Stunslinger.com Blog

It’s been 15 days since I last had caffeine. I’m not ready to kill anyone, although I came close to it at 7-Eleven this morning and afternoon.

It’s strange, I don’t mind the taste of caffeine free diet pop…honestly I can barely tell a difference. But for some reason I know that I’m missing out on something and it bugs me. Slowly, quietly, incessantly: “This is just temporary, two weeks is good enough, have a diet Coke, it’s no big deal.” I like to say that I stopped because I was giving myself an anxiety disorder. Really I was just exaggerating normal school stress, but it sounds so much more interesting as a disorder. I started clenching my jaw so hard that I would wake up with sore teeth, afraid I had a cavity, even with the rubber bite plate in my mouth. Yep, I already wear a rubber bite plate thingy at night so that I don’t grind my teeth all flat like those island guys in Endless Summer. That started when I began this stressful life many refer to as “graduate school.” So there I was, drinking caffeinated beverages to get through classes, meetings, supervisions, testings, homework and giving myself an anxiety disorder.

On to being close to killing at 7-Eleven. Ok, so in case you don’t know, I’m a pacifist. Another thing you may or may not know: it’s Lent. As a Quaker (really a Friend, but better known to the world as a Quaker) I don’t get into ritual for ritual’s sake. Many of my friends celebrate rituals (and I am not accusing them of losing the meaning, I do believe they celebrate these rituals for the right reasons) like Lent and they were trying to figure out what I need to give up. Finally, someone stumbled upon it: pacifism. I need to give up non-violence for Lent. Hmm. I thought about randomly attacking people on the street and in malls, but decided that would cause legal problems that I really wouldn’t enjoy. But if I was provoked, could even label it as self defense, then maybe I could really get in some gratuitous violence!

So I arrived at my practicum (read neuropsychological testing done for free, I mean experience) site early and decided to pop into 7-Eleven up the street to satisfy my psychological addiction to drinking pop* (even non-caffeinated pop). So I walk in to the store where I have purchased caffeine free Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke on several occasions. What do I find? Empty. Crap. The only thing I could find that would suit my needs: Diet 7-Up. I haven’t drank this stuff since I was 9….well, I’d feel like an idiot walking into 7-Eleven and not being able to find something to buy, so I buy it. I mean, really, who can’t find something to buy at a 7-Eleven on a Monday morning?!? So I drank it, and it wasn’t horrible. I began to wonder if I could justify random violence because I couldn’t find a non-caffeinated pop of the brown variety. First the Twinkie Defense and now the “Where’s My Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi/Coke? Defense”! I think it could work.

Certainly they’d have more selection by lunch. So I walked up the hill again. I saw the Pepsi truck parked promisingly outside, like a homing beacon. “You will find it here, young caffeine-free drinker!” I walked in, smiling at the counter-guy who scowled at me and walked into the back yelling at the Pepsi-guy that he left some crates behind. Over to the glass display case brimming full of…..regular…diet……more diet. WHERE’S MY CAFFEINE FREE?!? Nowhere to be found. Instead, they replaced the spots normally filled by my wonderful golden labeled, no caffeine added, libations, with brightly colored caffeinated varieties. So I grabbed another Diet 7-Up, paid and walked outside. Halfway back down the hill I realize it’s not even Diet 7-Up.

Crap.

* Yes, I call it pop. Not soda pop, not soda….pop. You can argue semantics all you want, it will always be pop in my book.

That’s right, it’s a beautiful day here: 47° and rainy.

As of late I’ve been getting kind of down on the rain and general grayness of western Oregon. After spending some time outside of this great state, I became seduced by the idea that it can be cold and sunny at the same time! The more I think about moving to Salt Lake City, the more excited I get about claims of 300 days of sun!

But then a day like today happens. It’s cold and I’m inside. I have no reason to go outside and I can hear the rain pounding on the roof. Something about it makes me happy, I just want to be inside reading a good book with a cup of hot tea. Of course I’m not reading a good book right now, and I’m drinking water instead of hot tea, but you get the idea. I guess 25 years of Oregon living has poisoned me. Part of me enjoys a good overcast, rainy day.

