Apple Apostle – Applostle, If You’re Nasty

R got me an iPhone last week for our second anniversary.

Holy crap.

I should have listened to Dan during all those podcast debates; this thing, on which I am writing this WordPress blog, is F-ING awesome. Seriously. It’s even smart enough to correct for my sausage fingers, which was always my main argument for sticking to Blackberry devices.

Dan was right. Now that I have one, I see how superior it is to any other phone in the world. Not that Blackberry and Android-based phones are horrible… It’s just that this thing is near-perfect.

Why near-perfect? Battery life & lack of a caps lock option come to mind. And I accidentally hit the backspace key way too often because of its proximity to the m key – did so twice just trying to type proximity. I think they should have kept it well away from ALL of the Wheel of Fortune letters (r s t l n e and n’s neighbor m). And what the hell is up with no Spell Check? And no custom dictionary!?! That tastes like Communism.

Small grapes though. In almost all ways, I frikkin’ love this thing for all the myriad reasons you could love a “phone”. And so far I don’t honestly have any gripes with AT&T’s service (aside from the exorbitant cost). Hasn’t dropped any of my calls, and in the places where I want it, the 3G is available. (To save battery, I turn this off a lot, which I wish didn’t take 4 gestures from the home screen to do-simple shortcut code in the next update to the OS would be welcome.)

So now I walk around with access to pretty much every piece of digital media I own, the ability to create content with various apps like WordPress, and can get to new material/media – all in a sleek & consistent format. Blackberry’s formats look simply gross by comparison, mainly due to their more universal/open approach, which is both virtuous & unambitious. There are lots of reasons to stay open & unlocked, but developers are still making far more iPhone apps than are showing up in Blackberry’s app world. In reality, the sex appeal of iPhone apps simply outweighs the ability to code in whatever open languages RIM enables.

It’s official. I’m an Apple apostle. An Applostle, if you’re nasty.

Posted in R, Small Wonder, anniversary, awesome, podcast, wired | 2 Comments »

Immersed But Not Extinguished

WOW.  I think you all would have left me by now if not for microblogging.  It’s been SO long… yet some of you still come by every once in a while; I appreciate that.  I appreciate even more that, in the last week, I’ve had three friends tell me they read the blog & that they want a new entry.  Let it never be said I don’t give the people what they want.  Unless, of course, by ‘people’ you mean John McCain, and by ‘what he wants’ is my vote.

Hark!  Could this be a political post?  Nay, dear reader.  I only spice up the intro with the occasional buzz term to increase my popularity with web robots who have no idea how boring I can be.  Case in point:  Sarah Palin, Tina Fey, BARACK OBAMA IS MY HERO, I Want to Be A Plumber, Al Smith.  See?  Simple.  Part of me is even tempted to use the words BREAKING NEWS STEVE JOBS HAS REALLY DIED to see if Bloomberg picks up on it, publishes it, and causes yet another stock dive for AAPL.  (Mentioned that on the podcast, which is going well, by the way, and we’re recording episode six on Sunday morning.)
No no, you’ll simply get the update.
Job:  Going well, if at a BLISTERING pace.  For a while we were actually back to the work schedule I kept on a regular basis at Corporate HQ in New Brunny.  My boss is gone, and still not replaced, so I’ve been able to step up and take on some new responsibilities and some more ownership.  I’m the only guy on this huge trade funds project now, and that’s the thing that’s been keeping me there so late – yes it’s huge, yes it’s important, and yes I’m the owner, but no, it’s not exactly filling me up with the sense of purpose or fulfillment that I’d feel if this was what I really loved to do.  But on the upside, I have learned that I get more enjoyment out of projects that I feel I can own – and projects that I can own & understand, more importantly.  So the trick is to learn things quickly & then start to own them as soon as possible.  Seems intuitive, but then so does your choice for our next president, and at least the middle portion of the country will still manage to vote for their prejudice instead.
Wyf:  Doing great things at her job; health could be better, and it actually has gotten better in just the last two weeks.  Was quite rough & tumble there for a bit, and we still have lots of follow-up appointments to check off, but for now we seem to have emerged from that dark cloud.  We just celebrated our first anniversary by going down to SLO for a quick weekend getaway; we had an awesome time, stayed at an awesome place for two nights, and even got surprised with a dinner reservation at a great spot in downtown SLO.   But you know that rule about not drinking while in a hot tub or a jacuzzi?  Yeah, there’s a reason that’s a rule.  Almost collapsed like a naked sack of potatoes.  Twice.
Running:  did the Bridge to Bridge 12K, and it was probably my least favorite race experience to-date.  eading up to this one, I basically gave myself a bye on regular runs because I had just ran the SF Half Marathon about 5 weeks earlier & figured there couldn’t have been much lost if I just warmed pine for a while.  I was wrong.  1) I ran pretty slowly during a race when I really should’ve been able to cruise along much closer to an 8-minute mile; 2) I ran alone – Wyf was supposed to run it too, but hasn’t been feeling up to snuff for training for something like that, so we decided abstinence was prudent; 3) my form was off and I got a pretty bad feeling in my right hip flexor, which I’ve never really felt before unless I was running lots of hill repeats.  The bright side is that it’s probably one of the worst experiences I’ll EVER have at a race, because I learned not to run alone & to make sure I keep up with regular short/medium distance runs even if I’ve trained well over the distance of the race.  Plus, now I have a ‘bad race’ under my belt, and you only need one of those.  Check.
Improv:  this is a completely blank slate this time, and I have no one to blame but myself.  If I was REALLY craving it, I would’ve found a way to make it happen even with all the crazy work hours.  I let it be disposable, and thus it became disposable; yet I refuse to dispose of this part of my life.  I definitely let myself get immersed in work, but this little light o’ mine ain’t extinguished yet.  Another upside to the long work hours is the improved work environment:  because most of my team has put in some longer hours, we’ve gotten closer & I feel more comfortable joking around with them & working on some routine material (more on that soon) while at work.  So I’ve been able to augment work to fill a little bit of this void, but it’s still a big gaping hole in the middle of my psyche.  This means my psyche is donut-shaped, which also means my psyche is delicious.
Podcast:  thanks to TechGuy’s limitless patience & flexibility, we’ve actually managed to get these recorded on a regular basis.  We record #6 this weekend.  I’ll admit that I feel so self-conscious about whether or not I’m just a rambling idiot on the show that I still haven’t listened to any of them after they’ve been uploaded to iTunes (hint hint: go subscribe to it!).  But we have a ton of fun doing it, even though I think it has more of a ‘wung’ quality to it than TechGuy’s probably comfortable with.  For all the technology out there, we still haven’t found the Doc Brown that lets us create more time (or go back in time to drive a sweet Studebaker), so none of the three of us really have time to do tons o’ research & scripting beforehand.  I think it’s fine – feels green, organic, wind-powered.  And we’re THIS close to getting sponsorship!  ;-)
Goals:  I think I need to look up what this means.  Based on my current definition, I count 19,818 ‘goals’ that I’ve yet to achieve.  (Actually, that’s Excel’s COUNTIF function.  One of the 407 goals I’ve actually achieved was to ‘Put Goals in spreadsheet for ease of tracking.’  Suck on that one, Propensity to Procrastinate!)  Makes me feel like I fail a lot.  Which, as we’ve all learned, is okay.  But I’ve yet to find anyone who goes & tells people about all the things they failed at.  (That’s Goal # 15,722:  Find the one guy who only has stories of extreme failure that isn’t a Bush.)  So I think I need to start whittling down the list and make it at least all fit on one page.
That’s the key though, I think.  Focus.  Pick three elephants to juggle & do it the best you can until you do it well enough to add another.  Never been something I’ve been great at – look at this blog entry, for example.  Three political jokes, minor cultural references, and a bunch of randomly generated “topics” to fill in my readers & try to drop knowledge (see! minor cultural reference!).
So before the wyf decides to go to our date night dinner establishment without me, let me wrap up by picking the next three things on my list.
1)  Figure out a viable next step in the Career.
2)  Keep physically active until such time as you’re inspired to create a more audacious goal, like a Marathon.
3)  Finish writing a solid 5-minute routine of open-mic material AND JUST GO DO IT ALREADY.
Oh… and just one more thing:  watch this space for a new idea I have that’s very related to #2 and possibly something I could craft into accomplishing #3.
Also… thanks for coming back.  Good to see you again.  Did you bring me anything?  ’Course not.  You never do.  And now you expect me to let you watch our new 52″ LCD HDTV that I got for half price at Best Buy.  You are SUCH a Republican.

