So I’ve decided that I’m taking a vacation off of work, and it officially started yesterday morning.

I didn’t get much sleep, as is usual on my days off. After I got off of work on Saturday, I went straight to my sister’s house to spend time with my new puppy. (zomg he is so cute, look!)

That was taken this morning before I came home. Anyway, I went over to my sister’s house and played with my puppy. Then I came home and talked with people online. Around 7 or so my roommate woke up, and we had a 3 hour long discussion about the yard and what she wants to do with the house.

She accused me of having no design/landscaping instincts, and that wanting just one type of grass was ridiculous. (She likes our yard as-is, apparently, and it looks like crap… I think I’m going to just till the yard one day and then sew some real grass.)

I was getting extremely tired so I took a nap around 10 or 11; just before my alarm went off. I got up a few minutes before 12, (short nap,) and lounged in the living room for an hour, almost asleep the entire time. (I managed to get a few good sarcastic remarks in.)

Both Roommates were complaining about being hungry, but I wanted to go see my puppy, so around 13:30 I made them hop in my car. I bought’em lunch at Dairy Queen and spent about an hour or so playing with Julian. He passed out in Pat’s arms, (she’s the main roommate,) and his head lolled around in various cute ways that looked very awkward.

After that we stopped off for soda at the Gas Station, (Jones, of course!) and headed home.

We got home around 15:30 or so, and I hopped online to relax and tell people I’d been playing with my Puppy. I got a text from Steve, (best friend) that said, “Wanna go to the lake?”

It was hot outside, so I said sure. Headed out, bought some swim trunks, drinks, sunscreen and snacks, then headed up to the Lake with him and his Girlfriend. (It was an awkward trip; luckily, I drove myself.)

We stayed there for a few hours, went ‘lake diving’, which is really just seeing how low you can go under the water before the pressure gets to be too much for you. My pressure clocks in around 20 feet; it was hard to breath on the surface for a while after that!

The drive home was uneventful, and I was supposed to have dinner with them, but we all went our separate ways when we were told the restaurant that we wanted to go to was closed. I went over to my Sister’s house and played with my puppy s’more.

By this time I was pretty tired, but I didn’t take a nap. Instead, I played with Julian, (trying to bond as much as I can with him! He’s already attached!) and then we went to the store for drinks. (They didn’t want what I had.)

I picked up a bottle of rum, some soda, and then some chicken fingers from Burger King. Unfortunately, it seemed that around this point, (close to midnight) everyone was too tired to really do any drinking, (so the bottle went unopened) and they went to bed. I watched “My Bloody Valentine” because I’m not used to going to bed until around 04:00 most days. With how tired I was, I managed a nap around 02:00

I woke up to a few text messages sent, one from Twitter when Lothus went to bed, (02:45) and one from a girl named Brittany about 20 minutes later.

I passed back out without responding to either of them, as they were pointless text messages. Brittany would have required an actual conversation, which I didn’t have energy for. Besides, I didn’t want to argue about some trivial thing with her for a while, like she normally wants to do.

I was awoken again by a text message over an hour later. It was from a close friend of mine, who I’ve been wanting to actually talk with for a while.

We talked for almost an hour before my phone battery died. We would have talked for well over an hour if it hadn’t. Talking to them made me want to get in my car today and go see them. I’m on vacation, so I might just do that.

Now I’m home. It’s 08:30 almost, and I’m just now finishing up this log of my first day of Vacation. I hope the second day is just as full. If I don’t go see my friend, I might head off to the movies so I can see Angels and Demons, or maybe Terminator: Salvation.

An Aside that only a few people will understand:

A line drawn in the sand is permeable. Something I discovered last night, I think, is that the line is easily re-drawn no matter where you’re standing, when it was drawn, or why it was drawn. Things change constantly… And maybe you just don’t understand that a line wasn’t being drawn; it was a map.

Looks awesome as hell.

There’re quite a few videos up about it on YouTube; I suggest taking a look at them.

