I hear that it helps to sometimes write down your New Year’s resolutions. Because I usually fail to complete most of my resolutions I figure that I should receive all and any the help that I can get.
Another year has gone by and I am once again typing to the sweet melodies of Slipknot, with a glass of Jack Daniels to the left and my MacBook at my right. This birthday unfortunately will be plagued with stuffing my nose into a physics book learning about electromagnetism, but I figured I would take a little time tonight to write a small little blog post about the things that I am thankful for this year. I find myself looking less upon the past as of recent so I think it is fair to give the time needed to acknowledge those that have had a profound meaning to me this year.
The Guys At Zinkk
What can I say? The past year has been full of amazing achievements for a group of guys that came together with a dream. We each are working through our lives to try and make this business float. Up until the past couple of weeks the outlook was gloomy, and then we pulled together to have an truly amazing time at the teacher’s conference. The late nights spent coding, planning, and sipping coffee with you guys are among what I cherish the most this past year. I hope, no matter what happens with our business, that our lives will allow us to continue to work together in some form or another. There is absolutely no way I would be happier if Type Aloud launched and immediately was taken down by a storm of rabid Twitter fan boys. We can only hope for such a mob!
My Friends, Close and Far
Many of you may not even know the affect that you have towards my ability to still be a sane person. Some of my happiest times are sitting at the universities’ pub drinking back beers and talking about life. Or spending a night drinking booze watching people make fools of themselves playing Asshole or arguing about the logistics of Michael Jackson being both a superstar and a pedaphile. I do have a myriad of misfit friends, but you all each play a specific role to my plan for future world domination, and I will make sure to treat you all like royalty in the new republic.
The Fam
They may or may not be reading this. Nevertheless, it need not be said, but I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them.
Well that’s about it for me. I am going to exit on that note (and Smashmouth – Walking On The Sun). I hope all of you have a great holiday, an even better year, and I can’t wait to see what the next twelve months will bring.
The Twitter service is agnostic to your special characters that we use as annotations to #topics and @people. The community came up with these “features” as a way to facilitate conversation on a service that was meant to broadcast our daily meanderings. One of the main reasons why Twitter took off was its easy to use, well documented, and public API that can be used to literally build a client out of any computer language that knew how to handle HTTP requests. The service boomed, but the problem is that Twitter’s gold standard client was now left in the dust because all of these brand new kids on the block were offering features that the community invented.
Twitter web client as of November 2009
So let’s fast forward to the current day. The Twitter web client now incorporates almost every single feature that you can find inside of a third-party client. Any username that is prefixed with an @ symbol is properly highlighted and linked, and #hashtags that convey an idea (subject matter about the tweet) are highlighted as well. These subjects, when clicked, take you to the Twitter search feature which show you all the tweets “related” to that subject matter.
Now obviously it is not perfect. If you take a look at the daily trending topics people will append tags to the end of their promotional tweets to get to the top of the search list. We have brought ourselves back into the days of high school where everyone wants to be the popular kid of the block, wearing the latest clothes, and listening to the new music.
The problem that Twitter is facing is that they are competing against themselves. Because they are allowing outside clients to literally do nearly anything they want their “market share” is being chewed up by application authors. Will Twitter be able to survive? Well, that’s precisely why we are seeing the addition of Twitter Lists and the infamous Retweet features to the web client. These are ways that Twitter is attempting to draw back people to using the web service. A couple of months ago Twitter even hired an ex-Google web designer to spruce of their web interface, and let me tell you something, it looks a hell of a lot better now!
While the community still invents clients and services around Twitter they need to figure out a way to make some cash. Eventually the guys with the money are going to start pounding on the tables wanting a pay out. I enjoy the interaction that I am able to get by using Twitter, but the business side of me keeps asking How are they going to make money? Every time that I look at Facebook I keep thinking that eventually my Facebook information kludge is going to eventually be rebranded to Twitter when they dump a boatload of cash on the venture capitalists laps. Although the way that the Internet works you’ll see a clone in the works as soon as news of that merger hits the pipes.
Well, well, it has been quite awhile since I have last written a blog post to the masses. Since then there has been some very awesome updates in the world of technology that I have been unable to give my opinion about (not that anyone is actually reading my opinion). The last month has been a busy time in my life. I finally have a change of scenery and have moved across the Passaic river from Newark, NJ to Kearny, NJ in a much better apartment (and area). I cannot even begin to express how great it is to finally have a bed to sleep on. You do not really know how much sleeping on a couch, mattress, in your car, at your friend’s place, really sucks until you have to do it for two months of your life.
My tenure at the New Jersey Institute of Technology is about up. I will be receiving my bachelors degree in December as long as I do not screw up any of my classes. As it looks now the only class that I have to worry about is Physics II, because I absolutely loathe electric circuits and the such, but I have a good feeling about the next exam so I think all will be good. Last week I taught two classes on Linux, Boost, and C/C++ to some capstone students at NJIT. Capstone students are essentially students that are working on their senior project (or thesis) to graduate.
At the beginning of September I made the concise decision to get off my ass and start getting my life in gear. So along with a controversial hair cut (went front long hair to short hair) I went and began putting out my feelers for contract (and consulting) work to pay some bills. I am currently working on a project for a friend of mine, have one or two personal projects in the pipeline, but unfortunately nothing that is paying some green yet. We’ll see how that goes.
That’s about it for the quick read. I am going to make an effort to post some more blog entries when I think about it. Most of my bright moments happen when I am not near a keyboard.
