CUBEsMIND

I've finally come to the conclusion that websites and anything using logins need to just give it a rest. There is no point in forcing users to create complex passwords or having security questions or any of that stuff, because I've found that when people don't want to do something they will just find a way around it.

Case-in-point; my work got a new site to help track employee information, hours, and other such information. After about a month the system makes you change your password, and to do this you have to verify yourself with a bunch of security questions that you setup when you created your account.

I was trying to help someone with their login, and when we got to the security questions...well the first one was something like, "What's the name of your first pet?" his answer, "Max". Okay cool, next question "What's the name of your first grade teacher?" his answer, "Max"...there are something like ten questions and he just used the same thing for all ten.

Don't get me wrong, I understand it, most people can't even remember their passwords. It's even worse when a site forces people that don't want to remember a password to tell them what a password can and can not be, what it should contain, and that you need to makeup a new one each month.

I use password managers, but the average person doesn't even want to go through the hassle of learning another program to keep track of something they don't want in the first place. Then on top of that you are going to dump two handfuls of questions on them too. I mean developers kind of bring this on themselves.

I think that the most a site should do is have one of those password strength bars under the password, with recommendations on how to make a password stronger, but not force the user to do it. If a site is worried about liability, all they need to do is to add a checkbox confirming that the person wants to use a weaker password for the site. If someone wants to use a one character password and they end up getting hacked then that is on them.

I hate whatever generation has just learned about the complexities of data minning. I blame them for this current rash of every site asking for cookie permissions and asking if I read their privacy agreements.

You have to install an adblocker, then I'm sure at some point you'll have to install something that will auto accept cookies to get rid of that pain in the butt. Guess what, everyone has had your information for years. It's too late to stop that now!!

These aren't new things people stop complaining about them. The more you complain about them, the more you're going to have to complain about! People, you're ruining the internet!

All this time and I needed to be coding on a laptop to finally find a use for these key combinations. Just for those that don't know, when you are coding and you are trying to see the rest of your code that is just a bit off screen you can use this to move the page without moving the cursor.

Got some food from the mall today, and realized what I missed the most about the mall. It wasn't the stores, but the pushy little Asian lady that makes me eat samples, and eventually talks me into buying the 3 entree meal before I even realize what is happening.

I was thinking about what a good person really is. Particularly about how religion actually interfers with a person's morality.

If a Catholic believes that they are going to go to Hell for doing bad deeds, so they do good things to avoid that...are they really a good person?

If the only reason they continue to do good is for the promise of a heavenly afterlife, than are they actually good?

I'm not nearly as religous as I once was, but even now, in the back of my mind, I can still feel that concern as part of my decision making process. So how am I actually making my decisions? Am I actually a good person because of my actions? or Is that flicker of eternal damnation swaying the things that I feel I should do?

Am I a bad person because I still have to make that choice to do good things. Is it wrong to convince children that they will go to Hell for an eternity if they don't "act" good. I mean it really is an act for most of the people most of the time. I don't mean people are phony, but it behooves one to be kind and generous...so is that truely who we are or just what we've been trained to be.

You can train a dog with kindness and fear, both methods work, but which is better for the animal. The purpose of the training is to get the animal to do what is against its nature, to make the owners life easier...does that make the dog good and the owner bad?

Are your parent's to blame or is the Church to blame for the training you didn't ask for? Perhaps in one instance the Church is, if the parents also believe that truth, because they also believe they are protecting you, but then what about Santa Clause? Your parents know that is a lie, but they force that belief on you to gain your behavior, even to the extent of threatening that Santa won't come if you're bad.

I watched the first season back in 2015, then lost track of the show for the past four years. I finally heard some friends had been watching it, so I jumped on the band wagon and have been catching up over the past couple of weeks.

I finally finished the 4th season, and I still think the show has held up over time. I was going to give it 4 stars, but they really have some great story plots. Like when I think they really aren't going anywhere, they throw something in their explaining everything that is going on. So I'm still excited for the upcoming season, unfortunately now that I'm caught up I have to wait like five months or so.

Not really one for the classic zombie lover. Zombies were more like "Return of..." instead of "Night of...", but it was still a fun movie to watch. Made me laugh a couple of times, and the production value was way better than I thought it was going to be!

So if you are just looking for something to laugh with friends, I would say go for it!

I realized I haven't put anything in here in a bit, but now that it's been getting into the summer heat, my enthusiasm has once again skyrocketed.

After a couple weeks of stressing about getting the right rack, I finally just bought one and went with it. My good friend and movie partner, Chris, helped me get the roof rack installed. Which I'm glad for because it was harder than I thought it was going to be, definitly a two person job! He also had some great insight into the order of assembly, which at first I was like "what?", then I was like "yeah!".

So we got that sucker on the roof, and it's holding steady. Next he's going to help me get the solar panel mounted, and that is really the only big thing left to do. After that it's just gravy!

