For the most part I haven’t even been thinking about writing, but when I do I just can’t seem to figure out anything to say. Then when I do come up with something to talk about, like this post, I can’t seem to organize my thoughts and format what I want to write in a way that streams nicely and is worth reading.

I guess it is just a passing phase or something that I will need to work on. Maybe I just need to not worry about it at all. I don’t get paid to write anything, and I don’t have a big following on what I am writing, so if I continue to just not post due to a lack of interest or desire, or a simple case of writer’s block, I don’t think there is a lot of people out there that are going to be striking with discontent over the matter.

So, this left me with two options for typing and communication. The first is my iPhone. I like my phone, I am almost addicted to using it, but it isn’t exactly what I think of first when I am looking to type a few hundred words. I went as far as downloading the WordPress app for my phone and even typing a full post. That is a post that no one will ever read because I plan to delete it. With all the mistakes and what nots from trying to type on a phone and keep up with my thoughts, is a mess that I don’t even want to read just to edit and fix. So, the iPhone was out for doing more than comments and rereading my posts, and it is great for that. I recommend the WordPress app to anyone with a smart phone. They make one for almost all of them now I think. It is great for minor edits, comments, reading posts, and so on. I just don’t think I could use it for more than a short post for actual posting.

Now I also had an older computer that I have that my brother put to gether for my dad at some point. The real issue here is that until last month I didn’t have internet, the internet card in this old machine barely works and doesn’t pick up the neighbors internet half the time, that they said I could use if I needed, and the computer is most definitely not mobile. It is an older Windows tower and I wasn’t going to get it online, and it wasn’t from a lack of trying. I also didn’t want to pay for an internet connection for a computer that ran so slow and that I didn’t really have room to keep set up.

So that is the answer to where I have been. Nothing has worked out for me to really be online for about six months, outside of the intermediate online activity I get from my iPhone. At this point I have internet at work again, I have a new computer at home that I just bought last month and I have full internet at my house get it, and that older computer, online. I’m back. I am still working on getting a lot of neglected things up to date with having the computer back, things like family pictures and playing around, so I make no promises on when I will be back in the swing of typing like this, but for now I can at least do it during a boring day at work. Although because of the thing that happened late Fall to early Winter, I will do most of that in txt that I email to myself and post later from home. Trust me, it’s a long story I don’t want to tell and you don’t want to read.

I first came across this group at some point in 2007. I was a little shocked and dismayed by what I was reading at time. My first exposure was a personal blog of a “Flat Earther” that was ranting about how NASA needed to just come clean about the conspiracy to perpetuate the “Round Earth Theory” and fool the public. I read with fascination thinking how wonderful, wait are they joking, oh wait they are kidding, right? this cycle went through over and over in my head until the end of the article when I realized it was no joke. This lead me to do some major research into these Flat Earthers and what it is they believe and why.

After some quick searching around you can easily stumble onto the website for the Flat Earth Society, well at least the site that most agree to be the official site for the real society. It seems there are other, much smaller, groups that claim to be the real ones. There are also a few well designed sites that the Flat Earth Society claims are satirical sites making attempts to make fun of them and divert attention from the real issues they are bringing forward. Of course there is also the Wikipedia entry on this group. Unfortunately the wiki page for the FES is partial proof of where Wikipedia falls short of being a source of real information. The wiki page for this group is slanted against them, which instead of being a source of information it becomes an opinion driven piece against them not to just inform about them. Although some of the information was helpful. Let me try to give a short explanation on the group from what I have learned from the sources I can find.

The Flat Earth Society was founded officially in 1956 by Samuel Shenton, but this wasn’t the real beginning of the group. For that we need to go back to the mid 1800′s to Samuel Rowbotham. Rowbotham invented a theory called Zetetic Astronomy. This theory was based largely on literal translation of Bible passages that spoke of the earth being a disk. He wrote a book addressing his theory and grow a following of people who agreed with his ideas. When Rowbotham died his followers formed the Universal Zetetic Society. With a main purpose to get the word out and inform the masses of the “truths” put forward by their lost leader. Like many groups of its kind, the Zetetic Society went through many phases throughout the century of its existence. Up to the 1950′s there was many people who came to light as the leader or president of the group, at least two different times there were magazines and newsletters circulated by the Universal Zetetic Society or just the Zetetic Society, while at times there seems to be no mention or real record of the group at all, while some say that the Zetetic’s never died out.

