humbug

lately i've been eating bowls of salad with more frequency. i caught a cold only a week or two after having had a stomach bug, and frankly that ain't cool. even now i feel like there is stuff in there that shouldn't be. maybe its the smog. maybe its the smoke. maybe its nothing. maybe i've run out of maybes ok?

i find myself in a familiar spot. i told my friend the other day it was like the chumbawumba song, "we get knocked down, but we get up again" (it made more sense in the context). i guess that is what we aim for, and with a little musical motivation we get up again...but is it supposed to be easier to keep getting up each time? should we avoid getting knocked down in the first place? i don't know.

i DO know i don't want to stay sick, so maybe i'll delay the fall as much as possible, or maybe i'll dodge this time. hmmf.

a few days ago there was this event called earth hour. i misunderstood and so didn't participate when i was supposed to, but then i did it the next day. i think i will start shutting down my machine at work until somebody tells me something.

technorati tags:nonsense

we own the night? the night pwns me!

it is yet another sleepless night in the life of adkenc. ever since i can remember, I've been a night owl. staying up till the wee hours of the morning is cool and all, but recently I've started changing my mind on it a bit.

the good thing is that i go into work late in the morning. my Moroccan friend at work has recently started calling me the king, and later explained that the king wakes up late and has his servants waking up early to do the work for them. at least that's the explanation i remember, and i don't think he means it as an insult.

i'm always a bit sleepy, i admit, but just give me a couple of hours and a cup of coffee and I'm at 100% no problem (well, most of the time). i think i must come off as being asleep all of the time though. i get comments frequently on it for some reason. the truth is that most of the time even if i am a bit sleepy i'm doing ok.

my current boss told me i should work the night shift because i'm always sleepy in the mornings. i replied with a naaaaaaaaaah, but in my head there was a meaner explanation. i'm reminded of a telemarketing survey i took once. (excuse me if i've already written this before). anyway i took a survey over the phone once, and one of the questions asked which fast food restaurant was my favourite. i replied chick-fil-a (its a chicken place). one of the next questions was how often i ate there, and when i answered once every 3 to 6 months, the person on the phone seemed really confused. its really simple though, if you really like something, you'll appreciate it a bit more if you indulge in it less often. the infrequency makes it better, at least to me.

so, back to the "i should work the night schedule" scenario. i SHOULDN'T work the night schedule because the night is my time. i'm awake, i'm thinking, i'm reading, i'm writing, i'm listening, and oh so much more. the thing i DON'T want to be doing is working, especially since i don't particularly love what i'm doing at the moment. i've realized that although it may be somewhat boring or saddening to me, i don't mind my job so much. the people are nice for the most part, the schedule is cool, its close to home. maybe its the 1984 ending happening to me; i love big brother!

the clock ticks on. "where is he?", she quoted once. it was a clever tv quote that expressed how she felt. i knew he wasn't me, but i do know the feeling now. i have my own movie references now. tick tock in analog times; beep beep in digital speak.

yesterday i found a place where i can repair my bike. it adds a little happiness knowing i might actually be able to stick to my plan of riding to work soon. a little exercise would do me good. the reflection time will be nice too. i might have to wait a little bit though. last week was short, and while it was nice to have time off, it means my check is going to be smaller than usual.  eek! i have to do my taxes!

writing the words of a sermon that noone will hear

Here is a photoshopped picture of my new buddy Grumps the Firefox (click to enlarge as usual). You can also maybe make out my new headphones. I like em. I might try to get them in lime green.

I was browsing around one day and stumbled upon the Firefox plushies at the Mozilla store. I had thought about following my friend Laura's suggestion of calling it Firefoxy, but when it arrived and i opened the box it seemed to be looking at me with a grumpy expression. It seemed to say "it's about damn time you get me the hell out of this box". or maybe he's grumpy about being endangered?

This picture is a spoof of my friend Mike's current default picture on myspace.

