johnguinness's Diaryland Diary
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dead red winged blackbirds
I haven't checked the tickets I bought this afternoon for the $355 million lottery. I'd like to toy around with the possibilities a while before dealing with reality. All told, over the past four years I've probably put as much planning into the If I Win The Lottery idea as the American military did into the Normandy Invasion.
It's early enough in the year that I'm still looking at ways to make my life better. I tracked down a Firefox add-on called Blocksite, and blocked the cycling sites that can cause drama, especially the one with the forum. If I can stay away, my year will be much more calm, I won;t have people arguing with or insulting me, and I won't feel the need to defend people or help expose their mischief.
I've also abandoned being the breaking news guy. With Google News searches sorted by date, in any language, a click of the refresh button helped me be one of the first people to see a story when it posted to the Interwebs. If it was a story I thought people should see, I tweeted it for the cycling writers who followed me, and cycling website owners, and the general cycling fans. Some times I posted it to the forum. I enjoyed the role of finding bits and pieces that others would never see, and helping them get worked into articles in English. A few weeks ago I deleted all but ten of my twitter followers and locked up the account. I know maybe six of them, and the others are serious Contador fans. By locking the twitter and avoiding a lot of sites, I'm abandoning the need to be knowledgeable about a lot of the goings on in the sport, and of sharing that information. Blocksite was a positive step.
I've mentioned how much time I spent at JustinTV trying to stay entertained when there were no new shows. It's a frustrating experience, because I usually miss big chunks of the starts of films, and I settle for mediocre stuff. There are rarely subtitles when people speak other languages during a film that's in English, so Kill Bill for example loses a lot because there's no translation at all. Then there's the chat, which is tough to ignore if the film isn't good enough to keep my attention full screen. I enjoy a bit of interaction, making people laugh or whatever. But feeds like South Park are full of proud stoners, and homophobes, and people who really like to talk smack. Entourage (which stresses me out watching episodes back to back to back), has similar problems, but add in guys describing acts they'd like to do with the female characters, and gay guys cruising for other gay guys. It's not very entertaining.
But when I got up at noon, there was an e-mail to an old account offering me a free month of Netflix. I got excited, because commercial interruptions have really hurt my focus, and I'd love to have some variety. I started with a clean slate too - this was a different sign in than the last, where I had 500 films waiting in my Instant /view queue. I spent hours rating things, then rushed out to buy lottery tickets when I saw the jackpot amount. So far I watched Close Encounters Of the Third Kind, which was just okay. Now I just finished watching an old cowboy movie - the kind with lots of cattle and dust and a rattlesnake. It was only OK too, but I did watch it start to finish, and did get to see two complete films with no commercials and no vulgar chat or anti-Americanism. So with new TV episodes popping up, two weeks of the Australian Open on ESPN3, the NFL Playoffs, and Netflix, I figure I can avoid JTV for at least a month. My life will be better for it.
I watched the first episode of Biggest Loser. There were some major twists, some people who made decisions based on fandom over logic, but not until the logical ones had their way, and there's a lot of stuff going on that we're not seeing. I hope to pick up a little motivation, but I can't sit here at home and hope to emulate a guy who lost 41 pounds in one week. It's just not real life, at least in this basement apartment. That's more than five pounds a day, folks, I'm not going to high five over that.
Hah! A Spanish website just posted a story that the Contador decision might not happen this month, and I tweeted it to just my ten followers. I don't care if the rest of the English speaking world finds out. Result.
I'm anxious to see what small steps I come up with Wednesday to make my life better. I hope yours is getting better every day as well.
By the way, I'm totally up for some big story explaining the two occasions where thousands of birds dropped out of the sky, and the tens of thousands of dead fish along a river. "It happens all the time" is totally not cutting it.
2:09 a.m. - Wednesday, Jan. 05, 2011
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