Monthly Archive for December, 2007

Saw 2 movies over the last couple of days.

Sweeney Todd
Johnny Depp and that other crazy white chick. I didn’t know it was a musical going in, but I still enjoyed it. Very gruesome and weird.

Juno
Best movie I’ve seen all year! I’ve been waiting for months to watch this, the trailer for it was excellent. A character driven comedy/drama with excellent acting and screenplay. The human element in movies; sappy love plots; have been getting to me more and more and this is a great example. Lots of high school comedy realism and awkwardness that I totally relate to and some good questions about love. Definitely go see it ASAP!

Again, a re-occurring theme in my life as I mature, I think about what makes me happy and what I want out of life. I’ve defined it before with money being the roots for happiness. That still stands, but I’m aiming deeper now, with what I want to do with my life. My happiness comes and goes, generally I’m positive overall, but what do I want to do? What makes me happy?

I was absorbed reading a short novel yesterday called The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect about the technology singularity, an event when similiar to Skynet or something when humans build a computer smart enough to think for itself, improve itself, and the consequences as the computer takes over. As all technology improves exponentially, eventually we might reach that point very soon. A scary thought, but the main point I took away from that novel was what people did once the computer took over. Imagine that it could grant you any whim you pleased. No more food, no more need really, no worries, so what would you do? What would make you happy?

The interesting thing I took away was that people would still chat and interact. A person is unique and ultimate. We control things ultimately. When I loosely relate that to my life, I came up with traveling as being one of the most important things to me. Meeting new people, learning new things, experiencing as much as I can ultimately makes me happy. I need to travel more.

• I saw I Am Legend at the Thursday midnight showing and it was excellent. A very haunting, psychological thriller that reminded me a lot of Children Of Men. Will Smith has been working on his acting range and this really showed it off pretty well, plus it had plenty of stuff blowing up. I definitely want to read the book for this now.
• Speaking of books, I’ve been trying to read more frequently. Recently finished Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi and it was an excellent piece of knowledge. It showed me the power of networking and socializing, two things that I am now working to improve on. I wasn’t oblivious of these principles before, I just didn’t have them explained in such detail. Understand how being social works and then realizing what you can do to improve at it is the true goal.
• I need to learn to sew! Jeans are falling apart.
• I’ve been updating some of my PHP scripts on the site. Main thing is my Birthday script for Shacknews.  I formerly had the script just dump any new data into a text file, which I would then edit and input the data into MySQL. I felt it was better not to put bad data into the database and be the middle man. After 6 months now, I’m a a lazy middle man and I realize Regex would be a better middle man. Also, for such a simple application, entering a bit of bad data isn’t that big a deal and it would be easier to just edit the database directly to fix the bad data. Lesson learned, simple is always better. Less clicks, less middle men always save time.
• Along that same line, I’m working on Ruby on Rails again now that 2.0 has come out. Again, after 6 months of RoR, I see the major point of simple web applications and where to use them. Get the basic data interactions planned out, how you want people to use things, and then expand off that. Once you get people entering data, you can polish and clean it up, but the data and functionality is king. I was formerly too wrapped up on Rails and trying to accomplish too much.