In 1956 Samuel Shenton took over the Universal Zetetic Society and formed the International Flat Earth Society. Following his death in 1971 Charles K. Johnson took over as the president of the society after inheriting all of Shenton’s library and Flat Earth material. Johnson worked to build and grow the society in his time as the president eventually boasting over 3,000 members. He also worked at funding the society by charging membership fees and proved to be excellent at running the society. In 1995 a house fire destroyed Johnson’s home and most of the societies library and paperwork along with it. The fire was claimed to take not only all the research, maps, collected information and so on, but also took some important for keeping the society together including the membership database. The society saw a decline and had lost formal organization, although Johnson is said to of vowed to get it started again one day, but died in 2001 before he ever saw that happen.

After several years of inactivity the Flat Earth Society was reactivated in 2004 by Daniel Shenton.  Although they didn’t start accepting new members until 2009. The society now resides mostly online with a website complete with Daniels blog, a public forum, and much more. You can even become a member through the site. If you like what you read you can go to the join page, then after a $6 or more donation you will get a certificate and medallion, both printed with your unique member numbers on them.

So what is it exactly that they believe? What is the point in the society at all? Well that is really the simple part. They believe that the world is flat. The society is formed as a way to not only give other believers in a flat world a place to meet and a club to be a part of, but as a conduit to find others, get the word out and try to disprove what they believe is the misunderstanding that the world is a sphere. Although the people who belong and participate on the forums are seemingly all around mainstream and level-headed about most topics, they differ on two points. They believe that the earth is flat to the extent of their being a conspiracy to convincing people otherwise for unknown reasons to unknown ends, and they believe that under the Flat Earth Model that space travel is an impossibility and any space exploration, including the moon landing, was faked.

Really just rapping your head around what they believe and way is something that you only think you understand until you open another section of the sticky forum topic of “Q&A.” It would take days for someone to really weed through and read it all, but that is not what I came on to type about. My intention was only tell of the group not what they believed, that is something that you should find out for yourself.

Mysterious Universe was started in 2006 by Benjamin Grundy as part of the SOH Network. Although it started out a little rough around the edges, Grundy quickly showed his talent for putting together a well made show. The technical editing for this show is obviously something that takes longer than the show itself or the research for doing the show. The bedding music is amazing and he has a talent for putting the right song to the story and mixing it in so to scare the hell out you. He also has a great voice for radio himself. So with all those elements in place, you have the making for a great show already. So what is the show?

Well the back history as I know it first. SOH, or Sound Of Hope, is a network broadcast for a Chinese market. As I understand it, they broadcast in different forms including short wave and AM/FM to do reporting on Chinese issues. Being critical of the Chinese government makes this a difficult job. They not only do what they can to report in to the China mainland, they also legally broadcast in other Asian countries and to countries outside of Asia in order to spread awareness. There is probably a lot more to it than that, but that is what I know in my limited knowledge of who they are. Grundy is or was in someway affiliated with the SOH Network, and as he talks about on the MU, he has a lot of knowledge in Chinese history and culture.

Grundy started MU as part of the SOH Network of podcast in order to spread the content of what was being produced. That is what he stated at one point at least. There is no way for me to know for sure why without doing an interview with him and I am not in a position to do such a thing. The point is more that the show was started as a project by Grundy that he seemed to take on as a regular show at some point.

This new show of his is not about the Chinese government or culture though. Mysterious Universe is about just that. The mysteries all around us. They report on things of the unexplained that they find from many different sources, including stories that are sent to them by listeners. “News from beyond the mainstream…from ancient history to the UFO phenomenon” is part of the tag line for the show. It really sums up a lot of what they are and talk about. They do seem to try to keep an open mind, although they don’t always come across as doing that, they do keep each other in check about it most of the time.

The show does seem to go into moods and phases. There will be a series of shows that seem to be focused on the same type of subject, but you can bet on the fact that it will move on to something else soon enough. I do not know why that is, but it is something I have noticed in the last three years.

Although it started in 2006, I didn’t find it until early 2007. I was pretty much hooked right in though. I loved the show and got as much as I could of the back episodes. I was happy to pay for a premium subscription when he decided to do that as well. At the time is was very little to pay and worth it to me. When they started the paid subscriptions they did it in a great way in my opinion. Instead of taking the show down to a preview of the full episode to give to a free feed, he decided that the free feed would always get that same amount of content. So the free feed would get that same hour, but those paying would get an extra thirty minutes to an hour, additional shows during the week and interviews that wouldn’t be going out to the free feed at all. This model is still in place today, and I think it works great. This gives you the choice of a free feed that gives you a great weekly show, or paying the $9 a month to get more of that show, an additional weekly show, and occasional extra content.

