The Behrens Venture

It’s a typical Christmas post. Merry Christmas and whatnot. My heart just isn’t in it this year though due to a combination of factors. Whether my family situation or my personal situation, I’m not sure which, but I’m just not celebrating too much. No tree at home, no snow, no heart. The one redeeming element were the presents of course!

I was extremely happy about finding a local knitting shop called Knit One, which seems to have a great community attached to it. I purchased a book for my mom from there and got the shops card, hopefully I can get her out of the house and making some connections. I hope she follows up on it.

My main gift was a great cashmere scarf, I don’t think I can get enough cashmere. A few gift cards to B&N and iTunes also. I really don’t need much anymore, I’m trying to slim down my physical connections as much as I can due to all the moving. Simple is better now-a-days. Also had a nice honey ham dinner with some great wine. I can’t really ask for more. Hope your Christmas was just as good!

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.

A friend of mine has created a blog for his dad as a christmas gift. If that isn’t a great gift, then I don’t know what is. If the though is what matters most, then this is definitely up there.

Now to keeping looking for gifts for my mom, someone I can barely relate to! This will be fun.

• 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.

As the title summates, tonight I went to a yoga class that RIT offers and it was excellent.

When I discovered last week that this quarter was going to be “easy,” I was excited. More free time for projects, more time to relax, more time to do what I want to do, because usually what I’m doing IS the right thing to do be doing. Once this weekend hit however, I just hit a wall and couldn’t focus at all. I’m very much a swing person, back and forth between periods of high productivity and focus to periods of complete lethargy and non-activity. This weekend was a big on the lazy side and I hated it. Once I got to the gym on Sunday morning, it set me back in motion and then I sent out like 7 resumes in the afternoon and got most of my work done! In that time while I was at the gym, I realized that the gym is where I get my focus and center. I enjoy burning off energy because I have so much. It’s part of my life and I can’t change that anymore.

Once I was back from the gym, I looked around and then signed up for the next Yoga class that was still available. I’ve done yoga, pilates, mixed cardio, and focused training classes before, but yoga has something simple and peaceful about it. The best class I’ve taken was in completely darkness and just had Enya playing in the background. Not what people would expect for me, but I love it none-the-less. It gives me time to focus and relax. I push my body hard and doing a focused stretching session is excellent for my muscles as well.

I went tonight and it was great. I ran afterwards and felt great doing that. I’m home now, tired and loose. Yoga is definitely worth the time.