We can be like they are

Things with the girl I met online didn't turn out. So that's all I have to say about that.

Women

So at work I've been doing the couch to 5k program. I think I blogged about that last time. A week or so ago I completed it. Now I'm going every week day and ellipting 35 minutes per day and I've added a 5-minute cooldown walk on the treadmill afterwards. Yes, I've decided that ellipting is the verb to use. Deal with it.

I've been catching up on my podcasts. I started listening to The Savage Lovecast and even called in a question to their line. The way it works is you leave a message and they might call you back and/or put it on the podcast. Since I didn't want to sound retarded I wrote it out before calling it in. So here it is:

	hi dan, i was listening to lovecast 93 when you answered a call from a guy who ended up being every girl he knew's platonic boyfriend. I was so happy to hear that call because I have been in a similar situation as that caller and was so relieved to hear your answer. I came up with the same answer, to no longer audition new friends. It was awesome to hear you give that same exact advice. However, I've come to a couple of snags. First, when I describe this idea to my friends (a couple of which I'm stuck in the platonic boyfriend role) I get accused of just looking for pussy. Like i'm just a user. I find it hard to explain what it's like on my end of things. I liken it to the old saying "why buy the cow if you get the milk for free", if these girls want all of this emotional support, then they have to date me. Well, that doesn't convince them. So I'm still called a sex-crazed abuser. I might have to just chalk this up to the same old male/female double standard. Second, I have no idea how to really meet women effectively. Primarily I look on dating websites, send out interesting messages and if I get a reply try to strike up a conversation. So typically this is the "friends first, lovers later" strategy. It hardly ever works and I end up in the platonic boyfriend zone. So on the advice of some friends, I've tried asking these girls out on dates earlier than I normally would, to do the "dating first" thing. Yeah...that doesn't work out well either. They disappear or whatever. I know it's not black and white and that either strategy isn't foolproof, but I was hoping you could provide some pointers for me. How do I make it clear to women that I'm interested in dating and not being merely a friend? And how do I do that without sounding like an asshole?
—Keith

But in other news, I've been playing D&D with some friends for a while, and recently we've started up a weekly board games night. Man I love gaming.

Not to get expectations too high, but I've been in preliminary talks with a lady I met on okcupid. She is pretty cool so far and we've hung out a few times. Still very cautious here, but maybe this could go in a good direction. So far just trying to play it like Fonzie. And what's Fonzie like, Yolanda? He's cool. That's right, Fonzie's cool.

So in the floods of 2008 a shit-ton of Advil was donated to Iowa. Turns out that severe flooding doesn't really cause all that many headaches. There's a bunch of Advil left over so anyone can take it for free. I've grabbed quite a bit and am willing to give it away since it was free. The conditions are that you have to take a full case (2400 pills) since I don't want to dick with dividing up boxes. Let me know.

So a few days ago Dreamhost shat the bed and all my sites went down. They were down for a few days and boy was I pissed. Things seem back up now. I got a $50 credit so it wasn't so bad, but I mean, 2 days of downtime? You've gotta be kidding me.

Women | Job | Weight

I solve problems. That's what I do. It makes it even harder on me when I don't know how to solve one. So frustrating. I just have to keep working at it. I'll get it eventually. And then I can tell everyone how I did it and how goddamned smart I am, eh?

Head down, slog it out. Only way out is through.

Well, unless that chunk missing out of my driver's side front tire turns into a blowout before I can afford new tires. Then I just don't know what the fuck I'll do. Right now with my next paycheck I can afford rent and to start paying on my student loans again, I'm pretty sure. I'll need another roughly 1200 for wheels and snow tires. But I don't think I can swing that, so maybe I'll have to bite it and toss another few hundred down on 2 new regular tires. Ugh.

I asked a girl out on a date and got a pocket veto. Typical.

Money | Women | Car

Exercise

So I just got home from working out after work. I'm doing the Couch to 5K program to increase my cardio.