He stopped doing the show completely and shut down the website for over a year, but came back with the new co-host and it has only gotten better in my opinion. I will say that the year was proof to me that this show can be addictive.

The show is also just part of the MU world at this point. The website itself has more posted information then you can get from the show. Everything that is on the show is also posted on the site. There is also a premium version of that as well. As the same as the show, you can get enough from just the site or you can get more from paying for premium.

A lot of people have a lot of bad things to say about podcast and blogs that charge for additional content of any kind. I have to say that I can see their point, but I don’t agree. This site is a great site that I enjoy and listen to, and I enjoy every moment. I don’t always agree with them, but I like what they have to say and write. That said, it isn’t for everyone, but there is plenty of free for those that aren’t willing to pay and those that don’t want to or just checking it out that might not be into it.

I struggled a little bit about if I should post this one as a UA or a TIL. It qualifies really as both if you think about it, but it really is more of the UA, because it is a website.

XKCD is an online web comic maintained by author/artist Randall Munroe. The comic is primarily stick figures, with an occasional detailed drawing. Unlike most comics, this one doesn’t really have a character theme. You aren’t going to be following situations within on story line or set by reading this. Really each comic strip stands alone and does a really good job at standing out.

Each strip might be about a number of different things. The site’s tag line “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language” is really quite accurate. Although he left out computers, science, nostalgic references, programming, and other nerdy things to read about. The strips, according to the about page, come out on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. They seem to come out regularly and without fail.

My favorite is comic 157.

That really isn’t my best of reviews, but it is all I got today. Maybe I will be in a better mindset for the next one.

I went to Stillwater Property Management to see what they have and require for deposit, and I have never been so put off by a place that I would be renting from in my life. The guy that was “helping” me was really off-putting. When I walked in the door there was no one there to greet me or really in sight. I started looking at flyers and mingling about the office. This guy comes out from an office and asks “can I help you?” in a tone that might as well of been “why are you interrupting my day?” I told him I was looking for an apartment and made some stupid joke of figuring I was in the right place to do that. He sighed, yes sighed, at me. Then walked over to a table with a listing sheet of all the apartment building they have with opening on it and told me to drive around and then come back if I want to see any, then turned and started walking back to his desk as if done with me. Little did I know he was. I stopped him and told him that I came there because I already had an idea of what apartment building and type I was interested in and wanted some information on getting into it.

Now I will stop here and give a few opinions at this point. When you are ANY business and someone walks in the door and doesn’t want to waste time, but are there because they know they want something you are selling, the least you can do is act interested in them and do what is needed to separate them from their money.

That said let’s go over what this guy did. He told me the rent cost and handed me an application. He didn’t tell me anything about what bills are paid, pets, deposit, move in dates, app fees, or anything else really. At this point he had already worked his way into his office, as he was not really interested in me at all, but I did follow him and continued. I want the apartment after all. While rolling his eyes at me while I was asking him a question about deposit and app fees, he picked up his phone and started texting. It was at this point that he never made eye contact again. The rest of our conversation happened while he was looking at his phone. I was done now and was close to just dropping the papers he handed me on the floor and walking out. I didn’t do that but instead just turned and started to walk out. It was while I was leaving that I saw another person for the first time. The receptionist was returning to her desk. I turned to her to see what she would do. I am a receptionist myself, and even if someone else helps the customer or they are there for reasons that I am not involved in, I will still ask if there is anything I can do for them. Not in a “what are you doing here” way but more of making sure that they got everything they needed so to leave my building happy. This person instead fit right in. She glared at me as she sat down and said nothing. So I just walked.

So I am looking for a place, I have an app in the car but don’t know now if I want that apartment so bad anymore.

I have also been looking at job openings. I could take a lot of time expressing issues with my current workplace, but I have much more good things to say. I won’t do either though since I do not wish to risk anyone reading this while I am looking for a new job. How’s that.

What I do know is that I want a job at OSU. The pay isn’t the highest in the world but the benefits make up for it. The hours, the time off, the family friendliness of the environment, and the stability of work. There are other reasons for me wanting to stay on campus, I just don’t know if I will be staying with this job. Wait, I know I will not be staying at this job. I just need to figure out the updating of the resume, I have never been good at wording that stuff. I can format it but the wording. Hell you’ve read this blog, trust me, it doesn’t get better.

