While Others Are Enjoying Life

I'm merely thinking about today and the weekend. Today will be a busy, busy day but I think my morale will be high since, while on my most recent TDY I had a name patch made that has my name, rank, wings and Dark Wing Duck on it. How awesome is that? Not old enough for people to say "who?" but old enough that people will be pleasantly shocked to see him. That's pretty great. I hope I can go the whole day without getting told to take it off.

Anyway, today will be crammed FULL of stuff for me to do, or at least hope to do, but since our side of the base does not have today off and the OTHER side of base does, my capabilities will be limited. I envy the folks who don't have to worry about this. I have to get as much of this done as possible today because I'll be off next week. I try to do this every time there's a four day weekend. You pay three days of leave for the three days you would have had to go back to work but you end up with nine days off. That's just being practical.

During this week I aim to consolidate my knick knackery I've collected over the years and trash the rest, then finally get all of my comic books catalogued and the list posted in a couple of places, but a friend of mine gets first pick. Anyway, I hope to sell them all, either privately or as a last resort, through eBay.

Ebay's such a bastard though. I tried to sell some comics on it a few years ago and there were no takers. I think it was because they weren't mainstream enough. Anyway, those are my goals for the week.

I'll be back on soon, but without any pictures from my computer (sorry).

The Amazon Kindle Pt. 2

I think the Kindle is probably one of the best gadgets out there right now. There are a few drawbacks but the drawbacks pale in comparison to the potential.

I wrote Amazon with some questions and recommendations to help people see some things about the Kindle (like how books like I am America and So Can You has jokes in the margin and how would that translate to the Kindle version) and they wrote back saying that if there was any book I wanted to see transribed to the Kindle to email them and they would contact the publisher to try to get it worked on as soon as possible.

I'm not worried about color especially at this point in time. Magazines with Kindle support are not using it to its full advantage anyway. Time is not putting things like graphs and pictures in there, newspapers aren't publishing comics and why? Certainly not because the Kindle can't support it. Just looking at the common picture depicting the cover of Freakonomics shows that it can support pictures, and even look pretty good doing it and yet these companies aren't doing their part. If they don't get on the ball it won't matter if the kindle has color support or not. It would be like having an unelievably fast car to drive to the corner store and back with. All that potential and no one using it.

But imagine how great it would be to store not only your recreational reading on it, but educational and professional books too. Imagine being a doctor and having all of your references right there in your bag or on your desk instead of on the book shelves or stored in your computer. Imagine being a college student and having to tote around your kindle in your backpack instead of the twenty or so pounds of books. In my career, I have publications that easily, EASILY go beyound three thousand pages and it would be a ton easier to have all that in something like the Kindle.

And price. College text books are so pricey, but if they offered them at a price that's reasonable considering they're cutting out distributors, printers, transport, and shelf space, then that savings would be passed on to the buyer. Imagine a whole semester's worth of books for 100.00 instead of 600.00.

Also, one of the things I really like about it is the fact that I could read all sorts of books and then populate my bookshelf with printed books that are ESPECIALLY amazing to me. My particular favorites. Over the years I've bought a ton of books I thought would be good only to be disappointed and those ones end up in totes which is just wasted space honestly.

It's an AMAZING invention as far as I'm concerned and most of the things that people complain about are either because they haven't lookd far enough into it, or because they're expecting something entirely different than what the device is meant to be. You don't buy a book expecting it to also function as, say, a hammer, even though if it's heavy and sturdy enough it could. So why expect an e-reader to also be an MP3 player? I also don't mind it not having a backlight. I just got done reading Survivor by the same author as Fight Club (can never remember how to spell his last name) on my computer and it was horribly hard on my eyes. The fact it looks like paper has been reviewed time and time again by the owners to save strain on their eyes making for longer and more comfortable reading sessions.

So all in all, it seems like a great invention for me, but I could see why people might not like it. I can especially see why book fans wouldn't like it, especially when you get into the idea that it or something like it might replace printed books as we know it (something I don't believe at all but have heard concerns about). I seriously doubt the printed book will go away any time soon.

All of that being said (and I do apologize for the length) I do think the price of the device is REALLY high. I also think the prices for magazine and newspaper subscriptions are also pretty high. True, the prices of magazines aren't so bad, but they aren't good enough when you think about all the money that is being saved by the company by publishing it on the Kindle as opposed to print. The profit margin should be the same percent in my opinion. And if they were to lower the price of the device to get it into more people's hands, more people would be buying more books, and more money and profit would be generated. Most video game developers lose money on every platform they make but make up for the money in software sold. Well, that used to be the case, anyway. I don't know about now with 600.00 systems out there. Anyhoo, this is a lesson I would urge Amazon to take heed of even though it's constantly sold out now.

