BrainDrain

Via BoingBoing, I discovered this fascinating profile story on Blaine Lourd, a ridiculously successful investor who ended up deciding that all of Wall Street is a lie. My favorite quote from the article is this:

"It wasn't exactly the career he'd hoped for. Once, he confessed to his boss his misgivings about the performance of his customers' portfolios. His boss told him point-blank, "Blaine, you're confused about your job." A fellow broker added, "Your job is to turn your clients' net worth into your own." Blaine wrote that down in his journal."

The article, written by Michael Lewis, appeared in the December 2007 issue of Portfolio magazine. Amazingly prescient, based on the current turn of events in the stock market this year and the egregious lack of accountability therein.

Well, my friends Kyle & Morgan are now married off and will spend the next week in Aruba. As far as weddings go this one went pretty well - which is saying a lot because it was in a different city than the one that most of the attendees live in (both the bride & groom plus "locals" live in Austin, and the wedding was in San Antonio). There were a couple of things that didn't go as planned, but the newlyweds did a pretty good job of handling them with a good attitude.

For my part, I was able to get out of Austin right on time and we avoided any serious traffic jams in both cities (except for a small backup while a bull was chased off the highway near Selma) - some of the rest of our party wasn't quite so lucky and just made it to the rehearsal with a few minutes to spare due to getting stuck in traffic. Traffic was also a problem on the wedding day as well. But everything went well and we had a good time.

We went to see the new 007 flick, Quantum of Solace, on Friday night and so I had the bright idear on Saturday afternoon to pick up some airsoft guns for the groomsmen to brandish for the "fun" picture in the men's photo shoot. Kyle's a big Bond fan, so we knew that he would love it (and we also got him a gun that had a laser sight on it, so he was pretty stoked about that as well). I'm sure that there are pictures a-plenty up on Facebook by now of all of us screwing around with the pieces. It worked out pretty well because some of us hit a Bond-themed party after the reception that was being thrown by one of Morgan's friends for her birthday. We fit right in, being all swanky from the wedding and super suave in our tuxes. It was a good way to get some extra mileage out of our tuxes before we had to take 'em back to the store.

So, now that that rigamarole is done with, I can concentrate on getting some new shoes for my ride (I've put it off as long as I can, but the tires are about as bald as my pops at this point) on Monday and then being ready to rock the ATX at the Red Eyed Fly on Thursday night. After that, there's a leadership retreat over the weekend, and then I'm on vacation...sweet, sweet, vacation. I can't hardly wait!

I added to my art collection tonight by purchasing a couple of originals by my homeboy 9AM. He scored an art showing at Truluck's, a swanky restaurant downtown. I guess the downstairs is used for private parties and such and I'm guessing that this isn't the first time there's been an art show there judging by the picture hooks on the wall. He was able to sell several paintings, so I think that things went pretty well for him. My latest additions are thus:

As you can see from the comments on the flickr page for this one (click the pick to make the jump), I've had my eye on it for a few weeks. It was still not sold by the time that I arrived at the show, so I resolved to buy it.

This one didn't jump out at me as much from the flickr photo, but seeing it in person really sort of grabbed me. To me, the star tattoo makes the picture. There was something about it that just captured my eye, so I decided to purchase this one as well.

Andrew's been doing this for a while, and he does some really good work so it was my pleasure to help him continue to turn out good artwork for the Austin art scene. That's one of the cool things about the Austin arts, whether it's music, painting, photography, whatever - we all support each other. I bought some of his art, he'll show up to my band's show next week (9AM, you better be listening)....the circle of life, as it were.

Now I just gotta figure out where to put 'em.

12:45AM. I should be in bed. No, really...I should. I haven't been getting as much sleep lately as I need and I did mention to a buddy a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to be held accountable to getting into bed by at least midnight. And here I go, blowing it, publicly, on the web to the entire world. Oh well. Even though I should be in bed, I feel compelled to blog something since I went for almost a whole week last week without blogging, and I'll probably not have much of it this week either as the weekend will be wrapped up in a wedding down in San Antonio.

So, I'm sitting here listening to some ZZ Top - I think the album's title, Smoke, Chrome, & BBQ, about sums it up - and chatting away on Astra in an attempt to give it a good workout. I really like Astra...it's a worthy update to the tried-and-true original. It mostly seems to be a cosmetic upgrade, but those little things are making the experience a lot better for me. Just like web browsing became a little more exciting for a bit when Google Chrome was released, so chatting has become something new again because the interface is just a little nicer. It's really nice having Twitter integrated into the chat client, too.

