uvageek

So on a whim, I took the advice of my brother and picked up a copy of the The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris from audible.com and listened to it over the holidays while at the gym, listening to each chapter once (or twice sometimes if I inadvertantly set it to repeat the track) and decided that I wanted to get a little more out of it, so I ordered a copy off of Amazon.com and thought, "let’s start putting this into action" or at least start letting it affect the way that I work and the way that I live.

The first chapter, definitely an interesting read, though nothing really lept out at me, springing off the page and making me go, "Whoa, how true it is."

It did catch my eye however when Ferris was discussing the difference between the Defferers (D) and the New Rich (NR), specifically on page 23 where he states the following:

D:  To have freedom from doing that which you dislike.
NR:  To have freedom from doing that which you dislike, but also the freedom and resolve to pursue your dreams without reverting to work for work’s sake.

This hits me squarely in the chest, primarily the "working for work’s sake."  Stop and think for a minute, and I’m not saying that you should cut corners and leave your jobs or do anything drastic that could get you fired, but what is your passion?  What is it that drives you?  What motivates you to work hard?  For me, I would definitely say that I work to the best of my ability to support others to make better decisions.

Though I cannot say that I am a member of the NR yet, I do seek (and dream) to get to that way of life here soon.  I want to be able to have 90% of my time working from my home office or St. Louis Bread Company or local coffee shop whereever I’m off adventurering rather than in the corporate workplace, constantly being pulled aside to assist with tasks that don’t provide benefit to me.

So what’s that mean?  Right now as I continue to parse through these interesting notes, it’s time to replace assumptions of life - people seem to say things to scare us off from adventuring, time to break down those relics and illusions.

Auckland City Sunset

Wow. I don’t think that words can really express the feeling when I see this. Needless to say, we don’t get these anything like this here in DC.

John Mayer - Continuum - Bold As Love 

Sydney Harbour NYE 2007-2008

Happy New Year everybody - I’ve gotta say that this picture and many others from good ole Sydney are simply spectacular. As much as I hate flying, I think I might spend my 29th NYE there next year. Might.

Mae - The Everglow - Someone Else’s Arms

IMG_0104

Originally uploaded by uvageek

So the Northern Virginia area has been dealing with “interesting” weather in that we ended up with some blistering cold temps this week and are looking forward to mild days in the 50’s and 60’s this coming week. Nonetheless, it snowed on Wednesday, Dec 5 and ended up causing havoc on the roadways (not that they were treacherous but more along the lines that commuters decided that 5 mph was the speed they wanted to drive). By Dec 7 when this photo was taken, there was still snow on the parking garage parallel to the office building in which I have an office. Quite cute to see someone’s idea of a message to the rest of the folks on the north side of the building.

Has anyone had issues where you’re attempting to upload files through an  HTTP interface web method of sorts while at Panera bread and hit a package limit of 500 kilobytes?  Just curious as I’m attempting to upload a few pictures to Flickr.com through their web site and hitting a size limit - pretty sure it’s not Panera.

I’m curious if there’s a size limit which Panera has their wireless routers set to limit the size of files that are able to be transferred via HTTP based web methods.  Anyone else run across this?

So I admit, I do randomly surf the Internet from time to time, finding odd and interesting little articles here and there… so one that caught my attention… "9 Signs You Might Be An @$$hole".  Interestingly funny in some respects.  I personally like the absurdity of the last sign

So honestly, I’m not the biggest fan of movies with gore, or anything like that but, wow, what a movie.  300 definitely inspires something deep in the heart of patriotism and nationalism that is hard to brush aside.  If you were a fan of Braveheart, I would highly recommend this film - though be warned that it takes graphic nature of slaughter to a new level.

Sonicflood - Sonicflood - Carried Away

So I have to say that these guys got some mad skills in their video editing and I’m sure that they used a Mac to produce the video, but I was somewhat disheartened by the ending. Check it out for a good chuckle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHueWwdIR7k

Derek Webb - Mockingbird - Please, Before I Go

So the first thing that I think of when reading through the Google Operating System last night and came across this article regarding the storage capacity of gMail and how it’s going to go to Hotmail’s limit of 5 GB and add 1 GB on top of it.  Google eloquently termed this "Infinity + 1" back in the day.  I like to think of it more along the "These go to 11" terminology.  So they link back to the official gmail blog article regarding the increase in storage.  Holy moly!  Overnight I went from about 2.9 GB to 3.3 GB - wow.  And what’s better, my Google Apps e-mail account now has a whopping 25 GB of e-mail storage :)  This made me smile though:

and chuckle a little bit thinking to myself, "Dang, that’s sweet."

Emerson, Lake & Palmer - The Best of Emerson, Lake & Palmer - C’est la Vie

So if you took high school chemistry at some point in your high school education (I can’t pull myself to say career because high school isn’t a career, you don’t have a salary… you can’t get fired… there 401k plans…) you probably remember playing with the bunsen burner and lighting yourself on fire.  Okay, so maybe you didn’t light yourself on fire like I did (just singed the hair on my fingers) but you probably did learn about blue flames.

So what does that have to do with this post?  Absolutely nothing.

Found a pretty cool article about how on days when there’s a lot of dirt and dust in the atmosphere over in Egypt the shifting of the color of the horizon turns to blue causing the color of Sol to change into a bright blue flame, similar to that of the bunsen burner.

Check it out… I’m thinking I might just go out there for kicks to see it in person.

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/gen/page2237.html?theme=light

Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny - Beyond The Missouri Sky - Our Spanish Love Song