Random Thoughts 12

Sunday, January 16, 2011

- “I can’t take this 10 more times” “can you hold in there today?” “yes” “that’s all you have to do today.”

- Unofficially saving seats for friends in church can be hard sometimes. When someone comes and just starts to sit down you don’t want to be like “wait! Sorry! I have better friends than you coming, you’ll have to go elsewhere.” Funny that I was thinking of this today when I sat alone in the back again. What’s wrong with me on Sundays lately?

- I need to find non-computer activities to do. Even learning/practicing programming and job hunting are good things I do that I never even need to leave my doorway for. It would actually be really nice to clean my room or do my laundry alone. I’ll try shopping alone…

Monday, January 17, 2011

- Ward activities, I need to attend my ward activities, my pat blessing even says so. I used to think of people who came regularly to church but not activities as active members but not people who wanted to be part of ward family social. Maybe others view me that way too.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

- Went to the institute fireside Friday, it was great! The speaker was a relationship coach, and hilarious. Anyway he talked about smoke kills 95% of the time and only 5% of fire deaths are by the fire. When arguing, people will be like “why can’t I buy a $400 purse? You bought a $370 golf bag!” “$370 isn’t $400!” “it is if you’re rounding!” etc etc. Here they’re arguing about bags, rounding, money, etc, but this is just arguing about smoke, what needs to be taken care of is the fire. He listed 7 categories that are the root cause, or the fire, that most smoke arguments are derived from. They are, safety, trust, appreciation, respect, validation, encouragement, dedication.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

- Hunger makes people ornery, even Lehi got grumpy when he was hungry 1 Nephi 16:20.

- “Watch out for people who act weird – they may not be acting.”

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

- I’m really looking forward to working. My singleness has been pressing on me powerfully lately and it’s not fun. Work should be a good thing to focus on.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

- I LOVE INSTITUTE! Sister Terry is amazing! I take a notepad page of notes every time. Stuff that hit me hardest this time:

- We were talking about what people think the Celestial Kingdom will be like, class members used a lot of words like “color” “mansions” “gold” “light” etc. I realized when I “picture” the Celestial Kingdom, I don’t picture the streets or walls or anything like that. You know when you see an amazing friend that you haven’t seen in forever and you can just feel the love and excitement? I just picture seeing someone and feeling that. The Celestial Kingdom is definitely more that feeling to me than any landscape or architectural mastery.

- I can’t feel the spirit in my apartment, not while any room mates are awake anyway, and sometimes not even while alone in the apt. It’s hard to meditate without feeling the spirit. HOWEVER! I remembered today that my van is a wonderful place to meditate/feel the spirit. I plan to spend a lot more time in my van, even for no reason.

- BUSY. Gotta keep busy, I’m not doing that well enough. Sister Terry was joking about how if you keep yourself busy there’s no time to sin. But it’s true, it’s when I’m idle that I feel the most lame/lonely, or I’m most tempted to do something stupid. But when I’m busy there’s no time to drift into carnal security.

Random Thoughts 11

Thursday, January 06, 2011

- It's not every day a fire starts in my van when I open the door. But apparently, today was that day. It was just a small electrical fire. In the 30 seconds or so as I sat there stunned deciding what to do next it burned out. Still super freaky, I'm afraid to go anywhere today haha. Good thing I'm fixing it tomorrow...

Friday, January 07, 2011

- Amazing, I'm at my parents house, and we have those long vertical slot blinds to cover our sliding glass doors. And I happened to be position such that one blind, which happens to be swinging, is alternating letting the sun shine on my face and not. Why is it even swinging?’

Sunday, January 09, 2011

- Very melancholy day. Couldn’t even find someone to sit by in sacrament L.

- If you show up ‘late’ and they haven’t started yet, are you still considered late?

Monday, January 10, 2011

- It’s really freaky to look in the mirror and find a huge mole on your face you didn’t know existed. But it’s really relieving to find out it’s actually some meat from the arby melt you just ate. Not that I’d know this from experience or anything.

- I think people tend to think they don’t have/need to be grateful for something someone is expected (or paid) to do. Like, if maintainence is shoveling the walks, many (sometimes it seems like the majority) have a “well it’s about time” attitude about it. I usually say thanks personally. I’ll bet the same people who aren’t grateful for maintainence people doing their job are also the type that aren’t grateful when God blesses their lives. After all, isn’t that His job?