I'm Grumpy because my Firefox install updated and now its seems to be freezing at random pages. I have the feeling that one of the plugins is probably not compatible. i'll leave testing for tomorrow.

today has not really been a day of good news, and yet at the micro level i got in touch with several people that i hadn't spoken to in some time. its one of those times: just when things are looking up, life says whoa whoa whoa, wait a minute cowboy. here's some crap.

so today i added, "don't worry be happy" to the music playlist. worrying only makes it worse; i think that's true.

this profile is kinda new...

i'm still only getting spam with myspace. today i signed up for twitter and added it to the right side of this blog. i guess the idea is that you are mini-blogging and updating the question "what are you doing?" in 140 characters or less. it's like a combination of a text message and a status update on myspace.

i'm not sure what the point is to twitter. is it a blog for people who don't like to blog? is 140 characters more revealing that super long posts? i don't know; it doesn't seem like something that would catch on. i signed up though, and i'm sure you can guess my screename.

either way it probably doesn't matter what we type or how we type. maybe it only matters to ourselves when we go back and read something and remember....or maybe it won't make sense at all.

it's 322 and i'm going to head home. hopefully i can wake up super early, in a good mood, and with no more cough ready to go to austin and fix this crappy headphone situation. today i had some drinks to temporarily take care of my cough. the whole situation went to crap; drunk fools were messing with my friends and i felt quite useless in coming to their defense. bleh. goodnight. surely its the wine or the rum and coke typing.

technorati tags:wine, and, rum, and, coke

it's raining mud!!!

i think the news people blamed it on Mexico. of course! didn't you know? if its something bad surely its not OUR fault. ok the story goes...

i walked out of work today to find my car in a really dirty condition. naturally i grabbed my camera and took some pictures. these are 2 from the sunroof and 1 from the windshield. my sister said that my brother in law got his suit all muddy when they walked outside and it started raining on them.

i don't remember this ever happening. i've walked outside before to discover my car turned yellow from pollen, but brown from mud? hopefully there will be some heavy rains to wash it a little...as long as the heavy rains aren't muddy too!

oh yes, don't forget you probably have to click to view the whole photo.

technorati tags:muddy, rain

st. patrick's day

my headphones have been getting crappy lately. today i decided to go to fry's (in austin) and remedy that. i wanted to go with my friend because i take forever to decide on things like this...well, my friend didn't make it and the ones i picked out ended up breaking before i got back to san antonio. damnit. damnit on several levels.

i went to a bar called sherlock's and stood in line for over an hour before i got in to see my friend. they are the kind of fun times that pass too quickly.

i made it home at 3am and found that something i'd ordered on ebay finally arrived. its the play-yan micro, which is a cartridge that allows me to play movies on my gameboy micro. very nice. unfortunately i don't have any flicks in the correct format yet, so at this very moment i'm transcoding a test file into the proper format. once i see something i will leave positive feedback. this  person kicks ass....they included a 1gb sd card even though it wasn't part of the listing. AND the buy it now price was actually about 20 bucks less than what it could have been.

sigh.
i wish i was in a happier mood.

new friend requests!

soa little over a year has passed since i axed my old myspace profile. that profile, myspace,com/adkenc, was friends with quite a lot of people. most of the people i knew at some point or another in real life.

it took me a couple months to cave again and get a new non-adkenc profile. actually, ive had it for over  ayear now. i am currently at 15 friends, well 16 but one is my friend's startup profile so i don't count it.

i don't know that sad would be the word,  but perhaps it is a little enlightening that after a year of having this new nonadkenc profile, i am at 15 friends. i think  for the most part they were all people who requested me as friends.

except for these few people, all the friend requests from crappy porn spammers. how sad is that? well...thanks to my friends for being my friends...

talkative

this is the second time in my life that i've had a "phone job". it can really suck with a name like mine. i end up wasting so much time on clarifying my name that i end up caving and responding to martin, joaquin, or whatever else they throw at me. what's the point in arguing about my name for 3 minutes? just tell me your fuckin' problem already and i'll see if i can fix it.  pardon my english.

i'm not much of a talker with most people. my eldest sister once told me i was a vault, and i guess that really holds true for the most part. there has really never been anyone to share everything with, or any reason for me to spill the gossip about things people tell me. c'est la vie.

tonight i broke a streak. any time i thought i've recognized someone at a bar, at a club, on the bus, at school, or at work....it has never turned out to be who i thought it was. i think most of the time i probably come off as some sort of asshole using some stupid "don't i know you?" pickup line.  after many rude replies from the wrong people i've decided to just not ask anymore. same thing goes for dancing. i don't really dance, and most of the times i don't care to dance, but every once in a while i'll feel like it. what happens? women of s.a. tend to interpret it as if i want something more...and before you know it i'd be just sitting at my spot again. ugh. people.

tonight was all sorts of weird. after finding out it actually WAS who i thought it was, i stumbled horribly in the question and answer session that followed. i'm just not all that good at being a chatterbox. i prefer listening or typing. few people want ro make any effort to hear me, and i'm a little too content in being a listener.

i always thought it was just an airport.

i don't know much about him, but today i came across this in a video clip and enjoyed it:

Prohibition cannot be enforced for the simple reason that the majority of American people do not want it enforced and are resisting its enforcement. That being so, the orderly thing to do under our form of government is to abolish a law which cannot be enforced, a law which the people of the country do not want enforced.

