Nerdvana

I was discussing this with my wife last night. In either case, be it Obama or McCain I think we will be in a better situation. That’s pretty sad considering that Georgy boy has us scrambling to get someone else in office.

It’s simply a matter of how better off will you be? My personal belief is that we will be better off with Obama. Sure he’s a smooth talker and frankly both candidates make me nervous. I’ve been pretty much on the line all the way and this is the first election I’ve been really excited about.

I have a few issues with Obama. First, I take issue with the fact that he’s playing the line when it comes to the whole Muslim thing. Typically he steers away from acknowleging the mud slinging. However as bad as McCain is for slinging “Muslim” as a bad word, Obama appears to be avoiding associating with any of America’s many Muslim voters. Being a member of the Muslim faith is nothing to be ashamed of. Being a member of ANY faith is nothing to be ashamed of. Obama’s not Muslim so why avoid them for his image? Muslim has been synonymous with “Terrorist” since 9/11 and that’s unfortunate. While I might not agree with their views, that doesn’t make them “Terrorists”. It’s not up to Obama to educate people to that fact however, but by staying away from them he’s sending a clear message and losing out on that vote.

One of the things that also makes me a bit nervous is his ability to smooth talk. He’s an excellent motivator. He can get people rallied around a cause almost to the point of being “foaming-at-the-mouth” crazy over it. That’s a bit unsettling. That said, I think that’s kind of what we need right now. The last 8 years have been a perpetual stalemate when it comes to our government. No one can really agree on anything. Getting congress rallied around a cause, getting foreign leaders rallied around a cause, these are things I think he’ll be able to do. Like it or not, the President is the face of our country. He’s our main representative to the world. We’ve had an ugly face for a long time. It’ll be nice to have someone who has the social skills not to drool on himself or turn into a rabid idiot when faced with a foreign leader with different views. Frankly, right now we look pretty dumb.

Now on the McCain side of things, let me say this first. McCain, overall is a pretty good guy. Sure he’s made mistakes and has had issues in his past, but so has everyone else. I don’t want a perfect person as president. EVERYONE has made mistakes and if you can’t find something on someone that just means they are *REALLY* good at hiding things. That makes me nervous. I liked McCain back when he was running for the republican convention in 2000. However I think his views are closer to Bush’s and don’t agree with him on a lot of the issues. Do I think he’d make a bad president? I don’t think he’d be any worse than Ronald Regan, who was a good president but certainly had his share of problems. Comparing him to George W. isn’t fair as George was SUCH a bad president I still don’t understand how he made two terms. My biggest problem with McCain is really how he’s running his campaign and his running mate. Sarah Palin is an absolute joke. She’s completely unqualified and frankly I’m insulted every time she opens her mouth. I’m not sure what McCain is thinking bringing her on board other than just trying to grab the female vote(which seems to be working in a lot of places). It frankly scares me that if anything happened to McCain, this woman would be president! Had he chosen Charlie Crist as everyone expected him to, I’d really be on the fence about things. Also his campaign is all about mud slinging. Compare his site with Obama’s sometime. Obama’s typically sticks to the issues and what he plans to do. McCain’s is all about how he’s so much better than Obama.

Anyway, those are my views. I think in either case there will be change for the better and change is good. Personally I’d love to see Obama pull it off. I can’t wait to see the outcome.

In other news, I’m working on a themepark blog. It’s a work in progress so there isn’t much content on it yet, but I plan on adding a lot. If you have any suggestions or things you’d like to see drop me a line. Check it out at themeparkjunky.com.

I’ve been waiting a few days to make this post as I want to word it correctly. A few people have been asking me what’s been going on so here’s the official word.

I’m no longer with Izea. There’s nothing wrong or nefarious going on. I loved my job and the people I worked with. Izea is kicking ass and taking names in the consumer generated marketing space and there are a LOT of REALLY cool things on the horizon.

The main reason I left was mostly personal. I plan on getting my health under control and heading back to school. I plan to get this weight off and get my life back to laser focus.

Working in a startup is stressful. It consumes all of your time and energy. My work ethic is such that if I see something that needs to be done, do it. Unfortunately in a startup there’s ALWAYS something that needs to be done. I was having a hard time balancing my personal life with my work life and the stress was just too high.

I’m sad to leave but know that it will be the best thing in the long run. I plan on keeping in touch with all of those guys and hope we can do something again in the future.

I plan on keeping up with this blog and keeping in touch with the blogger friends I have made while there. So keep an eye here to see what I’m up to.

