New stuff is elsewhere. Here to be exact.


Hope all is well - new stuff is coming along nicely. Ver 3.0 is pretty good (and Smokin' Joe still hates Ali).

Selah

O

The new blog is: here (and this is the RSS feed).

No custom domain name yet. Slack. And havent gotten into really editing the CSS, but its a new start. The finish line being a completed site plus scraping all my old stuff off of here - fucking myspace has no options to actually move your data with you (one of my main reasons for leaving in the first place).

And in honor of this event? A haiku:

a fresh beginning
new blog address and new rules
now i can post boobs

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The transition has begun. Thank you all for bearing with me. I hope to give you some reasons to follow me (video and audio posts - better content - and no rules. Should be fun.

Selah,

O

Favorite books in relation to SAT scores. If you want the background of the study google it.





[Note the position of "I don't read"]

or: How many posts must a man write down?

Well I had three ideas for this space today - maybe a combination of all of them will work. Three for the price of one! Lets go:


1. Hey neato, I have 42,000 hits here! Ah 42, the answer everything. (Actually im about 30 hits short but by the time I get around to posting this... ;).

And yeah, I know it doesnt count for anything and is just an extension of sorts of my virtual penis - but I have seen so many pages actually marketing things from major companies that pale in comparison - I just love how they dont get it. And in all honesty I enjoy writing something decent enough that I can count on a certain number of friends and random people to come by and read almost every post. Cool :D


2. What do I do... Post this or dont... Edit the hell out of it or leave it... Do I write about my personal life here or not... I can never really answer that.

"Jobs are tough these days in the States... I knew I was picking the wrong time to come back and go on the hunt - but after 3 years I had run out of excuses and quite honestly needed to put a little distance between myself and Peking...

And so I am back, and on the job hunt.

Skipping a lot of details brings me to where I am now: basically unemployed. Doing tech side jobs but nowhere close to where I want to be. And fuck it, lets face it, I am in my prime and its not so much that I am not where I want to be its where I NEED to be. If I am going to be making 6 figures and living comfortably I just dont have time to screw around anymore.

So I worked my contacts, did the monster / careerbuilder thing and lo and behold I found that position I am looking for. Pretty amazing.... Never something I had really considered but once I applied I realized _every_ bit of experience I had was leveraged into this job. Corporate training, marketing, and IT - thats what they need a background in for this. And thankfully the owner of the company saw it the same way. I had 4 interviews culminating with an offer. We hashed out the details Friday and he asked me to call and come in Monday if I wanted it.

Niiiiiiiiiice.

The reaction from my family was immediate. I cant really describe it adequately but ill try. They just glowed. Both of my parents just had so many great things to say about how excited they were and over and over how _proud_ they were of me. Proud. Over and over. In all honesty.... I cannot remember a time when they have really said that to me. Or even looked at me the way they were looking at me this weekend. In fact even at the time it was disconcerning and a bit creepy - I had truly never seen it before. But as thrown off as I was it was great to have it, and great to be moving in the right direction.

And then Monday morning he put it all on hold. Christ."


3. I might be done here. For a few reasons.

First problem is myspace is technically inferior to an etch a sketch at times and I just dont toloerate that. I am an early adopter of the best solutions. 3 years ago myspace was that - but since has grown massively in size while not evolving an iota - creating some ugly beheamoth that is below Good Sir's discriminating technological tastes. Whats that? Rats are the first to leave a sinking ship? Well you can tell your story swimming ;)

The second reason is I dont know if this is healthy or not. Do I write about my personal life here? Is writing here cathartic or just an echo-chamber for my own stupidity and a waste of time. Is it worse than that? You dont have to be some sort of superhacker to find your way back from my real name to here through the internet - and at the same time I would imagine ive gone out on limbs here with artistic license that I wouldnt want on my permanent record.

So I dont know.

If you come here for the links then start following me on twitter/doctoro. If you come here for my ranting (sports or otherwise) ill likely be passing on a new site in a few weeks. Even I dont think I could totally stop writing at this point.

Anyways - cheers and enjoy this rainy Sunday:




O


" . . . I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul. In my degradation I have not been so degraded but that the sight of you with your father, and of this home made such a home by you, has stirred old shadows that I thought had died out of me. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it." - Charles Dickens

Here are some good articles ive been saving.

And..... thats about it.

O

Joseph Merrick has a posse.

[Btw if you have never seen The Elephant Man (imdb) you really owe it to yourself. Anthony Hopkins and directed by David Lynch, great flick.
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I remarked today that its been, oh, 4 years since I was trying to establish a life where I currently reside here in beautiful Davidson. Odd. And not coincidental. As much as I love this place I fucking hate it. Id rather be back in Beijing right this minu-

Wait. Or do I? Ah these rose colored glasses!

Well let me back up and establish things first. Quickly. 3 years ago I left the US, left all my familial and friendly relationships (well 'put distance between' might be better used there) and started a new life. And I liked it. At the end of my run I had a great 'family' in Beijing, a great home, a great job and a perfect girlfriend.... Wait strike those last two. I had an ok job, it paid well and wasnt hard. And wasnt really getting me anywhere. The perfect girl? Hohoho. I was involved with 4 women in those three years - and today not long removed I still dont know how to reconcile it.

So I am home, with a purpose. I had to leave Beijing because 1. my career was going was stagnating at an important time and I wanted more 2. I needed to spend time with my family (should be #1 reason) and 3. I was going crazy (totally unrelated and actually quite natural for me, just included here for completeness).

