25 things about me

This note-writing meme has been going full force on Facebook lately.  I thought I’d cave and do it.  Since I did, I’ll put it here as well.

Rules:
Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

1. As a young boy I shot a squirrel for no reason. I still feel bad about it.
2. I’m an activist for marriage reform. Something with such a high failure rate obviously has a flaw.
3. A web app I once built was in PC World magazine as one of the “best of the web”. I was so proud.
4. I get upset when I have to use Windows at work. It’s like being tasked to cook a whole meal with only a lighter.
5. I love coffee.
6. People see me as young in Chicago, and old in Omaha. Therefore I feel young in Chicago, and old in Omaha.
7. Growing up I would perform at least two theatre shows a year, mostly musicals. I started at age seven with Fiddler on the Roof.
8. My favorite number is 8.
9. I respect people for their music taste more than I should.
10. I’m an atheist, but I used to teach Sunday school in a Lutheran church.
11. I started an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel that’s been running for almost 15 years with many of the same people.
12. I wish I could get into reading. There’s so much good content that I don’t give myself access to.
13. I would love to be a professional musician in some fashion. But I know I’d never be good enough.
14. I haven’t had meat in almost two months. I don’t miss the food, I miss the convenience.
15. Before I turned 18 I did a lot of not so legal things online. It allowed me to learn programming languages, operating systems and network topology in a way school never could.
16. In high school I had a band that changed the lyrics of a song from “Tell me about the time you fucked your mother in your living room” to get a gig at a christian coffee house. We still never played there.
17. I never saw someone use chewing tobacco until I met someone from Omaha.
18. I once hosted a top ranked Podcast. But I altered the rating system to rank us that way.
19. I miss drumming.
20. I once wanted to be a hobo. Given the options I thought it would be the most freeing and the best opportunity to start fresh.
21. Being in a drum corps was some of the most fun I ever had. Until I started to care more about winning.
22. I swore off celebrating Christmas with my family after this past holiday.
23. Without Twitter (and a couple other sites) i’d have no friends in Omaha. I’m so thankful for the sites and the friends.
24. I’m listening to The Cars – “Just what I needed” right now.
25. I told myself I wouldn’t do this, but after enough people tagged me, and reading Katie’s, I figured I owed it to them. There’s a lot my new friends don’t know about me. This is like a cheat sheet.

Hello from Chicago

I dragged Cassie (well actually she drove most of the way) to Chicago this week.  Been here since Tuesday night, and it’s really nice to see the city again.

It is a little eye opening though.  Living here for so long, then going elsewhere, and then coming back.

All the odd looks and questions when I say I really do like Omaha, and i’m not just saying that to back myself up in the move.  All the logistics to do things and meet up with people. 

I haven’t used the CTA much at all, really ever.  A little here and there to go from place A to place B, but I pretty much drove myself everywhere.  I don’t have a car here now, and I feel pretty stupid when Cassie gives me a look like “shouldn’t you know this stuff?”  But I don’t.  I’m not a CTA user.  I know how it works, I know how to get to simple point to point things if I plan out the line ahead of time, but that’s about it.  So this trip is certainly overshadowed by her thinking i’m an idiot and I think she’d have more fun if I wasn’t here.  That really bums me out to know you’re holding someone back.  Especially when you thought you were doing something nice.  It sucks to to feel not good enough.

On a side note, my friend Corinne just moved to Chicago.  Go to her web site.  Follow her on Twitter, become her new Chicago friend.  She’s fun.  Link = Krin!

Happy 2009 everyone

So it was brought to my attention by one of my tweeple friends that I haven’t blogged, specifically about the “no meat experiment” recently.  Since before Christmas.  So here it is!

Christmas was not fun.  And from now on i’m not going to celebrate it anymore.  Using vacation time to spend forced time with people i’m just not compatible with is just stupid to continue.  Guilt is not a “holiday spirit”.  There’s not much more to say about that.

