Beyond good and evil

This LJ is now defunct. If you want to keep tabs on Alex, you can view his blog.

If you want him to be able to see your friend's only posts, you will need to add him.

If you don't want to have yet another website to check up on, you can subscribe to his blogfeed. But truly, Makesitgood.net is slowly gaining a bunch of other cool feeds to look at, so that might be worth visiting now and then.

Go Here

Add as friend! It's me! This is one of the last steps of phasing out my lj.

I'm not going to be updating this journal anymore, however I will still be blogging.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/bgae/

bgae will be my syndicated feed here for your friends lists, so add it!

Bands I need to investigate or check out their newer releases:

30 seconds to mars
Earshot
Feeder
Flyleaf
Masterplan
Trust Company

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This was my quote of the day on google:

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. - Nikola Tesla

I think that's horribly apt. Also, I think it should be applied to more than just scientists. Deep and insane thinking is wonderful for those in the expressive arts: Performance, Music, Literature, etc. I wish we could keep it more out of everyday life, politics, business, and so on and so forth.

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I went through the model home of our floorplan and made a virtual tour. Just a bunch of photos of each room with descriptions. Also floorplan and elevation style.

Take the tour!

Obviously that's fully decorated and painted, so ours won't be near the same, but we did pick the same cabinets for the kitchen and bathrooms. Our countertops are a subtle grey green, and we have a matching accent tile on the kitchen backsplash. We have a laminant that looks like old worn tile/stone for the kitchen area as well. Our walls will start out as "coconut white," but we plan on painting a few accent walls.

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1411 now, but check out the back fence for free.99!

Google Earth Mark



( more pictures where this is )

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Our new street number is 1221.

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I'm 30 minutes early for the christmas and hannukah crowds.

I put up some photos from the holiday parties. Here are a couple highlights:



And who could forget the reality-bending rendition of Linkin Park's Crawling?

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Good party Kent (the_mfk_legend,) thanks again for the invite and hospitality! I think that was only the second time I've done karaoke without being smashed. I think fully half of the kickass-cool-OAers were there, and none of the obnoxious ones which is quite a feat. That alone is a recipe for goodness. It was good seeing everyone, and putting a couple faces with names. It was nice sighting Asuka out of captivity. It was even fun losing my DS, house, and wife to </lj>stewart213 because of my lack of pool skills.

Work should be pretty calm today. I might be able to get some stuff done and shelved that has been on my plate so long it's gotten cold. I'm looking forward to a relaxing weekend. Only one more week till we flap our arms to Dallas to spend the start of 2006 with </lj>pumpkinchick's parents, hooray for that.</lj>

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At what point does persuasion begin?

If you were to write a story (or lj post, forum post, etc...) explaining some of your viewpoints, what is the point at which the line between explanation and persuasion is crossed? Is there a difference? When writing to an audience your goal is to communicate your ideas to them effectively so that they understand your points, your meanings. Whether you're writing a report or creative fiction piece it still holds true.

So is every form of communication an act of persuasion on some level? Certainly, no matter what we say to one another, the goal is to have the other person hear you, believe you, understand you. You want to affect some change in the person you're communicating with, however trivial it may be. Perhaps the only change you wish to cause is conveying some information but how different is that really?

Say you're walking down the road and say hello to someone you pass. You may not want to have a conversation with them, but you either want them to acknowledge your presence or you want them to know that you have acknowledged theirs.

Where does it seperate?

Have you ever discussed something and had someone accuse you of trying to make them look stupid when you were simply stating your viewpoint? I find that hilarious.

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What happened to the news? These are two headlines from CNN today.

Wintry mix of misery across east.
Ice is 'greatest nemesis'

These are the TOP headlines on the site. I guess on one hand I should be thankful that nothing dire is going on to trump these silly headlines, but am I the only one that finds this ridiculous? I mean, I know there's lots more interesting and important things going on than the first major snowstorms of the year. Why do we need to dramatize weather patterns that happen every year to be the most oustanding news item on a national news service? I understand they want attention, they want ratings, they want more readers, but I fail to see how this gets them anything except maybe ignored.

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Bumblebee Tuna!

