My brother-in-law had requested all the photos we had taken at the wedding we attended last weekend and I was glad to oblige him. Seeing how the combination of photos and videos were almost 500 megabytes of data, I fired up my trust browser and navigated to yousendit.com only to find out they've bamboozled me. I had come to love and use the yousendit since anytime I needed to send a file attachment out that is larger than 10 megabytes and smaller than one gigabyte. It was the best go-to solution. But now, they've suddenly scaled their ceiling back from one gig to just a hundred megabytes! So now, I have to pay for the use of something that was once free. I understand that when you start up a business, you have to sustain it by selling services, but they're pulling a classic textamerica.

Ok, so its not as bad as TA but I am annoyed that what I once got free, I only get a tenth free what I was once getting. I'm hoping box.net can come to the rescue.

Update: Box.net isn't much better, I keep getting errors thrown using their drag and drop java tool. I've found http://www.mailbigfile.com/ and hope that it will be a stop-gap solution. Seeing how they used to offer 1 gigabyte uploads before and now have scaled back to 512MB emails, I'm not counting for them to keep the ceiling that high for long either. At least they haven't completely punked out like yousendit.com.

I switched the template and gave my site a redesign. Ok, basically its still laid out the same but it looks different. We just got back from a mini-vacation and I'm ready for another one. I'm not dreading coming to work, but I'm starting to contemplate whether this is the best way to spend my time by sitting at a desk trying to figure what the hell I'm doing here.

I keep having flashes of this scene from the movie Chasing Amy and how one of the characters gets into this huge argument about his station in life. I never had a clear vision of my station in life, and well, if you don't stand up make your own choices, someone in life makes that choice for you. I guess I'm learning that the hard way. My parents always extolled the virtues of having a solid/safe job to fall back on. But what do you do when you are sick of the fallback job? I have to preface that I am not vomiting up bile because I have to come to work everyday and get paid a nice salary to do a pretty dull and yet not too complex job. No, that would be a spoiled thing to say, but I guess I'm saying after working 8+ years in a job that I never really intended to keep in the first place, I have to ask myself, what the hell am I doing? I keep telling myself that I need to re-evaluate things, but really, its difficult to be creative when you've been told what to do all your life. This is my current and ongoing personal obstacle among many others that I'm not sure how to deal with.

What a difference an hour makes. We're on CST right now after wading through that was a mess yesterday at the airport. Apparently this was only the case in Reagan National Airport. My sister in law apparently took about 2 whole minutes to get through DFW's security on the way to her vacation in Mexico. I got to see her about 2 whole minutes in the terminal while we were swapping stories and to pick up the car to get out of DFW.

Our story to get through DCA was not as nice and clean. We got up at 6:30am to Alison Starling and her serious news anchor voice of breaking news. Stupid UK bomb plot made us repack, and also leave an extra 30 minutes early to the airport. Once we got there, it was like being at the DMV all over again. There's that line in Seinfeld about 98% of the people out in the world being un-datable, he's right. And the other 98%? They're complete retards as well. I'm usually tolerant of situations like that but I guess combined with waking up early, TSA screaming at us every 2 minutes while we waited in snaking lines, it all just got to me. On top of which some really pot-bellied tall guy was crowding me at the bagel stand after we got through an hour or so waiting in security and he kept brushing his fat tummy up against my arm.

I was glad once we got to Texas. No more mass hysteria, no crowded masses.

When you're still tied to Eastern Standard Time, and you wake up in Central Time, its kinda refreshing. I don't feel like a slacker waking up at 7:30am EST thinking I missed work, because really, its still damn early here! Too bad its only a temporary thing and if I stayed here for more than a week, everything gets reset and I'm back to square one. I guess I'll have to just enjoy my temporary newfound lease on life for the next few days.

There's an article in the post today about them trying to quantify the Super Mario phenomenon. It makes me realize that I've been playing those games since I was 13 and well, Mario has been there for a big chunk of my life. He's sorta like Mickey Mouse where he never ages, he never changes. Basically the opposite of what the buddhist mantra is: "The only permanence in the world is impermanence."

I've been thinking about this on and off the past year or so, about how easily I bought into our cultural institutions. Its sorta like going to a diner and finding your necessary ketchup/catsup, salt & pepper shakers, and your 3 or 4 varieties of sweetners on the table. Its there, it should always be there. Lately there's thought of the production of all said condiments coming from multiple factories to the delivery men and the waiters/waitresses that have to set it all up. There's a lot of unseen effort to keep that idea alive. An idea I guess I've always sorta taken for granted. And if there isn't any Equal or Splenda at the table, I'm like WTF? Where's my quasi-sugar?

Speaking of which, there's a lot of change going on this past week that has gone undetected on my radar. We had decided to take a walk around the Columbia Heights neighborhood (detailed in the wife's blog) and I can see how some of the longtime residents are resistant to the idea of change. After all, change might be good to some, but not to those with low property taxes, low rent bills, or someone that had a nice view of the blue sky only to have it blocked off by a hulking big box department store in the works. I for one am not one of them when it comes to city living but I am like that with my job at the moment.

I'm being forced to learn a lot of new things on the job lately, more so at a rapid rate and its requiring me to adjust and change a lot mentally. To the point that I'm being very resistant to it and I'm questioning why I am being resistant towards it? Maybe that's my sub-conscious self telling me either a) I'm a lazy son of a bitch or b) its time for a career re-evalutaion with possible plans for a shift. Either way, I guess I'm going to have to face the change with both eyes open.

