Randomly Lost...

Some people I stalk/follow online… Sobriety update, dating update, life changes, and work. A.D.D. post. :)

I haven’t been making posts as regularly as I had been in the past. I’ve been somewhat busy.

I drive about 2 hours a day… While it may not seem like a lot, I think that the commute is starting to kick my a$$ a little. It’s totally worth it though because Iloveliving where I’m living.

My roommate is cool and we get along great.

Anywho, I wanted to share some links for some of the people that I follow on various sites just in case some of my friends are interested.

There’s DaveyWavey on Youtube: He’s eyecandy and he reminds me that people do actually care about the world. Also, he makes me remember that each of us are beautiful in our own ways. Most of all, he’s taught me to love myself for who I am. While I’ve been told this by my parents, teachers in the past, and counselors at school… He’s the one that made me finally realize it.

Then there’s TylerOakley. I didn’t really follow him on Youtube until recently. I think I found him via his Tumblr. His videos can remind me about the stereotypes of gay men in the community in general and usually can put a nice spin to it.

Somehow, I came across samkinsman… He thinks that people doesn’t watch his video posts… but I do. :p

I find it amazing how I can become connected to people through following their blogs, and then connected to further people by reading, listening, or watching the content that they post. It’s great to know that there are people out there that arecreatingthings rather than just consuming them.

I’m definitely a consumer… However, I sometimes create things. It’s nice to know that anyone can become a creator by simply doing so and posting it to the web somewhere.

The advancement of technology in my lifetime has been amazing. For example, I thought my friends and I were “the shit” when we had a T1 (1.54megabits). I now get 20megabits downstream to my phone when I’m in a metropolitan area (LTE). When I’m in BFE where I just have CDMA, I get around 4-5 megabits.

My home Internet connection is around 20megabits down, 5 megabits up. It’s amazing to me about the advancements in technology in terms of photography, video, and communications.

There have been some major changes in my life since I’ve been sober…

1) I’ve gotten a job that I have been wanting for 2 years.
2) I’ve paid off a debt to a bill collector, mostly so they would stop calling me.
3) On next Friday, I’ll have a loan paid off (finally) that I had taken out nearly a year ago.
4) I’ll start working on my credit card debt (which isn’t a lot of debt to begin with, but I had been putting it off.)
5) I can now pay all of my bills comfortably.
6) I’ve met someone that I’m very interested in and he’s interested in me as well. I had a fling after meeting him with a friend of mine. I told him about it and he claims that he isn’t holding it against me because we haven’t had the monogamy talk yet. However, I think that we’re progressing into something more because we’ve brought up the idea of it. I felt bad after the hookup/fling because I do want to pursue further relations with him… so I told him about it. I remember in the past, I had met someone, the day that I met him, he went over to one of his friend’s houses and hooked up with them.

He basically hooked up with someone the night he met me. I was young at the time, but he always left that bit of information out. So, I felt like it was lying by omission… So, I went ahead and told the guy that I’m interested in about what had happened and cleared the air.

I’m come to the conclusion: no more hookups since I’m finally interested in someone.

Test email post…

So, I’ve found out via the Tumblr staff blog that I can supposedly post via
email and have tags, so this is a test of that functionality. :)

…

At the moment, everything in my life is working for the better.

I got the job that I had been wanting for years… I’m starting to pay off bills and become more financially secure.

However, I definitely noticed something while attempting to get back into dating.

On most of the “dating” sites or services: the ones that I want, don’t want me… then the ones that do want me, I don’t want.

I haven’t been in the dating pool for the most part because I didn’t want to play any of the games. I still don’t want to play the games, but at least now I know I really don’t.

For example, there was a person in Bay City who I had hung out with, then he avoids me… If you’re not interested, at least grow a pair and say so.

On my birthday, two different groups of friends are having events. I don’t know which one, if any, that I’ll go to. This will be my first birthday w/o alcohol, so I might just go to Lambda for a meeting that night and not do anything too special. Maybe I’ll hangout with Beth or something if she’s free.

I think it’s official that I’ve moved. My desktop is at the house that I’ve been staying at. I guess it’s the official mark that a geek has moved. I get along great with my housemate and we haven’t had any issues. Which is somewhat strange because I usually don’t get along with people that I live with…

The commute has been kicking my ass, but I think that it’ll be worth it in the end. I might eventually move closer to work, but I like living where I’m at now. I just get up a little earlier and leave earlier to make it on time.

