tomorrow should be fun…

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I’m only going in for a couple of hours tomorrow because I have some vacation time to burn before the end of the year, but not enough for an entire day. The plan is to be out by noon, come home and do some things around here for a few hours, then head on over to Disney to catch a couple of shows and the Christmas lights in the evening at MGM. I will be sure to go dig out my battery charger for the camera just as soon as I finish posting this so that I can take some pictures along the way!

I’ll get myself into the damn Christmas spirit around here one way or another… 🙂

expectations

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Just food for thought, but sometimes I wonder if I set expectations that are simply too high for some people.

Somehow I got thinking about this tonight and it really made me wonder because often times I find myself getting angry with people and they don’t even know it – in one hand, I factor the values and moral implications that I [try] to live my own life to, and in the other, it also needs to be considered that not everyone else shares these points of view. So by expecting people to live by the ideals that I have in my own mind, am I setting unfair expectations or merely setting the bar for the kinds of people that I want to be around?

And the bigger question, why do I let some people slip farther away from these expectations than others???

I’ve got to admit that I’m more than a bit torn right now because part of me wants to proclaim that everyone should be able to live by their own morals…and I would certainly agree with that, but at the same time, it seems to me like this is something that pretty much everyone does, even if we don’t realize it. It could be something as simple as returning a phone call in a timely manner or your etiquette as far as opening doors for other people, or on a more grand scale such as your opinions of life, love and the pursuit of happiness – I guess we all judge people to some extent … its how we chose which people to be friends with in the first place, what kinds of company we keep on the weekends, and so on and so forth.

This is probably a topic larger than any single LiveJournal post can handle, so for now I’ll end by just throwing a couple of questions out there…

  • When I find myself getting upset, is it because someone no longer meets the expectations that I had at the time or simply because my expectations have evolved beyond something that said person can meet?
  • If the latter, is it fair to try to hold someone to these new expectations that weren’t conditional when you first met?
  • And ultimately, does this lead back to pave the reasoning for why some would believe that the past should stay in the past, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and your best friends are the ones that you have right now?I’m certainly not pointing fingers at anyone, mind you – just entertaining an intriguing topic that I pondered during the drive home tonight, so feel free to chime in with any comments or ideas. It’s like sociology all over again… 😛

interesting…

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My auto insurance policy just dropped by $12 / month after giving them my new address! I still think it’s too much to be paying to only cover me against lawsuits, but hey – that’s a hundred and fifty bucks more for me each year…

fudgecicles…

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I had been planning on going over to Disney the day after Christmas to check out the Christmas lights at MGM, but I just noticed on my calendar that my pass has blackout dates starting Thursday and running into the new year … by the time I can go again, the exhibit will be closed… 🙁

Hmmm … is it worth taking Wednesday afternoon off to make the trip?

Re: President Bush’s Address to the Nation

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So I missed Family Guy this evening because our President wanted to dominate the airwaves in an attempt to save face…and possibly divert some eyes from the whole spying on citizens scandal that he’s been under fire for lately. Is it just me or does it seem like the man’s been trained like a parrot to throw in the words liberty and freedom every sixth word or so?! Well, I’m happy to hear that he thinks that we’re doing well over in Iraq, but here’s just a little something that came to mind while I listened to his incessant banter this evening…

Dear Mr. Bush,
I’m glad to hear that you have a plan for us to finish up this whole Iraq-thing in 2006 – maybe when that’s all said and done, we could focus on some of the problems we still have here at home…that is, if you’ve got any time left in office at that point…

Maybe we could start with all of the hospitals that I pass by each day on my way to work, filled with diseases that have no cures and patients who couldn’t afford to pay for them anyways. I’ve heard good things about that “Let’s just give everyone free healthcare”-plan that Canada’s got going – maybe you could give them a call and pick up a few pointers?

Then a bit of time shining up our classrooms – that might be nice, don’t you think? We could buy more books for the libraries that are still stuck in the 1990s, and perhaps even some more classrooms for the schools that are still praying for class sizes of forty or less. And I know this one is a little crazy, but I hear that there are still some schools that are connecting to the Internet via dial-up – there must be a telecommunications corporation that’s looking for a little primetime spotlight these days, isn’t there?!

And last but not least, and this should be an easy one because I can only assume that the situations over in Iraq must be horrendously worse than here – how about a solution to our homelessness and poverty issues? I just have a hard time getting into the Christmas spirit when I pass by several street corners in downtown Tampa that feature folks scavenging for breakfast out of the garbage cans, so I was thinking that once freedom and liberty have been restored over in Iraq, maybe we could get these citizens something to eat…

Just a few ideas from another one of those guys who thinks, “we’re wasting time, money, and American lives rebuilding Iraq in the name of freedom” – I hope I got that quote right because I had to step away from your speech for a few minutes to make myself stop laughing … a man can only take hearing the word “terror” mispronounced so many times … you’ll understand, though – I’m sure. Best of luck with Iraq – if you need me, I’ll be back here … at home …

Sincerely,
Scott Sevener

Walking to Mars

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Who else remembers NOVA???

I caught an episode this evening (in HD, no less!) and was kind of taken back – I guess I just haven’t really geeked out on the whole space exploration gig for a while, but this one was pretty interesting. An hour of highs and lows about two of the Mars rovers that we’ve explored the red planet with, highlighting a system failure that nearly lost us one of the vehicles and of course, its miraclous comeback. It’s been a while since I’ve searched out some decent high-res photographs from abroad – maybe I’ll have to take some time to do that tonight!

Mental Note: Next year, a trip to Kennedy Space Center most definitely needs to be on my list of weekend adventures. To infinity and beyond… 🙂

computer surgery

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I replaced the NIC in my desktop PC tonight because I’m just plain tired of it losing its connection all of the time. It had gotten so bad that I’d actually created a separate folder on my desktop to save all of the files that I was working on from network drives to after the card went down and I would have to reboot to restore the connections. With the old 10/100 back in, I’ve got multiple torrents running, the FTP, and all of my usual IM and web apps, so I guess now we’ll see if that really was the problem…

I think this just really urks me because this happens to be the second port that’s died on this motherboard in the past couple of months (NIC in this instance is actually an onboard gigabit ethernet controller). A few months back, you might remember my parallel port crapping out one random day and I’ve been connecting my printer and scanner via USB ever since. I bought an ASUS because I always hear everyone raving about them, but so far I’m not impressed. I suppose it does have a three-year warranty, but you know what kind of a pain it would be for me to be without this computer for the weeks that it’ll take them to replace it?

Why can’t things that I buy just work right the first time?!

12/16/2005 – To-Do List

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– go to work, collect slightly more than $200, provide ~9 hours of quality service, come home
– prior to coming home, pick-up Christmas gifts along the way to ease the burden of doing all my shopping this weekend
– get new fish at PetCo so Oscar and the gang won’t feel lonely
– upon returnng home, hang some pictures and clean up odds ‘n ends
– go spend at least 1/2 hour at the gym
– eat “healthy” dinner
– watch The Polar Express
– bedtime

Also…

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I’m none-too-pleased with my dishwasher right now, to the point of almost considering actually doing them by hand…and those who know me well can vouch that it’s certainly gone to extremes! The “heat dry” setting doesn’t dry anything…even overnight, half of my dishes come out with spots still on them, and as long as the thing takes to actually run, you’d think it’d be doing a decent job in there…

I’m going to switch back to Cascade this weekend and see if that helps any – if not… 🙁