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#5178 – fucking awesome

today was fucking awesome, and no, i’m actually not being sarcastic.

i was actually looking forward to work on monday (WHAT) because it meant i could go for a run on the treadmill in the gym after work.

i was a bit worried when i ran into traffic on the way to work that i’d be late, but luckily made it to work right on time.

they’re doing a trial at work to save money, and so they’ve replaced my microsoft office suite with folger’s crystals staroffice, sun microsystem’s version of openoffice. they actually added staroffice on to my computer last week, but today they removed every other bit of microsoft office from my computer (except for outlook). well, wouldn’t you know i ran into the first snag: access databases are not directly compatible with openoffice… but then i figured out how to get them to talk to each other.

i got to use my new apple in-ear headphones at work for the first time — i picked them up saturday night, and though i already had in-ear headphones, these are much better quality-sounding and also have built-in microphone, remote and volume controls, so i can now just carry around this one pair of headphones (microphone and remote work on my iphone for calls and changing songs; microphone, remote and volume controls work on ipod nano for recording voice notes which i doubt i’d do and controlling songs and song volume; none of those controls work on my regular ipod, but who cares). it’s nice to be able to change songs via the remote while i’m running instead of fumbling with the ipod nano… even though i was using the iphone stock earbud/remote setup before, that style of headphone makes my ears hurt after a short while because of the way they fit in, so i’m much more comfortable now all around.

had my performance appraisal today. my supervisor said that though i didn’t score as “leading”, because i’m so awesome i scored as a high “performing” level and she was able to to get me a little extra in my bonus that they’ll pay out in just under 2 weeks.

i went to subway today and was feeling super-awesome, so i got myself a footlong turkey sub (normally i just get the 6″, since i only have a 30 minute lunch or a “30-minute lunch hour” as i told one of my coworkers and then realized what i just said), and i (to quote greyplanet) HOUSED that thing like it was nothing. SO DELISH. i was like that scrawny japanese guy who always wins the nathan’s hot dog eating contest every year, except it was a sub-eating contest, and i was the only contestant, and there was only one sub to be eaten. but not only did i eat that sub like it was going out of style, i also filled in one of my coworkers on the awesomeness of mini coopers since she’s thinking about buying a used 2003 mini for like $10k, which is a pretty decent deal. i can’t wait to eat another sub, mmm.

after work i did my exercise in the gym (no thanks to all of you on twitter who didn’t tell me how many miles to run 😛 i got a 4-4.5 from cynicalscribe, 3 from sk8bette, and two “run 0 miles and get fat” from whammywah and asavas). i kicked that run’s ASS and pulled out a 4.62 mile run. i’m adding the songs that i listen to to imix playlists on itunes (and i just realized tonight that i listed the first one as 2008-02-05 instead of 02-05-2009, whoops… and no going back and editing them, either. oh well.) if you want to see what i’ve been listening to.

came home, had three packages waiting for me from amazon: bone supplement pills (mm, 500% dosage of vitamin d and other healthy things), socks and t-shirts (yaay, but this is quite clever, since i needed new socks anyway so i ordered enough to get rid of all my old ones and now there’s no more matching of mismatched socks!), and a valentine’s day present that’s probably guessable, but oh well.

looked at the kindle 2, and i’m not that impressed. a little annoyed that they’ve gotten rid of the amazon nownow service – even though i only used it a handful of times, it was a nice extra feature. while it’d be nice to have something a little thinner, i don’t really push the buttons by accident and i don’t know if i like the redesigned look. i like the new cover since the cover for the first generation irks me sometimes. text-to-speech is too robotic-sounding. i like 16 shades of gray e-ink, but i don’t like how they got rid of the memory card slot (i use mine to help organize my kindle’s memory and for retrievable storage especially of non-amazon titles should my kindle go kaput, so i wouldn’t have to hunt down all the non-amazon stuff i had stored on the internal memory). if my kindle broke tomorrow, i wouldn’t have any problem switching to the kindle 2, but i don’t see any reason to upgrade since mine’s thin enough and though i’d like the improved screen, i like having a memory card slot in mine. time will tell if they make a client for the iphone, because that’d be pretty sweet.

anyway, i should get my clothes out of the dryer and get to bed. i kind of want to get breakfast in the morning and have pancakes and eggs and all sorts of stuff like that, but i doubt that’ll happen. i can hope, though.

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#5177 – "of course we run. but for recreation. for fun." / "run for fun? what the hell kind of fun i

today i joined the fitness center at work — they were having a special this week where non-members could try it for free, and new members get their first month for free, so now i have a free membership through the end of february. i’d never been a member of a gym before, so i stopped in the fitness center during my work day and asked about it, and they scheduled me for my evaluation after work.

the fitness evaluation was checking my weight, my blood pressure at rest and while i was on a stationary bike that they increased the resistance on every few minutes, and then i had to do as many crunches as i could in a minute (34) and as many push-ups as i could do in a minute (33? or was it 32? it was just under my number of crunches, i know that), and then a sit-and-reach for flexibility.

they had asked what made me interested in joining the gym, and i told them how i heard about the special, but i was also recently listening to cynicalscribe‘s dad talk about his nike+ system; i had heard about it before and looked into it a little bit, but since i wanted to get back into running i looked at it again a bit more seriously. i thought the shoes for nike+ were fancy specialized shoes for the sensor (the sensor itself is only $29.99), but looking at the nike store showed the cheapest to be a pair for $39.99, and since i need a new pair of running shoes anyway (i had found my shoes from my running/jogging class a few years ago, but those are a size 9 and my feet are now a 9.5; they still fit, but they’re very tight), i thought i’d buy ’em. turns out that pair is only in a size 6, so that wouldn’t do. the next cheapest pair is $59.99, but then i found these coupons completely by chance, so i considered it a sign and bought a pair of $85 shoes for $50.87 shipped. not bad! especially since i had to get an ipod nano for the damn thing since it won’t sync with my existing ipod OR iphone, but then again it makes sense since i wouldn’t want either of those big things clunking in my pocket while running along, bleh. but i got a deal on that too.

so after my fitness test, coach dave gave me a rundown of the equipment in the facility — he runs marathons, so he showed me the treadmills (“the cadillacs of treadmills” he called them), the elliptical and the stair-stepping machine.

it’s going to be nice, because i’ve been meaning to get back into running ever since my running/jogging class got out (i enjoyed that class, since it was basically run around the indoor track for a few hours a few times a week), but i haven’t really liked the idea of going out jogging around the neighborhood that much, and definitely not in this weather, so jogging on a treadmill or working out on the elliptical or stair-stepper definitely appeal to me.

i wasn’t even sure if i wanted to do the nike+ system, since i already had runkeeper on my iphone and used that for riding my bike around the trail next to my house; i liked how it graphed out a google map with the trail that you took, and marked every mile you passed, but the problem with it is that it doesn’t use the phone’s accelerometer to determine your speed and pace — it uses the phone’s gps signal. so that’s not a solution if you’re indoors, on a stationary treadmill. oh well. at least it’s still useful for bike-riding.

but the thing that i like about the nike+ system is the nike+ coach making a schedule for you to follow each day (and a quick glance at the schedule it came up with for me has saturdays and sundays off, which is good because the fitness center at work is only open monday-friday). i like how it mixes it up. i also like seeing other people’s running routes they’ve made up online, there’s a few that look interesting to try once it warms up in the springtime.

i also like how at the fitness center at work they can do personal training as well, so that’s nice too. and they’re open 6 am – 7 pm, so i could theoretically go for a workout and change and shower at the fitness center afterwards before my shift begins at 9 am. theoretically… since i’d still have to get there early. but i could possibly be persuaded to wake up around 5 am sometime so i could have breakfast here at home, go work out, then get secondary breakfast from the cafeteria at work (but who am i kidding? it’s after 2 am and i’m still up, so i don’t see me waking up at 5 am anytime soon).

and it’s only $15 per month, automatically deducted from my paycheck. very nice!

so this is exciting 🙂 i stuck a widget on my website to show how i’ve been doing, but it’s not going to show anything until the shoes hurry up and arrive. even though it was nice to not pay shipping, it’s a pain in the ass to wait for my order to finally ship and ground shipping to arrive. probably should have paid for the speedier shipping, oh well.

in other work news: my supervisor talked with me today about a possible career progression at work that i never really considered, but actually might be interesting to do (sales operations for federal government). she thinks my skills would be great for it, because they work often with the technical folks running the intranet and such. problem is, there are few places i’d want to relocate to, and new jersey isn’t one of them (sorry new-jerseyians, unless it’s for something right in nyc, in which case maybe), and though my supervisor said that i may be able to get a job with our hq in new jersey and work it remotely from my current office, i don’t know how likely it is for a job like that to show up in our job system.

anyway, time for bed. no workout tomorrow, going to (probably) be watching all three “back to the future” movies in order (hence the subject line!).

