Thanks to the good folks at Domain-by-Proxy and my paranoid attempts to keep even my location a secret (only the webmaster and my wife know about the site), Hit Coffee provides excellent cover for even the most paranoid blogger.

More than once people have commented that they wish that they could take advantage of anonymity. Well here’s your chance. If I know who you are (ie you comment or you have emailed me) I will provide you space to vent about your job. I’ll even help you set up a secret identity in my little fictional map if you like.

If you are at all interested, email me and let me know.

Okay, so some of my posts have gotten out of order somehow. Broken Promises was for some reason sent back in time. I tried to bring it to the top, but brought Talkin’ Trash to the top instead. So if you are so inclined, you may want to check the three preceeding posts to make sure that you caught them all.

Oh, and if any of you are for some reason using HitCoffee.org to access this site, I am letting it expire.

There’s been a lot going on. Every now and again it is worthwhile to consider one’s life looking inward instead of with a megaphone. I will be taking a brief break from the site. It will probably be back on in April. I’ll see y’all then.

Yeehaw. I just got a cease-and-desist letter from an entity that calls itself “Dixona Transport.”

I am evaluating my options as we speak.

Addendum: Here is the letter:

Mr. Truman,

I am writing to inform you that “Dixona” is a registered trademark of Dixona Transport, a Limited Liability Corporation in the State of Florida, with all rights reserved. Your web-site makes enough references to “Dixona” to appear first on a search using Google or Yahoo and this could cause potential customers to confuse an affiliation between your site and my company.

I respectfully ask that you remove all references to “Dixona” from your site. If you do not I will contact the following organizations about taking your site down or obtaining your identity to take you to court: Domains by Proxy your domain host, GoDaddy.com its parent company, and EV1Servers your site host. I will also consider taking other actions such as finding any other copyright or trademark violations on your site and contacting the holders of those copyrights or trademarks.

I appreciate your cooperation on this matter,

Michael Jeffries
President, Dixona Transport
[street address withheld]
St. Petersburg, FL 33703

Note: The name of the state has been changed from Dixona to Delosa.

An interesting topics that has been on my mind lately is the appropriate role that computer games play in our lives. I’ve never had a whole lot of patience for those who view any form of entertainment as uniformly good or uniformly bad. There are, I’m sure, various forms of entertainment with no redeeming value (cockfighting comes to mind), but to be blunt they are generally reserved for those people that are not exactly waiting to become productive members of society. A symptom rather than a disease.

I recently ran across an article on The Strategy Page that points out how video games are becoming an asset to our military:

American troops appear to have a considerable advantage because most of them grew up playing video games and using PCs. More and more military equipment uses computers, or are basically electronic gadgets. American troops require a lot less time to learn how to use this stuff, and tend to be very good with it. This extends from fire control systems in armored vehicles, to new radios, electronic rifle sights and training systems (which are very similar to those video games.)

I can also think of many other uses of video games. In addition to the old “eye-hand coordination” argument, I think they also help people develop the ability to think more quickly on their feet and make time-sensitive decisions when under pressure. It seems to me that most any task that involves cognitive or physical exertion is probably not a complete waste of time. Even spectator sports like football can be helpful. I’ve seen people who can barely string together a grammatically correct sentence discuss the intricacies of a 4-3 defense placed up against West Coast offense.

And so it is with video games. Some are certainly better than others, but curiously society by-and-large makes no attempts to distinguish between productive video games and non-productive. They are generally considered either all good or all bad, or to the extent that distinctions are made they are usually along the lines of violent or sexual content.

And yet while I can appreciate the contributions that video games make (or can make) to society, I can’t help but notice that the effects it seems to have on those I’ve seen partake in it regularly are predominantly negative. It seems that more than occasionally they become all-consuming to many of their participants. Those I know that game do so for several hours a day every day. Whatever the point of dimishing returns exist, I’m not sure they particularly care where that line is.

On the other hand, games are increasingly becoming a social experience. Multi-user games such as EverQuest or City of Heroes and their ilk actually encourage communication in those that are at a loss to communicate otherwise. In many cases I think of the people I know that are avid gamers and to whatever degree it may be hurting their social life, I’m pretty hard-pressed to say that their social life would be peachy-keen otherwise.

Video games have become less goal-oriented (where you jump through a specified number of hoops) and more life-oriented, where there is not a single set goal but rather a giant playing field that you build up characters and… socialize… by forming various alliances. And that makes me think about online communication.

The BBC recently had an article that touched on how predictions that online communication would diminish personal communication. I heard those arguments ad infinum back when I was BBSing. It was frequently said that online chatters were avoiding reality, isolating themselves, and so on. To be honest, they weren’t entirely wrong. But it also came at a time in my life that I needed the help. I needed to learn how to talk to people… particularly of the female variety. Online relationships became real-life relationships all the time – in fact, in those cases where we never did meet, the friendships eventually faded away. I made as many lifelong friends fr0m the Camelot BBS as I did at North Mayne High School. More, probably.

Of course, that brings me back to the video game dilemma. At some point, and I’m not sure what point it was, I did sacrifice my “realtime” relationships for the ones that were online. A lot of my problems in high school had to do with not having very much in common with my classmates – even online I gravitated towards people that went to other schools, including our my high school’s rival only a couple miles away. But looking back I see ways that I could have made it work. I can see with crystal clarity girls I could have asked out with probable success and people I could have hung out with socially with just a little more effort. But it was effort I did not need to exert and so I didn’t.

Balance has always been an issue for me. It is an issue for a lot of intelligent people. In fact, most people I know that are discernably more intelligent than myself have even more difficulty juggling non-academic things. Most seem to throw themselves 100% into one of a handful of notoriously geeky things such as anime, comic books, and… video games. Such things are not solely the realm of geeks, of course, but you’ll notice that many of those that sail to the top in expertise tend to be those that have dedicated their intelligence, time, and imagination towards non-utilitarian ends.

