Riding the Spiral

My Code of Ethics

2008-05-15T03:26:00.000-07:00

The following is the final paper I just turned in for my ethics course, let me know what you think.

Joshua Rivera
05/05/2008
MGMT 308
Albright

Personal Code of Ethics

Initially, I had a hard time coming up with my personal code of conduct. It seemed like it might be easy as I wrote out short notes like “Don’t steal”, “Have integrity”, “Don’t do this generic bad thing”, “Do this generic good thing”. But it didn’t feel right, it didn’t feel satisfying, and it didn’t feel like me.

So I scraped it, because my code of ethics should evoke me like nothing else could.

I spent time analyzing why I didn’t like those kinds of generic ethical statements, and I decided they are too “clean”. They aren’t realistic; they are black and white in a Technicolor world.

The one thing I know I will keep with me from 308, is that ethics is not what you say, it is what you do, and anyone who says they won’t lie, that they won’t ever take a shortcut, that they won’t ever use their works printer because it’s free and it’s convenient, those people are all going to fail at upholding their ethics, because they aren’t views that are practical, and they are views that challenging to hold oneself to on a consistent, day to day basis.

I let these realizations sit in my head one evening, and when I got up in the morning and groggily got ready to face the day, it hit me. I have a billboard near my door. It holds tickets to events I’ve gone too, bills that need to be paid, take-out menus to restaurants. It’s the last and first thing I see when I leave and enter the house. It also holds index cards with quotes I’ve enjoyed, things that I live by. That’s when I realized, those are my ethics, these statements that I enjoyed so much I put them up as a daily reminder. They are me, and I try to live up to them daily.

So here are a few of my ethics, as they have been unknowingly collected over the last eight years.

"I like to exceed expectations. Or fail to meet them spectacularly."

- Chris Knight, Real Genius

This quote is interesting because it seems to mean a much different thing to me than it does most people. To me this quote is about my self-expectations. It’s about how if I am not trying to exceed my expectations for myself in everything I do, that is failing spectacularly. I am a big proponent of self-actualization, of taking personal progressions in everything I do. Every project is a building block for my next one, I don’t start from scratch. I add to what I have already done. I refine it. To not attempt to exceed expectations, to be dormant, to be satisfied, that to me, is a spectacular failure.

This is one I know I put into practice daily at work. I started out making small applications, and then I went larger. I started out with one language, and then I learned another, and then I combined them. I learn about new technologies, and I work to implement them, and each project is a progression of those past dealings. Most of the time my projects would be able to reach completion with current technologies, but I would rather push the envelope of what is expected and what is expected of me.

On top of that, I keep communication open with my managers to keep me pushing the envelope. I don’t want to allow myself to get lazy; I go out of my way to force a symbiotic relationship of progress.

"Success will be the best revenge"

- Dilated Peoples

Everyone has and will be wronged in their lifetime. I find what someone does after that shows their true character. It’s very easy to get caught up in the moment, the disgust that comes with someone purposely doing bad by you. In those moments, I choose to focus on myself and what I did wrong to get in that situation, how I screwed up to let myself get taken advantage of. I then work to fix these things, and continue on in improving myself. Forcing myself to move up, to better myself, is a infinitely more satisfying than bringing someone else down, no matter what they might have done.

For example, in the past I have had a falling out with roommates. After getting screwed over they still tried to provoke me into more arguments and more incidents. Rather than letting that get to me, I allowed that energy to feed me in a productive way. Rather than allowing them to provoke me or trying to get back at them, I got to work on getting a raise and putting the paperwork into getting a mortgage, getting myself more secure both professionally and personally. It was far more rewarding than any of the alternatives, and I suspect that will still hold true in the future.

“Never offend with style when you can offend with substance.”

- Sam Brown

I love this quote because I believe it fits the world we live in, it fits real experience, and it reminds me to be consistent and thoughtful in what I do. To say that you will never argue with someone, or that you will never have differing, and possibly, offensive opinions is unrealistic. This quote however, reminds me that in every one of these situations, in everything I do period, it is important to be substantial in my arguments, to have knowledge and research, to be well prepared. Having an argument with someone is fine; to not back your opinion up with material information is disappointing personally and for everyone involved.

In class, when discussing the innovation matrix, we talked about how when implementing an innovation, it may be in opposition of the work of those who came before you or may still be there. That's why in my paper and my filled out innovation matrix I noted that it is good to run evaluations on the work before and point out what the negative and the positive outcomes of those changes would be. This is a way to both be knowledgeable about the subject at hand as well acknowledging what came before. Someone may still be upset about what you are saying, but there is little recourse when what you are saying is well researched and logical.

“Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.”

-Bruce Lee

My old roommate used to simplify this quote into “Flow like water”. This quote is about two things to me. One coming into any situation with preconceived notions, either about people or events, and letting them shape things in a way they shouldn’t. It’s also about being realistic and responsive to the events around me. It’s impossible to plan for everything, but I try to do my best to react to what is happening in coherent and thoughtful ways.

“Search out the answer before asking others”

This is a huge pet peeve of mine, and therefore I do my best not to be hypocritical about it and follow thru with it myself. Asking questions, is fine, and should be encouraged. Opening a dialog helps people learn and reinforce their positions and knowledge. But not going out and doing at least a tiny bit of research before asking the answer to a question, especially a commonly asked one is, in my opinion, one of the most annoying things a person can do. I cannot count how many times I have been asked simple questions about syntax, and when I ask “did you look at the documentation” the answer is always no. When running into problems and asking questions, I always remember to try and look it up first, reminding myself that it will take just as much time for me to search out the answer as it will for someone else.