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

- Make goals based on your strengths rather than your weaknesses. Set goals to contribute to the kingdom using your strengths. Maybe building up peoples testimonies in your 1 on 1’s. Learn their strengths.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

- It’s both relieving and sucky when I figure out why a girl isn’t romantically interested in me. I figured out Ashley Cabrales today, I’m not Spanish enough. I don’t dance or speak Spanish. At least it provides some closure.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

- I feel my witty banter/joke/compliment capacity has been high lately. It’s very enjoyable.

- I’m doing something wrong, time to move towards the other end of the spectrum. In the last week there have been four (4) separate occasions where I was having a fun conversation with a girl over digitial means (facebook, texts) and we got to the idea we should do something sometime and I asked when they’re free or suggested days we should do something and they stopped responding or mysteriously vanished. One I haven’t heard from since, two told me sorry and why they vanished (but seemed to neglect answering the “when are you free?” question) and one responded telling me where she went and when she could do something, we then made plans for lunch the next day, and she bailed 45 minutes before. I like to be optimistic about girls intentions or motives, and maybe it’s all just coincidence, but apparently I’m doing something wrong.

My best guess is I’m a genuine creeper. When I’m talking to someone I usually think “hey, maybe we could do lunch sometime soon!” and I extend an invitation if I can. I’m lead to the conclusion that I really don’t read/understand people as well as I think I do though, and I must be terrible at determining whether it’s an ok time to extend an invitation. In my mind, if I only get a chance to communicate with them once every 3 weeks, a lunch invitation after 3 weeks isn’t a big deal. However, maybe in their mind it’s more like, “holy crap, every time I talk to him he tries to take me to lunch” thus the once in every 3 weeks chat. So, my current theory is I need to rarely give such invitations, or wait until they express interest first, or something. Which sounds retarded to me honestly, how am I ever going to get to spend time with girls if I’m waiting for them to suggest that I take them out? But what I’m doing clearly isn’t working, so I guess I’ll try something different.

- had another interview today, I verbally fenced with the self proclaimed jokester and the team seemed to like me from there out. They drilled me with conceptual programming questions for 90 minutes, some of which took me a while, and they gave hints. But apparently a lot of interviewee’s have walked out, or got really angry, or told them they were wrong when given the solution. The fact I kept sticking at it, didn’t [walk] out, and so on seems to have made me appealing enough. They were saying things like “we’d get you a company laptop…” and such that leads me to believe I’m a very likely candidate, so that was fun.

Friday, January 14, 2011

- Had a significant other in my dream last night. I sure wish I didn’t care about such things.

- Crap haha, well so I have no plans today or tomorrow. But if I’m going to go with my thought above on asking people to do things, what I need to do is contact some women and chat or something but NOT ask them to do anything, which would still leave me with no plans this weekend. What the crap will I do with myself? I’d DEFINITELY feel lame just playing WoW all weekend. Ooo! Programming!

- Also, I’m working on programming a turn based RPG battle system (complete with character customization) for practice. I don’t think I mentioned that here.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

- “As we seek our bread from the Lord daily, our trust in him grows”

Random Thoughts 10

Monday, December 13, 2010

- “Your own problems are mostly a bi-product of your own blind spots.”

- I generally prefer video games and board games to be difficult (aka, challenging). Why do I feel different about relationships? Haha.

Sunday, December 26, 2010

- At CJ’s ward Sunday School they talked about the 6 lessons missionaries used to teach in order back in the day. Our Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, the plan of salvation, the restoration, our responsibilities, and then church organization (in that order). Like a pyramid, the first base the biggest and so on, so it’s a firm foundation. Some people turn it over and do it backwards, basing their testimony on something like the organization of the church, and so when someone gets offended the rest topples. Anyway the cool thing I got out of this is that I feel better about my current direction. I don’t feel I have a huge powerful testimony of the restoration, or lots of things, but I do have a powerful connection with my heavenly Father, and apparently it’s a good recommended place to start.

- Go to institute, it’s a basic recommendation you’re missing. Also, go alone so you’re forced to meet people rather than hovel up.

- I feel like I’m fighting some inner turmoil battle over nothing specific. I’ll probably just start be re-quitting WoW.

- I’ve started writing the code for my RPG battle system, it’s quite enjoyable J

- I find it attractive when I see a girl use “you’re” correctly, how funny is that? (addendum, the next three or so times after this that I went to write “you’re” I wrote “your” instead, and felt like an idiot.)

- Way funny so Micah posted the following status, and here’s the conversation that followed.

Micah Clements Nieman: if mankind weren't around to rule the world, what animal would? I vote kangaroo.

Andrew Clark: I think there would be a crapload more tigers

Josh Wyciskalla: Grizzlies.

