Motivation.

Yes, I haven't done the goals thing yet. A big part of that was not hitting them at all last week - including the Bible reading. Now I need to play some serious catchup, but at the same time I also would like to play catchup on my sleep. When it's 95 in the apartment during the afternoon, guess which one wins.

Knives, great things, and delays

Going to have to wait until Monday I think to go over the goals and stuff from last week... we are at the parents' house for Easter weekend.

Went and saw the Jesus the Christ pageant at the Mesa Arizona temple. It was awesome as usual (either the second or the third time I've seen it). Also as usual, there were protesters on Main St. I wonder what they were protesting? I wonder if they realize the irony that they are protesting a show that is taken completely from the Bible and proclaims the glory of the resurrected Savior. Also, I don't think Jesus went around with big signs telling people that they were going to be damned.

Another thing... this whole "greatest thing since sliced bread" thing. What I want to know is, what was the greatest thing before sliced bread? And is that thing second best still, or have there been things greater than that which was greatest before sliced bread, but not as great as sliced bread? And what qualifies something as the greatest thing since sliced bread, anyway? Is there a list of that anywhere? You'd think the phrase could only be used once in someone's life as it is, because they will eventually find something greater than sliced bread, then the phrase will become "the greatest thing since", say, string cheese, or pay-at-the-pump fueling. Can I get an answer on this question?

Tired tonight, church early tomorrow. The Ten Commandments is on TV right now, I guess that's the closest they can come to showing an Easter-themed story (Passover) on TV without anyone freaking out. It's interesting how Easter stories, if told correctly, encompass two faiths. Maybe that's why there's not as much squawking about them as there is Christmas stories... Christmas only favors one religion (and all its many flavors), and has the word "Christ" in it. I suppose it could be worse... we could have things like TV specials for Administrative Professionals Day or some other "holiday" that Hallmark has invented for the sole purpose of selling greeting cards.

New finance method

Stumbled across a question on Ask Metafilter on how to avoid overdraft fees. One of the answers was to build up a reserve in your checking account by rounding: rounding up to the next dollar on withdrawls, and rounding down to the previous dollar on deposits. I was going to check how much money we would have accumulated for the year, but February and March were weird months for us financially. It was nice, however, to see that we would have accumulated $43 in January. That's pretty darn good -- figure $43 over 12 months is about $500, and who couldn't use that in the bank? Plus, if we get a high enough reserve, we could actually earn interest on that amount. I'd like that.

Probably going to switch over to the credit union for all of our finances once we move -- I've sold Michelle on the rounding thing, now all we need to do is get our finances in a more friendly, local place, and I feel really, really good about a CU for that.

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Goals, Week Ending 4/15/05

1. Read Ephesians 2 - 1 Thessalonians 5. These little bits, by the way, are about 20 pages in the LDS KJV Bible.


2. If you didn't guess "pack the bedroom", you haven't been paying attention closely enough. :-)


3. Try not to miss my old stereo receiver too much. I was thinking of ways we could run the computer through Michelle's stereo, and also be able to split speaker output between the "main" speakers, and a set of satellite speakers for outside or the enclosed patio (at the new house). Then I remembered, my old stereo receiver did all of that. SAD FACE.

Not a lot this week; it's Easter weekend and we are going to be going up to Mom and Dick's on Friday afternoon.

Week in Review, 4/8/05

1. Read the Bible. Probably the longest it's ever taken me to do it, since I technically finished it this morning, which is outside of the goal period. But, I did complete the goal.


2. I packed a bunch of stuff in the kitchen, only to find out that Michelle needed some stuff for this weekend. Who knew?


3. We did find the moving checklist, however, Michelle has hidden it on a website to where I have forgotten the password.


4. Stuff in bedroom still needs to be packed.


5. Never did figure out what that fifth item was...

In addition to all this, the music listening project is almost completed... I have listened to or either have on reserve all the CDs from the top 100 of the list, putting me at or near the 20% mark. (I need to be at 33% to finish by the end of the year.) I am getting more aggressive, although it is difficult to listen to so much music in such a little time.
The BPM project was much more easily implemented at work, so I did it there... and promptly exhausted my "up-tempo" (120+ BPM) playlist by listening to it all day. What a wonderful invention. I loved listening to a wide variety of music. Now, what I need to do is, get about, oh, 700MB of music from my computer at home to my computer at work, so I can enjoy more music at work.
I have also started looking at "Once a Month Cooking" more seriously, borrowing a book called Frozen Assets from the library. It has good tips in there, and I think it would be nice to implement something like that, maybe not on a "cook-for-the-month" basis, but to at least have some homemade frozen meals ready to go in case neither one of us feels like cooking. Simple things, like spaghetti sauce, pizza dough, cookie dough, meatballs, etc. Just keep a supply of those onhand in the freezer, as homemade frozen staples.
I think that's it for the week... oh, no wait, there's more. The band got together and recorded some stuff on Wednesday night, and Kent laid vocals down at home. We got one really good song out of it (I would like Kent to re-do the vocals on "At All"), "Fall", and it sounds demo-worthy. I would love to be able to record that professionally, but more importantly use this to get a gig somewhere.
Also considering upgrading the blog to more of a website feel, since I am now writing more things than just goals and journal entries in here. Get back into the writing groove. Back to music for a bit: I am using my growing music library to make mixtapes for other people, and I would like to post those so they can be preserved for posterity.