In other news, I got bored on the weekend and started to build out a closet in the back. It covers the battery, and will probably mainly be for clothes. I just needed something to help tidy things up, because the several loose plastic beens were easy to get into the first several times, but now are juts kind of annoying.

Still planning on a launch date of this year, hopefully before Fall hits.

Growing up my parents would constantly tell me how I have to plan for things. Not just life, but the shorter 5 or 10 year plans, even just planning for the week.

Of course over years of observing and studying their actions, I've learned why I'm such a bad planner...it's because they really don't plan like they think they do.

My father is notorious for telling my brother and I that he needs help with opening/closing the pool, or some other project that is going to take most of the day, on the day that he wants to do it. It's like Friday night or Saturday morning, and he just springs some project that for some reason has to be done that day. I didn't mind it so much when I was younger, but now I have limited time, so without a heads up I usually can't help. Then he seems to get kind of mopey, like I don't want to spend time with him.

The thing is that even if I do have time, he doesn't really have a plan. Once again, when I was a kid it was no big deal because I was mainly a gofer and I was just trying to watch and learn what he was doing. Now I'm old, my knees don't work as well, and lord forbid I try and pull a zero-to-sprint without...well pulling something. I've learned a lot from him, I can actually do work now, but he has no plan setup that isn't linear. Like most adults I don't have time to just sit there and watch him do things, while I hole a flash light. That's just not a good use of either of our time.

My mother isn't much better. She does the same thing, but with house chores. I've even tried several times to explain, that waiting until the weekend to do all of the house chorse is just more exhausting and not what I want to do on my weekend. I've experimented with making a list of chores and breaking it down into a daily thing. Spending 30 minutes or less each day after work is way easier, and leaves your entire weekend free.

Alas, my mother doesn't want to see that the things are clean and since she didn't do things during the week, she usually just ends up yelling at me for not doing anything on Saturday. She's one of those people that if she is doing something that she doesn't like doing, then everyone else has to be miserable too. She will not hesitate to berate others about how they are sitting around while she is doing all the work...even though she isn't, and by noon she will be napping on the couch.

It's no wonder that when I met my good friends Matt, I spent every minute I could at his house. Looking back I realize that all I was trying to do was to escape. The less time I spent at home, the better my mental stability.

So the more I work on trying to run DnD online, the more I realize it's a lot more work to do it online.

You have to start out by researching different systems, to figure out what capabilities they have and what is easiest for you to get working. You have to take into account things like what can your players use and if they have problems you have to fix them.

Then building maps can be a pain and makes it hard for players to focus on roleplaying because they have a screen in front of them with a map. Once you show the map, they want to see more of the map. I'm trying to figure out an easier way to do this. I've been toying with the idea of hiding the map, when combat ends, but don't think it's going to work well.

Where as in person you have one setup for a fight, then nothing else happens with the board so the players have no choice but to switch their focus to the DM and other players.

Well I've got to attend to some family time, so if I figure out a way to smooth out the bumps I'll put another entry in.

I started to use this for building DnD maps, and I'm liking it so far! It's pretty easy to use and, if you pay for it, you get a lot of textures and assets that work with it.

It looks like they are still rolling out some updates, but as is it works really well. You can even use it as an online or VR tabletop system. I haven't tried this feature yet, but I was watching videos on it and it looks pretty smooth. Right now I've just been exporting the maps and pulling them into Roll20.

It's neat that it's pretty easy to add lighting/shadows to the level, but I do wish there was a way to set it so that everything automatically had it applied. As far as I can tell you can only add it to one object at a time, so if you want things to look really cool it takes some time.

https://www.dungeonfog.com/

I understand this much better, since I've been trying to run a Dungeons & Dragons game. So difficult sometimes, but still having fun so hoping it all smooths out.

I was going to make a fart joke, but I held it in.

I found this a little difficult to use, not enough assets, not enough functionality, and I found something that is better. Also, the issues or questions that I did have and found on the forums, came down to things that the developer wasn't going fix, instead saying to users don't use the tool the way you want to, use it the way we want you to use it.

For example, many people are interested in scaling objects by only the X or Y axis, but the developer replies by just saying you shouldn't need to scale at all because the objects are the size they are supposed to be. And can't even fathom why someone would want to scale by only one verticie since it would distort the image even more.

"In fact, I do not quite understand why do you want to scale objects. First of all, they are the size of which should be, secondly, they are raster objects that lose much in quality being scaled up" -developer

The point being that you don't need to understand why a creative person wants to do something, you just give them the option to do it. That's the whole point of creativity, is going beyond the box!

https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ

I don't care what anyone says, this song is awesome! I remember back when getting "Rick Rolled" was the big thing online, and it took me a while to figure out that it was a bad thing. I was always like, cool I like this song! The only downside I had about getting Rick Rolled was that then I would sit there and listen to the whole song and froget what I was in the middle of doing.

