ironSoap

I rolled the window down to let the breeze of motion cool my face; the expected coastal winds were noticeably absent without help from the moving car. I turned up the radio, some anonymous station playing new rock that sounded suspiciously like old rock that I used to hear in high school. It had a persistent beat and a tolerable melody so my foot tapped of its own volition.

The stretch of road that runs around the large business park block where our soon-to-be vacated office lies is crisscrossed by small swatches of what was once wild lands, a large pond hides between multi-story buildings that house technology companies and corporate satellite offices from larger firms whose headquarters are elsewhere. Creekbeds wind through the area, running down the gentle slopes of the hills and forcing city planners to be creative with the placements of parking lots and strip malls.

It felt like an eternity since this kind of tranquility had crowded out the worry and stress from my over-active mind and allowed me a moment of peace. I relished it, briefly. The reason for the mid-day drive was an all too short lunch break where I was planning to try and run and errand as well as pick up something to eat in under thirty minutes but in the fleeting moment I only had to point the car ahead, feel the moving air and sunshine, and hear the music.

The errand was to return the cheap pair of noise-canceling headphones I’d picked up from Fry’s last week. Not only did the NC feature “work” by blasting literally audible static into the ear, but they were based off the design for a torture device whose purpose was to crush skulls one centimeter at a time.

The returns process was not as painful as I had feared, for all of Fry’s plethora of faults they do at least have a pretty generous return policy and a halfway efficient process to boot. Afterward I spent a few moments back in the headphone aisle but since trying on a pair of Bose headphones had been enough to convince me the TDK set I bought was laughably shoddy, there was little hope that the other models displayed proudly in their impossible-to-open stiff plastic bubble packaging would compare.

I left empty-handed but with a slightly more robust wallet, a state which I find little to complain about.

Addendum

I realize I promised a playlist example for you yesterday, but I felt really sick all day so please forgive me. I will get it posted, as soon as I have time to finalize some of my selections, but it will have to be later this week. I guess there is a reason I avoid making blog-related promises.

Nik bought me a new pair of boots for Valentine’s Day. Doctor Marten’s, for the detail-oriented.

This isn’t necessarily significant if it were coming from anyone else (I mean me, not Nik… she’s very generous). But for me to have new boots… well, it’s a thing. To set up the significance you should understand that this year we decided to have a “theme” for our Valentine’s Day gifts: We gave each other things that we knew the other would never buy for themselves. In fact, we made it a requirement. So she couldn’t get me any video games or underwear or hats and I couldn’t get her magazines or shoes or perfume. It was a fun exercise.

So why wouldn’t I buy myself boots? Because I had a pair of boots. Doctor Marten’s as a matter of fact. But when I say I had a pair of boots I mean I had them. My parents gave them to me for Christmas when I was either fifteen or sixteen, I can’t remember any longer. But let me tell you, whatever else I got for Christmas that year has long since been used, broken, discarded, lost or given away. But not those boots.

I went into a shoe store last year looking for something else… a sweatshirt or jacket or something. It’s not important. But being a shoe store, the salesman’s eyes shot right to my feet to see what I was sporting. His eyes widened when they saw my boots. To fully understand you have to realize that after fifteen years these boots were worn. I mean, it’s not like I drug them out for certain occasions: They were my freakin’ boots man and they’d been to at least thirteen states, survived a motorcycle accident, lasted through high school, college, trade school, camping trips, every actual job I’ve ever held, marriage, everything. I’d never once polished them so the toes were worn and scuffed and grey. The soles were worn to 1/2 their original height (more in some pressure spots… I measured against the new pair) and the insides were a perfect and exact mold of my feet. Here’s a bit of trivia for you: Through all that, I still had the original laces. With the plastic end caps fully intact.

So this salesman… more like a kid really. He stares at my shoes and says something like, “Those look well-worn.” I cocked an eyebrow at him.

“Son,” I began, asserting an air of wisdom and authority, “I’ve had these boots since you were in short pants.”

I’m paraphrasing here. I don’t actually talk like my grandmother. But the guy was suitably impressed. Rightfully impressed.

So yeah, I got new boots and Nik sweated about it for weeks. It did fit the gift criteria: I would never have replaced my own boots. But would I accept new boots? Nik asked Gin for advice. Gin was skeptical. She didn’t think I’d go for it.

When I peeled off the paper and saw what she had gotten me, I grinned. “Sweet! New boots!” I immediately took off the old pair and put on the new. Nik tried to ease the blow by saying we could take them back or exchange them or anything else I wanted to do with them. I shrugged and left them on. I threw my old pair into the back of the closet.

They were good boots. They were my boots.

But now I have a new pair.