“Give someone a chance”

I have been lucky enough to be on the receiving end of this and feel a responsibility to keep the cycle going by giving others chances similar to those I was fortunate enough to receive. I know that I followed thru on this at least three weeks ago when interviewing candidates for a position at work. We had two qualified candidates, one with a couple years of professional work, and one with nothing but academics under his belts. I gave my recommendation to the academic; based on the fact he appeared to have so much more passion about what he was doing than the professional. He deserved the chance, and I was glad to be able to help him along.

“Chance never helps those who do not help themselves.”

-Sophocles

Along those same lines, personal responsibility goes a long way. Taking the steps, making the phone calls, reading the books, going to the interviews, all of these things show drive and determination that I hope to display. I don’t want handouts, I want a helping hand. I want to work my way up and get a break when I have earned and deserve it.

___________________________

In order to be accountable for all of this, I have shared and discussed my ethics with friends and family over the last couple of weeks while developing this paper. Making sure everything I listed are things that at the very least, I attempt to put my best foot forward on. I am going to do my best to keep this dialog open with everyone I am in communication with, and especially at work where we have to use our best judgment on decisions daily. I have also decided to make this paper available with my resume and portfolio on my personal website, allowing everyone, and especially prospective employers, to read up on it ahead of time and hold me accountable for what I say and do.

To clarify, I don’t believe this encompasses everything I believe I do; I don’t believe any document could ever represent a person both accurately and completely. But I believe these seven points really are things that I believe and will work hard to uphold in present and future work. I think they are all realistic, and importantly, I think they are all very ‘me.’ I hope to add and modify this as I get older, adding new beliefs as my experiences grow and my worldview expands.

Some actionscript 3.0 to get your evening started

2008-04-14T18:28:00.000-07:00

I've been taking on a lot of responsibilities at work I normally wouldn't have anything to do with, as a result of that, I have been doing some Flash development lately. As a result I wrote some code I am proud of, not really because it's anything special, but just because I used to have such deep seeded fear of any Flash programming, and in two weeks I have completely re-written a file we use, which is now generated by dynamic xml for use with the latest version of actionscript for use on our entire intranet. I'm not going to explain it any more than it already is in the comments, just know that I liked what I did enough to document it. (and obviously, this is only the actionscript 3.0, the actual graphic part is not here, nor do I have the ability to post that)

(there's a scroll bar at the bottom of the frame, sorry, blogger apparently has shit for brains when it comes to formatting code)

//hard coded variables for testing directly in flash
//var myServer:String = "censore";
//var mySite:String = "/censored/";
//var mySubSiteID:String = "33";
//var myXML:String = "https://" + myServer + "/includes/headerXML.cfm?subsiteid=" + mySubSiteID;

var myServer:String = String(loaderInfo.parameters.server); //grabs server var from object embed
var mySite:String = ""; //creates var, set once xml is loaded
var mySubSiteID:String = String(loaderInfo.parameters.subSiteID); //grabs subsite var from object embed
var myXML:String = "/includes/headerXML.cfm?subsiteid=" + mySubSiteID; // creates full path to dynamic xml

var xmlLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader(); //create new URLLoader Object
var xmlData:XML = new XML(); //create new xml data object

xmlLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, LoadXML); //when the request is successful, call LoadXML function
xmlLoader.addEventListener(IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, LoadXMLioError); //when the request fails, call LoadXMLioError function
xmlLoader.load(new URLRequest(myXML)); //start it up by calling our xml url

function LoadXML(e:Event):void {
      xmlData = new XML(e.target.data); //set data from file to our data object
      ParseHeader(xmlData); //send data to our parser
}

function LoadXMLioError(e:IOErrorEvent):void {
      myLargeText.text = e.text; //print error code to browser
}

function ParseHeader(xmlInput:XML):void {
      //prints our values to the trace window during flash debugging
      trace("-----------Start XML Output-------------");
      trace(xmlInput.header.smalltext.text()[0]);
      trace(xmlInput.header.maintext.text()[0]);
      trace("------------End XML Output--------------");
 
      myLargeText.text = xmlInput.header.maintext.text()[0]; //set the large text as defined by xml
      myLargeTextShadow.text = xmlInput.header.maintext.text()[0]; //set the large text shadow as defined by xml    

      if(xmlInput.header.smalltext.text()[0] != "0"){ //make sure theres a value to get rid of the 'loading'
              mySmallText.text = xmlInput.header.smalltext.text()[0].toUpperCase(); //set the small text as defined by xml
              mySmallTextShadow.text = xmlInput.header.smalltext.text()[0].toUpperCase(); //set the small text shadow as defined by xml
      } else { // no value? 86 it.
              mySmallText.text = "";
              mySmallTextShadow.text = "";
      }
   
      mySite = xmlInput.header.url.text()[0].toLowerCase(); //set the URL on the clickable area
}

backtomin.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, backtominHandler); //create evenlistener for a click on the button
function backtominHandler(event:MouseEvent):void {
      navigateToURL(new URLRequest("/"), '_self'); // go back to root (THE MIN!)
      trace("Action: Back to MIN"); //tell me what happens on debug
}

linkarea.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, linkareaHandler); //create evenlistener for a click on the link area
function linkareaHandler(event:MouseEvent):void {
      navigateToURL(new URLRequest(mySite), '_self'); // go to the URL defined earlier
      trace("Action: Go to Current Page"); //tell me what happens on debug
}

Visualize

2008-04-09T19:10:00.000-07:00

This was too amazing, I absolutely had to share, check out the rest of this guys vimeo profile for even more.

