Don't Panic

Snowboarders and Skiers

2006-02-28T08:33:00.000-08:00

Now forgive me if this has been touched on in this blog before. With only twenty-four posts it would be a simple feat to look back in history and double check, however since this is a sore subject, it's going to get a bit more attention.
This has always been a bit of a ingrained hair to me, the whole, this way of getting down the hill is better than that way of sliding down the hill, those people a bd for the mountain, debates of this sort used to be fun to sling mud in. These days though, I just feel that, screw it, everyone is having fun, there are pros and cons about both, and we all have our bad apples, so shut the hell up, and slide down the hill and mind your own damn busines.
Coming from that new enlightened perspective of mine, which was easily grown out of necesity, since those around me continually poke,prod,bully and gang up against my choices of snow activities my recent eavesdropped conversation in the gondola makes me want to throw up.
There were two skiers conversing about how bad snowboarders are for the mountain, how they shouldn't be allowed there, how they are ruining the olympics with all their new events, and really the crown piece of biggotry, was when they said that because of snowboarding, there are not enough people going into ski racing, and that's why America was getting beat in the olympics.
That was the line that did it. It was as if a light shown down from the heavens upon me and made me understand something new about human nature. Be it from skiers hating snowboarders, surfers hating windsurfers and windsurfers hating on kite surfers, this is the root of all of it.
It is bigotry, and hate. There is no reason for it, and a skier blaming silly shit on a snowboarder or snowboarding is nothing different that a white person hating a black person, or blaming them for all the social retardededness of our country.
If the analagy between snowboarders, skiers et all is compared to the racism and biggotry in our world, between any other social group, I think that it says something poor about us as individuals and as a whole society.
People really need to learn to not care so much about what other people are doing. You are black, so what, you are on a snow hill with two feet on one instrument of fun, so what. Is any of this really harming other people? No?
Fine, shut the fuck up, be nice, and have fun. Is that so much to ask?
I fear for us.

When in Doubt

2006-02-09T11:38:00.000-08:00

What is an empty page really? In high school there was a time when once a week, in an English class, we were assigned to fill a page with writing. There was no topic assigned. Just write one page on something.
That had to be one of the easiest assignments I've ever had. Here is a blank page, fill it with your ideas! Write down a fictional story, write down how you made a sandwich this morning for breakfast, write about a conversation you had while rushing to fill the page with text. Just write it down!
In another English class, AP English to be exact, the only bit of knowledge I crisply remember was to just start writing. The teacher was training us and preparing out youthful minds to take the AP exam. That test involved several essays on whatever topics the Education Board had decided we should discourse upon.
In a scrunched up period of time were were to fill page upon page of document full of handwritten verbal spew. The board went so far as to even hire handwriting specialst to decipher some of our hieroglyphic like cursive. So the advice was to just start writing. Don't think about writers block or wait for inspiration to strike.
Start with one sentence and work through to the logical conclusion of the tome of papers that was to be the answer.
I found that all through my life that stuck with me. Don't let an empty page get into your head, conquer it with writing; bad writing is better than no writting at all, and even in bad writing there may be something worth expounding on that develops into something great.
So, if you want to write a book, just start somewhere, isn't that first step the hardest? Want to learn something, just start somewhere. Want to lose weight, want to do anything? Just begin.

Take the first step and the rest may fall into place, but even if they don't, you may still find something worth writing about later.

Grocery Store Shenanigans

2006-02-01T12:30:00.000-08:00

I hate lines at the store. Don't you agree? They have to be the most annoying thing when you are hungry, when you have other things to do, whenever, a line always seems to present just a negative feeling on a person. There might even be studies about how bad lines make people; how a long line will actually make people not want to do whatever it is they set out to do until they found said line.
While standing in a line today at the store, a thought occurred in my usually vacant, mind. I wonder how often a similarly bored persons in line stole from the people in front of them. When the cashier is busy scanning and bagging, and while the customer is bagging trying to get out of the hell called a line, or queue, have you ever seen something in the persons pile of groceries that struck your fancey and put it into your group of items?
Wouldn't it be easy to snag an avacado or a lemon or a yogurt from a persons shopping cart and put it into yours?
It struck me as something funny to do. Is it really stealing at that point? Ethically probably, easy to rationalize, absolutly!
Get out there people, and play the Loki!

