Post Holiday Report.

I hope everyone had a great holiday season.

It started like any day for me, in my bed sleeping only to be awoken by a phone call from my uncle reminding that I need to get Gramps ready to leave when he comes to pick up. So I did.

At first Gramps did not want to go any where, but after a while he relented and we started our journey in my uncle's 1974 VW Camper.

While at my uncle's we had the usual fan fare of opening some gifts, and eating some food. I got to spend some time with my cousin as well, which was kind of awesome. The first thing he grabbed when he saw me was his Pokemon cards, he wanted to impress me with his collection, a feeling I can relate too because I was like at his age as well. When he handed me his cards though they were all jumbled up and some were even bent which kind of triggered an OCD fit (I call it that because I am lazy and do not know what else to really call it) in me and I had to go through all of his cards and organize them all for him. The sad thing is, my cousin, as much as he loves Pokemon, he has not had the chance to play the games. I tried hooking him up with a gameboy emulator, but that did not really work out, most of what I found was spam or junkware. 

As time progressed, and as the day went on my uncle suggested we go on for a ride on his boat, but first we needed gas. My mom volunteered me to go get the gas, so I hopped in the car, went to the nearest gas station and bought five gallons of gas and came back with a six pack of beer. That's where the fun began.

I am so classy I drink my beer with a straw...

There was a total of seven of us on the boat, which was a bit to much for the 70 HP outboard engine on the boat, but we still managed to get out of the channel, go out on the water a bit, and then turned around because we really were not getting any where fast or comfortably.

Then we ran out of gas...

Fear not, we made it back to land. 

Over all I had an awesome day yesterday, and I realized something: Christmas is not about exchanging gifts with loved ones, it's about spending time with and realizing that we are lucky enough to have made it through another year together. Oh, and drinking as well. It's not necessary, but it certainly makes things a little more interesting.

Anyway, let me leave you all off with some pictures I took while on the boat.

 Out of gas...

 Over cast...

 Gramps is smiling, sort of...

 Nice one...

It's a boat.

There you have it guys. Merry belated Christmas, and a happy new year...

Online Dating Sucks...

No really, it does.

Maybe I am being a bit lazy writing only a few lines for this post, but it is kind of hard to put into words really how much online dating sucks. It is possibly one of the most soul sucking and depressing experiences for a guy my age to go through.

The only real success I have had online is the girls I have met from WoW oddly enough, I guess because of the shared interest, and the fact that I can hop into a ventrillo server and actually talk with them. WoW is a good place to start, or you can try other online video games, you just have to be patient I guess.

Your Opinion does not Count...

Ever see the ads on TV promising to pay you to take a survey? Ever though, "Gee, that sounds like a pretty sweet deal?" Well, I did, and I am beginning to realize I got the short end of the stick with this arrangement.

See, they take your personal information, and your time in the form of the surveys you take. The problem with the surveys is they take about 30 minutes to complete, and that is if you are even "qualified," to take them. The site that I ended up being suckered into using is "Mysurvey.com," a site which for every 1,000 points you earn can be converted into a $10 gift certificate, that takes six weeks to be mailed to you, or 10 days if sent via e-mail. How long did it take me to reach my first 1,000 points on the site? Close to four months. In that time I took several surveys, and most of them I was not "qualified," for, so I got fed up with their bull shit criteria and just started clicking randomly until one of the surveys actually allowed me to finish it and receive points for completing it.

In order to get ahead on the site you have to lie. Which really means your opinion is not valued, and your time is meaningless to them as well, because there have been many surveys where half way in the middle of them they will just stop, after you spending say 10 minutes taking them, and instead of it rewarding you with points it instead gives you a "sweep stakes," raffle ticket. They hand those out like candy, and they do not actually give you any benefit since the chances of you winning their lottery are astronomical, and that everyone else on the site has at least 100 of them just sitting around doing nothing.

How else is taking a survey for "money," a losing proposition? Well, even if you do manage to make it through a 30 to 45 minute survey, the site will only give you at a maximum 150 points for completing it, and if you convert that into their point system of 1,000 points = $10, then you are being paid $1.50 for 30 minutes of your time to answer questions about shitty products that you will not ever buy.

So in the end is it worth it to be "paid to take surveys?" I would have to go with a resounding "no." Your personal information and time are more valuable than what these assholes are willing to give you for it, and while they do "pay out," it's no where near how much they should be and they do their best to hold on to your "money," for as long as possible. Bottom line: It's bull shit, and do not bother with it.