Shortly, as I must join the homeward commute presently:

• I’ve been making headway on the ironSoap book/formatted archives and I just finished part two. The parts are determined by Google Docs’ (nee Writely) retarded and arbitrary file size limitation of 512K. Anyway, I began working on part three when I realized that the tarball I’ve carefully preserved since I moved to WordPress is half corrupted and my backup files go through September 2002 at the latest. I do have a slew of miscellaneous and ill-labeled archive CDs that I can search through but you can bet this won’t speed up the book’s completion any.
• My fool-proof strategy for avoiding the receipt nazis at stores who criminally refuse to let you leave without analyzing your purchases as if you were crossing the border with several crates of produce: Pull out cell phone, stride purposefully past while hitting random buttons and pretending to be far too busy to hear their plaintive cries to stop so they can treat you like a thief.
• I have discovered the purpose for my work-granted ThinkGeek gift certificate (a Christmas present, mind): AirSoft weaponry.
• Never, ever, ever mix Red Bull with SweetTarts. I’m just saying, I know a guy who did and it didn’t turn out well for him.
• There is a new poll.

I think it would be nice to say, “Hey look, I have a new post. It is well-researched, carefully edited and revised and thoughtfully written.” But you’d probably be like, “Where am I and what happened to ironSoap?” So in the interest of fulfilling your expectations… hastily written bullet points! Ahh…

• Tomorrow is Super Tuesday. If you are part of a Super Tuesday state, I encourage you to vote. Now, I know that primary elections aren’t as significant as the general election in November so if you skate on this one, I’ll forgive you but only if you promise—and pinky-swear!—to vote later this year.
• If you do vote tomorrow and can participate in the Republican election, would you please consider Ron Paul?
• I know people like to say that voting for an underdog is like throwing your vote away but, well, tell that to New York Giants fans. Truth is, you never know.
• And while I’m sorta on the subject, how weird was that Super Bowl? I mean it was the biggest snoozer of all time until the 4th quarter at which point it became a great game, seemingly out of nowhere. The telling statistic? There were three lead changes in the fourth quarter: A Super Bowl record. I listened to the end of the game on my commute home from work. When Manning tossed that pass for the TD late in the game, I LOL’d. Seriously.
• You may have already gathered from the Twitter feed (had you been following along at home like I keep telling you), but I finally made my HD dreams come true last weekend. We picked up a Samsung 46″ LCD, got rid of the old 36″ Trinitron, wrangled some HD cable and iced the cake with a PS3/Blu-Ray, an HD-capable TiVo and a Logitech Harmony 550 universal remote. It was a lot of money… so much that I kind of freaked out about it for a little while, but then I caught my first Sharks game in HD and, well, I didn’t feel so bad about it after that. There is more to the story, of course, including a still-ongoing royal rumble with Comcast over the acquisition of a cable card for the TiVo, but I’ll spare you the details until I can provide the epilogue.
• So… there’s this movie called ‘Sunshine.’ It’s deeply flawed but I think still worth watching. Either way, it basically did for Blu-Ray what The Matrix did for DVD: Sell the format.
• I have, however, decided that I no longer have any interest in purchasing physical copies of movies. As such I won’t be “upgrading” my DVD collection to Blu-Ray. Aside from the general uncertainty of the format’s future, I just am sick of storing movies in my living space. First we had a pretty impressive collection of VHS tapes. Now we’ve finally gotten to where we have a lot of DVDs. I don’t care to go through the exercise again, so until we all figure out how too handle digital film storage, I’ll stick to rentals.
• Of course, the PS3 came with Spider-Man 3 (ugh) and also included a 5-free Blu-Ray offer (which I felt obliged to take advantage of) so I will have at least six of the stupid things. But that’s it! I’m not paying for any more.
• I am also fully aware my resolve has no bearing on the activities of my spouse, who loves to own her favorite movies and TV shows. I guess I better buy a new DVD rack.
• You know what I think is tacky? That the Cheesecake Factory has ads in their menus.
• However, TCF makes a mean meatloaf.
• Nik and I saw Michael Clayton over the weekend. It’s a pretty great flick although I didn’t think so until the very end, and there is still a particular scene that I don’t quite understand once the “truth” is revealed. Or I guess considering what that truth does reveal. Either way, it left Nik and I scratching our heads. Also, it has to have the worst title of the year. Who wants to see a movie named after the fictional lead character? It’s not even some deeply memorable character nor a remarkable/memorable name like Forrest Gump. Michael Clayton sounds like the title of a biopic for some long-ago sports star no one remembers.
• I would have gone with “The Fixer” or perhaps “The Settlement.” But that’s just me.
• Snack Watch: So, if you like Sun Chips I implore you to find the “Garden Salsa” flavor, they are exquisite. However, you may also want to investigate Cinnamon Sun Chips (you read that right) which sound questionable but are in fact quite delicious (though more of a standalone snack than a lunch accompaniment). You may also be interested in knowing that the Black Cherry and Almond flavor of Clif bars are especially tasty if you need a mid-afternoon light meal. And I can say with confidence that the energy drink Nos is not suitable for human consumption.
• On the flip side, has anyone tried Chocolate Chex yet? Nik is too chicken to try them and I’m hit or miss with Chex brand cereal, but I can see it being a fine addition to a batch of Chex mix. Anyone?
• I’m committed to Lost for the long haul, but I’m terribly, terribly disappointed in the direction they’ve decided to take the show.
• I have to give some respect to Netflix, a company which had such a terrible site back when I joined almost five years ago that I filed a bug report on it. Now they have one of the best designed, most user-friendly sites I frequent. As a simple example, I indicated to them that I was interested in getting Blu-Ray discs when available. Their system simply confirms that you know what you’re talking about and that you have the appropriate hardware and then it automagically goes in and replaces any movies in your queue with Blu-Ray versions. Brilliant.
• I loved the book Freakonomics and since I finished it I’ve been following the Freakonomics blog, which often has funny, insightful or thought-provoking posts. Today they had one I found cynical and amusing in all the right ways: Choose a six word motto for the US. My favorite sarcastic suggestion: “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Democracy.” My favorite funny suggestion: “Just like Canada, with Better Bacon.”
• As much as I love Rock Band, especially the multiplayer, Band World Tour mode is sadly flawed in a fairly fundamental way. And the fact that online co-op doesn’t allow BWT mode is kind of a criminal oversight. Still, I have faith in my Joey Big Hat bandmates to rise above the stupid game limitations.
• It occurs to me that we need a band logo. And I think you can upload such files into the game and use them as tattoos for your avatar.
• Excuse me, I have some Photoshopping to do.

