insanehorizons.net

Well I often say that I am going to mend my ways and post more often to this blog. I am beginning to understand that when I say this I am lying to myself and someday I will have to sit down with myself and with great introspect and subtlety, have a conversation that I am just injuring myself and looking very foolish when I don’t tell the truth to myself.

With that being said I now will try and post something less than moronic.

Well we have been putting a pool in for the last 20 weeks. The contractor told us 6-8 weeks and we are now at week 20, and it is just a big cement hole with really nasty looking water in the bottom. Moral of the story, never sign an event based contract with a contractor, always use dates to put boundaries on their performance.

So this is the Cad version of the pool;

This is what my backyard looked like a couple of months ago;

Then we started making progress;

Got the gunite sprayed;

Finally later on the deck was laid;

And then some color and acrylic was put down;

And hopefully today I go home and the screen enclosure will finally be up.  Still no equipment or surface to hold water but we do what we must.

That is all for now….

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When I retired out of the Air Force in 2007 I had started down a road of becoming rotund.  There I said it.  In a matter of a year I had increased my body weight by about 80 or 90 lbs.  What can I say, I was happy to not have the stress of forced compliance as far a physical fitness goes.

My doctor said I was going to die if I didn’t quit it.  She had been witness to about 30 lbs of gain.  I took that to heart and did my best to readopt the Air Force methods of losing weight.  It worked for about 15 lbs but my system was stubbornly holding on to the weight.

This led me to a search for something that would work.  If you watch infomercials all of the stuff out there will work.  But there is something wrong with that.  They don’t all work.  There is a balance needed to bridge the behavior and the new behavior and some fancy machine doesn’t do that.  in my case it did happen to be an infomercial product, but I didn’t know that.  I had someone suggest p90X.  I searched and found the company and read about all their programs and settled for Chalean extreme. 

What a difference.  Lose weight by building muscle mass.  We know that lean muscle burns more calories so why don’t we focus on that.  It made sense.  It wasn’t just the program though it was the membership in team beach body where I found support, tools and all the information I needed to be successful.  I have dropped 15 pounds and 12 inches so far, and am having no trouble staying focused and energized.  So now, if you read my blog, you will have to listen a lil bit to my zealotry about fitness.  If you want ignore, but if you cant seem to get anywhere with the treadmill, check it out on the left.

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Lately work has been hectic.  It seems like we run around in circles and get nothing done.  I blame myself, everyone wants to own every process.  Everyone with or without stake in the product wants their say so.  It is amazing that we consider ourselves successful.  If someone would get a clue and take ownership of theirs it would all straighten out, but instead we want to get full detail on things that aren’t part of our competency.  I don’t know if I am correct or not, but it makes me angry that our taxpayers are funding me and my coworkers and we do not take those dollars seriously.  We are just as bad as the rampant elected officials.

Programs wind up over budget, and over schedule because the government wraps itself around the axle on trivial details.  Reviewing a document and you only have it electronic so we reject because it wasn’t on CD.  A draft listing of items to be delivered and we latch up that it isn’t an exact accounting instrument yet.  A progress review with no deliverables and we fail the contractor on the review.  How can we fail them when nothing was delivered, we are only causing cost on the contractor because maybe we are bitter that we aren’t in industry making  it happen.

Most of my coworkers are not military and have not done there job anywhere except government service, but they are experts.  Does this not pass a logic test to anyone else except me?

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Boy have I been lax on posting to my blog.  So now my blog is part of the undead alliance.  I hope I will find entropy in it someday as the hunger is too great!

I have been meaning to post but have been so absent minded not caring that I just didn’t even look to post.  I have no one who reads my blog so why post?  Well it is in the vain hope that someday someone will read my blog. 

I have been thinking lately about starting my own business again.  Unfortunately that which I have experience doesn’t translate well into money, so it makes no business sense, so I try to get in volunteering at times.  I used to work on the Dunesteef audio fiction magazine, but the corporate vision and my vision diverged.  I still love their podcast but am more interested in trying to see these fiction blogs become more mainstream.

For fun I love air out my shorts.  absolutely crazy concept of two cool personalities getting together drinking and reading flash without editing or stops.  Sometimes hard to follow but is something new, which makes it refreshing.

The escape artists brand has potential to do this, but they are wavering a little lately.  I think after so long they are thinking it should be bigger, but unfortunately the “build it and they will come” motto doesn’t work in media today.  It takes much more than that, it takes a concerted effort to market oneself on the net.

I look at what some of the successful vloggers on YouTube do to market and I don’t see much of that going on in podcasts.

  I look at the highly recommended literary podcasts and the big ones usually have a corporate presence behind them.  A culture of vision and mission as it were.  I love the Selected Shorts brand, and they have some great sponsors and the readers are actually on stage and professional actors.  no sound effects, music etc and its a great NPR product.  I listen to the EA casts or Drabblecast and the core practice is missing.  Almost no sponsorship and no effective marketing and while in good position for rated podcasts, the are 100% listener funded directly.  I am not sure if this business model functions as a business or a co-op.

I find myself thinking about that these two industry concepts must meet.  Say a podcast that allows users to submit stories then animator amateurs to animate them, post them both iTunes and YouTube and market them for success.  Get a Google ads hookup and if views take off, the business model starts producing funds.  I think there is potential.

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Well today I have no agenda or smart quippet to shove out to the blogosphere to see if my wit can illicit a response.  I guess we all have off days.  It’s been eventful since Halloween.  My kids were actually pretty good for Halloween so I guess the uncomfortable toddler years are past and now we start having fun.

I lost about 28 pounds on my new diet/lifestyle.  This is no mean feat as I haven’t worried about my weight in years and then the doctor tells me its time to change.  Got me with the your family is too young for you to be this heavy.  I actually feel great about it so I guess I have the right motivation this time.

My car got hit while parked at my gym.  Of course on the cusp of me getting prepared to change cars.  Yeesh.

I am waiting for the government paper mill to finish up deciding how much they can potentially pay me.  This has been going on for months so hope is hard to find, but it is a much better job even if it does mean I may move again.

Getting ready for me and Young Ah to go to Jamaica next week on a couple’s vacation.  This one percolates in my brain like crazy, but it is all preconceptions and if I get half of the relaxation from this vacation as I imagine, we will be sitting good.

Making plans to go to my brother’s for thanksgiving.  All good, need to spend time with family that is here while I am here.  My dad wanted us to come together as he passed away and I think I can do a much better job of that. 

Life is good, kids are cute, humor is well mine and everyone who doesn’t laugh just missed the point.  Talk to you next time. -out

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