Posted by Ryan
November 21, 2008
Things on my mind right now:
- Why have I only eaten once today?
- Why am I still home when I could be out having fun?
- I don’t really want to go dancing tonight.
- I am going to go dancing anyway.
- Going on a road trip to Seattle sounds fun.
- Or maybe New Mexico. I’ve never been there.
- Is there anything to do in New Mexico?
- Which of my 4 or 5 book ideas do I start first?
- People are weird.
- I like weirdness.
- I have an awful lot of stuff to pack.
- I’ve gotta get some boxes.
- I wonder if anyone’s online on facebook. It is a Friday night…
- Wow, at least 5 other people have no lives. 22 others are marked as inactive.
- For how many friends I have, I do remarkably little with any of them.
- Does that make me anti-social?
- Probably.
- Dang it!
- Actually, I disagree with myself. I’m not anti-social.
- I’m selectively-social.
- The selection process is pretty straightforward.
- Is ___ weird? If yes, hang out.
- That’s really not true.
- Like I’d give away my who-do-I-hang-out-with-tonight formula.
- Hint: it involves a rubik’s cube and lots of cheese.
- Have I ever made cheese?
- Making ice cream is awesome.
- I don’t usually eat because I’m hungry, even when I’m hungry.
- I eat because it satisfies some other need.
- For example, I’ve never been sky diving. So I eat instead.
- I do understand, though, that eating keeps you from all sorts of unpleasant things, such as starvation, so I do also eat for that reason, too.
- I think I use commas too much. Perhaps I should throw in some em dashes here and there for good measure.
- Semicolons are nifty;
- however, I don’t always know when to use them.
- The problem with a brain dump is that your brain has a tendency to keep thinking once it’s started.
- I think I’ll go eat.
- I’m not really hungry, but I should be. I’ve only eaten once today. And I didn’t even eat that much.
- If the universe had no meaning, would we ever have discovered such a thing?
- C.S. Lews is awesome.
- I don’t like unpacking.
The funny thing about all these thoughts is that they’re all somehow related. It’s not always easy to draw relationships between them all, but I think they’re there. If nothing else, they’re related by being in my head—they’re a part of me.
Posted by Ryan
November 19, 2007
When people ask me what I do I generally respond with something like “save the world from alien invasions,” but only when I want to scare the person off.
Yes, that a lie. I figured it’d been too long since I’d started out a post with a lie.
The truth is, I usually answer the question saying, “I’m a programmer.”
Not anymore though! I read a nifty article today and I’ve decided to change how I respond to this question.
Isn’t it pathetic? We live in a world where people don’t care about the things that you do — the things that interest you. Correction: They care more about how you make money, first and foremost. All the time — parents, friends, family, new people — they all want to know “what do you do?” But it reality, they are asking “how do you make money — what’s your job?”
- David Askaripour
From now on, when someone asks me what I do I’m going to say “I dance, fly fish, read, write, geek out, eat food, think, hike, and pretend to punch people in the face!” As I say that last part I’ll pretend to punch them in the face. People will think it’s hilarious.
Posted by Ryan
June 7, 2007
So I’ve been all sorts of productive today. Sort of. When I say that I really mean that I’ve put off a lot of important things in order to do other, perhaps less important things. Are they really less important though? I’m not sure they are.
Have you heard of DailyLit? It’s so incredibly awesome. I discovered it a week ago? Two weeks ago? I don’t remember, but I am loving it. Basically, you can read a book in your email or in an RSS feed. The idea is that people don’t want to take the time, or don’t have the time to sit down and read a book so you can have them send you pieces of the book everyday, or weekdays, or whatever! I signed up to get emails every weekday of the books A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. It’s got to be one of the coolest ways to read a book. I often don’t feel like I can justify picking up a book and reading it, but reading a short email is easily justifiable. Each e-mail contains a link to have the next part of the book sent to you immediately, which I took advantage of a great deal tonight while reading both books. Anyway…
Yesterday and today I’ve been occupied with updating this website, along with Learn4Liberty. I haven’t done much aesthetically; I’ve mostly been cleaning up crap, finding and installing wordpress plugins, getting distracted with reading a bunch of stuff I found off of reddit, coming up with ideas for websites, etc.
In the process of doing all this updating I realized that I didn’t have an about page for this site. I was linking to the about page on ryanware.com, but that’s not all that helpful if you, say, actually wanted to learn something about me as an individual. So I started writing about myself, which I’ve never really enjoyed.
From my About Me page:
I’m really good at sleeping in. I have been known, at least twice a week, to push snooze on my alarm clock for anywhere from 1-5 hours. If sleeping in was a lucrative profession, I would be the Bill Gates of it. I wrote a little alarm program for my computer, which I use to blast music from my speakers at the time I desire to wake up. My sister, who also loves to sleep in, told me “that’s the loudest alarm I have ever heard.” The alarm does remarkably well at getting me out of bed. In fact, the speed with which I usually jump out of bed is akin to that of a butterfly attached to a bowling ball dropped from an airplane. What’s even more remarkable is that I turn the alarms off (after typing in 1-2 passwords) only to get back in bed. I am improving though! Really! It goes in cycles, but I am improving.
So a few weeks ago I was doing really good at waking up. I was a waking up early machine. I set my alarm and BAM I was out of bed and I stayed out of bed! It was great. And then I started staying up really late working on a deadline. Then I went on a dancing adventure to Denver. And then to Seattle. And now I’m back to sleeping in really late and staying up really late. Case in point: it’s now 3 AM as I write this.
So where does the “oh crap!” moment come in? So while I was writing that section about sleeping in I realized that tomorrow (err… today) is Thursday. And on Thursdays I wake up at 5:30 AM to attend a weekly Toastmasters club meeting. I’m not even tired yet! Okay, maybe I’m a little tired, but I certainly will be very tired by the time 5:30 rolls around. Especially if I don’t sleep, and even more especially if I do sleep. crap.
So of course I had to write about it, instead of going to bed when I realized that I was going to wake up so early.
But seriously, check out DailyLit. I’m addicted and loving it.
