I don’t know how your mate is, but mine wants a card. She doesn’t care if anything else happens that day, but the card is not negotiable. So I rolled out of bed super slow, grabbed some clothes, and slinked out of the bedroom into my office where I got dressed and grabbed my keys.

First stop, the local superstore who shall remain nameless. I headed to the card aisle, passed the musical cards, and started poking at a few of the anniversary cards. I picked one that was funny but still had enough room where I could jot some warm fuzzy. Next, roses from the case on other end of the store. Finally, I swung through my wife’s favorite mexican place for breakfast burritos. I couldn’t remember if she liked them with or without steak so I got a couple of each kind.

Still tip-toeing, I got into our bedroom and stood there until she either smelled the food I was holding or opened her eyes because she had that creepy “someone is watching me” vibe. Either way, I wasn’t standing there longer than a few seconds when she saw me. She smelled the flowers, took the card, and suggested we sit there together and munch on the breakfast food.

We had each gotten through one of our burritos (we had a steak & no-steak each) when it occured to me: “maybe she didn’t get me a card!” Of course I had to call her on it and put out my hand. “Card, please.”

She went to get my card and when I flipped open the envelope it open it was *exact* same card I had gotten her. Not only was it the same card but we’d written pretty much the same thing: thanks for being awesome, you make me awesomer, and you snore. Though I don’t think it was in that order. We’re going to have to work on using separate random() generators next year.

This random person references a SEO (search engine optimization) startup. My handy-dandy Twitter Classify User greasemonkey script identifies them both as spammers (a spammer being someone with at least a 5 to 1 following to followers ratio).

Now that I’ve classified the two users as profit-seeking folks, why am I inclined to accept the invite from the local coffee shop trying to sell their cream of mushroom soup and deny the invite from the startup trying to sell me a better spot on Google’s search results?

I guess I can be fairly sure that a local coffee shop isn’t trying to amass followers so they can use them to leverage some ad campaign for whoever pays them. The SEO startup, I’m not so sure. I followed the link to their site and a couple of the articles on the front page even tell you how to script sending unsolicited follow requests to large numbers of twitter users without having to do a lot of manual clicking. In fact, since I started writing this article they’re following an additional 200 users.

I accepted the coffee shop request and declined the SEO startup.

For me, twitter is about social networking. I spend so much time traveling or shackled to a home office that it’s important to me to keep in touch with my friends & family and this is a convenient way to do it. Beyond that, I don’t want to read updates from companies unless I’m involved with them somehow (i.e., @comcastcares, @twhirl, and @pranzo).

In the end, it’s a tool like any other and you have to decide how you’re going to use it. I’ve decided.

I just got a call from a company working with/for MADD to re-up my magazine subscription to Men’s Health. I read a couple of them, but I think I gave most of them to Rob when he was over last. There are some cool articles but for the most part it’s an ad-fest. At least when you’re reading a web site the ads are usually tucked away at the top or side of the screen where we can mentally filter them out. Magazines, not so much. I do pay for the stuff so I ought to give it another try.

Marilyn Manson is one weird duck, but I do dig some of his music. There’s one track, “If I Was Your Vampire” that I consistently keep in my play lists for the gym. I don’t know why, but I like it. Maybe it’s the vampire angle. I still think that if I were inflicted with some paranormal virus I think I’d prefer vampire over werewolf or something else. There’s just something about losing control that doesn’t work for me. Maybe that’s why I don’t drink much? Something to ponder…

The workouts have been amazing the last few days. I’ve been hitting the cardio like I used to back in the day: pushing passed the point where I really don’t want to do it anymore. Most of the time that comes in right around the 12 minute point when I’m doing heavy work. Those last 8 minutes are the suck if I’m doing it right. Lately it’s been 20 minutes on the elliptical followed by 20 on the treadmill. Both exercises are ramped up pretty high so my heart rate has been sitting right around 153–155 after the initial work.

I just realized I have no water here and I haven’t taken my vitamins or fish oil. Got to get on that.

I’m up in Fairfield this week. Working out has been a constant draw but only tonight did I actually go down and knock out 45 minutes.

Sleep now. 6am comes early.

My first computer job was working in a law office. I didn’t have much with keeping the computers online, but I did a lot of research using their Lexus Nexus software. From there it was customer support for a title company. There were WYSE terminals, green screens, and shell scripting. I figured out that I could take a handful of commands that I ran frequently and put them in a script. Oh yes, that was the start. I even remember my first battle with parsing a file that was ultimately solved with a couple lines of awk provided by a friend at the time. Who would have though that a short awk script would spark a love for programming that burns even today.

Fast forward to the last few years. My current job is as a road warrior for a company based in Austin, TX. It’s played hell with my weight, which I’ve always fought to lower/maintain, and so the battle rages on to get it back down to a level where I’m able to do the things I enjoy again. More on that over at geekfit.com.

This Knol thing is pretty interesting. I sat and read through a few of them and they all seemed to be posted by doctors and professors. I wonder what I could write about. I certainly have the experience in a few areas–hm, maybe a post about learning new things? That’s a challenge sometimes.

When Jason and I talked about it, we wondered what kind of personal lives we could have if we could knock out an 8 hour day and then have the next 16 to ourselves.  We figured we could be awake for 48 hours, sleep 8 hours during the usual time of night and then run for another 48 hours. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I think if you stayed on that stuff for too long you’d start seeing dead people (thanks James). The movie Flatliners comes to mind.

• grabbing a shower, shaving, and getting dressed
• unpacking my laptop and docking it at my desk
• opening and sorting a mountain of snail mail
• organizing the finances and addressing any issues
• figuring out where the trash can in my office went
• realizing I’m hungry and eating something

That leaves my expense report for the last week, cleaning up my office (why can’t I keep this place clean?), and putting the AC unit in my office. The last bit isn’t routine, of course; it’s just once a year, but it’s still on the todo list.

The punchline is that it’s stressful. The double whammy is that on top of having all this to do before Monday when I have produce again it’s the weekend. There’s the feeling that goofing off would be justified which makes procrastination that much easier… in fact, I just spent 5 minutes staring at the last thing I wrote.

Alright, maybe a little guitar hero before I start working on cleaning my office.

Ivy and I got back to the hotel and she immediately crashed out until my brother and his wife showed up 5 hours later. I knew I was going to be in trouble with her freshly rested. I was mostly right but she was really nice about it.

The first stop was the Taste of Chicago. We had pizza, some pizza bite things, and cheese cake. I think there were steak tacos mixed in there somewhere too but all in all it wasn’t great. We walked all over, took lots of pictures, but we could just as easily have eaten somewhere else. The jury is still out, but we’re thinking of skipping “taste of” anything at this point.

After that we were pretty well tuckered out. We were a block from Muvico so we decided to round out the evening with Hancock. It was a surprisingly good flick with a deeper story line that I expected. There had better be a sequel though—there’s a lot more there.