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National Novel Writing Month is once again almost upon us.   I’m hoping to “win” this year by actually finishing my first novel (now decades in the making).  I’ve been trying to pump out blog content to be published over the next month, some good, some bad and some “meh”.  But I’m planning for nanowrimo now and I was wondering, would it be possible (with enough caffeine) to sit down and write the 50,000 words in one session.   My first instinct is it wouldn’t be (for me), not that I’m going ot attempt it.

Though I looked over my past track record, I’ve knocked out 3000 word blog articles in an hour before (very very rare), why couldn’t I?  With enough caffeine I could see me doing it in under twenty hours.  I just wonder if anyone that is trying to finish is actually going ot attempt this.   I’m hopeful that the first night I will be able to break out and do 5000 words.   I only need to do 1667 words a day to finish the novel.

Heck this post is a little over 200 words, it took me just a few minutes to write.  If this was practice for my novel I would be already 1/8 the way there for the for the day.

All other NANOWRIMOers – I wish you the best of luck.   See you on the other side.

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I originally wrote this for Journey to Get Paid published here.

It seems more and more of my past associates and friends are starting businesses, mostly ones dealing with a tech front. You have Shea who seems to be starting a a new business model for something every week. Most of his stuff deals with blogging or enviromental concerns such as wind energy. He works for himself and his latest venture deals with making t-shirts.

I have another friend who just left his current cozy job to do a security company with a partner. He’s planned this for months so it’s not a phantom leap in the dark. I am however very impressed – now if I could only find a partner to do a similar thing here in the midwest.

Finally a friend from Oregon contacted me to ask me questions on kiosks. It turns out he started an eco friendly baby item website. Of course I think there should be a blog attached to it, but he has his own online business which he said is going well. (btw use the coupon code BRENTSPAWN there to get 5% off).

I’m interested and ecstatic about new media. New media however for someone like me doesn’t pay the bills. Until I can figure out how to successfully monetize my activities I’ll have to keep my normal boring day job.

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A couple weeks ago when the VCMA had their concert in Vermilion, OH there were school teachers wandering around the downtown area (the picture above is not my hometown) protesting.   I can’t say I understand completely what they were protesting, but before I go into a rant about the protesting – I’ll give you my understanding from what I got out of it and what others told me.

The contract from the local school district had been changed; previously the school district paid for the retirement of its teachers or supplied a portion of it.  Recently however this had been changed to put the burden on cost to the teachers who will have to pay their own retirement compared to the school district footing the bill.  I don’t even live in the same county as my past hometown, so my diatribe has no bearing other then outside views since my taxes will not be raised, nor will the quality of education my children receive be impacted.

The first thing that comes to mind – welcome to the real world.   I know a ton of people that went into public service or civil servant positions for the retirement.   It didn’t matter what the job was, it just mattered that at the end of the career they received that fat benefits and nice retirement package.   They could be a janitor or they could be a mailman, as long as the benefits were there at the end of the career they would be happy.   I’m so I care about what I do now and though I should be worry, I’m not thinking about the end of my career yet.  No one I know professionally get’s their retirement paid for by their employer anymore, that notion is old and out of date.

If a company in this day and age announced it was going to have an all inclusive retirement package for its employees there are a few things that come to mind.   The first being, what person is going to stay with a company for the 25-30 it takes to qualify for a retirement package – jobs don’t work that way anymore, very few people in this day and age start at a company at 18-20 and retire from that same company.  It’s idiotic and small minded in so many ways, to believe that you will be with the same employer.  The second is how far would a stock drop in a publicly traded company that announced something like this.   In the age of profits and margins an announcement like this would be considered fiscally irresponsible by the share holders.   However our tax money goes out to support all the public servants of our local, state, and federal governments.  Personally I understand the point of unions – but I don’t think anyone should get the guaranteed contracts that union works receive.   It should be dog eat dog and fight for the best value for the dollar instead of bringing down the people at the top and raising those at the bottom.  This is my tax money and the billions that the government could save by not offering automatic benefits are enormous.

There is another reason though I don’t have respect for the protest.  My freshmen year in high school my (then future) band director was up for retirement.   He decided that he wasn’t going to retire and he was going to keep teaching for another 3 years.  The next year was my first in band (other then a brief stint in 5th grade) and David Henry is now the metric I judge all other band directors against.   My senior year was his final year.   In a side conversation with him one day I asked him why doesn’t he just keep going?  He told me and a friend that he lost 15% (these numbers maybe wrong but it’s been 14 years and the intent is still the same) of his pension because he went on and taught the last three years.  He was happy to do it and would have done it again.   However, if he continued for another three years he would lose another 30% of his pension, and that he could not afford to do.

David Henry at the VHS Alumni Band Practice in 2007

Why is this relevant?  Well the teachers I saw protesting were all obviously younger then I am, and I’m not that old at 32 – the most they could be in their career is 10 years and that would still be stretching it.  I’m sure that most of them got into it for the idea of having summers off and the decent retirement package.  Some did it for the pure joy of teaching, and for those I would hope they would have done the job diligently regardless of the benefits at the end of the career.   One of the largest arguments that I’ve heard is that teachers are underpaid.  I won’t argue that, but at the same time almost all of them knew the pay rates before they started.   Feeling bad because they make 30-40k a year is just as bad as feeling sorry that the check out clerk makes minimum wage.  There is no surprises, they knew the scale and the pitfalls going into the game.   They could have done something else if they wanted to make more money.  They should do what they want to do because they enjoy it, not because of the money they make now and in the future.  I don’t see any of the love in teaching in them that I saw in David Henry.

Maybe it’s unfair to compare them to Mr. Henry.  He is one fo the two teachers that influenced me most heavily in my young life, though both of those teachers taught at teh same school district that these teachers are protesting in.   These are just my thoughts, take them to heart or throw them aside as you see fit.

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In the last year I’ve started rolling in more of my high school, college, and for lack fo a better description “real life mundane” friends into my online social profiles.   Mostly in the past I’ve kept it down to current co-workers and friends I was an actively engaged with and friends from the online video games I used to play.  On the surface there is a simple reason for this, most people from high school I didn’t like.  I don’t need to play the “hey great to see you, what are you up to, why have we never talked since high school discussion”.  They seem to forget that we didn’t talk when we were in high school.

Now I have friends from elementary school in my Myspace and Facebook friends list.   Last night my college room mate (and other college friends) showed up on facebook finally.   My college room mate had managed to stay very quiet for well over a decade online and I hadn’t been able to track him down.  I’m still waiting for him to actually accept my friend invitation, but as far as I know we didn’t leave on bad terms.

I wrote the other day about being grown up, everyone is now old married, has kids…the whole gambit.   I wonder if they all feel as young as I do and still feel the same as I did in my early twenties.  Maybe they do.

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Last night I we had our community band practice moved to a church for the night.  Ironically it was the church of the girl I lived with before I was with my wife (over a decade ago).  I wish I could tell you that we broke up over a mutual disagreement where we went our own separate ways but it didn’t work out like that.   Since at one point of time she was once a huge point of my life I thought I would document her, at that point the facts will be recorded and I’ll put the past behind me.

When I was a freshmen in high school I met Kim the night of the High School Homecoming dance (back in 1990 – cripes this memory is of legal age).  I had friends in marching band (this was the year before I started playing trumpet at all) and I was hanging out with them some girl was just wandering around a circle of people crying on the shoulders of those around her.  I was one of those people, this girl was Kim.   She had just been dumped by some guy and the marching band members were taking the pity circle approach.  She started crying on me and I didn’t know who the hell she was.   Eventually she moved on to the next person.  A few weeks later she started dating my best friend, fortunately I didn’t go out with them to do anything so I saw very little of her the rest of the school year.  She popped up occasionally but for the most part she was a non issue.

Picture of me and my best friend that brought Kim into my life – bastard.

The next summer I got conned into joining marching band (ironically I didn’t play an instrument at the time) and I was there around the time my friend dumped Kim (who graduated the previous year) so he could have a shot at chasing after another girl.   Kim hung around the marching band practices like graduated seniors with nothing better to do occasionally do.  One day it was raining and I asked her for a ride home – curse her.   This started to be a regular thing, she was still upset with my friend leaving her so she would talk to me about him, and other things.   After a couple months of becoming good friends we started dating.   On a cool fall day down the road from house at her friend’s house I had my first kiss sitting on the hood of her 1991 powder blue Topaz.

I started sneaking out a lot at night to see her, I think this was the start of my 4 hours a night sleeping routine.   I had sneaking out of my house down to the science.   Sometimes I wonder which was greater, the nights I did sneak out or the nights I didn’t.   My parents were not too ecstatic with their 15 year old son dating an 18 year old.   I’ll also be kind enough to leave out details and allow you to read between the lines when it comes to intimate details.

This was also the year I started writing.  I started with poetry and found I had a knack for it.  I did the silly love letters and so did she.   I think I still have a few of them.  Almost all of my poetry is already is already on this blog but I’m sure there are some journal pages (folks that was analog blogging) I’ve left out.   I’m sure reading them today would sound very Emo-ish.  If I can find them and read through my chicken scratch hand writing I’ll put them up.

The summer that followed we spent most of our time with one another, we went to movies, to Cedar Point, and other related activities.  One thing I can remember sticking out in my mind was when we left Cedar Point because the weather was picking up.  As we were driving back there was a Tornado siting in our town.  We watched the skies carefully and made it back to her parent’s house.   We found out later that a tornado did touch down about 2 miles from us.  It was very crazy and stupid to be driving out in that.

We dated for 9-10 months and the following year in marching band I took my friends lead and dumped her.  I started dating another girl Mari.   About 3 months later that relationship didn’t work out and I left Mari.   We’ll discuss more on Mari another day.   At this point Kim was going with Nate, some guy ahead of me in school.

Mari from back when I dated her.

Well Kim and I started talking again since we had always been good friends.  On December 31st, 1992 I was having a New Years Eve party at my house (with a fair amount of people as I recall) and I get a phone call from Kim.   She wasn’t going to stop by because some of the people there didn’t like her, which was fine.  She was at her friend’s house at another party just a couple streets over.  What ever was going through her mind, because though we had been talking again off an on, she wanted me to stop over and talk for a few minutes.   So like a good friend (fool) I wander over to talk to her.   What I don’t remember if she told me was that her boyfriend Nate was there.

We were talking (and sitting on that damn Topaz again) and someone started yelling inside the house.  Out of this house busts this big guy.  All he said was “Nate wanted me to mess you up.” and I got punched in the face.  Since I was on the edge of the car he caught me in a spin and knocked me down a few feet from where I was standing. This was the second time in my life I have been punched (in a true fight and haven’t been punched since).  I think he may have gotten in a couple more shots, it’s been so long ago it’s a blur.  This guy’s girlfriend and Kim dragged him off an pulled him back into the house, Kim apologized and I wandered back home.

When I got there I was fuming, I grabbed a baseball bat from my bedroom and started back towards the front door.  Luckily from a police record stand point I was talked down by the people at my party.   Granted half the guys wanted to go over there and start something, but the girls at the party and some of the other guys cooled down the situation.  I never went over.   Since that night was one of the few times I have been punched it’s etched into my brain.

Things calmed down and Kim and I continued talking.  A few months later things didn’t work out between her and Nate and they broke up.   We dated a little bit for a few weeks, but just kind of maintained a friendship point of view.  After that we went our separate ways for awhile.   In spring of 1994 my girlfriend at the time dumped me right before prom (today we have different takes on how this went down).  Shortly after that (somehow I don’t remember) Kim and I started talking again.   Talking lead to dating.    This was the road that it always was with Kim.   Being friends and trying to keep it platonic always lead to something more.

We dated through the summer and she even went to my Mother’s wedding.  My step-father and I never really saw eye to eye, he came into the house trying to be an alpha male.  It wasn’t happening though.  We never got along though for time periods we could fake it and even be civil to one another.   Why is this relevant?  Well right after the wedding took place ( I played trumpet so I was part of the service) I guess my step father made a lot of derogatory remarks to her about her and about me.  Then and there I didn’t know this.  She told me as we were driving back to my mother’s house for a wedding reception.

I was fuming.  I arrived to the house just a couple minutes before my mother and my new step father.  I happily started a screaming match on the front lawn.  Luckily Kim was house sitting at her sister’s place for a couple of weeks I went inside and grabbed a couple changes of clothes and left for a few weeks, never even calling.  Sometime during this time frame being an young fool I asked Kim to marry me and she said yes.  I was just a couple weeks past eighteen and I was engaged.

I came home and stayed for a couple weeks before I was to leave for college.   The big day arrived and I was supposed to use my mother’s mini van to haul all my stuff an hour south to school.  Originally my mother was going to drive me down to school and Kim and my friend Tim were supposed to come and help move stuff.  My mother said she would go but my step father also had to come.   I didn’t want him there and asked if we could just take the van and Kim would bring it back afterward.  Well this escalated into a screaming match that rivaled the wedding reception just a month or so earlier.

I hadn’t been on speaking terms really with my father at this point, and there was a lot of animosity between my mother and him.  My step-father helped fuel this by mocking me and saying my father should take me down (I literally had to be at the school the next day for college marching band camp).  Time was dragging on and the fighting escalated, I ended up kicking the mini van in the front passenger side fender and leaving a huge dent that stayed there for a few years until my step father pounded it out.   For a little FYI the mini van was already packed and filled with all my stuff.    Even if I had compromised and capitulated and had him go there literally was no room for a fifth person in that van.  My mother had enough at this point and handed us the keys.

I think I cried the whole way down to college this was the second time my mother chose my step father over her child in what was an important day in his life.   We made it to school and I settled in.  We were going to do the long distance relationship.  There was a phone on campus where i used to make collect calls to her (or I had a huge roll of quarters sometimes).   When I called collect I used a fake name so her parents wouldn’t know it was me and think it was a wrong number if she didn’t answer the phone.   She came down and visited once (which looking back for a 40 minute drive really is pathetic – that’s less then one way in my daily commute).   After three of four weeks I had enough and broke it off with her.  I started dating someone at college and I called it a day.

Christmas break rolled around and I was kind of in between girlfriends at the time (another post for another time) and Kim and I managed to get back together.   We spent most the month with each other and when it came time to go back to school, I took a side trip to see my grandfather who was in the hospital.   We drove down to the Dayton area about 4 hours away and stayed at my my grandfather’s house since no one else was there.   That night Kim went to bed and I stayed up and wrote a letter to my grandmother.  The next day we headed to the hospital but stopped at my grandmother’s grave and I left the note for her there.   We went and visited my grandfather who had suffered and stroke and lost 60% of his body mass.  She was there for me and I appreciated it.

School rolled around and I reconciled with my girlfriend from the previous semester.  Now for some reason this should have been a straight break up with Kim moment.   I held off for a couple days and Kim came down to visit.   The situation was not a surprise to my college girlfriend, she knew what was happening.    I took Kim to the local mall and we walked and talked, but my college girlfriend stalked us and was obvious about following us. After getting back to the car Kim asked what it all was about, I explained and broke up with her.  She dropped me off at my dorm room and I thought then that she left.   I went up and spent time with my college girlfriend, while this was happening Kim proceeded to make out with my roommate’s best friend.  That’s the kind of rebound girl she was.

At this point you would think that the Kim college years era was over, well not quite.   I get a phone that she is pregnant and needs to talk.   I arrange it that I come home that weekend to talk to her.  Problem was college girlfriend insisted on going and I had not told her about the pregnancy.  I manage to get up north and slip away for a little bit to talk to Kim.   This leads me back home and my college girlfriend is upset.  She tells me she is pregnant (I had not told her Kim was pregnant yet).  So I’m 18 years old and I find out in less then seven days that I have two girls pregnant.  To add to the top of the tower here, college girlfriend and I break up.

A few weeks later I’m dating someone else and I find out both college girlfriend and Kim have miscarriages within a week of each other.  I don’t tell anyone and did not tell either one of them, so it’s coincidence that they both told me, and today I think they were both lying to me over the incident.   Around this time period my grandfather died and I was dealing with that also.   College progressed mostly Kim until summer rolled around.  I was not going back to school the following year, so two weeks after moving back I moved out of my mothers house and moved in with Kim who had taken over her sisters apartment.

Kim managed to get me a job at the local Speedway, which at the time was about the size of two of the cubicles I have at work now.   I enjoyed working there, I enjoyed the night shift.   One day however I got in a disagreement with the manager and just up and quit.  After that my high school friend that originally dated Kim secured me a job at a local marina.   I did that for a year paying the bills until I secured my first computer job.   All through this Kim and I stayed together.   One day a girl saw us at a restaurant and told me (a year or so later) that she felt so bad for me she wished there was something she could do for me.   I used to go out and hang out with friends until early morning hours and around this time I finally got my drivers license (I was twenty).

One night Kim went out and didn’t come home, she stayed at a friends house – a single male friends house – after a night of drinking.  from all accounts nothing happened, I don’t happen to believe that.  The reason I didn’t believe it was that my high school friend kept saying she came on to him when I wasn’t around.  I believe him, not her.  Things were getting worse and worse over the next year, I would go out more and she would do her own thing.  She criticized my friends, or say they were too young. or into the wrong things.   Though we did manage to go camping twice while we lived together.

The first time we drove to somewhere in the backwoods of Pennsylvania with her parents.  Her parents treated me even worse then she did, so for the week we were there I hated it the whole time.   It’s hard to get me to go camping as it is now (ask Xie) let alone with people I don’t really like.   The second time we went camping I took a friend with me, in the middle of the trip Kim went storming off and said she was taking off and going home leaving use 300 miles away from home with no way back.  While she was so confident and storming off to her car I told her to “Screw off, ” I then laughed at her and told her I had her keys which she asked me to hold.   My friend and I left her at the camp and went off hiking.   Things reconciled and at this point we are at July 1997.

At this point I was hanging out in a different crowd with people with which I’m still friends with some of them until this day.  There was a girl who caught my eye and I was interested in.  My friend from the camping trip and were talking and I asked him if this girl would be interested in me if I was single.   He said she probably would be (he had no clue).  This is a Tuesday night.  I went over and talked to my mother and asked her if I could move my stuff back home.  I then showed up at the apartment with at least 10 people with 3-4 vehicles and I told Kim I was moving out and the group then paraded through the apartment and had me moved out in about 20 minutes.   I told Kim I would come back and we could talk about it after I got everything unloaded.

I went back and spent the night at the apartment (nothing happened) and we talked most the night.   She borrowed 100.00 from me so she could pay rent.   The next day I asked the girl I was interested in out on a date.   Kim called me on Thursday night to see if I wanted to do something on Friday.  I told her I had a date.   The next morning there was books and items strewn across my mothers lawn.   Things that I had forgotten to take with me.   The date went off without a hitch and the girl told me that a year or so earlier she had seen me at the restaurant broken and wished she could have helped me.   This girl was Xie and I married her.

You would think this is where it ends, but there is an addendum.   Xie had recently broken up with her boyfriend.  For some reason it was in her boyfriend’s head  and Kim’s head that we mutually dumped both of them to be together.  It was a matter of circumstance, but to them they felt the logical thing was to date each other.   Xie and I laughed and let them be on there way.  Kim degenerated more and more, she slept around a lot, somehow everyone thought I wanted to here and know about the stories so they filtered in.  After trying to make me jealous didn’t work she dated a couple people and then one day a couple years later I get a note on the windshield of my car outside the apartment Xie and I had.   It said she missed me and really jsut wanted to be friends.   Well we’ve seen how being friends worked out in the past, I never called her.

I did have to deal with her for a few years at the High School Alumni Band every year, but I guess while I was in Oregon she got in a big huff with someone and said she was never coming back.   Yay me!  That was a treat to hear when I came back.  Other news that passed through the grape vine while I was in Oregon was that she worked as a lunch lady for a little bit, my sisters told me they saw her working at the school.  She was married, but the marriage only lasted a few months.   Now it seems that I hear that she is single and can’t find anyone that wants to settle down with her (I don’t blame them).

The last year we were together she was working for my father, and still worked for him a little ways after the break up.   She borrowed 100.00 dollars from him and never paid it back.   So she owes him and I each 100.00 dollars, it’s definitely worth eating the loss to have to not deal with her again.

The last couple years she has been at the sidelines with Tim who helped me move to college all those years ago (as friends they always have been) during the Vermilion Woolybear Festival while the whole band is on the float.  She kept her head down, pulled a hood over her head and wore sunglasses, but it was her.   I think she was hiding from teh band in general then just me since Tim looked shocked my first year back from Oregon seeing me on the float so I’m sure she had no idea I was up there before hand.

I started this off by saying I had practice in her old church.  While on break I wandered around a little bit and saw a K Pearce in the member mail box area with a pamphlet in it.  I then found a board that had pictures of all the members and who they were.  There was her picture.  She looks a good 10 years old then she she should and who knows if the picture is recent.  I thought for a minute to put my initials in an art style she would recognize as knowing where they came from on the pamphlet in her mail box.   I thought about putting my email address, or just typing in “Google Creeva”.  I then realized I might find it funny or humorous at that moment, but it wasn’t worth it.   The humor did not out weigh the pain of maybe actually having to hear from her or deal with her in any way.

