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I’ve always had a tendancy to stand back from things.  This tendancy has kept me from doing alot in my life.  Last week I blogged about wanting to go on a cruise.  It is still, and probably always will be on my mind.  Unless I hit the lottery there’s no chance of that wish becoming a reality.  BTW, I don’t gamble…  There’s many things I wish I had done and many I wish I hadn’t.  Still this tendancy to hold back isn’t always a bad thing.  I am able to see things from an outside perspective in almost any group argument because I never get in the middle.  I suppose I would make a good judge or arbiter.  This outside perspective often falls upon other things besides arguments. 

What prompted this blog entry was nothing more than a few second clip of video I stumbled across.  Prior to now I have admitted that I am an Anime fan.  I would go so far as to say I am in love with the japanese culture.  The particular clip that caught my eye and set of this train of thought was from Memiors of a Geisha.  The clip itself was nothing special.  Someone had taken a song and mixed it with video from the film.  Poorly I might add…  Where this outside perspective came in was thinking about how beautiful some of the things that come from the geisha lifestyle are. 

There is no doubt in my mind that the abuses suffered by young girls who are or were sold into the geisha life are terrible.  There is also little doubt that in the modern world such abuse will eventually be forced to its end.  As society grows so does communication and eventually outrageous acts will be seen and prevented before they can take seed.  On the surface this is a good thing.  Now I know you are thinking there is no way that ending abuse is a bad thing thing, and you are right.  However deep below the surface we as a society will lose something along with it. 

When you put a piece of wood on a lathe and turn it you create a representation of the balance in all things.  If there is an ugly scar on one side of the wood and you cut in to remove it, you inevitably cut away a beautiful piece that lies just on the other side.  This balance exists within all things.  It is the principal of yin and yang and more fundimentally equilibrium.   The force behind this balance controls electricity and the very nature of the universe.  The balance of energy between positive and negative lies at the very hart of the atomic structure that makes up every fibre of our existence.

I’m not saying its right to beat a troop of young girls into geisha’s.  I am saying the practice once extinguished will leave behind a hollow shell where once a great beauty resided.  Sure there will probably be for decades or even century’s woman who proclaim to carry on the geisha tradition.  They may keep the face paint and practice the story but in the end the true soul will pass on.  The heart of the truest beauty is bound inseperably to the pain and suffering of those enslaved.

I don’t always see things from the outside perspective but on occasion I have glimpsed it.  This intangable bond between beauty and pain can be seen or rather heard quite clearly in the greatest of music.  Think of all the great artists who have died from drug overdoses and suicides.  There is some pain deep within all of them that drove them to their eventual end.  It is at the height of great pain and the deepest point of suffering that the music begins to resonate with the hearts of so many.  Without this struggle an artist’s work becomes bland and falls into the medium. 

I could name many examples of artists who at their debut had a tremendous hit and upon gaining the fame and fortune of a big record they became content.  The money or the fame settled this deep pain within their hearts and their new music lost its edge.  Those who continue to constantly top the charts seem all to be plagued by drug addiction or some other problem that simply cannot be solved with fortune and fame.  Even going back as far as Mozart and Beethoven the pattern of suffering resonating with artistic prowess holds true.  This balance I speak of resounds through all forms of art.  Van Gough was in so much inner turmoil he was lopping off body parts.

I leave this post not with my idea for a solution, but rather my prediction for the future.  As time goes on parents will no longer be able to beat their children into ballet dancers and pianists.  School counselors will be so well equipped that they will be able to solve the problems of teens who want to drop out, get high, and play music.  In the end society will advance so much that nothing of value will ever happen.   The eventuality will be the extinction of mankind through sheer boredom, or our one in a billion shot at a reset through a catastrophic global event that devolves us back to the stone age.

There is no such thing as a superhero without an equivalent villain.  While plenty of darkness still prevails in the world today I have to wonder. Is it truly right to eliminate it?  What motiviates and inspires us to do more, to create, to be great?  Necessity is the mother of invention.  If something doesn’t bother you, you will never find the power to change it.  Perhaps most of all this post describes patriotism.  The united states was born upon labor of prisoners and slaves.  The evils that must have existed at its birth have fostered the fighting spirit of this great country.  Unfortunately the seed that will broach its eventual destruction has been sewn in the fabric from the very beginning.  This seed is the opposite of innovation and insiration.  This poison seed is known as religion. For no other thing desires more to find the perfect balance.  An end to evil that will truly bring about the apocolypse.

