Yesterday I renewed the domain for the (soon to return, I swear) Orange Blossom Media. That means to me that it has been two years since I officially started that as a freelance business. I mainly stopped last year, due to excuses that don’t really make much sense anyway. I suppose being disheartened could be one of them that sticks. Still, I recently decided to do so again, and have gotten a few clients, so that has lifted my spirits on it a bit. I briefly considered changing the business name and going in a new direction, but as I already have all of the paperwork in for this one with the gubmint, have nice business cards, and the domain and logo, I decided that I’d just go the easier route. Still I think that it’s strong, so I have no regrets with the decision.

Writing this is more a reminder for myself that this is something that I will continue putting some of my time into, even if finding clients is more time consuming than getting the work done for them. In addition to my WordPress development, and hopeful mobile app development this year, I feel that it will be a good way to keep stretching my abilities, and teaching myself new skills. Here’s looking to you 2012, the year that I come into my own on the web!

I’ve heard the saying that the halfway point of a marathon is really the 20 mile marker, and having finally done one myself, I can attest that it is indeed the case. Daniel and I foolishly stopped our running regimen about two months ago, and went in to it a bit more unprepared than we would have liked. The week before was nice, with an excuse to slack on weight lifting, and to eat more delicious foods while throwing around the term “carb loading”. Getting through the event though, was quite an ordeal, and my body is still mad at me about it.

While running there was a woman near me that had a shirt on showing that she was running for her son, whose birthday was the same as mine, down to the year. I don’t know what he died of, but it got me thinking to the fact that I am 23 years old and healthy and able to do something like this, which I can now mark off as a bucket list item completed. I hope that the run gave her some form of healing, and am glad that I have the chance to do so myself.

Beyond that, I have already accepted my first freelance project of 2012, and it has gone well so far. I hope to complete it before going on a trip later this week to Fort Lauderdale to see Lisa and a short cruise that we were lucky enough to get via Daniel’s boss. While I’m still having general headaches over work and difficulties in school bureaucracy, I’m also hopeful that this portends a good year, and successes that I have been striving towards for some time.

Do any of my readers have things that they want to complete during heir life that they intend to do this year?

Click on Mario!

Here is yet another New Year’s post. It has been a full year since redesigned my website, and I feel another design coming on soon. I have tried to keep busy over the past year, though I haven’t always done as much as I wanted to, as usual. I find it easy to make promises that I do not keep, and plans that I do not follow through with. At risk of doing so again, I am going to post a list this year of a few things that I would like to get done.

• Develop a web application. It doesn’t need to be as grand as some ideas that I’ve had previously, but something that does something useful, is well designed, and works.
• Complete a  rough draft of my non-fiction book. I’ve already begun a good deal of my research, and have started an outline, so as long as I keep myself on task, I should be able to do a good amount of work. I’m setting the high goal of completing a first draft, in an attempt to stay motivated.
• Work on becoming more prolific with my blogging. If I resuscitate the websites that I’ve been working on, I’ll have 3-4 to update, and it would be useful to do so on a regular basis, especially if I’m trying to get more readers for them.

There are several other things that I intend on working on, but I don’t want to overload myself any more than I already am. Judging on how I overextend my actual reserves of motivation, I don’t want to do so quite as much. Maybe by making some proclamations here, some people can help keep me going.

Hermitage of St. Bernadine Library, New South Wales. Photo by Christopher John

I recently read an old New Yorker article, concerning what life would be like if most people stopped reading. I have aspirations of making writing become a career path in some respect, or at least continue on with it personally if I have an audience. I read constantly, in all forms and formats, and often wish that I made even more time to read than I currently do, or could go through more books quicker. I feel guilty if I pick up my 3DS or the television remote in lieu of a book, or if I open Twitter on my iPad instead of iBooks.

Still, I am aware that I read more than the average individual. I keep a large backlog of fiction and nonfiction books by my desk to work through, often working on several at a time depending on my mood. I have several novels on my iPad that I’m working on, and if I get bored of that for a bit, I pull up the newspaper, Flipboard for its articles, or the invaluable Instapaper app (seriously, if you ever read anything online and have a compatible device, buy this app). According to studies quoted in that article, and from my personal observations, the purchase of books has declined, as has their consumption, and reading comprehension in general is moving in a downward trend. The author foresees a return of reading for pleasure or personal information to a niche group, this time not due to a higher rank or elite status, but due to general disinterest and apathy.