I mean come on he's a snappy dresser. Great hair, good smile, upbeat tune. Look at that very tastefully done video. Not over the top, but still classy. Even the ladies are sensibly dressed and tastefully dancing. Lets ignore the fact that he's singing to an empty room with one bartender. That's neither here nor there.

SHAZAM!! Damn, this movie was way better than I thought it was going to be. I mean I thought it was going to be pretty good, because the trailer was showing a good mix of action and humor but I really enjoyed the whole thing...well actually I think we ended up missing the first ten minutes or so but nothing that we couldn't figure out during the movie.

Now keep in mind this was one of the heros I didn't know much about growing up. Like I knew the name and I knew he was a kid...well I think at one point it wasn't one kid but it took like seven kids that had to be like in a certain range of one another to change into Shazam, and I remember them all being like foster kids. Like I said it felt like the creators were still trying to work out the details of the superhero, so I never really latched on like I did with XMen and Venom and some others. Getting off track...

Point being if you like humor and superheros I think you're going to like this one! I'm not going to say the ending, but I did like the way the last fight branched out the way it did.

Love it! It's a zombie show, but it's a comedy one, so that made me a little more open to check it out.

Great casting choices in this show. It just feels like everyone fits their character to a T. I've also enjoy their slant on zombies, I don't want to give too many details about it, but it's got some neat little twists that are pretty good and keep you guessing.

I binged the first three seasons of this, and I'm excited for a fourth one. Now from a quick search it looks like they haven't officially approved season four, at this time, but it seems to be popping up a lot on social media too so hopefully they go for it!

I just had to put these up. These aren't a new candy by any means, but I just love them so much! Best consumed at pocket temperature.

Luckily, I have yet to get a cavity, but I certainly believe that in the end it will be because of these delicous little chocolate caramel candies.

I have to force myself to buy the smallest bag, because I'll just keep eating them. I've easily gone through a bag in a day, which just happened again last Sunday. I woke up and put a couple in my pocket, went downstairs to make some eggs, and while I was waiting for the eggs to cook I snacked on some pocket candy.

I ended up eating more candy, then real food before lunch hit. My stomach was even upset from the large quantities of sugar I was putting in it and I still continued to eat them.

On the plus side, it does make me brush my teeth more...mostly because I want to make sure I have teeth to keep eating them. This is the main reason I hope I don't get dentures. Come on scientist! Figure out how we can regrow our teeth! I'm thinking we should get at least three teeth regrowths a lifetime.

Yes, another zombie show.(notice the period instead of an exclamation point) I have to admit, it's kind of odd that they keep pumping out more and more zombie content.

I mean I know that The Walking Dead is still pulling in viewers...or I guess a better thing to say would be pulling in money, but this over saturation of the market is kind of how things die and we have to wait years for them to re-emerge. It would be great if different concepts would be scattered about the viewing landscape, so that we get more of a sprinkle here and there to wet our appetites. But I digress...

This is actually a pretty cool series. I like the way they set it up, so that each episode is broken up into these mini-glimpses of what is going on for different people/groups over the same span of time. It's like here is what is happening to group A, now here is what was happening to group B during that same time of what you watched happen to group A. Inevitably the groups/people cross paths or reconnect, which is a really cool setup. I know this happens a little bit in other shows, but the scale they do it on in this show is more indepth.

Now just a heads up for the purest. These are your fast change, runner zombies, that have enough thought power to climb and course correct. Just wanted to throw that out there, because I've realized that sometimes I get pulled out of the flick when I have to right my zombie logic during the show. Which is basically me talking out loud to myself something like, "Zombies wouldn't be able to do that...nope calm down Captain Judgy, this is just their take on it, lets just enjoy their world building".

There were maybe two scenes where the shakey came was a bit too much and went on for too long, but all-in-all I enjoyed it!

I was reading some article that said the Earth is like 4.54 billion years old plus/minus 50 million years. That made me remember something about how religion said that it wasn't that old. This led me to start thinking that maybe there was just a miscommunication between the source and the writer of the Bible.

From a couple of quick searches it looks like Moses essentially wrote the Bible, and more-or-less took dictation from God on The Beginning. This of course conjures visions of God laying back on a couch, while Moses feverishly toils at a desk trying not to miss anything, and not wanting to ask God to repeat or slow down.

Taking those bits of information I start to remember when I was younger and a large harddrive was measured in MegaBytes. The thought of anything larger was either not named or just wasn't common enough to be remembered.

This made me start to think would anyone in Moses's generation even know what a billion...or even a million was? I looked at a couple of articles that say that words for these numbers didn't even exist until we needed them. Which to me makes sense, because much like technology we don't really need to even know sizes until it becomes common place. Can you imagine someone back then trying to keep track of a million of something, they would have to hire multiple people just keep count!