Credit Cards

2006-01-30T08:08:00.000-08:00

Owning a house and having expensive hobbies is not the best way it seems for me to live. Adding to that complexity of finances, I also have picked up a nasty Home Depot and Lowes addiction. I almost have everytool known to man now, which I have gathered through necesity!
This is what seems to happen with those large stores just 5 minutes of driving away; having a grotesque kitchen in need of remodeling does help with the accumulation of debt. However terrible this situation seems, its really not all that bad. It is however quite dissappointing to know that I let money get out of control, spend spend spend. The fruits of my labor so to speak are a new kitchen, wow, how amazingly drole.
The question is though, how long can I go from card to card creating new ones to transfer balances to? This is a curious question to be sure, and one I fully intend to explore with creditcards.com. I count over five that I can apply for an transfer balances to interest free for 12 months! Who even knows what other deals there will be in another twelve months. That's what over 5 years worth of interest free loans. At this rate I may actually pay off the cards and not have spent money on financing charges.
Its too bad that I can't transfer a Home Depot Card balance to these other cards. That one is going to hurt in another few months.

I'll keep everyone posted on this little scam(?) of mine and see how it turns out. Hell I should put a paypal button on here and get people to help me pay this debt off so that I don't have to go through the hassle of opening new cards and moving money around and then closing cards.
There something that has not happened yet though, closing cards. If I logon to certain sites I actually find that I have several cards I didn't even know about.
The funny thing is they send checks for 3-5$ to turn on services for free for 30 days that they then charge for.
Today I even cashed one for 20$ to turn on their service. Too bad I'm canceling those cards tonight when I figure out how to, its hard without the account number! But really, if they keep sending me those checks, I might even be able to pay off this balance with their money! How crazy would that be. Of course, luck would have to grant me 200 of those turn on this serivice check for 20$ a piece.
I'm amazed at the world we live in.

Death, Life and Experience

2005-04-01T12:47:00.000-08:00

What happens to a person that suddenly finds out from the doctor that they only have a few years left to live? The older one gets, the more they find out that statistics are against them. That the grim reaper is sharpening his special scythe just for them.

What of the younger generation though? How would would a member of that group fair upon finding out: "Mr. Barney, your physical turned up something we'd like to run more tests."

Weeks go by.
"Mr. Barney, I don't know how to tell you this but you have x,y and z wrong with you. There's nothing we can do to help. You will die in at most 3 years."

There it is, three years left. What to do what to do? Continue to work at IBM, making money and just living each day to its fullest? Is that really possible though? Do people really do that? How can one live each day to its fullest and still have a budget? Isn't that what I'm doing already? Doing as much as I can with my time, to travel and have fun with friends and loved ones?

Whats the next step? To kill the budget and live beyond it? Why not right? Burn bridges and take no prisonors? I have no kids nor any dependants that will be stuck with my debt. With no strings like that what could I do?

The list of things:
Professional working at IBM with lax WAH policies.
No mortgage and 16 months left of car payments.
Minor credit card debt issues.
Girlfriend that is willing to move.
Three years to live.
Life in a country with lax Bankruptcy laws.
Savings from working at IBM ~40k(to pull a random number out of thin air)

So what would one do given the propisition and the list?

Computers

2005-03-09T08:02:00.000-08:00

I did it! I ordered a new Dell. My girlfriend got cable, and now we are going to have a bunch of tv stations, and broadband. Finally starting to feel like a geek again. It has been a long long while since I've had fast internet at home, or a computer at home. Such a big change. Might even have to buy a desk!
Funny thing about Dell though, if they don't get the correct extra credit card number off of the signature panel they end up failing on the credit card so they won't ship the computer. They do offer their own financing though, which makes things easier. Here's what happened. I had to call thier credit number, and tell them to cancel my order, after which I just went back to the site, found the computer I wanted again, and then ordered it with their financing. Easy as pie! It didn't even take that long to wait on hold to cancel the order.
Later that day, while at the mall with a friend doing the geek walk around best buy, my friend pointed out his graphics card and talked about how bad ass it was and how he was going to get a new motherboard and processor just to finally take advantage of the cards potential. I told him to get a dell, that he should be running pci-e instead of AGP if he was going to upgrade, and that his card was over a year old, that the cheap card on the dell was prolly just as good if not better than his card.
This of course led me to do some research back at work. We all know that I don't really work that much at work, a topic and book all of its own. Well, after some quick google searches, and some reading at tomshardwareguide.com and a few benchmark comparisons I was back on the phone with Dell.
See, it wasn't really sitting well that I had ordered a Dell, it wasn't making me happy that I own AMD stock and I wa getting an Intel based computer. It also irritated me that I ws using Dell's financing, and prolly going to get screwed on the interest rate. Plus I really wanted to build my own computer, like the old days. Tinker with it and what not. My grandfather was a tinkerer and I think that whole take thinks apart and put them back together gene is in full on effect in me.
While on hold with Dell, trying to navigate their menu looking for the person to cancel my order with I got fed up. They really don't make it easy to talk to people if you don't have a "real" problem. A bit of clevel thinking on my part and I called up the credit/order problems number again and talked to someone out issues with my credit card. This person said that the order was fine, that it was getting built as we speak and everything was good.
"ok, thanks, could you cancel that order?"
"ahh, yessir"
"thanks,bye"
There it is, it was that easy if you lied to the number punching machine and had my second order canceled in under a minute. AFter which I hopped back onto the web and went though notes I had previously made about building my own from zipzoomfly and newegg and had everything ordered an on the way in an hour.
Of course when all the parts started arriving, the case was broken. Guess what? NewEgg doesn't do cross shipping anymore. I have to now wait until the broken case gets to Californa by UPS ground, gets processed and a replacement part gets sent back before I can play with my new toy.
How much does that suck?
Tomorrow fun with Time Warner!