-Fiorello H. LaGuardia

I can't seem to sleep tonight, but i imagine that my body still feels like its only 1:30 in the morning. i guess i just need to put on some relaxing tunes.

last night was class 2 of the web event. i had about 4 1 second skips in the whole thing, so that is really really great improvement! i noticed the stream stayed slightly above 500kb/s for almost the whole duration. last time it would spike up to 900 or 1000 and then drop to 300, and really i think they could have lowered it a little more if they wanted to allow more people to join. i hope they will release some stats of the second viewing as well. who knows, maybe people's reaction was to not watch the live stream and then crash the servers tomorrow by trying to download it. hopefully not.

some changes in this event for me, i was chatting on messenger to my friend whom invited me to the event. at one point i turned on my webcam and it actually didn't seem to have any effect on the oprah stream. hooray laptop/broadband connection! also, my stream was actually a few minutes ahead of my friend's. she's in florida and i'm in texas. i am guessing the studio is in illinois. i wonder if that has anything to do with anything.

alrighty folks well i don't care for daylight savings and it don't care for me, but its now about to be 3, and i have to get up in the mornin'....see? so goodnight to all and to all a good night. or good morning. the choice is yours.

contribute!

maybe it has something to do with howard dean...but i'm a little tired of these candidates begging me for money. i'm subscribed to emails from obama and hillary, because i definitely prefer their styles of thinking over other's...and because i haven't really had the opportunity to subscribe to others. anyway, they've both started including big red donate buttons in their emails.

i don't know, but in the back of my mind i've never seen money as the answer to political problems. take dean for example, he broke all sorts of fundraising records and in the end most people just remember that stupid scream. (i have to admit for a moment i had it as my cell phone ringer, but it was kind of a "so what?" instead of poking fun). for the record, here is the non-mainstream dean scream. amazing thing, this youtube. sometimes.

when it comes to politicians, i think mayor quimby on the simpsons can be regarded as accurate. i do enjoy watching it all unfold though. the change that follows might be background noise or might smack us right in the face, but it's going to change.

anywho, my battery is almost dead, but since i'm talking about politics again i figure i'll mention this strange article. apparently obama wasn't even on the ballot in michigan? and here i was wondering why people who are no longer running are still on the ballot and getting voted for in texas....

these are the things i think of when i hear this rubbish about greatness...(unless they were talking about greatness in the field of mediocracy).

reading habit

when reading, i often skip ahead to the page where the next chapter begins. sometimes i get frustrated with reading, particularly if i feel like its going nowhere. knowing that i'm moving closer to somewhere helps take away this feeling. i'm not reading just for the sake of reading; i'm moving towards the end of this chapter and will soon be at the next. there's a path to follow...

are we there yet?

do you have these too?

what else is there to know of you?

nobody has to answer, as they're really not what they might seem.

technorati tags:awake, at, 1:04

why is it happening now?

well, i'm about 1.5 chapters into this book. since i was one of the people having problems with the webcast yesterday, i opted to download the m4v file to watch on my laptop. i don't have an ipod, and i really don't like that people call these things podcasts, but whatever.

in the book and on the show they say that this is happening because we're reaching that crisis point. i think this is only partially true. part of why its happening now is because it CAN happen now.

take one of the sponsors: skype. skype's initial release was in 2003, and they didn't add video features until 2005.

consider also move networks, the people who's plugin you have to install to connect to the webcast. the copyright on their web page says 2004.

now, i remember seeing webcams as early as 1994, but the stuff behind the stuff that makes it all possible is all relatively new. i'm not really sure when it all started becoming more common.

anyway, what i'm getting at is that many people may have already been feeling or going through whatever it is that they are experiencing now....we just didn't know about it because it wasn't there yet :)

i guess the technical difficulties of yesterday show we're still not totally there, but we have made some incredible leaps. thank you al gore! (for creating the internet)(just kidding)

---

i went to the caucus after work, but i was really, really hungry and didn't stay for the whole of it. i signed in and wrote down what candidate i supported (which btw was a different candidate than the one whom i early voted for)...

here are the current results for my county according to a local news site. it looks like we still have a long way to go.