Personally I vaguely know that a PetaByte is after TeraByte, but I have to look up the next two after that one. I love technology but like with most things I don't need to memorize something that I have no use for, and when personal computers get to that point it will be no problem adding the next size to my vocabulary.

I'm getting a little off track, but bringing this back around. My point is that maybe as Moses was writing all this stuff down, that God said it took him about six billion to make the Earth before he decided to take a break. Moses basically heard six and some word he didn't know so just wrote down day and kept writing.

Heck I remember growing up and I hated to talk to my parents about houses and cars and time. This was because I was a child trying to learn things, and they would keep short cutting terms. When you tell a child that a house costs 199, a child doesn't understand that you mean 199,000, because a child doesn't learn those shortcuts in school. Shortcuts are not consistent, nor good for children that want to learn!

That's kind of what it comes down to though. God is essentially like a parent in the eyes of Moses. The parent is not only the provider but the one who posses all the knowledge. Moses isn't going to constantly stop and ask him to explain every little detail, so he's probably just going to get the bulk of it and try to make a logical decision about the information he's given.

I guess my whole point is that it always seems that relgion is trying to debunk science on things like this(or vice versa), but what if the reality is that both sides are actually right? It's like two kids arguing over a balloon being dark red or maroon.

Maybe all the arguing is just from a misunderstanding that happened thousands of years ago by one guy not understanding one word. Stop trying to prove each other wrong and instead put that energy into a more productive outlet.

Yes, the book of monsters! Muwhahaha! This was a lower budget movie and sometimes they stayed focus on the monsters too long, which made it easy to see that low budget monster build.

It wasn't a bad one to watch. Not really any new concepts in it, and it had a bit of silliness too.

It blew my mind when I realized Jordan Peele wrote this...which made me look up what else he's wrote, and led me to find out that he also wrote Get Out (2017), which again blew my mind.

I actually figured out the movies while I was watching them, but I still enjoyed the heck out of them. They were just a good time.

When they started to explain more of what was going on, in this movie, it blew my mind because I had the exact same conversation with my friend at work like last year. Now don't get me wrong, he took it a further step in a thriller/horror direction so that was cool.

After seeing this I started to think he's one of the people that I would probably get along with, and from the way he writes I feel like we would be good at fueling each others imaginations. In any event I hope he keeps it up, and I'm excited for the upcoming Twilight Zone series he is working on!

Well I haven't been working much on my site, because I've been putting my free time into building a web programming for work and trying to startup a D&D campaign with some friends.

So just haven't had enough time on my hands to finish the Edit button and try to fix the Spellcheck. Which doing either one of those would essentially be enough to temporarily handle the problems of the other one.

On the plus side, the site for work has got me thinking about general website infrastructure, so that should help me overall. It's nice to work on something that may actually be used by other people as well as help me at my current day job. It just kind of pushes me to keep at it, instead of getting into my normal rut of "why am I doing this? no one cares? I'm the only one that's going to see this? etc.".

These are issues I've always been trying to work out of my psyche, but it's not the easiest thing fix by one's self.

Good movie, but just felt kind of like the standard Marvel format at this point. I wasn't really blown away by it, or anything like that.

I also thought it would be more critical information to get before watching Avengers: Endgame, which I plan to see next, but wasn't anything really critical as far as I could pickup.

About all the movie does is give you a quick background of Captain Marvel, which doesn't really matter, and an idea of how powerful she is. That's cool and all but unless she can remove the infinity gauntlet she still isn't a match for Thanos.

What this all means is that I'm eager to see the new Avengers movie, to see how they play all this out.

Side Note: Kind of a bummer it looks like Marvel's website has been revamped to push the movie stuff. It use to be like looking at the Marvel cards, where it listed their stats, abilities, backgrounds, and was just very straight forward.

This one was hard to get through. It was an anthology, and I didn't necessarily hate it, but I don't think a lot of people will be able to make it through it.

Acting was okay in it, but the quality wasn't the best. I didn't mind the old style filming with the graininess or even the tracking effect they did, but some times the shots were too hand-camy or not framed enough for the details they were trying to get across.

Like in one shot they wanted you to see that a picture on the wall was the picture of a person from one of the other stories, but the shot wasn't framed on the picture it was framed on the wall and there were a lot of things on the wall to take your focus. The shot was also just a couple of seconds so it was hard to figure out what they wanted you to see.

To counter issues like that they would have two hosts, that were watching the film, that would fill in those gaps. So one would ask the other about the picture that you could barely make out. They would also explain the story you just watched, so it kind of took out any discussion...that is if you knew anyone that watched this to talk with it about.