Here's a little Rage for you all, and as always, do not be shy about commenting on my posts, and if you would, connect with me on Google+.

Diablo II is possibly the best game I have ever owned...

In the last 13 or so years there are few games I have had to buy more than once, Diablo II is one of those games. Something about this game, despite how old it is, is still quite engaging and fun. It brings me back to a simpler time, when Online RPGs did not suck (though technically Diablo II is an offline game, it at least gave the option of playing online, which was kind of an awesome feature to bad they screwed that up with Diablo III).

Now I am not really a spell caster type of player, but the last time I played the game I had a level 24 Necromancer that I decked out in field plate that I got from the secret cow level. Maybe it was stupid to raise his strength over 100 so he could use it, but I really just wanted to see if I could do it and guess what happened? I had a freaking tank Necromancer. I invested most of my points into Bone spells and had him primarily set up for defense/offense using Bone Shield and Teeth to mostly clear out rooms. Bone Lance was pretty helpful too, and Bone Wall.

That experience above was one the reason why I loved the game so much, you could play a spell caster, and if you wanted too, you could build them to wear heavy armor even though they really are not supposed too. I tried to replicate a Necromancer in the same way this time around but I quickly got bored and started an Assassin, which was alright at first. I got through the first Act pretty easily, but started to notice a problem in Act II. Mostly because I was super squishy, getting one hit by bosses, and also a depressing lack of damage. I guess you could say I kind of suck at building characters. I kind of just abandoned her for now and moved on to my Barbarian.

My Barbarian is level 19 right now, I am in Act II and really the only problem I have had was in the viper bit, the boss kept three hitting me which was a major pain in the ass coupled with his knock back (I was kind of stupid and chose to put a point into Iron Skin instead of Concentrate). I built my character around dual wielding and I have been using mainly swords as my weapons of choice (I lucked out with imbuing from Charsi, I took a regular Falchion and it came out being a superior sword with added attack bonuses on Undead which are really helpful in the second act). Most of my points are in combat skills and weapon skills, I am kind of ignoring completely my battle shouts which may not be the smartest thing I have done, but damn it I am going to try anyway.

Enough about my characters though, I really just like the game, and I really could not argue with the price of $20 (the other two times I bought the game as a special edition I paid $40, add that all up and I have spent $100 on literally one game) which was awesome because my mom gave me a $20 target gift card that I ended up impulse buying it on the spot. My only problem with the game is that Windows 7 for some odd reason has trouble playing the game, well not any more since I figured out how to set it up to play on Windows 7.

The first time I tried to run the game it took like 20 minutes for it to open, and when it did finally run the colors and everything were really messed up. A quick google search however, gave me a solution to my problem, turns out I have to right click on the icon, click "trouble shoot compatibility," and go through a couple of menus before Windows suggests the best options to run the game in. I've got a video I made detailing the process.

Anyway, if you are also a massive Diablo nerd like me, then feel free to relate your favorite moments from the game in the comments section below, and if anyone currently has the game installed and wants someone to play with, let me know I'll be more than willing to tag along. 

Losing weight is easy (sort of).

Seems like these days people are crazy about losing weight, mostly because this whole "obesity epidemic." There are these fancy programs out there that are supposed to make you "lean and sexy," but in reality they are incredibly gimmicky and ineffective. So how do you lose weight? Easy, stop thinking about it.

You can waste all your time and energy trying to figure out a way to lose weight, but in the end if you don't take action, nothing will change. How do you take charge and make a change? Simple.

Start small and build yourself up.

It does not matter what you do, so long as you're doing it. As CT Fletcher once said:

"It's still yo mother fucking set."

Even if you do not plan on being as big as CT Fletcher, his advice still stands.

When I started out weight lifting I had barely any weight, and even less money, so I did what any other industrious American does and I improvised. Instead of spending $120 on a barbell set from Wal-Mart, I opted for the $20 40 lbs bar bell set and used those weights on a $12 curling bar I picked up from Play it Again Sports.

In between my sets of weight lifting I was also doing a lot of shadow boxing, and occasionally did some sprinting. When I started I lifting I was about 245 lbs, and after six months I got myself down to about 232 lbs and then shot back up to 240 lbs because I was stress eating.

See the key is consistency. If you start small, build yourself up, and keep at it, somehow in the middle of it all manage to not undo all of your hard work by binge eating fatty foods, then you can rather easily lose weight.

