Valentine's gush

Spent yesterday in supernaturally beautiful Seaside, FL.

We had a few beers and some kick-ass crab cakes and the best fried green tomatoes at The Great Southern Cafe.


I could only dream of being half as good of a writer as would be required to write admirably about that stretch of Unknown Coast along Highway 30-A. When they have a Most Beautiful Places on Earth contest, south Walton County could confidently submit its application. Seriously. Whenever I drive through those pristine perfectly planned communities my mind periodically explodes through the dome of my head at how PRETTY everything is. Damn it...I am a man and I'm forced to admit that something is indisputably pretty. But it is. It is not only pretty but it's beautiful and amazing and it's where you wish you could live.

I think back on yesterday's drive along the Gulf and I think of sunshine and blinding white sand and my wife's gleaming eyes. We were on our Valentine's Day Eve holiday, a DAYCATION. Yeah, daycation. We drove down the coast on a daycation celebrating Valentine's Day Eve. A holiday featuring love and romance is one we should all feel good about. Don't hate. Don't let the mass marketing ruin it for you. It's about love. Valentine's Day is about Love. I don't care about the Catholic origins, the pagan origins, the origins on picture disks from our ancient alien overlords. Valentine's Day is about love and I was out on a sunny afternoon with eyes watering in the brightness and a sniffle from not-quite-spring breezes and all that's running through my head is love, love, love, and maybe some other stuff, too, but I couldn't stop feeling lucky and blessed. I have the best wife and I love my life.

Speaking of life. Other than weeping over the beauty of the landscape and the beauty of my wife,  I've been studying this stuff:

Looks like a good time, doesn't it? Blows my mind on a regular basis. The circuitry driving the blinking LEDs on your Bluray player kicks my ass. Don't even get me started on the stuff that actually reads and translates those Bluray discs. Hooray for electronics!

crusty ol laptops vs Droid

My Apple iBook G4 is dead tech. It has almost always functioned perfectly and continues to do so. However, I ask less and less of it as time goes on. It has a PowerPC processor which cuts it off from being able to play a lot of streaming media (such as Netflix) and OS X is no longer being updated for it. It's a dead platform. It's no longer being supported and its weak graphical capabilities are beginning to flag under the weight of today's graphics-rich computing experience. It's done its job admirably for around 6 years and I'm thankful for that. But there's part of me that desires to smash it to pieces on the ground. I'm done with it. I wants a sweet new computer.

Speaking of dead tech, I'm typing this on my trusty old Toshiba Satellite. This tank is even older than my iBook. It has better stickers on it, though. Plus, it's able to stream Netflix. It also has Office, which the iBook lacks. The more time I spend in my electronics classes the more I feel that I'm much better off with a Microsoft-based computer. I also took a Cisco class and its online curriculum was much better suited and tailored for Windows.

The iBook is my music center. Almost all of our music is on there and I often use it for Last.fm, MySpace music, and Pandora. The Toshiba is where I get things done.

Battling the laptops for computer time is my Droid. I use it more than I use the laptops. It does everything they do and almost always does it just as well. Sometimes the system lags a little and sometimes there's network lag but such occurrences are not often and the Droid is ridiculously convenient. It does everything I need a computer to do except that I wouldn't use it to compose anything longer than a text message or short email, but even that's changing. I recently downloaded Swype and it's been great.

To sum up: iBook is a jukebox, Toshiba is for typing and Electronics Workbench, and Droid is for everything else.

Happy New Year

Squirrel Chronicles 1

A white squirrel stands in the middle of a large square of bright green grass and ponders the nearest route to a tree where he can more peacefully enjoy a tasty nut he'd found. He springs and leaps in bounds across the man-made lawn and makes for a nearby magnolia. Quickly he clambers up its comfort-giving sides and swiftly climbs higher than the house roofs. He scampers out onto a thick, swaying limb and sets upon his nut with a fervor. There is a warm wind blowing and the sun is beaming in a blinding blue sky. The white squirrel blinks his brown eyes and licks his paws in satisfaction. He ate the nut so fast he hardly knew it was there.

A commotion below draws his attention. There's a clamor coming from the house nearby. Metal is clanging and then there is a sound that draws his attention like nothing he's heard before. It sounds like Squirrel and if it is it means there's a squirrel in the house. The squirrel cautiously makes his way down the tree to satisfy his curiosity.

He peers into the house from the safety of the magnolia trunk and sees a creature as intriguing as the sound he'd heard. It looks like a squirrel but is bigger and fatter and only has a silly little nub of a tail. The strange brown creature is standing on two legs and looking around the room.

The squirrel oh-so-slowly inches its way lower on the trunk to get closer to the house and the strange creature within. The squirrel and the strange creature lock beady eyes, and the strange creature calls out in a strange accent, “Hello, Mr. Squirrel!"

This BlogPost is August

This entry is brought to you by:

Hell, for 8 bucks you can't afford not to buy it!

I suppose writing, "This entry is brought to you by," suggests I am being paid in some way for promoting Arcade Fire's new album. I can assure you, I am not. I wish I was, though.

<------- click there and benefit me and yourself as well, my friend...

August has been a ride. This whole summer has been a ride. Now that I think about it, this whole life has been a ride. What kind of ride, I'm not sure, but a ride nonetheless.

School is back in session which means both myself and my wife are busier. That's not an entirely bad thing. It just sucks that we don't have dinner together as much as we'd like. I love being with her as much as possible. Yesterday I didn't see her from 6:30 AM to 9:30 PM and I was home way early last night. If I work a dinner shift during the workweek it means I'll see her for a little bit in the morning, kiss her while she's sleeping when I come home at night, wake up with her, kiss her goodbye, and see her again 12 hours later, sleeping, then I kiss her, and I miss her dearly and I wonder what the fuck's going on...

...and then happiness wells up in me, all the way to my eyeballs, eye-hole deep in cool, cleansing waters. Love. Love is what the fuck's going on. We work hard for love. Why else would you get up in the morning?

In other exciting MitchellG news, I've been using the heck out of Foursquare. Does it mean I'm messed up if I want to share with the world where I am? A voice crying in the wilderness...

My Foursquare usage has been entirely driven by my acquisition of a Motorola Droid. What a fun, useful device. I'm using it to get more organized. My personal time management is not one of my strong areas. I'm working on it, though. Taking advantage of the calendar feature has already helped me stay on top of things. And I've signed up with Mint to better manage my money. We'll see how that goes.

Speaking of making better use of my time...

Peace,
mitchellg

testing Blogaway Lite (beta)

I've been messing with my Droid for hours today.