sunnywiz

9:32am at a La Quinta Inn in Germantown, just outside of Memphis TN.

I’m sitting on the floor next to the window, whose blinds are mostly pulled down.. the teenager has half an hour more he can sleep.. but I can see the sun peeking through the bottom of the blinds, and I feel warm.

The inspiration of this post was the feeling of ZOMG! There’s NOTHING I need to do!   … for the first time in, well, what the heck have I been doing?

• Friday Night: Driving to Memphis.   Last night, from 7:30pm to 1:30am.  For a soccer tournament.  U19.
• Before that:  7 nights or so: Working every night on the 2012 SOHS Soccer Banquet Video.   I rendered the .final version (.final = will be presented, unless something better happens) on Thursday night.   There are things I had to cut.. the hurricane flag waving, the interviews with the parents.. there’s a few edits I might go in and make when I get back home, but its DONE enough.
• Before that:  Working on wedding video – to get my workflow figured out.. color correction, sizing, multi-cam setup, audio scrubbing, etc.    Not finished; awaiting my attention in the near future; but the hard part is over.
• Before that:  “Vacation” (not) to Iowa – to go shoot the wedding, and to hang out with as many people as I could grab and love on.
• Before that:  Stressing about work, transitioning into a team.   Glad to say, we are teaming with teaminess now.   We decided to do admin stuff in Round Robin form .. so now Person #2 is going to show Person #3 some of the admin stuff that I used to take care of, and my job is to stay out of it now, till it comes back to me.
• Before that: I don’t even remember.     There’s some Water Heater stuff in there, I think.

So I have 20 more minutes of relative down time now.. and then some soccer to watch.. and then sit back and do nothing (?!) .. and then more soccer.. and then nothing (or maybe the parents will decide to conglomerate for dinner and I’ll have a margarita, but Donna Hulsman is not in this group, so I don’t think there will be any peer pressure)… and some more nothing tomorrow, and some soccer, and a drive.

Perfect.   Electronics off / time to sit in the sun / peeking under the blinds / playing on the floor / it knows more.

Watching the coverage after the wining declaration, before the speeches.   Those on Facebook would have seen my flip-flopping – actually, I had started out on the Democrat side, but because I married into a Republican family, and I really like some of the ideas of limited government, I forced myself to investigate, soak up, digest, get sick, and puke, on information. 

Here’s the perspective I ended up with.

So, I voted, and my state went to Romney anyway; but that’s okay.    If Romney had won, I would have hoped he was closer to column #2, than to column #1.

Probably the biggest turn-off I had about Romney was in reading what I *thought* was a pro-Romney book.  (Maybe it wasn’t?)  When it got to the kind of work he did at Bain Capital – it became pretty obvious to me – he doesn’t know how to build businesses.   He knows how to exploit the weak ones via control and extract profit from them.  Maybe the democrats did a spin job on me… maybe not. 

If I were to go conspiracy theory,  I would propose that the same folks Bush are the same folks behind Romney .. and that the war in Iraq was planned, not a result of 9/11.   I might even go down the #truther road, but therein lies some madness.. but yeah, I think there are folks out there who are ruthless enough that they would do something like that.   And I do not want them in positions of power.  (Note: if these folks do exist, and Obama is their enemy, then either some scandal will occur like it did for Clinton, or something more like JFK will happen.)  #IHopeImWrong

But, conspiracy theories are bad for me.  My mind gets stuck in them.. a cycle of neurological triggers, there was an xkcd comic on it. 

How the heck do I reconcile “Appropriate Government” with Obama?   What do I think is the right role of government? 

I haven’t spent a lot of time on this list, but that’s my feel so far.      Maybe it is better represented as “too much”, and “too little” .. I’ll try that sometime.

And now my brain is blank, and I can sleep.

In this year, I’ve switched my main blogging place to geekygulati.wordpress.com, as I’ve wanted to focus on my more technical side as well as build up a history of “here is who I am (hire me)” for the future.  But when it comes to my philosophical posts.. I have so much history here on LiveJournal, I may as well continue that vein of thoughts here.

