Today I was able to upload the revised versions of my Blog and the main website. Everything’s pretty much done, but I will continue to tweak things over the coming weeks. So far so good…

I was once told that everyone should make a New Year’s Resolution, as it is the one time in life that you can tell an outright lie to yourself and everyone around you and no one will think anything of it. I tend to do them every year and one of them always has to do with writing.

I didn’t need further proof that this is common – go to a New Years party with a bunch of writers and you’ll see just how common it is – so when fellow Altered Fluidian Eugene Myers sent around this “The Washington Post” article last month by Ann Patchett, and her realizations of how making yourself write every day actually resulted in writing every day and having higher output, it wasn’t a new concept for me. (I have to admit, though, that the first time I read the article, all I could think was “wow, this woman knows Edgar Meyer!)

In the article a yogi is credited with saying that if one picks a task and does it with consistency for the first 32 days of the year, then that sets the tone for the year. I agree with that, but I don’t think you have to limit it to the first 32 days of the year. Doing something every day is simple programming of the human body and mind. You can teach yourself to write every day by simply sitting down and writing every day. You can teach yourself a musical instrument by practicing every day. Professional football, basketball and other sports players practice every day. And even if you’re not that good at first, and maybe you don’t care for the task, you can still program yourself to do it. For proof of the latter, read about Andre Agassi and how his father decided Andre would be the best tennis player in the world and it became so. Also look at how many people, if they really thought about it, would admit to despising their 9-5 job, but they’ve programmed themselves to do it through repetition of the task and the telling themselves it has to be.

So, while I don’t think New Year’s Resolutions are incantations that guarantee success or failure, I’ll still make a few:

1. I will have Indian food at least twice a month. This one is easy!

2. Writing. I’ll write every day. Within reason. Some days I can’t write, due to travel, being sick, long days at work. But on the days that I can write I will. I’ve done it before, no sense not to keep it going.

3. Skydiving. Who wants to jump out of a plane with me? Kristen’s said many times that she won’t.

4. Exercise. I got into a good routine with running and Gyrotonic sessions last summer and fall, but work and the weather have dropped that to zero. No time like the present to pick it up again.

So. There. Promises I make to myself that may or may not turn out to be lies for the New Year. But, no worries. If they don’t take hold on January 1st, then I can start again on February 1st, or March 7th, or “The Ides of March”, or whenever.

Have a great Twenty-Ten!

As I’ve always said, if I’m not participating in online blogs, Facebook, emails, and anything else yet invented or yet to be, it generally means I’ve been busy with other things. A summer full of travel, a novel completed (a rough first draft, that is) and a lot of consulting work have kept me away from posting here. To get the ball rolling again, a photo of the loading *cranes in Alameda at sunset, looking north west towards the hills of San Francisco.

*the rumor is that cranes such as this in Alameda and Oakland are what inspired George Lucas to create the AT-AT snow walkers in the movie “The Empire Strikes Back”.

I uploaded these photos the other day but forgot to link them here.  Old age.

We had excellent conditions for the show this year; after rain on the two previous years that was a welcome change.  Also, instead of having to strain our eyes across Manhattan, this year the fireworks barges were stationed in the Hudson, to mark the 400th anniversary of the discovery of said river.  A great show overall.

One of my biggest pet peeves is the misuse and swapping about of the words “than” and “then”.  Drives me absolutely nuts.  So much so that at my old desktop support position I continually corrected the call tracking tickets of others and let them know of their mistake whenever they’d use one in the place of the other.  Flash-forward two years, I’m back at the law firm as a consultant for a Blackberry rollout project, and I see the reminder in the photo attached to a co-worker’s monitor.

Makes me smile.

The end of a televisions series always brings forth certain emotions, theories, disappointments, and, of course, opinions.  While the journey should be the thing — and with Battlestar Galactica it has been four seasons of a wonderful trip — everyone wants a great end to a long journey.  I’ll get it out front and say I liked the finale.  It isn’t the greatest thing I’ve ever seen and I did have problems with parts of it, but overall it worked for me.