Is this a bad thing? As someone who enjoys reading myself, and who would like to find paying customers for things that I write, which would become increasingly difficult with a smaller customer base, I cringe at the thought. Still, different strokes and all, so I can’t take this personally. I just wonder if there will be other side effects that we can’t envision now, or how people will change in general without the more consistent use of the internal conversations that books provide. Watching a movie or television show, even based on a book, is not the same as living that story in your own head, mapping your experiences onto it and letting it shape you as you are shaping it to yourself. Creative thinking results in many of our greatest achievements, and I worry: will a decline in literacy correlate to a decline in creativity?

‘The Tree of Life’ is a slow burn. It is a film for the patient, and for their patience, they are rewarded.

The film had been on my radar for about a year, and life, as well as only the single art theater in town playing it for a limited run, kept me from seeing it until now. I’ve never particularly paid attention to Terrence Malick before, and did not go into this movie with the history of his work that many critics have. I did watch ’2001: A Space Odyssey’ again recently, and I think that it helped to prime me for the visuals in the film. Indeed, Douglas Trumbull returned to do visual effects for this film, as well as Peter and Chris Parks, who had previously worked on ‘The Fountain’, one of my favorite films that is also concerned with a different tree of life. Their work and Malick’s eye for a great shot made Every scene a bit of eye candy, whether Jessica Chastain tending to her children, or a volcanic eruption on early Earth.

‘Tree’ is about the universe, all encompassing. Beginning with the news of a son’s deaths, the movie jumps back through the creation of the Earth and life on the planet, including the rise of dinosaurs and their fall to a meteor strike. We are then returned to one of the other sons re-visitation of childhood, in Waco, Texas in the 1950′s. There is love and beauty on behalf of his mother, raising him and two other brothers with a tender hand. There is hardness also, from the firm embraces of his father, a stiffly paternal Brad Pitt. He is conflicted both at home and at work. He loves his sons but cannot express it in the same way as his wife. During a scene where he is teaching his sons to fight you can feel the tension, the play punching bordering on real fighting. His struggles in reconciling his love of music with his need to earn a living for his family fuel his inner turmoil, which most of us can attest to being stressors in our dealings with others in our own lives. A good portion of this pain resonated with me personally, which I imagine is what many of the positive reviewers of the film felt as well.

I’m not going to say that I fully felt Malick’s entire vision. I do agree with some of the detractors that there is a bit of pretension in the movie, and not enough of the substance is stated outright” I gathered it to be about the contention and duality of the different ways of being, whether tender or firm. When young Jack confides that he feels that he has become more his father than mother, it puts his scenes as an adult making a living as an architect into perspective, as memories of his childhood flood him while at work. Sean Penn, as an adult Jack, had far too little screen time, and I was yearning to feel more of how his childhood shaped him as a person. While ostensibly being about the formation and destruction of the planet, the film is really his story, and one that was entirely human.

Emotional, overwrought, beautiful and melancholy; ‘The Tree of Life’ is one of those films that can have tremendous impact on an individual, but if they do not feel it, then it can falloff and fall flat.

With every trip to DC, I find something new to take in. There is so much to see in the city, it is difficult to do a fair amount of any of it in any one trip. Even over five full days as we took over Thanksgiving weekend, plenty of important sights and sites have been left out. We visited a mass of memorials and monuments and museums, saw an assortment of art, partook in eclectic eateries, and visited a sampling of shops. A Jonathan Coulton and They Might Be Giants concert was part of our vacation, as well as a two hour drive to Charlotesville, VA to visit Thomas Jefferson’s home of Monticello. A few trips per day and plenty of relaxation time kept the trip from becoming stressful, and we were never at a lack of things to do. The weather was generally pleasant as well, and overall I would rate it as our best trip to the nation’s capitol.

Daniel is a lucky guy it seems. Both he and I won preshow passes to see The Killers on Friday, at a local club that I’d not been to before. Though we spent about three times as long waiting as the show was, it was an excellent experience. The same day, Daniel won two tickets to day two of Orlando Calling, which we already had day one passes to. We opted not to go to the second day, having plans already, but We did spend the majority of the day at the Citrus Bowl, which probably has no other events coming up there all year. The variety of bands was pretty good, and we got to see sets from several bands that I like, including The Killers again, O.A.R. before that, and Iron & Wine earlier in the afternoon. All in all, it was enjoyable, and I look forward to the return next year.

