There are so many things I would like to talk about on my blog and a lot of them have to do with my personal life. I do mention some things about my personal life and voice my opinion when I get the opportunity, but to really go into detail about how I feel is a line I would rather not cross.

The internet is a very powerful thing and it only gets more powerful every day. I worry that someone will be able to search and find information that may alter their opinion of me by reading out of context or without reading about events leading up to those feelings. I have been debating having a friend register a domain for me under private registration so nobody could access those records and find out who actually runs the blog. A lot of my friends no longer live here and for the time being I am not leaving anytime soon giving me nobody I can really talk to. I have a couple people to talk to, but I do not feel like I can bring up some topics, and for the childish reading this no I’m not gay.

I will probably have to get a private domain to express how I feel, which I guess wouldn’t be so bad. My friend Josh expressed his personal feelings too often in his opinion and had to move his blog after all the search engines already indexed everything.

I have only a few

Trust nobody, including yourself

If you are early you are on time, if you are on time you are late, if you are late you shouldn’t have shown up

The rest of my rules are as they said in the Pirates of the Caribbean, “more like guidelines” and not nearly as important as the two above.

This is a quote I heard that I absolutely love. It is more than a quote, but I feel that I need to start to follow what it says.

I’ve come to the conclusion that if having things turn out the way you wanted them to is a measure of a successful life; then some would say I’m a failure.

The important thing is not be bitter over life’s disappointments. Learn to let go of the past.

I recognize that every day wont be sunny but when you find yourself lost in darkness and dispare.

Remember that it is only in the black of night that you can see the stars and those stars will lead you back home.

So dont be afraid to make mistakes, to stumble and fall, because most of the time the greatest rewards come from doing the things that scare you the most.

Maybe you will get everything you wished for; maybe you will get more than you could ever have imagined.

Who knows where life will take you, the road is long and in the end the journey is the destination.

… But if you look closer you might see someone like you.

Someone trying to find their way.

Someone trying to find their place.

Someone trying to find their self.

Sometimes it is easy to feel like you are the only one in the world who is struggling, who is frustrated, or unsatisfied or barely getting by, but that feeling is a lie. And if you just hold on, just find the courage to face it all for another day someone or something will find you and make it all okay. Because we all need a little help sometimes, someone to help us hear the music in the world, to remind us that it won’t always be this way; that someone is out there and that someone will find you.

So far it has been a good start to a year. Some positive projects are in motion and some big things will be happening this year. For one it looks like I will be working with a Vintage watch dealer to improve their design and improve sales. I have also been brought on at Newsforge as a freelance writer and I have some exciting topics to review and provide tutorials on. I have for quite a while wanted to start writing and this will be my opportunity to really get involved. I had a meeting with a local high school last week and if all goes well I will be involved in some of the projects they have going on and maybe I can start a club for teenagers that are wanting to learn more about programming.

With the good comes the bad. This week has been fight after fight with family members over things that make no sense whatsoever. On top of that I re-fractured my right pinky, which never healed properly the first two times. It is a boxers fracture that comes from punching stationary objects. Before you make some conclusion about who I am and what my attitude is like I route my anger through physical action to reduce the emotional buildup. I have never been in a physical fight though so that shows I have great control over my actions. I kept the brace I was given the very first time I fractured it so I have began using it to try to let it heal properly.

The good news on the health side is that I lost 3.5 lbs this week, which is just above what most consider safe, but I know I am getting the proper nutrients so I consider it to be safe. My goal by 7/1/2007 is to weigh 200 lbs so with the ups and downs of weight loss I figure I can average 2 lbs a week over the course of 26 weeks and considering I was 251.5 on the 1st of the year I will weigh 199.5 going by those numbers.

In my last post I mentioned my interview with Sweet Briar, which I had this morning at 10:30am. I was very nervous going in, because this interview was very important to me and this was only compounded by the fact that I had four interviewers at one time. I am not much of a public speaker and it took a number of minutes for me to even out my nerves. I’m sure many people do this, but when I am nervous my speech skills go out the door a little. In the very beginning they seemed to be a little better than they normally would, but later in the interview I found myself speaking a little jumbled. I repeated the question rephrased at the end of the answers and my answers could have been better, but after speaking with people who know more about interviews than I do they think it went well. It shows I am human, and afterall they are not looking for my ability to speak in public they are interested in my abilities as a programmer.

After visiting the campus and listening to their philosophy on work environments and such I REALLY want to work there. I enjoyed the staff members that interviewed me and I believe I could get along with them very well in a work environment. I do not want to get too excited and jynx it, but man oh man do I hope I get this job.

