Tonight I was chatting with Amanda on IM about what we’d both been up to lately. It’s funny how busy we are that even though I do much work for her, we lose track of the other things happening in each others lives.  It’s a far cry from the days we spent crammed into the same office, but the price we pay for having our own pursuits.  She has three wonderful pursuits which she can only take partial credit for, those come in the form of her amazing husband and amazing 2.0 children.  She also has some wonderful pursuits for which she can take even more credit for, like DailyWorth and Soapbxx.

We were discussing these pursuits of hers on IM, and she asked me what I had been up to, since clearly she knew I hadn’t been working. I answered that I had been at the beach, the cousin of a friend who was visiting had called me up and so I went to chill, and I intended to spend the remainder of the night on two projects that I am currently working on. To which she replied:

Amanda: sounds like a typical simon day
Amanda: friend, beach, code
Amanda: repeat

We then finished our conversation and she went to get some much-needed sleep.  So I was left reflecting on her words while listening to the song that I have chosen to accompany this post (it happened to be playing on my iTunes which is often just set to shuffle).  At the right time of day, with the right soundtrack, the simplest of statements can resonate so loudly with me.  With some loose interpretation, the essence of my very being can be refined down into that simple but eloquent observation. Friend, beach, code. Repeat. These are the three most important things in my life, in the order of importance.

On most days, my friends are my friends.  Everyday, my family are my friends.  Not because I don’t have the choice as to who my family is, but because I choose to spend time with them when I don’t have to.  I hang out with my family on a Tuesday afternoon, or on a Sunday night. I go to the beach with them, or out on the boat, or to a new restaurant, or to one of our favorites.  No matter how often we do things, the day/night never goes by without someone saying we don’t see each other enough. Of course my friends are my friends not purely by circumstance or genetics, but by choice. My friends are a finite pool of haves and have-nots, and some how in some way we manage to mutually benefit from talking/singing/listening/loving/hating/breathing/watching/eating/being with each other. If you put all my friends in a room together and asked anyone in the world to tell me what they had in common, no one would ever guess it was me.  Whatever that is, there is no substitute, and so it stands to reason that there is no substitute for my friends. I love my friends.

The beach is the best place on earth. Whether it’s the over-crowded Jersey shore on 4th of July weekend, or an uninhabitable island in Fiji, the beach is an iconic place of respite and/or joy.  The sun, the water, the sand/rocks, the waves, the birds, the winds, the heat, the smell. The feeling of the beach is unparalleled.  I’ve chosen to spend my days living in a home several blocks from the beach, in a beach town, on an island chain that is furthest one can get from any other land mass on this planet.  Next to the company we keep, the environment in which we choose to spend our time impacts our enjoyment of our lives the most.  This is why I’ve chosen to spend my time in a place where most people dream of spending a week-long vacation at most. I love the beach.

I live by the code and I will die by the code.  On the surface, the code is the various programming and database languages that I use to build applications for non-profits all over the U.S.  On the surface, the code Amanda was referring to is the code that I spend all of my working hours and a good portion of my non-working hours pouring over, soaking up, and even thinking in.  I see 1’s and 0’s.  But dig a little deeper and it’s evident that everything I do, and most things I feel, are part of a larger non-web-specific code.  It is a continuously evolving code, a code not bound by any traditional boundaries, or a moral/ethical compass pulled from any ancient scripture or influenced greatly by any popular culture or western society.  It is a code that has resulted over nearly 26 years of eating, traveling, living, loving, losing, witnessing, feeling and bettering.  It is a code that is intended to be hackable by anyone who cares to, and is guided gently by a ghost in the machine.  I love the code.

Amanda ended our conversation with:

Amanda: programmers aren’t supposed to write well

No need to be stumped Amanda, I am not a programmer.  I just happen to love the code.  Cause the code got me to 25 years of age.  The code got me to day-after-day of loving where I am, the beach.  The beach got me to being okay being alone, and more importantly got me to knowing how much I love my friends. My friends, the beach, the code.  I should be so lucky that this record stays skipping the rest of my life.

Distant flickerings, it’s greener scenery, this weather’s bringing it all back again.
Great adventures, faces in condensation, I’m going outside to take it all in.

Often times I leave my iTunes on shuffle when sitting at my computer working.  I used to maintain a ‘work’ playlist but then I’d get sick of those songs, so now I just throw it on random and skip any songs that begin to play and I’m not in the mood to hear.  It’s working better for me than the playlist was, for the most part.