Gym Stories

2005-03-03T07:56:00.000-08:00

It's an easy admission for me to make that I'm not the happiest person at my current gym. I feel completly fucked over there for a number of reasons. First of all, I started dating one of the trainers at the gym, and I hear her stories about the owner and how the head trainer there was a complete bitch.
Granted, that's politics at the work place for my girlfriend, and nothing that really concerned me, other than me having to put up with an unhappy woman. Fine,I can deal with that, if that was just it. Now my girl quit and started work at another gym that she really likes, with cool people there, cool owners and a better work environment for her. Super.
Let's fast forward for a few months. The best trainer at my current gym, who gave me a few free training sessions, chatted with me and was generally one of the most genuine and honest person I know, was fired or pushed to leave by people at the gym. I don't know the full story, but since he was left without a job for a number of months, I can easily hypothesis with a fair bit of certainty that he was fired or quit over something hateful the owners or head trainer pushed him to .
Before he was pushed out of the gym, I had lent him my gravity boots. After he left, the gravitiy boots were still in the office at the gym. Well, about a week after that, they vanished. Head trainer blamed good trainer that he took them. Well, that's definatly not the case, since I contacted that trainer, and now I train with him at his personal training studio.
Its nice, that something out of the trainers office, was stolen. I have heard stories about this trainer from another gym that she stole stuff from that gym. Its as easy jump in logic to figure that she's a dirty bitch and she either stole my stuff, or threw it out.
On top of that, the rates at the gym, were somethign like $39 a month, with a one time sing of fee of about $80. Well, partway through the summer, they decided that they were going to switch their franchise. They are now a "Planet fitness" and they also made all their current members resign up, for a cheaper $15 a month, which would have been fine, but they threw out all their dumbells above 85lbs, and they installed a "Lunk" alarm, that goes off if a person is judging another person, dropping weights or grunting.
Something like that on its own would be completly assinine and worthy of being ignored, but on top of that, they also charged everyone who wanted to resign up for a membership $100. At the same time, they didn't tell people that if they just resigned up with 5 other people they could have earned a corporate discount, something in the area of a $40 dollar sign up fee, and less monthly charges.
My feelings for these people are currently extremly jaded. When I spit my gum into the water fountains or leave a few weights on the leg press machine, it doesn't really bother me. Although when I get yelled at, while in the shower because i left 3 plates on the leg press machine. Something that i feel damn near anyone ought to be able to do, women included, and i get told "Don't make me tell you again." It seriously rubs me the wrong way. Espcially since I have been known to clean up other people's left out weights in the past. AND I wasn't the only person using the leg press machine.
I did go out to pull stuff of the leg press machine after showering. I did not feel bad about filling the bottom storage bar on the leg press machine with 45lbs plates. Then, on the absolut edge of falling off, I put a 100lbs plate. I did that on both sides of the leg press. A person is goign to have to stand a bit away and drop the plate off the bar to get at the 45s. I don't think anyone is going ot be able to lift the weight off, because as soon as they get their fingers between the plates, the plate is going to have fallen off. It's hanging on by just a hairs breadth.
My own little project mayhem at the gym.

Katimari Demacy

2005-02-17T10:11:00.000-08:00

Went over to a friends house last night for some kicking chilli and some homemade cornbread. YUM.
Ended up playing some Katimari Demacy. That game is TWISTED. Totally the best game gift I've given a friend. Its like japanese craziness on acid. I thoroughly advise anyone interested in a super fun game to get it.
Now my last two games that I played for any length of time were San Andreas and Viewtiful Joe 2. Both of those games are serious fun, and I spent a lot of time on them; Almost beat Sana Andreas twice, and those games didn't hook me as much at Katimari.
We played it for tops 3 hours, and that night, I totally had dreams about it. Of course those dreams also included zombies, so whose to say what the hell was going on in my head.

Anyways, yah, short meandering, unfocused post. Not like anyone reads it. At least its an update! AHEM clublife tjs place

Beer and Backcountry

2005-02-14T09:43:00.000-08:00

I just wrote about Lake Placid last time, my apologies for writing about it again with minimal filler time. This is comical though, and I'm going to share it. Maybe there will be some saving grace though, since it not actually about Lake Placid, its about Whiteface mountain, and the people that frequent that place. Whiteface is in Wilmington and that's about ten minutes from Lake Placid.

On the weekends, when there is snow, its very ordinary to find me at whiteface, playing in the snow, snowboarding on either a race board or more lately due to horrible boot issues, on a soft freeriding board. Most days the gondola and other lifts open at 8:30. This is fine for me, I get up, eat some breakfast and get to the mountain well in advance of 8:30. The reason for this isn't so much that I want to be the first on the gondola, its more that I don't like to have to walk all the way to a crummy parking spot when my legs are all shot from a day at the hill.

I usually get there, wander around see if any of my friends are there, talk to the people I know that are working there, and then start to get ready to go out and make some runs and enjoy the day. I try to time it so that I'm ready to go outside, right as the large back up of people waiting for the gondola have all been let on. Its really not that fun to rush outside just to wait in line to be the first to take go at the hill. Getting to the mountain early so as not to have to deal with lines or lots of people at the mountain, that's what I try to do. Waiting in line first thing in the morning is the opposite of that.

Well, there was some snow overnight this sunday, that changes things. On the weekends there are many many more people around to wreck fresh powder than there are on the weekdays. Three inches really isn't a lot of fresh powder to share, and with the wind, and the poor snowmaking and the poor grooming this year, well all of those things combinded, ending with me waiting in line as the third person this past sunday.

I was in the first gondola car riding up the mountain, crammed in with 8 other people. Not really what I'm used to as my first ride of the day. Like I said, I usually space it out a little better so as not to be dealing with lines or crammed up gondola cars.

Its ok though, because these were some serious skiers. These guys hiked up Adirondack mountains in search of backcountry fun, they went to BC and rode around in snowcats to find the good snow, these guys, were back country guys that just loved to be out in it.

Facial Hair covered, skiers and tele-skiers. Grizzled gronola eating men. Guys that, once they get onto the gondola, at 8:30 in the morning, open up their backpack crack the can or beer open, and then offer some to their fellow powder hounds. Well lets be serious, there was only one guy offering the beer, and drinking it, all the rest of these guys were declining. Ok, that's a little more normal, I've seen people drink on the car before, not that early but hey, it was cold out. Then another guy busts open a flask and shares that with his friend.

That's the kind of people that make life interesting, and its definatly not a surprise that these were the first guys in line. They were probably the first guys in line most of the time. It leave me with hope though. Hope that later in my life, when I'm tired of what ever it is that I'm doing then, that I can regress some, grow some facial hair, learn to hike some, pick up ice climbing and then take those trips out to BC and hunt for the powder, and to always always keep smiling.

Lake Placid

2005-02-11T12:22:00.000-08:00

Lake Placid, New York is the best approximation of neverland that I've seen. This town, in the middle of the Adirondack park, nestled between mountains and spring fed lakes and streams is fairly close to the place where one goes to never grow up.

Its been described that way by a number of people that have lived there and moved away. One speaks about how it really is never never land, one graduates from college, or even just from highschool and something happens to them. They get some kind of job, maybe an apartment if they have enough adult left in them to move out on their parents, or if they were one of the groups of people to end up moving from wherever to live there. Then these people get jobs, end up going to the same bars and hanging out with other people, chasing after tourists for sex, and taking all kinds of liberties to go to the Olympic treated Whiteface mountain to enjoy that.

If they are not of the alpine sort, these people end up hiking and camping and just doing those sorts of granola hippie things. They don't think about doing anything else, but working and playing, with a super emphasis on the playing. Its amazing.

There are certainly other places like this around, for instance, I'm sure towns in Vermont and Colorado and Utah are similar, being close to ski resorts, but that isn't all that Lake Placid gives these people. This town hosted the winter olympics twice, and now there is an abundance of athletic peole there, pushing this onto other people.

The town even hosts things like Ironman and great outdoors games. People like to come to see these things, to volunteer, to participate. Lake Placid people want to share thier town with other people. I've been known to bring all sorts of people home, just to play in the summer or to run around on whiteface in the winter. Its great. I know other people from work that travel to hang out there because its so much fun. These people could run to the better mountains, with the better nightlife and better snowmaking, but they, like me feel the never land qualities, and love to go back there.

