Back to a long non-posting rut as I sometimes have here on T&T…Its hard to stay in the groove of blogging every day, especially when you are running multiple blogs. I don’t even have a whole lot of time for this post seeing as its 4 minutes past midnight, and I need to head to bed as I’m leaving for Hollywood in the morning.
My friend Laura has been in town from Australia for the past 2 weeks, and we have been super busy doing just about everything there is to do in SoCal. I took this week off work, and we have headed to Havasu, Sea World, Padres Game, Downtown, The Zoo, and tomorrow -Hollywood / LA. Its been awesome, as I haven’t even done any of the tourist stuff and I have lived in SD for over 4 years now. My parents came down on monday, and they have been hanging out doing stuff with us too, so Its been a super busy, hectic, and totally awesome week!
I will have tons of pictures and updates about her entire trip in an upcoming post, not to mention all the insanely cool stuff I have in store for WBSD, along with some new web design jobs I have coming up, Awesome plans for a river trip with Dani for the 4th, and a million other things that make up the way-too-busy but extremely awesome life of Ian. Stay Tuned!
Another week down the tubes. Finally wrapped up some big projects at work, so thats a big step in the right direction. Also, let me just say that filling my iPod up with every season of American Dad and Family Guy was a great decision on my part. Anyway…lots of current goings on:
My parents are coming down this weeked (Today). This is awesome because my mom has been feeling really good despite chemo. She is usually a bit sick the day after, but by the next week is feeling normal again. I haven’t seen them in a couple months, so it will be great to have the family here and spend some time at my aunts house. Also Danielle’s first time meeting them, so we’ll see how that goes. Kind of weird to have been dating her for half a year almost and she still hasn’t met them. I’m just used to them being in town so often, but theres been a lot going on in my family recently, so I’m just glad they will be here.
Planning another trip to the river for memorial day weekend. Thinking of leaving Friday the 23 through Monday the 26th. I just emailed the crew, hopefully Kjo will have his boat fixed by then, and the guys from DBG can make it, so we can have an awesome time out there. I think im going regardless.
Some party out at San Vicente tonight thrown by the guys from wakesports, but I don’t know if I’m going to make it. The DBG crew is going, but I think I’d rather spend some time with my parents.
Anyway, thats about it right now.
I read blogs of a lot of my friends every day, since a lot of us spread out after college. It’s interesting to see what all of us are accomplishing after school, but sometimes it makes me think of what I am actually accomplishing in my own life. At times I feel pretty damn successful, at others I feel like a complete waste of time. I know its not a contest, but some people are in other countries, traveling the world, volunteering, living in Hollywood, Alabama…all sorts of places.
Ragsdale is in Alabama, partying in New Orleans at ever chance
Brett is still playing with our band from SB, The Riot Before, and Touring the US
Jason, Baingo and Johnny are in Hollywood still having the crazy nights we used to have
Tracy is in New York making the same mistakes
Sometimes it just seems like I’m not doing anything that great. Your life gets into a rut sometimes and you have to spin the tires to get out of it. I have been working for ESET for nearly a year and a half. Its a great job, but the same thing every day really begins to get monotonous. I suppose some of it is just that I dream of doing big things, but can’t figure out a way to get there. That and maybe that I haven’t really taken any time off since I started working here (I Have 91 hours of vacation time saved up!).
When things start to blend together into one constant stream, what do you do to differentiate one day to the next? Weeks tend to blur by, Monday turns into Friday, turns into a quick weekend where I try to accomplish everything I didn’t have time to do during the week, and the loop starts over. My roomate Adam recently said - "What would you do if you didn’t have some project to accomplish on the weekends". True, I always am working on something - fixing a motorcycle, a truck, the boat. When do I have time to just sit back and enjoy the shit I worked my ass off to get? My brother and I do web site and graphic design as a side business, and most nights we come home from work only to turn on our computers at home and work on another project until nearly midnite.
I have made some sacrifices, or concessions in order to, what I thought would, improve my life. I have quit smoking, (going on almost 5 months), don’t drink much (maybe one night a week, if that - a big cut from my college/SB self), joined a gym that I hit during lunch a couple times a week, take vitamins, try to eat healthier…but what has it given me. I’m still the same person, who misses partying, less responsibility, hell I just miss sitting on the porch and smoking a cigarette. In those days I knew where my life was going - somewhere successful in general, although nothing specific. In my head then I was headed up and up, just had to finish my education and get to that good job. Those were easy dreams to have when you thought they would never come true (College took me 5.5 years - it seemed like time was frozen in place back then). Well now those dreams have come true, I have that job, although I’m just working my way up the corporate ladder. Success for a 25 year old I suppose, but nothing special - I still have a lot to learn and achieve.
But god damn it sometimes I just want a cigarette, and to have the conversations I used to have with the people I used to have them with. Maybe its just changes that come with age and maturity, but life used to seem a lot more passionate. Things used to be bright and colorful when you didn’t know where you were headed. Not that anything is bad now by any means, but it just seems to flow from one day to the next seamlessly, when it used to be clear, concise days of achievement and down time, where things could be accomplished at any time of the day or night. Now my life is blocked out from 8-5 monday through friday, rushed from 5-10, and hectic on weekends. This can’t be the way it was meant to be enjoyed? I’m not complaining by any means, and my tastes are way too rich to be enjoyed as a bum just living on the beach, but god damn it I have to figure out the way to live my life in a manner that keeps my fire burning, because I am quickly realizing that this is not it.