Every now and then a song comes on that is one of ‘those songs’.  One of those songs that evokes such an overwhelmingly  emotional surge. One of those songs that not only presents my mind with such vivid imagery of a time and place from my past, but also the smells, taste, and even temperatures that I felt and experienced at the time.  Imogen Heap’s Speak For Yourself album is twelve songs of just that.  A trip.  A trip on sounds, a trip into my past, a trip to the winter after graduation.

I was 21 years into life.  I’d been living in Manhattan for a few months, and had recently started my first job in the ‘real world’ as a full-time web consultant/rover/coder/content-migrator/convio-tweaker/torture-document-search-engine-creator/anything-that-Amanda-wanted-to-do-but-didn’t-have-time-for at the ACLU. I had just discovered the album (I don’t even remember how, surprisingly), and had thrown it on my iPod Nano. I was listening to it everyday in my headphones on the walk to the subway, on the subway, and the walk from the subway to the office on Broad Street, all day at work, and then back again.

At the time I was sharing an office with Amanda, who was pregnant with her first child, and also (unbeknown to me) was binging on some good old fashion Imogen too.  I still remember the day when Amanda asked if I minded if she put on some music (which she often did, and which I never minded), and out of the speakers came the sweet twinkling sounds of snowflakes falling (that’s what they are in my mind) that make-up the first few seconds of Headlock.  She said something to me like “I’ve been listening to this Imogen Heap chick a lot lately, do you know her?” I proceeded to share that I was addicted to the album as well and for the next few weeks we listened to more Imogen then any two people should ever consciously do.

It was winter in the city (always a depressing time for me), I had just split with my girlfriend of four years (always a depressing time for me), and I found solace in how lost the album allowed me to get.  I would wander in her voice and the sounds that she (more than any other experimental electronic artist I’ve ever heard) manages to couple together in such marvelous and enlightening ways.

Now, years later, whenever one of those twelve songs come out of my speakers, my skin gets cold, I smell the condensation of my breath in a subway station, I feel the ice slush in my socks, and I see the carpet in the office that Amanda and I shared for those first few months.  I didn’t know then how much the album would come to mean to me.  I didn’t know then how much that job would also come to mean to me.  I didn’t know then how much the fact that Amanda also loved that album would mean to me.

Both the album and my job were bright lights in what was an otherwise dark time of my life.  Almost five years later, even though I am in a much brighter place, they both still shine bright  The album holds so much weight with me that it’s the only thing that makes me miss winter in a winter-less place.  That says a lot. The job (more importantly the person who gave me the job despite my 0% experience/formal-education in the field) held so much weight with me that I forwent the opportunity of a full-time salaried/benefited employment in hopes that we could make it work as a tag-team of self-employed information/knowledge workers. That says a lot.

Thanks Imogen. Thanks Amanda.

Today, Amanda pointed me to an article about a man who made his own home-made prosthetic finger-tip with integrated USB storage. A pretty simple but impressive feat, and one that may leave many geeks a little more careless around sharp objects.  I mean, how much more hardcore can you get than literally hacking your body so that you can hack your body?

Naturally I began to ponder what modifications I would make to myself if ever I decided that I was going to pursue the path of upgrades.  I’ve thought about getting a tattoo before, but there is a difference between decorating what you already have, and modifying what you already have by adding onto or taking away.  An even greater leap is when the modifications that are being added-on are things that are not naturally found on a human, like a USB stick.

A USB stick is neat, but it’s size is limited.  They don’t make them that large in capacity yet, and they are easy to break/bend/damage/scrape the pins on because of their wafer-like construction.  So if I were to become part cyborg (after all, a cyborg is nothing but the marriage of man and machine is it not?), what would my enhancement be?  I tried to think of this in a real-life, right now environment and not some far off distant future, and I came up with this.

If and when my appendix were to become infected/burst, I would bring the largest available capacity solid state hard drive with me to the O.R., and have them fasten the drive where my appendix used to be.  The power and USB cords would both be wired from the drive to my navel, which would be outfitted with a USB female and AC Adapter female port. It would be called the Appendrive.

Outfitted this way, I could bring my Appendrive with me wherever I went, backups of all my photos, music, videos, all my data with me at all times.  It would even be burried with me.  Also, why purchase an SSD drive for so much more money than a traditional HDD? Because if someone wants to copy the latest episode of Eastbound And Down from my Appendrive while I’m doing something, like swiveling around in my chair (it is, after all, the most physical exercise I get in any given day), I don’t want the hard drive scratching any of its platters.  No one wants a return visit to the O.R. for an Appendrive crash.