I guess the question is, is it time to move on to a new place and a new job? Should I wait and do one first, or do I need to go with my gut on this and do it? Or am I just way off base and need to stick with the stable? I have to say that I don’t like sticking with the stable. I want to get to where I need to be and I will never do that unless I take a few chances and get myself out there. If I feel stuck at this job then I need to do something to change that.

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UPDATE:

I needed to add this update to this. I am typing this the next day from the post.

When I went back in today with the completed application, seeing how I decided to get the apartment anyway, the receptionist was very nice. I do not know if she had something else going on yesterday or if it was the moment or situation that caused what I saw yesterday, but she was very nice today.

The guy was still a jerk and more so while giving me the third degree about my entries on a background check that were frankly none of his business and pissed me off a little. If the rent wasn’t so cheap and the location good, I would never of gone through that.

I start this that way for a very important reason. I have to ask the question, why is this important? Anyone that reads these pitiful ramblings of mine will know that at least once a year I ask this question of myself and then I find the same answer of, because I want to do it that makes it important. But that isn’t important today. What I am typing this for is to encourage others to do start a blog of some sort.

Now why would I go and do something like that? Well because it is important. You don’t think it is important? Then why are you reading this? I am just an idiot with opinions and I like to type. These elements bring me here. So what makes it important enough to read? Well you either know me and do find my opinions important enough to humor them by reading what I write on occasion, you could just be passing by while searching through one of the many social bookmarking sites that I have seen myself on, you might have seen this link on a friend’s computer that happens to know me and you were just being nosy, or you could even be one of those people who search random blogs or tags. For whatever reason you are already here, doesn’t that validate what I am doing a little?

I can say that it isn’t just you. I know that several people a day come to my site and read a little of what is on here. I have stats showing activity, so I know someone is reading this inane dribble. Since I don’t know who is coming in and reading, or if they are reading it all or skimming it and passing on, how do I know if it is important to them? Well I don’t. I do know that I have friends that read it and they might make up for 1% of the views, they are the most important of my views, because I know them and get direct feedback. If these are only the 1% why do I need the other 99%? This is one thing that was directed at me.

A really good friend, that I have said should be blogging, told me that they didn’t see a reason to do so and if they wanted someone to read something that they would send it to that person to they wanted to read it. I would like to address that and why blogging an article can have importance as well. There are things that people write that are rants, letters to no one, topics of general interest, or as I do it, random nothingness. These are things that can be fun and even therapeutic to type, but they aren’t things that really have one or a few name-able people who you would want to read them. It is for these things that personal blogging is so great. You can post these type of things to the web and let all your friends, enemy’s, and random strangers read them. If there is one person that you want to read it, you can then send them a link. If you just keep them on your computer and never share them though, you will never know what kind of response you might get.

The common fear is of comments. We all know how stupid comments online are. Go to any YouTube video and you can get angry just reading the stupidity that you will find there. People are mean and we know this, but people can also be really nice. You may not realize that these people are out there, but they are. I do have a rule on my blog and I have told people on different post this before. This blog is safe for free speech. You can post ANYTHING you want, you can call me anything you want, and you can call my family anything you want. You can trash me or the subject, you can troll or verbally attack others. I will not block, ban or report ANYONE for ANY of this. What I will do is delete your comment. It’s that simple. I don’t like it I will get rid of it. It isn’t that I don’t want to allow you your free speech or to restrict my site. It is more simple than that. If I don’t like it I will remove it because I don’t want to leave things that others may not like. If you don’t like what I type then it is your problem because it is my site.

So this comes down to blogging is important in my opinion. The quick recap and reasons as followed. You get stuff out there, and that can feel really good. You can get feedback for what you are getting out there (a positive comment on something you wrote from a random stranger can really make you feel great). The ability to type long repetitive posts about subjects that are aimed completely at annoying and pestering one person in a profound way. Filling in time by doing something that feels worthwhile. Being about to tell a lot of people something you are finding it hard to tell any one person by simply posting a blog about it. Being able to say things with the disconnect of the blogging process.

There is one major down fall, that it is called a blog or blogging. I didn’t like the sound of “web log” when the term was new, and I don’t like the sound of putting the words together. I don’t have anything better to call it, maybe if I was more creative.

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For,

Pretty Pixie

So what is it I am asking about, well it is this. My blog, or whatever you want to call it. I am always wondering why I do it. Is it for me or for others? If it is for me then what am I getting out of it, if it is for others than who are they and why do they care?

I don’t really even know if there is anyone out there that actually reads it on their own. I know that there are people who if I tell them about a specific post they will go online to read it, but not really much more. I know that I get hits everyday, but the majority of them are from a couple of blog scrolling sites that I got added to somehow some time ago, and you can’t really count those because you don’t know if someone just scrolled past or actually stayed to read something. If there is someone out there reading all of this, they don’t leave comments, because I don’t get any comments.

