I'm surprised sometimes just how often people point out to me how long it's been since I've written. It's the good kind of surprised though, it's nice to think that anyone checks this regularly and likes reading it. And it's true that I have trouble keeping up with it sometimes. Part of the problem is that I find that, compared to when I was in school and working for the government, there are more aspects of my life that it would be irresponsible for me to write about on the internet.

I can write about my job, but only in an indirect sense. And I wouldn't want to say anything (good or bad) about people I work with because there's a very good probability that could work its way back to me in some way. Besides that, I feel that whenever someone talks about their job, it's almost always incredibly boring to any other person.

The fact that I'm not traveling around the country anymore also limits some of my usual writing subjects. Don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly happy about that though.

So that leaves me with general thoughts, or things I do on weekends, because on weekdays I don't really do that much besides get up, go to work, and come home. There are exceptions of course, but generally on weeknights I just want to take advantage of the time I have. So if I have to choose between, say, going over to Mark's, having dinner with Gregg, or playing Final Fantasy Tactics A2, well, those usually beat out "sit down at the computer to write something".

I am going to try and make more of an effort though. I think I may be letting my Livejournal slip away a bit from being an actual journal and instead being just a place for me to put up videos and internet links. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I know I'll still be doing a lot of that.

But actually, maybe the thing that makes it the hardest is that I don't have anything to read on LiveJournal anymore. I may be told that I don't write enough, but if I go to a friend's Livejournal, I'm likely to just see an entire page spammed full of my entries.

For me though, if I go to my friends page, there's almost nothing to read anymore. There are only two posts on my friends page right now. The most recent is from Carol, and it's a week old. The other is some Livejournal news crap.

Dave last wrote a month ago. Marcie's one of my more prolific friends and she generally writes once a month. Carol and Beth are probably the two people I read the most, and it's been over a month since Beth wrote.

As much as I write here, I actually like reading far more. I remember at one point I was reading so much on Livejournal that I would watch for my flashing indicator in the system tray whenever someone posted. Not that I'm demanding people write more or anything, but I really truly like hearing about people. I guess to some extent sites like Facebook have kind of taken that on, and of course I'm in pretty regular contact with the people around me already.

Oh well, I guess that was very 2003. Nonetheless, I'm going to try and keep writing, even if it means more friends-only entries or something. If nothing else I think this is a good method of keeping my parents up-to-date about things going on in my life that aren't important enough to warrant phone call!

current weather: Partly Cloudy, 76, Wind: NW 9

Tags: dave, livejournal
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: none

I wonder why I have managed to consistently write on Mondays and Tuesdays all month long, but have so much trouble on other days?

Last month it was Wednesdays. Maybe I feel bad after having gone a week without writing.

Tags: livejournal
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: none

I think I've come to realize that if I really want to post on a daily basis, then on Fridays I'll need to write something around lunch, because otherwise nothing will get written. I have a tendency to immediately go see someone or do something on Friday nights, and then am doing it long enough that if I stop to write something before I go to bed, it's past midnight and therefore I've missed my window. The same is true for Saturday but I seem to have more luck squeezing something in on Saturday.

I had a dream last night that I had to travel for work... in Iraq. That was pretty messed up. I can only conclude that my brain hates me, although that would seem to imply that I hate myself, which is sort of a disconcerting thought. Maybe not quite as disconcerting as surveying in Sadr City, but disconcerting nonetheless.

currently reading: "Designated Targets" by John Birmingham

current weather: Clear, 38, Wind: NW 3, Rain today: 0.01"; It was supposed to rain last night and today but I think we barely got any at all

Tags: dream, livejournal, work
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood: okay
Current Music: none

There was a great Onion Sports article today:

Excited Red Sox Fans Eagerly Await Debut of Matsuzaka's 'Ultimate Galactic Dragon Gyroball Pitch Power Explosion'

From the article:

"If what we've heard is correct, then Matsuzaka indeed possesses a Power Level of well over 9,000," said ESPN's Peter Gammons, struggling to contain his excitement on Tuesday's edition of Baseball Tonight. "Over 9,000! Which, of course, is only to be expected of the ballplayer whom sources say descended into the Underworld to spit in the flaming eye of the Lord of Hell and steal the secret power of the Onikaze, or 'demon-storm' pitch, which tails away nicely from both lefties and righties."

Weapons of Choice has proven to be a little more difficult to find than I anticipated. The Stow and Kent libraries each have a copy (Kent has two), but all are out at the moment. I went over to Borders when I was over at Mark's the other day and their computer said they had a copy but the employees couldn't find it anywhere.

I ordered it from Amazon two days ago, but after I ordered it it estimated a delivery time of March 14-21, which kind of sucks. But mysteriously it shipped today so it should get there much sooner than that.

I can confirm that I will be traveling next week from Monday through Wednesday. The basic version of the itinerary is this:

1) Fly from Akron-Canton to Denver Monday morning
2) Drive to a site in Parker, Colorado (far southeast side of Denver), then drive back to the airport
3) Fly from Denver to Oklahoma City Monday evening
4) Drive to Lawton, Oklahoma (hour and a half southwest of Oklahoma City) to do a job there
5) Fly from Oklahoma City to Akron-Canton Wednesday, get home around 3 pm

So the work itself should be pretty easy, but I'll be doing a lot of traveling, which is fine, these jobs are kind of fun :).

