It's been a while since I've posted anything in this category. Nevertheless:

Is it me or is my imagination running wild
Some things are not what they seem, no
You know I'd ask you to come into my world for a while
But I know it's only a dream

Stir - Only a Dream

If you read the previous entry, I imagine you're wondering how it's going between me and this lady. Well, I'm not going to give you any explicit detail, but I would like to say that it seems to be going very well at the moment. :)

That is all.

For the last several months, I've been planning to take a trip to Indiana to visit my Dad for his birthday. I did the same for my Mom back in November for her birthday. The only difference this time though was that it was kept a secret from my Dad the entire way.

When I ordered the plane tickets a couple of months ago, I told my sisters to keep it quiet because I didn't want Mom or Dad to know about it until I showed up. A couple of weeks later though, Mom sent me an e-mail and reminded me when Dad's birthday was, and asked if I had any plans of something to do for him. Well crap, I had to spill the beans to her. I made her understand though that nobody else was to know, especially not Dad. She did well.

I landed in Indy around 7:00 local time this evening, and as I was making my way out of town I got a call from my Dad. He asked if I got the message he sent me on the instant messenger, and I told him I hadn't because I was out driving around (not a lie - I was driving around). I got off the phone with him and continued my journey to their house. By the time I got there, he was done for the day and was half asleep in front of the TV.

I don't think he really realized at first that I was really here, but as he woke up he certainly did. After a big hug from him and Mom both, we ate dinner, then Dad and I sat and talked for a couple of hours.

So far it has been a nice surprise for him, and I hope that the other happenings this weekend will be just as nice for him. :D

Since TSRum complained that I haven't made any posts lately, I figured I'd take his advice and tell you all about my weekend.

As lame as it might sound at first, I've been a member of an online dating community for about the last year. Now that I've said that, let me challenge you to think about how social networking sites, which a dating site really is, have changed how people view the internet and making friends therein.

Anyhow, back to the story. Sometime a couple of months ago, I started talking with a young lady on there and it seemed to be going well. When she suggested that we meet up, I had no qualms with it. We met a couple of weeks ago for a cup of coffee and to meet each other face to face. We spent probably 3 hours or so sitting outside in the perfect evening weather, just talking and getting to know each other a bit. After we went our ways that evening, I got home to find a message from her saying how much she enjoyed it. A couple of days later, she sent me another message, saying that if we didn't plan to get together again, it may not happen. Thus, we made plans to meet up for bowling and dinner, and those plans were executed this past Saturday.

I picked her up and we went to the bowling alley just down the way from my place. The first game was mine, but she leveled the stakes on the next game. We bowled a third game, just for fun, and somehow I threw one of the best games I ever have.

After we got done bowling, we went to find dinner. We had previously discussed what was in the area, and she said that Olive Garden was fine with her. So off we went. As we were finishing dinner, I realized that it was really much earlier in the evening than I thought, so I asked her if she'd like to see a movie. She agreed, so we went down the way to the theater.

We had an hour to kill before the movie started, so we sat on a bench outside in the (again) perfect weather and talked for a bit. We went back in to the theater just in time for the staff to finish cleaning house for the next show. We sat and poked fun at the pre-show advertisements for a bit, then the show started.

The movie, "Up", was pretty entertaining and I think we both enjoyed it equally. By the time it was finished though, I was feeling like the old man that I'm drawing closer to being and figured that 11:00 was probably a good time to call it a night. We jumped in the car and I took her home by way of downtown Houston.

You're probably wondering all the details: Did I kiss her? Did we hold hands? Where did it go from there? Quite frankly, that's not really your business and out of respect for the both of us, only a very limited few shall know the answers.

I think it went quite well. I left her a follow-up message that evening to tell her that I really enjoyed the time together and that I hoped we could do it again soon. I'm not going to make the mistake I did several times in the past and push for an answer, but I am optimisically under the impression that she had a good time and is looking for a repeat soon as well.

If you know me fairly well or if you have been reading my blog for very long, you know this is the end of a proverbial drought for my "love life", for lack of a better term. I'm finding that the social skills I've developed in my career have really been a benefit to my personal life as well, though. Don't get me wrong, I still sometimes wonder what the next topic of discussion should be and feel that brief moment of awkward silence. I don't think that will ever go away, but I only hope that whoever I am in such a relationship with will understand that we're all human and not hold it against me.

Overall though, this has been a great experience and I hope I can get to know this young lady better and build a relationship with her. :)

Yeah, I fail on multiple counts. I just realized that one of them is with how this site renders in Google Chrome, particularly with forms. I guess I'll have to look that over later this weekend...

But really, the other place where I fail is in posting any sort of updates about myself, rather than this site or the government. Time to change that!

