I finally got my miniMac up and running tonight. It was harder than I expected, because I didn't have a USB keyboard on hand, and no one else I knew seemed to either. I didn't realize that PS/2 keyboards were so common still.
So, anyway, this is my first entry written on a mac. woohoo!
I think that it is going to take me a while to really relearn everything mac on my miniMac. There aren't a whole lot of applications installed on this that I can really use. That is pretty sad to me, because I was hoping for more.
What I got was iLife '05, which comes with iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD 5, GarageBand 2, and iTunes (which is free for everyone, no?) The miniMac also came with iCal, Address Book, iChat, Safari, and Mail.
To get the miniMac to run, I had to go to a CompUSA and buy a USB keyboard. The Apple keyboard I found for $30, was actually one of the cheapest USB keyboards I could find, so I decided to get something that would match... even though it cost me an extra $5.
We just moved to Gainesville, so we don't have the Internet set up yet. We called BellSouth and ordered it the day after we moved all of our stuff into the new apartment, but it's going to be a week or more until everything gets here and we have DSL up and running. So I am using AOL dial-up for now. There's a story to that too, but let's just say I grabbed a disc, popped it into the mac, and got online for my week free*.
*This is actually a 90-day free trial, and is only free if I remember to cancel it before the 90 days are over.
Joy and I are moving in less than a week now. Things are getting interesting and tense now, because we've still got a lot of packing to do. Then there is also Christmas between now and the move date.
Yesterday I went to work with Joy. I'm not working now, and Joy said she desperately needed my help. At first I didn't want to go. It was early in the morning when she suprised me with this request, and I was tired, warm, in bed, and I knew it was cold everywhere else.
I drove Joy to Ocala, and let her do her thing there. Then I drove her to Gainesville. We unloaded the car, went to lunch, and then did more work stuff. I waited in the car while she delivered chocolate to people and talk about her products. At first I spent the time in the car napping. Later I used up the time with reading. We got a lot done.
Today Joy went to work without me. She had this big thing planned today that took her a couple of hours. That would have been a lot of time for me to sit in a car. Also, I helped her out a lot yesterday, and someone needed to stay back and pack. That was one of the many reasons that I quit UPS early after all.
I slept in today. I didn't do all that much packing, and then Joy called me and totally changed plans around. She got most of her work done she thought, so she was going to take Thursday off too. It wasn't for sure yet, and it still isn't (we'll know for sure when she wakes up,) but we needed to do somethings as if that was the plan now. So, I packed up the Escort and drove it two hours up to Gainesville. Then I unloaded the valuable stuff into her storage unit. After parking the car at our new apartment complex we went to dinner, ate some sushi, and drove two hours home again.
I've spent eight of the last forty-eight hours driving on highways. I've spent even more than that in the car, because I was in the car for 12 hours on Tuesday. OK, it was more like eleven hours, because I got out of the car for lunch and two bathroom breaks.
With this schedule I can understand why Joy is really wanting to move ASAP. I can't wait to move either. Unfortunately there is a whole lot of packing before I can actually move. Hopefully, Joy will help out a lot with that and won't throw out too much of my junk.
Tonight Joy and I watched My Date with Drew. I liked the movie a lot.
I went to the site tonight to read more about it and found out that they originally had roughly 85 hours of film, which they cut down to 5 hours of interesting, watchable material. The finished products is between 90 and 100 minutes long, and I still felt like some of the movie could have been cut out.
This doesn't mean that I didn't like the movie. It was fun, and it had a lot of appeal. I liked the end the best and was totally excited for the guy when things worked out well. I really want to recommend the movie to Jenn, because of all the people I know I feel like she'd like it the most.
I couldn't tell whether Joy liked it or not. She was fairly tired the whole night and seemed to like the beginning a lot. However, she was really frustrated with Brian, the main guy, because he was such a loser in Joy's eyes and didn't really have his act together. She couldn't understand how this guy could expect to get a date with Drew (or any girl for that matter) with some of the life management issues he had. That's Joy for ya though. Certain details throw her off when she watches movies, and she still doesn't know enough about girls to realize that some girls don't need a guy to have his stuff together to be interestedin the guy.
I got to thinking about communism and Marxist thought today, and I had this realization that perhaps much of what Marx wanted when he wrote The Communist Manifesto is already existant today in America or within our grasp.
In Marx's Manifesto as I understand it, Marx describes the then present-day situation of the mid 1800s. He describes the problems of his world and then suggests a grand solution.
I am not a Marxist. I haven't even read any of his works in their entirety. I have read exerpts and summaries, and from this I feel like I have a fair idea of what he was proscribing for Europeans at the beginnings of Industrialization.