Ah, Twitter. I'm notoriously a late adopter when it comes to social networking phenomena (the only reason I login to MySpace is because my band has a page, and I will never have a Facebook account unless IBM requires it as a condition of employment) and so I jumped on the Twitter train a day late and a dollar short. A lot of my friends have already come and gone and are no longer using the thing. I guess the constant stream of microblogging in 160 characters or less loses it's luster pretty quickly. For me, it's just something that I've not gotten in the habit of doing. Some of my friends tweet every 20 minutes or so, but usually I forget to make any during the day and end up posting like 5 in a row before I go to bed. I think I treat it kind of like taking a picture because it is, after all, a little text snapshot of what's going on at a specific moment in time. I don't like taking pictures because I really hate having to stop what I'm doing (or what someone else is doing) so I can capture a moment on film. One of my biggest pet peeves is when something happens and then someone who has a camera wants everyone to re-enact it because they were too slow on the shutter.

I think I sort of envisioned Twitter becoming my online stream of consciousness, something that captured all those little nuggets of wisdom (in 160 characters or less, of course) that were too insignificant to post on the 'Drain here but significant enough to tweet. It just goes to show how lazy I am though, I'm afraid - how important could the thoughts be if just sending a text message about it is too much work? I tell myself that it would be cool if something could just sense my thoughts and tweet the ones that I deem safe for public consumption, but I'm sure that I would probably find the act of tagging a certain thought as tweetable to be too onerous and would stop doing it. My posting laziness knows no bounds, apparently. After all, that's what technology is supposed to do when it comes down to it, right? Make us even more lazy than we already are because we have to do less work than we did before?

*yawn* Well, I think that's my signal to finally get off this crazy train and get into bed, where I should have been an hour ago. And, since this was sort of just a ramble about nothing important, I don't really have a good idea in mind on how to close this little bit 'o blather out. It's kind of like leaving a message on someone's voice mail...there's just not a good way to end it and you end up always sounding stupid somehow. So...

Good night.

Argh. Six, nearly seven, days since my last post. Where did all of my time go? The discussion on the redistribution of wealth topic was lively, and so most of my "posting time" went to answering or monitoring that discussion, I think. But as we get into the holiday season, I think I should just plan on watching my time slipping away. Life On Loan is practicing two times a week to get ready for the show on the 20th, and that's taking a big chunk of my free time. Looking at my schedule for the next two weeks, I pretty much have something scheduled every night until the Monday before Thanksgiving. Oh, and I can't forget work in there, seeing as that pays the bills and allows me to schedule myself silly and overbook.

Starting a couple of days ago, I've had a growing desire to go back to my 360 and play some more Mass Effect and finish up some of the side quests. It was about this time a year ago when I got that game (and Assassin's Creed as well) and I'm taking Thanksgiving week off, so I'm thinking that I may have to have the Second Annual Drew Geek-out where I do nothing but play video games for a couple of days straight and only pop my head out to do small social things like dinner or something. Gears of War 2 came out last week, and I never finished Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, or Dark Sector and as I already mentioned, there's those pesky, niggling side quests in Mass Effect that I would like to finish up for completeness. Plus, Anathem is starting to get pretty good, so I would definitely like some time to just sit and try to power through that story and finish it so that I can move on to my next book.

Mmmm, yes....I think that sounds like a good plan. Sleep until 11am, game until 3am or so, sleep, wash, rinse, and repeat until I have to go back to work (or I run out of games). First, I shall rock out with Life On Loan on the 20th; then I shall chill out at the leadership retreat that weekend; and finally, I shall geek out at home going on a week-long video game bender the likes of which has not yet been seen by mortal man.

I can hardly wait!

I'm a big fan of the Trillian IM client for all my messaging needs. I've been using it for about 10 years now, so it was really cool that I was able to score an invite to the Trillian Astra beta program, the next revision of Trillian. It's still relatively closed, although I'm not sure how easy it is to get an invite. But so far, I really like it.

Google chat, Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook are all integrated as basic connections now, and since I've recently joined the Twitter bandwagon, that's really nice to have my tweet feed show up in Trililan. It comes with a plethora of built-in color schemes for themes so you can pretty much match it with any color scheme that you may have for your Windows destop. The integrated chat history can be represented in an iPhone like "chat bubble" conversation format, standard history, or "rich text" version of that history with a little bit of embellishment. The basic functions remain the same, but the interface seems to be cleaner, updated, and some things are just a little easier to find and use.

So far, I'm impressed. When this bad boy is released to the general public, I would suggest that you consider ponying up the paltry fee to get the pro version. It's well worth it, in my opinion.

Editor's Note: This is not meant to be an endorsement of any candidate or inducement to get you to change your vote. I'm actually quite done with this election and am ready for it to be over, and I'm pretty sure that all of you have already made your decisions on who you are going to vote for at this point anyway. It is merely meant to be a discussion of a particular issue which has come up a lot recently and which I wanted to think through 'out loud' with you, my readers. Feel free to offer up your opinions, but please keep be respectful of others who have dissenting viewpoints.