It’s not that there aren’t any reasons for me to revert to my default mode of grouchy crankiness, it’s that somehow I’m fully capable of ignoring those reasons, at least today. The resulting mood is an alien sensation, something I presume is my own filtered version of contentment and joy. And like the countering forces, there is an air of mystery around the happiness catalysts: I can identify them, but I can’t describe why they seem to matter more today than usual.

Whatever the case, I thought I’d mix it up around here and give you a few thoughts of a positive and uplifting nature. Or as near as I come.

• I love the Fruit Guys. They deliver a variety of fruit to businesses sort of as a healthy alternative for companies that like to provide snacks to employees. What I like is that they branch out beyond the typical apples and bananas and include blueberries, grapes, pears, peaches, apricots and so on (depending on what’s in season). They happen to get our shipment here on the same day that they usually bring in bagels so Monday mornings I typically have a tasty (and free!) breakfast of blueberry bagel, piece of fruit and a glass of milk. There’s usually enough fruit left to compliment lunch, too. Today my breakfast peach and my lunch pear were both delicious.
• Nik and I got new phones on Saturday. Originally we had different models, but the Samsung I went with wasn’t working out for me (and it was $20 more than the LG VX9900 phone Nik got) so Nik took it back for me and got another one like hers (only in olive green rather than silver). Our biggest desire was to have a full QWERTY keypad since we’ve gotten into the habit of using text messages about 75% of the time, so we have that plus we got the full unlimited data package which allows us to hook our email into the phones as well. I know I was pretty psyched about the RAZR when it was new and that eventually wore off, which I’m sure will happen again with this phone, but the prices were right and we got good service from Verizon (a marked difference from AT&T, our original provider, who basically told us flat out that they didn’t care one way or the other if we stayed with them). For the moment, I’m happy with my phone.
• I’ve been working on an interesting project at work, which is a very nice change of pace since I get to create something and watch my work unfold rather than just respond. Normally when I have “work to do” it means there is something broken, so I had almost forgotten what it was like to feel satisfied with something I was doing. Unfortunately my skills have been stretched close to their limits trying to make this work and I decided to use an unfamiliar tool at a critical juncture which is causing me some problems. Still, these problems are of my own design and I can tell that resolving the issues will be even more satisfying so I’m happy to work on it, unlike most problems I address which result in a sort of shrug and a “Well, that probably worked. Let’s wait and see if it breaks again.”
• I may have to work today, but at least bank holidays mean far less traffic on the commute trail which is always a nice change. And I like this holiday a lot: It’s nice to have a day set aside to honor someone legitimately worthy. I don’t always understand why we set aside New Year’s Day and Columbus Day as holidays, but for MLK ‘s birthday, I understand completely.
• Our house was a horrible mess on Saturday night and I had promised Nik on Friday that I’d clean the whole thing. Then we ended up spending hours and hours shopping (mostly for the phones) all afternoon and I wasn’t looking forward to spending my last night before “Monday” cleaning. Then without fanfare or anything Nik stepped in and we knocked the whole thing out in about an hour together. Now the place is all nice and clean and it wasn’t an egregious hassle either.
• I caught up on some of the email replies I’d let slip over the last couple of weeks this morning. I don’t know why I let things like that go; I always feel guilty about it and I don’t have any negative connotation with composing email correspondence so there’s no reason for my procrastination. Plus I hate seeing a relatively empty inbox and knowing it’s my own fault. Today I feel like the ball is in other folks’ court, so I’m content.
• So one negative thing that I’m going to spin as a positive is that I discovered that among the other flaky behavior with my old phone over the last few months, it would arbitrarily decide not to alert me about new messages or grant me access to my voicemail. It was inconsistent; enough that I probably lost several messages and or never got others but not enough that I was fully clear on the extent of the problem. If you tried to call and left a message sometime in the last several months but I didn’t get back to you, I’m sorry. I’d blame the phone but honestly if I were better about keeping it with me and on I’d probably have answered a few times and avoided the situation entirely. Plus I knew the phone was garbage and kept using it anyway. But in either case, I believe my new phone works as advertised so if you care to try again, I’d appreciate the second chance.
• Someone stop me before it gets all cheerful in here.