So you're probably wondering why I didn't give it one star? Maybe it was the 80's feel it had going on, or maybe it was that the stories weren't that bad if they had just had more money to improve upon the quality and special effects and flesh out the ending a bit more. Basically it had enough for me to stay interested.

Google Wanted Feedback about The New Gmail, so this is what I sent them.

I have to be straight, I stopped using GMail because the interface wasn't that good. The only reason I started to use my gmail.com email again was because of Inbox. It was a clean interface, easy to use, and quick to run through my emails.

I keep trying to use GMail, but it's just not a good layout. I started to look at it on my phone, and I couldn't even find important emails that I had pinned or were waiting on. I finally started to figure out that things were just being pushed to the Updates tab...and I'm not even sure why a new email is being pushed to that tab.

I guess I just don't get it. Inbox, in my humble opinion, was just a revolutionary jump for email. I seriously saw that design as what all web based email clients would start to copy.

I've talked to everyone one of my friends that use gmail as their primary email address and I haven't heard one of them say anything positive about losing Inbox.

You're really taking a huge step back here, and I don't see any real changes that can justify putting the word "New" before Gmail to get people hyped about this change.

The only other site change that bothered me this much was when Netflix went from a clean 5 star rating system, to their current thumbs up/down debacle. I don't even rate things anymore...but lets not get into that.

A thought occurred to me the other night. If you don't eat off a dirty dish because you could get sick,  but you don't wash all soap off a dish and get get sick...then what does it mean to actually be dirty? 

Let's say I cook a chicken and take it out of the oven, then I drop it on the floor. The people seeing this won't eat it because it's dirty. Now if I take that same chicken out of the oven and pour soap on it, people seeing this won't eat it because it's dirty...or is it clean.

I guess what I'm trying to go for is that I think saying that water cleans things is accurate, but saying that soap cleans isn't, even though that's how it's depicted. 

I keep seeing the phrase "Naturally & Artificially Flavored", and I'm having a hard time with it. It just seems like they should just say "Artificially Flavored".

It's like if I have a pot of water and a pot of salt water and I pour them together into one pot. Do I have a pot of water and salt water, or just salt water?

It's like they are trying to get brownie points for the natural flavoring. Somehow that is going to make it healthier? It's like people that try to pass-off carrot cake as a healthy dessert. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the bad stuff always negates the good stuff.

If you want to continue to put this trivial label on your product then kick it up a notch and add in the percentage/ratio of artificial vs natural flavoring in your product.

I'm just saying that because you have some elderly bonnet wearing Italian lady squeezing the juice from one blueberry into each ten thousand gallon vat of your product, that doesn't count as naturally flavored in my book.

A little sour, a little sweet, a little yum-yum in my tum-tum. I like sour stuff, and even though these weren't like super sour, they still hit the spot.

If you like sour stuff and you like jelly beans, you're probably going to like these, like I do...did I use enough "likes" to get you interested?

I knew it was going to happen. I've got several things going on that are important to me, and all I was thinking was that things were going too smoothly.

First my laptop failed in the middle of a Windows update and it just started to crawl after that. Luckily my friend Brian suggested that I run a chkdsk, because that had fixed a similiar issue with his computer. Sadly it took me like a week to resolve the issue. Whatever had messed up was allowing the computer to boot, but it was running at like a fourth the speed. Just getting to the command prompt took like 20 minutes of waiting for the machine to not only boot, but bring up menu to get to it. Since I could only work on it after work, it was like doing one thing a night.

I got everything running, thanks again for the tip Brian, then I was already to get back on finishing the first version of a program I'm developing for work. I just needed to do a handful of things to start an actual test at work and BAM, I get sick.

Most years I don't get sick, but when I do get sick it hits me hard. The Friday my laptop was ready to go was the day I went down for the count. I was laid out all weekend and had to take off Monday. Started to feel better on Tuesday, well enough to drag myself into work, but I was physically exhausted by the end of the workday.

I don't know how the rest of you are, with getting sick. For me I start to get better incrementally. So like when the initial stuck in bed thing is over, I basically slowly get better over the course of like a week. Like I'll wake up feeling great, and then like four hours into the day I feel horrible again. Then the next day I'll be good for like five or six hours, then feel like crap again. Eventually it gets to the point where I can make it from morning to bedtime feeling fine, and that is when I know I'm better.

Anyways, I'm like two weeks behind on everything I've been working on. Program, website, trying to startup a rpg, and van build. Currently trying to get maybe ten hours put in over this weekend to get back to where I want to be. Keep your fingers crossed people!

This is a hard one to rate. It wasn't really a bad movie...I guess I might have been expecting a lot more from it.

It was kind of like that movie The 33, where the mine workers get trapped in the mine, but it's just three dwarves and there is no real information on what is going on outside of the mine.

There is a lot of information that they talk about to help you form a picture of what has been transpiring over the years and how they got into the situation, but it's one of these movies that eventually just fades to black and leaves you with that frustrating feeling.