So, am I doing it for me. I enjoy sharing and talking and typing when I can’t talk. I like for my stuff to be read, but as we know, that isn’t happening. I don’t want to force people to read anything, and bugging them to do it would just make them not want to. Do I really want to take the time to put my website out there to try to engage more strangers to read this junk? I would ask if I should just do this for me and not obsess about how might and might not read or comment, but obsessing is something I am good at and you aren’t taking it away from me.

Know that the lines of what I should do are completely vague and uncertain, let me try to see why I do it at all. I can say that I have always liked the idea of having a website, although the idea of a blog never entered that. I will also say that I am going back over stuff that I have talked about before and I am sorry about that if you already know this and are reading this, and see how I am still concerned about the people who obviously aren’t reading this. Ok, I started my first “website” a long time ago and I put it in quotes for a reason. That site was http://blacksilver.hotbot.com. I don’t know how many people are familiar with HotBot anymore, but that was an awesome site, at least it was for a Junior High student in the mid nineties.

HotBot was basically the next big, waiting to fail, search engine with a new idea hoping to be the next big site to topple the thrown of AltaVista, which was the number one search site of its time. As it went for a long time each of the search sites had their rise to fame until a new one that worked a little different or a little better came along. Then the larger ones would by the smaller ones to integrate and advance the searches to get one up on the major competition. That is until Yahoo! went over all of them in ’98 leaving even the best competitors one step behind until Google destroyed them in the early 2000′s.

Anyway HotBot provided not only their search engine, but for a short time provided websites as well. It was also one of the first places I saw with an online website from template builder. The site I had been simple and in the short time it was up I had entered around four pages of information about quotes I liked and, well that was about it. I devoted the sites to quotes I liked. I eventually lost the site and all the information, as anyone that used HotBot’s websites will know, they ended the service and deleted the pages with no warning or explanation, and forced me to dislike the company and move to Excite, another one of those raising and waiting to fail sites, but Excite was better and it was Yahoo! before Yahoo! was Yahoo!.

So for a few years following that I lost interest in having any kind of site again. It wasn’t until ’01 when I got married that I thought I should start a site and get it set up to share pictures and information about my family with my extended family. I started a web log site at Blogger, later to be bought by Google, and posted comments about things going on and pictures and stuff. That didn’t go over well, since no one understood a web log and just wanted a website at the time, so I decided to buy a domain and do a real website of my own. I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea, since I think my disinterested friends are really more interested in my life than most of my family, but I did. I kept this site for a long time, in fact I had it longer than I used it. I used and updated it for about two years until it became overwhelmingly obvious that I had no one looking at the site and didn’t want to continue paying for the hosting if it wasn’t being used. Something that I think Tink can relate to.

Well after scrapping that I did what I am good at and didn’t do anything to help please anyone else. I continued writing in my journal. Oh, that is important, I keep a journal. I have since I was 12 and still do. I love talking to myself including typing to myself. No I couldn’t be normal at twelve and write in a journal, I typed. I had a computer so why not.

This all came to a point with my brother. Ian moved away, a long way away. He, in his ever hoping ideas of sharing and communication talked me into starting a page with Xanga to type and update in. I tried for him, but I was in a bad place at the time and it just didn’t work out. Then in ’07 I started a MySpace, for the same reason and with the same idea. Yet again Ian wants me to update my life somewhere and he will read it. For a long time I updated Myspace for quite a long time really. For just under two years I posted something on a regular basis to my Myspace account. I did eventually give the account up all together. This was done for a couple different reasons. First was my general paranoia of who was reading my posts, why they were and what information was going to be taken out of context. Although I normally have that paranoia, at this time in my life there was a lot going on and I was going through a lot and it was getting overwhelming. I also was having a lot of technical issues with Myspace. As you can tell, if you have made it this far, I type a lot when I post something, and Myspace was getting in the habit of errors that deleted what I just wrote.

This moved me on to WordPress. I looked around for a while before deciding on a service that did what I wanted and looked and worked the way I wanted it to. That is how we got here. I then migrated all my post from Blogger, LiveJournal and Xanga to WordPress. I migrated most of the MySpace ones, but I still haven’t gotten all of them even two years later, and that is what we are coming up on. The two-year mark on WordPrss.