I've even noticed that friends who move away still think of themselves as "from lake placid, but living wherever for work". Yes, one can go there, and be active and run around and not grow up. One can even "grow up" by being married and having childeren there, but it still realy isn't growing up, when a person can bike to work, leave work, jump in the river off of 20' cliffs or just swim around in the lakes. Take off and hike, for a lunch break, or blow off a day to go ice climbing up a waterfall.

If I ever have kids, I want them to grow up there. I want to grow old there, I'd like to go back there.

Anyways, I'll be there at the mountain this weekend, smiling even if its cold, even if the conditions suck, cause every run I make, keeps me young.

Happy Chinese New Year

2005-02-09T11:53:00.000-08:00

That's right, its Chinese New Year!
Horray for the year of the cock!

Yippie!

I think tonight my girlfriend and I will have some friends over for dinner we will each chicken stirfry, and some dumplings and feed our faces with chopsticks. Cause that's the thing to do, isn't it?

Really, any excuse to have friends over to socialize, and to eat and be merry is a good excuse. Life is too short to sit around on the couch(re:coffin) and watch tv(re:satan). Granted it would be nice to hop outside and go for a bikeride, or wander around on foot or do some such healthy activity, but that's not really going to happen.

Why do you ask? Simply because its dark when I leave work, and its usually pretty cold out; the 20 inches of forcasted snow also tends to put a damper on that. Although it might be a good time to find a hill, get a shovel from Home Depot or Lowes, and then make a huge(not so huge now) kicker and play on the snowboard.

We'll see what the night brings though.

Get out and have fun people!

Skiers vs Snowboarders

2005-02-07T11:24:00.000-08:00

What's the deal with this rivalry? Seriously? I used to ski, I snowboard now, and I'm really just happy to get to the hill, and be on snow. Its fun to go down the hill, even on a sled. Does it really matter if a person is skiing or snowboarding? What's with all the hate?

Life is definatly too short for that. We all know that the problem is that there are tons of yuppies skiing and lots of skater punk kids snowboarding. Of course these people are not going to get along. Yuppies suck, and the punk kids are idiots. Two useless factions of people causing a veritable war on the hill.

Let's just go down the hill. Be nice to each other on the lifts and the gondola, and enjoy the day. Have fun not being at work, not being at school and goofing off. That's really what we're all doing on the hill, isn't it? Playing and goofing off.

Now let's look at the gondola, yours truely is sitting there, listening to the people chat about this and that, its definatly hard not to pay attention when people are having a conversation on the gondola. Well, the wonderful gentlemen sitting next to me; re:yuppie scum. Worked for the sports medicine business in town. He was saying that they had more snowboarding injuries in the terrain park than in the halfpipe, or some derogitory snowboarders get hurt skiiers don't comment like that.

Being the jovial person that I am, I thought he was just being funny, implying that only snowboarders go into the pipe and get hurt. I said "Hey, skiers go into the pipe too" to which he responded.

"Does your practice get more skiers in it from the halfpipe!"
What kind of asshole says things like that to a complete stranger? I was utterly shocked into being quiet. The guy started off sounding like a normal hill slider enjoying the day. He turned out to be an asshole deucebag yuppie prick.

Well here's my question to you Mr. Sportsmed, "Does having your legs on separate sticks make you a cockhole, or were you shit our of your mother like that?"

On the road Again

2005-02-06T08:09:00.000-08:00

Its been quite awhile since this blog has seen any entries. There are many excuses that could be made as to why that is. Lets take a look at them:
1.People don't read this blog; that's a good reason, no audience no reason to write. Well on the other hand, no entries, no traffic, no reason for people to read this blog.
2.Nothing to write about. This one is an easy one to counter. I should write just to write, and get it outthere. practice makes perfect and all of that. Improve my story telling abilities, get creative and then find things to write about. Its definatly something where if you don't use it you lose it. If I want to write a book, if I want to write and be an author, I should write more often, and be more prolific with my blog. Its what could be called as a start.
3.Lazy. Well,isn't that the truth, most people sugar coat it with excuses etc etc, but really its just that most times when things go downhill on a blogg its laziness. Writesblock can even be attributed to lazines; I think so at least. My A.P. English teacher used to say, that if one spends too much time thinking about what to write about, and organizing thoughts, one was going to run out of time and end up not having anything to turn in. Now that's definatly more true in a super timed test like A.P. English, but its also something that could be argued about real life. One needs to do things, instead of thinking about them and worring about them and putting them off. Cause life too, is a timed experience.

Gyms

2004-08-31T12:51:00.000-07:00

How many gyms have you worked out at?