There are also a lot of dark scenes in this movie. I get they are trying to give you that sense of how dark a mine is when your light source goes out, but just watching a black or barely illuminated screen with random sounds can easily be overdone.

I think I might have been just really looking for a dwarf movie, with large mines, and expertly crafted stone workings of a vast underground kingdom. All I got was three dwarves trapped in a small cave with very little combat.

This show was really slow to start, but I just stuck with it because I enjoyed all the crazy things that were going on.

At first I was just watching it while I was doing some other work, but it really started to come together as it went along. Eventually I just couldn't do other things while I was watching it, because I didn't want to miss anything.

I'm just about done with season one, but I think there are only two seasons. If the second season is as good as the first, that's going to be a bummer. I can kind of understand why though. As stated before it took me a while to get into the first season, so if you aren't binge watching it, it could feel draggy.

I'm not finished with the first season of this just yet, but this has been are really great series!

I don't know if it's only going to be one season, but as long as they wrap it up nicely I'm not really concerned.

The first two episodes are a little slow, but it really starts to take off after that. It has just about everything I'm looking for in a great show.

My constant battle in life, lack of time. Well this week has been rough. My laptop failed a Windows Update, so it was out of commission for the week. Well it would startup but was going so slow that it was unusable.

It's stressful when you are trying to fix something, but can only work on it after work. My whole work day is me trying to think of ways to fix the laptop, and then having to wait 8 hours to test what I've been thinking about trying.

Also, stressful when it gets me a week behind in a side-project, I'm doing for work. Something that could potentially help me speed up and remove some stress from my daily 7 to 3 job.

I'm excited to be working on the project, even though it's almost like I'm working two-shifts. On the plus side, I'm not being pressured from work to get it done, so aside from my own expectations of completing it, it's kind of a work on it when I feel like it.

On the downside, some days that I feel like it, I have to go into work my normal job. Very confusing, but I'm glad I chose a manual labor job because it is helping me prove one of my previous thoughts. Which is that if I am not in a job programming all day, it pushes me to program more when I'm not at work. My problem before was that after programming all day long, my mental and spinal fatigue made it almost impossible to do work at the end of the day.

My point is more that if I'm right about this, then maybe I'm on the right track with this van-life and traveling around for a bit. Here's to hoping something good comes out of it!

If you don't know me, I've been working on a van conversion. Part of the reason is to just explore the around the country for a couple of months. Maybe I've just watched too many National Lampoon movies, but I think I will enjoy it.

I want to be able to draw a little better than I currently can. I found the video below, where the guy talks about some exercises and techniques. Sounds pretty straight forward and I like the way he draws, so I've started to work on what he is talking about.

https://youtu.be/oPJfS4rHnzY

I don't think food critics should be allowed to drink alcohol, because when you are drinking everything taste awesome!

Got tired of researching and bought a power inverter, it should be here in the next couple of days. Pretty sure it will cover my neads.

I also already have small electric heater that hopefully the inverter can handle. Everything looks good on the details, so fingers crossed.

Oh yeah, and I think I came up with a DIY way to build an electric air cooler. I'm going to just spring for the parts and see if it works out, but basically I'm planning on just using at least one enclosed liquid cooling unit for a computer processor. Essentially it's the same thing I have in my gaming rig. Mostly because every time I try to find like a portable or camping unit, they all require some kind of ventilation. This is something I'm not really interested in setting up. We'll see how it goes!

I'm wondering if I can run an InstaPot off of the small setup I'm going to do, but still not sure about this. Mostly because I would still have no way to store leftovers. Even the small InstaPots are for two to three people...I may just get one and try it out and if it doesn't work out just let my parents keep it.

Great movie! Enjoyed the animation and comedy in it. Don't worry this isn't another reboot of the Spider-man series, they even joke about that in the very beginning.

I feel like this may even be a way to help introduce the multi-verse theory to people that are new to the concept. Which would be really cool if they had planned this to get ready for upcoming live action movies, perhaps even to help with something that may occur in the upcoming Infinity Wars movie.

Although the run time is a little bit long, I would still recommend it. Especially if you, or someone you know, needs a quick brush up on what the multi-verse is.

After noticing that I tend to do several posts at in one day, then no posts for the rest of the week. I wanted to setup a system that would fix this imbalance in content.

I've added in a post-date system. So that setting a future date on a post will hold that post until it is the appropriate date to show it. Hopefully this will allow more consistency in my content.

This was the third movie, in a Godzilla Netflix trilogy. I liked the first two better. This one was just kind of drawn out. When I watch a Godzilla movie, I pretty much just want to see and learn about Godzilla.

This spent more time on the natives and an alien's spiritual concepts. I started to get to the point where I was just fast forwarding through the jibber-jabber.