Of course, then, it is not the existence of these distractions that is the problem, but the inability of a lot of people to deal with it handily.

The domain was friggin’ registered yesterday. Unbelievable. I have checked on the status of that domain at least once a week since it expired on 10/29/5. I understand the rationale for giving the owner of a domain a little extra time with it so that it doesn’t get swooped up a day after it expires due to some miscommunication, but it sure would be nice if there was some way to know exactly when a domain will become available without having to spend $60 to backorder it.

Of course, the current owners of the domain may have backordered in, and if so are more deserving of it than I. I don’t know, it wouldn’t irritate me quite so much if they were actually doing something with the site other than running ads for those that mistype “hotcoffee.com” or something (hotcoffee.com is itself, incidentally, being cybersquatted upon)

Oh, well.

Stupid Internet.

Something you probably didn’t know: “Bad Habit” was considered as a title for this site. Turns out it was in use too frequently elsewhere so it didn’t make the final list of candidates.

Anyway, so I have been tagged by Barry. Here are the rules:

The first player of this game starts with the topic “five weird habits of yourself,” and people who get tagged need to write an entry about their five weird habits as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next five people to be tagged and link to their web journals. Don’t forget to leave a comment in their blog or journal that says “You have been tagged” (assuming they take comments) and tell them to read yours.

As most of you know, I usually decline to forward these things largely because by the time they get to my little corner of blogland, most everybody has already partaken. But five habits is something I can come up with pretty easily.

1. I only cash my paychecks every six weeks. Drives Clancy crazy, but I let them accumulate in my desk until I have three and then I go cash them. More than one former employer has tried to use this as evidence that I am well-paid if I can comfortably go without cashing my checks right away. This every-six-weeks thing is actually an improvement. I used to only cash checks once I got around to it. In the meantime paychecks would get lost and I would forget about them. When I departed one former employer, they cut me a check for nearly $2,500 (in addition to my severence package) because the accounting department said that I had declined to cash that amount in paychecks (it was an $8/hr job… I think that was something five paychecks). The state of Delosa still owes me $150 from unclaimed checks, but I haven’t had time to jump through hoops in order to reclaim that money. Given recent discussions with Clancy, I don’t think this little habit of mine is going to last much longer.

2. I set the alarm to go off even when it’s a weekend and I don’t have to get up. If I’m going to be able to sleep in then dag-nabbit I’m surely going to be able to appreciate it by pointing out to myself whenever I would have to get up anyway. My ultimate goal is to get up as early on weekends as I do during the week. Right now I get up at 6am… that may be stretching it. Maybe when I only have to get up at 7.

3. I don’t put my seatbelt on until I’m moving the car forward. In other words, if I’m pulling out of a parking spot I go in reverse, put my seatbelt on, then start driving forward.

4. When choosing sides for a bed, I always insist on the side furthest from the door. Doesn’t matter whether it’s by a wall or not by a wall, on the right side of the left… I just want the side furthest away from the door. Similarly, I strongly dislike having my computer situation so that I am facing away from the entrance to a room, though that’s how it is set up presently.

5. You ever seen Natural Born Killers? There was a routine in there where Juliette Lewis’s family was presented as a sitcom (Rodney Dangerfield as “Dad”). They bleeped out some cusswords and yet left others untouched (the movie was irredeemably rated “R”). I am like that sometimes. I don’t have a problem with cussing, but as often as not I blurt out rated-PG censor cusswords. My “F” word is Frag as often as it is the real thing. I am also really prone to say “Good grief!” and “Good golly” and “Holy heck.” This is less unusual in Deseret than it is in the South, though. One common expression up here is “Oh My Hell”… I have yet to pick up that one. When I first met Clancy, one expression I used was “Dag nabbit!” which she found hilarious because it was considered an “acceptable curseword” for a card game. She had never heard anyone use it in any other context. I picked it up from a coach/teacher from high school. I even usually say it with a thicker-than-usual southern accent because that’s what he had.

I spend an inordinate amount of time illustrating this blog — looking for just the right picture that encapsulates the content of any given post. Sometimes I find one that’s wrong for the post but that I love regardless. Not sure if I’ll ever be able to use these, so I’ll just post them. I’ve made the pictures smaller because they’re not entirely work-appropriate (they’re in that gray area). Click to enlarge when no one is looking.

Me: Lesson of the day: Even if a fit of frustration, it’s a bad idea to name a query “GODDAMMIT”… it gets tedious repointing all the other queries when you cool down and give it a more proper name.

Tony: You should see what the engineers name blocks they use in drawings.

Pure Nerd 60 % Nerd, 43% Geek, 47% Dork

For The Record: A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia. A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one. A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions. You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd. The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular, which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendences associated with the “dork.” No-longer. Being smart isn’t as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older: eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful. Congratulations! Also, you might want to check out some of my other tests if you’re interested in any of the following: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Professional Wrestling Love & Sexuality America/Politics Thanks Again! — THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST

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I got the test from my cooler counterpart Barry. Not sure how much I agree with the results – particularly on the dork index. Which is not to say that I’m not a dork, but the 84th percentile? Given how much I agree with the general assessments outlined here and here, I’m either a hypocrite or the test is off-base. My guess is that’s it’s conflating introversion with dorkity and/or (more likely) a lot of the folks taking this test vastly overestimate their computer skills. While I agree with the given definitions, I consider a dork’s difficulty in social situations to be more a product of a lack of skill rather than a personal preference. Not that I am unbiased, of course.