Allan Wheeler: the wolf

Corby Campbell: I think there should be a crapload more tigers in everyone's life as is. Tigers are friggin' awesome.

Drew Strunk: Penguins. NEXT QUESTION

Corby Campbell: False. Tigers tear penguin faces off, penguins get tripped by their friends (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGy_7gY4f1o). Tigers make intimidating tyrant pets, penguins make tap dances. Tigers would rule the world, but the king tiger's court jester would be a penguin.

Drew Strunk: Baby penguins are so cute that their very presence would crush the very will of your "tigers" and turn them into sissy orange tiger goo.

Corby Campbell While penguins are undeniably cute, tiger babies are also cute, and adult tigers will have developed a tolerance to cuteness as a whole. Thus the flightless bird's only weapon would be rendered useless, and any necessary face ripping would proceed as scheduled.

Andrew Clark: Guys. Guys. Why can't the penguins ride the tigers and have some sort of codependent aristocracy?

Drew Strunk: Andrew, please see the following table. http://dropmocks.com/mOVmV If anything, the tigers could become mounts for the penguins... but they certainly wouldn't share in the total dominating world power. That right would go solely to the most majestic creature. Clearly, the Penguin.

Corby Campbell: Well played, but this table is subjective and inconclusive (as most politics are...) and lacks important headings like "could kill a human", "warm and soft enough to cuddle with", and "has one of the greatest iconic cartoon animals based on the species". This isn't even mentioning the fact there's a martial arts style named after tigers. A crouching tiger is fierce and powerful, a crouching penguin is taking a dump.

Drew Strunk: I feel like if I just repeat Morgan Freeman enough times, I'll eventually win this argument.

Corby Campbell: I've been in contact with my tiger colleagues, they don't have a desire for complete world dominance. They say they're willing to let penguins rule the frozen parts of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, while the tigers maintain the temperate and fertile parts of the world, except for Australia, which will remain under kangaroo control. My colleagues are sure that through trade and diplomacy the world will be a far better place than it ever was with humans.

I'd also like to apologize publicly for my racist court jester penguin joke, it was truly uncalled for.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

- So I often wonder how much things were the same thousands of years ago. For example, I was reading Mosiah 4:27 “And see that all these things are done in wisdom and order; for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength. And again, it is expedient that he should be diligent, that thereby he might win the prize; therefore, all things must be done in order.” And I had the thought, “wait, so did they have races with prizes? Why wouldn’t they? It’s not like it’s a high tech idea.” Huh…

Sunday, January 02, 2011

- Reminder to self: your hair is thick, when you don’t shave for a day, shaving on the subsequent day is painful. Thank you for your time.

- I love music. SURPRISE!

- So for a quick update on job hunting, I first interviewed for a church internship at the Family History Center with Bryan Jackson’s dad, they wanted me and he even got the pay bumped from $10/hour to $14/hour, but I didn’t want the commute and it’s strain on my already struggling van (as I write this, I’m currently trapped in my van until I call someone and have them help me with the door.)

Pursuit two, my two time class group mate Hardy Cherry got me to interview with his company CleanTelligent, they make a cleaning management software. They’ve offered to hire me too at $16/hour with a nearly guaranteed raise to $17.50 after a trial period. But it’s a small space I’d be in, and the rest of the development team would be upstairs. They wouldn’t mind coming down to answer questions, especially because one is my friend already, but still.

Pursuit three, Paul Tomlinson recommended I contact a few people, one of which responded and I have interviewed with them twice (for different teams). They’re called Service Repair Solutions and they do management software for car inspections and some other things. It basically sounds like people with the experience they’re looking for are hard to find, and having no job experience yet I of course don’t have said experience. However, I am easy to get along with and I emphasize that I learn easily and well, so I guess I’m their next best bet. I don’t feel like I did amazing on their technical questions either though.

Pursuit four, Imagine Learning makes games for non-native English speaking kids to learn English. They start at $18/hour part-time and if they like you they upgrade you to $50,000ish salary. They had me interview with two guys, and then a call back interview with the head developer. The head developer googles applicants before interviewing them and found my website. He read my talks and was super impressed with what he called my “iron will” (maybe iron resolve?) to take on challenges, he sounded ready to hire me, but I still had to do a technical test (which I felt good about). They said I likely wouldn’t hear from them until the beginning of the year, but this is the main job I want.

- Oh, I feel geared enough in WoW to not need to play solo, and I’m going to attempt to only play it when playing with the guys. It definitely takes time. If that doesn’t work I’ll probably quit, which would be sad because everyone is playing (Andrew, Neal, Leo, Drew, Jason, Micah, Jake) but meh.