Solar from flight404 on Vimeo.

Went to Las Vegas

2008-02-18T14:55:00.000-08:00

I went to Vegas last weekend, it was a great time, of which I will have pics sooner or later. I was bored today (no work for Presidents day), so in between reading the Enron code of ethics for skool, I uploaded two pretty neat videos to YouTube. Enjoy.

Writing off 2007

2008-01-06T18:04:00.000-08:00

OK, I decided to change focus a little bit, I'm going to try and make updates more frequent, but they will be tons shorter. Sort of an expanded twitter. They can be about anything, updates in life to code snippets just so I can keep track of where I am at, maybe even just a quote I happen to find interesting. So, where to begin? How about now that 2007 is over and I have absorbed just about everything I think I want too, some stuff I enjoyed

Games
3 of them take the cake

Halo 3 - do I even need to explain this one?
BioShock - amazing, deep story, with great gameplay that pulled the whole thing together, and an amazing theme (Choice vs. Free Will). Could not possibly say enough good things about this one.
Portal - Short, but had a great story, humor, and game play. Looks like a shooter but is probably one of the best puzzle games I have ever played. An original throughout, here's hoping more developers get on the page of the team Valve put together for this one.

Runners-up: Super Mario Galaxy, Call of Duty 4

Movies

No Country For Old Men - amazing thru and thru. It really conveys 'the west' too, Chigurh is the stuff nightmares are made of
Juno - It's pretty much impossible not to love this movie, unless you're a soulless robot or something.
There Will be Blood - The definition of brutal. And not a stupid 'Saw' way, in a way that really digs down deep.
Transformers - yeah, it's my childhood re-packaged and re-sold to me, but I don't care, GIANT ROBOTS

Bitter disappointments: Spider-Man 3 beats out all. I tried to convince myself I liked it, but I just couldn't do it.

The great experiment

2007-12-17T15:57:00.000-08:00

I finally put my money where my mouth was. For the last year I have talked about how amazing it is that every service a person could need online was available, and available for free. And yet, I was still paying for hosting. Today I decided to prove that I was right. I'm using mostly Google services for everything, my domains point here to the blog by default. I'm using Google pages for document hosting (I might switch to Google Docs when I figure out how to force my documents to download rather than show inline). Picasa for pictures. YouTube for video.

The only thing that I don't have the ability I used to is random footers for some forums (they were running on a PHP script I wrote, and I don't have PHP access. No biggie)

So, while a lot of you probably have no idea what I am talking about, those of you who do. Let me know if you join in the free revolution. There's no reason not too really.

I haven't decided if I am going to edit the look and feel of the site yet. Hasn't really bothered me yet, and I kind of like the simplicity. Plus I'm a programmer, not a designer, I don't need to show off.

RIP hosted falsefiction, viva la revolution.

sleep is for the week

2007-10-16T01:00:00.000-07:00

I can't sleep. I know I haven't written in a long time, but I realized there was not a lot of point in forcing words out if what came out was going to be honest. Sometimes I write when I need to write, and sometimes I don't because I can't. Guess that's why I'm not an English major.

But I can't sleep and I can't figure it out. I just spent the last two and a half hours in bed. Restless. Normally I sleep with music on. It's because when it's just me alone with my thoughts, no matter how tired I am, my mind keeps going, and going, and going. Energizer bunny ain't got shit on my gray matter. It's pretty much impossible for me to catch some Z's on it's own. So I started to sleep with the stereo on about midway through high skool. It helps, quite a bit actually. It's just enough to distract my brain to let the natural process take over. But it isn't working tonight, my mind keeps shooting back and forth and back forth. It's like Chinese checkers meets ping-pong meets retard.

I bought that condo and have been living here. It's nice. I rent my second room out because I realized that I am a very boring person, and that having a roommate really wouldn't hurt. I've never had a roommate it didn't end on a bad note with. I'm staring to believe it's me. I don't know. I'm a pretty patient person but I can only put up with so much bullshit. I'm not like most 20 year olds, I'm doing so much, so I can only handle so many excuses and retardisms. Luckily my current roommate is the best one I've ever had. I refuse to believe I'm gonna fuck this up.

Since I've lived here I've had a neighbor with the shakes sell me a flashlight so she could go get some 'groceries' and some guy I've never seen before lean his head towards my open car window and tell me "Be careful what you wish for". EVERY DAY IS AN ADVENTURE.

Skool is ragging on me hard. I come home from work everyday and do about 4 hours of homework. I haven't done less than a 12-14 hour day since the beginning of August. I come home and do calculus till my brain explodes. Then I pick up the pieces and take care of the Espanol I couldn't care less about from one of the most unorganized teachers I've ever had. Then to top it off I do a shit-ton of work in the most mind-numbing of subjects in the world, Accounting. Debits, credits, revenues, expenses, contra accounts, accumulated depreciation. My brain is revolting against me.

Work is [So, after a little distance from writing this (and a little bit of sleep) I realized that saying certain things on a non-anonymous blog would not be the most prudent choice. So, while it probably wouldn't matter to 99.999% of you who may come upon this, I figured I would rather be safe than sorry. Let's just say this paragraph would be described as having a tone of 'frustration' - Josh 10/16]

Girls. Fuck girls. I've been in the position twice over the last 6 months where a girl wanted a 'real relationship', but then when I inform them that a real relationship means that I have to answer for them and their decisions, and that means no drugs and no retarded drunk decisions and all that comes of it. That what they do reflects on me and I have worked very hard to get where I am. That we have to be on the same page about a lot of things. That I work and go to skool and if they want me to put the effort into a real relationship then they need to do the same. Suddenly they don't want it anymore. Fuck, sometimes I feel like I am so much older than those around me.