Marx wanted the proletariat to rise up against the bourgeoisie. Why?
--The proletariat did not own capital (land, factories, means of production, etc)
--The proletariat were alientaed from their labor and were becoming less valuable as a source of labor to the bourgeoisie.
--The proletariat were alienated from each other, from the political process, and from nature itself.
--The majority of people are proletariat.
In my mind, having someone identify a number of problems to sell me on an idea or a course of action does not necessarily mean that their proscribed idea or course of action is the best choice for me to take. I think that this is the case with Marx. He was a intelligent and observant thinker, and he correctly observed many of the problems in his world (and our world today) but his suggestion for improvement is unacceptable to me... even as a member of the proletariat. It is unacceptable to me, because a social and political coup like the one Marx suggests would almost certainly involve a great deal of violence (as it has in several historical examples.)
My thought would be to find another way (or ways) to address and correct the many problems that he mentions. I feel that this has been happening already in our history. Here are a list of some of the issues Marx wanted to fix that we are already in the process of fixing in America --
Marx wanted individual property interest returned to the laborer.
This is available to Americans through the Federal government's laws concerning Real Estate, mortagages, savings and loan programs, etc. Many more people can work a few years and then apply for a home loan, and ultimately become home owners and by extension... land owners.
Marx wanted to end child labor
This has taken place in America almost universally. Children are still allowed to work in home businesses, agriculture, and in entertainment. Also, minors are almost universally allowed to hold part-time jobs as long as the job's hours do not conflict with school hours.
Marx wanted universal provision for education
In America free education is not only provided but mandated until the age of 16.
Marx wanted women to be empowered in their own right as workers, instead of being subject to domination by the universally male bourgeois class.
Through social reform that took place in the beginning of the last century to today, women are now able to hold nearly every job that men hold. In fact, in roughly 20-25% of marriages the wife earns more in her occupation than the husband does.
Marx wanted progressive taxation because he felt it would provide for a re-distribution of capital, which he felt would end struggle between classes.
Today America uses a progressive income tax system. The poorest of the poor pay no taxes on their income while the wealthiest members of society pay close to half of their taxable income in income taxes. (I will be paying around 10-11% for 2005, so I am somewhere in between.)
The one ideal that Marx had that has always stuck in my mind (and got me started on this entry) was his desire for the proletariat to own the land and the capital instead of the bourgeoisie. I think that ideal is within our grasp today. More and more families own their own homes than ever before. Also, more people are able to own investment properties other than their primary residence. So, the land is available to a much larger section of the population than ever before. Also, owning the capital that drives every industry is a universal opportunity. Now all it takes is $100 in some cases or $500 in other cases to own a part of a company. Most of the major corporations in the United States are publicly held, which to me is another form of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie owning 'the capital' together.
I can't help but wonder if this would be a satisfactory set of solutions to the problems that Marx saw during his time. I know that when he wrote his Manifesto he wanted a revolution, but that doesn't seem to be his desire by the time he was working on Das Capital
Today I am retiring my laptop's AOL Instant Messenger profile. It's long overdue for a change. I would have just erased it, but people seemed to like it, and over time that's gotten me to like it too.
Bye profile {waves}
I guess I have to have a profile for my laptop especially now that my desktop never gets any Internet action nowadays.
Uhm... Hi... My name is David and I am using my laptop.
This means that I am on campus somewhere using their wireless Internet or at home in Fort Myers. There is also an unlikely chance that I am back in Gainesville connected to Joy's network, but that would only be on a weekend.
Anyway, check out my blog
I went paintballing about a month ago. A friend from UPS invited me to go with him one weekend early in October. I couldn't go, but I told him that I was interested and that I'd definately go with him at some point within the month. It ended up being November so I decided to go the first weekend of the month.
He told me about this little place on Hoffner Avenue just East of Conway that has three fields and a pro shop, and he said he goes every weekend. So, I told him that I was going to go on this particular weekend, and he got excited. He reminded me of the times that he goes and told me all about it again. I invited a few other guys, but most of them already had plans for the weekend at that point. So I figured I'd just go and meet this one guy. It's not like I'd need to be hanging out with a group the whole time anyway, right?
Well, this guy is really bad about answering his cell phone. So when I called him that day and he didn't answer I didn't think too much of it and I just went to the place. When I got there I told the people I was looking for my friend, but they didn't seem to know him -- even though he goes every weekend. That was weird to me. Know your repeat customers, people!
So, I rented the gear, bought paintballs, and went out to the fields to look for this guy. I talked to a lot of other guys to try and see if anyone knew my friend from work. No one did, so I just stayed at the last course and played with a bunch of people I did not know. Some of these guys were from a big group of employees from the Regional Hospital that is nearby. Others were amatuer league paintballers, which meant that they were really stinking good.
During the first round of actual play, I was the second to last guy to be shot out. I was happy that I lasted a long time, but pretty upset that I didn't manage to shoot anyone (and know about it too.) I was even more upset that these guys came around my back left and ended up shooting me in the back of the ear... behind my face mask. It was one of these shots that just never happen. All the paint went into my mask and the wrapped around my ear covering my face inside the mask. It was aweful, and my ear didn't stop hurting until the next day.
The next round was slightly better. I never got shot. I still didn't knowingly hit someone, but we won and that is cool.
In some of the other rounds I would get hit mulitple times by these paintballs and they wouldn't break on my arm or any other bare part of me that is somewhat muscular and has smooth hair. This is annoying because you are crouching somewhere, reeling in pain, wanting to walk out of the place and the ref is telling you that you are still in. This typically just means more pain until you actually get a good break.
Next time I will wear more clothes. Paintballs break on clothing really well. They also break on masks. They do not break on any soft muscled skin. Ears... yes. Arms... no. Face mask... yes. Neck... no. You live you learn, right?
This is old news, but I've been wanting to write about it for a long time too. Joy got a new job, and with that job came a company cell phone. So, Joy worked something out with her comapny to get an upgraded phone somehow, and her new phone has Bluetooth.
She wanted Bluetooth when she saw how it worked with my parent's phones and their cars. We don't have cars with Bluetooth in them yet, but Joy has used headsets before and saw some potential for cell phone fun right there.
Now she's got the Bluetooth phone with a sweet little Bluetooth headset. She wears that thing around a lot of the time now -- even when she is not on the phone. I know she'd do this some of the time no matter what, but I feel like I encouraged it by reacting really positively to her and the little headset. It's just so freaking sexy sometimes, people.
One of the best moments was seeing my wife in the kitchen one morning. She's on the phone, but she's just wearing the Bluetooth thingie... and nothing else. It was so sexy and sci-fi all at once, and then there was the frustration of knowing I was about to jump her, but also knowing I'd need to wait until the conversation was over. Grrrr...
Nah... fun fun fun!
So, anyway, Joy's got Bluetooth. I think it's awesome. She thinks it's awesome. She just got it for her mom too now, and she is raving about it endlessly. She thinks that everyone should get one. Oh, and the cool thing about it is that she can operate her phone from the headset. She pushes one of the three little buttons on it and then says, "Dial... Four, Zero, Seven,..." or she can say, "call... David" or whoever and then the phone dials for her automatically. It's so freaking awesome.
And let's not forget that the headset has a blue LED on it. There's nothing cooler and sexier than a blue LED. (OK, maybe a purple LED, but I'd need to see that and compare). It looks really cool when she's wearing it and her hair is covering the phone and all you see is this blue light and a chrome glint coming through her hair. MMMM mmmm mmmm! It's fun to have a tech-friendly wife.
I put my two weeks in at UPS in the middle of last month. I have been wanting to write about that, but I've had severe blogger's block lately. Now it's been so long that I am actually done with UPS. This Friday was my last day there.
It was weird leaving UPS. For so long it had sucked. It was definately a hard job, and it challenged me and my desire to always keep a positive attitude about work. The environment in the sort facility is dirty, smelly, and usually hot. During my last days it was cool though. The winter cools the place off well, and the machinery generally kept it from being too cold.
When I was working as a sorter I was able to talk to people during work. All you really do as a sorter is stand by the belt, grab a package and look at the shipping label, determine which belt to put it on, and then move the package to that belt. It's cake. Well, cake except for the fact that you are doing this really quickly and the boxes range from 2 to 72 pounds.
When I first started at UPS I was a loader. I thought this was a cool job to have at UPS, and it was. I missed it for a while. I got a scanner. I got to be in a truck by myself for a whole night and daydream while I worked out and got paid for it. The downside of all this though, was that being inside the feeder was dirty. Not the kind of dirty that you get when you roll around in mud though. This dirty is the kind that gets under your finger nails, through your shirt, and deep into your skin. I had to use one of those loofa thingies to get the dirt off. Oh, and it also got on your face and in your nose.
So, I became sorter. I got moved from $9/hour to $10/hour and received $150 in Visa bucks or whatever they were. Being a sorter was cool because there were all these people to talk to every day. And every conversation was a one-on-one conversation with the occasional group of three. Both of those kind of conversations can make for some great talks.