My weight has plateaued for a while in the high 250's. And ever since my trip to Tulsa, where every restaurant has "steakhouse" in the name, I gained about 10lbs and have been steady. I need to get back on track so I can get down to a dateable size again.

So week 1 day 1 down.

I felt great accomplishing it.

I have been shying away from cardio because my joints hurt and my feet and legs are pretty fragile. The C25K program seems to be a good way to start, since it starts off very very slow. I plan on continuing through the whole thing.

Last week on friday I had tried to go to start out. The website for the Wellness Center says it closes at 7 on fridays, but apparently it closes at 6 now and I didn't find out till I got there at 6:15. D'oh. But I didn't get discouraged. I went there today. It was pretty busy so that was intimidating. But I conquered it. I went in there, got changed, did my workout, and got the fuck out. Fuck yeah.

Birthday

I had a birthday. Hardly anyone came. Just hung out with my roommate, a couple acquaintances from Strangetalk, and my hot ex-roommate Beth. Seriously, folks. Beth flew in from L.A. for my birthday (well, and a wedding too), why couldn't you show up?

Next year I'll be 30. You fuckers better show up for that. No excuses.

Ladies

Briefly within the past year I had a girl I hung out with exclusively and frequently and had sex with. Despite fulfilling all of the definitions of dating that I could think of, she insisted we weren't. She "wanted to live the single life", so I let her do that. I tried to remain friendly after the fact since she was a pretty cool person. But I guess it turns out that she's not so nice. So I don't talk to her any more. Good for me.

Had a talk with my friend in Minnesota about the whole friendship vs. wanting more than that thing. So since then we haven't really been talking much. She's pretty busy at work, but I dunno. I think I may have irreparably harmed our friendship. Which is a pretty big shame, since I actually do want to be friends with this girl. Hope it works out. At least she seems to have stopped wanting to talk to me about guys. That was pretty heart-wrenching and I'm glad it's stopped. We can be friends, but man, that's gotta be off the table.

Job

Oh, what's this all the sudden about having a exercise facility at work? Well, depending on when we last chatted, you may not be aware about my current employment status. So here we go.

I parted ways with Palisade at the end of February / start of March. I was unemployed for about a month and got picked up at Source Allies. I worked there for about a month and then when it became apparent that I wasn't fitting in, I left there too. I was then unemployed from May till August 20th. It was pretty embarassing so I didn't really want to put it down in print.

So what happened at Palisade?

Well, I was blindsided really. My boss didn't think I was measuring up to expectations. I thought I was doing fine. They let me go. He seemed genuinely upset about it, but hey, he wasn't the one that was unemployed, either. It seems since I left they've lost a couple other developers too. They're apparently down to 3 guys writing the whole thing. Good luck to them. I still think the rest of my employees (and even my former boss) are nice people and I wish them all luck.

Ok, so Source Allies?

SA is a consulting company. So my first job was to develop a web-based employee scheduling system for a local amusement park. I won't say which one, but working on it was truly an adventure. The time schedule was pretty rushed. I was working 9-12 hour days to get this done on time. Working weekends some times too. So I got it delivered about 2 days late. Then that weekend I was hanging out with the girl who would later become (and then even later become not) my girlfriend. I got a call from my boss asking me to research several technologies so that I wasn't completely retarded when we pitched my next job. Pretty reasonable. I saved the list, emailed it to myself, and then went on with my weekend hanging out with A GIRL.

I thought it was a pretty easy decision until Monday. I showed up, sat down and began researching. The boss came over and asked how much research I'd gotten done. I said none. He pulled me into the conference room and told me he thought I wasn't working out and he wanted to let me go. Recalling the 9-12 hour days of completely unpaid overtime, I agreed that I wasn't fitting in. I left.

Where Now?

Okay, so fast forward to August. I'm getting broker and broker. My savings is gone. My credit cards are maxed out. I am about to run out of money. I get a job. Huzzah for me! The big problem is that now, despite having an income, I have to drive to Des Moines every day on ~$4/gal gas. Ugh.

