How Is It Possible That Monday Is Here And I Did No Coding?

For as much as I love coding (aka software development) I am not doing a whole hell of a lot of it. I really hope to reverse this trend in 2011.

Conclusive Evidence
As I strolled around the Woodruff Arts Center, Table 1280, and the Hertz Theatre looking at the happy couples I was reminded of something. Even when I consider myself to look “nice” I still look like a slob. They were all in fancy dress and suits, I was in jeans and a nice shirt. I don’t dress well enough to attract the women that I find attractive, and frankly given the state of my body (the fat being a minor contributor), I doubt that I ever will.

I had a beer and some tempura vegetables for dinner at Table 1280, which is the most convenient place to nosh and slosh prior to a performance. With extra time on my hands I wandered around the Woodruff Arts Center, shopped in a pop-up gift store there (complimenting the young lady working inside, and pretty much asked her to use my extra ticket — which she declined), and snapping a few iPhone photos of the surrounds (which did little more than make me wish that I was using my DSLR).

The play “The Second City: A Miracle At 1280 Peachtree Street” was a funny collection of skits and improve. I’d seen The Second City’s performance of “Atlanta: Too Busy to Hate … Too Hard to Commute” a few years ago and enjoyed it enough to give this show a try. I’d recommend that you go as well, except for the fact that the show closed yesterday.

I’m Not Afraid Of This Hite
Saturday was known as the “busy” day. Daybreak photography at the Chattahoochee (see below), followed by a breakfast at Waffle House, followed by lavanderia time, followed by an incredible three-hour (if not longer) nap, followed by a drive to some place known as “Sandy Plains Rd” for Korean BBQ and karaoke.

Wait.
What?

Yes, Korean BBQ and karaoke at a place called Melody Karaoke. Now don’t get your hopes up too high, for I did not sing the entire evening. Why? First, I felt a little uncomfortable with the people around me (the outing was a graduation party for a coworker and I while I knew about half of those in attendance I felt strange.). But, more importantly this place had almost no songs that I knew where in my vocal range.

In case you didn’t notice, most male-vocal music is done by guys in their twenties — an age at which higher notes are achievable. I am not in my twenties, and am not certain that I could hit the high notes back then either.

So I looked for:
Frank Sinatra — they didn’t have any of his songs
Johnny Cash — they didn’t have any of his songs
Tom Petty — they didn’t have any of his songs
Willie Nelson — they had one song, “Always On My Mind”, which was sung by someone else. I was interested in singing “Crazy”

Oh they had all of the Journey, ABBA, disco songs, hair metal, etc that you could ever “want” but nothing in my range. Well, except for Nirvana, but I didn’t feel comfortable singing “Lithium” to that crowd, so I watched instead.

Other crazy things about Korean karaoke is that in addition to the words on the screen there is a Korean video / movie playing in the background which has nothing to do with the song you are singing (it’s quite distracting), and you are in your own private room.

And why “Hite” you ask? Because that was the name of the beer which I consumed all night at the restaurant.

ITP Flickr Pic
It was cold and dark when I arrived at the Chattahoochee off of Akers Mill Road just inside the perimeter. However, my heart was warmed when I realized that my seemingly waste of $80 — the purchase price of the annual “America The Beautiful” National Parks pass which I bought back during the “great times of my vacation” — would allow me to forgo paying the $3 parking fee because I was in a National Park. Honestly, I had no idea that Georgia had any National Parks.

I met my friends Jim and Lee and we meandered down to the water and set up for what we were hoping would be a sunrise equal to the one each of us has seen individually on Friday. We didn’t have that much luck, but I was able to capture (and enhance) this scene.

Yes, I do see a common thread amongst my latest set of landscapes. (see also : last Monday’s blog photo)

Video Frustrations
After The Amazing Race (no spoilers here) I decided to use watch some of my beloved Christmas shows on my first-generation AppleTV. One (huge) problem, I have re-ripped all of these shows so that they can be watched on my iPad, but the newly ripped versions are now not playable on the AppleTV. Even worse, the audio plays but the screen remains black and the only way to stop this is to reboot the box. What the fuck, Apple?!?!

Undaunted, I decided to watch some Netflix movies streamed through my first-generation Roku box (and was one button click from ordering a second-generation Roku box last night.) The experience was atrocious. First, not all of the movies in my Netflix streaming queue were available (specifically the Frank Lloyd Wright documentary that I was going to watch), and then the real deal breaker occurred when the video I started to watch paused to buffer content and then downgraded the video quality, not once, not twice, but three times, before I quit. I’m paying AT&T U-Verse for 12Mbps download service, I certainly was not getting that last night, and in the end it cost Roku another sale because I canceled my order. Seriously, what’s the point of having “fast access internet” and fancy-pants devices for streaming media if the experience is going to be that poor?

RealiTV Update: The Amazing Race — And The Winner Is….
You know that there are spoilers below, right.
I said SPOILERS!

Well there we were, at the end of another The Amazing Race. I was so excited for the Grand Finale that I never even got out of my pajamas. Okay, I never got out of my pajamas because I knew that the plan to have three ladies over for the finale, wine, and pizza had completely fallen through thanks to shitty weather and pending deadlines. That just meant that there was more pizza (more on this tomorrow) for me!

As is custom for the finale of The Amazing Race, all teams board the same flight to head from whatever exotic location in which the penultimate leg finished to fly to a country where English is becoming a second language — the United States. Each team arrived at LAX and quickly began scrambling for a cab. Oh. The. Drama.

We found out that Team Docs With Boxes “met” at UCLA — how nice — and their understanding of LA’s arterial traffic system should help them immensely.

Meanwhile Team Home Shopping have put on cheetah pants. I was oddly disturbed by this.