Fin.

On Minimalism, iTunes, and Smart Playlists

Last entry I talked about my desire for simplification in all facets of my life, and basically deconstructing everything down to the bare essentials. This apparently does not apply to my music listening preferences, however, as I have completed one-half of a rather extensive project which has little to no real practical application.

I must digress here and say how much I hate labels. I don't like being pigeonholed by people, and I don't like confining people -- or other things -- to labels. This naturally extends to music. So it's only natural that I would spend forever and a day meticulously tagging all my .mp3 files down to the littlest detail (BPM). I scored a handy utility from mixmeister.com which will go through .mp3 files and determine their BPM, and then I can just go into iTunes and re-capture all the file info to get that loaded in there.

I figured that once the BPMs were loaded, I would be able to create "chill out" mixes and such so I could make "smarter" playlists (more on that later). Here's what I found out, at least from my work music library (which consists of 307 songs with a median BPM of 112), that many of the songs that I consider "chill" have a higher BPM. So, while I now have two new smart playlists -- Uptempo and, um, Not -- divided along the 120 BPM line, I will still have to go through and tag songs according to if they're "chill" or not. I will have to find a way to get that taken care of. :-) It's not that I don't want to listen to all the music on my hard drive (and at home the process is what *really* scares me), it's just I don't want to sit there and tag all the music, especially with my huge music library at home where I'm adding albums by the truckful, without necessarily listening to all of the songs.

About the Smart Playlists thing -- I'm trying to figure out why it appeals to me so much. I think a lot of it has to do with the computer programmer/data manipulator in me. Sure, having a consistent style of music going from the speakers so I don't shuffle from, say, Public Enemy to the Tabernacle Choir, is very appealing, and I love that idea.

I have officially forgotten where I was trying to go, so I'm ending here and "quitting while I'm ahead".

Musings.

I've found myself embracing minimalism for a long time, and I am looking forward to moving so I can really take the chance to just completely rid myself of things that I don't need. I've eschewed my rather large CD collection for the opportunity to purchase music online (a large hard drive helps out a lot). I'm using the library a lot more for my book-reading needs. I'm just trying to keep everything down to nice and simple. I like simple.

On a side note, baseball season has started today, and MAN, do the Dodgers look good. Even though they're losing 8-5 right now to Atlanta, they look like a really good team. I love Opening Day. There has been baseball on TV for 5 hours now, and I get to be home and enjoy it instead of at work trying to catch up on scores on the Internet.

I kow we're getting a fairly decent-sized house (1200 square feet), but I am treating it like a much smaller space, so we can really maximize its potential. I've got Michelle talked into using the "Arizona Room" (I prefer to think of it as an enclosed patio, which it really is) as a den, with the bookshelves out there to act as an artificial wall to the washer and dryer. We might even get to keep the dining room set out there, because I am really looking forward to having some nice get-togethers out there, rather than having to go to other people's houses because we are in a somewhat cramped apartment.

That monster.com commercial, where people look so excited to be on the job? I seriously can't think of a job I would have where I would react like that. I think this job is one of the best I've ever had, and I still can't wait to get out of there at noon every day, and it's very hard for me to get the computer turned on to work from home. I think I'm going to have to talk to Michelle about me working until 1:30 and then coming home, with her working from 2-5 every day. I can tell you, that would probably be a lot easier, because right now, with working 7 straight hours without a formal break, I am getting burned out pretty quick near the end of my day at work, and any time after 11 AM is barely productive for me.

Goals, Week Ending 4/8/2006

1. Read 2 Corinthians 1 - Ephesians 1


2. Pack kitchen implements we're not going to use in the next month.


3. Get a moving checklist online and make sure we are caught up, then stick to it for the remainder of the month.


4. Complete the eternal bedroom project of get this stuff packed or else


5. I'm sure there's something I'm missing... sorting through to find out if I need it or not. Can't quite figure out what it is, though. So my goal is to figure out what it is.

Nothing else too spectacular this week. Just trying to keep my head above water here; last week was way too exhausting for me.

Week in Review, 4/1/2006

Two goals, 50% complete.

1. Read 1 Corinthians.


2. Tackled that file cabinet... finally. Wow, that's more work than I thought it would be, and getting it started throughout the week while trying to make up hours missed on Monday was too hard. I made a major dent in it on Saturday between Conference sessions, but I would be lying if I said I was anywhere near being done.

And that's it. I did get the cookbooks packed in the kitchen, for what it's worth.