BrainDrain

For Entertainment Purposes Only

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 23:45:13 -0600

While channel surfing tonight, I came across a show on TLC called I Can Make You Thin, an ostensibly self-help show where some pretentious Brit gives you techniques that you can use to fight off the root causes of overeating. Tonight's show was on acupuncture, apparently, and tapping acupressure points to relieve stress (and hence, the desire to overeat - I think). I didn't watch the whole show and I haven't seen any other episodes, so I can't really comment on the content in a meaningful way.

However, coming back from a commercial break, there was some disclaimer by TLC to the effect of "any weight loss program should be under the strict guidance of a physician and this show is for entertainment purposes only." Entertainment purposes only? Come on, TLC...you can't have a show called I Can Make You Thin whose host says that he can make you thin "through your tv" if you follow the techniques he outlines in his hour show, and then say that it is for entertainment purposes only. That's like putting a big 'ol bowl of wax fruit in front of a starving man and telling him that he can pick it up, smell it, look at it, desire it, but if he tries to eat it, it will not satisfy. What is entertaining about a show where several guests come out who have lost weight using these techniques, the people in the audience tearfully recount stories of their own inability to overcome their weight problem, and the host speaks to some qualified individuals in the field of whatever technique he's employing any given week to accomplish some weight loss? You're crafting a show that people will watch (and you want them to watch, TLC) because they want help and this man is spreading a message that he can give it to them with little work, and you can't just slap a "oh, this is for entertainment only" sticker on it because that clearly goes against the very essence of the show. Look at the title, for cryin' out loud. Honestly, do you actually expect an overweight person to hear "I can make you thin" and think to themselves, "wow, that sounds entertaining but I certainly wouldn't try anything like that." You might as well have a sister program called I Can Make You Clean and see how many drug addicts find that "entertaining".

Putting your lame disclaimer after the commercial break is weak. Just stand behind your programs, suck it up, and deal with the aftermath of someone watching this show. Otherwise, change the format of the show such that the host isn't claiming to be able to do something that you don't want your audience to try (or you don't want to be blamed for if something goes wrong). Who watches this kind of thing for entertainment? It's not the psychic hotline, for the love of mike...if this show was hosted by Mistress Cleo, I'd have more understanding of the entertainment only disclaimer.

Stiff Upper Lip

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 22:34:33 -0600

I decided that Easter Sunday was as good a time as any to go for a slight change in my look, especially with the changes in living space coming up. For the first time in at least 9 years, my upper lip is bare nekkid. Witness:

It's a weird feeling and different to get used to, but I like it. One nice side benefit is that my CPAP mask seals much better around my nose when I go to sleep. I got all sorts of comments as people tried to figure out what was different - did I get a haircut, did I lose weight, etc. A few people noticed right off that the 'stache was gone, but most did not (which made it more fun for me). The biggest compliment that I got was that it makes me look younger.

Sure it's not a major change, but I think it'll do and it shakes things up enough to make things fresh and yet still sort of keep the image intact. Click the link to take you to my Flickr photostream to see the original photo, the "conceptual markup", and then the current state of the face.

Change is good.

You're The Best...Around!

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:05:46 -0600

I just wanted to say that I found it highly amusing that no less than three people were late to home team tonight (myself included) because AMC was running The Karate Kid and we were each waiting to see the "You're the best...around!" karate tournament montage. As much as I hate to admit it, this is the movie that got me into karate in 1985 (although I didn't actually start karate until a year or two later).

I also love how I can throw out quotes from this movie in just about any social group and someone will know what I'm talking about. All I have to do is say, "sweep the leg, Johnny" and I'll get a grin from someone. Such a terrible movie, and so far from the mark when it comes to the reality of martial arts, and yet such a formative movie in my development.

You're the best around, indeed.

Hmmm...

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:11:59 -0600

The dollar's not doing so well world wide, and BoingBoing posted a Dutch documentary which examines the possibility of a dollar collapse.

Maybe I chose the wrong time to get a new apartment. Or perhaps we'll all be riding Vespas soon and my buddy Kyle can finally ride one without fear of ridicule and derision.

SXSW 2008

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:53:40 -0600

South By Southwest (SXSW) has been going on all this week, and 9AM and I decided to get down there as soon as we could escape the shackles of corporate America on Friday to see what we could see. Here are the quickie highlights:

- Flatstock 12 sucked.
- Best bands I saw: Helmet, MixHell, We Barbarians
- Other bands I saw: Breakfast Bender, Chromeo, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Nico Vega, Black Mountain, Yeasayer, Neon Neon, Digitalism

Here's a link to my photoset from the various shows I attended:

Follow the jump for more specifics.