Luckily I have a side-job to tide me over. More on that in a second. So I'm just barely making ends meet right now. I had to borrow some money from my mom and from my roommate to keep the bills afloat. By my calculations, I'll be broken even some time around January 2009.

So I work for the State of Iowa. It's a cool job with a lot of cool coworkers. I do software development in an ancient system called filePro. I'll have to make a post later about how lame filePro is. But it's paying the bills, so I love it for that.

Tulsa

Part of learning filePro was going to an advanced class on filePro in the middle of September. I got a crash course in filePro from a coworker and signed up to go. The tuition was $1696. Going into it I was afraid that at that exorbitant price, it might be a rip off. In retrospect, I was 95% right.

I didn't have the money to go. I was to be reimbursed by the State, but that didn't help me. However they did front me money for the tuition, hotel, and something like 80% of the food allowance. Woohoo.

So I went down there and had troubles with my credit card and debit card. I was so furious I had to threaten to cancel my CC every day until the damn call center people would transfer me to someone that could help. But in the end it worked out. Still pretty lame that I had to be embarassed like that in front of my coworker who went with.

Side Job

My friend Drew, who used to fix computers for a living, moved to Denver. He's been forwarding calls from his Des Moines clientele to me for a few months now. It helped me stretch my budget out while I was unemployed, and now it's helping to make sure I've got food and gas. I'm going to keep doing it indefinitely to help reestablish my money cushion and then to pay down my car loan early.

So that's all I can think of for now. I need to wash some dishes.

Job | Money | Women | Weight

You will need:

1. The afore-mentioned phone.
2. A registry editor for your phone. PHM Regedit is the gold standard.
3. two short sound files in 44.1khz PCM .wav format. If you're a transformers fan, you want this.

Okay, so first, install PHM Regedit if you haven't already. It installs just like any other application.

Next, prepare your audio files. If you downloaded my zip file, they're ready to go. Otherwise, make sure they're in .wav format, and pretty short. While it's not strictly required, you probably want to rename them something like 3_in.wav and 3_out.wav. Or 4, 5, 6, etc. If you are adding a bunch of sounds.

Now put the audio files into your \Windows directory. You can do this while your device is synced to your computer by browsing to it, emailing it to yourself and getting your email on your phone, etc.

Here's the hard part. Open PHM Regedit. Tap "My Device" so that it is highlighted. Tap "Tools" at the bottom of the screen, then tap "Find...". In the "Find what" box, type "piano". That's right; piano. Put a checkmark in each of the three boxes, and click Find.

You will have 1 result, which is a subkey of "SlidingSound". Click the "X" on the search bar to close it. Now click on "SlidingSound" to highlight it. Tap "Edit" then "New Key". Give it a number that is 1 higher than the highest one you've got there. If you've never done this before that means you should enter "3". Hit enter.

Your new key should be highlighted. Tap "Edit" again, but this time go to "New String Value". For "Value Name", replace the text with "Default" (I'm pretty sure capitalization counts). For "Value data" put the name you want to call your sound. If you grabbed my zip file, something like "Transform". Tap the "OK" button. Since your phone is probably open to type, you'll have to scroll down to find the "OK" button.

We're going to do it 2 more times. Tap "Edit" again, and go to "New String Value". For "Value Name", replace the text with "in" (I'm pretty sure capitalization counts). For "Value data" put the file name of the sound you want to play when you close the phone. If you grabbed my zip file, type "3_in.wav". Tap the "OK" button.

Do it again, but this time the name is "out" and the value is "3_out.wav" (or whatever yours is if you don't use my files).

Now you're done with PHM Regedit. Tap "Tools", then tap "Exit". Wait 30 seconds. Hit the power button to put your phone to sleep. Wait 1 minute. Hit the power button to wake your phone up. Now use your stylus to hit the reset switch to soft-reset your phone. You have to do this little dance to make sure the changes you made to the registry are actually saved.

