hawaii’s Neighborhood

Just to demonstrate the level of my growing apathy toward web development ...

In the past two days, I've toyed with the idea of setting up a shopping cart system online so I can offer MP3s of my demos. The purpose is more to track listeners than to earn an income. In fact, I would rather the system offer them for free.

I experimented with Zen Cart, which is available from Dreamhost as a one-click install, and it was too robust for what I had in mind. Other solutions were paid services using outside servers, and I have more than enough space on my web site to accomodate my files. I'm not concerned with bandwidth at this point because, well, no one is listening to my stuff.

The more I looked into it, the more it became apparent that my needs are way too specific for what is available. And if I went with a third-party tool, I would need to hack it extensively to do what I wanted.

I've built my own applications, and I've hacked other people's applications. The time sunk into them is equal.

I wanted something to run out-of-the-box. That's not possible.

Five years ago, I would have dove straight in and started coding. Today, I'm filing the idea in the mental cabinet to wait for a time when I'm not feeling so apathetic.

This apathy even extends to my blogs. I have a lot of reviews I've been intending to write but no drive to write them.

I want a sabbatical.

I'm usually hesitant to fire up the home studio and work on music. Something happens when I get deep into the throes of recording -- I don't want to concentrate on anything else. There's always something to tweak, something to adjust, something to edit.

When I get into that mindset, everything else is a distraction, the least of which is the means by which I pay the bills. I've tried (unsuccessfully) to set up the Windows XP VPN server so I can make a Remote Desktop connection from my work computer to my home computer. (Yes, I have a VPN connection from home to work, but I'd like to make the appearance of face time.)

It's these times that make me dread heading into an office, which then results in a spiral of doubt and fantasy. What would I be doing if I weren't doing what I was doing?

First off, I'm feeling restless with web development. As professions go, development has always been something I could do that doesn't annoy me, but my identity is not entirely wrapped up in it. I read these articles on dzone all the time bestowing the virtues of good developers -- the ones who constantly learn, the ones who recognize the holes in their training and try to plug them -- and I resembled a lot of those traits about three years ago.

(Huh. Three years ago. That's about the same time I started building up the home studio again.)

Now I've hit a wall, and I'm not certain I want to get past and/or around it. I could do much more to be better at PERL, PHP and all the rest, and I could probably even take a deeper plunge into Ruby and Ruby on Rails. But the time spent doing that means time away getting better with effects processing, mixing, rehearsing ...

I don't even know if I want my day job to be "developer". Oh, I still want a day job -- I like how music serves as a refuge. It would stop being so if it became the focus, and I would develop the same restlessness for it as I have for web development.

I think more than anything, this restlessness is more about mental stimulus than anything else. Solving problems with code is a great fit for me, but at some point, how many more ways can I look at the same control structures and data types?

Which brings us back to the question of what I would be doing if I weren't doing what I was doing.

I don't have a concrete answer. Some vague ones in which I might indulge at some point, but nothing solid.

In short, I don't know.

(Kind of a sequel to this entry ...)

What is it about a sluggish economy that triggers my covetous moods? In reality, some of these items might cross over to "need" than "want". Still, it would be nice to have ...

• An upgrade of Microsoft Office 2000. It didn't seem the 2003 upgrade was all that necessary, but the complete overhaul of Office 2007 reveals a lot of clunkiness in Office 2000. What spurred this realization was the utter hell of trying to get my novel properly prepped for QuarkXpress to layout correctly. Thing is, I don't write all that much, and my heavy spreadsheet use happened before I released enigmatics. Still, the version I have is 8 years old.
• A new laser printer. The one I have dates back to 1995 and print out 8 pages per minute. Yeah. Ancient. But shopping for printers is really, really paralyzing.
• A camcorder. A total pie-in-the-sky desire. I've been making music videos with my point-and-shoot digital camera, and while I've managed to gloss over the cheap video quality with creative editing, I would like to try my hand at using the proper tool for the job. But really? I must prohibit myself from purchasing a camcorder till after I get a new printer.
• A new desktop computer. I bought my current home computer in 2005. It's more than capable of supporting the digital audio software I have installed on it. Now that I'm venturing into video, a faster processor would be really nice to mitigate rendering times. But I just extended the warranty on the current computer till 2009, and maybe by then the idea of moving to Vista won't be so nightmarish.
• A full version of Windows XP. But really, that's just a fear of Windows Vista. Is it warranted? Will it matter by 2009?
  