Read More on Mario

So I didn't do a fancy schmancy job of ipodding our civic, but after reading these instructions, I was able to hook our car up to have an auxillary audio jack. It took 2 trips to RadioShack this morning and a few tools but its done. So now, any ipod or mp3 player can be used to blast tunes through our car speaker system. I actually hooked up my walkman sony ericsson cellphone for the maiden test and it sounded sweet! It only took about 30 minutes to do too, so even better. I feel so elite.

Listening to WAMU in the mornings, I usually enjoy the NPR created content alongside WAMU's news reporting except one thing that really gets on my nerves. The smooth jazz. Don't get me wrong, I love the hot jazz from the 20s and 30s but if I wanted to listen to smooth jazz, I'd switch to 105.9. Everytime Bill Redlin segues into traffic reports with Joyce Nielson (another gripe of mine I'll get to later) or back into NPR content, there's the smooth jazz. Its the horrible type of smooth jazz that you only hear on the muzak systems when you're in the waiting rooms of most dental offices. Just before you get a bunch of really sharp instruments poking into your gums and flesh. So please WAMU, no more cheesy musical segues.

Speaking of WAMU related topics, I also find it a bit annoying that they're trying to push their traffic person onto us like she's going to be the next Lisa Baden. There can be only one! To top it off, Joyce Nielson is not as bubbly as Ms. Baden. I'm not saying she's a bad traffic announcer but don't try to hype something she's not. Ok, we get it, she's going to be doing the traffic everyday. Yes, we can count on her to deliver the traffic like back in the good old days of Walt Starling on WTOP, but we don't have to get so overly excited about it. I kinda miss Gerry whatshisname from NBC4 on WAMU because the way he signed off always made my wife think he was calling himself a geriatric.

Back in 2003, I got an invite from a friend to join friendster. I joined and found the site while interesting, completely slow and unusable. Still, somehow, everyone I knew had joined and I thought it would be fun to see the six degrees of seperation. At the time Friendster was running at "beta" which meant most of their code sucked and their servers were running at molasses. By the time they figured out that they had to dump their horrible JSP written code for a more efficient PHP design, in the process firing one of their employees for saying the old code was crap, it was too late. Everyone had jump shipped to one of the Friendster clones. Most made the transition to myspace.

Now, I'm on myspace, poking around and I'm having deja vu all over again. Its like the internet got re-introduced again, but to all the non-tech savvy people. Before, you had to know HTML, figure out how to host your "home page" but now its all done for you. Its internet for dummies that lets them carve out a little chunk of the net to call, uh...my space. However, the site is CRAP! Its like a massive mobile trailer park. Meanwhile, friendster got their crap together and built out their neighborhood to be like a nice little fenced in suburban community, albeit a deserted one.

There was one big difference between Friendster and MySpace. Rupert Murdoch. He paid 580 million bucks to buy MySpace and now MySpace is ranked in the same league as Yahoo and Google when it comes to net traffic. And yet, their code is horrible. I get an error page 25% of the time I do something on the site. And their server load-balancing is also horrible. It takes 20 seconds to minutes (eternity in net time) to load a page on a broadband connection. I heard rumblings months ago about how they were migrating the site code to something like ASP.NET.

And yet, it still sucks. I wonder who will eventually overtake myspace? Or maybe its here to stay since it has so much "old media" money backing it. Some had said that they're basically trying to set myspace up to be the new MTV of the net generation. Seeing how we're in the middle of Internet Bubble 2.0, I guess we'll have to wait and see. And I'll have to suffer through using myspace if I want to keep in touch with most people that have decided to set up home there.

Photos from 5 years ago. Circa July 2001 to September 2001.

Its amazing. I am going through some of my photos from 5 years ago and so much has changed. Not just externally and but internally. I was talking to an old net-geek friend about how we've both become different people than who we were. I think back when I was 26 and I was amazed how unhappy I was. I was searching the ground for something that was never going to be found. It makes me think of some obscure Electronic song lyrics:

"It happens all the time
but not when you're around
why do some people shine
while others search the ground
it's like walking in the snow
it's happening right now
it's got to be somehow"

I would have to think that it was at the height of my realization that I wasn't happy with my life. I had spent probably a good portion of my 20's agonizing over why shit wasn't popping off like it should. (I know I know, I've been listening to too much Kanye West lately.) But things weren't popping off like they should, but I was walking around with a huge heap of entitlement issues. Why wasn't I living the life that I was destined for? It sounds so much like horseshit now, but I realized slowly the only person I could blame myself. Had someone asked me 5 years ago what my 5 year plan was, I would've shrugged and said, "I dunno." But at the same token, I knew I didn't want to keep feeling like complete crap anymore and blaming others for my existence. Not my parents, not other people that let me down. Its funny that my talks with Ms. Lady D have sorta put that in perspective because she's right. I'm not a passive participant in the game called MY life. I shouldn't have been looking at the ground, at others, or even around. I should've been looking within and proactively asking why am I hurting? After all, its MY life, so its up to ME to adjust accordingly. Of course to do that would mean owning up to things. Taking responsibility.

Its funny because the word "responsibility" to me used to only mean one thing: homework. It meant you did your homework, and if anyone that knows me or has kept up with my writings will know that I hate homework. Of course, responsibility now means something completely different. It means ownership, it means its up to you to continue digging up or down in your life and knowing full well you're the one holding the shovel.

I think that epiphany for me didn't happen til I turned 26, and even then, probably a year after for it to sink in and for me to take some control of my situation and move beyond that. And I'm still moving beyond it, and while I can still see it in the rearview mirror, its slowly getting smaller. Life didn't turn out how what I thought I was entitled too, and for that I'm grateful. Otherwise, how would I ever have learned to appreciate the life that I have now? Who knows, maybe I am still blindly fumbling in the dark, but hopefully I'm a little less blind than I was 5 years ago. I hope I am.