Category: general

Not that I’ve ever been attacked. But the idea of being able to electroshock somebody is just awesome.

Maybe that’s just because I’m in a bad mood.

:P

Or at least, that’s the impression I get from this Mainichi article:

Investigators said Okumura dressed himself up in a long hair wig, a miniskirt and boots before entering the women’s underwear sales section of the supermarket. After selecting three items of underwear, he allegedly took them into a changing room and hid them in his coat before exiting the store and driving off.

However, Okumura wasn’t wearing any makeup, and a security official who realized he was a man and thought he was acting strangely followed him and took note of the license plate of his vehicle.

Poor crossdressing shoplifter…he wasn’t much of a transvestite, was he?

This was originally written in response to a forum thread. I’d like to archive it here because it expresses my present opinions about the responsibilities involved in having children and keeping pets. If anyone would like to discuss my opinions with me, please leave a comment or send me an email. If anyone would like to make fun of me, please go to hell.

I do not believe pets should be looked at as "children".  They are not human beings.  They have different needs.  When you consider buying a pet, you should consider why you want one.  A guard dog, a cat to kill mice…these are good reasons.  Companionship is also a fine reason, but I believe many people take it a step too far.  If the reason you want a pet is so you have something to baby and spoil, you should not have a pet.
 
A spoiled animal is only a joy to its owners.  To all others it is a nuisance and sometimes even dangerous.  Pets should know their role in the household.  They should be trained to treat humans with respect.  They should be trained not to jump on people or (in the case of dogs) bark incessantly.  If you have a pet you have to accept the responsibility for its behavior.  You have to take the time to train it properly.
 
I firmly believe that spoiling a pet affects the animal’s health.  If the animal eats the wrong kind of food, or doesn’t get enough exercise, it is in danger of heart disease, cancer, and other ailments associated with malnutrition, sloth, and obesity.
 
And spoiling a pet has a definite impact on the animal’s personality.  If the animal doesn’t know who is the boss in the household, it will make itself the boss, and you will be unable to control it when you need to.
 
The way you treat a human child is extremely different from the way you treat a pet.  Pets have their youth, during which they must be trained, but ultimately the things you expect out of a pet remain the same over time, perhaps decreasing with old age.  Children, on the other hand, are learning continuously for far longer than a pet’s childhood.  Their responsibilities must increase over time, and they must be taught how to surpass the role of child and become adults.  You do not have to teach your dog how to grow up and move out of the house.
 
Ultimately, I feel that many Americans are failing in the roles of pet-owner and parent, partially because they don’t see a difference between the two, and partially because they do not accept the responsibility of either role.  They want something to love on; they don’t want annoyances.  But annoyances are what they get, and more and more of them crop up when people don’t seriously take on the role of teacher to their children and pets.  Both can be guided, but in different ways.
 
As far as watching snakes eat live animals, I don’t like it at all.  I think that predatory animals that absolutely must feed on living creatures should not be pets.  The live animals that are fed to the predator do not even have a chance at survival.  They would at least have a fighting chance in the wild.
 
Raising animals to be fodder for our pets seems like extreme excess.  Pets themselves are an unnecessary luxury.
 
We already raise animals to be slaughtered for our own food.  I don’t have a problem with this in principle; I love steak as much as the next person.  But I think there should be a limit to our use of the fruits of the land.  Just because it’s there doesn’t mean we need to own it.  And the more responsibility we take for the lives of other creatures, the more risks we take.
 
Ultimately, to me it all comes down to responsibility.  I feel like our society is sorely lacking that trait.

From Yahoo! News – Oddly Enough. There are too many great parts to this article, so I’m quoting liberally:

It’s the busiest day of the year on the darkened stretch of road where adventurous couples looking for a discreet and special way to say “I love you” join in a long-cherished tradition among islanders who pride themselves on their passion.

[…]

The road is home to more than a dozen motels with names like “Bambu,” “Rainbow” and “The Fountain,” all nestled among a throng of tile stores in the otherwise unassuming town of Caguas, about 20 miles south of San Juan, the capital.

“There’s a saying here that goes if you’re coming to Caguas, you’re looking for one of two things: to buy tiles or go to a motel,” said a smiling Yvonne Rodriguez, the owner of the 30-room Rainbow motel, one of Caguas’ oldest and most respected.

[…]

“We get a lot of famous people here, too,” said Cano Alicia, a 38-year-old handyman at the Rainbow. “But it doesn’t matter who you are, the same rule applies for everyone: what happens here, stays here.”

He said the motels serve an important function for islanders with big sexual appetites who need to maintain appearances in the socially conservative U.S. Caribbean territory of 4 million people.

This reminds me of the idea of “face” in Japanese society (and surely I don’t need to remind anyone about Japan’s “love hotels”).

That’s what this Osaka man would have you believe, anyway.