And, not the be left out, Team Hotre Dame guaranteed that there is at least one dick in this finale.

The first stop in LaLaLand was the docks. I assume that all teams will have to get tattoos, which would make Team Piercing a shoe-in for an undeserved victory (more on them later), but instead it’s time to battle your FEAR OF HEIGHTS. We’ve been down the this road on this race before and we keep harping on how Nat, or is it Kat, hates heights. I’m with you sister, but why should we discount the fact that your vegetarian-for-twenty-two-years partner ate a fucking sheep’s head for you? Shit your pants and drop on the bungie cord already! Meanwhile, for the first time since the beginning of the season I dislike Team Home Shopping because Brooke continues to scream as she drops. And then she screams some more. And then she screams some more. I think Team Hotre Dame was having bungie sex, but CBS seems to discount their efforts. I wonder why??? Could they have little impact on the outcome?…

Back on solid ground fluid water, all teams take a helicopter (More heights? Why isn’t Kat, or is it Nat, crying like a little girl?) over the Rose Bowl so that they can help paste flowers onto a Rose Bowl parade float. Is this legal? Isn’t that a Union job in California? We see that each team has gone to elementary school and completes the task with relative ease. And we keep cutting to Jill as she wishes that she’d done this Road Block because she’s crafty (I bet she is) and wished the Road Block involved writing your name in snow without using your hands directly.

All teams now have to solve a series of questions in order to get to their next clue. It’s at that time that I receive a text message from ITP-Reader Terri who can’t believe that none of these contestants have read “Don Quixote” — hey, they are all pretty people, and that’s all that matters to CBS. But, thank Jeebus we are in America where everyone owns an iPhone, speaks perfect English, and can Google nekkid pictures of Kim Kardashian from their cab. Except, that it seems as if CBS has rounded up all of the cabbies from the 1980’s who have neither heard of an iPhone, The Google, nor CBS for that matter. Team Hotre Dame has it the worst because every time they try to get help from their cabbie he keeps asking “How much for the girl?” in some dialect that we heard in one of the earlier episodes. Meanwhile Team Docs With Boxes and Team Home Shopping have figured out how to coerce people to help them and are on their way to making The Amazing Race herstory!

Inside Don Quixote Studios, Studio 7 to be exact, we find an animatronic Bob Eubanks doing a creepy dance move standing in front of an awesome video screen and three stations which have iPads. That’s right, iPads!!! How I wish that I could program one of those bad boys… ARGH! Oh, sorry.

Now is the time where you better remember every little detail about each stage of the race — or have written it in your moleskine notebook. Team Docs With Boxes recognize each greeter by the disease indigenous to the land in which they finished and head out of the studio before Team Home Shopping and Team Hotre Dame arrive. Team Home Shopping show up next and are thrilled to see animatronic Bob Eubanks because, you know they too work in the “tv,” which nearly blows animatronic Bob Eubanks’ circuit board. Meanwhile Team Hotre Dame are crossing into Tijuana where the gorgeous blond will fetch a wonderful price.

Out of the studios and off to the finish line!!! The clever CBS editors make it look as if Team Docs With Boxes and Team Home Shopping are neck-and-necking, but honestly I think we all know that Team Docs With Boxes probably finished well ahead of Team Home Shopping. We are spared, or perhaps deprived, of seeing Team Hotre Dame attempt the video screen / greeter recognition Road Block, and we see them plop on the Finish Mat in third place.

There you go, herstory has been made as the first female-female team has won! And it’s about damn time that some beautiful doctors caught a break in this world.

Next season we get to see some of our “favorites” (Really CBS? Team Piercing?) return to take care of “Unfinished Business.” And by “favorites” CBS means “teams from the past few seasons that you probably don’t like, but what the fuck, we know that you’ll watch anything. Remember ‘The Amazing Race: Family Edition’?”

Stats & Goals
Daily
Current Mood – nervous, very nervous because things aren’t the way they should be; also sad because we had a death in the family this weekend.
Current Music – silence
Website Of The Day – I keep hearing a lot of good thing about Why We Cook, the blog of chef Erica Wides.
Mode Of Transportation To Work – my car
Exercise (b)Log – nothing
Morning Weigh-In – didn’t care
Pages Of 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die Read – 77

Monthly
Foot Mileage – ~5.5 miles
Wheel Mileage – 0 miles
Pushups – 0
Situps – 0
Stairs – 55 flights

Consecutive Days Of Bed-Making (Longest Streak) – 0 (0)

Vegetarian Days – 2
Carnivorous Days – 10

Marta Rides To Work – 0
Bike Rides To Work – 0

December Goals
– Not to get sick for the entire month
– Not get fired from my job
– Run no fewer than 75 miles
– Prepare Sharpened Stone, LLC for 2011
– Lose two pounds
– Eat vegetarian at least one day a week
– A couple of secret goals which I will not divulge

2010 Goals
– Reduce my weight to 185 pounds (starting weight was 198 pounds) [update: On July 1 I’ve sadly gained weight; I’m at 203 pounds]
– Completely read the book 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die
– Earn at least $150 through photography sales in order to cover the cost for the renewal of the Sharpened Stone.
– Save $500 for the sole purpose of donating to charitable organizations of my choice
– Attend at least one professional photography workshop
– Enter no fewer than three photographic competitions / gallery showings
– Get the Black Sheep stats out of Excel and online, completed
– Ride in no fewer than two 50 mile or 50K bike rides, completed
– Complete my Taco Mac Passport requirement of 125 beers, completed

The Unmeasurable
– Continue backing up all data, including the off-site storage
– Become a proficient programmer in PHP and CSS Objective-C
– Do not create a solution for something which is not a problem

Cheers,
Paulie [eatl/ga]