I’ve been sick for the last few days with a pretty hefty cold. I thought it was the flu at first because of the general sense of achy unpleasantness and chills, but after staying home on Wednesday and having it not manifest with the usual aches and fever I’m inclined to believe it’s merely an industrial-strength common cold.

I’m still recovering but I’ve been doing a lot of lying around and thinking so I have a few unconnected thoughts and anecdotes to share, in a familiar format.

• For reasons that won’t make sense unless you’re a gamer who owns an Xbox 360 and an OCD-afflicted psychopath such as myself, I purchased a copy of Madden 06 for under $5 from my local game store and have been simulating thirty seasons worth of games. What’s significant about this is that, according to the software, the 49ers won’t win the Super Bowl again until the year 2033. Just something to look forward to.
• I’m reading a wonderful book by Naomi Klein called “No Logo” about marketing, advertising and branding. There is a passage in the book that stuck with me:
  

  The people who line up for Starbukcs, writes CEO Howard Shultz, aren’t just there for the coffee. “It’s the romance of the coffee experience, the feeling of warmth and community people get in Starbucks stores.”

  I guess that’s why I dislike Starbucks. Here I thought they made bad coffee and served them in pretentious and ubiquitous locations. Turns out the make pretentious and ubiquitous locations in which to serve bad coffee.

• Our band name (comprised of myself on “vocals,” Nik on guitar, HB on drums and Gin as a roadie/groupie, but soon she’ll play bass… I just don’t have another guitar-shaped controller) is “Joey Big Hat is a Bit Much.” It’s completely an inside joke and probably not a very funny one at that. However, it still cracks me up whenever I think about it.
• The above bullet refers to Rock Band, which Nik bought me for my birthday.
• However, I’ve decided that this year I will buy a new guitar (I’m thinking Fender Telecaster), Nik has indicated that she wants to take guitar lessons and Lister has indicated that once he returns from overseas he wants to get a bit more serious about forming a jam band so music is on people’s minds. There may one day be a real-life variant of JBHiaBM. We probably won’t cover Bon Jovi’s “Dead or Alive” however.
• My folks sent me a very kind gift for my birthday which was essentially funds to be converted into San Jose Sharks tickets. I did some digging around and found that you can actually buy unwanted season tickets for a single game through Ticketmaster which seems to be the only way to get lower-reserve seating. But I found that the price differs wildly depending on what team is visiting. For example, for about $60 a ticket I can get lower-reserve center ice tickets (row 25) and see the Sharks play the Columbus Blue Jackets. For those same seats I can see them play the Anaheim Ducks… for $300 each.
• I’m probably going to see the Blue Jackets.
• We went and saw Juno on New Year’s Eve. It’s an exceptional movie.
• Just days before my birthday I went to the eye doctor as a sign of solidarity with Nik, who was going because she’s had terrible migraines for about a month now and her doctor suggested she may be having vision trouble (the actual doctorese-to-English translation of that is “I have no idea what’s wrong, so hows about a stab in the dark?”). I hadn’t had my eyes checked in a very long while so I went along, assuming my vision was still 20/20. It’s not. Now I need glasses. Strangely, Nik and I need practically the same prescription.
• I have no delusions that people who meet me or pass me on the street are fooled into thinking I’m anything but a nerd. However, for those few who may have been blinded by the ruse, I think glasses ought to remove all doubt.
• Truthfully, I’m okay with that. However, with my basketball-shaped noggin, hairless pate and the chunky Buddy Holly style glasses I went with, I fear I may end up resembling Dr. Bunsen Honeydew.

I discovered this wonderful statistics-gathering Perl script via the equally excellent Rands in Repose blog. It gathers data about your Twitter activity for general analysis which is incredibly geeky but, to one such as myself, also fantastically cool.

Since Twitter is rapidly becoming my preferred method of remote communication, I simply had to try this out. Unfortunately the default script package was designed to use Apple’s Numbers spreadsheet software which I don’t own so I used the variant script found in the comments for the original script post to use Google instead and came up with the following:

Tweets per hour

Tweets per day

Tweets per month

So some of the data is a little strange-looking primarily because up through August I was working a grave shift and since as you can see from the daily chart I do most of my Twittering during work hours, I have some activity in the wee hours of the morning. However, I’ve begun Twittering much more earnestly in the last couple of months, mostly due to me finally convincing several friends to join, which means the activity seems heavily weighted toward the regular daylight hours.

You’ll note a fairly fitful start at the beginning of the year. I’ve noticed that there seems to be kind of an adjustment period when people first get on the site: You update for a few days, forget about it for a week or so, remember again and make a single update and so on. Until at last there comes this sort of moment of clarity where you either get the critical mass of friends and acquaintances involved enough that it becomes a real means of communication (as opposed to an interesting toy) or you become so enamored with the idea of following the activities of other people in tiny bite-sized morsels delivered throughout the day that it just “sticks.” You’ll note that October was the moment of clarity for me and the dip in November was a sad side effect of me being dumb and forgetting that I can update from my phone while we were in Seattle visiting Fast-Track.