And then I buy a new toy like an idiot. Speaking of which H3 was great. And I haven't been able to play it nearly as much as I would like too, and yet more than I probably should have.

I traded in the Prelude before it died on me. I financed a 2000 Xterra. I like it.

Our contract at work is up on December 11th. I've been told not to worry about it, but to be completely honest it scares the shit out of me. I have 70 hours of unused vacation time (and 20 of sick) I need to use before then. But I don't think it's going to happen. I have too much I need to do.

I'm finally making a profit on my stock investments. I decided if I play it right I can make myself a lot of money doing that. I need to be careful though. I'm not a gambler by nature. Quite the opposite actually. But risks come with rewards? Is that how the saying goes? Gotta stick my neck out there eventually, on something, I imagine.

I want to go on a vacation. A legitimate vacation. Something with no computers and beaches and cerveza and fish tacos. Something different.

El Torrente

2007-05-31T18:42:00.000-07:00

I can't believe how long it took me to write again. It has been an eventful couple of weeks.

I wrote my last entry the day before my birthday. It was shit and I had to call the cops because my roommate brought some awful people to the house that started to trash shit. That was really the beginning of the end (as if you couldn't tell I was looking for a place before that). I've been doing a lot of looking around since then for places, and found a place to buy. Yes buy. So, on top of finals (which went well) and work, I was going thru the process of buying a home for the first time, which I to sum up in one phrase would be 'cluster fuck' but now that I'm almost done with the whole process I'm pretty glad I did it.

I decided to go with a condo in Albuquerque, it's close to both skool and work, without being too close if you know what I mean. It's going to be relatively inexpensive considering I will be living in the place by myself, and if you ignore the buying costs of getting into the place. But I looked around for mortgages and all of that and got a really good deal on the terms that I finish a class and this program to make sure I got my shit together. It wasn't that bad and overall people seemed to be impressed and surprised with how organized I was and how I had read up on everthing prior to committing to it.

So now that my lease on my current place is up, and I haven't closed yet (but most likely this week) I am doing what I never wanted to do again. I am sleeping on a mattress in my old room at my parents house. Sigh. It's not that bad though, knowing that this is temporary (two weeks or less) makes it a lot easier. It's also nice not to have to pay the rent on the old place for an extra month with all of the expenses incurred in buying the new place and getting all of the things that I don't have right now, but will absolutely need. Like a new bed (fuck a twin size), like a new stereo (damnit it's not hi-def without hi-def sound), like pots and pans and soap and vacumns and dishes and tables and everything. Wow. Being domestic just sounds lame.

On the work front things appear to be going good. A co-worker and I are tearing thru the process of creating AJAX applications from scratch. We could wait for coldfusions new version to come out with CFAJAX in place, but the two of us are really in the mood to bypass all of that and learn how this works from the grond up, to gain the kind of knowledge that will carry over to any language or business process. It's been interesting, but just yesterday we built our first pseduo-application and are looking into starting an actual code library (which is far more organized than we have been in the past).

Also, the same co-worker and I will be going to OSCON in Portland, Oregon at the end of July. Should be a real fun trip with a lot of interesting information. We don't deal with a lot of what would be considered 'open source' at our work (due to legalities, I think we would all prefer it) but we are going to be taking the courses they offer on application development which should carry over anyway, and bring something new to the table we don't normally see in our enviorment.

Kind of a short update, I just knew I finally needed to do it again. I can't believe I missed the whole month of May, just too busy I guess. I'll hopefully be writing the next one from within the confines of my own home. Wow, what a summer this will be.

Flow like water

2007-04-14T18:57:00.000-07:00

Change comes in waves. I've been thinking a lot lately. I can't really explain it, but I'll try anyway.

My current lease is up, I'm currently living month to month and can leave whenever I want. Personally, I think I want to move on. Ever since I moved out I have lived with roommates, which has been good, and unbelievably awful at times. The current roommates are... not so bad comparatively. But I can sum it up with 'muh'.

I think it's time to strike it out on my own. I'm looking forward to a level of privacy that I've never had before. And I'm looking forward to not having to explain anyone ever, or make excuses for other people. To knowing that every problem is a cause of my own and not feeling like I got cheap shotted when I have to do someone else's fair share on top of my own. I'm looking forward to not having drums played in the house at 4 in the morning.

It also scares the shit out of me. Like all computer geeks, I can very easily see myself becoming a hermit. I'm not an outgoing person. Coming home and getting on a computer has been a regular occurrence for me for years now. I'm going to have to work to keep myself sociable. Hell, I have to work to do it now sometimes. This will be a larger effort now.

I also hate renting apartments. I think part of this is that I just feel older than I am sometimes. I turn 21, tomorrow. But I have a great job. An amazing job. I get to go to skool, I have acquired no debt (in fact I have savings and am looking into investing), for fucks sake I get to start a 401k on Monday. That is all amazing. I feel so unbelievably lucky so often. But then when it comes to things like renting I feel like I'm just throwing the money away. It's the same thing every 21 year old is doing when they strike out on their own, but it's hard to mentally come to terms with. On top of this, our contract comes up and will be awarded soon. It could be the same company, it could be a different company, it could be on the same terms or totally different terms. We may gain people, or we could lose them. Everyone could be gone, who knows?