• An upgrade of QuarkXpress. I think I'm actually more curious about an upgrade than I am desirous of it. QuarkXpress can be inscrutible at times, but I've managed to hammer out some CD covers and actual books with it. I must be doing something right.
• An upgrade of Sony Sound Forge. I'm so tired of the lack of UTF-8 support in the IDv2 tagging. Of course, I could make life simpler and not title my songs in Japanese. Sound Forge 9 takes care of it. I have Sound Forge 8.
  

I'm so broke, I have no notion I'll be able to scratch off anything from this list. Except the printer. Holy hell, do I need a new printer.

I finally realized what my personal motto is:

• You need to get out of my way.

It's a phrase I tend to mutter a lot, particularly on the road but also while waiting in line or getting through a crowd. Yes, it's a quite a conceited world view, but I don't intend it to be threat. Just a realization of a problem and how to go around it. The traditional perception of "You need to get out of my way" is "You need to give up your ground and let me pass." Too confrontational. For me, "You need to get out of my way" is a statement of fact that allows another follow-up question: "Which way can I take so you're not in it?" It's all about expediency.

A friend of mine has a better personal motto, one which applies to potential relationships as informed by her own divorce:

• Keep up.

But to some folks, it may look like it is.

I enabled the cross-post to Livejournal feature from Vox a while back, but I haven't really employed it. First, I don't post here much. Second, I like having a blank Livejournal. For a while, I even called it 「死気」, which means "dead journal".

At first, I wanted this Vox site to be something of a hidden-in-plain-view kind of site -- something that would be fairly open but nothing I would actively promote. Thing is, I get the impression all the friends who could read this site aren't because they're not inclined to seek it out. My original online journal has been defunct for more than a year now, and I've done little to dissuade people from thinking I'm out of the online journal business.

Besides, I've got about seven different blogs, most of the overshadowed by Musicwhore.org. It's not like I've become an Internet hermit.

So I'm going to making this site a bit more available. I'll be posting select entries to Austin Stories and to my Facebook page. And I'll cross-post to Livejournal when I write something public. Vox supports some privacy features, so if you want to keep up with the very rare secret entry, you'll have to come here. Aside from that, I hope to make this easy on everyone.

Honestly, though? Most of my blogging is the micro format. Yah, I'm one of them Twitter users.

So for the folks on Livejournal who might run into this entry, I invite you to catch up with past posts. And I'll maybe see you around there some time.

An inventory of my refrigerator includes the following contents:

• Meatloaf
• Spicy chicken tamales
• Turkey breast
  
• Wilted spinach
• Broccoli sauté
• String beans and nuts
• Carrots
  
• Green tea ice cream

All of these items were purchased from Central Market at Westgate. A while back, I lost the enthusiasm for cooking, but I didn't want to revert to my drive-thru/takeout ways. The Central Market restaurant serves some really tasty dishes, but they can get pretty pricey. Then I discovered the Chef's Corner, where prepared food can be bought by the pound and heated at home.

It turned out to be the perfect solution. I buy half to three-quarter pounds of dishes and spread them out over lunch and dinner for a number of days. Some dishes are more successful than others. The turkey and grilled chicken are nice and light. The flank steak -- being flank steak -- can be a bit chewy, and I tried some Asian BBQ pork once. A bit stiff.

The big boon are the vegetable dishes. I'm not much of a vegetable cook, so the broccoli sauté, wilted spinach and string beans add some much needed greens to my diet. I didn't list the bok choi since I already dusted it off. Nor the fresh berries. Yum.

The recent heat wave, which started the weekend I went to Hawaiʻi in freaking May, does not make a hot kitchen a welcome prospect. So I've relied on the Chef's Corner to feed me. At some point, I'm going to get tired of the menu, but at this point, I haven't exhausted it yet.

Are the dishes really all that healthy? I can't say. But they don't taste like they've been dropped into a vat of oil.

I've mostly stayed away from ice cream on this weight loss regimen, but going through July weather in freaking June without ice cream is, well, uncivilized. I saw the green tea ice cream in the Central Market freezer and was intrigued. So I checked the label and discovered 33 percent of the calories come from fat. That's 3 percent above the FDA recommended allowance, but it's close enough not to be excessively fattening. The same goes for the green tea mochi ice cream, which I didn't list because it too has been dusted off.

Other Central Market items currently a regular part of my diet is zucchini bread and bananas.

So, yes, I am Central Market's bitch. It helps that the Westgate location is literally across the highway from my apartment.