Incidentally, it would have been awesome to have Twittered from Seattle and I sincerely regret my lapse; I lamented the oversight on Twitter hours after we got back.

The script also tracks the ‘@reply’ usage as well, but since it took me the better part of the year to get anyone on the site that I know well enough to reply to, my stats in that category are dull and unimpressive (hence the omission). It’s also misleading because I’ve noticed that with Nik I tend to use direct messages (‘d DixieGirl’ for example) when I need to speak to her directly versus ‘@DixieGirl’ which everyone can see. However I tend to have semi-public conversations with Ryan so my top ‘@reply’ listing is @corvock even though I communicate with Nik via Twitter at least 3-to-1 compared with Ryan. But obviously these stats can’t collect info on the direct messages which aren’t publicly visible (that’s sort of the point).

What I find most interesting about all this is how it took Twitter to really make me see the benefit of text messaging, but because of it I now have a pretty steady stream of messages coming into (and out of) my phone. For sanity’s sake and also for the sake of my cell phone bill I’ve had to limit the people who’s tweets update directly on my phone to Nik and Scott, but I sincerely regret not being hip to what’s happening with Red, Gin, Whimsy, Lister, Ryan and the rest simply because I can’t afford to have 25 messages per day.

However, with Twitter facilitating so much of my daily communication now and with discoveries like the sublime Oh, Don’t Forget, I may have to simply call AT&T and crank up my text message plan to the next level and just be done with it.

I realize I’ve been neglecting the three people who read this site, but even as I shed some commitments that I made with the best of intentions to free up some time, the crushing demand for my mental capacity remains unwieldy. It doesn’t help that my maximum threshold was… unremarkable to begin with.

I have nothing noteworthy to say, but I feel compelled to stop in now and again to say “hi” as if that compensated for my general malaise. Better that I could produce something of note, but I’m sure you’ve come to expect nothing of the kind. Lo, the bullet point!

• I started following the Sharks about a month and a half into the season, or, if you prefer, several games ago. They currently sit atop the Pacific Division by a small margin, but they scarcely seem to deserve their position. What I’m more concerned about however is that it seems Sirius satellite radio’s loss of the NHL contract to XM escaped my notice. This development significantly impacts my affection for the service, and the terrestrial alternatives which ought to fit neatly into my driving-heavy schedule are so poor as to be nearly worthless. The general lack of appreciation for the country’s best sport remains a perpetual thorn in my side.
• Are you on Twitter? If not, please acclimate yourself to it promptly. I realize that the beauty of micro-blogging takes some time to appreciate, but once you accept the elegance of the 140-character limitation and note the wide assortment of update/notification options available, it fits casually into one’s life the way few other technological/social cross-breedings can.
• Had you been following my Twitter feed (which is conveniently updated on this very site), you would have noted that my Xbox broke about a week after my buddy Foster’s did. I tried to arrange a bait-and-switch scam with him to utilize my store warranty which I fear will expire presently without use. He declined for reasons that are his own, but when my machine broke the point became moot—until it began to be clear that a key component of the exchange (my receipt) had not smoothly made the move across town last spring. Hope still lingers that the mysterious boxes in the garage hold the valuable treasure, but they have become bed and breakfast facilities for several species of repugnant critters who respond to interruptions of their romantic vacationing by scurrying up one’s pant legs and distributing the crawling creeps whose effects last and last, sometimes for days.
• I had occasion over the last couple of weeks to work on some projects that felt strangely like coding. Wednesday is the day when our weekly shifts overlap so we have double coverage on all shifts and, when the day and swing hours intersect, up to four NOC personnel on hand. Because of this and because we only have two workstations, I chose to pull out my iBook and just do some project work elsewhere and let others handle the task of watching the service. As I worked and switched between Terminal, MySQL, Finder, Safari, Colloquy, Mail and installed various unix applications, OS X applications and generally made a lot of progress I noted that I was feeling something reminiscent, something almost forgotten: Joy, while computing. I’ve been working on Windows machines for about two years now as my primary employment-based environment and while tools like PuTTY, Pidgin and Firefox make things sort of tolerable, I never feel happy to be working on them. I think part of it is also that the work I was doing was similar to the kinds of things I used to do at my City job and, before that, the kinds of things I used to do contractually at home. But the uniting thread was really that I was working in a comfortable environment on something that interested me. That’s been happening less and less frequently the last couple of years and I need to find a way to recapture that because on days when I’m being honest with myself I note that I’m getting dangerously close to burning out in this line of work. What’s terrifying is that aside from muddling through technology work, I’m utterly useless as an employee.
• We’re heading up to Seattle for Thanksgiving this year, a departure of sorts but one I’m very much looking forward to. I went there last summer and absolutely loved it so I expect to have even more fun this time with additional folks along to appreciate it. And if you think I won’t be getting cream cheese hot dogs, you’re flat wrong. I’m not saying they will replace the turkey dinner, I’m just saying they are inevitable and given the choice between leftover turkey sandwiches carefully layered with gravy-moistened cornbread stuffing and cream cheese hot dogs, the outcome is not predetermined and may possibly result in paralysis. Of the mind.
• Exercise is my foe. It’s like this: I truly love being active. It’s kind of taken me a long time to realize this, because it suggests something that isn’t precisely true. But when I had buddies at work who were willing to join me and the time to spare, a high point of every day was going to the gym. And all I was doing was light cardio and some minor weight training. Practically the second I switched jobs and lost my daily partners, I drifted away from my daily regimen. These days I try to make it to the gym as often as is practical, but in fact the only consistency I’ve had is meeting my buddy Dave a couple of times on my off days for tennis or racquetball. And yet, again, those activities are among my week’s delights. It’s not that I’m terribly athletic—quite the opposite, actually—it’s that I find the typical awkwardness of purely social encounters dissipates entirely when framed by physical activity. In a strange twist, when either element is removed from the equation the result is remarkably unsatisfying and I prefer to retreat to my default environment of inactive and antisocial. Note that the general benefit of exercise remains even without any social context, and that includes a general sense of well-being and mental clarity, but I cannot apply raw logic to the scenario. For someone who keeps unusual hours and yet spends most of them parked in a chair with ready access to an assortment of free or dangerously inexpensive snacks, the recipe is fraught with peril.
• My brother, a generally awesome guy, upped his awesomeness factor once again by patiently waiting for me to come ’round on digital music mixing. His steady but non-pressurized acclaim for products such as Reaper ensured that as my inevitable curiosity finally got the better of me, I would readily find details I needed to dabble. Now, granted, Scott is a superb musician and I am… not. But, I have a strong affinity for creative endeavors and this is the kind of tech nerd/art nerd hybrid that touches the soft white underbelly of my soul. At the moment my technical and financial situation makes for a sort of interested observer level of involvement, but it would be the work of a nice bonus check or a few hours overtime to enable some deeper investigation which may result in… well, best not to speculate. But should such a situation arise, you can be certain I’ll subject you to it all.