It's a level of uncertainty I am unused too, and it's nerve wracking thinking of all of this while just about to sign what is essentially the most expensive lease of my life considering I will no longer be splitting it with anyone. Match that with my unwillingness to live on the south side of town (it's awful) or the west side since it's so far from work and I haven't put myself in what many would call a low price bracket. That uneasy feeling that I could be knocked down a few pegs from "guy with a career" to "guy serving food or stocking boxes" at any minute just lingers over every big decision.

The time I spent living at home again after the awfulness that was my first roommate experience taught me something. That something being that I am never doing that again. I am never going to ask my parents for a place to live again. I will never move back into that fucking room. I just can't do it. I appreciate what they did for me, more than I think they know or that I am able to express. But I will never, ever, do that again.

So yeah, June should be fun.

Ringers

2007-03-26T21:37:00.000-07:00

Tonight I had class. Statistics 145. Every Monday and Wednesday from 5:30 to 7:00. Tonight my teacher didn't show, I got to go home early.

The weather was beautiful and I would not waste it. In mere weeks even the evening weather will be unbearable, but I will love it anyways. But it will not be great basketball weather. Tonight was. So I go home, I change, I got my kicks on, grab my favorite so smooth it shouldn't be allowed on a court but god damnit it's still better than rubber basketball, call up my friend D, and head to the park.

Within minutes of getting to the park. Two girls come up to us. One is short, frankly speaking has a nice ass, and is outgoing which is 100% what I am not. She starts to talk to us, and tells us the catch. They are selling magazines. Sorry, not interested in magazines we say. She says, "If I make a 3 would you buy one?", "I'll think about it" I say as I toss her the ball.

She takes off the UHF's. That's an acronym for ugly face hiders. You know, those huge sunglasses that make a girl look like a praying mantis? Ready to pounce on you at a moments notice. Happy to disguise the cavernous expanse that lies beyond. This has never proved more correct. She laughs for a while, can't believe we agreed to it. throws up the worst shot I have ever seen in my life. But you know what? Swoosh.

Fuck.

Ok, I look thru the fuckin pamphlet, covered in stickers that said "hottie". Those stickers fucking lie.

"Wired magazine. Ok, I can deal with that. How much?."
"40 bucks."
"40 bucks?" what the fuck is this?
"It's a two year subscription."
"Two years?!?"
"Yeah it's all we sell."
"What else do you have?"
"Maxim?"
"I like Maxim. How much?"
"Same price."
"That's all you have? Two year subscriptions?"
"Yeah."
"Sorry, I'm out."

They were very upset. Whatever no one said two years.

Morals of the story. Never trust a girl wearing UHF's, make her take that shit off first. And never make a bet with someone who looks like they don't know what they are doing. Ugly shot or not they are a fucking ringer.

They'll repackage it and try to sell it to me again

2007-03-20T08:54:00.000-07:00

I had a ninja turtles bike growing up. That bike is better than any bike you could ever get now.

My spokes had these things that did the same thing as cards (made noise) but they were each in the shape of ninja turtle heads and the back clipped on the spokes. They made noise by sliding up and down the spoke, but if you were going fast inertia would take over and they would all hit the outside of the wheel and rode in silence. It was kind of the 6 year old equivalent of breaking the sound barrier.

I gave it to my cousin when I got an 8 (?) speed silver diamondback that made me feel like a baller. I didn't like it as much in the end.

made me think at least

2007-03-05T15:31:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago (Feb 11 to be exact), I woke up. That's not a metaphor I'm talking completely literally. As is par for the course on a Sunday, it was about noon, and I was heading over to the parents to eat their food and do laundry (I don't have a washer or dry at my current pad). As geeks are wont to do, I got on the computer to check my email and a few other things. After a few minutes I checked my facebook account. This is when I found something that caught me a little off-guard. On the "feed" that it shows as soon as you log on, a bunch of people had commented on my friend Michael's profile, but the content of the comments was out of the ordinary. They all said things like "I hope it's not true", "I hope you're ok", and "I'm so sorry, I hope your friends and family are ok".

You probably put it together.

Michael had passed away.

As more details came out later, I found out he fell while climbing in San Lorenzo Canyon on Saturday night.

Mike was a great guy. I went to high skool with him. We took a bunch of computer science classes together throughout our term in public education. Mike was a great guy to geek out with, talk about Star Wars, talk about cars. He was my vice president in BPA senior year. I went on trips with him to Dallas and Cincinnati. He was with me when we got evicted for throwing water balloons out of 13th floor window of a downtown Cincy hotel room. Water ballons that would hit empty delivery trucks and sound like bombs went off. Mike could make anything out of duct tape, wallets, backpacks, his prom tux.

Mike deserved better. I hadn't talked to Mike a lot since we graduated, but he was just the kind of guy who would be there if I ever needed anything. One time I posted a stupid bulletin about how I fucked up. Mike wrote back right away, "you allright? everything going ok?" I was just mad at myself for fucking up with some girls. Not a big deal, happens all the time, but Mike was there just on the chance something was wrong.

Every other person I know that has passed away (in my age range) did things to fuck themselves over. They got involved in gangs and drugs, hung out with the wrong people, didn't do anything to protect themselves, their families, or their futures. That wasn't Mike. Mike was genuine. Mike was over half-way towards his CS degree from NMT. Mike was going to do great things.

R.I.P. Mike.

The rest of this is probably going to sound kind of self-absorbed, but I know everyone else thought about the same things, so whatever.

