Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

It’s a Sunday and that seems like a good reason for a post.  It’s also the last day of the month and I’m attempting to rev my brain up so that I can attempt to post an entry to this site every day in the month of October.  This might fail towards the end of the month when I head out to California with Denise, but I figure I’ll give it a shot.

I’m happy with the new theme.  I upgraded WordPress to 2.3 and decided it would be good to find a theme that had been updated to take advantage of the changes made to this new version.  Of course I stumbled on to this gem - and because of my Mac geek heritage I figured that it was the theme for me.  I’ve got a couple of minor changes I plan to make on it over the next few weeks, but overall I’m quite happy with it.

I couldn’t tell you what exactly it is about phones that freak me out, but there is something. It takes a great deal of physical and mental effort on my part to work up the ability to make a phone call. Answering the phones isn’t a huge deal - more often than not it’s a slight annoyance (though in fairness to those who call once I’m actually talking to them I’m fine, it’s just the fact that the phone is ringing that triggers some sort of negative response in my mind). I’ve literally spent hours sometimes trying to make a call. When I’m calling someone I care about it doesn’t take as long, but it’s still a difficult process for me. Like I said, I can’t explain why it’s this way. There’s no particular feeling of dread - it’s more as if a physical barrier has been errected that impedes my progress the closer I get to making that call. There’s been times I’ve hung up the phone before I even finished dialing all the digits in someones numbers. Fortunately most of my friends are perfectly fine communicating with me over such means as e-mail or instant messages, both of which I thrive on. I like others. I love communicating - it’s just that the phone is not a medium I am adept at. To complicate matters I have trouble hearing what people are saying on the phone. On average I’d say in a given conversation I don’t actually hear every third or fourth word. When talking to someone I am familiar with its not so much a problem as my brain sort of anticipates what word would best fit there based on who I am talking to, so I comprehend what is being said. When answering the phone at work, however, often times I have to get people to repeat themselves a few times… especially with names. For instance someone with an easy name like Bob Clark calls and I go to take a message and to me, at first, his name sounds like blahblahblaaaahblah. Fortunately its rare that people call here with terribly complex names - like if I didn’t know her and my friend Shoshi Kamholtz called I swear I’d have to get her to repeat herself about ten times - and likely she’d just get annoyed and hang up. I know I would.

So for all my friends out there who I neglect to call as often as I should I do apologize. This is in no way meant to be an explanation or a cop out - I just wanted to share my perspective with you. Does it change anything? No. But a little understanding sometimes can go a long way and fortunately my friends are quite understanding.

I’ve always been curious about how quickly the minions of Google index websites and such. It seems like they’re on the ball about it so I created a couple of test pages using some friends names - ones whose names yield virtually no search results when I looked earlier today. These are the kinds of things that I do when I’m bored.

Want to talk about all kinds of server messups, and other issues. That’s what I get for giving someone else temporary administrative access on this server. You can bet I won’t be making that mistake again - at least not without testing their OS X server fu first. I still need to do a little tweaking to get the speed back up - it’s running a little slow, but I haven’t investigated why yet. First things first, I wanted to get the Travesty proper back up and running.

Since getting engaged I’ve actually been trying to think things out more and make a plan of attack in regards to long term projects. At the very least I’m trying to outline the projects I want to get done. I haven’t set any type of deadlines, though it probably would be good to as I work better when I actually have a set time table for getting something done. In that regard I’ve been working out a check list of things I want to do to both the server end of this site, and the actual web presence part. There’s several projects I’ve always wanted to do, but for all sorts of reasons never actually did. I now have much more clear of a goal for what I want to do with this website. Some parts are still vague and unstructured, but I’ve got some basic goals set. I’m even looking in to various types of task based software to help me keep track of these things, and time lines, etc. Self-improvement, what a weird concept, but for a change it actually feels less like I’m just forcing myself to do something, and more like I’m actually trying to declutter and take an active stance in to improving the self a little. No, I’m not going to become some task oriented freak with every daily aspect of their life planned out months in advance. I’m only trying to give myself a basic framework - mostly in regards to long term projects. I still have no clue what I’ll be doing this weekend, and quite frankly I like that.