I'm starting to resent the trip back home I took in May. It was essentially an eating trip, and it's absolutely thrown off the trajectory of my weight loss.

I was already reaching a plateau before the trip, and afterward, said plateau seems to be more like a floor. I haven't been able to get much further than 173.8 since April. I thought I had plateaus before, but this one is for real.

I'm already exercising four times a week, so that leaves calorie counting. And I can't say I've been very good at it since May.

This past week was terrible. I started it off by caving into a Pizza Hut craving and ended it with a work lunch that canceled out any work I had done to mitigate the pizza.

Cutting any more calories means drinking the rancid SlimFast shakes twice a day, instead of the breakfast dosage I've been chugging down since, well, forever. I've been neglectful of fruits and vegetables as of late, so I'm reintroducing them to my diet. The dirty secret of weight loss is having a regular bowel movement -- you could lose a pound by having a very productive sit-down. (Yes, that's TMI.)

At the same time, shedding 40 pounds is not subtle. People who see me notice. And in another bit of mixed news, the size 36 jeans I bought because I couldn't fit the size 38 jeans are also now loose. Damn it, I sank $30+ on three pairs.

I'm approximately 10 pounds away from my goal, and it's always the last 10 pounds that are hardest to shed. I think maybe I should settle in with being comfortable at 175 pounds.

I would very much like to see myself at my ideal BMI weight (166 pounds), but when I look in the mirror now, I actually don't mind what I see.

It's been a month since I filed papers with the Travis County Clerk's Office to create two businesses -- Observant Records and Eponymous 4. Of course, Eponymous 4 isn't really a "business", but if I want to sell merchandise or get paid royalties under an alias, it's probably best to be somewhat official.

In this past month, I've reacquainted myself with accounting concepts, got familiar with creating formulas in Excel, shopped for office supplies and visited the post office many, many times.

A long time ago, I took some kind of online personality test to see if I had the fortitude for entrepreneurship. The test results told me to keep my day job. I can't say I'm getting into this whole record label thing with the aim of quitting said day job, but at the same time, I don't think I'm total inept at being my own boss.

The test -- I wish I could find it again -- did attempt to gauge my opinion on a number of situations. How did I feel about putting money in a business without a return on investment? How comfortable was I with being financially insecure while getting the business off the ground? Speaking on generic terms, I'm honestly not comfortable with those situations. But with music, hell -- I'd be surprised if I got paid for anything. So that kind of fear can be nicely mitigated by nihilism.

Besides, it's not about the money -- it's about the music. Right?

Here's what I've learned so far in trying get a business off the ground:

• Filing a DBA ("doing business as") is ridiculously easy and cheap. It came out to $16.20 for each company registered at the Travis County Clerk's Office. The hardest part was carving out the time in the day to do it. Just show up, use the clerk's office database to make sure the name you want isn't already taken, fill out the form, wait for your number to be called and pay your $16.20 in cash. Nope, no checks or credit cards. I filed both Observant Records and Eponymous 4 in less than half an hour.
• Take an accounting class. In fact, take it even if you're not considering starting a business. It takes the mystery out of all those mysterious financial reports, let alone your bank statement. And if you're going to sell stuff, you will need to collect sales tax. It's better to do that with your books in order.
  
• Yes, even if you sell a t-shirt at a show, you'll need to tack on the sales tax at the time of the sale, or take the sales tax out afterward. Getting an sales tax license in Texas is not difficult and costs nothing. You can even do it online.
• If you don't take an accounting class, you might get away with being able to use Quickbooks, so long as your remember it's not Quicken. But it's better to take the class, so you can understand why Quickbooks won't let you delete anything. No, really.
  
• Download and install PDFCreator. It comes in incredibly handy if you're dealing with government forms in fillable PDF format or when you're prompted to print something out. With PDFCreator, you can print to file and have a backup of any form, label or printout you create. Not all fillable PDF forms allow you to save a copy.
  
• Using the Post Office's Click-N-Ship for Priority or Express Mail is cheaper than doing it in person or using the kiosk. The cheapest online rate for Priority Mail is $4.75 with free Delivery Confirmation. In person, it's $4.80 with Delivery Confirmation an extra $0.65. Mailing stuff is going to become a regular part of life, so it's best to get very familiar with the Post Office web site.
• Get lots of mailing labels in various sizes. If you plan on selling stuff through your website, stack up on envelopes.
• If you ever wanted to get in touch with people you haven't spoken to in a long time, asking them to buy your stuff is a good excuse.
  