Writing an email to a friend today, a story about an old gym I used to frequent came up. The story doesn't really matter, although it may get repeated cause its a repeatable story. Makes a point when the point needs to be made sort of thing.

It sent me down a nice thought path though. How many gyms have you ever been a member of or worked out at? Personally I havn't really lived in a lot of places. I grew up in a small town of about 3500 people, went to a college 70 miles away, and then got a job 3.5 hours away from that home town.
How many gyms do you think that would make for me workout out in? Its not a trivial thing for me to add up. I've had memberships to, snunk into or just worked out at 14 different gyms. That seems like quite a few different places for someone who hasn't really moved around all that much. If you count name changes then its 15. That's a fair bit of different gyms.

For a person who has only been our of college 4 years, could that be below average? Probably not.
Next time lets get into all the different gyms.

Life is wonderful

2004-08-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

Interesting times, really interesting time. Living in the paper street soap company house, and showering in a river as an IBM java developer doesn't seem to be quite the normal stereotype.
Hating said job may in fact be normal, who can say.

What's really interesting though isn't just living with a bisexual girlfriend, nor is it living with a gay man and his "boyfriend". Getting all of these people together tends to make for a very colorful arrangment. For example, the guys wanted to go out dancing, where do these guys like to dance? The gay bar. The girlfriend also likes to dance, a lot, she likes having out with the guys because one of them is her best friend, and the other is a very fun and sweet person to hang out with. Who wouldn't want to hang out with happy fun loving people?

Well, since I'm the straight, guy, the stick in the mud who didn't want to go out, simply because I don't like clubs, gay or otherwise and I don't enjoy dancing and I had injured my leg and didn't really feeling like standing up on it for a long night of watching people dancing had to be convinced to go.

Suffice it to say that it didn't really take much for me to be convinced. Who wants to look back on their weekend and say "slept all day, and then went to bed early, and repeated for the next day". That doesn't make for a very good story, doesn't make for a very good argument that one is passionate about life either, now does it? Its a simple choice really, what's a better story, being convinced to go out to the gay bar, and chill with some good friends and maybe get convinced to burn some calories off on the dance floor, or to go to sleep?

The gay bar was rather interesting. Mostly cause it had some televisions with video games. I would have been fine there all night long had the games been intersesting, they were not, so I followed the girlfriend and guy friends around. Staying close and trying not to make eye contact with the drag qeens walking around, and the guys checking me out.

We finally made it to the dance floor part of the club, where there were couches. I filled up a couch with myself and watched everyone have fun on the dance floor. It wasn't long in there until the freaks started coming out.

It was when three guys started undressing and having a dance fight on the floor where they were voging and showing thier asses, that it started to go over board. The huge fat guy in nothing but a thong on the dance floor was almost too much, then a gentleman who had been dancing with his shirt off decided to drop his pants and start to flop his penis around while dancing.

My libral girlfriend had enough at that point and wanted to leave. Very surprising that such a thing scared her away from the club. Not 15 minutes later our gay friends left. The club was too much even for them.
The freaks came out in force. It doesn't help that one of the guys on the dance floor my girlfriend knew from a theatre show and was posative he was fifteen years of age.

Made my youth feel like that of a saint.

New Paltz really is an interesting town.

Corporation's suck

2004-08-17T08:17:00.000-07:00

The wonderful gym that used to be World Gym and is now known as Planet Fitness has a great new policy. If a person was a member, paying membership dues on time for all of 2 years, or even less than that, they get to pay another hundred dollars to resign up for the gym.
Great isn't it?

Well a nice side benefit of this is that the $44 monthy membership fee is turned into a $15 a month membership fee. That's not so bad, if one does out the math, the $500 a year membership turns into $300 after the $100 fee and then another $200 for the monthly dues. not as much of a deal as its supposed to sound like is it?

Ok it is a savings but its comes at a cost of losing those dumbells above 85lbs, and it also comes at a cost of a ton of new members that have no idea what they are doing, that are just there to take up space and make my life more difficult.

On a side note, anytime I lost my credit card, and had to tell the billing company that it changed after they tried to bill me, I was charged a 15$ late fee. Even if I was one or two days late. Yet, when they switched me over to the new system, they negleted to tell the billing company on time and I was billed 44$ for my old membership. That really pissed me off until i saw on the next month a 44$ credit. I was happy for a moment until i thought about it. They charged me 44$ one month, my credit card company then decides that I have a balance and charges me interest on it. Then the gym billing company credits me that money back. BUT I'M STILL OUT THE INTEREST PAYMENT.
The way I see it someone owes me 2-3 dollars in interest that I was billed and there isn't much I can do about it. But whenever I was late I got charged 15$.

Who's side is the law on in this? Not the consumer that's for sure. In a nutshell that's what's wrong with this country now. Corporations are killing us. Don't they realize that you can only kill your food supply so much before you slit your own neck?

I can't wait for it to happen. I hope to be on a Hawai'ian island when it does happen, living in a house and chilling on the beach. I can live off of pork and coconuts and tropical fruit. Hell I wouldn't even mind some fish. Long as i have some kites to surf with and some windsurfing gear I'll just chill and watch the shit hit the fan.

Apologies

2004-08-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

Sorry that its been a very long time since I have graced this electronic ether with my presence. It seems that when I was surfing porn at work, and surfed a little too much porn, that when I cleared my cache I lost my blogspot username and password.
It took way too long for me to figure out how to recover that information. It seems that the password that I was changing my password too, blogger didn't like and wouldn't take once it changed it.
Problems solve, back to the blog, I had two rants that I wanted to write about, for the life of me i can't remember one of them.
I'll work on it and spill it within the next day.

Bloggin

2004-07-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

Blogger for me is a journal where the pronoun "I" is left out as much as possible. It follows, then that when times are good, that there is less to talk about. When times are emotional or when anger is flairing, that more writing seems to happen. Is it like that for other people blogging out there? Or do they seem to keep things rolling along irrespective of personal states of mind?

Not even that its good times that prevents writing, its more like when times are ok, that personal introspection drops off and then things slow down. Instead of having bad days and looking to the future and coming up with plans that change things, its easier to just float along.

Work is work, fun times are fun times, and not thinking about marriage, or moving, or working somewhere else and moving, these are the things that my mind should be working on. Avoiding writing in a journal, even one where the "I" pronoun is mostly absent, seems to keep things on a more even keel.

Maybe then blogging is good for people. Its a way for people to keep thoughts more organized, its a way for goals to slip up and get written down, its a free way to have personal therepy without having professional opinions on it. Sure people can comment on posts and say "Your a 'git touch off", but what does that really mean, and who really cares what a poster says? Random people posting random things on a blog are fun to read but they don't have to be taken to heart. Its really just a stranger saying something.

Writing in a blog is fun, reading the comments are fun, sifting through a locked mind looking for intersting things to write about while avoiding moving forward in life and creating any kinds of goals is scary.

Gyms

2004-07-06T13:12:00.000-07:00

There once was a World Gym in Poughkeepsie. People went there to work out, people went there to lose weight, people went there to take yoga and spinning classes and to better their bodies.

World Gym is now changing to Planet Fitness. The big scary weights are going away, the child care is going away, the group classes are going away, and they are spending $500,000 for you, their members to make the place better.

What was wrong with the gym in the first place? People working out and losing weight and gaining muscle? Oh no, they don't want that. They want to maximize profit, cause that's what an owner has to do right?

No, its not good to have a $45 monthly membership and actually have members show up, its better to have a $20 membership where members don't like the gym, can't find time to drop the kids off and end up leaving the gym after awhile.

Who is going to use this new gym where lots of the free weights are gone and the dumbellls don't go up past 80 lbs? No one uses the heavy weights anyways right?

To make money a gym needs to recycle lots of members, charging $20 a month will certainly entice people to join that wouldn't in the first place. Then those people might stay for awhile because working out with "no judgements" will make them feel comfortable.

Will they really be more healthy though? No one there to make them feel uncomfortable about how fat they are, how crummy they look compared to the ripped body builder next to them, no one telling them "Hey I work hard and this is what the pay off is"

No they will get someone there to chat with though, and they will get all kinds of different people out of shape to make them feel like they are not as out of shape as that other person so they don't have to work as hard.

Its sad really, for a gym to want members for money and not want to open a gym to own a gym. A place where people work out and try to get better and healthy and ready for life. They want to open a place where they make money and get the lowest common denominater to earn it.

I need a new gym.

Biking

2004-06-30T10:44:00.000-07:00

The road less traveled sometimes has little bonuses. Driving on the same road day in and day out, one would think that one would know everything about the road. Where the bumps are, where the turns are, what the scenery is like, lots of little tid bits about the road.

Ok, now ride a bike along the road. It changes things, changes perspectives, now hills that didn't seem to be noticed stand out in full force, now temperature changes from chade and from a river hugging the road are abundently more apparent. Now look down, you might see writing on the shoulder of the road.

While riding on part of the Ironman http://www.ironmanusa.com course up in Lake Placid on Saturday, I noticed these things. On the shoulder each hill was named. It brings a smile out when one is riding along, trying to get up a hill and finds out that the brutal hill is called bear papa, and that the hills conquered before it were bear baby and bear mama.
The cherry little and cherry big hills were even nice to learn about. Biking is important for people to do. Biking lets a person enjoy life at a slower pace, but at the same time it makes life more exciting, and really gives a feeling of being outside.

To ride a bike on a road and get somewhere is such a great feeling. Ride a bike to work one day and a wonderful feeling of accomlishment and vigor happens. Unless the ride to work is excessivly long and prohibative.

Plus the fuel is cheap, my bike gets 1 burrito for 20 miles. roundtrip to work is 1.2 burritos.
Cheaper than my car.

Goals

2004-06-24T11:39:00.000-07:00

Finish school, go to college, finish college, get a job, or go to more college and more college. These are goals in life. These are the easy goals that make sense and are simple decisions. They put of life decisions don't they?

Being an angst filled youth, or pseudo youth who can't make decisions is tough. Working to pay bills to work to fill time. Thats not the best way to drift through life. Work isn't the end all be all of existance, for me at least it isn't.

Work is something that takes up time that could be better spent doing other things, any other things, just as long as they are not work and they are for me and my happiness. There are people that love their jobs, that love going to work, then there are people like me that don't quite love their jobs, or rushing to go to work to answer that email about that project that really doesn't matter in the scheme of things.

To defeat and derail depression in these situations, one needs goals. Let me write one down right now. One that will yield experiances that will in turn yield bloggs.

I'm going to gain 13lbs and compete in a body building contest next october. There, its a goal, its written down and it can be measure and kept track of. That wasn't so hard was it?

The traine that is giving advice and roadside assistance on the way to this goal crippled my legs this morning. It was definatly fun. Its educational how many different ways there are to build muscle, and how some of those ways really really hurt.
good times.

Gmail

2004-06-21T12:40:00.000-07:00

Its amazing, under a week with a new fancy gmail account, and they are already giving invites out. Six invites! It really puts things into perspective; it took me ages it seems to get an invite and now the account that I opened has 6 to give out. Three are already given out, but there are three more that are still ready to be given out.

This brings to mind the idea of gmail hoarders, people that just chase after invites. Then there are the people that open up all the accounts themselves with the invites, it makes a person think that maybe google is doing this not only to be the coolest freemail service, but to also run a social experiment and see how people try to get a gmail account. How people try to get invites and what happens.

Who knows whats going on behind the scenes?

Next up on Johann's corner: rant on grilling. Tune in same bat time same bat channel.

Archery

2004-06-18T07:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.xeron.org/cosas/bowman/

That game is impossible. Not totally impossible but partially. If one has the setting to add wind, there are certain situation where one will not be able to hit the opposing archer, ever, at all.

Its rather frustrating to have the wind blow the death blow away from the opponent. Very very Dreadfully hateful.

The game is so very simple with wind off though. Sometimes its possible to win with wind on but other times the computer clearly uses its magic to blow away all of the arrows. Unfair it is, unfair.

Insect

2004-06-17T05:31:00.000-07:00

http://www.asphaltplayground.com/

There it is. The asphalt playground. It was only a matter of time before this snowboarder, carving on a race board stepped onto a long carving skateboard and decided that its a good thing to play with in the summmer.

How many hobbies can a person have? Snowboarding, both on soft and hard plates, sky diving, mountain biking, road biking, bike trials, kite surfing, wind surfing, and now skayboarding.
Its a good thing tall people have trouble with white water kyaks. I think I would end up doing that next. Sheesh.

There are lots of fun things to do in the world and there isn't enough time and money to do them. Hell wouldn't it be nice to pick up sailing. Theres another fun sport. There is guy I know that is living on his new 26' odey sailboat for the summer. He takes it out on the water, he brings it in, he sleeps on it, he travels around the state on it.
Fun Fun stuff.

Ahh life is good isn't it?

Back again for the first time

2004-06-16T06:23:00.000-07:00

Begforgmail.blogspot.com was my first blog. I was using that to beg for a gmail account, and it finally paid off. The nice Heather over at http://innoparticularorder.blogspot.com/
was kind enough to set me up with a gmail account.

Gmail rules by the way, if you didn't already know that.

Since I thought it was funny to have a url that was begforgmail.blogspot.com I figured That I would change the url and then start a new blog and just link the old blog to here if anyone was caring.

That's what this is, a new blog just for a new url cause that's what I want.

1) If anyone happens to have the mp3 of zwan doing the Iron Maiden cover "Number of the Beast" I would love to have it emailed to me. That would rule.

2) If you have never checked out http://caliblog.com check it out. The movies are cool and the blog itself is interesting. It may actually inspire me to do something similar.

3) Anyone figured out the meaning of life beyond the number 42? I'd be happy to hear what it is.