I don't have one yet. It would be amazingly useful to me since I'm flying pretty often and always in need of a book, but I'm not in a place financially where I could justify getting it.

So, again, sorry for the long rant. It's just a device with a ton of potential that I feel doesn't get voiced enough. It's the potential of the device that appeals to me and honestly, if people don't stand behind a product with potential, the product will fall away due to lack of interest (meaning the potential will never be fleshed out unless it's done by some other thing).

The Sanctity Of Marriage

I think the idea of marriage as a lock, guarantee, obligation, or logical stepping stone in a relationship's progress is a sham. I don't buy it.

Some people get married because their relationship's in trouble and I don't see the logic in it. If you have troubles before jewelry and the debt associated with a wedding, you're going to have them afterward too.

Some people get married because they think it will guarantee success, that their partner will never roam. It's just a ring, folks. What you're looking for is a chain bolted to the floor in your basement. That's the only guaranteed way to keep your spouse from roaming.

Some people get married because they got pregnant/got someone pregnant. How is this fair to anyone? There are going to be an awful lot of bad feelings floating around the household and there are really no good endings here. I recommend someone in this position to go find a lawyer, settle on an amount of child support and try to establish a relationship with the child individually instead of trying to force a marriage to work too. There may be some stigma but in the end I think all parties will be far more happy.

Some people get married because they think it's just what you do after you date for a while. This is the one I have the most beef with. Some people don't want to get married. Some people shouldn't get married. Some people have mental complications that associate the wedding ring with a tourniquet that cuts off the freedom you used to have (pssst: it's still there) and end up sabatoging a relationship that might have had a far greater chance of survival if they had just been dating long term or became "life partners."

I think that this comes from the pressure of our parents and the ethics they were raised with. I don't agree with them (most of them, anyway) and in no way is that a knock on our parents, their beliefs, their religions, etc. I think that we're all different people and I think that this is something that should be re-evaluated. Marriage statistics show that there's a scary possibility of failing. So many marriages are failing nowadays and I think that it's because they were entered for the reasons listed above.

I say there's no need to get married but that's probably just me. There's no shame in living together for a long period of time and if I had it my way, we'd get rid of marriage all together and replace it with common law marriages based on the state you live in. I see nothing wrong with gay marriage, straight marriage, I just see something wrong with marriage. Not that I feel bad about being married, it's just that, even if we weren't married right now I'd be fine with that too. I think that's the best route to improve statistics. I mean, let's say that most failed marriages fail within the first ten years of marriage. But imagine if the state you were living in said that if you lived with a person for ten years and declared that you were in a relationship you were legally married. By then, you've proven that you can stick together for at least ten years and the odds of future success go up quite a bit.

I know some people will think it's a bit too much, so maybe a change in mental outlook will help: It took me something like 30 days to get my marriage license. That's a waiting period to make sure we don't back out of it (30 days?!). But if the waiting period was ten years...

I think it would work.

The Rain (It Never Stops)

And thank god for that. I love the rain. I think it's beautiful and oh so conductive for all sorts of indoor activities and the absolute BEST weather you can have if you happen to be sick.

Which I happen to be.

Yes, my weekend was spent with the family, all of us with our own sicknesses, Kim with a cold, Annabelle with an upset pooper and a cold and I've been nauseous and hot (temperature-wise) the whole time. I haven't had a fever, but I've been ungodly hot which is funny (kind of) because Kim is so cold. So last night I stayed in the bedroom with the fan on and the blanket off to try to cool down and she was out in the living room with the fan off and the blanket on to stay warm (also to avoid any germs that might lead to puking).

This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened though so I figured I'd let some people who have yet to experience the pleasure of a whole family sickness with you being a parent and not a kid, know some of the insights I've recently had.

1) And this is the most important one: I miss my family. I think if they were in the immediate vicinity that Kim and I could call them and ask them to please watch Annie because Kim and I just feel like crap. They'd probably do it too. I have a great family.

2) There's nothing wrong with completely avoiding a family member who happens to be sick. They need you to take care of them, not to be lying there next to them just as sick as they are. So sticking them in the bedroom and only coming in to refill water bottles and give cold gatorades and hot chicken noodle soup is not a bad thing. Leave the room as soon as possible.

3) If you haven't had kids yet or if you already have kids but haven't thought of this situation (because when you're healthy how often are you thinking about being sick?) do this: buy two sets of baby monitors. Or one set with two transmitters and one receiver. This weekend would have seen one in the baby's room while she was asleep being put to use but also one in the bedroom for me to ask for a water bottle or something instead of either going out there, exposing my love to the horrible germs I have acquired, looking around for my water bottle getting said germs everywhere and then going back to the bedroom without the bottle.

It was in the dishwasher.

So kudos to baby monitors.

And finally:

4) Being a parent of a child that is not even one year old (though close) and even being gone for about half of her time on Earth, I have been sick more often than in the last, let's say two years combined. So take my advice and stock up on drugs. Also, it's important to try to maintain sympathy. All those sicknesses will no doubt wear you thin after a while but it's the love of a parent that is a saving grace to the joys of being sick.

The iPhone (Shame On You, Apple)

I recently came into posession of an Apple iPhone. They're all the rage nowadays. I didn't want it as a phone though, I already have one of those and I like my phone. It's pretty compact and the bill isn't too high or at least, not as high as it is with the iPhone (too high if you ask me).

Anyway, my plan was to get it and use it as an iPod Touch that just so happened to have a camera. I thought it was such a logical leap that many people have thought of this. Apparently I was wrong though because searching through Google I found a whopping one other guy who wanted to do this and his question about whether it was possible or not was met with a lot of "just get an iPod Touch."

By the way, that's not the answer to the question. He didn't ask what he should buy, he asked if it was possible. You were of no help at all, people who responded.

Well, let me tell you what will happen if you try this:

First off, you need iTunes 7.7 or higher. I don't mind that at all though. I love iTunes. You download the newest player and then plug in your phone to computer via USB and get a message saying put in your AT&T phone number.

I'm a little ahead of myself. Before all this, when you turn on the phone you're greeted with a screen saying plug into iTunes and the only other thing you can do is access an emergency call screen. That's it.

Anyway, it asks for your phone number and doesn't give you te option of skipping this, of saying you don't want to use it as a phone, or of just having it open up like any other iPod in your devices column.

On a whim, I took out the sim card from my phone, put it into the iPhone, hooked it back up to iTunes and it recognized the card, pulled my number and my plan and said that, while my voice plan is fine, I need to up the plan to cover the perks of the phone with unlimited data so I can have digital voicemail and all that stuff.

But I don't want to.

It wouldn't let me progress though. It was either sign up for this extra fee and move onto the next stage or don't and stop.

So I stopped. If there's one thing I hate more than cell phone companies, it's their common rule that any change to the contract extends the contract another two years without any perks or bonuses. That's bad business to me.

Anyway, I thought that surely there were more people out there like me and found that there really wasn't. I called AT&T and asked them about it and someone said that you CAN use it as an iPod, "just plug it into the computer." The fact that they thought this escaped me is pretty insulting, but once I told them what was going on, they said that sucks and there's no way around it that they know of, and that I would have to sign up for a data plan that lasts two years. I asked if maybe I could sign up and register my iPhone, just until I synched up and pulled my music onto it and then cancelled using it, swapping my sim card back to my old phone and use that instead with little cange to my bill. Nope. Two years minimum.

Shucks.

So I called Apple. They said there's no way around this.

Look, I understand it's a phone, that this is its main feature, but if there was a way to get around this I think that Apple would sell even more just because it has a camera and the OPTION of using it as a phone. I could see good sales indeed.

But instead, I'm getting a refund from the kind seller I bought it from and I'll just go with an iPod Touch whenever I can save the scratch. Th 32gb model has enough space for all of my music and I can just put photos on it via USB instead of an onboard camera. No big deal.

But really, Apple, I would have thought that YOU would have thought this through a little more.

My Thoughts On Fuzz

In my ideal setup I would only have one amp. The base of any good amp is its clean sound and if it sounds good really clean then it stands to reason that if you start adding to it, it would still retain some sound that's pleasant (hopefully).

Enter gain.

I enjoy almost any genre of music but as far as guitar playing goes, there's basically four stages I like to play in: no gain at all with a very jazzy clean sound, some gain but not a ridiculous amount like what you hear in most rockabilly or Texas blues, punk-ish gain where there's a higher level of treble and a more buzzsw-ey tone best displayed by my favorite punk band Alkaline Trio and then metal. I wouldn't say that Slipknot is what jumps to mind when I think of good metal tone though they're one of my favorite metal bands (an odd one that group because when you start peeling away its nine members I don't like them nearly as much, the guitar tone isn't something to die over, the personalities aren't very fetching, but when t's all together I like it. A lot.). No, if I were to have to come up with a good example of a metal tone I'd have to say... I don't know. So many bands tune down further than I would or their tone isn't really that great and the attitude is there to make up for it.

Jeez. I didn't plan on something so hard coming into this while I'm writing this blog. Most of this was well thought out beforehand.

