Perfect Void

I have finally entered the world of smart phones. For the first time in my life, I have a phone of comparable technology to a majority of my friends. I have always been behind the curve in terms of cell phone technology for the simply reason that I just didn’t need any of the features (and I still don’t), but now I want them. I decided against the iPhone route because I had already played with them enough since all my friends have them. Since there seems to be a surge of Android phones entering the market, I went with the HTC Hero from Sprint. So far, I’m happy with my purchase, but I still need to further the use of my mobile platform.

There are a few cool android apps, very few. I think I have all the highly recommended ones and only use about four routinely. There is a lot of potential, and I’m banking on the fact that the Droid and forthcoming Android phones will boost the quality of future apps. I started playing with the API a little and will probably throw something together just for the hell of it, I have at least one idea.

Now that I have this smart phone I’m left with some pressing questions to decide:

• Will I actually give in and start using Twitter?
• Will I text as frequently as I IM? (Already leaning to yes so far)
• Will I find something useful to use my phone for besides texting and email? (doubtful)

It’s performance evaluation season at work, so I figured I’d extend that out to my blog. Here is my self-assessment for the year.

• Blogging: B- (Though worse in the recent past)
• Work Ethic: B+
• Social Life: A-
• Love Life: F
• Friendships: B
• Outgoingness: C+
• Happiness: B

Hopefully my work assessment turns out a little better than this one did.

I was bored earlier today so I decided to check out the big Tea Party protest on the National Mall. I metro-ed in after the main events, so I was traveling against a constant stream of protesters going the opposite direction as me. I don’t think I’ll ever see as many shirts with the word ’socialist’ on them as I did today. It was just like all the other protests you see on TV.

The first interesting thing I noticed didn’t have anything to do with the tea party at all. Apparently today was the 24th Annual National Council of Negro Women, Inc. Black Family Reunion Celebration. I found it slightly amusing that this group of people was sharing the same lawn as the Tea Party goers. The tea party goers did not dissapoint with their signs and t-shirts. I think the oddest that I noticed was a guy wearing a shirt that said ‘I’d rather be waterboarding.’ There were also a fair number of people dressed in colonial attire. As expected, there protesters were exuding a grab bag of issues. It seemed pretty unfocused (other than everyone calling Obama a socialist).

I’m glad I walked through the melee. It’s always fun to hear random people talk about politics and using Fox News talking points. I heard a bunch of people talking about how they came because Glen Beck said they should. I also saw a lot of copies of his book. On the way home I was surrounded by people discussing Glen Beck’s book and Atlas Shrugged and relating both of them to how Obama is ruining the country. Protests are fun…or at the very least entertaining.

“She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her w/ babies right away.”

I am currently reading Slaughterhouse Five (only a few more pages to go). The above quote is from the book, and pretty much makes the book for me. I was very amused when I came across it. I mentioned it to a friend and he, strangely enough, said he also took special note of that quote. I blame awesomeness.

For some strange reason, Kurt Vonnegut has come up as a topic an inordinate number of times in my conversations recently. It seems a good portion of my friends are reading his books at this time. I have a couple friends reading or that just finished Slaughterhouse Five, one reading Cat’s Cradle, one reading Player Piano, and one that recently finished Breakfast of Champions. I guess it’s not too odd considering how popular he is. To add to the theme, just today I got a magazine issue in the mail that features a short story by the Vonnegut.

I have mixed feelings about his books. I’ve only read two so far (the other being Cat’s Cradle). His books seem to have really cool premises, but I feel like they don’t quite live up to how awesome the summaries make them sound. It also really annoys me how he picks a phrase and keeps repeating it though the entire book. I do enjoy the books, I just feel like I should enjoy them more. Player Piano sounds cool, so I may give that a try next and hope I don’t fall into the same trap again.

I’ve always been a huge fan of scones. How could you not love a food that goes so well with a cup of coffee? I decided to make a batch of blueberry scones on a whim today, you can see the results above. It’s pretty quick and easy, I think I need to start making them more often. They came out much more biscuit-like than the store bought ones. That and the gooey pockets of warm blueberry made for a pretty good after dinner treat (with an accompanying pot of coffee of course).

I just had a conference in Orlando for the past week. It was fairly useless overall. We had classes on exciting topics such as risk management and earned value management. There were some speakers too, none that really stood out though. For one panel of speakers we played buzzword bingo, that was fun — but since no one on the panel was an executive, it took a bit longer to win than expected. The area around the conference was much better than previous ones, there was actually a good selection of bars to goto in walking distance. We were near Disney, Sea World and Universal, but I didn’t end up going to any of those places.

The best part of the trip was the time before the conference. Some friends and I flew down to Miami and stayed on South Beach a few days at The Park Central Hotel. It was a really good location, right by the beach and walking distance to the clubs. I didn’t realize that Florida had such awesome beaches before. South Beach puts the gulf side beaches that I’ve been to previously to shame. (And the fact that it’s a de-facto topless beach doesn’t hurt either). I think I might need to go back to south beach sometime in the future, it’s probably my new favorite Florida location.

Currently, I’m back in Chicagoland for a friend’s wedding. When I finally get back to DC on sunday, this will have been a nice 10 day, 3 city trip. And I only needed to use 10 hours of vacation thanks to conference activities!

Parking lots and 24-hour things (though maybe I just can’t find these).

My office has recently experienced a surge in people. We suddenly have a bunch of new hires, and the addition of an increasing number of summer interns. This has lead to a rather annoying problem, through no fault of any one individual. Every once and a while a bunch of us like to go for a lunch outing. In weeks past, we usually split into very reasonably sized groups when we went to a restaurant. Now, there just seem to be too many people. Our office is pretty social in general, so we don’t seem to currently be forming cliques of reasonable lunch-outing sizes. Last time I tried to arrange a quick, ad-hoc lunch trip, the invitation propagated for about 40 minutes and reached approximately 20 people, nine of which came. Now I don’t like to exclude people (well most people), but when groups reach more than about six, the seating, paying and travel become awkward. And that causes everything to take time that people don’t want to expend when they need their 40 hours for the week.

The best solution is invite everyone, and hope only a reasonable number accept. Unfortunately, this doesn’t tend to work out most of the time. I’ll have to wait and see how things work out once the office reaches capacity, until then I guess I’ll have to ford through the risk; cause I’m not going to start packing a lunch.

I tend to not have enough motivation to accomplish things normally, so I decided to publicize some goals in attempt to force myself to go through with them.

1. Build something robotic. The current leading idea is an automated drink mixer, but anything robot-like will do.
2. Complete prototypes of two software projects that are mildly interesting to at least one other person. (maybe start an LLC)
3. [ Classified ]
4. Become certified as a Dive Master.
5. Make a movie/short.
6. Pick up one new hobby and become reasonably good at it. (Though I have no idea what the hell that might be.)
7. Work out before work every day that I don’t need to be in early (at least 80% of the time).
8. Do something or go somewhere new at least every other weekend.
9. Finish 10 books.

Target Date: November 18, 2009