I don't know it just seems like they just didn't explain the last part. I can only assume that Godzilla was just going to leave them alone as long as they didn't make any technological advances.

These are awesome. I'm not even a gummy bear kind of person, but I really liked these. So as long as they aren't lying about what's in them, they seem like a great candy to me.

A Keto friendly coffee creamer. A little bit easier than making your own Keto creamer. If you don't like coconut than you probably won't like this. Apparently the Keto stuff is supposed to help sustain energy, so that you don't crash.

I'm going to say it worked pretty well. I didn't really feel a huge drop in energy like I usually do, when caffeine wears off. Then again this is one of those things where it's hard to say that it was the cause. There are so many things that effect energy levels through out the day, that it's really hard to measure.

Simply put. I thought it was tasty and I didn't mind substituting the sugary flavored Coffee-Mate that I usually put in my coffee, which I know isn't good for me. So from a health stand point it has to be better for me.

A lot of people think that I don't plan things, but I actually just make very vague plans. Today I think I realized why I do this, which is simply because I hate waiting. When I keep things vague it's more of a way to trick myself. It prevents this switch in my head from flipping to the waiting position.

There are two positions:

The planning position, which is more of an active state of mind. Even though everything is actually worked out and ready, this active state keeps my mind checking and rechecking things. Accomplishments are set on more of a monthly and at most a weekly deadline, but there is always wiggly room.

The waiting position, on the other hand, is a passive state. It's like I've put down the pencil and gone over everything with a sharpie. Now the only thing that has to be done is to wait it out, which is usually because I'm just waiting for the pile of money to get large enough to complete the end goal.

This is where the problem comes in, during this waiting position. At this point I know that where I currently am isn't permenant. That soon I'll be free of this mundane repetitve daily minutiae, whether it's for a week or longer I just won't have to be forced to deal with it. So when I'm in this state of mind, all that I have to think about is that I'm just waiting for the money to accumulate. With nothing to organize or figure out, it just hits me that I'm just waiting and there is nothing I can do to speed that up. 

The bad thing is that since I can see an end to my current situation, I kind of become a jerk. I just don't really care to be cordial anymore. Being cordial is actually pretty exhausting. I mean trying to stay positive, especially when you keep dealing with the same problems everyday and no one you tell seems to care. I just get to this point where I'm like, why the hell should I care, if no one else does? Why should I continue to stress myself out about these things that I won't have to continue to deal with? Why do I always put too much effort into these things?

...I don't know if I got off topic there or not, but it's late and I need to get some sleep.

The Scraper

These are the ones that put a fork in their mouth and for some unthinkable reason use their teeth to pull the food off the fork. The sound of metal scrapping against enamel can be heard, like finger nails on chalkboards, as they don't seem to know how to use their lips for pulling and teeth for chewing.

The Breather

The person that doesn't seem to know how to manage breathing and eating at the same time. These individuals sound as if they are being drowned, as they desperatly gasp for air after swallowing each mouth full, before plunging another bite into their still gasping mouths.

The Smacker

One of the lips many purposes is to create a seal that keeps food in your mouth, but for some reason not everyone understands this. With every bite chewed they need to part their lips, releasing a smacking sound of saliva and partially mashed food. Perhaps this is to alert others around them that they are feasting, perhaps it's so their teeth gain more momentum for mastication, or perhaps it's just to drive the perople around them slowly insane.

Working a bit slow today, so I just ran my site through a SEO analyzer to get an idea of where I currently stand with that. Not too bad so far. I did notice that the favicon wasn't up to snuff, so decided to mess around with that a bit.

Apparently I had to add some more "options" to cover all the different and magical devices out there now a days. I think I have everything in there now. Had to put in a couple of different sizes, some XML, and add some header links in.

I know the regular viewer of the site won't see what the New Post form looks like, so I put a before and after picture of how I cleaned up the form view.

Changed the topics and the rating from radio buttons to dropdowns. Was trying to figure out if I could put the New Topic field into the dropdown, but have yet to figure out how or if this is possible. I'll look into it again later.

The date field now keeps the format shown in the input box's placeholder and I moved the current date into the append part of the field. Although I won't forget how I format dates, I like to see it displayed and even though the current date is as hard to find as looking at the corner of my screen I like just having it sit to the side. I kind of want to add one of those dropdown calendars, but just seems like a little more research than I feel like doing at the moment.

I finally took the time to put in TinyMCE and the plugin to insert images. This adds a bunch of convience when typing up posts, giving me the ability to easily format without the need to insert html tags.

This will also make things like paragraph seperation easier, instead of just dumping a large block of text into the user's lap.

I haven't used the image plugin before, so I may need to tweak it a bit. Reading through the documentation it appears that some more features can be activated with it, allowing me to edit images. As for now I can just insert them, which is well enough because that will help me with adding reviews and ratings.

