THE NEGATIVE REACTION

THANKSGIVING HAS COME AND GONE. .

And it turned out a lot better than I thought. My son stayed at his grandparents (my parents) and I saw him three days he was here. I still wish his ankle had been fixed so we could go snowboarding. It would have been the earliest I've been out in a LONG LONG time. Like I said, it would have been nice, but I have to understand having his ankle heal properly is more important in the long term.

WHY DO PEOPLE MAKE THE DECISIONS THEY DO?

I always wonder sometimes why people make the decisions they do. I have a friend who does some web stuff and a year ago, he took a big corporate job downtown and hated every minute of it. He posted about it all the time on his site (which shall remain nameless) and finally after a year - he quit. He said he wasn't cut out for the "corporate" life and had already taken a job at a smaller company.

I'm not going to bag on him making his decision, but clearly some people don't need a lot of money to be happy - which is admirable. What I can say is I spent a long time working for small businesses and I never made much money, while I basically ran the place and the owner reaped all the rewards of my hard work. This was something I always resented. Not to mention, I felt like I knew more about the industry in which we both worked,and here I am, still making a pittance for salary and commission.

Several years ago, I felt like I needed a lot more security and saw the writing on the wall in my own industry that changes were taking place and unless I did something, I was going to be out of work - which is not cool. I actually sought out a corporate gig because I felt working for a larger company would give me a stable income with a buttload of benefits.

After almost four years and three positions, I think I finally found where I really want to be. I was successful in my main goal of getting out of sales, and had a career change at *gulp* 38. In less than 3 years, I dug myself out of a sales career, changed positions twice and have arrived at somewhere where I feel challenged every day, in a fast paced environment, with some of the smartest people I've ever worked with. It's a nice perspective when you're not the smartest guy in the room all the time.

Like I said, I don't know why this person opted to get out of his corporate gig, only he will ever know, but he must have felt like he could not find happiness doing the corporate gig during the day and then doing what he loves after his day job. Maybe his friends were harassing him about it, I know when you're a skateboarder, it's pretty uncool to work for the "evil empire" (whatever that evil empire might be) and I've plenty of people laud my decision to work at a large corporation.

In any case, I will never know what motivated him to quit, but I do hope he does find happiness in whatever he does decide to do in the future.

AM I FINISHED WITH CONSPIRACIES. . . . ?

I was thinking this afternoon about how long its been since I've been interested in conspiracies. Maybe its because I don't have much time anymore. In my old job at Mobile Cellular, I could surf the internet all day and do whatever I wanted. I was on several message boards which kept my interest most of the day.

I famously gave up the ghost on the one conspiracy I followed the longest, after a long time of thinking about it and what might or might not be happening. In the end, it never really mattered to me, and I found once I pulled back a bit, I found the people on the above board to be completely fucking insane. The paranoia of these people was pretty intense and pretty shocking.

In any case, I concluded today that conspiracies only have so much life, until they run their course and then what do you do? Where do you go from there? It's like a dead end, nothing else left to do except let people decide what really happened or who was actually behind whatever it is your investigating. In short, it gets boring pretty fast.

SO WHAT IS INTERESTING TO ME NOW?

A LOT of new things. I've set up one of my desktop computers with a Linux system last year (after my laptop took a crap and stopped working) and I've been learning ever since. I consider myself a pretty creative person so I've been looking into how to change the theme on my Mandriva / KDE environment. The one site I lean on a LOT is KDE Look. They have a lot of cool stuff and a hoard of good developers.

I'm also trying to do some low level web development on it as well - just as another challenge. I say its a challenge because its hard to find comparable developer software for Linux, and more specifically Mandriva.

What else? Just more graphic design stuff with Photoshop and Illustrator. Things where I can use my creativity to make cool things.

I might be burned out on soccer, but at this moment, I'm watching Juventus play Reggina in the snow. Juve is up 3-0, late in the second half. Even though I still watch a LOT of games, the bug to play still isn't there. I feel like I've closed the book on my career and want to focus on other things which I've taken an interest in.

WHAT ELSE?

Oh yeah, about a month ago, I got a call from my sister about where the project to re-do her website was going. After trying to wrangle a few guys to do the site, I was pretty disappointed with the results. I guess I shouldn't have expected something amazing since all the guys were working for free and they all had several freelance projects which they should be working on and which had paying clients. In the end, I scrapped it and was moving on when she called me and was talking about how her and her partner were going to close up shop and call it a day for their business.

She was giving it 6 months and then she was moving on. I figured this would be a good opportunity for me to use my savvy business skills and rescue her business. Problem is, she's not very motivated. I know if it was me, I would be working my ass off to make it work, but my sister is a different person than I, and I needed to realize this. I'm going to see her tonight and she's supposed to have some figures for me so I can determine how much monthly overhead they have, and develop a business plan which will work going forward. We'll see if she comes to my parents with the info I need. I know the business is already $25K in the hole, and that's a BIG hole to dig out of, but her partner is responsible for half of the debt, which at least takes care of a large part of the debt - which is good news. Like I said, we'll see.

For now. . this is all I have. .

Sorry, no pics or vids. . just some rambling on a crappy day.


SEACREST EWT.