My mind drifts in and out of linear thought, with an emphasis on out. My tailbone is sore and I’m twitchy in my seat, having gone too long without significant physical activity. It’s too early for a break, but I tell my co-worker that I’m going anyway. What, exactly, are they going to say?

I lock my workstation so no one sends questionable emails in my name and I cast a disgusted look at the television feed playing in a picture-in-picture window atop a scattered and disorganized cluster of mostly incomprehensible graphs and monitoring readouts. The feed is tuned to some anonymous 24-hour news station and they’re gleefully recapping the day’s sordid celebrity gossip as if it were legitimately newsworthy. Somewhere in the span of time it takes me to stand and stretch my back out against the protestations my shoulders and knees the channel switches to a more somber tale of soldiers in Iraq who re-enlist without notifying their families back home. The channel is muted by workplace requirement but the potentially intriguing story is sharply undercut in the silence by the inappropriately low-cut blouse worn by the field correspondent.

Taking the back door to avoid traipsing through the rows of offices filled with half-familiar cubehounds who spend their days staring out of their doorways, awaiting some passerby to hijack into a one-sided conversation about whatever uninteresting television show they caught the night before, I step into the poorly decorated upstairs lobby of the office complex. I take the stairs, as always, moving mostly on instinct just for the excuse to move but not without any actual purpose. Halfway down I meet an arbitrary group of Dockers-and-Polos with their belt-clipped cell phones and Bachelor’s degree haircuts who refuse to yield even a millimeter in their center-stair ascent which forces me to try and impersonate the grainy off-white paint on the stairwell walls to avoid being trampled by sixteen pair of identical imitation leather loafers.

By the time the cool autumn air touches my face I’m mentally weighing the possible repercussions of simply climbing into my car and driving as fast as traffic will allow toward home. Some kind of ingrained sense of responsibility that I keep trying to convince myself I do not possess compels me instead to turn the other direction and move toward the back of the parking lot. I don’t venture this direction often and as I pass the building south of the featureless one I call work I note with a touch of surprise that the tree-lined lot set against a surprisingly structure-free hillside is vaguely picturesque.

My momentary astonishment is crushed by the bawdy and senselessly loud one-sided conversation from an unknown receptionist taking a cigarette break out by the dumpster housing, peppered with screeching laughter and context-free profanity. I wonder with disgust how there could be a tranquil scene so close and yet she would choose to spend her personal time pressed tightly against a reeking trash bin. I stuff my hands into my pockets as far as they will go and I walk away from her offending voice as fast as I can without incorporating arm movement.

I’m deep into my bitterness, staring at the pavement as I walk in who-knows-what direction when suddenly I come across a small, shallow puddle. I look down into the water’s reflective surface, noting that the late afternoon lighting is just so and the trees I didn’t know I was approaching stretch not up but down into the pool’s mirror world, where an entire sky is hidden just beneath the oily water’s plane. I’ve stopped walking without realizing and I stare, down but yet up, at the tops of the trees beneath my feet.