I spent a part of my morning watching the documentary ‘The Transcendent Man’, about the works and ideas of Ray Kurzweil. He is known as one of the inventors of the flatbed scanner, as well as the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the blind, music synthesizers, and other technological devices. He is also an author and futurist, whose idea of the Singularity as an evolutionary path merging human consciousness and technology. His meetings with other academics, as well as popular figures, such as Colin Powell, Jon Stewart, Stevie Wonder and William Shatner amongst others illuminate his ideas on the progression of mankind.

Kurzweil has made many predictions on the future over time, with many coming to pass, and proving personal successes for his businesses and ideas. Extrapolating forward, he has pegged dates of mere decades in the future as to when humanity will irrevocably merge with machines. For instance, based on the progression of computer capabilities, he imagines that in the year 2029, a computer will have the processing capability of all of the brans in the human race. Only shortly thereafter he envisions the rate of technological growth to become too fast for any one mind to keep up with. It is at this point, or prior, that we will merge with machines and in effect become immortal.

It is clear, in his words and actions, that Ray Kurzweil refuses death. The case could be made that he fears death, and his diet and exercise regimen in addition to the reportedly 200 separate pills and supplements that he takes a day could be his attempt to live long enough to see his visions come to pass. His belief is that soon the life expectancy of the average person will increase more than a year every year, thereby indefinitely stretching lifespan. Included in this vision is the merging of the human brain with computers, so that we can back up our minds, enhance cognition, add extra memory, and even use the DNA of dead people to bring them back to life. Possibly tongue-in-cheek, but he states that he now sees something useful in cemeteries, which were previously pointless to him, as they are a stockpile of genetic matter for those that we miss.

His feelings toward our merging with computers, and what that means for the future of humanity, definitely make Kurzweil more transcendent than the average person. Most people, myself included, have a knee-jerk reaction when it comes to this future pace of advancement, and the inability to know what it means for us, or how much change can be made while we are still defined as human. The point can be made, however, that we will all be experiencing it together, and that it won’t be a matter of the computers taking over or anything, as we will in essence be the computers. Still, I’m trying to wrap my mind around it a bit, and finding it difficult to relate to how we live currently and what this future vision promises. As the idea of singularity implies, no one can really know what will happen when it strikes, as a fundamental paradigm shift in the universe will occur, and a new form of evolution will begin.

Language study has long fascinated me, and as a recent post may demonstrate, so has baking. I recently read Words to Eat By: Five Foods and the Culinary History of the English Language, an interesting history of five historically English food staples, and their storied history of nomenclature. The apple is one of these such foods, the only fruit native to Great Britain, though there it was more associated with the crab apple than the larger and sweeter varieties that we routinely eat today.

The apple is believed to be one of the first fruits that was cultivated; with over 7,500 cultivars all stemming from a common ancestor of Malus sieversii. Most are created through grafting, as the apple plant is extremely heterozygous, meaning that it doesn’t just inherit DNA from its parent plants, but can differ dramatically. Combine that with the large genetic sequence (an apple tree has almost twice the number of genes as a human), and the fact that they are triploids (3 sets of chromosomes, which don’t divide evenly), and wild variations are hard to come by. Were humans to stop grafting and cultivating apples, they would eventually return to a state more like the wild ancestor that they are derived from. Throughout all of our meddling though, some amazing varieties in shape, size, color, russeting, and flavor, along with factors important beyond taste, such as habitable climates and ability to store and travel well.

The bible does not state what kind of fruit grew on the Tree of Knowledge, but it was not always represented as an apple. The type of fruit most likely envisioned by the writers would have been the contemporary pomegranate or some similar fruit, but popular culture holds that an apple is what Eve was tempted with. Renaissance painters would draw from Greek mythology in their Christian interpretations, and golden apples have a sordid history in Ancient Greece. Combined with the homophonous nature between the Latin words for apple and evil, and the world’s most popular fruit is branded as a thing of sin. Indeed, the popularity of the apple exceeds any species, as the word for apple in many languages and cultures is synonymous for the term for “fruit” in general. Try it. Close your eyes and think of the word fruit, and see what comes to mind.

By the way, the pie came out smelling and tasting wonderfully, and is definitely something that I will try again.

Warm Apple Pie and Vanilla Ice Cream with Coffee. Heaven.