Also, Blizzard knows how to build a fuckin’ site, man. Their Diablo 3 site is kick ass. So, by the way, is the video-demo they did of the game. Compared to the former Diablo games, this is an obvious improvement.

Blizzard seems to be cranking out yet another fantastic game.

I’ve been watching a lot of Late Night Television these past few days. Tonight I was watching the episode of Roseanne where Becky gets married and the aftermath thereafter.

It’s in the early 90’s, (Near the election, so 91 or 92). For a comedy, that show could be quite depressing. It had Dan lose his business, Becky moving out and getting married without help; both Dan and Roseanne out of work without any money coming in; bills were stacked up to the roof…

All in all, a pretty bleary outlook on life, but then the economy was doin’ pretty poor around that time.

It was a reflection on how a lot of people were living around that time. Paycheck to paycheck, insurmountable bills… just one bad thing after the other coming in and breaking down the human spirit.

I look at that, and how they pushed on and thrived, and I realize that my own mother did that for me too. No matter what was going on, she knew she had a responsibility to keep her children clothed and fed.

Sheer tenacity kept a lot of those people from giving up and calling it quits, which, to me, is a pretty damned amazing thing. The human spirit, (particularly in Statesmen) is a pretty powerful thing.

Our country has always been based on the idea that if you fight for something, you can achieve it. I’m getting pretty tired of people who make excuses for their situation. Bad shit happens, but that doesn’t mean you have a free pass to just give up hope. Maybe some of the old war veterans are right; maybe we haven’t had anything defining happen in our lives to give us the strong moral fiber that past generations, (like my mother,) had.

My friend is a postal employee. He’s insane about saving money, and he’s got, (roughly) $10k in investments. He’s been working for years, he has several clear cut goals in mind for what he’s going to do with that money in the coming years. He got that with hard work and careful planing.

He doesn’t complain about his station. He doesn’t complain about having to work, and he doesn’t have any aversions to working.

I’m wondering if my own outlook on work, (I’m fairly lazy) might have been tainted by my aunt. She didn’t work at all while I knew her, (my mother supported her for taking care of me and she dealt drugs for spare cash.) Having someone around all the time might have been a bad situation for me.

I don’t blame her, though. I make my decisions day-by-day and it’s up to me whether or not I change how I act/feel.

I start a new job soon, though. It’s going to require a hefty commitment from me. (At least two years of my time.)

Questioning myself and my own motives has been a problem of mine since before I can remember. I’m constantly wondering whether or not this is the right situation/career choice for me to get into. I also realize that, when I’m done, (if it is only 2 years,) I’ll be 24. If things go right, I’ll have a reserve of cash in savings of about $25k when I finish.

Half of that will be in a 401k program, which will actually have double whatever I’ve put into it. (Or so I’m told; the company says they’ll match whatever I put in up to about $1,000 dollars.) So in effect whenever I leave I’ll have roughly 35k in savings. At the age of 24, I think that’ll be a pretty good nest egg.

I think watching Roseanne and Dan on Late Night Television has actually helped catalyze me into serious action with my life. I’d originally been very depressed when I watched Late Night Television. Now, when I look at that show and draw the lines that correlate with my reality, I can see it as a catalyst for action.

Maybe others do too.

And society further devolves into madness.

The article

My response to the people commenting.

Okay. Here’s the situation:

You volunteer at a radio station. Part of what you do is set up playlists for overnight Internet radio play while the station itself is off the air. You get into a minor disagreement about what’s being played, so you decide to leave the station.

So far so normal, right?

But then you take a wild swerve into left field. You throw logic out completely. They changed your god damned playlist. What the fuck. They’re not playing all the music you want. Those bastards. You need to pay them back. You have to. It’s in your blood. You can’t let them get away with this infraction. Who the fuck are they to change what YOU did?

You’re boiling with rage over a minor problem, right? So before you left you made a copy of the key to the building. You left. Then you waited for everyone else to leave, and showed them a lesson.