When my wife and I were off traveling across the country, we began to wonder if perhaps we have Seasonal Affective Disorder and just don’t know it! Our whole lives could be one long episode of depression, and we really could become manic once we leave. I’d better make sure and steal some Lithium to stabilize our mood, just in case!

I love my new 60 GB iPod Video. It was annoying the crap out of me.

So I finally gave in and bought a new 5th Generation iPod. And I love it. I’ve had a 15 GB Dell DJ for two years, and there was nothing wrong with it really, I just had more music than it could contain. Plus, I got into podcasts and audiobooks, and the DJ just doesn’t have the capabilities to handle either one with the ease of the iPod. So now I understand what all of the fuss is about, these things truly are wonderful.

However, I ran into numerous problems last week that I’m just now getting sorted out. My iPod started having these weird “glitchy” problems. Sometimes the menu would lag by about 10 seconds, other times a song would start playing but the album art wouldn’t show up and it would “freeze” for a bit. Then it wouldn’t want to turn off when I held down the play/pause button. After several days and several resets/restores I got fed up and went to the Apple store to sort it out. Turns out that the iPod has problems with mp3’s that are encoded with a Variable BitRate (VBR). Something about VBR freaks the iPod out and can cause problems with the software that leads to all of the above mentioned glitchy-ness.

Frustrating. In fact, I didn’t fully believe them until they loaded my iPod with some test songs and sent me home to test it out. Wouldn’t you know it, I can’t make it freak out anymore! So now I’m tracking down all of my random VBR encoded tracks and transferring them to AAC’s. I do think from now on that I’ll rip my CDs to 160 AAC, it just seems like a better format. In fact, I’m now thinking about going back and re-ripping all of my 128 mp3’s from CD again. Ugh.

All this after I spent two weekends adding album art to every mp3 in my 20 GB collection!

On another note, I highly recommend upgrading your earphones to the Fontopia earphones I just got yesterday. They are infinitely more comfortable than the iPod stock earphones, and sound way better as well! Now I just want the iSkin eVo3 case so I don’t scratch my new toy to hell.

If you ever start thinking that people in general are nice, unselfish and un-lazy, go to a supermarket and remind yourself how messed up we are.

Yep, I just returned from the local Fred Meyer’s (substitute whatever local buy-everything-under-one-roof store you frequent), and I guess I just don’t understand people. If you have a shopping cart, and you put your groceries into your car, when did it become so difficult to walk the cart back to the store? I live in a small town, yet every time I go to the store there are 20 or so carts in my section of the parking lot. Are people really this selfish and lazy? Of course they are, but it still ticks me off! Are we such a couch potato society that we can’t push a cart 100 feet to the nearest cart collector thing? The thing has wheels…you just pushed it all over the store collecting the sugar-filled, artificially enhanced, preserved for the rest of eternity crap that you call “food”, and you can’t turn around and put the empty thing where it belongs?

Not only is this selfish and lazy, it’s self-defeating too! People complain about prices. Constantly. Think about it: a part of the cost of the junk we buy goes to pay the wages of all the workers of whatever store you shop in. The more lazy customers are, the more services a store has to provide (for example, cart-collector guys who run around the damn parking lot getting carts) the more their costs go up. When their costs go up they can either reduce profits or raise prices. And you know they’re not going to let go of any profit margin, so the prices go up. Then people complain about prices…some even say, “I’m paying so much, I’m entitled to leave my cart wherever I want.” That’s true, as long as you’re selfish, lazy and don’t mind paying more for the same junk in a year!

I can’t even wrap my brain around the logic behind propping the front wheels of the shopping cart on a curb/in the dirt. I actually saw an older guy empty his cart into his car, turn around and walk 30 feet away from the store to stick the front wheels of his cart into a grassy area…but he could have walked 60 feet towards the store and dropped it off where it belonged! “Yes sir, we did include many areas of grass and shrubbery specifically for customers to decorate with the front wheels of their carts, thank you for using these grassy areas to their full potential!”

So I have some grad school friends who are on their internship year (still students, still paying tuition, but not on campus), getting ready to finish their doctoral work. Someday soon I too will be in this category. So one of my friends who is currently living in Chicago needed to get a transcript so that she can apply for a further training position. Should be a simple task, right? A current student of the school (remember, she’s still paying tuition) wanting a transcript to send off. Not if bureaucracy has anything to do with it!