This is the end of my first week back to work after vacation. It's been a doozy. Very hectic, yesterday was the first day I left before 6pm, and I've been coming in earlier than normal as well. The good side of it is that we MET all of our deadlines, and from here out it's just minor fixes and changes for a bit while we plan the next evolution of our products. That should be the fun part, actually planning and implementing new functionality, and cleaning up some of the ancient stuff. We're aiming at mid to late January for begining the transfer of our stuff to the latest runtimes and such.

We have a little bit of christmas shopping left to do, and then need to wrap and ship everything out. No big plans for Christmas here, but it should be a nice chill weekend. The big stuff comes the week later. We fly out new years eve to Dallas to spend time with Leah's parents. This is always a blast as we know how to party, and are great friends. We'll be taking some of that week to drive around and look at houses in the area I'm sure.

On the photo front, I printed my first 11x14" the other day and it's sharp as a tack. My technique and workflow seems to have improved a great deal. I need to decide on a few images so I can give some 16x20" and 20x30" prints a try. Once I'm satisfied with the post process on a few I'll be putting my photography website live which will allow you (or anyone) to order prints directly and automagically of my best non-commercial stuff. Then as freetime opens up I'll be using the site as a portfolio and marketing point for photo work.

Oh and kanmude gets back today! Not really looking forward to unloading her stuff, but oh well it'll be nice to hang out with her again. Plus, we can all frolic in animal crossing ds.

</lj>

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Well that was a fun week. We were extremely lazy, did touristy things a couple days, and hung out with our good friend Adam "Jop" Foley who we hadn't seen for over a year.

We went to Miami Metro Zoo one day and took many pictures. Leah didn't kill us for being camera crazy, so I consider it a success.



I'm very happy with some of my results. For some reason this shot reaches out to me, poor Gorilla. I'm thinking of working it a bit in photoshop and getting a large print. Any of you graphicy people out there have suggestions for a large print?

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Just thought I'd send out a happy birthday to Brian. Hope it's a good one, bro.

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I'm not saying my Nintendo friend ID is 107434109616, but I'm not saying it's not either. Who could say really? I mean that sequence of numbers I randomly keyed in there MIGHT JUST BE the same as the one my DS uses to identify itself on Nintendo's global network. It's an interesting point to ponder.

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I've imported all of my previous LJ entries into my new blog. I need to go through and clean some markup out, the html imported as text so it's not rendering all of them right.

I also need to go through and categorize entries. Maybe once I get to a breaking point today at work. I also need to find if there's a way to import comments. If not, no biggie they're on the LJ anyway.

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So I left home a bit early this morning, intending to get in to the office in time to start the coffee. If I don't do it someone else will. The coffee maker is finicky and I've just about figured out how to coerce it into giving a decent cup, but I digress.

Anyway, I was coming in this morning, a bit early. I found heavy traffic about a mile away from my apartment. (This is a 3 mile drive from the apartment to work.) Crap. There must be an accident. Luckily I've recently aquired XM (thanks Gatzu,) so I wasn't bored. There were some good comedy routines on. Little did I know there was another one playing out a few hundred yards in front of me.

I finally got up to the blockage. A blinking yellow traffic light. What you say? That shouldn't cause a blockage? Oh-ho, but this is South Florida. Flashing yellow apparently means 4 way stop in this wonderland. I find it amazing that a group of people that collectively run at LEAST 4 redlights a day right in front of my eyes take the time to come to a full stop at a traffic light which means "slow / caution." It's even more amazing considering this specific light is for two apartment complexes meaning that the cross traffic is something like 0.05%.

I was there 10 minutes in view of the intersection. There wasn't a single auto trying to cross the flow (or lack thereof.) I got up to the light and did not stop.

What's with ignorance/disregard to traffic laws? It's not like there's many, or they're difficult. I mean, I don't care if you're speeding as long as you're not a maniac. Most of the traffic rules are there to keep things moving smoothly as well as keep people from killing each other. I suppose I shouldn't be too annoyed, the cops in the area don't follow traffic laws either.

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Since the only features I really like about LJ is the friends list aggregation I'm seeing if I can't make a plugin or something to work with that. I'll let you know how it goes.

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Time is considering naming Katrina "Person of the Year."
GQ has named Jennifer Aniston "Man of the Year."

Next Up:

Siamese cat wins Westminster Kennel Club's Dog Show.
Minority scholarships for caucasian children in South Florida.... actually that one might actually happen soon.