I wrote a post to my blog a number of weeks back about how my father had suffered a heart attack.  Its been more than two months now and he is still in the hospital.  He was released twice, only to return just one day after discharge both times.  Internal bleeding keeps filling his chest cavity and putting pressure on his lungs to the point where he cannot breathe.  The poor guy is a pincusion full of tubes and wires.  They’ve opened his chest and relocated veins.  They’ve put tubes in through his back to drain out fluids.  They’ve put in stints, and even sprayed talk powder inside of him to clog up the leaks.  You’ve got to admit it sounds more like a diy plumbing job than a heart surgury.

There are different kinds of people in this world.  Some just naturally know how to have fun, while others were simply bread to be slaves.  Its rare, or maybe even impossible to change your lot in life.  Lying in bed he is still thinking about going back to work.  He is weighing all his options and trying to figure how he can move into management so that his knowledge is still useable where he knows he can’t continue to do heavy lifting.  Whats worse is that deep down I know I caught that terrible ailment known as workaholism.  I’ve made up my mind from watching my dad go through this that I will break the workaholic curse and become someone who is fun.  Or die trying…

There are so many things I want to do someday and I’ve been thinking about taking a vacation.  No not the kind of taking days off that I have done in the past, but really taking a vacation.  I’m concidering a princess cruise.  I know I’m kind of young but it really sounds appealing to me.  Not bieng a sporty type I can see myself getting into a game of shuffleboard.  There is alot of deep seeded fear I will have to overcome to make it a reality though.

Some of the toughest things that will keep me from boarding the Grand Princess and cruising off into the tropics are the sun and the water.  Its not like I mind doing a days work, but I have to keep out of the sun to really do at my best.  I see laborers on rooftops with their dark tans and bulging muscles.  They seem not to be affected by the sun.  Put me out in direct sunlight and I start to feel tired.  A headache ensues, and eventually I become a worthless lump seeking the darkness for shelter.  I dare say in the roofing trade I’d become a rasin or a prune in no time. 

I know that on a cruise ship a big part of the adventure is on deck.  I can see myself at night in the tropics out on deck, but during the day I don’t see it happening.  Is there some sort of trick to enjoing the sunlight that I’m missing?  In my daily life I have to work during the day and sleep at night.  These are required to maintain the flow.  On a cruiz ship I wonder if the opposite is acceptable.  I would have no problem sleeping the day away and partying all night.  I just wonder if I’d be up at 3am while all the entertainment is closed and everyone else is sleeping.  I know there are activities below deck, but I’m not one for gambling.  I tried it when I was younger.  The thought of giving away so much of my hard earned money for so little entertainment makes me sick.  Aside from that I don’t know what else they could offer that would really entertain me.  (unless they have cheap hookers…)  Most everything else I can do here at home and have just as much fun.

Besides the sun theres also the water.  Having inherited every other poor condition my fathers gene’s could pass on I’m sure seasickness is among the plagues I have yet to discover.  I know I don’t handle airplane travel well.  I don’t think its a matter of the plane rocking that makes me sick so much as its a matter of the people.  Bieng packed in a can in some sort of cultist sardineism with tainted air supply uncontrollable temperature and massively violated personal space all add to the overwhelming distaste.  I’d much rather drive for three days than fly for just a few hours.  I don’t know if I get seasick or not, but finding out in the middle of the ocean days away from dry land is not what I call smart.  I know that they have pills for that sort of thing.  The underlying problem there is that I don’t want to spend a week doped up on pills pretending to have fun.  I want to go and have some real enjoyment.

So this leads me back to the rut I’m stuck in.  I want to go on a princess cruise.  I want to have fun.  I’m not sure I would have any fun.  If I had a trophy wife slash sexual acrobat to take along I’m sure I would.  This puts me back to going to work every day trying to earn the cash to be filthy rich.  If I have a ton of money the hot chick wife who only wants me for my money isn’t far off.  Then the cruise.  Following that logic I end up just like my dad.  In the hospital from a heart attack still trying to make my fortune so I can eventually get to the fun part. 

So how to break the cycle?  Should I give up on the cruise and find something else fun?  The problem is that I don’t enjoy the all same types of things that other people do.  I’ve been bread not to have fun going to bars and drinking.  I get satisfaction from doing a job well.  Maybe its a grass is greaner complex but I just feel like I can’t have fun like other people do.  What do you all think?  Should I just say screw it and blow five grand on a glorified boat ride just to see if I like it?

About a year ago I finally broke down and bought an HDTV.   I really wanted one but I just couldn’t make myself pay the two or three thousand dollars that it was going to take to get one. I ran across a deal on a marked down return at sears and just couldn’t pass it up.  It isn’t a large tv by most peoples standards, but a 40″ sony LCD was big enough to put the itch to rest.  I payed just over a thousand for the set. 