The biggest problem with the entire episode was flying the fleet into the sun.  True, you can write it off as another bad decision in a series that shows how often we all make bad decisions, but all 38,000 people and everyone wanted to go retro and live off of the land?  No one would miss their radios, computers, and everything else that the human’s had evolved into?  I believe if they’d had more time to investigate the “breaking the cycle” notion, given it a little debate, then it might have worked a little better as written.  Give us a hint that the fuel is now finite, they’re out of medication, that everything they do have is temporary anyway (which it would have been).  But why even go through all of that explanation that still doesn’t cover everything?  This is such an easy fix:  a new-born hybrid should be able to see the foibles of the human and Cylon races, their inability to learn, how the cycle will continue.  Anders could come to that realization and simply go rogue, take the fleet into the sun of only his own volition.  The result is a great “what the frak just happened?” moment, stranded survivors with new seemingly insurmountable odds, and a truly a clean slate.

Secondly, I guess if there is a higher power, some hand pulling the strings, then the whole coincidence of the Raptor’s dead pilot nuking the Colony shouldn’t bother me so much.  But it does.

At first I was put off by the notion that “angels” were driving everything, but then I realized that this entire series has been about that.  Caprica 6 has been continually spouting religious rhetoric to Baltar the entire series.  The Colonials used religious texts to search for Earth.  The Cylons and their resurrection tech and One True God.  While I don’t like the “religion is the answer” angle, with the setup we were given, how could it be anything but?  It made sense, although that last bit in Times Square was too much.

Everything else, though, worked for me.  I’m a bit confused that Adama Sr. and Tyrol wanted to go off and die alone, but it’s their decision and I can live with it.  There are a few other things here and there, but nothing that stopped me or detracted from enjoying the episode.

Yes, I loved the resolution to Starbuck’s character.  Mainly because I don’t think the writers could have given us anything to explain her, possibly because they don’t know themselves.  There are hints Starbuck was an angel, but there are also hints that she was not – I personally think she was not.  She works better as an unknown.

The flashbacks were amazing.  My favorite part.  Tigh and Adama getting drunk in a strip club is one of the truest scenes of the entire series.  Those flashback sequences highlighted the character-based story telling that has always been the strongest part of this series.  It’s exactly the sort of thing that the sci-fi world as a whole needs more of.

Galactica’s final jump out of danger and the ensuing snapping of her keel was fantastic and heart breaking at the same time.  A fitting final outing for the old girl.

The finale was not perfect, but what is.  The more I think about it, the more I like it.  I like the fact that they arrive at least 100,000 years before sustained agriculture was successful on this planet.  I guess Baltar wasn’t that good of a farmer after all.  I like that the survivor’s descendants have to go through an ice age.  I like the possibility that if I was one of the 1% who survived Armageddon and spent several years crammed into a cigar tube in space, running for my life, that at the end of it all, if given a chance, maybe I’d say screw it all and just walk off into the forest, build a cabin, and take it easy for the rest of my days.  Maybe.

Darker and at a higher price would have been better.  Anders stealing the fleet for the “sun run” would have fixed 99.9% of the issues I had with this episode.  But, after the four years of pure hell and hopelessness that the people of the fleet endured and the price already paid, I’ll grant them this almost happy ending.

Here’s what you can do with a full day, a box of peeps, some scrap styrene and construction paper.  Kristen did an AWESOME job on the hair!

This is for the third annual Washington Post Peep Diorama contest.  Based on this poster.  Basically the contest is “take a bunch of peeps and make something out of them”.

Both peeps were liberally coated with clear lacquer before starting work.  I’m not sure if that changed the digestibility of the things.

A more permanent mount for the piece (the background is just construction paper and quite flimsy) will be built this week, I’ll get some better photos and show some of the details.  The guitars have strings!

With all of the talk of change being passed around in D.C., I would like to  suggest a new policy:

For the foreseeable future all 401K statements need to be mailed in red envelopes.  That way I know to pull it out of the mailbox and insert it directly into the paper shredder.

Wow, I really didn’t need to see that statement!

After setting up the cool new Wordpress 2.7 for a friend, I decided to upgrade my old version as well.  This is just a test so I can assure myself I didn’t make the whole thing go BOOM.

Happy New Year to everyone!

I put together the in-progress shots I have taken during my stint at the Chanel Mobile Art project in Central Park.  The event has opened to the public and runs through November 9th.  The exhibit houses approximately 10 art installations, including painting, photography, film, and sculpture.  Each visitor gets a personal tour,  guided by an MP3 player (which thankfully is NOT an iPod!) and makes for a unique experience.  As I heard a visitor remark yesterday, “Say what you will about liking the art or not, but you’ll never experience anything like that again!”