Note to the world...

Dear Future,
Please don't stop practicing! Even if something seems really basic, take some time to actually practice.

And practice...

And practice some more!

Cool like a cucumber…

Well, my life may not be easy at this point right now, but it’s important to find one’s center…

I’d like to thank all of you who have offered words of support in so many ways.

The bullet that broke the camel’s back

Well, it looks like we’re moving…

I'm doing fine!

Hey,
Things have been more than hectic, but I'm doing fine. I'm going to continue to move forward.

If you love sleep, don't have kids...

Honestly, last night was one of the worse nights my wife and I have
had with our children in a very long time. I'm happy that they love
life so much that they don't want to miss a minute by sleeping, but
some nights they are just driving us crazy.

I blame that new fangled rap music!

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Moving from wantabe to gonna be

Well, I'm slowly getting off of my but and making things happen with programming for the mac... and it's HARD!
For some reason, my years of doing nothing but tutorials and sleeping on my books do not substitute for doing real programming. Even with the roadblocks and the pitfalls, I'm going to continue with this.

Here's to the future.

Scott Stevenson's book!

via theocacao.com

Man! I can't wait to get some time (and money) to get this book! Scott has really helped out in the Mac development community and if I can give back... well, I'll feel good inside!

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Random pics from my iPhone

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My upstairs neighbors...

My upstairs neighbors have a problem in the bedroom. Every so often we hear them going at it for about 15 seconds and then silence.... Followed by the sound of a shower accompanied by the telltale sound of a certain battery operated boyfriend.
Now, I wouldn't care so much, except the guy starts pacing back and forth. Every step filled with anger, failure and a bit of what I'd like to call the "man pain". It's at this point that he wakes up my family... And that doesn't make anyone happy.
After an hour of so with her in the shower, he may or may take off or they get into an argument, where he or she takes off for a couple days just to repeat the process all over again. Honestly, the fights aren't as bad as they used to be before she got her B.O.B., but you can still tell they have a dysfunctional relationship.
I would feel sorry for the guy, but in this day and age, there are tons of ways to learn how to avoid this "problem".

Well, I'm going to try to get some sleep.

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Messing around with the jump feature

I just wanted to see what happens after the jump

It's the little things that get me...

Today, I loaded iTunes 9 on my work machine. It seems that there are a couple things that need to be tweaked.

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Where's the water?

Two of my favorite people having a good time. These are the good times.

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Ouch

Today I was doing my daily fitness routine with a friend of mine and he said that I was doing my pushups incorrectly. He said, I wasn't going all the way down and that I was moving too fast.

 "Big deal", I thought and went about doing it the way he mentioned...

 Hopefully, my arms won't fall off..

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I'm such a good blogger...

I've decided that the only way I'm going to get good at this blogging thing is to actually work on my writing...

 But what to write about?

 My feelings? On the inter-web?

 Naw!

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Finished connectiong posterous to the rest of my social web

It feels nice being able to have all of this stuff connected...

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100 Push Ups!

Today, I took the initial test for the 100 push up challenge! I did 20 of the “good” kind and I honestly feel a little drained. It’s definitely been awhile.

Thunderstorms and kids

Last night, the thunder storm outside woke up my daughter. My wife and I got her and let her sleep in our bed for a while. It was nice for a while… hearing her breath and being able to comfort her…

Well, until she kicked me off of the bed…

What the!?

Yesterday morning, I took my oldest daughter to the park. It was great for both of us; we had the whole place to ourselves. She got my undivided attention and I got a moment to forget about the rest of the world and focus online on spending time with her.

As we were playing, a homeless man came by… Well, I assumed he was homeless. Like most Americans, I think that if you walk around with a shopping cart filled with bottles and cans and look like you haven’t washed in days –if not weeks- than you could very well be homeless.  He started talking to us but I couldn’t understand him very well. The whole time, I’m being polite but I’m not very open to having a deep conversation with him. I just want to spend time with my daughter…

So, he walks away and I continue to play with my child…

Then I look around and catch him spitting on one of her toys!

WHAT THE HELL!

But, I keep my cool… Why get mad? This guy has issues already. From the look of it, he’s either hit bottom or somewhere very close, like 1/X for very, very large values of X. Trust me, part of me wants to knock out what little sense he has…

But that won’t help anyone, my daughter didn’t see it. What would she do if she saw her father attack someone for no reason? Or worse, getting beat up by someone (which is probably the real outcome). A day from now, do you think anyone would care?

Well, homeless guy, I hope this has made you feel better about yourself.

Time to give up?