So she calls the Registrar and asks for a transcript to be sent out. She’s not naive, she knows she will have to pay for them to click on her name, hit print, put it in an envelope and put it in the mail. Oh, but she wants a rush on it. Stop the presses! For the normal fee, you must be willing to wait a week before it will be in the mail. That’s right, a week for them to print a few pages, stuff an envelope, stamp it official and mail it.

Logical conclusion: This school must be so tiny that they use hand written grades, and these registrar people must have to assemble every known grade from a number of gigantic filing cabinets, photocopy them (or use the local scribe to hand copy by hand), cut the individual grades out of the copies and assemble them onto one page and then copy that so it looks like an official transcript. But no… a couple of years ago they computerized the whole registrar/financial aid/grades/everything. We put up with the headaches associated with that change (i.e. getting too much money back from your loans because the registrar didn’t tell financial aid all the classes you’re registered for “on time”, and then receiving a bill for the difference three months later) because it was supposed to make our lives easier. Hah.

Back to the narrative. So she finds out she must pay when the request is made. “Do you take credit card payment, seeing as I’m in Chicago?” Of course not. “Can you charge it to my student account, since I’m still heavily indebted to you each semester?” Nope. You must give us cash or a check. From Chicago. ASAP. So, she calls me to go drop off the money, which I do. When I get there they have no idea how much money I’m supposed to pay them. They can’t seem to find her request anywhere. I go ahead and leave the money with them (the amount my friend told me to pay, plus the rush fee which they neglected to tell her about) along with a post-it note with her name on it. Basically, “when we find this request, here’s the money.” No receipt for me, just an extra note on the post-it saying that it’s my money (because there’s also some question as to whether someone else may have dropped off money earlier), in case they have to give it back.

So I get home, and return to the sane world of the internet. That’s right, this crap is sane compared to this office associated with my institution of higher learning. And I find an email from the registrar… Apparentl someone else dropped off the money before I did, “you can have your money back.” Sweet.

First of all, thanks to The Office (US version) I learned that in order to give a good speech, I should wave my arms in the air and pound my fists on the podium a lot. So I’m doing it while writing, but you can’t see me…so imagine the waving arms and pounding fists while reading. Onward.

So I was reading an article on blogging (yes, it was actually a blog about blogging) and one of the suggestions was to give the reader what he or she wants. This is basic marketing. Now, because I’m such an impeccably logical person, I began to explore the limits of this idea and it hit me: Choose Your Own (Blog) Adventure! Yes, I did just come up with the newest and greatest idea in the history of blogging. I will now wait for the applause to settle.

First, you must think back to the glory days of teenage literature, and remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books (or CYOAb for those of us cool reader types). You would start to read the book and then you were confronted with a choice, inevitably presented as “Do you jump into the shark infested waters with raw meat around your neck? Choose Yes, turn to page 6. Choose No, turn to page 8.” These books were intended to teach valuable lessons, or were at least a way for the author to write a bunch of really short stories instead of a book. Anyway, the beauty of the books was that it could be everything to everybody. The content was (sort of) tailor made to each reader. You could read the “same book” several different times, and have a different experience each time. So how, you may be asking, does this relate to blogs? Well, fearless reader, I’ll tell you!

Imagine a blog that allowed you to create the entries as you saw fit. This way I could publish entries on the most incindiary topics, and offend nobody. I could write a rant about the current political situation, and please both Michael Moore and Bill O’Reilly, plus all those apathetic non-voters too! I would simply spend weeks working out all of the possible special-interest group’s preferred positions on the issue I was writing about, and then link each one up through a giant decision tree, so that in the end each type of person could read a blog (albeit a very short blog) that they could completely agree with. True blogging bliss.

I can just imagine the looks of confusion when Larry the Liberal and Corey the Conservative meet up at the watercooler to discuss their weekend blogging activity (what, you don’t do this at your work?) and discover that they both truly loved “Political Blog” from Stunslinger’s Blog Site.

Then, as always seems to happen, after congratulating myself for being brilliant yet again, I realize that this idea has already been done. Back to the drawing board….hmm, what about a Mad Lib Blog?!?