All of that and the 1300 words it took to say it basically only explain my history with having a website and web log and depicts the story of getting to where I am and why. The really sad part is that I summarized that quite a bit. There is a much longer version of all of that. I could write several posts this long on each of those steps, and that in itself is part of the issue. We live in a world where there is everything to do at once. I should say that is the world around me not me. The stats say that the average web log post or amateur article should be 100 – 500 words. Experts in this have shown in studies that successful sites have less than 100 words in a summary “fast grab” post. This keeps you in so that you will stay on the site just a bit longer. In fact, many studies have shown that quality of content doesn’t matter as much as how small and easily summarized the chunks of words are. After all the average person only stays on a web log or article site for 96 seconds. In this time a person makes a decision on what they think of your site and if they will stay there any longer. This choice isn’t made on the posts themselves. This is purely headline grabbing. They base a decision on your site based off appearance, readability, subject and headline. That takes only a few seconds and then they are either staying or going. If they stay it is only to read a short bit of the story under that headline and decide if they want to move on.

What this all comes down to is that 1600 words  into this, there is less than 1% of the population that will read this article, as that is the percentage I have found for how many people who are online that will stick around to read something written by a stranger that isn’t about an important world event over 1500 words.

In doing this I have come up with what my decision truly is that I need to make. Do I want to continue doing something that I enjoy and is statically deprecating to the idea that anyone other than myself will ever get any enjoyment from it as I do, or even finish reading it. On that I don’t even know if I will ever reread this, so it may never be read all the way through by anyone. That makes this very interesting to me since I don’t have to really be concerned anymore with what I am doing at this point.

You know what that really kind or make the decision for me right there. I do know that I enjoy typing and love sharing these meaningless thoughts and ideas, but even more so intriguing is the idea of the person that actually reads something like this. So really all of this ranting has been pointless. Well I don’t think I would say pointless it is the process that I have just gone through to make up my mind on something that I was unsure about. Now I am sure of what I am going to do. Just do what I am doing and not care about what anyone else thinks about it.

By the way, this post is intentionally 2000 words long. I just had to make it to that mark since it makes this the longest post I have made as well as doubling what I read was the death mark of an online posting of 1000 words. The theory that people do not pay enough attention or have the span needed to read that much online. I have a more positive outlook on the world and think anyone can do anything they want, and that there are no hard and fast rules to writing or reading alike. Thank you for just proving me right.

Now if I can just get people to comment on here.

Well, they are.

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February 19, 2007

Although a little late, I still want to say this to all that read. I like to take this time of year to tell everyone that I care about how I feel. I do not have that ability this year as I have in the past. I do have a lack of communication with many people these days.

All the same I say now that to all that I love, care about, and cherish, I am thinking of you on this day and that is the best I can do for now.

That is the short story, the long story isn’t getting told to protect both the innocent and not so innocent, and I was on the latter end so lets leave it at that. The important thing is that it sparked something in Dre and I. It was the catalyst for what would become an annual trip, and sometimes more. It was a few years after that when we had both dealt with getting married and having kids and settling into jobs, before we finally found some dates that we would both be available to go. That is all it took. After planning and talking about doing it again, ever since that first trip, we finally went. It was a slow start with a two day two night first year that has now developed into four days and four nights. I hope as we both make more and family life settles we are able to go longer.

The issue that prompted all of this is even though we have now gone for nine years, and if you take out the two after the first and the two that we missed because of a family issue with him and my divorce, this will actually be the fifth year, but the tenth that we have planned for it. By no means is this the fifth trip. There has been a growing habit that if either one of us is stressed to a breaking point the other will bend life a bit to get both of us in the car off to hike to some backwoods camp site for a one or two night trip somewhere.

Where was I, what is this all about, this all sounds great so far. Well there is an issue that I don’t know what I should do about all of this. This has to do with an odd growing tension between Dre and I. I don’t know really were this is coming from but started some time before our trip last year.

There is important information that needs to be shared before I go farther. Dre and I have known each other since elementary school, we have been friends since middle school and best friends since high school. We have been through a lot together, good and bad. In this time, which I now estimate to being around 17 years give or take, we have never had what one would describe as a fight. That is we have never had a confrontational argument or a physical confrontation with each other. There have been times that we didn’t talk or disagreed, but we always work it out. Now that said there is a lot of tension and has been for a little over a year. Most of it has come out in the form of I want to do this and he wants to do that and we are hanging out and neither of us are giving in. This is translating to the camping trip that is coming up with were to go, how long to be gone, how money for gas and such will be split, and so on. We have done this enough that all of this is really just pointless and stupid. In the past we just compromise or figure it out, not this year. Hell, last year we did a lot of that and didn’t agree, but it waited until we were on the road, this year it is happening a month before the trip.