If you know her and see her, you can happily tell her about this.   I’m happily married and in January it will be my tenth wedding anniversary.   I’ve managed to sum up most the highlights in the relationship in a few paragraphs.  If she wants to meet in public and talk about them I’ll be happy to…….as long as she has the 200.00 she owes me and my father.  I’ll give her time to finish a coffee at the very least.   I’d even bring the coffee, all conditional on the back debt being paid.   Otherwise I just look at the life she has, where she has gone, and what she has brought upon herself.  Do you know what I do when I do that?  I laugh.

The 2007-2008 season of the Ashland Community Band is over.   It will resume back up in the Fall (September 2nd) but for now the musicians receive a reprieve and a break from the weekly practices.   It is interesting, I originally joined community band to get back into shape for my high school Alumni Band which lasts only one day a year.  What I found was another experience.

I am a member of two community bands, the Ashland Community Band and the Vermilion Community Concert Band.  Neither one is really better then another, they are both different and have their own strengths.   The Ashland Community Band is lead by my college band director Leonard Salvo (pictured above) so I have a feel of consistency there.  I can say playing music from a theory perspective, jumping to different keys, improvisation, and playing by ear that I am about 60-75 percent from where I was 13 years ago when I stopped playing.   My range is fairly solid now but at a loss of an octave that I had back then.  What I have gained is better tonal quality then I ever had, better tongueing technique, and I’m sure some of my past band directors are happy I don’t puff my cheeks out as much – though I don’t really think that ever had any bearing on my playing.

I’ve also gained a new group of people that I have gotten a chance to know.  I’m playing regulary and I am enjoying it.  It’s not normally like it was back in high school when i would push and get a “high” for lack of a better term, but it’s still kind of there.   I don’t have the ambition to practice hours and hours every single day, though I should.

Ashland’s final concert of the season took place last Sunday, and Xie stated it was a good concert, but we did not manage to get it video taped this time around.  So as I look forward to September when I play with the band again I leave you with these video clips:

Previous stories I did on the Ashland Community Band:

Concert Number Two Complete

Ashland Community Band’s Spring Concert

Ashland Community Band Concert 4/27/08

Picture taken from here

Mobile computing is becoming my newest fascination.  My previous fascinations included network based storage, network redundancy, and network security.   I enjoy making things do things that they were meant or designed to.   This is part of the sould that drives my curiousity to the edge of insanity and teeters over the maw of the great beyond.   I think eventually I will completely loose it and tumble into that gaping mouth that will swallow my soul and my body whole.

Mobile computing isn’t what it was even 3 years ago, mobile computing by traditional defintion means being able to computer while having the ability to travel.   Mobile computing devices were originally laptops, then PDA’s were taking over, now cell phones and custom Internet devices like my N810.   The question you need to ask is this still what mobile computing is, or is it being morphed into the new Internet buzz phrase “Cloud Computing”?

While I’ve been doing my crossposting series I’ve been thinking about what it truly means to be mobile and to work in the Internet cloud.   Ironically there is more to my online activities then my blog and how far reaching I can make the posts go.   I have pieces of me that exists in the cloud.  Part of this is my blog postings, sometimes this gives you an intimate side of me.   There is more that make up who I am and my goal is to see how I can migrate that online so I can access it any time and anywhere I have a net connection and an interface to the online world.

I have the basic or myself, my memories in the blog posts.  As I go on and digg further in my past more of these will survive through that.   What about everythign I create?  What about my pictures, my videos, my friends, my documents; will these things always be able to exist in the cloud?  While there are methods to storing these data types online, what about when a service goes belly up?  If a company goes out of business and you are relying on them with your data, where do you turn?  Even the great and powerful Google isn’t immune to canceling a service and dropping your data.   How do you stop that?  How do you save your data?  Is there even a reason for home storage anymore?

I can say just typing that out that there will always be a reason for home storage.   There will be private documents that you never want to show online.  Private thoughts that will always remain yours alone.   Until extrememely heavy encryption is ubuiquitous and tied soley to you, there is no reason to trust this data online.  If you don’t want ANYONE ELSE to ever see it, keep it away from the Internet.