A couple of weeks ago I got a card in the mail from LA Fitness with a promotional "$0.00 signup fee" offer. Knowing that I was out of shape and that I needed to do something about it, I decided to go sign up. The gym is less than a mile away, so it's the perfect anti-excuse for getting back in shape.

I met with a trainer the first day I went, and he put me through one of the most intense workouts that I have ever experienced. It wasn't so much about the amount of weight on the stack, but it was about the reps and the type of reps I was doing. Since they're big on anaerobic exercise, it was all about keeping my heart rate up between the sets on the machines. The benefit to this is that it burns fat and builds muscle a lot quicker, but the muscle that is built is the "lean muscle". The figure they gave me was that 1 pound of lean muscle burns 500 calories a day at rest. If I can get rid of the fat and pack on lean muscle, I'll be doing pretty alright, I think. :)

But anyhow, I worked so hard that night that I was just on the verge of fainting and/or losing my lunch. It was a very similar feeling to what I experienced when I was in Las Vegas, but it was different enough for me to know that it wasn't so much a bad thing as that was. I ended up having to sit down, at which point my vision started to get very dark, and my ears felt like they were filling with water. When I was coming back from that, I decided I should get near a suitable receptacle, should I need to expel my lunch. After a couple minutes I knew I was doing okay, so I went back out front to meet with the trainer again. He and I both agreed that I needed to just call it a night, so I did.

I met with him again on Friday, when he had me work my triceps, chest, and abs. I was able to go that workout without feeling faint, but I felt like I had been whipped after I was done. For a couple of days after that, my arms were aching, but not too bad. But the following Monday it was bad enough that I couldn't bend my arms at all. I tried to work from the office for a couple of hours, but due to the arrangement of my desk it just didn't work. I ended up coming home to finish out the day. It made me feel pretty lame because I had to work from home just from post-workout pains, but meh.

I finally got over those aches, and went in to meet with a different trainer on Wednesday. She had me work my biceps and shoulders, which wasn't too bad... or so I thought. I had a little bit of trouble fully extending my left arm the following day, but it didn't really hit me until after Friday's workout.

Friday (yesterday), I met with yet a different trainer. He had me focus on legs and abs, which I did alright with. During the duration of that workout I did feel like I could vomit pretty easily, but I was able to hold it down. I had to cut my 20 minutes of cardio down to 8 minutes because my legs were shot, so I came on home after that.

The trip up the steps to my apartment were murder when I got home. It was so bad that I had to stop and catch my breath part-way up the steps. When I unlocked my door, I dropped the keys on the floor, but didn't have it in me to lean over and pick them up so I just kicked them in the door. :P

This morning when I woke up, I was aching really bad. You'd think it would be my legs that were aching, but it wasn't. See, I've identified that it takes 3 days for the ache of a high intensity workout to hit me. That's right, my biceps are the killers today. I can't lift my arms very far and I can't straighten them out because the muscles ache so bad. I'm even feeling it up in my forearms!

So yeah, that's what's been happening lately for me. Kinda dull, but meh, at least I'm doing something good for my body.

I got bored with the template the site was using and decided to re-introduce the old "Ice Flame" template. Please leave comments and let me know what you think.

Sure, it's possible. I risk getting in some sort of trouble for posting this on the internet, but I would like to point out that at no time did I dismantle any of the products used in this process to achieve the final goal. This was discovered totally by accident, and may already be public knowledge.

One night I was sitting at my computer, trying to debug some jQuery interfaces I was writing. For this, I was watching the network console in the Firebug extension for Firefox, making sure that my $.getJSON() calls were working properly. Somehow, I managed to pull up the network console for the tab where I had my pandora.com station playing, and I noticed where it was retrieving media from audio-sjl-a-1.pandora.com. Poking at it a little bit, I found that the files being retrieved were simple .flv files, with the audio embedded in them. Easy enough, I used ffmpeg to extract the audio stream and save it as an mp3, and there I had local copies of those songs that I can find nowhere other than pandora.com!

The information I gave you above should be sufficient for you to figure it out on your own. I don't endorse doing so though, because stealing is just wrong.

After my last entry about anything political, I got to thinking about this shirt I wanted. It would be a bright orange shirt, similar to those worn by inmates, with the word "TERRORIST" on the back in big, bold lettering.

Tonight I came across one of those "make your own shirt" sites, and they had the color t-shirt I was looking for, so I got busy. The product is this:



This shirt is intended to express my frustration for those in the Republican party who are very passionate about their beliefs, being labeled by the passionate Democrats as "Terrorists".

I believe that this should be tolerated under that whole "freedom of speech" and "equal rights" tag that the liberals are so concerned about right now. However, I would really fear for my own safety in wearing such a shirt. Is that sad?