So far it has been pretty good. Of course I have been spending time with family, I didnt get to box in competition like i wanted to but it did inspire me to get back into 'fighting shape' and im currently approaching the best shape of my life. Finally the job siutation: what looked like a disaster is really coming around - I think ill be accepting a job right up my alley and firmly on the solid career path working on enterprise marketing software Friday. If the pay is right, that is.

The score: im home, family is happy, job is good, life is good, bought a garage this morning. And im miserable? I dont even know. What I can say for sure is that China has ahold of me - and ghosts from my life there are still haunting me. Make me wish they would just....

..
[This video was a topic of discussion today after learning of MJ's auction and wondering aloud 'if the Elephant Mans bones are for sale as well?' - so of course this video was the first thing that came up]


Why am I still stuck in China. Why on her. Why these rose colored glasses?

My sister says I just need to replicate some of the things I miss. A weekly majiang game here, some China movies there. Made me think of this: (which I just watched on Valentines Day)


"Kilgore had a pretty good day for himself. They choppered
in t-bones and beer and turned the LZ into a beach party.
The more they tried to make it just like home, the more they
made everybody miss it."



More of me trying to figure myself out coming. Enjoy

O

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbnN6QmdrH4

I feel my whole childhood is either confirmed or destroyed by this. Still not sure which. Great job though... Enjoy O

I just love 27b/6. And I love cats as well. But right now I think I love 27b/6 more.

Cats

"I promised to look after a friends cat for the week. My place has a glass atrium that goes through two levels, I have put the cat in there with enough food and water to last the week. I am looking forward to the end of the week. It is just sitting there glaring at me, it doesn't do anything else. I can tell it would like to kill me. If I knew I could get a perfect replacement cat, I would kill this one now and replace it Friday afternoon. As we sit here glaring at each other I have already worked out several ways to kill it.

The simplest would be to drop heavy items on it from the upstairs bedroom though I have enough basic engineering knowledge to assume that I could build some form of 'spear like' projectile device from parts in the downstairs shed. If the atrium was waterproof, the most entertaining would be to flood it with water. It wouldn't have to be that deep, just deeper than the cat."


Dreams

"I hate it when people tell me "I had a weird dream last night...". I dont care, it didn't really happen and it is going to be boring. Just because you dreamt it doesn't make it interesting to anyone. I knew someone who told me a dream and it went on for about twenty minutes. That is nineteen minutes and sixty seconds longer than I have to care about something that didn't really happen. Another time she was telling me about a dream her auntie had, so not only was I listening to something that didn't really happen, I was listening to something that didn't really happen to someone I didn't even know. I glass over and my mind wanders after the words "I had a weird dream last night..." so it is just a waste of everyones time. The statement she made, "If you cared about me you would be interested in my dreams", I will put down to the fact that she was an idiot and possibly slightly crazy because she owned more than two cats."


::chuckle::

O

Ok 2 parts.

First part.

A friend sent me :this.

From the article:

Fact: At present, the dollar is, in effect, backed by China – an increasingly reluctant China. Every dollar we print is a prayer that China won't turn us away. "The value of outstanding American Treasury bills now reaches $10.6 trillion. ... Worry centers on the possibility that foreigners could come to doubt the American wherewithal to pay back such an extraordinary sum" (The New York Times, Dec. 28, 2008, p.WK1). How will a country that's lost its manufacturing base pay back $10.6 trillion and counting? It is not possible. When the world faces that fact is when our troubles really start. What's happened so far is mere rehearsal.


There's a line going around that just about says it all: "It's gonna get worse before it gets worse."  

----

And this was my reply:

Well ill throw in my 2c

This guy is only missing one thing: being that China has all her reserves in dollars it is of course in their best interests to prop us up. Two examples of where this becomes real:

1. there are those in the _chinese government_ that believe that this crisis was caused by bush and the imf on purpose to try and slow them from taking over. they are the largest currency not backed by the imf (a criminal conspiracy in its own) and the chinese gov considers them an outright enemy. because of this stance we have #2

2. they have literally started and importantly for china stated that they are going to try to get away from using the USD for reserves - but that it will take a loooooong time (5-10 yrs?) to do so in any real capacity.

Sure china could declare economic warfare on us.... and trust me, the average Chinese citizen would be much more content eating gruel and slaving away for a military machine for a few years than the average and less populous US citizen.... but it is still in everyones best interest to keep the US propped up for another twenty years and let it be a slow and eventual decline vs a sudden drop off the face of the earth.


I saw an op-ed somehwere that posed a crazy question recently: if within the period of a year the US was economically broken and society just fell apart at the seams, what would the rest of the world do? and could the rest of the world survive without the most powerful nation on earth from one year to the next....

And as scary as it is you realize 'well yeah of course the world would go on. rome and athens fell and i am still here. why would the world stop at all?'


Anyways.... that wasnt two cents, more like a nickel. Im betting on things getting much worse, but at a different pace than this guy ;)

they are in for the long haul... god if we ever went at it, i honestly feel like as advanced and powerful the US is they have two advantages

1. # of people and 2. the will power / nationalism of those poeple

they still have 1 BILLION people living below lines we cant comprehend. these people wouldnt crack so easily..... i fear for americans and 2 car garages

But hey, like i said, it is honestly in no ones best interests to sink us, right? ;)

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Part two: CCTV - The Chinese cast their votes for what really happened - the truth exposed!



































Personally I think it was Ultraman fighting vs Godzilla that must have done it.

"Wen hua ren" - any help with the text?

Enjoy,

O