I don’t really know what to do. I think that this is going to either go away or one, or both, of us is going to explode, or it will just go away with time. He is in his later years in college, has a wonderful but busy family, a beautiful wife and two wonderful little girls, and he has work plus a side business that he runs himself, all while his self-employed wife is working more than full time, and doing well at it. So, a lot of this can be simple stress on his end. Anyone that knows me or has read a lot of my other postings knows that I don’t deal with anything correctly and that I can be really annoying, so I could just be making it worse for him. I have some stress and that can’t be helping but I don’t have what he has.

I guess there really isn’t a conclusion to make now. I have to wait and see how things turn out, I just hope that it turns out well. Even if it turns out what we need is a good old-fashioned fight. Some times with friends, you just need to get a few good punches in to make you both feel better. Although he is a black belt, I will just try to get him drunk before I this happens.

So, I am involved in and I love doing it. There are just people and parts of it that I do not like about it. That is the root of my problem. When I have to do or say something that I do not agree with, but my function requires it of me and it can be really annoying. I think I could even get past that and live with that to a degree. The real problem is that with the certain people who I have to deal with. People can ruin almost anything.

So there is one particular person that I can live my life without. I have to deal with this person but really have gotten to my limit of not wanting to. It isn’t that this person is a bad person or really harmful to me or the group, but I just don’t get along with them. I know it isn’t just me either, other people have talked to me about them and they have similar opinions.

I guess my real issue is that I enjoy being in the group but I don’t know if I want to stay in and deal with the issues that I am having to deal with. Leaving the group isn’t something I want to do, for many reasons, but staying might kill me. Really it is an issue of me wanting to do something that I no longer want to do. This makes no sense, but when do I ever.

Well it is, in my opinion, the most resilient format that we have had for recorded music to date. As well as being the most diverse format, having the ability to be the best quality, and the most playable. Let me explain.

As I have already said, CDs are the worst format for really lasting. They scratch easily, and one scratch can ruin the disk. Newer ones are made out of softer plastic, and left in on the dash or the wrong place in a car, you can cause enough melting to make it unplayable. There are a number more ways that you can turn that $14 investment into a number of useful things. A toy to throw around, a target for you BB gun, even art if you are creative enough. Now to move to CDs biggest competition in the physical recording world, the LP. Compared to the CD the LP is more sturdy. Vinyl is harder to break than a CD, minor scratches don’t destroy the whole thing, if there is a major scratch it doesn’t destroy the whole thing but maybe one song or one half of the album. This said there is issues with it as well. It still can be scratched even if it isn’t as easy. There is a big issue with size, not only for storage but for playing. The quality is limited, it is difficult to transfer a LP to a different format, there is upkeep cost for the player, vinyl can melt, but worse of all is that vinyl can warp easily if not stored correctly. Tape formats are the worst. Not only is tape very limited in quality, but tape wears out from being played, IT CAN BE EASILY ERASED, and the player will actually completely destroy your album when it starts to wear out itself.

This is what is so great about digital media, and music for the most part. The file is only limited by the media you put it one. While you might have it on an unreliable media, like a HD or CD, but you can easily back it up to another media even media type. The file itself, if treated correctly can last a long time. A corrupted file can be easily replaced by a previous back up of said file. This makes the music itself more resilient than the previous formats. The quality is only limited by how you can get it, how it was recorded, and how much space you have to store it. You can even downgrade the quality if you wish to do so, I don’t but have known people who did. I am not even talking MP3 here. I started ripping my CDs into digital backup before MP3 was an option, and now am using AAC for the most part. A file can be converted and changed, so if you have .wave files and you start having trouble finding something to play them, it doesn’t take much to convert those files to .mp3 or AAC and keep the quality the same. This allows for this format of music to easily change with the times. The most important thing is that this is the most playable format. There is just so much you can put on a LP, CD, Tape, 8 track, reel to reel, and so on. Digital music gives you options. I have over 11,000 songs on my iPod, even more on my computer, and I can put that music to other mp3 players, computers of mine, flash drive, burned to an audio CD and so on. The ability to put my music in a place where I can listen to it is amazing, more so if compared to the other formats that came before it.