However, Christmas was the first time I had unlimited meat choices to select from… and opted to have none of them.  I never mentioned it to anyone, I just didn’t eat ham, or meatballs, or mini hotdogs, or anything.  I just stuck to everything else.  Nuts, veggies, cookies, pasta.  I just didn’t care to have anything else.  I planned on eating at least the ham, but I just had no desire to when it came down to the execution of it.  Nobody but my Dad noticed, and that was for the best.  The last thing I wanted to talk about was removing meat from my diet and trying to justify myself.  Besides, I don’t have a valid answer.

So now that I made it through Christmas… what next?

The first week back Cassie and I thought we’d do something crazy… go for Philly cheese steak sandwiches.  My first real time eating meat (aside from trying a piece of beef jerky once) and it didn’t go as well as expected.  I got about half way through and I started feeling pretty lousy… my stomach was pissed.  I couldn’t eat any more after that.  We had “light meat” on our cheeseburger pizza at the pizza shoppe last night and that was ok, but it was almost nothing.

People ask if i’m feeling any better or losing any weight.  No for both.  I had a bit where I felt pretty lousy at first, but I think my body was just going through a period of adjusting.  The stuff I relied on to live was removed.  But now, I feel the same as if I was eating meat, but I’m just a lot more frustrated when finding meals.  But maybe I just haven’t given it enough chance.  I’ll keep up with it until I don’t want to anymore.

Kat took me to McFosters, an all meatless restaraunt and it was awesome.  You don’t have to find something to eat.. you can eat anything.  It was nice to see and I’d like to go there often.
My goal of being less red meat dependent I think has not come to fruition.  If I were to put meat back in my diet today it would be a flood of hamburgers and tacos.  For all I know i’d be worse than before and just binge on cow.

So that’s that.  I still don’t eat meat.  And I haven’t died from it yet.

My poor little project

Poor PandoraFM.

I left it in a near-death state for the past couple weeks.  I didn’t know what was wrong with it, and I wasn’t finding the time needed to really dig into it until last night where I figured it out and fixed it.  But damn.  That was really douchey of me.

Admittedly, it’s run pretty flawlessly for years now.  I just set it and forget it.  But something happened on Last.FM’s side and I had to make a small adjustment.

Again I find myself wishing I could hand off the project to someone who wants to put time and energy into the next generation of it.  A lot of people still use it (almost 4,000 tracks were queued up during this downtime), so it’s still worthwhile… people rely on it.  It’s just not something that’s a priority for me anymore, and it deserves to be.

I do miss all the effort I put into it back when it was in development.  I’d hide in my room for hours every day working on the new version.  Spending even more time on top of that talking to users and getting feedback and beta reports.  I was a real developer one time.

Maybe some day i’ll be passionate about something again like that, but it won’t be PandoraFM.  I see that project really “as good as it’ll get” as far as the feature set.  In fact, it probably has more features than anyone really needs… but that’s what happens when one makes choices for the many :)

Almost time to take off for lunch.  Cassie is picking me up.  Then I have the remainder of today, all of tomorrow… and then i’m off for a week.  I’m catching a flight from Omaha to Madison on Monday, and then driving with my parents from Madison to the UP of Michigan.  Argh.  Why can’t I be from somewhere more rad than the UP?

And yes.  Still no meat.
Keep on rockin.

I’m still a frackin vegetarian

I made it over a week without meat.  Who would have guessed?  I knew I could.

I’m already seeing some success from this experiment.  It’s easier to eat food I have at home than to go out and find somewhere convinient that has a tasty non-meat meal.

When eating out I’m already finding new options that are probably better than before and loaded with veggies.  Noodles and Company has been a great find.  However at Burger King when asking for the Veggie Whopper (what they used to call it anyway) I got got a whopper with no patty of any sort, veggie or otherwise.  Fail.

Every day is an adventure, and it’s added stress.  What am I going to eat?  I’m still trying to figure it out every day.  But I think eating out less is going to happen a lot more and in turn it’s going to be easier to eat quick veggie meals.

I forgot to grab my lunch to bring to work today, so i’m about to go out in the cold-ass weather and get something.  Boston Market I think.  Oh man meatloaf sounds so good.  God damnit.