Today was the annual sermon on tithing (Thanksgiving is just around the corner, you know) and Pastor Mike spent some time in Matthew 6 today talking about where our treasures are and what the Bible says about our money. In the secular world, one of the hot-button issues in this year's election that I've received a lot of email traffic about has been Obama's policy regarding the redistribution of wealth (ROW) - I've received everything from jokes about it, to 'everyman' explanations of how it works, to downright rants about the impending reign of socialism if the "Obamanation" is going to happen. This will (hopefully) be the last time that I mention a candidate's name in this discussion, because I want to talk about the issue and not the man. I think this issue is larger than the man who speaks it.

Here's how I understand things, in extremely basic layman's terms (because I can understand them): supporters want an equitable playing field, to make an attempt to lessen the effects of (if not end altogether) the effects of poverty by taking from the excess of others and giving to those who don't have it; detractors say that this is wrong because it takes the fruits of one person's hard labor and gives to someone who has not worked for it and also perpetuates the cycle of victimization because (and this is my own subtext and interpretation shining through) "lazy" people get to enjoy the benefits of the "hard-working" people's resources.

I am going to take a moment right now to say that I'm not sure if this post will end up to be a defense of my current lifestyle or a self-loathing attempt at absolution because I'm pretty much about as WASPish as one can be at this point. I can't say that I know which side of this issue I fall on yet, and just like in the note at the beginning of this article, I'm not really looking to be converted to one side of the fence or the other. But let's explore it a little, shall we? Hit the jump to continue this foray into what could be a gigantic can of worms in the middle of a minefield.

Some of you may have noticed that I wasn't on IM today - that's cuz I was home sick. Yesterday started out pretty good - got some free pancakes at work from the execs, and got the last three hot off the griddle, too! - but rehearsal last night went terribly for me and I ended up getting something nasty in my tummy from dinner afterward. I was having some serious trouble playing last night...kept getting arm cramps in my hi-hat hand, which was causing my thumb and forefinger to go numb and not let me grip the stick tightly. It was kind of scary, and what with my recent shoulder problems, I would be lying if I said that I'm not a little leery of anything else happening. I'm hoping that it was just a one-time thing and that it was just residual stress from my fishing trip as this is also the same arm I use to cast my lures with. But between the cramps in my arms and the bug in my stomach, I didn't sleep very well and needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), I wasn't really in any position to be focused at work today...I was mentally and physically wiped.

Being forced to slow down like that did afford me some opportunities, however. I had some time to catch up on my Modern Drummer reading which had been getting behind due to my new address not getting picked up in their system. I contacted them to rectify the problem and they sent me all four of the issues that I had missed - all at the same time, and I just got the new issue in the mail the other day. While I wasn't able to concentrate on work, I was able to concentrate on that and so I was able to catch up on the last couple of months worth of drumming news and profiles.

More importantly, though, I was able to spend some time with God. I really felt beaten down this morning when I got out of bed, and knew that I needed to spend some time in God's word even if I wasn't feeling all in sorts. I read through the book of Ecclesiastes again, but this time did it all in one sitting and read the introduction notes and everything. I think that before when I had read it, I always was looking for it to justify my laments about not liking my job, or how onerous the job had become (in such times when I felt it had been), or whatever - I expected to be able to say, "See? Solomon said everything was meaningless, and he had everything - so why should I even try?" As I read it today as a whole book, though, I realized that Solomon wasn't saying that at all; what he was really talking about was what we in the corporate world today call "the work/life balance". He wasn't saying that work was meaningless so don't even try; what he was saying was to not pursue anything as the pinnacle of life because all of it will leave one lacking. Wisdom, riches, status, job description, pleasure...none of it would satisfy because we all end up dead and you can't take it with you. The only thing - the only thing - that matters is to live life in Christ because apart from Him everything is, indeed, meaningless. Our lives aren't for us, our lives are for him and his plan. When we live life with that in mind, rather than our own goals, then we're happier for it.

Which is not to say that life is not to be enjoyed; on the contrary, Solomon says to do just that because that is the gift from God for participating in his plan. If I believe that God has a plan for me, and that everything which happens to me is part of that plan, then it would follow that the work which he has put in front of me is something that I am to excel at doing. I shouldn't consider it onerous, meaningless toil - he has placed me there, so there surely must be a reason for it. The joy comes in discovering what that reason is and then doing the job to the best of my ability not for personal gain, but because God put me in this position and gave me this job which he created me specifically to do. You may be thinking to yourself that this seems like a grandiose justification to give some cosmic importance to something as mundane as a job, and maybe to be used even as a crutch to cover over a dissatisfaction with that job. But I would disagree; if I do a job for myself, I will never be satisfied - I will always jockey for position in my company, want more salary, or desire whatever will keep me in step with my peers or get me more praise and recognition to "be successful". However, if I'm working with the notion that God has given me this specific job, at this specific company, with these specific people, and at this specific salary, then that seems to me to be a much better avenue to contentment because it tells me that I'm "made" for where I am right now and that God will provide for me because I'm where he has put me.