Biggest changes I’ve noticed this year:

• I now admit that I am probably half-way through my life, or more.   This means I probably have 3 more houses that I’ll live in, maybe 5 or 6 cars. 
• I can see my body being more and more eager to not-function than to regenerate.   Nothing bad.   Just, more aware of it.   I can see how I have to take extra care now with all my parts.  Use it or Lose It?   I’m talking about you, Molar #5! (j/k)

What can I change about this year?  (this is effectively my “New Year’s Eve”)

• I know I MUST get back to working out.   This requires slowing down life enough to make the space for it.   It has to be in the evening.    Please please please I want to get to twice a week.. yoga and running, perhaps.
• I feel bad that I don’t call people.  Maybe I can start small.  Like, posting on people’s walls for their birthdays on facebook.
• I have two dogs with limited lifespans left.. and a cat, same situation.  There are a limited number of walks I can take the critters out on.    It might be time to do it.   This works well with working out.

Big Changes coming this year

• Looming: Quinn turns 18, and possibly graduates High school.     This will probably bring some changes.
• The rest is in God’s hands.  I don’t know what’s coming.   But I know I’ll be given the guidance I need to navigate it.

That’s about it.  Thank you all you beautiful people for your love of me and mine… 

*Hugs*

Sunny

• I have a very specific application, for which I might need the technology. This is not "reading for fun", but rather, reading to get a specific job done.
  
• I don't know enough about the technology to know what to search for. (searching online only gave me introductory examples, nothing with real meat.)
  
• I'm approaching it not as "a ton of money spent for a dead paperweight that I'll never look at again", but rather as a fairly inexpensive class briefing me in a specific subject which i can refer back to later. Most of these books cost me less than an hour's work, after taxes. (I am a professional, and I need to know as much as possible, as quickly as possible, to give my client the kind of service that I want to give them.)
  
• I have an e-reader. on my iPad, and pretty soon, on an e-ink device. I can archive with impunity, without killing bookshelves.

• PostgresSQL (done) (pdf, free)
  
• EF CodeFirst (done) ($10)
  
• EF (general)
  
• Asp.Net MVC 3 +/- Razor
  
• Dependency Injection (Structuremap vs Unity)

I started this post while in Evansville for Q's soccer stuff.. and then, the whole family fell sick. As I write this, I've just had my first big meal since the illness, and wow, I'm bloated.  Maybe not the best time to think about this... but hey, why not.   Maybe I'll be realistic rather than optimistic.

Food

I have really been enjoying flying around in xplane 10.

Last night I flew from Des Moines to Louisville in a personal jet at 5000 ft using mostly VOR. At night. Beautiful lights. Landing was amazing. Although in reality, probably fatal.

Eh that's easy to correct... Just being impatient with the landings, not bleeding enough speed.

I hooked up my iPad as an "EFIS" app.. Used it to control the NAV radios and stuff. The computer monitor was mostly mouse looking out the windows.

There are a few things I want to do:

Take what would have been a 2 to 6 hr road trip and do it in a Cessna instead. Just to get a feel of how much faster it isn't. Like to Evansville or Columbus or Morgantown.

Take a 18 hr road trip in a personal jet. To see how awesome that is.

Do a totally IFR ATC guided flight. In bad weather.

Fly over my house. Done and done!

Fly VFR dead reckoning to somewhere I know. Like maybe Cincinnati.

Figure out how to use the damned Navaids.

Not crash a helicopter.

Yep, I have a list.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

I'm sitting at Panera waiting for a friend to show, reflecting on the last few weeks of work.

It feels like some of the hardest work I have done in a long time.

Yet, having achieved a milestone, it's also some of the most fulfilling work I have done in a long time.

I think the difference was the kind of pain. In the past with other organizations, what I faced was unrealistic expectations and context switching. Here there was just work, aiming to a goal.

Granted there are things to improve.

Principle 1: Integrate early, preferably without context switches

Principle 2: if A depends on B, stagger A to start only after B is halfway stable, + principle 1. OR, code A to a mock interface of B until B is halfway stable.

Principle 3: each integration point WILL take time and can be burned down.

Oo my friend is here. Posting.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.