I attended the Mike's services the Wednesday after it happened. It was weird to the say the least. First of all, it was an open casket, and I showed up way too early for someone who does not in any way have an urge to see the body. I understand some people need it for closure or whatever, but it's definitely not my thing. After the service, I saw a lot of people I hadn't seen since high skool, I saw old teachers which was nice, but I noticed something, I have no idea how to talk to people in this kind of situation. It's out of control. The only thing I could think of was "how are you?" but I knew, the answer, "FUCKIN TERRIBLE! we're at a memorial service you idiot!" well, they didn't say that, but you I could tell that's what they were thinking, but no one really knew what to say to anyone.

Everyone talked about stupid shit, about how this made them feel like they were wasting what they had and they weren't going to do it anymore. Let me be the first to say, I call bullshit. Everyone knew beforehand, continues to know now, what they are and aren't doing with themselves. It was an excuse to fill the world in on how sorry they feel for themselves, on how they don't do anything, and it pisses me off how dishonest these people are with themselves constantly. These kids would preach to me about how I needed to find God and how he leads them thru life and is their best friend and all of that bullshit all thru high skool. And now they are no where because they have no personal accountability, never have, and never will. Even after this it was just an exscuse, a way to grab attention. I can't stand it.

It also however made me think about if something were to happen to me who would be there? would it be a lot? Family, friends, co-workers? Isn't that who it usually is? Should it matter either way? What would people say about me? Would it be good things like everyone has to say about Mike? Or about how much of an asshole I am? Does it matter? Here's what I decided, I want it to be the people who matter. The people who are around me all the time, the people who care on a normal weekend, the people who call, the people I talk too. Fuck everyone else. Fuck them caring when it was too late. Fuck all of that.

And then I realized, I think I'm kind of a hypocrite, I hope that's not what I did to Mike, I hope I don't do that to anyone ever. I hope I care about everyone and everyone knows I'm there, I hope there is no bad blood with people that there needn't be, I hope I give my all to everyone.

I think I went full circle, I think I'm right back where I started. I don't even know what I'm writing anymore. I hope one day I can figure it out, I hope one day my internal journey leads somewhere else.

That didn't last long

2007-02-19T12:09:00.000-08:00

I don't know why I haven't written in so long. I've been thinking, pondering, a lot lately. The words just don't want to pour out of my finger-tips. Maybe it's that when I see them in hard format I have to commit to them. Maybe I don't want too. Maybe I'll do it anyways.

So this semester before it started I pretty much came to the conclusion that Computer Science was no longer for me, this is for a number of reasons. First, early burnout. When I was taking CS241, I was programming all week at work, and then going home and programming for another 20 hours. It wasn't fun, I didn't enjoy it. I didn't enjoy the person I was becoming. When I started to program it was because I enjoyed it. I loved to see things happening on the screen, and I loved to know that was because of me. I loved being able to do what others would literally describe as magic. Geeks like me knew better than that, but it was still fun. When you do it for ~60 hours a week, it's no longer fun, not like it was. It was a distraction before, and as it became more and more of a focus, I lost focus.

I think this also shows the pro's and con's of getting into a field very early, you learn a lot about it, earlier than most. I've now been programming for a living for 2 and a half years. I read a lot of articles explaining how most programmers burn out and move on in their mid-30's, or live in obscurity for the rest of their careers. I don't want obscurity, and I know enough to realize that one day, a younger kid will replace me just as I am doing now. Now let's pretend that an average programmer will get out at 35 and have earned their degree in 4 years (hah) at age 22. That's a 13 year career for what they have a degree in. That's insane. Now let's factor in that I was on the 6 year plan, and I started at 18. That means I would have 7 year career (approximately) before I decided to get out. That kind of sucks and I really want to plan for the long term.

That's why I've decided to move on to a business degree. Something I can stretch in a multitude of ways, to match my interests at any point in time. I can still program and do what I enjoy, but one day I can actually manage a business doing neat and important things, but still have enough background to give my developers realistic and rational goals. It seems like a much smarter long term plan for myself.

Not to mention, when I talk about computers now, the code behind it is not what interests me so much, a lot of times it's just the philosophy of it (I say that for lack of a better term). I love talking about digital identity and what it means to anyone who is willing to listen. I love explaining the pros and cons of Digital Rights Management. I love thinking about how leasing digital content is a smart long term solution and how users should be able to do what they want with their information. I love talking about the series of tubes metaphors and all of the crazy things coming out of them. I love talking about how computers and technology and the internet are changing our daily lives. I want to get into a field where I can play and talk and communicate with people who are interested in the same. I just have to find them, and find out how to get in on that.

Hopefully I'll have some more updates soon. It's been an eventful couple of weeks I think, with a lot of surprises.

some kind of vu

2007-01-16T15:57:00.000-08:00

Last night I had a dream. For most people this is insignifigant. For me this is extraordinary. I have dreams (that I remember) maybe two or three times a year. The last time I had a dream I won 153 million dollars (after taxes, of course) in the lottery. I then bought all of my friends badass cars and built a mansion in New Mexico (cause it's cheaper) and built my own IMAX theater. That was a good dream. I bought lottery tickets for the next three weeks after that dream.

A few months before that was the first time I had a dream in over a year. It was especially astounding because I dreamt three times over the course of three days. Unfortunately I died in all of them. In more gruesome ways as the days went on. It slowly drove me insane. I didn't even want to go to sleep on the fourth night.