That, to me, is what Ecclesiastes is about - the wisest man who ever lived (aside from Jesus), who had everything, who could do anything, is saying to do everything in balance, moderation, and yet with all your might for the One who put you there. When I'm at work, I should do my best because God placed me there; when I'm playing the drums, I should do everything I can to maximize my ability because God has given me a band to play in; when I'm in my "free time" and enjoying the fruits of the labor that God has given me, I should enjoy life to the full because that is his gift to me for the work that I've done. But one of those things can't overshadow all the other things because then it takes over and the balance gets all out of whack - and then I'm right back into the "keeping up with the Joneses" (or the Ramones) mentality.

Life is short, so live well - work hard, play hard, love hard, because God has given you these 80 or so years on earth to do just that. After that, it's all gone...meaningless. Ferris Beuller said it best when he said, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and take a look around every once in a while, you might miss it."

Take a look around, and enjoy something today.

It seems like Time-Warner Cable and LIN TV (KXAN) have reached an agreement and NBC is back on the TWC channel lineup. I don't really care who had to expose their jugular to whom, I'm just glad that I have NBC back and can get to recording my favorite NBC shows once again. I just hope that whatever the terms of the settlement were does not involve costing me money somehow.

In Brief

• Pros: brought home roughly 8 Spanish Mackerel; learned to fish artificial bait (spoons) which produced several of those aforementioned mackerel; had a good time with the boys; refreshed my pool of Nacho Libre quotes


• Cons: still no redfish for Drew; no more jetty fishing (at least as the mainstay of the day)

In Long

This trip was fun and frustrating at the same time. We came home with a lot of spanish mackerel, and one of the fellas took home a good bit of mangrove snapper along with some other various fish fillets that he caught. There was only one red caught by our crew this week, and that was it. Our wade fishing turned up nothing but piggy perch and skipjacks, and the jetty fishing produced fairly well in the morning but was pretty much done by lunchtime. The majority of our catches were spanish mackerel, and between the six of us, we probably pulled in a good 15-16 of them. They are fun fish to catch and put up a pretty good fight and I had fun bringing them in. I also hit a ladyfish, which isn't good to eat but is a gamefish which means that it is really fun to fight and bring in. So, overall I had a good time, will have some fish to eat and share with people, and am looking forward to going back down in March or so to see about getting me that elusive redfish. Just call me Ahab...

On the downside, I think I've come to the conclusion that I prefer fishing from a boat when down on the coast. Both jetty fishing and wade fishing require so much gearing up that if you choose poorly and pick a spot where the fish aren't biting you're kind of stuck there for a while as it is a giant pain to pick up and move. This is especially true if you take the ferry boat to the north jetty of the shipping lane - you're not only at the mercy of a long jetty that is slippery and treacherous, but you're only able to leave when the jetty boat comes to pick you up. If fish aren't biting there, you're screwed.

I think that with any future trips, I'm really going to push to rent a boat if we're not bringing one down with us, for at least one of the days. A boat gives you so many more options - you can cruise out to the surf side of a jetty and fish (where the fun fish are and also where I've had the most personal success), or you can head over to some shallows and troll or wade fish (I find that it's a lot easier to gear up for wade fishing from a boat in the water than it is from a truck on the shore), or you can head out to one of the oil rigs and hunt for some excellent game fish (the BIG fish). A boat just gives so much more flexibility and mobility than the other options with the obvious downside of increasing the cost of the trip (fuel, washes, incidentals) that doesn't exist without a boat in the mix. But, for me, that's money well spent and I think that I personally would have a lot more fun doing it that way. We can go to where the fish are and hunt them down so that they end up on our tables.

In summary, I had a good time and came home with some good fish. I'm still on the hunt for a trophy red, but that's what makes the game exciting, I guess. I learned how to fish with a spoon lure, hit some new fish that I had never encountered before, and had a good time just hanging out with the boys and swapping stories and laughter. I'm now really looking forward to going back down in March and giving it another try.

Looks like my home team is going to reap some of the bounty of my success in the next couple of weeks as I'm planning to cook up the mackerel for one of our get-togethers. I don't think that there's enough to satisfy everyone, but they can at least get a taste. And hey, I'll have to learn how to cook it so the trip just keeps on givin'.