I watched last week's Battlestar Galactica today, and I thought it was a particularly good episode.

I managed to post every day but 2 last month, both of which were actually before I made the decision to try and post daily. I'm hoping to keep this up. I suppose the general quality of my posts may go down a bit as a result but somehow in my head I rationalize that by writing more myself, other people might write more too!

current weather: Rain, 44, Wind: SE 3, Rain today: 0.64"; All this rain and the warm temps and the snow's STILL not fully melted (or even really all that close)

Tags: baseball, books, bsg, japan, livejournal, onion, travel, work
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Sheryl Crow - Real Gone

I haven't been writing as much as I'd like to, and when I have, I'm noticing that it tends to be links to other sites, things I've seen on the internet, etc., and not so much about what sorts of things I've been up to, or my life in general.

So I'm going to try and make an effort to do both, that is, write more, and also write a little more about my daily life, because I feel like I've gotten away from that a bit.

Not tonight though, because I have a bit of a headache and sleep sounds great :).

current weather: Partly Cloudy, 24, Wind: W 12; we got a about an inch of new snow earlier this morning from an Alberta Clipper; now it's just cold and windy - there's lake effect snow in the primary snow belt but not here

Tags: livejournal
Current Location: 41.197N 81.433W
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: none

Yesterday marked the five year anniversary of my writing nonsense in this journal.

Doesn't seem that long ago...

Incidentally I had totally forgotten that Lisa was Torpedo Manatee.

According to this page I found, the:

Traditional 5th Anniversary Gift: Wood
Modern 5th Anniversary Gift: Silverware
Travel 5th Anniversary Gift: Airline Tickets, Cruise

At least, that is, according to web pages that tell people what they should give each other for presents on certain anniversaries.

So I thought about it, and decided that giving everyone airline tickets or a cruise would be kind of expensive. I don't think all my Choice Rewards Points could handle that many people. I figure you all already have enough silverware, and if not... well, actually I could use some silverware, so I certainly don't have extra to gift.

And uh... I'm not sure I want to give you wood.

[Ahem]

Tags: anniversary, livejournal
Current Location: 40.378N 76.670W
Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: the Colbert Report

So I felt that maybe it was time for an upgrade of my LiveJournal.

I'm approaching the five year anniversary of writing in this thing, which honestly kind of blows my mind.

Over that time a lot has changed and been added. I remember when I got a paid membership just because the site was too overloaded and only ran well for paid users!

I've been noticing that a lot of the newer features weren't showing up on my pages, because it was still using the original style system.

The two notable additions to LiveJournal are tags and the new location option, both of which only appear if you're using an S2 page (the new style system). Since my journal was S1 I hadn't even seen these when people started using them, so they're not necessarily all that new (well, tags aren't) but I only recently learned about them.

Tags:

Tags work just like they do in, say, Flickr, and give you a new way to search entries. This page shows all of the tags I have used, which admittedly is only over the last month or so. Clicking on a tag will show (up to 100) entries in which that tag is used. You can do this either at that page I just linked (or your own version of that page), or on your friends page or recent entries page wherever those tags are displayed.

I haven't really had a chance to test this out, and I sure hope it's true, but people can only view tags which they could actually view the entries for. For example, if you tagged all of your friends only entries with "friends only", not only could you click on that tag to see all of your friends only entries, but anyone that isn't on your friends list wouldn’t even see that a "friends only" tag exists. Make sense?

Location:

The location tag is pretty new, and I hadn't noticed it either because it wasn't in Semagic (the windows LiveJournal client I use) just yet. It is now though, in the most recent version.

It works just like the "current music" or "current mood" tags, only it's linked to Google Maps, so if you put in "Stow, OH", it will create a link to Google Maps with "Stow, OH" as the search term.

Generally this means that if you want the location link to work with Google Maps, it needs to be something that Google Maps will recognize. "Work" or "Home" won't return any results, even though they may make perfect sense to you.

As a mapping/surveying dork I think this is incredibly cool. One particularly cool thing about this is that Google Maps accepts latitude and longitude, in a [decimal degrees][N or S] [decimal degrees][E or W] format. Now, understandably most people don't know their geographic coordinates at any given moment, but this site can convert addresses into latitude and longitude! Pretty cool, eh?

Ok, maybe not, but it is to me.

So anyway, today I converted my journal to the S2 style. I realize that 90% of the people that may read this journal probably don't go to my actual page at all so the difference wouldn't necessarily be all that noticeable. I'm trying out the "Component" style. Unfortunately what I didn't realize was that while it's easy to set up a quick, nice-looking S2 page, going in and making changes or overrides is a lot more complex than in S1.

So unfortunately it's kind of unfinished. I think I have the colors and basic setup the way I want them (maybe), but I would like to add more "components" on the right, with more stuff, and I know it's possible, but it looks like there's a pretty sharp learning curve to get to that point.

Ideally I would like to have some more links over there, as well as modules for my Last.fm charts, Del.icio.us links and tags, and my Sitemeter, which is retired for the moment until I can figure out how to get it back up onto there. I think I may beg Ben for a little bit of help on it.

Also, I just realized I have 120(!) userpics available. Holy geez.

Tags: livejournal
Current Location: 41.196829N 81.432822W
Current Mood: confused
Current Music: Battlestar Galactica - Bear McCreary - Helo In The Warehouse