Steve Gets A Life

cocoa

so ive been dabbling in cocoa and objective-c for a little while now, what with all these macs everywhere. ive been reading some tutorials online, checking out the API every once in a while, but never really got much out of it. the tutorials were all too simple (ok, i can make a currency converter, now what?) and the APIs are a bit much yet.

of course, "get a book" you say. well i had been looking for a while for something really current. something that used XCode and Panther, and i recently found it. the latest edition of Aaron Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X is just what i've been looking for (at least i hope).

south park steve

kinda fun for about 5 minutes.

this is supposed to be me on south park. ... a show i haven't seen since freshman year.

web work

ive been working on a website for a guy in town. its a total ripoff of a dreamweaver template, but hey. check it out.

the site is for a book he wrote and the speaking tour he will be doing based on it. im just glad to be able to do a job on the side, and i get to play with dreamweaver templates and contribute. very cool tools for this kind of work.

what a loser

i haven't been blogging too much since i got back from vacation it seems. i wonder why. i think i've just been so busy getting the new place together and moving into a new office and all that, that i just don't have any pearls of wisdom (or pointless entries) that i think are worth sharing with everyone.

i also have been lagging in terms of researching all this stuff. i've seen a few more things about the new technologies out there, there's just so many acronyms i can handle at a time. OPML, FOAF, whatever. i think it would be pretty neat to work with that stuff, but i don't think there are a lot of people hiring new grads to think about social computing at the moment. who knows. all i know is that google sure isn't hiring me. jerks.

keep on runnin

andria and i have run two mornings in a row now. slightly on the way to constancy. that makes two weeks of pseudo-training for me and it feels pretty good. for some reason, i decided that not only should i run, but I'm also going to do pushups and pull-ups. so far i really suck. in fact, i can barely do ten pull-ups and no more than 25 pushups at a time. what a loser.

in order to motivate myself, i had andria cut my hair really short (armstrong-length) and stepped back into my triathlete shoes and buzzed my legs. thats right, im baldy-legs again. maybe its dumb, but it reminds me to go work out, or else i feel like an idiot who shaved his legs for nothing. that and when i put on my bike shorts i dont have leghairs poking out all over the place, which is good.

i actually have a picture of me with one shaved leg (pretty funny looking) so ill try to post it up here when i get home.

latest runs:

• santa rosa -> foothill -> train tracks -> home
• santa rosa -> foothill -> poly track (sprints, pull-ups, pushups) -> train tracks -> home
• santa rosa -> foothill -> poly -> "bleachers" at the football stadium -> train tracks -> home

i'm going to try to keep track with my HRM and look for improvement over these courses over the next few weeks. in case you were wondering.

daily run

i've been trying to get back into the routine of running every day. i started last week and got maybe 3/5 days in. this week is looking about the same. not bad for coming off a yearlong break from regular training.

i'm developing a "regular" run to go on in the morning, and tracking it with my hrm. hopefully i can see some improvement, maybe even discover why i feel faster on some days than others. should be interesting.

in case you care, here is what i did this morning (the latest revision of the monrning run):

1. Mill to Santa Rosa
2. Santa Rosa to Foothill (towards poly)
3. Foothill onto campus, to track
   • one lap easy/normal pace
   • pullups, pushups
   • one lap normal
   • pullups, pushups
   • one lap fast
4. back home via the train tracks

it took about 45 minutes this morning. run felt fine, pullups sucked (only could do 20 total). pushups did also (only did about 40), but didn't try as hard on those. really need to work on upper-body strength.

bowling for terrorists

saw "Fahrenheit 911" at the Palm theatre in SLO last night.

aside: by the way, that's a pretty cool theatre. they sell hot tea for $1 and it is very small with a cool, mellow atmosphere.

it was pretty damn interesting. very one-sided, and i'd like to see a rebuttal made with the same amount of impact as that one. not to say that impact equals truth, but the topics brought forward with the movie were pretty serious, if anything is false, i'd really like to see a serious counter-argument, not just Condi Rice saying "its not true."

so where does one go to find some actual thoughtful commentary on things like this? googling for "Fahrenheit 911 commentary" is useless, i wouldn't want to go to the filmmaker or distribution companies websites if i wanted an impartial discussion. there are thousands of movie comment boards, but it would be nice to have a place that has well-thought, well-written, highly-regarded commentary on things like this. hm. i smell opportunity. or maybe its just the napalm in the air.

anyways, the whole "bush is bad" thing got a little tedious. we get it, mike, you don't like the guy. now get back to the research you've done. i was impressed by the documents he showed (the uncensored military record, for example) and the connections he made between oil companies, Saudis, Cheney, etc. I had heard that there were all of these connections out there, but this was a good way to put them all together in one place.

it was a very well made documentary i think, in a cinematic sense. i mean, the cuts were great, a lot of juxtaposition of greed and poverty, clips of repeated mantras by the government, etc. the scenes of families with members in Iraq were tough, emotional scenes. many in the audience were crying several times throughout the film. the interviews with soldiers were also very good but he could have emphasized the change in spirit of the troops after the whole "mission accomplished" day. initially troops were talking about how they were there to kick some butt and liberate, but by the end, nobody wanted to be there, people were dying, it was real war with no real cause. you saw that transition in the film, but it wasn't really vocalized or shown explicitly.

its stuff like this that makes me want to go into politics. not that i actually do, but i just wish i could make a difference. the scene with a retired Senator (or was he a Federal Judge?) that said "you don't think we read any of the bills we pass, do you?" was pretty scary. helped you understand how easily things like PATRIOT can be passed in the right context, with the right lubrication. bad things happen this way. dictatorships are not always won by military coups in 3rd world countries. Hitler essentially rose to power legitimately (maybe not entirely true, not sure). my point is, the lawmakers are people. they get scared too. they make bad decisions that we all have to deal with. when a group is in control, all their actions are so that they remain in control. put these together and you get a government intimidating its lawmakers (not to mention its people) into accepting rash decisions (eg iraq) that would (and should) normally take plenty of debate and thought. i hate that.

the worst part? when all that "war on terror" was going on (well, it still is), and the idea of invading Iraq was first starting to seem real, did you question it? did you think "why are we doing this?" sure you did. but then did you say "well, they must know what they're doing." kinda takes faith out of government when it turns out so bad, when odd coincidences about who profits, etc turn up later. makes you think. makes you want change.