This weekend, my little world was rocked. Not by a single event but a collection of decisions and events. Things I have control over but for whatever reason have chosen not to pursue.
The most notable, not making getting my degree a priority.
Honestly, I could of had it months ago by writing 20 pages of bullshit, but a combination of childish disobedience to cave into "The man", not wanted to admit that it was time to grow up and... well, maybe part of me wanted to see how far I could fall. I'd been a very good student since before I can remember. It's one of the primary pillars that I had used to base my identity and when school was "almost" over, I didn't know what to do. So I didn't do anything...

And have been drifting since...

But I still had a couple dreams/desires...
The first, learning to dance: I sometime joke around with my friends that you don't really know what life is like until someone leaves you on the dance floor. That's the most vivid memory that I had when I was in high school. I didn't have a lot of self-esteem back then and I was caught up with the notion of what I was supposed to be versus just being who I was and on the way to what I wanted to be. In college, I vowed and eventually became pretty good at dancing. It became one of my passions and I took that feeling of accomplishment and used it as energy to improve other areas of my life. When I was nearing the end of school, I took some other dance classes but it seemed that I couldn't get that feeling again. I stopped doing as often and then I got scared to get back on the dance floor; the fear of comparing myself against what I was able to do and what I thought I should be able to do...

My other desire is to program in Cocoa. I've been playing with this dream for 6 years. Six years...
That's actually the first time I've actually thought about how much time I've put into just thinking about something instead of just doing something about it. I open the books, I do the tutorials, but I get stopped when I think about how crappy my code is going to be versus some imaginary other programmer. Honestly, it's one of the stupidest reasons not to do something... "I'm not going to do this because someone else can probably do it better, so I'm not going to even attempt to improve my skills."

So what shock me up?
I came across a blog entry by Aaron Hillegas (Leaving the Classroom), the author of Cocoa Programming for Mac OSX. A book that I've been lugging around a keystone of my fantasy of being a Cocoa programmer. In my dream, I was going to finish the book, go to one of his classes and become some kind of ubber programmer. Why was this happening? Why would he do this to MY dream!

He wanted to focus on the important things in his life.

And that's when it hit me...

I haven't been doing that. I've been just floating through life... Drifting along with these fantasies in my head. If these dreams were important to me, I should have been pursuing them.

I felt overwhelmed and I had to sit down. "What have I been doing all this time?" "What is important to me?"

My family is important to me.
My degree is important if only to make my parents proud.
Dancing is important to me.
And being a Cocoa Programmer is still important to me.

I won't give up. These are the things that are important to me.

Thank you for helping with my dreams and slapping me back to reality.

To my former hero

Today, I saw more of the real you. You’re human just like the rest of us. I don’t deserve to be treated the way you treat me. I’m not your dog.

And you are no longer my hero.

Linking Facebook

Well, I’ve just linked my facebook page with this blog. I’m not too happy with the EULA for both sites…

I know I don’t have a lot of content, but it’s all mine and I’d like to keep it that way.

So where’s the shake up…

Well, it turns out being a father of two and working full time can be kind of busy and I’ve found that it’s soo much easier to not do anything.

I haven’t added anything to my accomplishment calendar although I’ve done plenty of things… like… um… change diapers…

Changing things up

I've got some new goals that are going to effect this site. I'm excited!

Why not?

So Scott Bourne is having a give away where all I need to do in order to get at Drobo is post a Link to http://mydl.me…

It’s worth a shot and the site that he is advertising doesn’t look bad at all.

Nicknames

Over the years, I’ve had a variety of nicknames. Some of them that I actually liked.

The most recent one has been “Daddy”…

If you had asked me about having kids ten years ago, I would have said that it wasn’t even a possibility. Now, I’m working my butt off in order to be the best father I can be.

 

But what does that mean?

A good post about negativity

I was surfing the internet when I came across this page. It really summed up some of my feeling about the internet and the people on it.

http://www.marco.org/81566726

On top of the list

I recently did a search for my name in Google and -for the first time- I see this blog at the top of the list!

Yay me!

It must have been my plethora of outstanding posts that question the very nature of humanity and the existence of the universe…

Or maybe because this blog is hosted by Google…

Hard at work..

At least one of is working on something...

More and more and more...

I've made it through another month and I have to say...

something...

Wow, I still feel good...

The last couple of weeks have been crap at work and there has been a significant amount of drama at the home front...

yet, I still feel pretty decent.

Good for me!

My laptop is dying...

After more than five years of faithful service...

I don't know what to do or feel...

iwork.com

During the last macworld expo, Apple released details for iwork.com - the companion to the new iwork '09 suite. It's free now and will charge for it in the future.

Personally, I don't know how much they are going to get for it since a LOT of people are still angry about the me.com release.

DISASTER!