Was looking at my notes and remembered I wanted to put a rating system in for posts that have to do with reviewing various things. At first it was just going to be for movies and shows, but figured I can rate other things too. Well I say other things, but mostly the other thing would probably just be food and drink products. I'm going to go with a 5 star system, because I always liked Netflix's original rating system. Basically 1 is hate it and 5 is love it.

Just had to add in a breakpoint and a pull option on the post headings to get it to layout the way wanted on small screens. The edit button is going to be a little tricky but I think I came up with an easy way to handle it. Still want to implement tinymce, so I can format the posts. Need to see if that will also implement a way to add images, if not I have a simple idea for that...I think it's simple...yeah should be fine.

As with most things in life I'm backwards in this whole Mondays being the most difficult. For me Mondays are my best workdays! I've got three great nights of sleep, so I come in energetic, alert, and ready to get things done. In contrast Friday is my worst day. I'm exhausted, both physically and mentally. Haven't had a good night of sleep in a week, so just getting up in the morning is a challenge. All I want to do is get through the day so I can relax and not be under pressure to get anything done...I guess that's why people see me as indecisive when I'm hanging out. It's more that I relax by knowing I don't have to rush to get anything done. I get to just let everyone else make decisions and go with the flow.

Finally pulled the trigger on getting a solar panel kit for my van. I was just getting tired of being stuck in a research hole about it. Just putting so much time into looking things up and comparing what others had done, and since I'm no electrician I was just second guessing and worrying too much. Since it really is the next big step in what I needed to do I just got home from a rough day at work and decided I would just go with my gut and figure it out or make it work. It really wasn't that expensive, and hopefully it is as easy to setup as the diagrams are showing me. Most of my concerns about watts and all that I had to just use what I knew about building computers and figure out what I would exactly be using power for. Finally deciding that heating and cooling would be the biggest power drains, and in particular heating is a bigger concern then cooling. I found a small heater for an outlet that uses about 350W of power. The inverter I'm looking at pushes something like 1000W, so that should be fine. It's really more about figuring out how long until the battery is drained, that I'm not 100% about, but the good thing is that I do know I can create a battery array if I need more juice. So far my handful of tests with sleeping in the van have resulted in me learning that I'm fine until the temperature drops below roughly 45 degrees(F). That seems to be when my body wakes me up to alert me that I'm getting too cold. That's good to know because it means I can set the heater as low as 50. Got to hold off on installing the solar panels until I get the battery and inverter. Mostly because the power regulator says it needs to be connected to the battery before the panels, but hopefully I should have those within the next month. I think the biggest challenge of it all is going to be attaching the panel to the roof. That's the only thing I'm the most worried about. Just looks like I might have to drill into the roof to secure the panel, and I'm never 100% on anything that is going to permanently modify the body of the vehicle.

Took some time today to finish up the new post code. So now I can just add posts using the interface instead of doing a direct database entry. Much more convenient and will allow me to add posts from my phone while I'm out and about. Also added an input option to create new topics with the post. I like this option better instead of creating a whole new dialog to do this. Just have to do the edit/update code and that should be the main bulk of what I need for the site at this point.

Life can be difficult when you lose someone special. The easiest decisions are the ones that are black and white, where the most difficult are the ones that lay within that grey zone. The grey decisions are the ones that end up hurting the most. No matter how much you weigh the possibilities, the scales just never tip far enough in one direction or the other. I was forced to go against my feelings on this most recent one, and even though it saddens me when I think about the great person I may never get to see again...I have to believe it was the best decision for both of us at this point in my life. I hope some day we can make amends and share our stories and adventures once again.

I just sat down and hooked up login panel real quick. So now when the form is submitted it checks the submission against the database to verify if the user is valid or not. Now I just have to add in visibility options for valid users. I'll try to do that tomorrow, but not sure if I'll be up to it so may just do it on the weekend...kind of want to hammer out the new and edit posts abilities this weekend too.

Started to add in the login forms and controllers. Kind of going a bit slow, mostly because I've built logins and such before and it's just a little tedious. Kind of been a bit blah these past couple of weeks. Luckily I just pushed myself today and started to work on it, so now the progress should pickup.

Was going to setup the Date menu to be expandable but decided to just set it up in years for now. So changed the name from Dates to Years and have it display those accordingly. Just felt like a much simpler fix for right now. I implemented the Topic Menu too, so posts can be filtered out using either Years or Topics now. As an extra I also added the active class to the menu item that had been clicked on. So if someone clicks to filter and goes back to the menu, they will see what they had clicked as a reminder that the posts are being filtered. Later I'm going to add that active class to the Topic and Year title of the menu so they won't have to use the dropdown to see it. That will just mean I need to move some of the HTML into the function, so didn't want to mess around with that now, because I'm hoping to implement the create new and edit post functionality tonight...since I've been putting that off for so long.