I’m going to start a new blog series that investigates working in the cloud.  I know that this has been done before, but I think it will work nicely with my crossposting god series.  Why?  Because I’m going to focus on data redundancy and survivability in the modern Internet age.   I’m going to touch upon security and point out the insecurity that exists that most of us seem to ignore.

There are pieces of me scattered in teh clouds, I want some semblance and organization before I run into the hurricane.

I was randomly thinking about my past the other day and teenage mutant ninja turtles popped into my head while driving.   Out loud I said (quite loudly out loud) I can believe my mom is so freaking stupid.   My wife turns to me and asks what the hell I’m talking about.  (She won’t argue that my mother sometimes lacks common sense and because of this her intelligence is somehow in question).  I told her a story of something that happened 18-20 years ago.

My whole family was driving back from my Grandparents in Greenville, OH.   I enjoyed the TMNT cartoon, but my brother was the action figure collector of them.  (BTW shout out to my favorite turtle Donatello).   I being a normal pre-teen was trying to argue the possibilities of mutant ninja turtles existing (the way lots of pre-teens argue and defend things even when they don’t know the whole facts).   My father explained that it wouldnt work at couldn’t happen.   My mother trying to talk about sex gracefully in front of her 4 children (the oldest myself)  asked my father what if “a lonely guy and a turtle..” My father cut her off right there and gave her the “If you are truly that stupid how do you manage to breathe look”.

He then went into a basic biology 101 talk about how species had to be compatible to reproduce.   This unfortuantely I think shut me down and my mutant turtle theories.   That is until mutagen is truly dumped into the sewers, then we’ll see who is right on the ninja turtle arguement.

But, needless to say a woman who was in her 30′s or just about, thought the humans and turtles could not only be sexually compatible (wouldn’t the guy actually have to get busy over the turtle eggs?), but they would also have viable offspring similar to ninja turtles.    I must receive all my intelligence from my father, or my Mother must have got a skip year on her side’s intelligence gene.

This was the same woman who at one time was talking about getting money from her parents (they deny it) to pay off the house when she was going through marital troubles.  She had a grand plan living off of child support and possibly alimony.   Now for those that don’t know child support was non taxable and she had lived that way for a couple years when I was a teenager.    Her theory was if she got the money she would put it in the bank so she could deduct her mortgage payments and get a tax refund back.   I think that even after an hour of my explaining to her that she had to have taxable income and pay taxes to qualify for a refund at all, and if you haven’t paid any you weren’t going to get money back from the government just because you have a deduction.

If only my father was an idiot, I could say I was the milk man’s kid.    When it’s my mother, I have to hope I’m my father’s illegitimate child with a nuclear researcher that died in a radioactive experiment after I was born, and he met my mother and they adopted me.

Nuclear researcher….hmmm…I brought it full circle, I wonder if I have any turtle DNA in me.

I’ve scanned images into my computer to upload to Flickr. Slowly I’m going to pack the old photo album away. The photo album is essentially and archaic mechanism for saving memories. I’m not saying the web is any better, but in a lot of ways it’s more portable and a lot easier to share.

I’m hoping when I manage to post the pictures that a lot of them I will accompany stories behind them or incidents that had happened around them. I will share these stories with you and hopefully you will learn a little more about the man behind the blog.

My friends and everyone I have met along this journey we call life should be celebrated and embraced. I may not keep in contact with them as often as I should – if I do at all – but I can say they all helped shaped me in one way or another. Some of it was for the better, some for the worse. I can say I wouldn’t trade a moment with any of them or change the ways they helped shape me. I am the man I am today because of them and for that they will all always be cherished.

I’m slowly adding all the old poetry and information from my past that I want archived online.

A few things I’ve noticed though – I built this page on the new blogger beta – and alot of services I was using in the past to post directly to my blog are not working. Hopefully the support will be there soon – the best I’ve seen was flickr who used the new authentication API to post directly to the blog.

For those folks that haven’t seen this new API and don’t want to use blogger beta – download flock – flock is a great browser for the new web – it’s built on top of firefox and integrates with gmail, flickr, del.icio.us, blogger, and many other services. I know if you configure your browser for flickr access it uses the new authentication API. Check it out – it’s cool, it’s interesting, it will kill an hour of your time at least.