And, an afterthought: this is not a complaint about anything in my life. I know how fortunate I am, and some of has been given to me, some of it I have worked for myself. I love my life…this is just speculation as to how I can live it in a better way for myself.
My buddy Matt at work is obsessed with this song. It’s good, its growing on me, although I’m not sure why.
By some Denver hip hop group called “Flobots”. God damn it, now its stuck in my head. Not to mention that fuckin Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up” is permantly burned into my neurons, thanks to the irresponsible amount of RickRolling that has been going around. I have pwned just about everyone I know, and it has been hilarious. I even pwned my unwitting intern today. He didn’t even see it coming. BAM!
In other news, check out www.everylogin.com, a site Matt and I have been developing to compete with the popular OpenId login system. But instead of passing your credentials through the host site, ours stores it on a secure database on everylogin.com, therefore anyone can use it on any site, and be assured that the host isn’t grabbing their information when logging in! I think it could possibly be the next big thing in distributed identification across domains. Check it out and let us know what you think? Hopefully some day it could get picked up by Myspace, Facebook, and who knows what else. Hey, we can dream!
Aside from that ish, today is wrapping up to be a pretty good friday. Went to the Gym during lunch, which is awesome because I get out of the damn office for an hour, and then I don’t have to go when I get home, when I have pretty much 0% motivation to go. But around 12 in the afternoon I have 100% motivation to get the fuck out of the office, even to exercise! Plus, there is a 24 Hour Fitness in Horton Plaza, and if anyone knows traffic and parking in downtown San Diego - its a mess. Luckily, there is free motorcycle parking right across the street, and I ride my bike a couple days a week, so it works out perfectly!
Other news… Tomorrow I think we are heading out to San Vicente in the morning for some wakeboard. We delayed taking the boat in and just picked up the prop to put on. The amp for the new speakers is backordered, so we told DBG Concepts to just wait until they had all the stuff we wanted before taking the boat in. After that, there is a ceremony for the installation of the Alumni Chapter of Alpha Kappa Psi, which I am a founding member. After that, a bit of a cocktail party, which I’m sure will turn into a complete mess and last pretty late into the night. Hopefully following up on Sunday with some more wakeboarding, and then finishing up the College Funding Solutions website sunday night.
My mom went in for her first round of chemo yesterday, and in for some more today. After this I think its just once a week for the next 17 weeks. She is in good health and spirits, so I’m hoping it continues.
Lots going on lately! Heres all the fun I am involved in:
Evan’s boss at Accel RF apparently owns www.apache.com. This domain, as you can probably guess, gets a fair amount of traffic from people trying to reach www.apache.org, for the open source HTTP server software. Based on this traffic alone, the site has done pretty well, but just had ads up on it. We (Redline Designworks, in conjunction with our web host, Chase Hosting) we will be soon forwarding requests to apache.com to our site, and have built an Apache community - not just a link farm. We are hoping to attract enough people to actually build a thriving community, since there are thousands of people using the apache server and no formal community for it. This could prove to be a pretty beneficial and lucrative venture to both us and the community. Stay tuned for progress updates! And check out my first article I posted up there.
Insane amounts of ass-whupping have been taking place recently, mostly in the arena of COD4 thanks to the release of the new Variety Map Pack. Thanks to this sweet deal, the whole crew (EddieMcClintock, Hecknut, KillerMcGurk, DefJeff, PrisonLuv4U, TaperingPlanB) have all been logging some hours pwning noobs on Xbox Live. These new maps have definitely breathed some new life into a game I had been slightly neglecting, and I have finally got past the point I was stuck at, leveling up to 26 in just a couple days. Good to finally get ahead on this, as nothing takes out frustration like some serious gaming. We also got into a bit of a turf war with some Canadian d-bags on Live last night, which turned into a US v CA all out cage match. Shit talking was quite verbose as we dove into battle, and CA came out just slightly ahead after a few rounds. Look forward to a rematch.
I have been spending quite a bit of time working on a new website for College Funding Solutions. Its a new site that RLDW Is developing for a local company who provide funding options for student loans, etc. We brought on a friend of mine, Matt Morrison to do some of the more in depth programming, which should prove to be pretty beneficial as we can now accept some larger and more complex projects.
WakeboardSD.net, our online wakeboarding community, should be seeing a bit of a revival soon, since it will be partnered with the community over at Chase Hosting and Dezertboard. It will be headlining a new “extreme sports” element to the community, and will hopefully be the first of many similar additions.
In other news, the boat should be going in to DBG Concepts (A RLDW Designed Site) shop soon to undergo the next set of improvements. Our 2007 Maxum 1800 SR3 will soon be sporting the following:
Skylon sacks (similar to fat sacks) for some huge wake!
So, thats a quick update of the things going on in my world. A lot of exciting projects and hardly any free time. I’m hoping to head out to the desert to do some riding on saturday, then an Alpha Kappa Psi Alumni Chapter Installation ceremony and party saturday night, so it should be a pretty busy weekend. I’m sure it will fly by like they all do, and before I know it, it’ll be monday again and I’ll be starting the neverending cycle all over again. Its coming up on some time for a vacation soon…I can feel it.
Stuck in A Rut in the T&T Life Cycle
In other news, check out 