Hmmmm. OK. If pressed, as I am right now, I'd say that the guitar tone on Marilyn Manson's Anti-Christ Superstar album was pretty great. The Beautiful People in particular had a good tone.

Anyhoo, my attitude toward pedals: I don't look at fuzz boxes as shades of the same basic tone. Transparency isn't really a big thing for me because when you boil it down I like pedals to act more like pre amps than pedals as most people think of them. I'd rather have one amp, a punk-ish sounding pedal acting as a pre amp (the Seymour Duncan Twin Tube Classic does a pretty great job of this), a metal sounding box (the Duncan Twin Tube Mayhem would no doubt satisfy, I mean, just watch the video on their web site!), and a regular TS9 copy like my Digitech Bad Monkey (the only pedal overdrive box that would be treated as a pedal in my arsenal). With those three, I'd be able to have my four stages of gain, footswitchable at my whim to cover any particular genre with little worry and no knob turning.

This is different than the usual attitude of trying to make your amp sound better. The amp I want will no doubt sound great as-is with no help needed. Can you see how my attitude's a bit different? I think it is. I want an amp in a box to satisfy my desires for drastically different tones without having to lug around four different amps.

Anyhoo, that's my attitude toward it.

Fuzz

I've gone on about this movie on my Myspace blog but I want to talk some more about it. I deliberately kept it in my laptop when I deployed. I had watched it three times before I left. I did not bring my laptop with me this time on my deployment though since weight might have been an issue and I thought it better safe than sorry. I had also heard that there was wireless and my laptop does not have a wireless card AND it's a bear, constantly giving me grief when asked to do the simplest of actions. So I left it here at home with the Fuzz DVD in the drive.

Well, I'm back now (obivously) and I watched it again today and I'll say that usually with documentaries it's easy to digest and move on, digest and move on but for one reason or another, this one entertains me to no end. I aim to buy it sooner or later. I don't want to keep it and have my Netflix potential drop to two at a time.

I recommend any guitarist at least renting this documentary. Especially if you are at all interested in stomp boxes.

It brings up quite an urge to dive into pedals, but with pedals, that's an itch I doubt yu can scratch completely what with new ones coming out all the time. I'll write more about this later though. I need to do some research before I go into my opinion on what my setup would be at this point in time though I think it'll be a smidge unique in the world of pedals, not for use, but for attitude toward them.

One More Thing Before I Go...

The time zone for my blog is Arizona, because Arizona is home. Growing up, I've lived all over the world and none of the places I was fortunate enough to live ever really felt home. When my wife and I packed up and said goodbye to college and drove all the way across the US to AZ, we were doing something radical and what a great thing it turned out to be. I had never been out to the deserts of the US and even though I didn't like them when I was there, I do now. I think it was the situations surrounding our change in location that made me have a permanent case of homesickness (or as much of a home as I had ever had) and it was because of this that I failed to see just how awesome Arizona is.

No more. I realize the greatness of such a place and would love to live there, given the opportunity. The city is big enough, everything you need is there, the people are nice but not so nice you pause to question motives, family and friends are there and it will always be the place that my wife and I first attempted to make our home. College was great, but we did not have our own place, and college is such a temporary lifestyle anyway. When we lived in AZ we didn't know how long we were going to be there so we tried to make the most out of it.

To this day some of my best memories come from there.

A Hearty Recommendation

I recently came back from abroad and while out I had the opportunity to watch some great movies and TV shows and the standout was Flight of the Conchords. What an amazing show.

It's about two New Zealanders who decide to go to New York to make it big. Hilarity ensues.

I'd love to go into details about why the show is awesome but part of what made it so great to me is the shock that came from everything about it. Don't get me wrong, if I had known what was coming it still would have been an awesome show, but not knowing made the first time I saw it even funnier. It's not that expensive either (which is good because you'll probably want to buy the album too). I can't recommend it enough.

...So That Others May Read - Post One!

Greetings everyone! This is my first attempt at a real blog on a real blog site instead of the usual and much-used Myspace blog.

I feel very excited and at the same time kind of full of it, like I'm trying to be a bit more than I could ever hope to be.

Anyway, I plan on publishing a real blog right after this. This is more of a test post and as good of a place to explain the title of the blog. The green feet, the TACPs of the Air Force, the Special Forces of my branch have a saying that goes "so that others may live." I don't have such high hopes for myself, but am a missionary of the word. Not "the" Word in the Biblical sense but the written word, books, newspapers, blogs, things of that nature. Words have power and I'm just out to 1) encourage others to get into it if they want and 2) throw my own drivel into the pot.

So, if you like, check this out and I'd like to say thanks for giving it a chance thus far.

-Russ