Everyone knows that electronics go down in price rapidly as new ones come out.  Nowdays you can get visio’s and a few other brands with bigger screens than my sony for the same price as I got it on markdown for.  It really is a beautiful tv though, even if it isn’t the latest model with all the bells and whistles.  It does make for one hell of a cool monitor though.  I’m actually typing this blog on it right now. 

Anyhow what I wanted to blog about this week was the outrageous price of tv wall mount kits.  Now I know after having worked in retail for numerous years that the price of a product has nothing to do with what it is worth.  Pricing is directly correlated with how much the average sucker can be made to pay.  The guys going out and buying three thousand dollar tv sets obviously have big money they are able to spend.  Therefore the accessories cost big money.  Even if they are just a stamped steel bracket…

For the last year my big screen lcd tv has set atop a cheap plastic shelf that used to be home to my old small screen tv because I couldn’t bring myself to spend $150 or more on five dollars worth of steel.  As mentioned before, I have the computer connected to my tv.  I also have a ups system powering both.  (Uniterruptable power supply)  Yesterday it decided it was time to put in a new battery.  The UPS is a flea market special that I payed a dollar or two for so there is no chance I’m going to hunt down a new battery to go inside.  Unable to tolerate the beep every three seconds it became time to make a change.

Since I had decided I was going to have to get behind the tv stand and replace the UPS with a surge protector, and I knew the horror of wires and such I was about to enter I decided it was time to go all out and hang the tv from the wall.  I still haven’t overcome the unwillingness to pay $150 for a couple of metal bars, so I decided to head on down to the home depot and build my own tv wall mount bracket. 

Was it a success?  Well I’m typing this now, so you know the tv didn’t fall off the wall and break.  Was it cheaper?  Maybe,  I spent about $30 altogether for all the hardware.  The tv sets exactly where I wanted it, and it It looks great.  Then why only maybe?  Because it took me about fifteen hours from start to finish, counting in the hour or so I spent stopping off to grab a bite to eat.  Running back and forth to the hardware store, Drilling holes in the steel, designing it and redesigning it in my head, ect. 

Lets do the math here: 15 hours x $12 per hour + $30 in parts = $210.  Now I’m sure it would have taken me at least two hours to hang the tv even with a premade mount.  So the cost would be more like $175 if I had bought the mount.  At the end of the day, this diy project was more expensive to do it myself.  I have $120 more in the bank now because I concider it as having paid myself but it really wasn’t cheaper.  That is just one more day out of my life I spent working that I could have spent doing something fun. 

Overall the most important question is: Was it worth it?  This is a firm yes.  I’m a glutton for punishment I guess because even though I figure building the mount should be counted as work, at the end of the day and after looking back on it, I was doing something fun.

Just for posterity and to save anyone who stumbles on this article looking for information about building a tv wall mount some searching, here is what I finally settled on that worked and was strong enough.  There is a kind of metal beam that is sold that has clips to attach conduit to it.  I ended up buying one of those rails and cutting it into four pieces.  Two attached to the tv and two bolted to the wall.  Then I used the clips that attach to the conduit and two pieces of conduit to attach the rails from the back of the tv to the conduit, to the rails mounted on the wall.  Now if this were mounted on the cieling that would have been enough, but since it is mounted on the wall, the tv would slip down the channel if using just the clips.  The last part of the design was to drill a hole through all four rails in the same place on the sides.  I put a U-bolt through the rail, half inside and half outside.  That way as the tv slides down the rail the clips set onto the ubolts. 

I would post a picture, but there is no way I have the energy willpower or stupidity left to take the tv off the wall to take a snapshot today.  Perhaps that will be a topic for a future blog post.  How to build a tv wall mount for under $30…

The other day I was stumbling around on the web, and I saw something that caught my attention.  Of course bieng the forgetfull dumbass I am I didn’t bother to bookmark it.  So last night when I wanted to go back and look into it further I found myself searching google to find it.  I’ve been using the internet and google for so many years now that I just instinctively found myself keying in syntax strings in the search bar to find what I need quickly.  In a brief moment of inspiration I realized that’s probably not something a normal user would do.  Then it made me think about what else I can do with google’s search bar.

The particular sytntax I am referring to is the “site:” command.  It just happened that I knew what website the information I was looking for was on, but I didn’t know exactly where on that site to find it.  The “site:” command lets you use google to search for results only from one website.  While I am sure it is well documented, I discovered it when using googles webmaster tools to see if my website was indexed. 

