existence | inspiration

/EXISTENCE
This blog seems to have melted down and become something new over time and I'm thinking that this is more of a personal blog than professional. You can find my professional ramblings about those damn checkboxes over here. Sure, some of my professional life will seep in here, but it's really about me and what I do in my spare time. Most of my spare time for the past 4 years has been spent playing video games with friends. I've enjoyed it thoroughly but it's not really that interesting to talk about. I mean we're pretty juvenile in our humor and we rarely have any moments of insight. That said, we do have some on occasion and I may just share those here.

But I digress. I'm here to talk about inspiration. Inspiration can come from many sources. One more recently for me was hitting a weight that isn't good for my height or age. But negative inspiration rarely has a good effect on me. And so this brings me to my close friend Michael who has lost 250 pounds and transformed his life over that past 2.5 years to one of energy and life. His transformation is especially amazing when you learn that all of this has been done through changing what he eats, regular exercise, and breaking free of his own prison of the mind. I recommend you go check out his blog at http://chooselife.prohealthliving.org/.

Through his story and working alongside him during his journey, I've become inspired to improve my own life. I tried doing more dramatic changes, but they never seemed to work for me. Instead I decided to do small changes, make sure I succeed in making that change stick, and then move onto the next change. The first change I made was to eliminate gluten from my diet. It's been an interesting adjustment and my usual habits of eating out for lunch every day has undergone a change in selection. My current selection isn't the best, but it's a start. Only time will tell at this point.

Until next time:
Work smart. Play hard. Sleep well.

existence | rhythm

/EXISTENCE
Today was a hard day for some reason. Clients that I'm normally super happy to work with triggered an unbridled rage within me to which I reigned in only barely by stopping and thinking about what I was doing. My heart was in such a bad place I asked if I could head home early. On my way home I stopped by In-n-Out to get a burger and a chocolate shake. The sugar high did improve my mood, but only temporarily. Surely playing video games with friends online would help, but alas competitive co-op only made me feel useless when my score was less than half of friend and the lowest of the three of us. My heart was sinking and I felt the tailspin of an emotional vortex starting. In a moment of clarity, I decided to drop out of the second round through the game's rather short story in favor of taking it easy the remainder of the evening. I even thought about going and building something in Minecraft, but it didn't feel quite right. In a second moment of clarity, I finally followed the reminder I had setup to do some writing.

But I didn't have to write anything of any use if I didn't feel like it. In fact I didn't initially. I started with some free writing based on what was rattling around in my head. I even tried something a bit new and took off my glasses so I had to write everything by feel. My typing ended up being quite accurate and I was left with a clearer mind. No longer did the words and feelings have to rattle around internally. Now they were recorded in a file saved to my documents. As I let the emotions flow the words came with them, helping create a new description and image for my feelings. Music and audio have always been super important in my life and so I described my state as being in a state of dissonance with life. I don't know if I changed, or what's really different, but I've noticed that slowly I no longer feel a harmony with my work. But I'm not sure it's all IT work. I think it's just this style of IT support.

My sister got me thinking as well about what I really want out of where I live and I realized that where I currently live is actually pretty damn nice. I'm within walking distance of a major shopping center and things in general are pretty chill on the roads. Overall, it's not where I live that's out of sync with me. It's where I work. And it's hard because I am pretty good at what I do. But I hate having to go into LA or even north Orange County because traffic sucks and I just don't like the vibe I get. Everything is too... intense. I hate to think what kind of stress I'd have over in New York City.

So that's my goal at this point: to find harmony and bring a good rhythm back to my life.

Until next time:
Work smart. Play hard. Sleep well.

that damn checkbox... Java options greyed out

/TECH
My co-worker was going about his business one day when he needed to add an exception to the Java Security Exception Site List. So he popped in, clicked "Edit Site List...", and... couldn't modify the list. The "Add" button was greyed out. We started searching the Internet and found some things that sounded right, but they weren't. Most posts had to do with deployment options. Finally, we decided to compare settings.

As we were comparing various things, he scrolled down to one of my favorite hidden gems within the Java options and I noticed something strange. There was an extra box that he had checked. It seemed so innocuous. So unassuming. And so we unchecked "Store user settings in the roaming profile". He closed and re-opened the Java Control Panel and was finally greeted by the ability to modify his Exception Site List again.



But why would this seemingly good setting cause such problems? We're not sure, but my guess is a permissions issue to the roaming settings. We even tested re-checking the box on his computer and his Exception Site List was working either way now.

If you're having this issue, open the Java Control Panel -> Advanced tab -> scroll to the bottom and uncheck "Store user settings in the roaming profile". You can even re-check it later if you need it as it seems to fix permissions in the process.

And this was all because of a damn checkbox.

Until next time:
Work smart. Play hard. Sleep well.