It’s 2009 for those of you who haven’t been keeping track of time, and I am in Hawaii for those of you who haven’t been keeping track of space.  After a few days of reflecting on what my first post of the new year should be about, I found it only appropriate that the post be centered around what it is that moved me to first begin this blog 81 posts ago. In the last few weeks, I’ve been up to a quite a lot, and it doesn’t look like things are going to change anytime in the near future.  I’ve gotten to hop over to Maui twice, both times to visit some of the oldest (in terms of how long I’ve known them, not their ages) friends that I still keep in touch with.  My brother came out for a visit, and left last night to head back to the misery that is winter time in Manhattan. My cousin came out for a visit, and left today to head back to her South Carolinian college experience. Great times were had by all.

What is just as exciting as all of that, is what is yet to come (some of which will be happening, or is already happening, in 2009).  Just a taste:

• Matt and Grace Ann got engaged
• Jeff is back on Facebook
• Paul is considering investing even more of his time and energy into his music (even more then he already does)
• Cat and Alex are getting married
• Ashley is chasing her dreams down in ‘bama
• Amanda is launching DailyWorth.com and her second child
• Nicole launched her photo-a-night project
• Barack starts his new job
• VoiceStream drops Acapocalypse
• Bryant has a beautiful new baby

It’s kind of amazing that so much good is happening at a time where life for so many is so shitty.  I am certain you can chalk it up to ambition and perseverance.  None of these things are going to just happen to these people, and none of these people are just sitting back watching these things happen to them.  My friends get shit done, and my friends care about what shit they get done.  That is why they are my friends. It is what draws me to them, and I’m guessing, them to me.  So what do I have to offer them in 2009?  It’s yet to be determined, but stay tuned, and stay pants-less.

P.S. If I forgot anything that any of you would like to share, or to have on my blogdar (borrowed from the gays and modified for the ‘blog’ frequency), please share in the comments. (I can say this with confidence because I know you wont).

I can recall sitting in the den of our brick house (like the three little pigs) in Maplewood New Jersey at six years of age watching television.  I used to watch Nickelodeon back in the day (I would still watch Nickelodeon if I had television service).  Once every few weeks during the commercial breaks there would be this animated short of hippos, cats, dogs or pigs playing a sport.  Most of them were only like 30 or 40 seconds long (apparently they were appropriately titled Sports Cartoons).

Like most of my peers at the time, I enjoyed these shorts.  Unlike most of my peers at the time, it occurred to me that I should keep a pad of paper and a pen (even at the ripe age of six I never made mistakes) by the television so that every time one of these shorts aired, I could write down what sport was featured and what animals were playing it.  Why?  So I’d have a list of course! I’ve always been a list-maker.

At that age, just to have a list was the drive/motivation/reason for doing things.  Just about two decades later, so much has changed.  I still keeps lists, but now the list is what drives/motivates me to do things.  Being a self-employed (although my entirely lively-hood at this point depends on one person giving me work, thanks Amanda) freelancer/consultant/code-monkey/henchman-for-hire means that I need to self-motivate.  This isn’t usually a problem for me, but everyone has their days.  As a result I have come up with a way to get the work done even when I’m feeling unmotivated.

I call it the Happy Feet method (thanks Kimmie).  For those of you who haven’t seen the film, I present you with this clip (play close attention to the last few seconds):

You have to trick yourself into thinking that you are already being productive.  When you are feeling unproductive (and therefore are actually unproductive) shifting into ‘productive mode’ requires you to make a change.  That change requires effort and motivation which you clearly are lacking.  Therefore, if you trick yourself into thinking you are already being productive, you aren’t requiring any changes of yourself, you are just rolling with it.  So you may ask, how does this certain somebody manage to trick himself (especially with that razor sharp wit of his)?  It’s simple, the list.

Most times I am feeling unproductive, my list consists of large tasks that have been hanging over my head for quite some time and I have fallen into the habit of putting them off, I’m aboard the procrastination train and oh brother it’s a smooth ride.  When the list is empty except for these items, my motivation is at its’ lowest.  So here is where you make a fool of yourself.

Decide two things that you need to do that are normally too small/insignificant for the list.  These are the type of things that take relatively little time (compared to the items that normally go on your list).  Good examples are taking the trash out, taking the dog for a walk, or taking your pants off.  Now write them down on your list.  If you have spaces in your list, do yourself the added favor of separating the two, one near the top and one near the bottom as to appear like you are randomly attacking items in the list (this doesn’t work if your list is prioritized).  Now, do those two things.  As you complete them, cross them off your list.

Ten minutes ago you were so unmotivated and unproductive that you had nothing to show for it.  Now ten minutes later you’ve crossed not one, but TWO things off your list!  YOU ARE ON A ROLL BABY! VIVA LA HAPPY FEET METHOD.