Police declined to say whether he got any sushi.

Oh yeah, he totally got some.

She is such a fantastic storyteller. Here’s a piece about a man trying to reconnect to his teenage daughter.

This is the kind of writing I want to do.

I’ve created all the Projects I could think of, and then assigned at least one task to each one. Click here to see what my task list looks like. (The top Project is the possible new business venture I keep hinting about, and I don’t want people to know what it is, or what I’m thinking of calling it, so I blurred the name.)

I don’t know if I’m being too general with some of them or not. I can already see that I was a little vague concerning the Blogger export tool…what I meant to say was, fix the file up, and then publish the details of how to export from Blogger here in a post, and go link to my post on the WordPress forums. But that phrase could be interpreted as “Finish up Blogger export tool, then export Blogger posts and comments”.

(The tool is essentially done, but I don’t want people looking at the code until I’ve had a chance to make it user-friendly and less sloppy. I’m also not going to do my export until my WordPress template is done, and I’ve installed WordPress, and I’m satisfied with all the settings. Hopefully that will minimize the down-time for the journal. I’m going to have to edit the exported file to add usernames and to alter all the image links, as I’m planning on moving my images to /images. I figure I’ll use Dreamweaver’s Replace function to scour all the files for the latter; for the former, I’m going to have to go in by hand. Doing it before importing into WordPress will have the benefit of creating user accounts for each commenter. This will make it easy to find all comments by a particular person.)

I did completely change my directory structure in Outlook, getting rid of quite a few folders I’d been using to sort my “Done” items. Now they’re all in “Done”; if I need them I can find them with Find. (Imagine that.) I will be happy to stay with my new directory structure even if I end up removing the GTD Plug-In.

But to be honest, I really like the thing. It’s easy to use. Now we just have to see if it will help my productivity. There’s only one thing I’m concerned about, and that is where to put project plans and outlines. (This is why I think some of my Tasks/Actions are too general.) I’m not sure if I would make those into tasks, or if there’s something else I’m supposed to do with them. One of the main goals of GTD is to get all the stuff out of your head so it isn’t stressing you out all the time, so I would assume there is someplace I’m supposed to write all my plans.

You may note that I only have one deadline in my Tasks. The rest of them are ASAP, I suppose, but I wonder if I will actually do them without a deadline. I also wonder if I will tend to focus on tasks relating to a project I find interesting, and ignore the tasks for the other projects.

I guess we’ll find out :)

I had a post written. It wasn’t huge, but you know, it had information in it that I don’t feel like rewriting. And what does Blogger do, but have some kind of server error. Yet again. I’ve gotten in the habit lately of copying my text into Notepad before posting, so I won’t lose it. I don’t know why I didn’t do it this time.

Regardless.

After my lengthy lunch break, I took a shower. Then I watched the tour of the Getting Things Done Outlook Add-In. The upshot is that it seems like a good tool, but I’m not sure I want to use it, because I don’t want to have to change all my settings back if I end up not liking it. However, this could just be an attitude based on the fact that I’m tired from watching the demo thing, and from thinking about all the stuff I want to accomplish. It’s overwhelming, and I need to buckle down and find the right tools. If I have to go back and try something else, that’s just what I’ll have to do.

I’ll check in later after I’ve installed the free trial and checked it out some.

Hai linked me to this United States geography quiz. Pretty fun! I did a lot better with the Midwest and the South than I did with the West or the Northeast, though thanks to our trip to Boston I didn’t do too badly around that area. Ultimately I got 41 out of 50 states perfect, with an average error of 82 miles. It got easier as the game went on, because after a point it was like doing a puzzle, so I’m not sure how many state locations I actually knew. Still, it was a good test, and a fun way to learn where the states are.

Ooh, they have lots of other games, too.

Slashdot linked today to a Washington Post story about how in the future, we won’t buy our music on media, but will simply purchase a data file, which we will then port into whatever format we want–mp3, DVD, CD, etc. It’s an exciting prospect. But what gets me is not the changing future of music, but this abysmally stupid quote from the article:

Sitting at your laptop, pressing a few buttons and cueing up Bob Dylan may not seem very rock-and-roll. Will air-guitaring give way to air-mousing?

Okay, that doesn’t even make any sense.

(Also, it’s “queueing“, damn it!)

I was just thinking about how useless most Valentine’s Day gifts are. Especially plushies or stuffed animals. What do they do for you? Nothing. All they do is clutter up your house. I have plenty of clutter already, thank you. I’d prefer a night on the town, an exotic vacation, a picnic in the park, something I can experience. Or if you must buy something, let it be something I can use, like batteries for my camera (seriously), or even an AC adapter for the camera, or a cell phone with a camera in it. (Hmm, what’s with the camera theme?) But no stuffed animals. Please.