But last nights dream was especially odd. In the dream for some reason I was riding a bike around my old neighborhood. I was riding up a hill, and I started to get heavier. I tried to push forward but I couldn't. I thought to myself "damn I am out of shape if I can't make it up the hill". But the problem wasn't me, it was the Earth.

I moved off the bike and fell to the ground. Gravity had increased. I tried walking, with the bike but it was too much. Eventually someone came by in a truck and offered me a ride. It took three people get out and put the bike in the truck.

Eventually I wound somewhere, and inside gravity was normal. The problem only occurred when outside of buildings, and no one could figure it out. It was like a scene from a bad disaster movie when everyone is sitting around trying to figure out what happened.

So moral of the story, when you wake up and weigh 750 pounds and can't walk anywhere, remember, I warned you.

I told you not to wait up

2007-01-09T13:16:00.000-08:00

Allright, let's start this off with what I did this weekend to get warmed up.

Friday night, after failed attempts to get someone to go see Children of Men (more on that later) with me, I fell asleep. I woke up around 11:00 when my phone started vibrating. My friend's Holly and Becca were watching an apartment on the west side and having some tasty beverages and wanted me to come down. I was inclined to agree. I went down there and had a good time, but it started to snow again and I had to leave early because my Prelude, though I love it, is not agreeable with terrible weather. I went home and slept until noon.

Saturday was good because I only had two things to do. Get a haircut and clean up for the party. I would have liked to play some basketball but the weather kinda fucked that up. After a visit to Sam & Son's, the most quality of barbershops I've ever been too, I came back home and cleaned.

The party was our friend Cera's birthday. She's a cool girl and needed a place and we told her she could use ours. We have parties at our place pretty often, but this one kind of had us a little wigged at first. Between last weekends drama and the fact we actually hadn't gotten a lot of concrete details before the party we weren't too sure what to expect. But it actually turned out to be pretty awesome. There was a good turnout of people, nobody was a jerk or belligerent, everyone made sure everyone else was taken care of. It was pretty nice, no drama at all, good times to be had. And I didn't have to pay for everything and everyone cleaned the house up afterwards so I really didn't have to do anything. It was pretty awesome actually.

Sunday I slept in, said goodbye to everyone who crashed, took a shower and headed to my parents for football and laundry. (I left out watching Romo fuck the Cowboys over on Saturday. Comedy at it's finest). It was a good time and I convinced my parents to go with to see Children of Men since all of my friends proved too lame for cinematic awesomeness.

Children of Men is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time, and I've seen some pretty good ones lately. The director chose to use long shots for most of the movie (not cutting), but on a few occasions in the movie he did unbelievably complex and lengthy ones. There's one shot that I didn't even realize was happening because I was so involved in what was happening on screen. While driving down this country road, the camera is placed directly in the center of a tiny car with 5 passengers. Without cutting a single time for what must have been 5 minutes, they show an angry mob attacking this tiny vehicle, moltov cocktails, gunshots, being chased by a motorcycle, windshields breaking, people inside and outside the vehicle getting shot and injured, and the camera never cut once, only rotating on it's axis to show what was happening. It was amazing. There was a few other shots like that in the movie but that was by far my favorite, I have no idea how they did that at all. If you get an opportunity go see this at a movie theater, the big screen really helped pull me into what was happening.

Monday after work I watched the BCS championship. I figured since both teams hadn't played for about 6 weeks that the whole game was going to be close and about who made the fewest mistakes. I was wrong. Florida absolutely beat the hell out of Ohio State. It must have been maddening for everyone in Ohio. It was a mauling. And look at that, the end of the season and Boise State is the only undefeated team. If this doesn't prove there should be a playoff I don't know what will, but the BCS is a waste.

I've been thinking a lot lately about online identity. How everyone knows who everyone is, how many sign ons and emails and just how terrible things are organized. I think that's one of the reasons I like Google and Blogger, I get access to so much via a single sign on, it's always me. How much easier would it be to provide a single credential everywhere than to create new credentials everywhere. We have a drivers license, and you can show it to everyone and they believe it because they trust the issuer. We don't have anything like that online and I think we do. Someone, like the W3C needs to come up with a standard, and a way of handing this standard out so that all sites, big and small alike are capable of using it. People talk about privacy issues with this but I don't really see any to be honest. Reading information could be kept completely anonymous, but every time a user wants to sign up to participate, to play a game or to write a blog, to buy something, their identity can be verified. Maybe I need to think this thru more, but it's been going thru my head the past week.

Apple announced the iPhone today and I am jealous. The device looks amazing. I was going to pick a blackberry up in the spring but now it already looks antiquated and it hasn't even been released yet. Everything about the iPhone is everything devices should strive for. There is just an amazing level of convergence and I have no doubt on my mind that Apple has changed the game, again.

sushi is raw fish.

2007-01-05T15:07:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went to dinner with some friends I don't get to hang out with very often. Britney, in town from Texas, proposed meeting for Sushi. Sushi is delicious. But, I live in the middle of the desert. We completely lack large bodies of water, which means we don't really have a lot of fish. This immediately makes me apprehensive for any sort seafood, let alone uncooked seafood. That said, I totally learned my lesson because Sushi Gen on San Mateo is fuckin quality.

We had the all you can eat thing, which sounds pretty good at first but is also a bit of a gamble. You see, in order to keep people from ordering a ridiculous amount of very expensive food, they have a "no waste" rule. That is, any uneaten food is priced regularly on your tab. Ranging from 3-8 bucks depending on what that is that can be a little daunting. Also, the fact that I didn't realize that many of what we ordered came in 5-8 pieces and we had a metric fuckton (not to be confused with an imperial fuckton) of food.