It has been nearly a month since I have slept a full night on an actual mattress. During Labor Day weekend, about a month ago, the unit above my apartment sprung a leak in the bathroom and an existing problem got worse. A small spot of mold turned into a swarm, spreading from the upper corner of the wall, down the closet and into my personal affects. A small growth of mold that we wrote to a landlord about in a letter with our rent had multiplied, and forced my roommate and I out of our apartment. The water pressure had also destroyed the tiles in our bathroom’s shower leaving us miserable and dirty to boot. As you can imagine this was not how I wanted to begin my last semester as an undergraduate at university.
Over the course of the month I have seem my health be affected by the disturbed sleeping pattern, the uncomfortable arrangements I have had to make, and my studies have hit an all time rock bottom. This was the first time in my life that I have been physically without a place to call home; luckily I have been able to shack up at the office on an air mattress (occasionally sleeping on the couch to give someone else the mattress to sleep on) which has definitely eased the pain a little. But I can honestly say that this has been one of the worst months of my life.
All throughout this month I have learned how much I am actually able to take without breaking. I really feel like shit right now, burnt out and beat up, but my mind is keeping my sicken body going. I need to get this work done. No matter how much trudging it takes I am going to begrudgingly finish everything as best as I can. I am going to keep my mouth shut, no matter how much I think a teaching method is wrong. Maybe one day I will be able to incorporate what I have learned at college into something meaningful.
I am writing this blog post now sitting on the air mattress that I purchased a couple of weeks ago. My room has yet to be fully finished, I am waiting on a contractor to finish shampooing the carpet, and I have piles of work that needs to be taken care of. The past two weeks I have been nursing a cold that had seemingly gone, came back, only to be gone again leaving a persistent dry cough. I survived the first round of midterm exams, have one more next week, and will be officially halfway finished in about two weeks. This semester has truly been the worst and I am absolutely looking forward to the real world. A world without examinations meant to trick you into the wrong answer, mislead you, and generally make you feel shitty about yourself. A world where the end result matters and not the theoretical process that you used to get that result.
I can smell the roses. Let’s just hope that life does not through another curve ball my way. My apologies for something that is less humorous – I have been unable to write a funny piece this whole month. I’ll make an attempt to get back into the groove of things soon. I promise.
There are times that I wish I could be addicted to something. While hanging out with the local chumps I hear the war stories of people that were an addict. There is nothing better than listening to someone recount an experience that led them through the streets of Philadelphia on a path of destruction to find that last little shit who wants to sell him some crack.
Some of the world’s fucked-up people are the people that interest me. If you are crazy and hear voices in your head I want to know who they are. Do they sound like Burt Reynolds or Sean Connery? I think it would absolutely amazing to have the ominous voice of Charlie Manson speaking to me at totally irrelevant times. How many people can say that a serial killer talks to them while they are commuting to work?
I don’t care who you are. You cannot tell me that you have not at least once thought about what it would be to labeled clinically insane. I’m not talking about slit-my-wrists-emo insane; I mean the people that walk through the halls of Ancora eating crayons and smearing Elmer’s glue on their tongue. These are the type of people that decide to mold their feces in the shape of the Pope, or weave a blanket out of the hair that they had shed.
I am a firm believer that half of these people lie about these craziness. It would be nice to be delusional and hear the voice of a raving madman for a couple of minutes. Unfortunately I am not the type of person to go through a drug induced stupor in order to hear a second or third voice in my head whisper sweet-nothings into my consciousness.
Obviously a vast majority of these people are crazy. But what about the people that aren’t? Maybe Elvis is really speaking to that a random lunatic and all he wants is another peanut-butter and fried banana sandwich. Who knows?
Oh what I would give to be crazy for a couple of hours. It might answer so many questions in my life.
When living in an apartment it has generally been an acceptable practice to take out the garbage on time, pay the electric and gas bills on time, and generally be a good neighbor to all of your fellow homosapiens. Another general practice is to make sure that the children that you have bore both in and out of wedlock are properly disciplined.
Now, back when I was a kid this meant listening to your mother, playing nicely with your siblings and doing what you were told. Back when I was a kid, if you did not do what you were told, Papa would come home and show you the wrath of God which usually resulted in you thinking twice the next time you decided to defy an order. If you were stupid enough to do the same thing more than twice then it was usually time to stop using the belt and starting using more inanimate objects: the door, the wall, a lawn chair.
When I moved into my new apartment in August, despite all of the usual expectations of an apartment in Newark, it was actually a rather pleasant experience. I had escaped the wrath of Residence Life deciding to turn on the air conditioning about the three weeks too late and a maintenance request taking longer than the trip to candy mountain to be serviced. The benefits most definitely outweighed the costs (and trust me, Residence Life despite all of their falters during my tenure there did not drop the ball when it came to that $750 cancellation fee).
That was until I found out there were two inexperienced parents living upstairs who decided to have children a little too early in their “relationship” (in quotes because I do not fully understand the situation regarding Mommy and Daddy). This meant that while I was watching a football game I had the second floor menaces screaming at the top of their lungs and playing their own game of “Who could be the loudest during the Giant’s football game?”
I am a firm supporter of parents having the ability to beat their children. The recent teachings about being a good “parent” and using “positive” reinforcement helps the development of children. We are living in an age where parents are scared to discipline their student because some gung-ho grammar school teacher will report them to child services.
I envision a future where we will begin outsourcing he beatings of our children to a paid service so that the liabilities can be transferred via ink on a paper. Because we are living in a world where we do not like to be responsible for our actions. But not I, because beating my child is one privilege of parenthood that I am absolutely looking forward to – DYFS, I’ll send you an IOU.