The best thing to come out of this change in music is my kids. My 8-year-old son has every song that has been bought for or by him since he was born. The likeliness for him to hang on to the majority of that music until he is my age is starting to look better every year, and so much more than when I was his age. There is music that I had and will never have back. One of which was a odd little known artist that I wore a tape out by. I have never been able to find it again. I was only 6 when I got it and still remember it well. This is something that is starting to go away. My kids don’t own a CD and hardly understand why they would need to use one, and really they don’t need to. They are growing up now in a place where they will not have to many times that they will have to pick music they want with them due to physical space that the media takes up. It will be their choosing to not back their music up or deleting it themselves that cause loss of it, not flawed media making that choice for them. Sure this has its flaws, as everything does, but I think it is the best for my music. I really should back mine up now that I have typed all of this.

So how well do you think you can judge where your mouse cursor is on the screen? Well you can find out really quick with this game. According to some experts, people who use their computers on a daily basis use their instinct for where the cursor should be based on experience more than they use visual tracking. Basically, they seem to know where the mouse is and remember its location more than they look at it.

This game is simple. When you click start you will have a black screen with three randomly placed, and random sized, white and grey circles. You will have three seconds to start clicking the circles before the cursor disappears. After it disappears you the timer will start and the score kept. You get three seconds to click on a circle. If you fail to click on anything in the three seconds or you click on the black space the game is over. My high score is 150 so far.

This one is for those of you that just can’t get rid of ANYTHING.

If you have an old calendar that you found in your attic or at the thrift store, you can go on to this site and select the year the calendar was for originally and they will tell you what years match it. Now you can reuse that calendar, and rub the recycling nature of this into the faces of all those that told you that there was no reason to hang on to a decade old calendar that you would never use.

I do not know why this site fascinates me so much, but it does.

Okay, this site is pretty simple. A text box and a single Google Ad. Type your message into the text box and hit enter. The site automatically compiles your message out of Flickr tagged photos. That is it, it looks like an updated version of the old magazine and newspaper ransom note. The only issue I have with this one is that they don’t have it set up to save the finished product as one picture of file. You can still use a print to PDF or something like that, since it is given on an ad free white background, but still. I know it would be more work for them, but I would like to see that out of this. Of course you can just copy paste the pictures into Word or Pages with a select all copy-paste.

It seemed lame to me at first, but I have to admit I have gone back to see what something would look like in this format. It is really kind of cool.

This great little tool from Idée Labs has proven itself to be very useful. It is very well implemented and definitely worth a look. I hesitated putting the UA label on this one, because it doesn’t really fit, but that is the only place I have set for posting about websites like this.

So what is it? Well this is a simple tool that searches the Flickr website for images in the “interesting” section by colour as the only criteria. When you first go to the link above you will see fifty pictures matching the preset colour choices. You can add and remove colours with the colour pallet on the right side and the picture matches will automatically update to match the new criteria. You can choose up to ten colours at a time.

Pretty simply really, although there is a lot going on that you don’t see. I have used this to find a picture to match a theme and it works great.

Plain and simple, I am tired of the use of UFO as a descriptor for an alien spacecraft. All parties seem to use it as that. If you say UFO to someone who never even thinks about it, that is what will come to their minds. I don’t see how this ignorance can spread so widely. UFO means Unidentified Flying Object. Thats it, nothing more and nothing less. If I see a balloon floating in the air, it is a UFO until it gets close enough for me to identify that it is a balloon, at which point it is an IFO. That is a term you don’t hear much, an Identified Flying Object.

Both the term IFO and UFO were terms coined by the US Airforce to easily convey whether they know what an object that was seen was or not. “Did you see that? It was one of ours” this is an IFO, “Did you see that? I don’t recognize it” this is a UFO. Seems easy enough. So when the Airforce started taking reports for claims of people seeing things in the sky that could not be identified they tagged it as a UFO since it was seen in the sky, so it must be flying, and they didn’t know what it was, so it was not identified, and it was obviously an object of some sort. Well this tagging caught on to the “believers” and they have run with it ever since.

All I am asking is that we use the language that we speak correctly. If it is an alien space craft and you know that in your heart, then it is already identified by you and is no longer a UFO. I see UFO’s all the time. I am sure they are high-flying planes, meteors, or satellites. I don’t think any of these are alien spacecraft, and I have never seen anything that would make me think I had ever seen one, but they are still UFO’s because I couldn’t tell you for sure what they are. I can make an educated guess, but until I know what they are they are still UFO’s. See how simple that is. You take a term and use it properly and it kind of makes you feel better inside, others might think you are nuts at first when they hear you doing this, but that is when you have to opportunity to educate them on the proper use of the terms and spread this knowledge.

If we all share information with proper explanation then we will all be better off.