Btw, this is one of the reason's I've been so busy:

It's been a long time since I last posted. Unfortunately, it will be even longer until I actually have time to write a longer post. Meanwhile, here are some pictures to hold you over. These were taken during January of 2007.

This post is just a placeholder for my September 29th to October 2nd trip to visit Darcy. Meanwhile, here are the pics...

I visited Darcy again from September 9th-11th. I don't have time to do anything but post the lone picture I took:

I took an online quiz awhile back at that computed my ecological footprint. It made me fairly upset. Here are the results followed by my thoughts on the matter.
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HERE ARE YOUR FOOTPRINT RESULTS:

CATEGORY GLOBAL ACRES
FOOD 4.9
MOBILITY 2.7
SHELTER 7.4
GOODS/SERVICES 6.9
TOTAL FOOTPRINT 22

IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 24 GLOBAL ACRES PER PERSON.

WORLDWIDE, THERE EXISTS 4.5 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL ACRES PER PERSON.
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I don't accept this 'overconsumption' guilt trip imposed on me.

As a student, I live very fugally, spending only about $800 per month. I rarely ever buy anything that I don't absolutely need. I haven't bought a new pair of shoes in several years. I wait until my clothes are completely worn out before replacing them. I could go on and on. However, I took the ecological footprint quiz and still scored a 22. I can only reach one conclusion. 'Sustainable' living means living in absolute poverty.

For example, the food I eat has an ecological footprint of 4.9. That alone is supposedly more than the earth can sustain if everyone lived like me. If I wanted to live in a sustainable manner, I would have to eat less, give up going places, stop consuming goods/services and become homeless. That's just silly. If this footprint quiz is correct, then we're beyond the point of finding a practical solution.

Right now, I feel like I'm expected to feel guilty for consuming too much. To everyone who thinks I should, I have an important question to ask. At what point do we stop blaming 'overconsumption' and start blaming overpopulation? What happens when the world population doubles? Will you still expect a person to feel guilty for consuming anything more than the absolute bare minimum to simply stay alive?

The solution is not to become a starveling. How will that help curb the wild overpopulation our planet is facing? Poverty increases the birthrate! Instead, we should focus our resources on efforts that will actually help us in long run. How? Help address the source of the problem – population growth rates. Find out which countries have the highest population growth rates. Contribute to the aid organizations that are there right now working to solve this.

Convincing people to consume less will provide diminishing returns as long as the world population keeps growing. Any resource you save will be consumed at ever increasing rates as more and more babies are born. It's a losing battle. Focus on the solution, not the problem. We can't simultaneously do both.

Yet another list of words I've had to look up:

morbidity, comports, agency (other usages), complot, innumerate, peripatetic, histrionic, genuflect, hubris, charlatan, mountebank, quisling, resplendent, quaint, tenable, apocryphal, abraded, presage, limn, mordant, exculpate, environs, fastidious, chary, arrogate, fatuous, Occam's Razor (aka law of parsimony), recrimination, egregious, capitulate, acrimony, zenith, precipitously, modus vivendi, edifice, miasmic, duality, Cynic (as a proper noun), dystopian, euphemistic, dissonance, vituperation, vitriol, effete, traduce, solidarity

These are all words I've recently heard or read.

I've had it with the old beamer! Here it goes....

Last weekend I went on a much needed trip to visit Darcy in Lexington. It was great to see her. It had been over a month since my last visit!

We had a really good time. Saturday was a completely lazy day. We slept half the day, killed 4 hours at borders, then went home and watched a movie and fell asleep. It was great!

On Sunday we went on a double date our new friends Jen and Paul. Jen is finishing up her MS in teaching and plans to do missionary work in Papua New Guinea. Paul was recently involved in starting a local church. I'm really happy that Darcy & I now have another couple to go on double dates with! We both need to be just a little bit more social when we’re together.

The date took us on a road trip to Mitchell's Fish Market in Newport, KY (right across the river from Cincinnati). It was expensive but well deserved. Darcy & I hadn't treated ourselves to a really nice dinner for a long time. After dinner we went for a stroll on the Purple People Bridge, a pedestrian-only bridge that spans the Ohio River. The weather was perfect. It was one of the highlights of the evening.

On Monday we walked downtown to the fountains and spent several hours there just talking and enjoying each other's company. After that we brought home ice cream and watched a mostly incomprehensible movie that involved recursive (?!) time travel. Nonetheless, it was geeky sci-fi so we both were happy.

I forgot that I had the camera until the very end so all I have is this pic that I took right before I left on Tuesday morning.

I wrote a company-wide email today after three different people stopped by my office today in the span of one hour to express worries about website cookies! To prevent an outbreak of this, I sent out a company-wide email explaining my position on the matter. In case you are also concerned about cookies, here it is:

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To All:

I would like to address your concerns about website cookies. First, know that they are simply small text files that are stored on your computer. Here is what a typical cookie looks like:

en_GB
www.google.com/
1425
2053574882
29726548
4298754968
23581292
*

Personally, I don’t think cookies are harmful. They are website-specific and only contain information that you freely give them. A particular website cannot access any other website’s cookies. So why would you want them? Cookies are useful. For instance, our website creates a cookie when someone uploads a file. That cookie contains all the text values that the user entered (except the filenames). That way, the next time that person goes to upload another file, they won’t have to fill out all the fields again. Another example is a corporate website that has a different version of their website for different geographic regions (i.e. HP North America, HP Asia, etc.). The first time you go to the site, you have to choose your region. The website then stores that value in a cookie so the next time you go to the site, it automatically chooses the correct region.

Some people don’t like cookies because they can allow syndicates of websites that all tie in to a common website to track which website you visited. I don’t think that’s a big deal. If company X and company Y are in cahoots to find out if I visited one of their websites then let them, maybe they’ll start showing me more relevant ads. While I don’t see that as a privacy risk, some people do. I think it’s a small price to pay for the benefits cookies have to offer.

That’s just my opinion. You should decide for yourself. For more information, read: http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/security/are-cookies-dangerous/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie.

If you want to delete your cookies, please read http://help.expedient.com/browsers/cookies.shtml.

(name deleted)
IT Manager

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I had another trip to Lex to visit Darcy. Here's the abridged version:

Friday: Drove to Cincinnati. On the way there, we stopped at in a small town and went to a carnival. It was raining. We rode some of the rides, getting dirty and wet in the process.

Then we went on to Cincinnati and ate at Shanghai Mama's.

Saturday: Went bowling. It was great!

For some strange reason, I feel the need to be understood about a comment I made in a prior post. The comment I would like to address is: "I mean humorously, just look at this picture :)"

The humorous part didn't refer to how small the fireworks were in the picture. Instead, it referred to the fact that I was using a picture from a crappy digital camera to demonstrate how lame the fireworks show was. Understand? Good.

I just realized why I felt the need to explain this. I miss my sister. She's one of the few people who could laugh with me about this on the same humor wavelength as me. I was thinking about her when I wrote about it.

Word list (part 2):

hackneyed, journalese, mandarin, vogue, carping, rebarbative, agog, itinerant, pejorative, vestigial, harridan, incendiary, Shibboleth, veritable, trifecta, derogate, arrogate, clemency, imbibing, tome, paucity, bravura, contumely, luddite, ephemeron, transmogrify, severally, denizen, acuity, frenetic, didactic, jocular, sobriquet, languor, timorous, venal, hubris, apotheosis, emblazon, dilating, hyperdihedral, pedant

My sis just reminded me of my commitment to write a once a week update on my blog. Here goes.

I spend part of last week visiting my girlfriend, who lives in Kentucky. It was great. We went to Cincinnati on Sunday to watch the fireworks on the river. We spent most of the day walking around and people watching so it was a lot of fun.



The fireworks show was fairly lame for such a big city. I mean humorously, just look at this picture :)



On Tuesday we went back to Red River Gorge (park info here) for about the 6th or 7th time. I guess its bug season now. We got eaten alive by flies. Next time I'll remember to bring some repellent. The gorge never ceases to amaze me. This time we made a friend on one of the trails.



As usual, we found new trails and stunning cliff top views. I highly recommend visiting this place. I would have more pictures if it didn't rain on and off while we were there. Here's one I shamelessly took from www.redrivergorge.org. It's a picture of Chimney Top, one of my favorite places in the park. You can read about it here.



When we got back from the park, we watched the Lexington fireworks show. It rocked! It was one of the best shows I've ever seen. Way better than Cincinnati's fizzle fest.

I left Wednesday morning and drove 3 hours straight to work in Indy - not exactly an ideal way to start a work week but well worth it! My trips to Kentucky are always a blast.