Just a quick post to say that yesterday we brought a beautiful Australian Shepard home from the pound. Her name is Ginger, and she’s about a year old. She is still pretty skittish and gives off that vibe that she may have been mistreated a bit at her previous home, but does not run from us and allows contact. We’re hoping that she’ll get comfortable and more active soon, but we’re patient and will take the time that it requires.

I’ll update, but in the meantime enjoy this adorable picture of her.

Soft and cuddly!

I like to bake, this is no secret. Also common knowledge is the fact that I am not always very good at it. Like when it comes to making cupcakes, for instance.

Especially when it comes to making cupcakes.

I love the little treats. I get to snack on a piece of cake and have a little bit of self restraint too (insomuch as I’d be eating a slice the size of my face if given the option). I want to be able to make them at home though, and not have to go out every time I get the fix. Plus, I see all of these amazing flavors and concoctions online, and figure that the deliciousness of some of these photos is something worth attaining.

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Seriously, just look at these

I have had my share of failures, and then some. Many are my fault (trying new recipes when I don’t have old ones down, misreading and using baking soda instead of baking powder or vice versa), but sometimes I feel like making the perfect cupcake is just not something that I can do. I’ve had monstrosities emerge from the oven, feebly raising their malformed little cupcake arms and begging for a merciful end to their short existence. Today I went for a low fat recipe, replacing the butter with some oil and yogurt. They didn’t fall, they didn’t burn, they puffed up nicely, albeit more than I intended since I overfilled the papers. They did, however, come out tasting a bit of cornbread, as my last attempt of “healthier” cupcakes went. My attempts at frosting then went awry as I tried using a decorating tube with frosting that was a bit too thick. I got random squiggles out of it, making them even more pathetic than before.

I know I should probably just stop. I’ve wasted far too many sticks of butter and cups of flour on my futile attempts at sugary goodness. I should pack away the frosting bags and baking tins and call it a night. And yet…

I found this vanilla cupcake recipe with frosting and sprinkles that looks amazing!

Look. Look at these things.

Now that July is about half over, I thought I’d take a look at my challenges, and honestly assess how I’m doing with them. This is my first month, so I expected it to be a bit bumpy, but overall I suppose I need to start working harder in future months.

As far as going vegan for the month goes, I made it about 5 days, then messed up. After that I kind of continued to do so, including last night where I ate an entire calzone with some marinara and alfredo sauce, because I am an idiot. I’m kind of hoping that the getting sick from it part will deter me from consuming them in the future. Not fun, and it made me feel like crap afterward, a reminder that I need.

The sketching has been going better, with me doing significantly more this month than usual. It still means maybe half a page a day of doodles, but it is progress nonetheless. I plan on continuing this onward in general, and trying new things with it. I have sketches done for 12 of the 14 days that have passed so far, which isn’t perfect, but again, way more than my average. I will attempt to fill every day from now on, as well as doing a bit more each day than I have so far. I have the free time, so that shouldn’t really be an excuse for me.

The list of thanks I am posting to twitter each day, as it’s easier for me to record them there to remind myself of it. Some of them are a bit sarcastic I admit, but I’m still trying to make it positive while dealing with some less than stellar days. Without further ado, today I am thankful for:

1. That I was not in the car accident that delayed traffic for over an hour today.
2. The excellent stand up sets that are available to stream on Netflix. Saved my day!
3. All of those dragonflies doing handstands on the bushes outside. They can fly and are gymnasts. #showoffs
4. No matter how much it is clearly a bowl of sugar, kids’ cereal boxes can still sound like it is healthy for you.
5. Late nights and net surfing. Still counts!
6. The delicacy that is amazing Sicilian pizza. It has nothing to do with the cheese that it totally was not covered in.
7. New opportunities and hope that good stuff can happen.
8. This puppy: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lk71s6mgWW1qhhroto1_500.png
9. The film “Horrible Bosses”, which was all kinds of hilarious.
10. That odd feeling you get when you wake up from a nap thinking it’s the middle of the night to realize that it was just a nap.
11. Today it is completing the GRE and delicious cupcakes that I am thankful for. And the new full trailer for Tin Tin
12. My car, crappy as is, running for me after hitting 135k, and also for this wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_their_own_inventions
13. Today about the only thanks that I can give up is for a slice of cake and coffee, provided that I ignore the unhealthiness of it.
14. Good friends are always something to be thankful for. That, and getting ready to go to a midnight muggle fest

There’s more to come, stay tuned!