It took a while for all that to fall into place though. When I first got onto the sort aisle everyone was pretty much quiet. They all kept to themselves. No one really talked to me much, and that made me kinda miserable for about a month. After a while though, a person would leave here and there and then new guys would come. They wanted to talk too, and they usually needed help for the first few weeks. I was helpful. I worked hard and could easily take on a little more, because I was trying to be as fast as the best sorters on the sort aisle.
Being good at my job, helpful to new people, amiable, and talkative really helped me make a lot of friends. After about three months I knew just about everyone on the sort aisle. Some of the really senior sorters still didn't talk to me, but that was like 3 or 4 people out of 40+ people. Having all these people to talk to on a daily basis in what were essentially forty-five to fifty minute increments made for a fun night at work on most nights. Most people complained if this or that happened at work, but I was always happy because there were interesting people to talk with.
At UPS I got a chance to talk to and get to know people I would have never really interacted with otherwise. I talked with people from Haiti, Poland, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and all over the US. I also got to know city kids from the Orlando area who were born and raised within about 20 minutes of the UPS hub.
On my last day, I had a lot of these guys tell me that they were going to miss me in some way or another. It was kind of funny for me, because these are the kind of guys that have the hardened exterior that you'd get from being a city kid or having to work crappy jobs like this one for most of thier lives. So, when they came up to me at break, or during work, or even at the end of the night... they would allude to missing me for the most part at first, and then I'd just say I was going to miss him (or her in a few cases) and I'd get a laugh and a, "yeah, I'll miss seeing you around here too" or something like, "Yeah, it was always good to talk to you."
So, I left work on Thursday and on Friday feeling pretty sad, but also pretty good. I knew I was going to miss having so many different people to talk to, learn about, and sometimes even help out. I also knew that this was probably one the best I'd ever been at making new friends in my life. I made roughly 35-40 new friends in a matter of 20-30 weeks. That's pretty good for me. Some of them I will even keep in touch with too, because I have hung out with them outside of UPS. Although, I guess that will be a lot harder now that I am moving to Gainesville.
This will be the first time in my life when I am moving from a place where I have a lot of friends to a different place where I have a lot of friends. I am so confused as to how I should feel about all of this.
I guess in the end it doesn't really matter all that much where I end up. After a year or so I will likely have a few friends where ever I go. That's something that's really cool about life. We are all able to find friendship where ever we are.
I now have a new appreciation for the beauty of lingerie showers. I had thought they were cool from the first time I heard the idea; I liked them even more when Joy opened up this bag full of sexy little nothings; and I was sure there was genius in the world when she tried them all on and so on and so on...
It wasn't until recently that I've learned the true genius behind this sort of shower.
First, when you have one of these lingerie showers the bride invites just about every girlfriend she's accumulated over the years, and nearly half of those people will come and bring something. That makes for a wide range of personalities, which in turn means a broad range of tastes and ideas about lingerie and other such things. So, you start off with an eclectic mix of other people's personalities and tastes made manifest in satin, lace, mesh, cotton, polyester, leather, latex, and materials you wouldn't expect.
Then when you are married it takes you a few good months to try it all out. Sure, the bride tries it all on a few times to see what she should keep and what she should return. It needs to fit right, y'know? This initial stage is really fun and sexy, but it is entirely different from a normal night, morning, afternoon, etc when she'll have to actually select something from the little lingerie holder she also got at the shower. This is where the genius comes into play.
You get all this different lingerie. The husband has a few favorites in mind that he likes, and then the wife has a few favorites that she likes. In my situation she actually has more that she likes than I do, because she's got them all categorized by situation, mood and so on. Over time, I have gotten a really decent feel for what Joy's tastes in lingerie are, and I've also gotten a better idea about what my tastes in lingerie are. I've been really surprised by all of this. I have begun to like things that I never thought were all that great or appealing. Had Joy and I gone out to buy some lingerie ourselves we would have probably purchased a few items and enjoyed them, but not as much as the lingerie that we now know that we like. The gifts given to us by our friends.
The reason I am thinking about this and writing about this is because it is Christmas time again, and I am thinking of gifts for Joy. I had thought about buying lingerie for her, and I most likely will (but not for Christmas... I've decided to get her something else for Christmas... the lingerie will just have to be planned "spur of the moment" gifts because flowers are getting old for me.) Now I am shopping for lingerie again, and I see all the old stuff that I thought was hot, but now realize isn't really all that great in one practical way or another... or even aesthetically sometimes.
Also, I have this urge to individually thank the prescient minded gift givers who have helped me to see the light in lingerie selection, but I feel really awkward about going about that with most of Joy's girlfriends. So I foresee this helping me get all of that appreciation off my chest.