case and then sticking it in a corner somewhere. This is when I need a house with a dedicated server rack, but I guess my wife decided that she’d rather have the pool!  😛

I have a feeling that this little project is going to get shelved again for at least another few months unless I stumble across a briefcase full of money while I’m out walking Cleo one of these nights. And it’s definitely one of those things that’s just another toy for me to play with – having the old server down for over a year, there’s certainly nothing mission critical left unaccounted for by any stretch of the imagination … except that I have to go get the DVDs if I want to watch every episode of The Simpsons instead of watching the old copies that I used to download from newsgroups!

Oops – I wasn’t supposed to admit that last part, now was I?

Thin Post : Frustration

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0.2 pounds

That’s how much my weight went down since last week.

At this rate I should hit my target rate by around June 2015, that is, assuming that my rate doesn’t somehow manage to slow down even worse…

I’m a little frustrated at this point because for the most part, I actually thought that overall I did pretty well last week. I got in 6 days of cardio and walked almost 27 miles, got 2 of my 3 desired strength training days, and did pretty good at keeping my calories right around 2,000 with the exception of two snacking days. The last couple of weeks were kinda half-hearted, so only losing 0.4 pounds a week seemed deserved for those, but this time I really felt like I had gotten my act together and was going to see a number at least >= 1 pound lost as a result!

And not for nothing but I’ve been sore for the last month and a half, so I’m kinda ready to start seeing some actual results from all of this exercise!!!

So I guess it makes me wonder, as much as I feel like I’m already sacrificing, if I’m still not scrutinizing myself nearly enough to make this happen. I look back at what was mostly a good week and wonder – if I had forced myself to stay up a little later and get that 3rd day of push-ups in, or if I had done less of my short walks and more of the longer route, or if I had exhibited a stronger will power and not caved in to those two nights when I caught myself up snacking at 3am … would one of those, or even all of them, have made the difference with my weigh in today?

I’m trying not to beat myself up over it too bad because I know that it’ll just drag me down and make me want to snack even more, but as impossible as it seems, maybe I really do need to start scrutinizing even more in the next 7 days to see if it makes a difference. Better counting of calories, a strict no midnight snack rule, pushing myself a little harder with the exercise … I hate that this is so hard and yet I’m talking about pushing even harder, but I can’t wait another 3 years before I’m at my ideal weight!

I need motivation.  😕

Angry Birds … IN SPACE!!!

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I have little doubt that I’m going to be just as horrible at this game as I have been at most of the new Angry Birds levels, but the physics look awesome and I’m sure that Rovio will still get my $2.99 just the same…

Love the NASA promotional tie-in, too!