So what changed for me? I found inspiration, and a martial art I really like called "Mauy Thai."

At the time I was also playing a lot of Batman Arkham Asylum and Arkham City (before I lost all my games on my steam account I had like a combined 800 hours in each game) and began think, "Man Batman sure is awesome, I want to be just like him," so I picked up some weights and started using them. 

Back in August a friend of mine invited me to do a 30 day trail with a mixed martial arts gym in Jensen called "America's Top Team," and I decided to do it because I figured after all I did by myself that it would be pretty easy. It was not. 

My expectations were quickly  shattered when I found out the hardest thing about fighting is keeping your arms up, oh that and coordination (I have none). I showed up about every other day during that month and actually began to see results towards the end, and even managed to pay for a class after my trail had expired, only to have to drop it because of a family crisis.

I spent the next month and a half in Georgia taking care of my elderly grand father only to move him back down to Florida at the end of October. Since then I have been on a bit of a roller coaster of frustration and stress eating. I only recently got myself back in the habit of regularly lifting weight again two weeks ago. I also started something new: Upside down elbow knee crunches, which are actually kind of fun to do.

Where am I going with all of this? What am I trying to say? It's easy to lose weight, you just have to stop coming up with bull shit excuses to not exercise and just do it. Simple. No magic bullet, no gimmicky bull shit. You know what "Kung Fu," mean? It loosely translates to "Hard work," so even if you start doing something that is really basic and kind of stupid, if you keep at it you'll end up being kind of awesome at.

Keep at it you lazy bastards, and don't give up.

Hacks for Old People who can't see

CTRL +

I made this specifically for my Dad's friend, Jim Glendening.

I suck at First Impressions.

I think this is a common issue with people my age. We tend to give people the wrong impression the first time we them, and it is usually because we're lazy, and sometimes we just do not care. I know personally I have screwed up first impressions more times than I can count. The hard part is living with that and moving on.

Moving on would be easy, if only I could stop dwelling on those mistakes. I guess that is what I have had to learn, which is to not dwell on my mistakes. Sometimes that is difficult, because the amount of things I have to dwell on are ever expanding. Most recently I have suffered some social loss, mostly in the form of some long term friends, people whom I have known since pretty much the time I move over to the East coast of Florida. I really do not know what I did, but they no longer wish to associate with me, which is a real bummer.

See I could move on, if I did not get this nagging feeling at night reminding of all the relationships and bridges I have burnt in my time. I try to occupy my brain with other activities to distract me from these things, and yet somehow my brain manages to remind of exactly where and what I did long and torments with the idea that if I had the chance I could do it better, but I digress, dwelling on these things does me no good, I need only move forward.

Speaking of moving forward, what am I going to do? I have a tendency of announcing to people my lofty goals, and then falling completely short of those goals, mostly because I find an excuse to not pursue that goal, or I give up in some kind of fit of futility. That's the part of me that I struggle with, the one that keeps reminding me of the futility of it all, that EVEN if I do achieve my short term goals, somehow in the end my long term goal just turns to complete crap because it does not matter what I do, I am still stuck in the same shitty circumstance.

Maybe my attitude sucks?

To take a page from Socrates himself, when asked about the secret of success from a young man who he ended up walking out in the deep end of river and holding his head under water til he had to fight violently to get a breathe of air, relating that the sensation of fighting for the air at the time is just like how you become successful; you have to want it hard enough to fight for no matter what.

A lot of the fighting I have been doing as of late has been with myself though, I am constantly fighting the urge to just give up and jump in front of train, or maybe even on coming traffic and just end the struggle all together.  I am to stubborn to do that however, because I realize that is an easy way out, and despite how much my life SUCKS right now, it will SUCK LESS down the road.

Do I have a plan for success? Not exactly, I am not really the planning type, but then again, I am at the point in my life where I need to cut the bull shit and start doing the things that will ultimately make me successful which means I need to seriously invest some time into myself pinpoint exactly where and what I want to do with my life.

I got a little detracted. What does this have to do with first impressions? I guess I give people the impression that I am some kind of sad sack who is mostly coasting through life, which is mostly true. It's time for a change, and I am going to make that change. I once again publicly humiliate myself stating that I will achieve a major change in life and that I will amount to something within the next three months or so.

Here's a video from Eliot Hulse, a guy that's helped me with a lot of the shit going on in my head: