Looking around, people seem no more complicated than wind-up toys. Take one human being molded by experiences during childhood (when everything has significance beyond appropriate measure), fill them full of fundamental assumptions and beliefs, then set them loose on the world. They will act with nearly complete predictability. And why? Because we do not know ourselves. We do not understand or comprehend that we distort what we perceive as reality. We have so little control over the most basic ways we view the world. One person sees a landscape of relationships, a reality circumscribed by familiar faces. Another person sees a world filled with pain and deprivation, where people exist to inflict pain or have pain inflicted upon them. A third person perceives other people with indifference and exists in harmony with the natural world. The same goes for what people expect out of life. Many people have low expectations for themselves and for life, and many times this seems caused by an unrealistic understanding of life. I try to take the world as it is, and find my value in it. It requires an attitude of openness and compromise because if you set out to impose your view on the world you will find nothing but disappointment.
General
25
Jul 05
Been messing with Flash
Macromedia Flash is fun. By fun I mean time-consuming and frustrating. But, no really, it is fun to mess around with. It just takes a long time to really make anything with it. It reminds me a lot of stop-motion animation, which I messed with during a brief spell almost ten years ago. If you want to make anything more than a couple minutes of action, you’re in for a lot of work. I worked on this little movie for an ex-coworker’s birthday for about 10-12 hours. Seriously. I don’t think I’m all that slow. I had about twenty something layers and the resulting .fla (Flash editable source) file was about 150 MB. You’re welcome to view the final result, which I think is funny, however be forewarned that it is full of inside jokes you could never be expected to understand.
I learned many Flash principles during this attempt. How to build a simple preloader, looping animation, and even some simple ActionScript.
25
Jul 05
Long live work internet access
We’ve been without internet access at the office since our recent move at the beginning of the month. As a result, I have been running all over the place and not posting at all. Hopefully, I will have more time now since I won’t have to run home to put out fires and get work done.
20
Jul 05
Audiobook Reviews
Lately, I’ve been checking out a lot of audio books to read while I drive around town. It makes the driving so much more relaxing and enjoyable. You get the added benefit of learning something. Here are a few I’ve listened to recently.
On Negotiating by Mark H. McCormack
This is a great audiobook with loads of practical experience and advice on the strategies and techniques behind negotiating. McCormack presents numerous anecdotal examples to illustrate his points and brings his business leadership experience to the fore to provide very valuable insight and information. The material is highly valuable and you will find yourself thinking back to it when you encounter any type of situation that requires coming to an agreement. The biggest lesson to me was about thinking big during a negotiation. Don’t be afraid to make an insultingly high or low offer. If you start out splitting the difference during a negotiation you will have even less leeway and you will likely end up with a bad deal. The higher and lower you go (depending on if you are the buyer or seller) the more room you have to maneuver. This book is highly recommended for anyone. You will soon find new opportunities to put these techniques to work.
Stop Paddling & Start Rocking the Boat: Business Lessons from the School of Hard Knocks (1995) by Lou Pritchett
This guy has a folksy charm with his Memphis twang and fantastic stories gleaned from his 36 years with Procter & Gamble. Starting off in sales right out of college he worked his way to head of P&G’s Phillipines division and onward. Most memorable yet simple idea: if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. Don’t quit, don’t stop. Keep working to improve yourself and your work. It’s a process that never ends.
14
Jul 05
A Most Excellent Spam Plugin for WordPress… and It Really Works
If you’re a WordPress user and have a problem with comment spam you need to get the Link Right 2 Spam Plugin. Here’s how it works, which is actually very simple:
A simple WordPress 1.5 plugin that virtually eliminates comment spam. Prevents blind posting by adding a dynamic hidden field to the form and validating that field when posted. By default it logs all pertinent information to error_log so you can track the type and frequency of spam.
Since installing this plugin a couple months ago I have had zero spam comments! You can still spam my blog, but you’d have to be a human being until, and until they change the spam bots, that’s entirely too inefficient.
13
Jul 05
Short, Grumpy Movie Reviews
“A little guilt goes a long way.” I liked this movie a lot. Christian Bale’s skin and bones look was palpably disturbing. It’s one of those movies you’re going to want to read more about after watching it because there are many layers and details to catch. Bale did a great job in this one, but he doesn’t usually make me believe in him in most of his roles. I do think he is a good and convincing actor, I just can’t put my finger on it.
The last time I watched this movie was about ten years ago. I fell asleep then, although I liked parts of it. This last time I watched it I stayed awake, but it barely held my attention. I do not get this movie. I still don’t. What am I missing? Ten years has changed very little in terms of my experience of this film. There are beautiful moments, but that does not make it great. River Phoenix and Keanu are great in MOPI, but if it weren’t for that, I could not give it more than two stars.
Liked Al Pacino in this one although his performance was overdone. Johnny Depp and Michael Madsen… not so much. Every time I watch something with Michael Madsen it seems dated now. His squintyness gets on my nerves.
13
Jul 05
Iraq is not about oil as a commodity
Iraq is about oil as an instrument of strategic control. The rhetoric leading up to the invasion of Iraq is the public justification for our presence in Iraq. In other words, whenever anyone asks why we’re there we trot out the story of the great dictator Saddam Hussein and how we liberated a nation from the grip of a brutal tyrant. This conceals the main benefit of our presence in the mideast, the control of oil supplies. We now have nominal control over the first and second largest proven reserves of petroleum in the world. There was a fantastic article in the Washington Post today: Big Shift in China’s Oil Policy:
09
Jul 05
“Good advice never gets old”
Words of wisdom get lodged in my head and I like to get them out so they can be shared with anyone else who might find them useful.
- “Good advice never gets old” – JC spotted this one at a gas station on the way back from picking her up at the airport after her short trip to Lubbock.
- “At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all.” I think about this Gracian quotation quite a bit, especially as I approach “lionhood”, which is a good description of what I’ve been feeling now that a lot of my shiny surface is starting to wear off and I feel like I’m maturing in some hard to define way. The older I get the more I feel like I’m being either polished or worn down. When I’m feeling optimistic, it’s polish. When I’m feeling negative, it’s being worn down. I thought about the stages one goes through in life yesterday when I was at the grocery store behind an old man while waiting to check out. He look slowed and bowed by time with his modest selections of frozen vegetables and twenty pound bag of wild bird seed. He seemed almost transparent or invisible, and I tried to imagine him in his twenties or thirties and how he might have been different. Surely, he was not preoccupied with feeding birds then. Maybe as we get older and we realize we have more life behind than ahead of us, we take more enjoyment in the natural world around us that will live on after we pass.
08
Jul 05
You know you play Battlefield 2 too much when…
- …you feel weird driving next to other cars when they don’t have wrench icons floating above them.
- …you hear the endless thp-thp-thp of a helicopter in your head.
- …you find yourself humming the theme music.
- …you put off important stuff so you can play for just “a couple more rounds”, which turns into another two hours.
- …your last three blog entries have been about playing BF2 as if that’s all you do.