A sense of vertigo I didn’t expect cascades over me, sending a surprise shudder down my back and I avert my eyes, back up to the trees casting the reflection. The sky is blue-grey and a thin sheet of dimpled clouds makes the sunlight hazy and familiar, recognizable from the puddle-world I just saw. With a heavy sigh, I close my eyes and smile.

I realize certain words are difficult to spell for a lot of people. “A lot,” for example is too commonly written as “alot.” The simple trick to remember that is, you’d never write “alittle,” and so you’d not “alot.” I love those little tricks because they work so well to provide context for what would otherwise be an exercise in rote memorization (a technique that clearly didn’t work in the first place). Sometimes a trick does not exist for a word I often misspell, so I have to make up my own. Here are a few of them.

• I struggled with “significant” for a long time until I noticed that you can make a little sentence out of parts of the word. “Sign if I can’t” is, minus the apostrophe, the correct spelling.
• The word “their,” aside from being part of the they’re/there/their trifecta of grammatical butchery, stymied me for some time because I was always trying to spell it “thier.” Once I noticed that no matter what form of the word you’re using it always contains the three-letter sequence “the,” it was no problem.
• Definitely is “in it.” That’s how I remember that it’s not “definately” or “defanitely” or “defineitely” or whatever other mess of vowels people toss into that word. After the “def” and before the “ely” it’s just “in it.”

If you have your own little spelling tricks, I’d love to hear them.

The best part of this exchange, by far, is the abrupt topic change at the end, which had me laughing so hard my co-workers, who were playing four-player foosball and blaring Daft Punk at the time, yelled at me to keep it down.

Also, a bonus IM conversation follows. As a bit of backstory, this exchange is with my friend Ryan. Ryan is awesome because he can out-geek me which isn’t exactly an accomplishment per se, but it does have a certain significance. Observe:

I’m not sure if you noticed, but I spend a lot of time online. It’s partially my job, but I’m a pretty ‘net-connected type guy in just a general fashion. And this is nothing new. Part of my net presence has, for the last six years or so, been this site here, ironSoap.org. I cultivate it, I design it, I’ve made it my own over various iterations and levels of attention. To a certain extent, ironSoap.org is me, when I’m online. If people want to know who ‘ironsoap’ is on an IRC channel or a forum, I put my web address in nearly every public-facing “profile” I can find.

It’s not like I’m trying to drive traffic to my site so they can click on ads and make me a bunch of money. I don’t run ads on ironSoap. I pay for the hosting and the domains from my own pocket and I create all the content here. The key reason why ill-fated efforts like Hyperbolic Avatars existed was because I didn’t care to have other people—even people I love and respect—putting themselves onto my site.

There is even a conscious effort to make the site intuitive: Wherever I use the name ironsoap (which is pretty much everywhere), I figure people could put that “word” into a search engine and come up with this site. What else is called “ironsoap” after all? Or, they could just try “ironsoap.com” and they’ll come here. If they want to talk to me, ironsoap@ironsoap.org works as you’d expect. So does paul@ironsoap.com. I don’t advertise these addresses; they aren’t my official email address. But my official email address is listed and I like to it all the time without de-spamminating it: paul@ironsoap.org. Yeah, I get a lot of junk mail and I have to do aggressive filtering on my inbox.

But I don’t mind. This is me. Me online. I have a presence, by design.

So help me out here. A lot of people I know are on Facebook. Or MySpace. Or whatever other social networking site. Orkut or whatever. I don’t know. For the longest time I’ve avoided them. I’ve done so on purpose, because to me they simply seemed like a new-wave version of Geocities. They appeared, from my observational vantage point high on my horse, to be nothing more than a simple way to create an online presence. And, of course, tie it into someone else’s system so they can serve you ads and adjust the Terms of Service as they see fit. So they can limit you to their design sensibilities and the limitations of their web engineering departments.

My stance on all these things has always been, “No thanks. I already have a web presence. I’ve had it since 2001.” Is it smug? You betcha. But is it also true? Absolutely.

I’ve heard people complaining to me that I’m not “hooked in” with their little circle of Facebookies or MySpacers and they grumble that it wouldn’t kill me to have a profile set up. And they’re right, I suppose it wouldn’t. But why should I? Why would I want to keep a separate account for all these sites that offer me no value whatsoever? I don’t create profiles on Motley Fool just in case some armchair investor wants to contact me. My thought process is this: I’m not hard to find, but if you can’t narrow a Google search enough to track me down, you probably don’t know me well enough for me to want to talk to you anyway.

I didn’t say I wasn’t an elitist jerk.

But it’s getting out of control. I have Facebook invites coming in from business contacts now. What gives? Has the whole world gone mad? Am I overlooking something pivotal about these sites? Tell me, dear readers, why should I bother?

Is there anything I could do on a social networking site that I can’t do on ironSoap? Anything that makes me the jerk for not joining up when I’ve been trying to drag people online since 1998 only to find that when they got here they started telling me how it’s “done”? Have I gotten old and set in my ways already, destined to be the cranky old coot on the Internet’s porch screaming at the dang kids to get off my LAN?