PHM Regedit is very handy for making a lot of changes to your phone. I suggest you leave it installed.

When your phone is back up, Tap the start menu, go to settings, and finally to Sliding Sound. Open the drop-down list. Your new sound should be in there. Select it and hit the little play button next to it to verify the sounds. You should hear both sounds, one right after the other. Assuming everything worked, hit the OK button to close the settings.

Now, slide your phone open. :)

How to | Phone

1937 - 2008

The greatest comedian of all time. Nothing more can be said.

So yesterday I got a minimum of sleep. I drank some and then fell asleep on the couch and woke up maybe 2 hours later, wide awake. So I just stayed up. Then yesterday at about 6pm I went to bed. I woke up around 1pm. So that's about 19 hours of sleep.

During that time I had a few weird dreams. Here's one.

So I've got this friend I've had a thing for for awhile. That's nothing new. Anyhow, we were sleeping in my bed, spooning as I like to do. Not having sex, didn't even want to for some reason. Then it dawned on me that we were both naked. Weird. So here's the kicker: When I woke up, I found Amica laying next to me, with her head towards the foot of the bed. My arms were around her, uh, back end.

Here's another.

I also had a dream where I was in a group of people who went to eat at a restaurant at the airport. Don't know what airport it was. But we had to go through security to get in there, and one of my bags burst open after the checkpoint. There were so many toys. It started with transformers and I think legos. Then the toys got more and more childish. There were tons of toddler toys. I couldn't fit them all in my bag. I was so embarrassed.

In other news, the girl I was dating/not dating and I have broken up. After the big ridiculous fight we had we got back together. Then while talking about things we decided to be single, since that's what she wanted. She really wanted to be single. Well, until a couple weeks later she decided to start dating the guy she met immediately after we broke up. Even though my friends tell me it's obvious I dodged a bullet, it still stings a bit, you know?

Women

Okay, so we were over at her friend Jonathan's place hanging out. We were trying out those new Mt Dew flavors, so she would open the bottle and pour it out into glasses so we could all try it. She was on the couch, I was on the loveseat.

She opened a new bottle and I walked over to have my cup refilled. While standing there in front of her sitting on the couch, she reached out with the empty pop bottle and playfully tapped me in the crotch and said something like "nut shot!" or something cute. Whatever. She happened to get a lucky shot, and managed to hurt me pretty good.

I reached out and gave her a little slap on the face.

Whoops. It happened very fast. Like a reflex. She hit my nuts, and my hand shot out to retaliate. I didn't think about it before-hand, and I certainly didn't wind up and give her a big official pimp-slap. Now, I could have slapped her harder than I wanted. Like I said, it was just a reflex and nothing I really did on purpose. And as for hitting her in the face, well, I think that was a coincidence. She was sitting and I was standing, so that's where my hand went.

After I did that, she said something like "that hurt!" and I stood there and they stared at me like I was some sort of monster. Jonathan started in on the whole "you don't hit women, dude!" shtick. As if I hadn't ever heard that before?

Well, my nuts hurt pretty bad so I went to sit down. She was silent, and Jonathan was still talking. I didn't want to argue about it, and I certainly didn't want to apologize for hitting her back.

You don't ever hit a woman!

Fuck that. I believe in equality. If you hit me, I might hit you back. How about this for a better rule:

You don't ever hit...anyone!

The aftermath

She went home without saying a word. I didn't chase after her, because that's so lame and juvenile. I called her after she left and told her I'm not going to run up there and pound on the door and beg for forgiveness because she's got a roommate. I went home to my place. The next day I called several times offering to take her out for lunch (then later dinner) so we could talk about it. I think it's pretty chickenshit to apologize over the phone, so I wanted to talk.