Precincts Reporting - 5404 out of 8247 - 65%

President Democrat - Bexar County
Candidate	Votes	Percent	Winner
Hillary Clinton	100,791	54%
Barack Obama	75,266	42%
John Edwards	771	1%
Bill Richardson	700	1%
Joe Biden	242	1%
Chris Dodd	234	1%

i kind of wonder...(i'm going to pick on john edwards because i know he's no longer running), why the hell would 771 people vote for someone who's not running? then again, i've voted for someone who wasn't on the ballot so i probably should talk much. why are there no results for mike gravel? hmm. well, anyway...at the caucus things seemed a little unorganized but orderly. i heard some people trying to stir up a ruckus by talking about elections evils, but i didn't see any election evils firsthand. the hillary folks generally seemed older and/or female. the barack folks were generally younger and/or black. actually i'd say about 90 percent of the crowd was either hispanic or black. i usually don't notice things like this, but it kind of stood out to me tonight.

so yeah. i'm a little sad and i'm a little glad. tomorrow is another day and now i should sleep to be a little more ready for it.

technorati tags:oprah, and, texas, politics, again!

A NEW EARTH WEB EVENT

a few days ago i received an email from oprah.com saying i'd been invited to an online class by oprah and an author named eckhart tolle. tonight was the first night of this web discussion and unfortunately it did not go so well. first off, i don't have the book...although a friend of mine said she found it at walmart. i normally don't shop at walmart but i think i will go in a few to see if there are any copies.

i decided to "tune in" even though i had no idea about anything. it made me install a player/plugin and that was fast and painless. i received a link via email for my reserved e-seat and so i signed on after a super quick dinner when i got home from work.

when i signed on, they were showing some sort of rerun of oprah's show discussing the book. a countdown to the live event was displayed at the bottom, and it seemed like i had logged on just in the nick of time.

soon the live event started, and although it would chop up a little now and then everything went relatively smoothly for about 30 minutes. i thought it was funny that he was saying something along the lines of making time to block out noise and place yourself in a calm, natural place. i guess sitting in a hot bath isn't really natural, but it was pretty quiet and calming. anyway, after about 30 minutes the player really started to chop up. i moved around to different areas of the house and it didn't get any better. suddenly i lost video and had only audio, and then that started chopping up badly.

i decided to close the player and try connecting again. at first it wouldn't load, and then it loaded some sort of old show with an ob/gyn talking about cramps and menstrual cycles and things that really didn't interest me. i closed out again and when i reopened i was connected once again to the live webcast, although i was no longer given the option to ask a question. the feed started chopping up horribly again though, so i figured it was time to disconnect and do my usual web browsing.

its a wonderful idea they have going. they have a decent quality show with the ability to take questions from all over the globe via the web, skype (with video), and phone. unfortunately due to demand or technical difficulties or both, i will have to wait until tomorrow to be able to download and watch the show, and as such losing the interactive part of the experience.

i guess the C student in me thinks its ok though. i'll have some time to go get the book and catch up on my reading and be more into it for next monday's class. hopefully some of the issues will be worked out as the classes continue.

in unrelated news, i received an email from the hillary crew that there was going to be a townhall style meeting being broadcast on tv and on their website. when oprah's site started messing up i tried clicking on the link to check out the meeting, but i guess it was already long over and it told me there was no such event.

i think it would be great if they had what oprah did, worked out the kinks, and used it for other things (i.e. this townhall meeting). some day...

tomorrow is election day here in texas. i've already early voted, but hopefully i won't be lazy and not go to the caucus tomorrow night. from what i hear, its quick and painless. honestly i don't feel like much changes for the better ever, but i guess this current president has shown me that it can certainly get really crappy in a short amount of time. maybe just a little effort will have a fairly big impact? i don't know, but count me in.

technorati tags:oprah, and, texas, politics

soul mate pt.2

i was browsing around on urban dictionary, and apparently soul mate does not mean what i think it means. hmm...