What, exactly, is in it for me?

Nik and I have been discussing the local police blotter via IM for the last couple of weeks. By “discussing” I do mean “making fun of” because our blotter is full of lunacy and prank calls and precious little of actual concern. Unless you’re concerned about getting your catalytic converter stolen.

I’m serious. Those things get swiped all the time in our town.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to try to set up a podcast of us doing it live because it’s pretty funny sometimes (to us, at least) but until I get around to that I had to share part of today’s exchange. Some of the content has been altered slightly from the original, for legibility reasons.

Eventually my brain is bound to expire. It’s like milk that way, only in my case the date was not set far in the future the way most folks prefer, very different from the serendipity they will dig through cartons toward the mysterious world beyond the dairy case to obtain. Mine is like the lone quart left in a gas station snack shop, ink stamp smudged almost beyond legibility: Did that say ’09′ or ’06′? If you’re desperate, you’ll buy it anyway and hope for the best.

Whatever you do, you don’t leave it on the front seat of your car in August, practically begging for some sort of souring process to accelerate, perhaps leading to solidification. Likewise, I have little enough facilities to draw upon as it is and here I am lighting them afire with reckless abandon: Write for this site here! Contribute to that forum there! Maintain a similarly themed site of your own! Avoid neglecting your long-standing outlet! Then I arrive at my actual job and I’m expected to maintain a rapport with various co-workers via—guess what—written communications and then I recall that I have solicited people to contact me via email and IM so I must meet or exceed their expectations lest my future solicitations go unheeded. Further I am chastised by my like-minded acquaintances for not being hip to the game when I fail to maintain my Twitter profile and resort to archaic communication methods like phone calls rather than text messaging…

It is as though my phalanges and have begun to crust into crude claws and my vocal cords have withered like grapes on a vine or are mutating outward from my throat into hideous mandibles. Meanwhile, as mentioned, my mind has slipped into a state that is undoubtedly dangerous where the surface wrinkles contract and smooth over. The result will be either the development of telepathic powers or, more probably, the reduction of higher function leaving me in a state of reactionary instinct.

Essentially, I am becoming an insect.

Fortunately, even insects can fashion bullet points, of a sort.

• I managed to screw up rather badly at work. My job can be boiled down to its hot molten core as such: Detect problems before they manifest to our customers. Suffice to say that when a customer then contacts me to inform that there is a serious problem on our platform, I’ve basically failed in some key fashion. There were, as you might expect, certain extenuating circumstances. But those are probably merely enough to save my job, but certainly not my face.
• My commute is actually lengthening with each passing day. I leave a little bit earlier each morning and yet I arrive at work a little later. At this point I believe I’m up to two and a half hours in the morning. My nighttime commute is a steady hour and fifteen minutes, but I keep hoping there will come a point when there are literally no more humans left to stand between me and my destination. I did not anticipate that humanity is apparently reproducing at a rate that exceeds my car’s maximum speed.
• Nik is currently between jobs and being understandably choosy about what she decides to take on next. This has given her ample time to serve as a sort of post modern housewife for the last few weeks. At first she was timid, and approached her role as “fabricator of the evening meal” with trepidation. Steadily, though, her confidence has grown and last night she cooked a pork tenderloin whose equal I had not previously encountered. This is significant because while Nik has always been competent in the kitchen she has rarely ventured into a territory I found literally delectable and—this is most significant—experimental. Not only was the dinner last night scrumptious but it was unfamiliar to the extent that it almost felt illicit.
• An interesting bit of trivia: If you take a job that requires you to sit for ten solid hours and you interpret this missive literally, then marry that activity with an increased appetite for Kettle brand potato chips and Keebler Fudge Stripe cookies, you will gain weight. I discovered this through several clinical trials and now must reset in order to begin the control testing. My method for this is the same as it ever was: Regular exercise and a greater attention to what I eat. Part of my exercise routine involves comical-looking machines that I consider to be my arch nemeses; the other part involves playing an innocent looking sport called racquetball. There is not so much innocence there as you would assume. It doesn’t help if you’re a 5′ 7″ water buffalo on the court, however. I managed to run directly into a concrete wall playing this game last week and I got, for my efforts, a goose egg on my knee which turned into the most colorful bruise you’re likely to see. I suspect it’s all in the nearly perfect eggshell white of the canvas. I don’t go out much.
• Nik bought the DVD set of The Office, Season Three. I caught a few episodes here and there last year but wasn’t that impressed. My expectation was low because of this as I entered, but I came out the other side with my faith in the show’s writers renewed. You know how most shows have a central relationship that is in turmoil or question and you are supposed to root for the characters involved to work it out? Often to prolong the drama the writers will introduce a third party, another character, to stand in the way. Nearly every time this third character is abhorrent and so obviously written as a foil to the relationship that the whole exercise feels false. In the Office they did something similar but in a stroke of brilliance the foil is not demonstrably more or less likable than the central figures which generates something that feels authentic. Recall, for a moment, that I’m referring to a sitcom.