Several years ago while I was working at a local auto body shop, I had some personal health issues. Among those issues was this time when I was cutting some rusty metal off a customer's car. I was wearing the full safety gear (goggles, mask, gloves), but somehow a chunk of metal managed to find its way to my eyeball. I didn't know about it until the next morning when I woke up with what I thought was welder's flash.

Since I was having a really hard time seeing, I had my mom call my boss and tell him that I was in this situation and that I probably wouldn't be in that day. They somehow got into the details of the ordeal, and it was brought up that only my right eye was giving me fits. The boss, experienced as he was, told my mom that it probably wasn't welder's flash and that if it didn't go away within a couple of hours I would need to get in to see the eye doctor. That was one of the longest days of my life.

During the several hours that went past, I was sitting on the sofa in the basement, listening to the television. Why wasn't I watching it? Well, apparently my left eye started to feel bad for my right eye, and it began to swell and water, thus leaving me blind, a sensation like no other, which I do NOT want to experience again.

By about 2:30PM, Mom called the local eye doctor and was able to secure me an immediate appointment. The eye doctor knew full and well what to expect on both a best-case scenario and its counterpart, the worst-case scenario.

Upon arrival to the clinic, the optometrist put a colored eye drop in both of my eyes. This solution would "puddle" around any foreign objects, which would make them much easier to see on the scope. She first checked my left eye and found nothing. When she moved to the right eye though, she said I was a very lucky guy. She mentioned that had the chunk metal been just millimeters to the left, it would have been in my line of sight and would have left me somewhat impaired as a result. Not only that, but if I had waited longer the metal shard would have worked its way into my eyeball even deeper, which would have required emergency surgery at one of the nearby universities.

As we were finishing up at the clinic, the doctor mentioned that I would have a scar on my eyeball for the rest of my life, but it should not cause any issue in the long term.

This process repeated itself another 5 times over the course of that year, and they all resulted in the eye doctor telling me that I wasn't being truthful about wearing protective eye glasses or goggles (though I was). Each time though, I was just as lucky as the first: The damage was never in my line of sight.

Well, all of this changed just the other day. While it's just a minor issue, it is very annoying. As I was staring out the window of the airplane on my way to and from Las Vegas, I noticed this little black dot towards the bottom of my view that seemed to follow wherever I was looking. At first I thought it was probably just a speck of something in my eye, but on the return trip today it was confirmed.

I don't think this is going to cause any problems, since it's more of an annoyance than anything. It's just really weird though.

Well, this Las Vegas thing isn't really turning out to be as fun as I had hoped it would.

Thursday morning while I was sitting at the airport, my back started hurting pretty bad. I kept my mouth shut about it, but I was hurting quite a bit. The flight wasn't too terrible, but I was still in pain. After we landed and got to the hotel, I decided to go wander around a little bit. I tried my hand at the slot machines, then met up with the group and walked across the street to Planet Hollywood. One of the guys and I decided to go find food at the buffet while we were there, which turned out to be pretty good. He wanted to walk to New York New York and ride the roller coaster, so we made the journey and I waited patiently while he went for a ride.

We walked back to the Bellagio and went to meet up with the group and the CEO again for "heavy appetizers and cocktails". I didn't take part in the food end of it, but I did order a drink. I was able to make it through a conversation with the CEO before I started having issues though. While I didn't actually drink much (maybe 2 sips -- it was still a pretty full glass), it must have been enough to mix with my blood pressure medicine. I started getting dizzy and was sweating rather profuesely. Then, I started to black out and felt quite faint. I excused myself and went out to get some air (from the casino floor, no less), but rejoined the group after a few minutes. I thought I was feeling better, so I jumped back up to the table and attempted to join the conversation.

WRONG ANSWER.

I started to black out again, so I excused myself from the gathering. As I was on my way to the door, I felt my lunch start to churn. I made a detour for the restroom, but I couldn't hold it all back. A little bit of it made it past my tightly closed lips while I was in the lobby, then the rest as soon as I made it in the door of the restroom. By the time I was able to see somewhat straight, I quickly made my way back to the room and spent the rest of the night there.

This morning I went back down to the casino floor and played the slots a little more. I met up with one of other guys in the group and we made a lap around the hotel (which had to have been close to a mile), then my back started to kill me again. I came back to the room and laid down on the bed and apparently fell asleep for several hours again.

I just got back from another walk outside, where I watched the water show for a little bit, but my back started in AGAIN. So now I'm sitting in my room until I have to meet up with the group again then go see the Cirque du Soleil show.

I have to say, this trip really hasn't been too enjoyable. I think I'm going to call the doctor first thing Monday morning and get an appointment to see what's going on with my back, really.