It also gave me a prime-time position to show how I earned the nickname sloth, I am the slowest eater ever, especially in that quantity.

This is three updates over three days. I haven't written in any blog more than three times in a year. There's a reason for this. This last year I took Media Arts 210, otherwise known as Intro to Film. I love movies, I can never get enough, I watch good movies and bad movies and experimental movies. Foreign movies, animated movies, you name the kind of movie, their just awesome. And over the last few years I've begun to understand them from the technical side. I know what a panning shot is and a tracking shot and I notice things like cinematography and editing and all that noise. That's not really impressive, lots of people do, but for a certain point I actually thought about some kind of major in media arts just to work on films. That's why I enrolled in the class. I learned two things, one is that while I notice all of that kind of stuff, I really don't have an eye for anything. I'm just not an artistic guy despite my best efforts. I'm ok with that. But the other thing I noticed in the class, is that my writing skills were holding me back from the A I thought I deserved, (I got a B in the end).

Now, in skool they teach you about sentences needing to make sense and what should be in a structured essay and all that shit. But, there really isn't a lot to help (at least for me) express what I really mean. I can't really explain it, I ran into the problem at least five times just writing this damn blog entry. That's why I'm writing. So I can figure out how to more clearly state what I mean as opposed to that stream of consciousness running in that space behind my face. Also, I once heard that if you do anything everyday for three weeks it will just become habit at that point. And for the most part that's held up for me. Don't take that as a promise (especially on weekends) but I'm going to try to write pretty regularly.

Today when I got into work I started talking to my friend Mark online about websites (well, our websites, cause we're nerds like that). I told him about my decision to just use blogger instead of the normal CMS route. I spent the last week and a half setting up TextPattern before I realized, "hey, I don't want to do this shit anymore".

I had an epiphany. CMS's, and for that matter paid hosting in general, are a waste of time and money. Blogger does everything TextPattern does, and it's free and it links to my Google account which I use all the time for everything. It's convenient as hell, has an easy to use interface, and it's both free in the ad sense and in the monetary sense. Why wouldn't I want to use it to rant? That goes for hosting too. Anyone who isn't running some sort of business site is essentially wasting their money. You can get free hosting for web pages (Google pages, ad free, tripod, yahoo, etc), you can get free file hosting (DivShare being the coolest one I found recently) you can share your music (mp3.com, myspace), photos (picasa and flickr), you can share your videos,(youtube, myspace), pretty much anything you want to do, someone out there has a process enabled to let you do it for free. It's amazing. I just paid 90 dollars for a years worth of hosting for my falsefiction.com website. It was a waste. What am I going to do with it? I'm making a glorified splash page to point to my blogspot and to my claim id and host my resume.

I'm going to find someone to go see Children of Men with me tonight. That movie looks amazing. So expect something about how it met my expectations and I am satisfied or about how it went down in a terrible blaze of mediocrity. Sometimes I can't figure out if I'm an optimist or a pessimist. Realist? Sure.

Book learnin

2007-01-04T13:50:00.000-08:00

After careful examination of ancient literature, I have concluded that Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia, as alluded to in the Odyssey, is the earliest demonstration in Western culture of 'bros before hoes.'

Ok, ignoring that unbelievably awesome statement I just found in my Google Notebook, I don't really have a lot to talk about today.

I went to the optometrist earlier today, and for the most part my vision is the same, but something always gets me. There are very few things on this planet that can make me feel more mentally handicapped than going into a building and purposefully letting someone make me sensitive to light. For the love of all that is right how the fuck do they come up with shit like that?

I'm currently straddling the line between an engineering major and a business major. I can't decide how that makes me feel. Being an engineer always seemed like what I wanted to do, what I should do. But I just don't care anymore, I just want it done. Why do these institutions, these places I pay for book learnin at go out of there way to make it terrible to go there? Shouldn't they want me there? Shouldn't they want more engineers to come out of them? I don't get it, I just want my piece of paper so I can go home and sleep.

I had a conversation the other day about how Tool has ruined music. Not because they're terrible, because they are SOOOOOO GOOD. There's a few things the capital letter and italics are reserved for, things like Zelda, Halo, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica. Tool is in that group. It's amazing. I listen to something else and it becomes forgettable almost instantly. It doesn't have those progressive riffs or the amazing vocals or the deeper meanings. In a way it's good, I like to know that I've found music that I connect with, but everything else is just amateur in comparison.

Also, putting images up into blogger with Picasa/hello has proven strangely difficult. This is not something I am used to seeing from Google co.

I'm not a hater

2007-01-03T16:08:00.000-08:00

...but there are some things I really fucking hate. Case in point, for now at least, UNM's retarded bureaucracy, and drama.

The drama part pretty much explains itself, and pretty much covers new years eve. It was lame. And one Joe ended the night in pieces and another Joe got even creepier than he was before. It wasn't how I envisioned kicking off 2007.

But UNM, what a clusterfuck. First, they take the grade's and registration offline for the last two weeks so I couldn't find my grades out. Now that I finally know how I did (3.0, nothin but B's) I can't register for classes because the school of engineering has placed a hold on my account until I go in for mandatory advisement so I can tell them "I pay tuition I do what I fuckin want". But get this, they won't do "walk-in" advisement for the rest of this week so I have to wait till Monday. So I ask the receptionist how I set up an appointment to get this over with. She informs me that they don't ever schedule appointments.

I made her go over it a second time just to make sure I had it right.

Seriously, what are they using my tuition for? Just remove the damned hold so I can register.