Ryan Leland

I usually don’t like to think selfishly, and I’m not normally one to have materialistic desires. While I’ll admit I do love stylish clothes, and technology gadgets, and rarely pay full price for clothing, and the gadgets I do buy have to be justified fairly well before I lay down the plastic.

I had a dream that I bought a Ferrari last night though. It was pretty sweet. It was used in a race, and was a little quirky, but I really loved it. I think the cool thing about the dream was the feeling of going fast, more so than spending the money. I’m not much of a dream analyst, but I’m pretty sure euphoric feelings, and going fast, or flying are pretty good signs.

<maybe spoilers> And what made the experience even more awesome is that I had been listening to a song from the soundtrack several times throughout the day, and it ended up being stuck in my head. The song was “All Along The Watchtower”, and I had been humming it to myself. Watching the final episode and seeing some of the characters humming the song in a similar fashion to what I had been doing through out the day gave me shivers. This was a song I knew I already loved, but now seeing what it meant in the season 3 finale, all I can say is “holy frack, that’s awesome”. </maybe spoilers>

I still have Razor to look forward to, but I have a feeling waiting for season 4 will be agonizing to say the least. There are so many questions I have. Perhaps it’s no reason to get excited, but there’s too much confusion, and I can’t get no relief.

I think that creative individuals are not willing to give their finite time and energy very cheaply, for something that will only get them approval. So if the approval fuel isn’t satisfactory, people tend to get bored and complacent very quickly. I think creative people will tend to start fires to bring some risk and excitement to their uncreative jobs. If the game you’re playing isn’t big enough, you’ll do something to screw it up, just to make it interesting. Meaning you’ll slack off, and leave all your tasks till the last second, just to get a rush of adrenaline, and satisfaction.

I find it so disheartening in the corporate world, that the gift of being well rounded is as undervalued as it is. The ability to learn new skills very quickly, and be a very well rounded individual, is extremely important when it comes to becoming a successful entrepreneur. But, when you’re hired to do a task within a corperation, you are asked to specialize in a subset of those skills, and you will always peak very quickly, and begin to stagnate those other muscles that aren’t being used. This, for me, is when I began to feel frustrated, and feel like a loose cannon, even though that is not a natural  personality trait for me.

This sort of paints a picture of how I’ve felt very recently at a job, that I had very high hopes for. But I think there are many differences between looking for approval, and looking for appreciation in what you do.  I think if approval is what creates security in a persons life, appreciation is what creates the passion. Like, it’s if you were at the most amazing concert of your life, and somebody told you that the music was terrible. You’d probably laugh at the idiot, and keep on rocking out. Where I think approval really stems from insecurity.

I think appreciation is the fuel for the creative. I plan on looking for more of it in my life.

I just found this amazing blog about blogging, and various other web 2.0 marketing techniques. There’s a lot of great info on broadband video, viral marketing through social networks, and more great buzzwords. It has nothing to do with content quality, and it will blow you away with how much cutting edge, next gen, ajax, and web 2.0 buzzwords, ???, profit. Go here to find out more.

Seriously. The more I think about how much of that crap I’ve ingested in my life for no good reason, the more angry I get at mayonnaise. The amount of flavor it adds to, say, a bacon cheeseburger is not a good enough reason to ingest that much more fat and sodium. And it not like there’s any protein or food value out of the stuff from the containers. Just more chemicals in the form of preservatives, and who knows what else.

Want to know a great alternative? Guacamole. It doesn’t even have to be fancy guacamole. Just some avacado with a little lime juice, and some garlic mixed in can make any sandwich really fantastic. No, I don’t know how well that would go on abacon cheeseburger, but really, I’d prefer to stay away from those as well. And if I had vegetarian sandwiches with guacamole on them as an alternative to eat on a daily basis, I honestly might not be all too interested in a burger.

I’ve been kicking around the idea that I should write a book one day, and it would pretty much be useless theories, and completely over analyzed breakdowns, and charts of why simple things are the way they are. Oh, there would be graphs, and theories, and all sorts of goodness.

One such theory of mine that would be an obvious topic, is my bathtub curve of humor. It started out as a simple observation with my older brother about 5 years ago, and it has yet to fail me. The theory is simply that dumb inside jokes, and their ability to make you pee your pants with glee, or have orange soda come out of your nose, will have a high point, followed by a sharp drop off. There will be a seemingly long unfunny period, that i like to call the “inside laugh zone”, or ILZ for short. Then depending on the delivery, and timing, there will be a gradual increase of the inside joke effectiveness. This is due to the irony of using something that is no longer funny to such a point where you begin to laugh at the fact that you said, or made use of the inside joke, rather than how funny the original usage was. This is where the old joke is dead, and the new fun begins. The curve itself can actually have many layers, as inside jokes like this tend to spawn children, or perhaps even by accident, two very distinct inside jokes can combine into something of its own. Then there is also 3rd party mutation syndrome, where there is a noticeable evolution of a joke based on 3rd party inside joke pick ups. This can happen when a 3rd party individual can pick up a joke somewhere during it’s life cycle, and because of possibly mis-interpretation, or inappropriate use can add new meaning, or life to a joke.

One other thing I’ve noticed is that the longer the ILZ, the more unpredictable the timing of of the curve can be. Humor can be very fragile, but never give up on something, even when you’re pretty sure it’s completely dead. These are moments that can never be lost if you time everything correctly.

Anyway. I hope to shore more of my thoughts like this very soon.

Yes. It’s true. I was always firm on the idea that spending time playing Guitar Hero was a huge waste when I could be playing my real guitars. But it’s been calling at me ever since I downloaded Frets on Fire and decided it was a buttload of fun. And I still stand by the fact that Guitar Hero is a time sink, and I kind of regret spending the $120 on one game.

But is this game ever fun. I pretty much played it all day yesterday, and finished the easy mode, and unlocked a bunch of stuff. This morning I’m trying to work on medium, and at least get to a few of my favorite songs. One thing is that I almot wish I had just skipped through easy mode. It took a little bit of the sense of achievement away for me, as I kind of just ripped through it all.

I’ll be posting an update when I beet (yes, beet) medium, and give a better review of the game. For now I’ll just say it’s a fun waste of time.

So what started out as fairly lame outing, proved to be a really cool evening. Before I go any further, I should provide some back story. I had won the Mi-Fri Mexico Qualifier entry through my daily routine of collecting sonic points, and spending accordingly. After much frustration of not seeing another iPod Touch style giveaway, and no sign of anything epic, I gave into a hunch. That hunch was that I would win a trip to Mexico. So I spent all my hard earned points one fateful morning in mid January, only to receive a phone call that same day notifying me of my winning entry. This was exciting to say the least, as I rarely win anything, and I’ve never been to Mexico.

On to the lameness. My Brother could not make it to this super sweet event, as he was backed up with work. Fine. I decided to invite a buddy from work, which proved to be both the redemption to the lameness, and the partial cause. Okay, so not the cause, but we freezed our asses off 2-3 more times than I normally like to on a harsh winter day, and I need somebody to blame that on. So we go to the wrong pub first. It’s cool. We figure it out after walking about a block towards it. Back in the car! No problem, we call the number of the pub thanks to my GPS, and get the right address. Awesome. Now to find parking. “Hey look, a parkade!”. This might seem promising, but by this point we are already about 10 minutes late, and very cold, standing in line to pay for the parking. Oh, God! The machine won’t accept Chobans Visa, or my MasterCard. This was getting to be rediculous. Neither of us have change, so we decide to get to the pub which is still about a block and a half away from the parking, register, get our names in the draw, get seated, meet some radio celebrities. Yes, ALL the Sonic radio personalities were there, and with only maybe 40-50 people in the lower level of this pub, it was a pretty cool intimate environment. But wait. We kinda need to pay for parking. So I ask Rick Lee politely if my guest and I can leave to go pay for parking. Yeah. He’s pretty sure that’s cool.

Off to pay for parking! We’re still frozen to the bone when we leave the pub, but we’re pretty determined to pay for parking, and get back so we can starting winning. So, a quick stop in a nearby Booster Juice to beg for change (which wasn’t even enough for the machine by the way), was enough to throw a piece of paper on my dashboard, and run back to warmness, and prizes. Now, I had hoped for free food and drinks, but as it would turn out, there was only one domestic beer voucher, and finger food. Which in the end I guess was cool enough. I did end up getting a shirt, calendar, and a sticker. Not to mention the ID card around my neck which I will likely keep as proof of my interesting evening.

So, first name they call for spinning-wheel-for-money game? Choban! More like CHOKE-ban. Seriously. I think anybody could have spun that wheel and won more money than he did. But in hindsight I’m pretty sure it was rigged. It’s okay though. It was only a chance to win $1000 cash, and there was still a trip to Mexico up for grabs. But Mexico drawing came and went, and was a bit of a let down, just like our domestic watered down beers. Upside was that there were some female web developers sitting at our table that had over heard us talking development, and invited us to the Edmonton Flash Users Group meeting afterwards. Uh, totally! How often does one go to a Sonic party, and end up sitting beside female web developers? Not very often. We both agreed this was an opportunity that would not be passed up.

The Flash Users Group ended up being very cool. Seeing previews of Adobe Air in action gave some pretty inspiring ideas, despite not being overly interested in the technology itself. It certainly has some promise, and wide open opportunities for forward thinking web developers. So we ordered up some veggie burgers, and salad which turned out to be awesome, and then ended up taking off a little early for some Starbucks before taking yet another bone chilling walk in the freezing cold.

So all in all, we’re talking 9 walks in ungodly temperatures, 3 sonic stickers, 2 calendars, 2 shirts, 1 EFUG meeting, and a fairly memorable evening. Oh, and one of the longest blog posts I’ve ever written.

By the way Choban… I have your calendar and stickers. We’ll need to do that again sometime.