Today at noon it will be 2 years and 7 months since I had my last cigarette. On March 22nd of 2004 I quit cold turkey and in January of that year I quit dipping. Smoking and dipping are obviously bad, but I think dipping was the best thing I could have done because as gross as it is I liked it. I never liked smoking so eventually I could have quit and only dipped, but then I would probably have gotten oral cancer and my life would be even worse. For anyone trying to quit smoking I wish you the best of luck. The one thing I did differently from any of the other times I quit smoking was that I kept a pack of 19 cigarettes around all the time. I smoked 1 out of the pack and I quit and made sure that pack was around me so I had to make the choice. The other times I smoked my last cigarette in the pack and said I was done, then I would say oh, I’ll just have one and I would buy a new pack or bum one of someone which in both cases just started it all back up.

It took me 7 years to quit and that is how I did it.

For a while now I have wanted to work for Google as I’m sure many people do, but until today I didn’t know about all of the benefits. Here are links to the pages outlining their employee benefits.

Summary

Benefits for US Employees

Quick Summary:
- On-site Healthcare
- Childcare
- Life, Disability, Accident insurance
- Financial, Legal, Counseling Services

You really just need to see those lists for yourself.

Searching for a job is one of the more annoying things I have to do. When I don’t hear back within 10 minutes I start to freak out haha. I sent my resume to a local college this morning. I think I would be a great asset to their school and from what I read it would be a great place to work. I have to update my online resumes because I made some last minute changes to the one I mailed.

It is very hard living where I live. I am pretty skilled with a computer, but there aren’t enough businesses in need of a high tech employee for me to find a job worth taking. Keep your fingers crossed for me, I would really appreciate any help I can get.

My TODO list for the day

- Finish Resume
- Refresh Sawmill Skills
- Learn REST with PHP
- Find a web service to get stock quotes
- Learn XSLT
- Go through more accounts
- Work on various project ideas
- KILL MYSELF FROM STRESS!!!

So the last one was a joke, but I just have too much to do. I am getting some training materials from a friend regarding CompTIA Security+ and soem server 2003 training. I am also borrowing some VERY extensive training for CCNA. I like writing code, but I think I would benefit more from learning networking and security and combining those skills with programming.

I have a few Brainbench certifications, and as far as I know they are respected, but who knows really. I am trying to avoid the whole Bachelors degree thing. There are a lot of subjects I would like to learn and the best place would be college, but I could care less about so me schmuck in 1823 who put his dick in the wrong woman and started a war in some stupid country or whatever dumb shit I would have to learn. English 101 will not improve my programming skills, I speak pretty well, I feel my vocabulary could use some work, but who’s couldn’t. The people who need college are these damn kids that are walking around speaking jibberish. I was in Kroger talking to a friend and a girl walked up asking about Western Union and long story short it ended up “Fureal? damn yo” Can you not speak in an even close to respectable way? Ok off topic. I just don’t feel that college is 100% necessary for a number of people and it should not be expected. There are so many languages and techniques people learn outside of school that I don’t see how school can come into play all the time. If someone wants to hire a Python programmer and has a requirement of a BS in something vague like “Computer related field” that could be graphic design, what does that have to do with Python? They will then ask for 3 years experience programming Python. Ok, well lets say Jim graduated in 1972 from Johns Hopkins with a degree in Computer Science, sure that degree required he learn many things that would help when programming, but they still had to learn Python outside of a structured environment. So that degree doesnt say anything about their ability as a Python programmer.

I have been working for my mom’s boss since I moved back and he knows jack shit about me and what I can do, but he says “You need to go to college”. He throws a party and these rich bastards that spent 160k on college and have a masters in the mating rituals of indonesian rectal bacteria come driving in and are too dumb to park a car where they are told to.

This post ended up being a rant of the BS of a BS, but in searching for a job I get aggrivated seeing these requirements. I sent my resume in about a job in Richmond and they wanted a HTML/CSS developer with organizational skills and who knew how to do table and css based layouts etc. I filled all of their requirements and almost all of their bonus needs and I can’t even get a call back. I have been watching my logs and they havn’t even viewed my portfolio yet. I understand someone could be out of town, but I just have this feeling I may have been overlooked by someone with a College Degree who has never worked on a large scale project. When I first started out the company I worked for was getting 17,000 unique VISITORS a day. Not google, but a lot of other sites do not get that. They were also advertising to a certain user base which limited who came to the site(s).

Anyway this is killing my time to work on my TODO list, late