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I took the pledge (quoted below), have you? I took it WITH a little modification, if I ever do send any other mail that could be seen as resend-able or forward-able to groups of people, I’ll use BCC and ask the recipients to do the same if they are to resend or forward said material.

Note: The following text is a quote of the article on Roger Ebert on Wikipedia (see the original text here).

The Boulder Pledge is a personal promise, first coined by Roger Ebert in 1996, not to purchase anything offered through email spam. The pledge is worded by Ebert as follows:

“Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.”

Ebert coined the term during a panel at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Conference on World Affairs in 1996. He wrote the text which appears above and encouraged everyone to take the pledge. It was subsequently published in the December 1996 issue of Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, where Ebert had a regular column, under the title of “Enough! A Modest Proposal to End the Junk Mail Plague.”

Tartan pattern on one of my favorite shirts

A friend reminded me of my comfy-wear today. Here’s a short description of what I call comfy-wear.

• Tartan long sleeve shirt (pattern shown in the picture), preferably in full cotton or similar soft cloths, with the sleeves rolled up to just above the elbows and not tucked in, with a white full cotton t-shirt under it, and normally one pen and a permanent marker on the pocket.
• Thick and semi-loose cotton pants with big pockets, or soft loose jeans.
• Brown thick leather two-strap sandals with a back strap, these had a very comfortable-like-a-sneaker-shoe feeling to the straps, not the usual leather-to-your-skin sandals.
• All these in dark colors, wine-red, green, blue, brown, black.
• No rings, watches, bracelets, or other jewelry-type thingies.
• My backpack with all my stuff. I have, over the years learnt to consider it part of my clothing.

So this is how I used to go to school, and I loved it. I have had to stop using it because now I have a job with a big business/corporate atmosphere and go to school from work.

So, I was this guy, going around on those clothes, long hair worn loose and beard, with glasses, and on bad-hair days a simple loose ponytail, and/or a baseball hat without any logos in the same tartan pattern or plain, same dark colors mentioned before.

Yes, I’m a geek, and that’s how I like to dress since it is as comfortable as it gets, and no crummy/crufty/untidy aura that might be related to such loosely worn garments, needless to say I always remain clean good smelling.

And yes, I like tartan/plaid/checked-patterns on clothes.

I can’t believe how life did a very abrupt turn some days ago, and I believe for the good too.

This post is about something I find interesting, something I have experienced over and over in life… the “second wind” effect.

During hardships one goes through some stages (I have not done any reading about this, but I will; so if you know a good read, let me know). I refer to hardships not as challenges you put yourself, but about something that goes the exact opposite of what you wanted it to go, and hurts a lot. Here are the stages I have gone through each and every time something has happened.

Please don’t question the logic, it’s my head after all…

1. Perception and shock. I become aware of the situation, and sometimes I’m paralyzed and can’t take any action related to what has happened, any action whatsoever for a second, a minute, an hour or even days.
2. Denial of what has just happened, my conscious knows, but my subconscious doesn’t accept it. I know it has happened, but still talk, and think as if it hadn’t.
3. Awareness, right, so now it has happened, and I know I have to deal with it, but that’s about all I know at this point, don’t know what to do.
4. Gloom, at this moment, I’m having a mix of emotions of anger, sadness and what not… I don’t know what to do, but at this stage, I’m more focused on my emotions than on the situation itself.
5. Despair, right after being sad/angry/<whatever else>, I start kicking and moving (figuratively speaking), but I keep sinking into those emotions, I can’t organize my thoughts, less can I organize my actions, I still don’t know what to do.
6. The halting, knowing that I don’t know what to do (haha, ok I couldn’t put it on other words), and seeing that my past actions didn’t have any effect, I lose hope and slowly start not doing anything at all whatsoever, and start to give up on the situation, and think I won’t be able to solve anything, and can’t go on. This is when anger fades away.
7. The drag, right after I think I can’t go any further I keep taking steps realizing that I was underestimating myself, note, this realization is silent. The “distance” I go “dragging” is probably as far as all the other stages mentioned above. I’m still not solving anything, just going along.
8. Solace, somehow without a solution I find solace in my steps, somehow I’m not “dragging” anymore but haven’t stopped moving. I realize that everything is clean and clear, at this moment is where acceptance takes place.
9. Solution, so, when I have ‘peace’ solutions come either by themselves, or made by myself.

So, what happens in (7) is more or less what is described here: Wikipedia; Second Wind.

I’m at stage 9 of a recent event, and now that I can think I can ask myself this question. Why do solutions come AFTER all that? haha.

Oh my very inactive (up to now) blog, but not forgotten.

Sometimes the only thing that can contain a my thoughts sometimes, is a piece of paper that is later scrapped after writing, and thrown away, to be found and read a long time after it has become irrelevant.

Something interesting happened today, I got a headache because of being angry at a situation. Yup, only a headache.

This headache/situation is because of a common practice, actually the MO of a lot of companies, they just expect you to be ignorant, and treat you like you are. So here I am, semi-ranting.

What would be the best sort of container for my thoughts? (I sometimes wonder).

• Music, I have been working on learning how to play guitar (classical/nylon strings).
• Prose, well, this blog is one, notebooks and journals are other ways of it.
• Verse, the fact that I stopped writing these long time ago, doesn’t mean I have forgotten.
• Code, yes… sometimes I can store my thoughts in programming languages… sue me for being geeky.
• Drawing, I’m not very talented at this, all I do is doodle most of the time.
• I know there are lots of ways more, care to suggest any? and or support any of the previous?

The question would actually be, coming from me… what would you pay attention the most? (leave comments, if you put [private] anywhere in the message, I wont publish it).

To write or not… about what? Meh… What to write about is a subject in and of its own. The big issue I find, whenever I start writing about something is: “Will this piece of paper, blog post, etc., be read?” At which point I take the decision to write about a said subject just because I want to, and because I want to express myself.

Such posts are called by me puddles of ink, mere blobs of (could be virtual) ink, that have no meaning, unless you’re a likeminded person. Please bear with me when all I have to write is that, like now. This puddle spree is definitely going to end, and this blog will meet its purpose soon enough when I start writing what you guys want to read.

I have always marveled at the fact that I can’t, most of the times, form a habit. As annoying as it is, I just don’t seem to have the mind or memory for that. Even when it’s something beneficial, or that I really like, I always have to consciously think about doing it, and a lot of the times forget about it. It is almost as if the only habit I have is breathing, and well, I forget about doing that too. Lucky me that I continue doing it regardless.

So yeah, one of my favorite movies is Memento (as old as it is). I have sometimes thought about creating a system to follow, but I always seem to forget what it is, or even that I have one .

A lot of my long time friends say that I’m just overloaded with work (or monotony, or just not stimulated enough), since I wasn’t always like this. I hope that this new job (first day is today) helps me on that. I also hope school starts loosening me up a bit since that could also be part of the combo.

As with most of the stuff I do, I poke a ‘hey, I can do this’ try.

Please make sure to visit the About Page. And post comments on whatever you feel like. Comments will be moderated for the most part, to keep spam off of them.

This is it, a post to signalize the birth of this blog, and also to have something for myself to see how it would look on the web.

I will allow myself to use smileys and post just a random image to see how this could work.