See you again on the tenth of October next year.

The rules are simple. Write seven things about yourself and then tag seven people, link to their blogs and ask them to do the same.

1. I have a hard time feeling loved. I mean, I know people love me, and I believe in their love, I just don’t feel it. I think this may be one of the main reasons I don’t believe in God.  Loving other people I have no problem with.
2. I value loyalty in friendships and relationships more than any other trait or attribute.
3. I hate the process of writing poetry, although I love having the poems when I’ve finished writing them. I’m my own favourite poet.  I used to enjoy writing when the result didn’t matter to me as much. Since I’ve been pushing myself to improve, turning towards danger and risk in my own writing, the process has been draining, wearing me out.  I started writing again in earnest at around the same time I started exercising and eating better.
4. This isn’t really a secret anymore since I’ve started the Clean Livin’ blog, but I’ve lost 87 pounds since mid-June 2008 (so far) and the kicker is that I really haven’t been trying that hard. If I’d known it would be this easy, I’d have started sooner. I guess I shouldn’t oversell the “easy” of it, because it’s a lot of work, but it’s not difficult.  It’s so simple, in fact, that I can’t believe I’ve been this overweight for so long. By this time next year I won’t be a fat guy anymore (although I’ll still have some weight to lose, I suppose).
5. I try to be honourable whenever I can.  Honour isn’t something that we value as a society, or even think about often, but for me it goes beyond doing the right thing and further towards being a right thing. I like to think of myself as an instrument of good in the world. I’m still working on this one because it’s so much easier to take the path of lesser resistance much of the time. Honour can be unpleasant.
6. I’m pretentious in a lot of ways.  I use British spellings for words like colour, honourable, favourite.  It’s a matter of personal style. Hell, I have a u in my name where it doesn’t belong either.  I used to read books or watch films that I thought I should be reading, or that would make me sound cool to be knowledgeable about.  In most other ways, though, I’m pretty down to earth.  I have no “guilty pleasures” because I’m not ashamed of liking things that I genuinely like, such as music or films.  “Top Gun” and “Roadhouse” are two of my favourite movies, but they’re not guilty pleasures – they’re movies that I enjoy watching.
7. I don’t know what the purpose of my life is, if I even have one, but it’s something that I think about often.

For the past four months I’ve been on the path to getting healthier, losing weight, and exercising regularly.

To help me stay focused, and to document the process, I’ve started a separate blog dedicated to my heath and fitness routines, workouts, nutritional knowledge, and thoughts and goals on my way to getting into better shape.

I titled it Clean Livin’: How I Got Healthy, One Day At A Time. Give it a read and let me know what you think.  So far I’ve lost over 60 pounds and already feel a huge improvement (even if my weight loss isn’t as readily noticeable as you’d think after having lost 60 pounds).  I still have a long way to go, but I’m confident that I can do this.

Thanks to everyone for their support.

Yes, we can have change we can believe in!

… and wrote this post. All of it was second nature and simply an extension of myself. Really, it’s that second-nature to me now that I don’t even think about the technology.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/30/mindread?gusrc=rss&feed=technologyfull

Way, way more listed at Wikipedia.

* Otherwise known as “April Fool’s Day.” Tip of the hat to Andy Baio for this term.

This video cracked me up:

Three, six, nine
The goose drank wine
The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line
The line broke, the monkey got choked
And they all went to heaven in a little row boat

I was back in Philadelphia this weekend visiting my family and my dad was singing The Clapping Song to himself, and I was reminded of yet another source of the line “… and we [or 'they'] all went to heaven in a little row boat.” It’s in my favourite Radiohead song (and one of my favourite songs ever), “Pyramid Song,” as well as the earlier Tom Waits song “Clap Hands” (from Rain Dogs, arguably his best album).

So I started to think if there was a precedent to the line, such as some religion that believes this. Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table would be sent out to sea on a little boat to Avalon when they died, until such day as they are needed again. That’s all I can think of offhand. This site claims that the lyrics to “Pyramid Song” are inspired by the Divine Comedy and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, among other sources, so maybe it goes back even further.

Anyway, the line feels significant in some way, like Dreyfuss’s mashed potatoes in Close Encounters. This means something.

So yeah, I’ve moved to Chicago to work as a web developer for Duo Consulting.

More on my Flickr site.