You caught the god damned building on fire.

Because you’re an idiot.

End scenario.

How dumb does a guy have to be to set a building on fire because they didn’t play the music he wanted them to play?

I can’t imagine how you justify that to yourself. I can’t actually wrap my brain around it. It’s too stupid. My brain doesn’t have a setting that goes that low.

This guy wins the, “I’m the dumbest mother fucker in the country” award.

It seems that, according to a “confidential” source inside Google, the search engine giant will quit running, or at least paying for ads on domains if they’re less than five days old. This, when it goes into effect, could make a lot of the random domain name registering known as “tasting” stop, or more likely slow down a bit.

The reason is simple. The “Add Grace Period” is a small buffer of time that a registrar can remove a domain they’d registered, at no cost to themselves. It just happens to be five days – the same limit as the leaked policy. The thing is, since a domain name is essentially free for the first five days, quite a few rather unscrupulous people have taken to making a business out of registering hundreds, thousands, or even more domains, dropping Google AdSense on them, and then canceling the domains when their freebie time is up. Perhaps unexpectedly, the parked domains can actually garner a LOT of hits – and therefore a lot of advertising money, even after Google’s cut. Basically, it boils down to “Free money” if you automate domain creation/cancellation. This really isn’t fair to legit site owners or, to some degree, the advertisers.

Now, you’re probably wondering why I list the advertisers here. They are, after all, paying for their ads to be shown, and they are, right? Well, yes. But to be honest, would you, as a possible customer, be more likely to click on and show interest in a product related to the page you’re reading than something piled in the middle of a page that is simply ALL advertisement? Especially if you got to said page by accident, likely a typo. There will always be those who see something and click it randomly – like those who try to buy “male enhancement” drugs through spam offers – but the great majority probably won’t.

In any case, although it’s rather interesting that Google (who makes out quite well from their cut of these ad sites) has taken this stand, it makes sense from a legal standpoint. Remember the recent and semi-recent lawsuits about “click fraud” and the like for advertising charges. This may be looked at as another safe move for them. One way or another, if other online advertising companies follow suit, maybe the web will be less polluted with random advert-only websites, as there will be less incentive to create random names to serve ads for the grace period. One can hope, but ad-only probably never completely go away, though. If there’s money in it, SOMEONE will give it a try.

This is just my take on the issue, your opinion may differ. Feel free to comment about it!

Reference, Jay Westerdal: http://blog.domaintools.com/2008/01/google-to-kill-domain-tasting/

They need about 23k a day in 2008 to meet sales expectations of 10million. I doubt they’ll get that. That’s an increase of (roughly) 3k units a day.

There are a few reasons I don’t see that happening. A.) They think that they’ll get 1% of the overall market. That’s pretty nuts in and of itself for a single phone to do.

Secondly, they want to nab up about 50% of the smartphone market. That’s incredibly insane; the fact that they have 20% is already pushing it. Their company just got record numbers and they’re saying that they won’t be able to match anything near that in the next quarter.

So a decline in sales.

Instead of a surge of sales.

And they’re expecting to meet quota.

Does anyone else see how that logic fails?

I mentioned this days before Macworld happened to my friends as we were talking about various different things. (Including some D&D content I’ll be releasing later.)

The thing is, part of this can be blamed on the economy. But only part. Most of this needs to be shouldered by the people who put so much into Macworld.

They made unreasonable expectations, and then Apple said, “Oh, yeah, we’re going mediocre this year.” and they did just that.

The iPhone was cool. The Macbook wasn’t s’much. (Still sleek lookin’, though.)

To be honest, I’m glad, but that’s just me.

Not necessarily. Being the sofware giant that is Microsoft comes with a few pitfalls. One of those is that everyone wants to haxxorz your software and fuck with the people who use it.

When you get good news, though sometimes you just have to hype it, and this is a pretty good example of that. Fewer security risks than any other OS around in the first year.

And people were all saying how much safer they were with OSX. Tee Hee.