A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

Nothing political here. Just 9 minutes of great laughs at the expense of the average human dumbass.

(H/T of course to DougM over at SondraK’s place)

Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof

Still, the number of climate change skeptics is growing rapidly. Because a funny thing is happening to global temperatures — they’re going down, not up.

But the eeaarrrtthhh…..

You know you need to step away from the monitor when your feed reader has 237 feeds and you’re all caught up.

Getting really bored with the iPhone.

The good part about that is that I’ve got all the other phones I’ve had in the last few years in a box (well… in several boxes strewn about the apartment.)

I’m thinking about going back to a symbian phone, maybe the Nokia N95.

I was makin’ my lunch and was reminded of one of my favorite tunes of all time.

Having a bunch of time to myself causes the thought engines to start up again.

My life is, not to put too fine a point on it, a disorganized mess.  That’s ok, it’s largely to be expected given my complete laxity this calendar year.  But my dissatisfaction with it has gotten me back up towards a critical mass that I usually associate with being dramatically overcaffeinated (pssh, as though such a state could exist *twitch*.)

Last night I spent about a half hour (doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but…) with a pad of post-its and a blotter pad (big 17″ wide desk pad.)  I was just brainstorming a bunch of life organization things “apartment clean” “baking” ” get laundry” “learn russian” etc.  and as always, once I got going, I ran out of space pretty quick.

But one thing I kept coming back to is this idea that pervades organizational systems all over, and that’s a calendar/tickler file to keep track of scheduled tasks, events, and deadlines so you don’t have to.

I thought I’d give it another shot so I started looking around the internet for calendaring software I could live with.  So far I’ve got Sunbird, the mozilla one as the “least bad.”  I tried “Lightning” the add-on to Thunderbird (I use the Mozilla “Eudora” codebase for email, which is actually Thunderbird with some tweaks) and it doesn’t really work so well.  Sunbird is passable, but it’s exceptionally mediocre.

Having everything online is cute (for solutions like Google Calendar), but I don’t want to have to connect to the internet every time I want to get an update a mobile device.  I could see using it as a backup, but not a primary point of reference.

Outlook is right out, primarily because of it’s unreasonably heavy weight process footprint and perfectly opaque persistance format.

I keep coming to this horrible notion that I’m going to have to write something.

Ok, I’m finally crawling out of the fairly predictable week long mental/emotional slump and it’s while it seems to have corresponded loosely with the weather change, I assure you it was orthogonal, falling instead squarely into the realm of The Topic That Shall Not Be Blogged.

A funny thing happens to me in the fall as the temperatures drop.  I start sleeping like the dead.  When THAT happens I start having/remembering dreams again.  But that takes a couple weeks to get used to so instead of waking up refreshed and invigorated, I wake up exhausted.  It’ll normalize in a week or two, but it’s pretty wonky to my state of mind.
So yeah, this weekend’s been pretty bizarre with dreams of being a PoW in China singing Allentown with my squad as we were working fields while the Chinese soldiers were raping and killing the land owners.

Also, this weekend was my niece Emily’s first birthday party, which was a blast.

If I could figure out WTF the problem was with getting pictures posted in to WordPress I’d show you some, but it seems to thwart me at every turn.

Let’s see what else.
OH!  Facebook!

I’ve been scoffing at these social networking sites since friendster.  Sure, I always join them.  But I sign up for everything (That’s why I have the “madwilliamflint” email account, so I can fill it up with crap to ignore :p)

What usually happens with these things (in my circles at least) is that they’re just a bit too flash in the pan.  I’ve been on Friendster, Orkut, Linked-In, MySpace, SixDegrees, Ryze, FaceBook and a couple others that I get “we miss you” automated emails from every six months or so.

About a month ago I was pinged on FaceBook by my friend Jenn, whom I haven’t seen in FAR too long and is one of those people that I’m a better person for knowing.

So I went in and filled in a couple more details and I realized that my sisters were on as well… and a fairly creepy number of extended family members (a topic for another time.)  There were a couple one-off connections (friends of my sisters) I reconnected with.

Then last week I heard from a buddy of mine from high school.  For those of you who are counting, that was 22 years ago.  We caught up a bit then I saw a bunch more of ‘us’ and started drawing lines back there.

It really cracked open the vault of that decade in my head.  I went back and forth a couple rounds with my Junior year roommate as well.  It’s funny how the memory of people seems to demand that they be frozen in time. I suppose it’s not so abnormal.  Apparently “everybody is married with children” which also is to be expected.  It does seem a bit alarming though and it’s tough not to contrast myself against that, with fairly predictable results.

I’m not sure I’ve got much else at the moment.  I’m really just trying to keep my fingers warm as my land lady hasn’t turned on the heat yet *twitch*.