I’m still working out the kinks on how I’m going to blog from this device, mostly because the browsers don’t play well with tumblr, there’s no official tumblr app, and I might just end up posting via email. I need to read the documentation on posting by email to see if adding hash tags at the end of it will add tags or how I can add tags to posts. I think that I might use the word processor application on the device and then paste it into a client that supports pasting…

Surprisingly, I can’t paste from my clipboard into either browser… Go figure. :)

After using it a couple of days…

This device has definitely grown on me for sure. I like it’s portability and ease of use.

There’s a couple of issues that I’ve had to find work arounds for. First, in connectbot, I couldn’t use !@#$%^&*() from the keyboard… The * is very important when doing things in bash as well as $. :P

That’s been resolved by using a port/fork of the project that someone else used.

Also, depending on what site I’ll be on determines which browser I’ll be using.

I know it sounds silly, but some don’t support Flash (such as Chrome), and others are a complete B**** to copy/paste from.

Others display some sites better than others. 

I wish there was just one REALLY good browser that supports all the keyboard shortcuts and flash. Chrome would be perfect if it would ever support Flash.

My allergies have been driving me crazy lately. I’ve been sneezing since I’ve been at my parents house which I don’t fully understand. In my bedroom, I have an airfilter that’s cleaning the air… I wonder if it’s something outside or inside that’s causing the issue/s.

I’ll be moving my desktop this weekend whenever I go back to Westbury. I think that’s an official statement of my living situation. I’ve noticed that once a geek moves their desktop, they’ve officially moved somewhere. I asked my friend if he was ok with it, and he said yes… So… I think I’ve moved to Westbury.

Since my TV is malfunctioning, I’ve given my mom my Roku and my Logitech Harmony remote… She’s diggin Netflix. However, since she’s using my account, I’ll need to get her an account sometime soon so that my and her recommendations don’t conflict with each other. Also, I had to remove a few things from the Instant Queue before she logged in. :)

I don’t have a lot of things… The most important material things were my phone, my laptop, and my desktop. I’ve gotten rid of the laptop by replacing it with the Asus tablet/whatever you want to call it, and am moving my desktop. My phone is also an important thing to me because it’s what keeps me in touch with the world when I’m isolated at work.

I’m considering moving a bed into the room that I’m staying in that’s larger than a twin size. The main reason is that the twin doesn’t have a lot of room, obviously. However, I’m going to need to organize the room, so I might go back early so that I can get the room organized in a better fashion for it to be ready for more long term residency.

Thank g-d my friend has a garage and storage shed. I don’t think there’s much that we can put in the shed since it’s exposed to the elements, but it’s definitely cool to have extra storage.

Since I’ll be moving my desktop into that room, I won’t be getting a TV for a while… If I do, I’ll use it as a second monitor since everything I watch is via the network or Internet.

I wonder what it’ll be like when I start school again. I know that I’ll be able to post in forums, etc… However, I don’t know how much school work / documents I’ll be able to write on this device… so I guess it’ll have to wait until I get home. I can do all my reading on this, and then homework and presentations on the desktop. Work has provided a laptop for me to use while at home if I need to VPN into the office to do any work. I don’t think that they’ll mind if I do SCHOOLWORK on it as long as it’s on personal time. Otherwise, their laptop is just sitting in the carrying case.

I think that the main reason I wanted to switch was that I was tired of carrying around two full size laptops. I went with this one because of its tablet form factor, but I really like using the dock on it for typing. If I’m ever rich, I’ll consider getting a netbook to put Ubuntu on.

I think there’s some hacks out there to put Ubuntu on this, but since I’ll be using it as both, a tablet, and a netbook, I don’t think it’s that good of an idea unless Ubuntu has touch screen abilities, etc.

Hmmmmmm. I’ll definitely research that some more now that I think about it. :)

In the end, a netbook by itself would’ve been cheaper… but I like being able to make selections directly where I want to without using the trackpad. :)

My Nikon D60 died… Well, I’ve read that it can be fixed, but I don’t think that it’s worth the effort. The shutter mechanism keeps failing and you have to manually turn the gears for it to reset it. I’m thinking that I’ll wait a while and buy a new camera once I get back into it or it peeks my interest again.

The device, I’ll call it “The Asus Pad” for short, can do almost everything I “need”… It does everything that I normally did with my laptop. Movies, browsing, blogging, and email… However, I don’t recommend it as a complete replacement for most people. I have SSH and I can RDP to my desktop at home if I need to do other things. :)

I think that’s all that I have to ramble about regarding the device and things happening with moving and replacement of technology…

The tablet versus laptop versus webdock/lapdock…

I’ve made the decision finally… and I purchased a tablet that happens to also have a dock.

I’m giving my mom my old laptop. I went ahead and hacked my old Inspire4G to be “Edge only” so that she could use it until I can buy her a new phone. More than likely, it will be the Motorola Milestone… It’s a decent phone for the price and will be A LOT easier to use than the Inspire.

Mostly, I think that the lack of a keyboard might drive her insane. I know it took me a while to get adjusted to it.

Anywho…

I’m considering my tablet w/ dock to be a “laptop replacement”. When using a personal Internet device, I mostly just use it for email, movies, music, and keeping in touch with people. Also, I use Tumblr.

Unfortunately, there isn’t an official Tumblr app for the tablet yet, but there will be eventually. For now, I’ll just use the web based dashboard to do posts. It isn’t that bad.

I tether using my phone and use wifi whenever possible, so that’s not of concern.

For those that are interested, I got the Asus tablet that came out after the Prime… It has 32 gigs of storage, 1 gig of RAM, and a quad core processor.

http://m.bestbuy.com/m/e/product/detail.jsp?skuId=5359476&pid=1218635271532&ev=prodView

I think that this will be ok for me to use as my personal device. I will have a desktop at home, and on the road or any time that I want to do casual browsing and some updates, I can use this tablet. It’s powered by Android 4.0/ICS and it’s snappy as hell. It’s more responsive than my old laptop. lol.

I guess that’s it for now. I can stop obsessing over it. I don’t see the point in lugging around 9 lbs of a computer when I can just take a tablet with a dock for the same functionality for the most part. I have a laptop from work for when they need me to work for them, so I was carrying around two laptops.

Now, it’s going to be my laptop from work and my tablet with dock. I wonder if I can use one of the “netbook” carrying bags/cases for the dock and tablet together… Otherwise, I just have a folio for the tablet. I’ll figure something out.

I’ll eventually get another SD card for it, but I won’t need it for a while.

Peaces.

The old feeling of opening a journal and…..

Sitting down at a cafe to jot down my thoughts… pausing to think about what word to write next… since it was written in ink. No wasted effort in scratching out or rubbing out the words…

Having to create with thought and built in censors… No quick erase or automatic spell check.

Sometimes I miss writing that way… having something tangible.

Although, I’d end up transcribing it anyway…. so, now I just skip a step.

But I miss those days in a way.

——

I need to find a BT keyboard for my phone for blogging purposes since this one is too small.

New phone!

I jumped the gun a little and went ahead and got the new phone.

Its 3g speed is a little slower than at&t, but in civilized areas where lte is available, it completely blows at&t out of the water.

I had download speeds of around 20megabits… while I’ll probably never max it out with normal phone use, it rocks.

The 3g is fast enough to work with if I need to and its sufficient for normal use… plus, it will reach into the building at work.

I made it a week with crappy service and it drove me crazy.

BTW: I switched to Verizon using a Droid 4.

I will probably post another update later about it with graphics from speedtest. :)

On another note, the new job is great. I’m definitely ready to jump into some projects though.

Wowza!

Well, not much has really been going on lately. I’ve been chairing the April Friday night 9:30pm meetings at Lambda. It’s been fun and very rewarding. It’s definitely been helping me maintain my sobriety.

I’ve also been staying at a friend’s house in Houston. I’ll be staying there off and on when I’m craving more bandwidth and wanting to be around the city.

At the moment, I’m at my parents’ house. I missed some of the quiet/silence, so I figured I might as well come down for a few days. I don’t have as much bandwidth here, but at least I do have high speed Internet. In the past, I used to dread being here because I had to use a wireless / cellular network such as Sprint or AT&T to access the Internet. They all had a maximum of 1megabit. At least now, with the new provider, I get around 4-7 megabits, depending on the time of day which is just fine for my general use.

The main thing that I don’t like is isolation and I can resolve that by taking a trip into Houston to hang out at Lambda or to hang out with friends.

I paid the deductible on my car and it has been repaired. I think it looks great. I need to take it to the car wash later to go clean it up. (Wash and vacuum it.)

I’m going to at least keep it clean since it’s been repaired. Since I put it through some trauma, I should baby it for a while. :P

Some other things have been going on that I can’t really write about yet, but I think they’re going to be good changes, so we’ll see what happens. I’ll find out more at the end of the week. Let’s just say that if you believe in a higher power, ask for some help for me for everything to work out. Otherwise, send some good vibes this way. More will be written about it at a later time when more information is known, but suffice it to say they’re very important changes and I hope they happen.

I’ve taken more time off of school so that I can save up money for tuition. I really hope I can do it this time. I only have 6 or 7 classes left until I can graduate with a B.S. in Psychology. However, I might go ahead and retake a couple of classes to bring my GPA back up prior to graduation so that I can get into a better post-graduate school.