5. When she’s acting cute it’s more genuine.

4. She doesn’t pretend to know things. If you ask her a question she’ll give you an honest answer.

3. She’s afraid of Moose.

2. She’ll work cheap. 2 bowls of dogfood and 2 cookies a day.

1. Honestly, how could any voter resist this face?

This is pretty cool. Apparently mozilla is providing python bindings to their applications. You can write your extensions in python and it generates an XPI wrapper that allows it to be loaded just like any other extension. The cool thing is that you aren’t limited to Javascript. It provides a Python GUI toolkit to build applications (XULRunner). You can build extensions for most Mozilla based applications, including Firefox, Thunderbird and XulRunner.The really cool thing is you can easily write multithreaded extensions! Some of the drawbacks are:

• The extension is large, between 5-15MB
• PythonExt uses a separate extension (xpi file) for every operating system supported

Pretty neat.

One chapter in my life has closed. A new one is starting. I’ll miss those left behind but hope we all stay in touch. Good luck to the future.

I was going to write a long post about my opinion on the debates. The gist of it was, Sarah Palin is a trainwreck, Joe Biden getting choked up makes me a bit uncomfortable, and this is the most important election we have seen / will see for a long time. My friend Jamie wrote an excellent post summarizing (more eloquently than I could) the issues brought out last night. While I don’t agree with EVERYTHING she says, she makes a lot of good points and backs things up with facts. Certainly worth a read!

So I’ve been trying to get more into blogging and writing with a bit of luck (you have to admit I’ve been doing better.). This all came about after izeafest. I was inspired by some of the advice I got from Merlin Mann. So I decided to really concentrate on my “personal brand”.

I know that sounds kind of lame and cliche but there’s a genuine point behind it. One of the reasons I never blog is because honestly, “who gives a fuck”. Most of the things I find interesting would make Urkle call me nerd.

I get facinated by languages and tearing apart and reverse engineering complex systems. My wife loves me to death and is very supportive. So I’ll run home to tell her the latest “neat” thing I’ve discovered and she smiles, nods, and pats me on the head. She doesn’t get it. Not that she’s less intellegent mind you, it’s just a simple lack of interest. I glaze over when she starts talking about gardening.

I was thinking about this the other day when I was trying to think about what I was going to blog about and then I realized. There are people out there who are interested. And most likely they would love to find other like minded people to discuss this stuff with.

Then I wrestled with the whole “Well I’m not that smart, I don’t really know as much as some of these people out there.”. It doesn’t matter. Be who you are, throw your thoughts and opinions out there. Let people correct you, it’s how you learn.

The key to all this is to be genuine and that’s where building your personal brand comes in. It’s important to me that my “online personality” is a fair reflection of who I am in real life. So many times I’ve met some of the bloggers in our network and have discovered “these people are just like themselves in real life.”. It makes it so much more personal when you read their posts after meeting them because you know this is real. This person is experiencing this, or has this thought or opinion and are genuinely interested. They aren’t just trying to drum up readers with asshattery or drama. One of my favorite people to read is Andrew Bennett over at Benspark. He’s a photographer, an avid kayaker, a proud father, and a bit of a geek. He’s genuine and it really comes out in his posts. I enjoy the chances I get to see him in person.

So I’m going to be doing some posts and maybe a bit of design around here to reflect my “personal brand”. To let my readers know (both of them…Hi mom.) a bit more about me and to add some of my own life and insights to my posts. I think it makes it easier to relate.

This blog is mostly about nerd stuff…tech, comics, gaming. But it’s also about my views on the world and the facinating people in it.

Welcome to Nerdvana.

As many of you who know me know, I’m a bit of a themepark junky. One of the main reasons I moved to Orlando was because of my love of the area themeparks. I lived here when I was a kid and remember many summers spent hanging out there

It was also the method of escape from the daily grind when I was living in Gainesville. Some of my best memories were hopping into the car with my best friend Stephan and riding off to the parks for the day.

Right now I live approximately 15 minutes from Disney and about 20 minutes from the other parks around here including Universal. And being the themepark junky that I am I know just about everything there is to know about them. The best time of year to go, what’s new coming down the pike, the best way to hit things so that you see everything, the history and interesting facts about the landmarks and attractions in almost all of the parks.

I’ve had backstage tours as well as in depth conversations with folks who put these things together because of my facination with the ins and outs of them. I’ve always dreamed of working at place that designed attractions.

So if you are ever in the Orlando area and are planning a trip to one of the parks and want a personal tour you will never forget, drop me a line. I’ll be more than happy to run along with you and show you around so that you get the most out of your vacation. Once I get to be more regular with this whole blogging thing, I plan to start a themepark blog reporting on my many trips and giving tips for the parks.