The other commands I’ve picked up over the years are “link:” and “define:”  I’m not entirely sure where I picked up the latter one but I use it all the time because it is much faster than looking for a dictionary.  I can pull up what I want to know on google faster than I can find a bookmark to an online dictionary.  This is especially true if what I’m after is how to spell something.  Not to imply that I bother correcting my spelling very often…

So to get on with my story I got the idea to research and find out just what else can be done with the google search bar.  Here’s what I discovered:

• intitle: If you add this to a keyword in your search it will find web pages that have what you are searching for in the title of the page.
• inurl: This will find results that are are an exact match for something in the url (link) So if you were looking for the keyword legal, you could search “inurl:legal” and find pages that have the word legal in the filename
• filetype: This is an interesting one.  If you are looking for photos you could try something like filetype:jpg or you could try filetype:pdf if you know what you are looking for is in an adobe brochure format.
• + an -: I knew about these already but I hadn’t really thought about them with respect to google.  If you use them in conjuction with some of the other strings it can become very powerful.  For example there is a particular site that always seems to pop up when I am searching for hardware info or drivers.  The site doesn’t have any valuable content but they make you register just to find that out.  It burns my butt every time they pop up at #1 for something I search.  A simple change to my search string “-site:experts-exchange.com” will keep all their pages from my results list. (amen) 
• intext:  Finds results that are in the text of the page.  If you use this with a quote you can find pages that are either the source of the quote or about the quote.  Intext:plurbus intext:unum would bring up results about the quote “e plurbus unum” which is printed on most (all?) USA currency.
• allintext: allinurl: allintitle: are the same as the intext: inurl: and intitle: except that they are for the entire search string instead of just one word.
• inanchor: finds keywords in the anchor text of links and images.

There are litterally dozens of others and probably millions of creative uses for these simple string filters.  One thing I came across researching these was a guy who demonstrated how to use these tags to find good available domain names.  (probably doesn’t work anymore because as soon as someone releases a trick like that it gets used to death…)  Anyhow, it used the intitle tag to search through massive lists of old expiring domain name auctions.  He would find lists of names with good keywords.  Then the lists were fed through some filtering and checked for availability.   In just seconds his little trick could come up with thousands of expired domains that didn’t get re-registered.  You probably won’t find any natural trafic gems this way as great names are always picked up on the drop, but if you are looking for a good name to develop there is potential.

Another interesting thing I came across is how to use google to find mp3’s.  Using the search string intitle:”index of” will find directorys of files.  Mix that with filetype:mp3 and you have a quick google search that finds open directories of mp3 files. 

Of course with good also comes the bad.  The less scrupulous types will use these same tricks to search the web for sites that have known vulnerabilities.  If you have a website that uses script that is vulnerable you can just about bet that google is telling some turd how to deface it right now. 

A few posts back in my blog I admitted that I am an anime fan.  This may or may not seem like a big deal to all of you, but to me it is.  Why you ask?  Well I am a very private person.  I seldom reveal things about myself.  To speak out to the world and declare “I am an anime geek” is a pretty big thing to me.  To get a solid idea of what I mean you should think of it like going to the mall nude.  I have a hard time wanting anyone to see me that way. 

The thing that gets me past that hurdle is how much I want others to join me.  It is time the american people broke the stupidity factor and moved on to some more intellectual televison.  Now I’m not saying there isn’t some really stupid anime out there.  I’m just saying that even the worst anime is better than the torture we call American Idol, and Americas Next Top Model.  I recently found myself in a position where I was at someone’s house working on their computer.  At the same time they were in the room watching america’s top model.  I actually had to ask them to turn it off because it was giving me a headache.

The current crop of this crud is an offshoot of survivor who is the bastard child of daytime court tv.  With each generation the content gets worse and I am positive it has reached the point where there is no longer any value in it.  Reality tv is like smoking.  At first it gets people hooked with a bit of a buzz then they go back because they are addicted.  There never was anything good or cool about it.  I wonder if I can start the class action lawsuit for the mass brain damage that will certainly be pandemic.

Anyhow, I didn’t start this post wanting to talk about Reality Retardity Tv.  I just sort of went off tangent on a rant there.  sorry…  What I really wanted to blab about was how I’ve been spending my time lately.  I have been watching what my fellow nerds have coined “AMV’s.”  What is an AMV you ask, well its an acronym for Anime Music Video.  Basically some pasty skinned computer geeks with way too much time on their hands have found a hobby in taking clips of Anime and mashing them together with popular Music to make their own videos.

There are more than a few videos that are simply thrown together by some kid and arent of much value.  However there are also a few real gem’s I’ve come across.  I’ve decided to post the Youtube videos of a couple of my favorites here.

I gave some thought to making my own amv. I doubt it will happen, as I can see just how much effort has gone into making these. I don’t like to do anything half assed, and I’m sure I don’t have the time or patience to do full assed. But just maybe one day you’ll see one of mine. I do have the talent / skill to do it. I’ve also got some great ideas. I just find it far too easy to spend my precious time doing things either more or less productive. Anyhow, if you are so inclined, drop by youtube and have a look. Let me know what ones you like.