Web Server Upgrades

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 21:10:02 -0600

Since I had to move my web server over to my windows box after crashing my linux box while trying to update the blogging software, the original 512MB of RAM just wasn't cutting it. I'm finding the Apache/MySQL/MovableType combination to be a pretty hefty memory load on the system so in an effort to (hopefully) speed things up, I went out to Fry's and got more memory - the web server's now rockin' 1.5GB of RAM. We'll see over the next couple of days if that makes the BrainDrain experience any faster when it comes to things like posting, searching, and archiving. I was reading some of the MT docs and it sounds like a lot of the application is kept in memory as it is run in perl, and the modules are loaded and kept hanging around. I seem to recall someone mentioning that upping the memory was one of the quickest ways to boost performance, so that's what I did.

I've been trying to get my old linux box installed with Ubuntu, but it's apparently too old - the Ubuntu installer keeps failing when it tries to load the X server, complaining that it can't detect the monitor or video card type. I've even downloaded the Xubuntu install, which is supposed to be the lightweight installer specifically designed for older hardware such as what I have, but even that fails. I got it to prompt me to load X in safe mode once, but like a dummy I chose to try and detect my hardware which caused the installer to fail and I haven't gotten it to give me that option again. The box is my old Dell Dimesions XPS-266 from college with the Voodoo II SLA rig for playing Quake. Apparently, though, Ubuntu just can't figure out how to run on that card (while Mandrake 7.1 had no problems with it whatsoever). It could be awhile before I get the Dell back up and running and get the 'Drain moved back over to it's isolated home.

And thus, here's to hoping that the new RAM will allow you to have a great and speedy BrainDrain experience, even when I'm jamming out to iTunes during prime viewing hours. If you do happen to experience any problems, drop me an email and let me know, eh? I'd appreciate it. Thanks for bearing with me as I get BD 2.0 on solid footing.

Ghost Town

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:01:22 -0600

With so many people working from home these days, people just aren't coming into the office as much and so it's kind of eerie to walk through the halls in the middle of the day and have whole hallways with dark offices. People are online and available by phone, but it's so different from just a few years ago when I first took the job with Tivoli. Then, there was so much more life in the office - lots of interaction between people, hanging out in offices, etc.; not so much anymore. It's cool that IBM accepts and embraces working remotely - goodness knows that I've taken advantage of that quite a bit - but it's also very interesting to see the effect that this paradigm has on corporate culture. Things seem a lot more disjointed and distributed, and I'll wager that this has some sort of effect on morale.

I know that for me, while I definitely enjoy being able to just work from home if I happen to get up late or am not feeling well or something, I also need the notion of having a workspace away from home to go to and I don't think I would function entirely well if I worked from home all the time and didn't have that away-from-home space. There's just something about being able to walk to someone's office and talk with them face to face or hear the day-to-day goings on that helps me feel connected to my team and the work that I'm doing.

We've compartmentalized our home lives so much that neighborhood interaction is mostly gone. If we do the same to corporate culture, what do we have left?

Revisiting Inspiration

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:53:44 -0600

I've been reading through and thinking about the comments that were left on the previous post about inspiration, and I wanted to revisit this topic as the original one has scrolled off the front page (out of sight, out of mind). After considering this, I think I'm going to have to disagree with the majority of the comments - I really don't think that inspiration is something that can be manufactured. At best, I think it's something that we can work harder on to be more open to - for example, taking some initiative to find work to do in order to feel like there's more purpose to the job we have - but I don't think that inspiration can really be manufactured.

I'm thinking of Thomas Edison's famous statement regarding invention being "10% inspiration, 90% perspiration". Inspiration is the spark that converts our thoughts into action, the drive to take steps to meet a need or accomplish a goal. I was having a great conversation with James the other day about Matthew 6:33 which reads:

"Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you."

I consider this to be a very "sunday school" verse insofar as it answers the question of what to do, but it begs a larger question that can't be answered so nicely, I don't think - namely, the question of why. This verse gets used a lot in discussions about why Christians should stop living for themselves and live for God, and usually involves materialism, failures of performance, etc. Anyway, that question I was referring to earlier is this: how is one motivated (inspired, perhaps?) to "seek first" something that he has never verified with his physical senses and has merely been told about rather than something he can verify that is right there in front of his face, in flesh and blood?

In other words, what's the motivation to set aside the things we can have right now in order to seek something/someone in the future that we've never seen and can only trust in our heart of hearts is real? If this is a cause and effect statement, then it seems like the motivation to seek first is the promise of "and all these things shall be added unto you." But if I can add them independently without seeking God first (which usually entails doing the crazy things like leaving lucrative jobs to go work in a barrio somewhere, for example), what's the inspiration for trusting that God is worthy of seeking first above all other things? Sure He's worthy of handling the things at the end of life, the things we can't control - death, natural disasters, that sort of thing. It's fairly easy to trust that God's in control of things which are out of my control; it is much more difficult to be inspired to do something I dislike by the thought that someone a bajillion miles away from me (who I've never actually met) is proud of me or wants me to do so.

Maybe I can describe it better this way...why follow the laws and wishes of a king 10,000 miles away rather than following the laws/wishes of the people that one interacts with on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis? Why put the will of a disembodied figure above that of the here and now? This is the crux of the inspiration issue for me, because my head knows that this verse is true and that it is "the right thing to do" but my actions would say that I believe otherwise. I'm looking for that spark that moves the knowledge from out of my head into saturating my actions and changing them - whether that's doing something massively great for God or just dragging my sorry cheeks into work every day and doing my job with excitement and professionalism.

Cold Shower

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:27:04 -0600

Wow, nothing says "WAKE UP!" like getting a cold shower first thing in the morning. I was, typically, running late on Monday morning and my little surprise was quite the shocker. Appears that the boiler system in my complex is having some troubles and they've already got people on it to fix it. I sure hope that my new place doesn't have problems like this.

Just 7 more weeks....

New iPod, Same Old Problems

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:47:32 -0600

While I'm super jazzed about the sleek black iPod I acquired on Friday, it seems that the problem that I was having with random skipping still exists. I was listening to Rihanna's latest this evening and the second song skipped ahead to the next track with 43 seconds still left to play. A later track skipped just 1:34 into the song. Seems that the problem wasn't with my old iPod after all and it does serve to confirm a problem with Apple's encoding format. Either that, or my downloads from the iTunes store are corrupted and/or incomplete. In any case, looks like Amazon.com is going to get my money for downloads in the future, because they give me DRM-free mp3 files and I've never had any problems at all with mp3's.

What I don't get is that I seem to be the only one I know of with these kinds of playback problems. Am I the only one buying music from iTunes? Maybe it's because I buy entire albums instead of just singles here and there. Is this some sort of problem with my computer? The questions abound...but, until iTunes starts providing DRM-free, mp3 formatted downloads, I think I'm sticking with Amazon.com as previously stated. I must say that it is really rather frustrating though that for now I have to hit up bit torrent to download mp3 versions of albums that I've already purchased from Apple.

Anybody else out there having these problems or know of anyone who is?

iPod Update

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:49:16 -0600

Well, today was the day that my old iPod failed me for the last time. As I've reported before, it's been steadily acting up on me ever since right before I went to Brazil last summer and it has gotten progressively worse over time. So, today's lunchtime errand was to run over to the Apple Store in the Domain and pick up a new 80GB iPod Classic to replace "'ol whitey". Contrary to what most of you would expect, I decided not to go with the 160GB model because I just don't need that much space (yet). Plus, I figured I'd save the $100 price difference between the two so that if Apple ever gets off of its collective keester and delivers a solid-state iPod that is big enough to handle my library, the cost of replacing this one won't sting quite as much. Then again, $250 is $250...so it will still zing a bit.

My intent was to get one of the silver/brushed aluminum ones that they have, but through the Apple "genius"'s mistake and my own inattentiveness, I ended up getting home with a black one. However, now that I look at it, I think I like the black finish - it strikes me as elegant and it matches my other must-have personal electronic device, my Centro. Coincidentally, last night I chose to change up the "what's on my iPod" graphic in the sidebar with one that would fit a little better and it just so happened to be a black one. Maybe this was a bit of foreshadowing. I recycled my old iPod at the store, but maybe I should have kept it until the syncing with the new one was done - syncing 8600+ songs takes about 4 hours and through the magic of the iPod software updater, I get to enjoy that fun twice today. Yippee skippee.

The last thing I'll say is that I really hate the Apple store customer service model. Aside from the horrid pretense that oozes out of every pore (their employees are called "geniuses", after all), the notion that I just can't walk in there and handle a purchase on my own is kind of insulting. I can't just walk up to the "Genius Bar" (I am not making that up, I swear) and say, "I'd like to buy an iPod Classic, please"; no, I've got to wait for one of these geniuses to recognize that I want something and make their way over to me. There's no clear indication of what the process is, who I'm supposed to talk to, what the protocol is. I just want an iPod. No I don't need anything else, just give me my new iPod. Please. I would happily walk over to the "Dunce Corner" and avoid all their geniuses if it just meant that I could get in, get what I want, and get out without having to pretend that I'm enraptured by the mere experience of standing close to technology that Steve Jobs brought into this world from his own secret plane of extraterrestrial existence.

Rock on.

New Living Space Acquired

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:48:09 -0600

Just about the only thing I hate more than actually moving is finding a place to move to. For those of you that maybe haven't heard, The Hills decided to jack up my rent by a considerable margin which caused me to look elsewhere for greener pastures. I spent most of this past weekend looking at apartment complexes, trying to find the next place to live that will give me the most bang for my buck. After a fairly frustrating weekend, I took the advice of one complex and contacted an apartment locator. The one promising place that I found on Saturday couldn't show me a place until today, and my locator, Daniel, had found two places that would fit the bill. In the end, it came down to two places that ended up being roughly equal and I had a hard decision on my hands because I really liked both of them - should I take a place with a ridiculously huge 2-car garage or take a slightly bigger place for slightly less money?

In the end, the cash money savings was the deciding factor and I signed an application for my new home: the Riverton at Davis Springs. I'm going to get myself a nice 2br, 2bath place on the ground floor with an attached garage. The only hitch in the plan is that my lease is up on April 30 and I can't move into the new pad until May 3, so I had to get a small extension at The Hills. Hopefully they won't rake me over the coals too heavily - after all, I have lived here for 6 years now. I hope that counts for somethin'...

I'm totally psyched. The new pad is pretty pimp, and I'm thrilled enough with it that I sort of wish I could just move next week and get to the livin' and explorin' of the new digs. However, I really should let the excitement of getting this new pad propel me towards getting all the interstitial crap done that needs to happen, which I hate to do almost more than going to weddings or funerals.

Going with a locator was definitely a good experience, because this was one of the places he found for me and I wouldn't have checked it out had it not been for him. Kudos to Daniel, and all apologies to my bandmate Travis, who lives in the runner-up and suggested that I look there in the first place. It was a close battle, but Riverton won my heart.

Can't wait for the housewarming party! Can I call it a housewarming since it isn't really a house?

Frickin' Caucus

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:41:19 -0600

Band practice was put on hold tonight due to the democratic caucus. I knew we might experience some conflict with the primary elections, but when they started packing up at 7pm, we thought we were golden. But then we found out that more people were showing up to caucus. I've heard of the word caucus used as a noun, but I've never heard it as a verb before....Hello, Judy...why yes, I am going caucusing tonight. You?

Ugh.

We waited around for like an hour, decided to go get food, waited around for another hour after returning from food, and they were still there. We finally decided to call it at 10pm and as we were walking out, what did we hear? The sound of stacking chairs. They were finally done. *sigh*

A whole practice session squashed by the democratic process.

Frickin' caucus.

Nu Muzak 4 U

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 10:55:34 -0600

For those of you that are fans of Leeland, they recently released a new album entitled Opposite Way, available on Amazon, iTunes, and (I believe) Rhapsody. I really liked their first album, and their second album is just as good - if not better - insofar as I have listened to it. No sophomore slump here. It's hard to imagine that Leeland was actually writing songs at 13 and has achieved such depth in lyrics at ages 16 and 19 for each of the band's major releases. If you haven't checked Leeland out before, I'd highly, highly recommend them. Go forth and listen likewise.

Doomsday

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:33:56 -0600

Sweet saints help me, but I want to see Doomsday when it opens on March 14th. Looks to be part I Am Legend, part Escape From New York, a splash of The Crow, and a chaser of The Road Warrior. Oh yeah, baby...send the kids to bed and sign me up.

I think this movie is going to be completely horrible, and yet so-so fun (in a Shoot 'Em up sort of way).