Posted in R, election, new goals, training, update, vote, work | No Comments »

Life Hangs in the Balance

This morning R says she’s feeling “off”, as in “off her game.” Which is interesting, because yesterday was probably the first in a while in which I DIDN’T really feel off. Begets the question of whether or not we put each other off our respective games by being on our own games; put another way, does my being ‘on’ consequently make her feel ‘off’? OR does me being ‘off’ make her MORE LIKELY TO BE ‘on’? What, if anything, is the causal relationship between the balance we seem to be finding?

In the first case, of me being on making her feel off, I would go back to my post on social comparison: she’s observing me and her behavior or attitude is changed in some way by that observation, and that cause is rooted in the human fear of death. (Read here if you didn’t quite make that leap with me.)

In the second case, of one of us being ‘off’ causing the other to try a lot harder & therefore succeed at feeling or being on, I would say this is actually why we’re getting married: because we are already thinking of each other as a unit, as a family, as the same person. Individual as we may be, we have begun the inevitable process of merging our survival instincts. While I won’t speak for her, I can say that I feel I’m a better stronger version of myself when we’re both on the upswing or near the crest of the cycles (lunar, hormonal, or professional) that invariably describe our lives. Those shared peaks, while not frequent, are pretty awesome.

Whatever the cause of what appears to be a trading off between the two of us, the net effect of one of us being off, the other being on, or to stick with the cycle analogy, one of us in the trough and the other at the crest, is that we, as a unit, are balanced. That we as a unit are approaching a steady-state, that we can be secure as a unit in spite of being at opposite poles at any point in time. No matter how low or high one of us might be, we take comfort in knowing the other one is at the other side, and taken together as a unit, we’re balanced.

Imagine being on a roller-coaster that’s climbing steadily up its hill, chug-a-chug-a-chug-a, clack-clack-clack-clackclackclack-clack-clack… silence as you reach the peak and you know what’s coming next, sh-sh-sh-whoooooooooooooooooooooooooosh.

That shit is scary if you just don’t like rollercoasters or if you’re by yourself. But when you get to look in the seat next to you and see someone you know going through the EXACT same thing, that you can count on them being just as freaked as you are, there’s a sense of relief: if you die, they’re dying too & you’ll approach your respective after-lives at the same time; if you survive, you can wipe your eyes clear of tears & laugh & catch your breath together afterward and then tease about who screamed louder or who barfed first. Either way you’re not alone, but you’re part of a unit.

We’re not always choosing to wait in line for the same car, but I do feel like R and I are on the same ride, climbing the same hills, facing the same sh-whooooooooooooooooooosh, and no matter what happens, we’re both getting there together.

That’s a better feeling than surviving chug-a-chug-sh-sh-whooooooooooooooosh.

Also, competing analogies.

Learn anything yet?

NOTE: Today is National Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Posted in R, analogies, lunar, sinusoidal | No Comments »