I'm certain I'm going to learn a lot of new things later, especially when I discover I'm doing things now that are totally wrong.

Back in 1998, web-based e-mail was touted as the on-the-go solution solution for people tethered to a desktop client. Widespread use of the Internet was still new enough that folks more than familiar with UNIX shells could bypass these free web-based services in favor of telnet, rlogin or ssh.

I scoffed at the idea of having a Hotmail account. I had one, of course, but I would log into it rarely. I would rather telnet into my e-mail and use pine than be bombarded with obnoxious animated GIFs.

But I was reckless with my e-mail address. It was my default address for every account to which I signed up. As a result, it managed to get on every SPAM list conceivable, and by 2000, the number of SPAM I received outnumbered mail by real people. The advent of online journal writing -- which would eventually become blogging -- made correspondence through e-mail more of a business action. Why write to individuals when I could just point them to my site instead?

I installed a shell-based SPAM filter so good, it filtered out legitimate e-mail. It was then I got into the habit of moving over false positives to the inbox, which would then be sucked down to my desktop client. I'd clean out the filters every day.

Having learned such a hard lesson, the Hotmail account then became my SPAM catcher box. Every site to which I registered would use that account. As a result, it's become the area to which I'm willing to be marketed. I don't mind if some business puts me on a notification list with that address -- that's why it's there.

My shell account changed hands, and the business with which I original signed up got acquired by another company. After a major change in e-mail platform, the rot began to sink in. The overprotective shell filters became too permissive, and the number of SPAM messages filtered out dwindled against what went through. By 2008, Twitter, social networks and web-based communication essentially made my desktop e-mail client neglected. I would go for months without firing it up.

The shell access came with its costs: $16/month. However portable ssh is, the shell e-mail account had lost its value. It was not worth that expenditure.

So after 10 years, an e-mail address familiar to everyone I know is no more. I canceled my Illuminati Online (actually it's Prism.net) account today, and nemesisv@io.com is no more. I would usually try to obfuscate addresses, but the SPAM scrapers took that address a long time ago.

I couldn't really kill it since it was already dead.

At the same time, it almost feels like I've torn down a house. It's a destination that hadn't changed for a decade. When all else failed, you could always hit up nemesisv@io.com. Well, not any more.

So goodbye, nemesisv@io.com. You lasted in an environment where permanence is an anomaly.

Rather than adjust to Hawaiian time, I've opted to remain in Central time. My dad sometimes needs help in the morning, and my mom really needs to sleep in. If I keep my body fooled into thinking that 4 a.m. is really 9 a.m., I can assist in that manner.

That just means when it's noon in Hawaiʻi, my body will think it's already time to start winding down for the afternoon. I went to bed before 10 p.m. HST last night, which means I stayed up till 3 a.m. CST.

The house and the neighborhood tend to wake up around 4 a.m. anyway. If it isn't my brother getting ready to go to work -- long bus commute -- it's the roosters all throughout the neighborhood, reliable alarm clocks you can't shut off till you need something to eat for dinner.

About the only thing I'm doing on this trip, aside from making sure my dad gets around without incident, is eating. All the discipline I've exercised in the last nine months have pretty much been thrown to the proverbial wind in the face of all the fatty, delicious food here. After shopping for CDs on Friday, my sister and I stopped by Grace's Inn for the requisite plate of chicken katsu. I thought about splitting the plate up between lunch and dinner, but who was I kidding? I dusted the entire plate off, including the chow fun.

I didn't bother eating dinner that night. But I did indulge in some malasadas.

I have been getting some exercise, though. On Friday, I accompanied my sister to get her daily Starbucks at a nearby shopping center, a round trip of 2.2 miles. This morning, we drove to Kapiʻolani Park and walked the perimeter. Neither excursion got my heart rate up to my usual workout, but at least I feel as if I've mitigated all the bad eating of the past three days.

I did, however, insult my mom when I refused to eat the breakfast she cooked Thursday and Friday morning. I drank SlimFast instead, to which she objected saying it didn't provide sufficient nutrition. I think she doesn't like having her cooking rebuffed.

After the walk around Kapiʻolani Park, we stopped by Island Manapua Factory to pick up some manapua. On the Mainland, they're called dumplings. They are actually called bao in Chinese. I stick with manapua.

I've weighed myself dutifully, as prescribed by the Hacker's Diet, and I'm not pleased by the numbers. According to the scales here at the house, I've gained eight pounds in three days. I think they're just miscalibrated. But I bet when I get home to Austin, my scale will corroborate theirs.