Finally, around 10pm I gave up and drove over to her place to talk in person. Her roommate lied and said she wasn't home. Of course she was. I didn't make a big deal out of it; obviously she didn't want to see me and there's no point in forcing the issue. I went downstairs to see if Jonathan was home (he lives in the same building), and he said he'd talked to her earlier. I said thanks and left. On the drive home I called and left her a voicemail apologizing. I didn't want to do it over the phone, and certainly not over voicemail, but if she won't talk to me, that's all I had left.

Later that night she got online to tell me she never wanted to talk to me again. We talked a bit. I think she was acting pretty irrationally based on a few of the things she said and decisions she made. I didn't really want to lose the relationship we were building, but a part of me was sorta happy to see her go. I really liked her, but if she was going give me the silent treatment every time we have an argument or something bad happens, then fuck that attitude. That's so immature.

So she didn't want to be with someone that hit women. Now let's back up a minute. That's a very loaded word phrase; "hit women". It implies that I do it all the time, or that I think it's OK, or whatever. Certainly not a label I appreciate after accidentally hitting her on the cheek after she wailed on my nuts. I'm not a woman-beater. I resent the accusation.

I apologized. Not for striking her in the first place. I don't think I did anything wrong there. It was an accident. She didn't purposefully hit my nuts (though she did happen to pick a bad place to playfully hit me with a bottle) and I didn't purposefully hit her back. She didn't need to apologize to me for it, and I didn't need to apologize to her for it. I apologized because I didn't immediately say I was sorry for hitting her harder than I wanted to. I apologized for not talking about it right away. That's what I had to be sorry for.

It really is a sucky situation. We had a lot in common and a lot of fun together. I think we could have built a nice relationship in time. The few weeks we had were really special. She was a hell of a lot cooler than a lot of people I know, and I'll miss her company.

Women

Since our last installment I met a nice girl and started forming a relationship with her. We even got close enough to be officially boyfriend and girlfriend. Now we are officially strangers. It is bad.

Women

Before I get started, the Before and After pics

Before...

...After

Phase 1 Complete

Another before shot. Note 2 tabs; CD and SAT.	Got this little bad boy to install	Push the vents down, reach in
...and give it a tug.	Pull the bezel out along the sides to the bottom	And it comes off like this.
Unplug the top wires first to give more working room	Now this one	Then the last. Set the bezel aside.
OMG it's naked.	Knife goes in	Guts come out
The factory connectors	A shot of my radio model number in case I need it later.	Wrap it up! It's a 12v power source. Not using it.
Plug in the big harness.	And the little harness.	Hook the audio output to the VES input
And plug the other end into the aux-in module.	And the familiar RCA plugs go into the other end.	And now plug the new stuff into the back of the headunit.
Packing everything back in. In this pic I've taken the module off of the cable.	Dry run to make sure I got everything plugged in right.	Bam! It works! Three tabs!
Attaching the 3.5mm to RCA adapter to test it with my mp3 player. Worked like a charm!	Zip ties will keep things in place.	The module buckled up snug!
Out comes the ashtray assembly to drill a hole for the cable.	Hrm, that metal piece looks suspiciously removable...	With a little bit of force amplification, it pops right off.
What luck! There's enough room to pass wires through into the ashtray cup. That's where my finger is.	The chunk removed, no drilling needed. Woo!	Reinstalled and ready to route the wire.
The slack was rolled up and zip tied, and then a bit fed through to the ashtray.	Alright, looks good, reattach the front bezel!	Oops, the ashtray won't go in. The wires tucked back there must be falling in the way.
So now to remove the bezel again.	Another zip tie will fix that up.	Back together, for real this time.
Stealth aux-in!	Oh, and now sometimes when my radio boots up it thinks it's in a Chrysler.	Shit, I had some parts left over.
A shot of the aux-in in use. More to come!

I added a module to give me not one but two auxiliary inputs into my car's radio. One of them will be for a 3.5mm stereo jack (Phase 2). The other one is for some super special sauce I'm still researching (Phase 3).

Magnum