Then, I saw these:

I take it back, I take it all back. There’s room on top of my monitor for beanie Bun-Bun. Oh yes.

God, sometimes Xeni Jardin pisses me off.

The must-have trash accessory for those who suck down their MP3s in a doublewide

Yes, because all smokers live in trailers, and obviously people who live in trailers are garbage.

It’s okay to say this, of course, because “hicks” and “rednecks” do not have “culture”, and are therefore inferior lifeforms, worthy only of being mocked.

Fucking elitist bitch.

Apparently human beings are very bad at budgeting their time. We assume that we will somehow have more of it in the future. (While we technically do have more time in the future–the rest of our lives–we do not budget our activities over time. We seem to budget them to occur in one day.) Here’s an article in New Scientist about the phenomenon (via Luke).

I need to incorporate GTD principles–and FlyLady principles, and anything that pushes a system for organizing work done over time–so I can start actually working on my life goals. Here are a few of them:

1. Start my own business.
2. Learn to speak Japanese fluently.
3. Invest in real estate.
4. Live in Japan for at least a few years.
5. Take a big vacation with a large group of friends.
6. Attain and maintain my ideal weight.
7. Become more socially responsible, both by being charitable and by being actively involved in citizenship.
8. Write a complete, publishable piece of fiction.

I’m doing fairly well with #6 with the help of DietPower. That software has really shown me how organizational tools can help. There are things I want to keep track of that DietPower doesn’t help with, though, at least not in a direct, easy to manage way. I’m thinking about adding a new section to my website, /nutrition, that will house all the information I personally want to track, but I’m not sure about that yet. (Website updates are another thing I want to do, but they don’t really count as “life goals”.)

As far as #7 goes, I was much inspired by some posts Sam made over on a post on WWDN. He basically called for people who were unhappy with the way the country was going to write their Congressmen…not just every now and then, but regularly. Make Congress responsible. As Sam said, “I think “For the People, of the People, and by the People” should be more than just pretty words.” I would like to start staying on top of important issues, and writing a letter to my Congressmen every month with my opinions on how the country is going.

Regardless, to meet all these goals I need to work on some or all of them a little bit every day. I’m not doing that.

I seem to make a lot of posts about things I would like to do, and then never start working on doing them. This is, presumably, because I assume I will have time to work on them in the future. Nice little Catch-22, there. So, rather than end here, I am going to lay out my goals in GTD fashion.

I will create spaces for the following:

• A “Projects” list
• Project support material
• Calendared actions and information
• “Next Actions” lists
• A “Waiting For” list
• Reference material
• A “Someday/Maybe” List

I will organize whatever materials I currently have into these categories. I will then begin preliminary planning for each project, one by one. I will determine what the “next action” is for every project–what I need to do to keep working on it. If that action takes less than 2 minutes, I will go ahead and do it. If not, I will “defer” it, to either a specific date (if it depends on a certain time) or to “next actions”, which will be done ASAP. (At this point I shouldn’t have anything in “waiting (for someone else to do)”, because this is all me. But you never know.)

I’m going to include short-term projects here too, like “update my website” and “create and follow a system for meal planning”, because these things need to be done, too.

In order for this system to work, I will check my Next Actions list every time I have a chance, and see if I have time to do one or more of them. Every time I check that list and do an action, I will figure out what the action after that will be, and write it down for next time.

Okay! Taking a break for lunch. My Next Action in this process is going to be figuring out what I’m going to use for organization. Robert has installed a GTD toolset into his Outlook Tasks; that’s a possibility. I may, however, just want to stick to hardcopy. I’ll figure that out after lunch.

Just call Destina Japan. From Japan Today:

A Japanese woman traveled 9,500 kilometers to London to meet four British suitors, a matrimonial agency said Saturday.

Reiko Suzuki, 38, a marketing manager in Tokyo, is the first of 1,500 clients to be introduced by Destina Japan, an agency which specializes in introducing Japanese women to Western men.

Destina has offices in the UK and US. Call Now!

Slashdot links today to a product called the AlphaGrip, which is an ergonomic game controller with a fully-functional keyboard and mouse built in. I spent a little time this morning watching the demos for the device, in which a gentleman types in a word processor, opens and closes applications, and plays Doom III.

All in all, the AlphaGrip looks pretty neat. I’m thinking Sean and I should get one to try out; he likes to use his computer in bed, and this would really help him to relax. They’re $99 right now, which really isn’t that bad.

The gentleman in the video stated that he could type 40-50 wpm on the AlphaGrip. As I currently clock speeds of up to 114 on a regular keyboard, I’m wondering how fast my typing would be on the device. Part of why I type so fast, I believe, is because I learned to type while I was still a child. There’s a greater learning curve for pretty much everything once you get out of puberty, so as an adult I’m not sure I will be able to reach my peak speed on the AlphaGrip. It would be interesting to test that theory.