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Thursday, January 31, 2008

Let there be travel... again!

Whoa. The last week and a half has been work work work. I know I talk about how low key my job can be sometimes, but when we throw down the work, we really do it. All of the sudden I have five projects to work on all at once, and in several timezones.

The main project is for a publisher in Cincinnati, so guess where I am going next Wednesday? Strangely enough Cincinnati's airport is in Kentucky and our client is on the NE side of Cincinnati. I'm only staying for two nights, so probably the most I'll see of the city is when I pass through it in a cab. There's a slight possibility of going into town on Thursday, unless the client wants to take us to dinner. Here's what my unofficial, official travel-guide Fodor's has to say about Cincinnati. And here's a wiki page. Now you know.

What will I be doing, you ask? We're doing an analysis workshop to help them movie from a print-centric publishing model to a single-source publishing model (so they can send out their content into web pages, cell phones, etc). If you're interested in this you can read along at one of my other blogs, The War on Error - a publishing blog. Don't go if you aren't into publishing. You'll be bored. And I need to add more content soon.

Aside from that I am working on a project to automate some publishing software for a company in Australia that makes music lessons. Also, maybe doing some XML training for a company in Washington D.C. I am not even daring to think that I might get to go to Australia this year. That would require a vacation. What happens if I go on walkabout and never return? National Geographic readers will point at pictures of the extremely pale dude playing the didgeridoo next to the natives and remark how badly I need to wash my hair.

Guess it has been a while since I last wrote. Life has mostly been work and play lately. Dawn and I are still enjoying Dallas greatly. We work a lot, then we go out and have fun a lot. We've been working out a lot too - not as much as we want of course, but well more than we did during most of our existence in San Antonio. We make up for it by eating a lot of really good Dallas food with our cohorts Tom and Jen and a few of the other folks we've met. We play World of Warcraft a lot, for stimulating and often bizarre social interactions with the online gaming world. And we slay much evil and are rewarded with phat loot. Shout out to Div, with whom I aggro lots of skettis for epic flying mount rep. Don't worry if that didn't make sense to you.

In closing you will note I am on a different blog server than the one I used for NASA stuff. I'm not terribly happy with blog software these days and since I don't have time to write the code for one myself, I switch around a lot. I'll be posting my travel stuff here for the Cincinnati trip, at least, so check back - put the link for this site in your Favorites, Bookmarks, or whatever the kids call it these days. Check in, anytime. I'll write more stuff about me in here as well, as opposed to stuff about NASA, although you might see some of that here too.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Well that came out of nowhere

Why does my perception of the world seem so fast these days? I got up this morning, early, and we (Dawn, Tom, Jen, and I) went walking on the Katy Trail. I noticed how cold it was, and breezy, and how felt that certain sense of "morning-ness" that you get when you are out walking in the dark on a cold-brisk morning. It's a very different sensation than the conditioned daily office air.

Despite the fresher experience of the walk, I still feel like I was focused just off-center. Like my perception was just behind the present moment. Or just ahead. I didn't feel saturated in the moment like I used to when I was younger. I remember being outside in rainstorms and just feeling the sensation of the storm in the moment -- not when it was going to be done or what happened before. I remember playing outside and feeling a spacious moment around my activities.

Now it seems like everything is so fast - even the slow things, like my focus is always somewhere else. But that somewhere is nowhere.

Then there's other times like when I'm playing WoW where I feel like my attention is hyperfocused and I can handle vast amounts of information happening to me in a single moment. So it's not like I don't have practice or can't handle it... but I just often feel like I am floating just behind or ahead of myself. What's up with that?

Maybe we are all in such a keyed state of hyper-attention we forget the moment point. Or, we haven't accellerated up to the keyed state we are capable of achieving and the off-focus feeling is just wind resistance.

Hmmm. I dunno.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Meanest Mom

Of course I don't mean my own mom.

Check this out - a mom sells her son's car because there was alcohol in it:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/01/09/mean.mom.ap/index.html