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#5175 – oh, livejournal

oh, livejournal. remember when people used to cower in fear from my posts because i posted ALL THE DAMN TIME? yeah, me neither. at least not lately. mostly because i’ve been so busy i haven’t had time to post, and when i have had time that was precisely when i didn’t feel like posting. blah.

anyway, yes yes, i’m still around and kicking it. i’ve been updating my twitter a lot more than my livejournal these past few weeks, so if you really want to know what i’ve been up to, then you should probably look over there.

hopefully i’ll get time and the mood to type up a longer post about what i’ve been up to in the last month – maybe this weekend – but until then this will have to do.

in other news, i want to go on a trip to a beach (australia! it’s warm there now, right?), drink some booze, look at girls in bikinis and go on a nice vacation away from this damn cold weather we’ve been having. BRRRR.

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#5174 – if that's ok

“I suspect – well, I am sure – that there are lots of people out there who have been brought up in some religion or other, are unhappy in it, don’t believe it, or are worried about the evils that are done in its name; people who feel vague yearnings to leave their parents’ religion and wish they could, but just don’t realize that leaving is an option.” – richard dawkins

it’s now christmas eve. it’s going to feel a bit awkward — i’m not sure which christmas mass i’ll be going to, if i even go at all. the last few years i’ve been feeling less and less religious, and several months ago when mom asked me why i hadn’t been going to church, i finally had to just say that i hadn’t gone “for personal reasons”. (that was awkward too, since mom started asking “what happened? did something happen??”, and it’s difficult to say “i don’t feel like it’s something that i can participate in without feeling hypocritical”, so the best that i could do was say “it’s personal”. i sometimes wonder if by “what happened?” she thought i was abused by a priest or something – yeech, no, that’s not it.)

it was kind of a slow process anyway. the best way i can describe it is that i’d go to church, but i’d be frustrated at the church “process”; it was always the same thing, week after week, but with different readings. but even still, it wasn’t like there was going to be a sudden plot twist or anything, so you always pretty much knew what was going to be talked about. the only thing that i really looked forward to was the priest’s homily, and even then it was only really certain priests whose homilies i liked to listen to because they were interesting for me to listen to. but eventually that didn’t engage me any more, and i started thinking about religion on a global scale and how ridiculous it is to say that one particular religion is THE RELIGION when there are so many of them out there, and that so many of them have the same basic rules, and even still they have been around for so long that i started to think about the general history of religions.

i guess my mind works for me in a scientific way. it’s hard for me to take some (if not all) things on faith and belief, and i suppose that religion is one of them.

i heard about pascal’s wager several months before reading “the god delusion” (it was recommended on macbreak weekly for everyone, whether or not you believe, because it really makes you THINK… i read it after i had already made my “personal reasons” statement, however), and i think this quote from “the god delusion” really makes my point for me:

“Pascal’s Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he’d see through the deception. … But why, in any case, do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? What’s so special about believing? Isn’t it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility? Or sincerity? What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not believed in him. ‘Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence,’ was Russell’s (I almost said immortal) reply. Mightn’t God respect Russell for his courageous scepticism (let alone for the courageous pacifism that landed him in prison in the First World War) far more than he would respect Pascal for his cowardly bet-hedging?”

hm. better not lie, because if god is omniscient then the jig is up. but that’s exactly how i feel about not attending church, because i feel that by attending and not really believing, i really shouldn’t be there in the first place. even now that i’m back at home, i try to stay out of the house as much as i can on sundays just because i feel so awkward when the rest of the family talks about what mass they’ll go to or which one they went to, since i don’t really want to be thought of as not going to church because i’m lazy or that i hate it (i don’t enjoy it, but i don’t HATE the idea), it’s just that i can’t see any reason in attending and going through all the motions when it’s not something that i have any interest in attending at this time, and it’s not someplace where i feel it’s appropriate for me to be.

and another choice quote from the book:

“Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.” – thomas jefferson

so, after poking around and finding and reading bertrand russell‘s “what is an agnostic?” pamphlet, i’d say that really speaks to me.

and, since it is christmas eve, i have to leave you with a movie that ties this all in: