31 Enero 2008 Jueves
6 inches of snow is comming tonight. While I hate the cold weather I don't mind the snow. The good thing about snow it that it has to be warmer to snow. Someone explained it to me as the snow as it falls releases engery in the form of heat or something like that. Anyway I don't know the exact scientific reason but I know that at least while it is snowing it will not be 6 degrees cold out side.

I caught an old friend online and I feel rather conflicted about the meeting. I still had her screen name on my buddy list but I really didn't think she used that screen name anymore. It has been a long time since I have spoken to her. A mutual friend had mentioned that she asked about me and then when we chatted online briefly today this long lost friend said she was just talking about me with another mutual acquaintenance. I really was quite surprised to know this. I would not have guessed that she would have thought of me at all, especially not recently.

I guess I should clarify what happened. I will try to do this briefly. We grew up together, went to high school, visited each other in our university days. She graduated first and was engaged first out of all us high school friends. She was planning to have the wedding ceremony one summer and then it ended up getting postponed until the following summer. I had been invited to the first summer's ceremony that ended up not happening. So since we were still friends and I had not been advised any different I assumed I was invited to the postponed version of the ceremony. Well sometime before the actual wedding ceremonoy occured I was out to breakfast with this person and another mutual high school friend. We ended up talking about her upcomming nuptuals. We were all three talking and then suddenly she turned to look at me and said, "uhh...you are not invited." I was surprised and shocked and a little hurt. I was more hurt about the fact that she never clarified or explained this. If I were in her position I would have said something like " hey I really value your friendship and appreciate you as a person but we have limited the number of guests in order to create a small ceremony". I would have made it a point to express this and I would have chosen a more approriate time to dis invite a friend. So anyway since I was hurt by the lack of respect towards my feelings I made no attempt to keep contact with her. I didnt think that I acted mad or upset with her I just covered it up and pushed it down deep. :) Sometimes I have a blockage when I should be expressing hurt or anger. Other emotions I can express just fine but the anger and getting hurt is a little harder. I used to assume that no one cared. But really you should always express how you fell. You exist. Why make it dependant on whether or not they care? anyway back to the story. So I let it go. I interpreted her actions as she no longer wished to have a friendship. I made no effort to contact her or remain connected to her. She no longer contacted me either. So her screen name popped up as she was online and I made contact and said hello. I really doubted that it was her. We spoke briefly and she had to return to work. We exchanged emails. Now I am thinking of sending her an email expressing how I felt that day of being disinvited. I think I should do it at least to just express myself and at least say what I had to say. But I find mysefl wonder "why would she care?". I should send it anyway. Below I will post the rough draft and I will probably sleep on the idea of sending it.

It was a pleasant surprise to catch you online today. ÊSadly it has been a long time since I have talked to you. ÊI remember visiting you at the OSU campus and visiting Randy and jamming out on the instruments in his basement at Purdue. ÊFun times..... fun times. ÊSo then I asked mysefl "why have we not spoken in so long?" ÊAnd the I remembered... It may not have been the last time we spoke but it was probably the last time we saw each other that we had this conversation. ÊI remember being at Bob Evans. ÊIt was Kristin, myself and you. ÊIt was some time before your wedding. ÊMaybe a year before, anyways the topic of your wedding ceremony came up. ÊI remember that we were talking about the ceremony and then you turned to look at me and in a very dead pan manner said, "uh... you are not invited". ÊAnd I remember that you kind of just left it at that. ÊI did not have any response and probably sat there with my mouth open with a surprised look on my face. ÊI remeber that Kristin started talking about something else in order to change the subject. ÊI spoke to her about it on the ride home and she said she just tried to change the subject to make it all less awkward. Ê My surprise came from origionally having been invited and then later the wedding was postponed and the later I was un invited in a very awkward way. ÊI was never angry with you for not having me present at your ceremony. Ê ÊI would have understood and respected your wishes. ÊWhat hurt was the manner in which you un invited me. ÊYou sort of just said it in a matter of fact tone and then moved on. ÊI can't remember if we spoke after that meeting but I know we never talked about the "wedding creremony un invite" situation. ÊI must stress that it was not the wedding ceremony un invite that hurt. ÊIt was the fact that you never clarified it for me. ÊYou never expressed that while I was not to attend your wedding ceremony, you did still want to continue the friendship. ÊI interpreted your actions and the subsequent lack of contact from you to mean that you were no longer interested in a friendship with me. ÊSo I just let it go. ÊI had considered you a good friend and a positive contact in my life and had always wanted to keep contact with you. ÊThat is how I felt about you and I just wanted to take this opportunity to express myself. Ê I will welcome any response and if this is our last communication I wish you well in life. Thanks

28 Enero 2008 Lunes
I found a neat site chronicalling someone's trek towards marketing to receive a free apple mini. You can see it here. I had stumbled on to the web site while I was trying to research if there was a way to maintian my tarraguna@mac.com Mac email address without buying the full version of .Mac with web hosting, web gallery and i Disk storge all of 10GB with all that for the big price of $99.00 USD. It is just too high a price to use for just the email account. gmail and gmx are better. I just liked the simplicity of the email address it is just me at mac.com. easy. I do not need all the other features of the .Mac as I already use flickr and photobucket to share photos online, I create my own web pages with HTML, CSS, Dreamweaver etc and my hosting plan is a whole lot larger with unlimited domain names and also I use Xdrive as storage so while the .mac would make it all easier and all confined in one place I really don't need it and don't need to pay that much. Plus I must add that the create your own web page aspect is really for some one with no web creating experience. I have now to date 21 web sites that I run. While I may be an amature I am no novice. Right so anyway there is no way to keep my tarraguna@mac.com email address after my 60 day .Mac trial runs out. It is a pitty. There are really too many good free email accounts out there to warrent paying for the mac email. But I liked it so much. It is just me at mac dot com. Anyway I got to let it go. I found out that quite a few of my previous co workers are decideing to jump ship. When a company does big lay offs every 12-18 months and they increase the weekly cost of the health care plan while lowering the amount of coverage and elimate all other benefits and also close the 401K matching while they are "restructuring"....too much. I guess the smart ones see the writtings on the wall and jump ship. Hey they are not the capitan. Why should they have to go down with the ship? The true capitan won't even be willing to go down with his ship after he set such a choppy course. Anyway I wish them all luck.

27 Enero 2008 Domingo
We watched the movie Saw IV today. If you like the Saw movies you will also like the most recent release. There is a lot of blood and I had the gut clenching feeling the entire movie. This was probably a really good addominal work out.

26 Enero 2008 Sabado
I did not leave the house today. Not even to check the mail or take out the trash did I leave the apartment today. I caught Suze Orman on Larry King today. I really like her advice. She breaks down personal finance in her straight talk. I like her slogan "people first, then money, then things". I especially like how she really encourages women to get involved and educated about their own finances. Women's lib sent them all to work in an office, to earn less money than the male counterparts and then at the end of the day to just give it over to a man. Was it really worth it the liberation? It was. True change evolves over a period of time. Revolutions take time. Stoping the cycle of violence, discrimination and hate takes at least a cycle. Oh yea, JW stopped by to load the new operating system Mac OS X Leopard. It was good to see him. We have not seen him and his esposa for a while. Hopefully we will be able to hang out with them a little more frequently. It was kind of wierd to see him. You know that feeling that you have when you see someone that you used to see frequent. You used to have that short talk with like you were in a suspended conversation all the time. After not seeing them in a while it all feels hesitant like you are both trying to find the conversation again and hopeing that you don't have to start all over and explain everything. Debo escribir más en españa.

24 Enero 2008 Jueves
My friend Betty purchased a new Pontiac G6. I am excited for her but now that means she has to be even more responsible. Before she only had the apartment and now she has the car payment. Growing up just costs more and more money. I finsihed my first week of tutor training for the adult literacy group that I have just started volunteering for. Next week I will be assigned a student. I am looking forward to it but I am also a little nervous. I have to remind myself that it does not matter if I don't have all of the answers. It is the questions that are important and the questions that don't have answers are the most important. I also found a neat blog web site at www.sixfoot6.com. I am always in search of authentic, neat, interesting web sites. There is too much crap out there. In some ways I miss the internet I first met in 1998.

20 Enero 2008 Domingo

18 Enero 2008 Viernes
We had lunch with our friends Creighton and Bobbi today. It was nice to see them again. Over the last semester I had only seen Bobbi once. Back when I was in university with everyone I used to see her almost daily. Our friendship has had to re adjust to our differing schedules; her being a student and working nights on the weekends and me working in the 9-5 world. I watched the show Numb3rs today. I really love how they show a group of mathmeticians gathering and figureing out problems together and bonding over math and being on the verge of discovering "it". I always wanted to have a crew of really smart sort of nerdy people that we could all gather and banter and be on the verge of something big. It has not happened yet. It is hard to get 2 people I know to clear up an hour so we can meet. Everyone is too busy buying stuff and working for the stuff they just bought that the commercial just convinced them of fullfillment if they only buy it. Pretty soon people will hire people to have fun for them as they have to be working all the time. The new OUTSOURCING, fun. :)

17 Enero 2008 Jueves
I am really enjoying this week. I have cleaned and organized my apartment. It is looking a lot better. I have also placed some things to sell on craigslist.org. I don't really need the money but I do need to get rid of the items. I am also reconstructing all of my websites. It is taking a long time. I have the linux project website up and running. I am watching Oprah now. It is a pretty good show. Well I guess I can't say that as I don't usually watch Oprah. It is all about female body issues. Suzie Oerman is on tomorrow. I will have to try to watch.

12 Enero 2008
I went to Meijers today to buy socks for my Grandfather's birthday gift. I found myself walking with quite a bounce to my step and I had to consciously tell myself not to smile. I had to hide my excitement. People don't notice homelss people but if you walk around with a huge smile on your face they really think something is up. Who knew that being layed off could feel so good. I keep realizing that I don't ever have to go back to that office. I don't ever have to be exposed to that ever again. I am so excited.

11 Enero 2008 Viernes
The Lay Off

My employer enacted a big lay off today. ÊI was layed off. ÊI can not say that I didn't see it comming. ÊI did not suck up to my boss. ÊIf you work in Collections and you choose to keep an employee that collected 36% over someone who collected 117% that is the reason, has to be. ÊSucking up to your boss is important. ÊImportant in coporate america that is. ÊWell maybe they let me go since I had the lowest seniority. ÊBut its collections, I thought it was about collecting money, hence the name of the industry COLLECTIONS.

I am not mad about it. ÊThey can keep their 36%ers. ÊIt is probably why the company is annualy in the position where it has to lay off people. ÊThey act all like oh woo is us and blame it on the business that they are in. ÊNewsflash: hey if you have to do this every year then maybe you should adjust for it in your business plan. ÊWhen you become known as an unstable company to work for, then good quality applicants won't work for you. ÊOnly people without options will work for you. ÊThis may work in a one horse town but naptown ain't no one horse town. ÊAnyway I was already on my way out. ÊDid you notice me working on my resume this last week? ÊOh I forgot to mention the best part...I can receive one week of severence pay. ÊAll I have to do to receive it is sign some paper that states that I will never sue them ever ever. ÊHa ha ha. Ê

Sue them for what? For being stupid morans and not being able to run a business without laying off employees every 12-16 months. ÊI mean really...it is easy our profesional relationship is over, we shake hands and go our seperate ways. ÊIt is a standard expectation that an emplyee give their employer 2 weeks notice. ÊThis is of course in order to maintain a "good relationship" ÊThus an employer that needs to lay off people should let them go with 2 weeks pay. ÊSo I only got a week severence. ÊWho cares. ÊThat is why I have my "oh shit fund". ÊWhat really upsets me is that my health care plan ends today...on a friday....how can I possibly explore my options and then pick the best one? And over the weekend who will I be able to talk to and set up a plan with?? What if I get t-boned while driving this weekend?? Will I not be covered?

Anyway I will miss some of the people I worked with. ÊI will not miss the employeer nor their way of doing business.Ê

10 Enero 2008 Jueves
I just found this neat website Me and my phones. It looks really cool so far. I currently have the Samsung Blackjack. I love it. Text messaging/ email/ instant messenger/ calender/ contacts...love it love it love! The only thing I don't like is that it runs Windows Mobile so I have to shut it down everday in order to clear out all the junk. The Nokia 9300 really interests me. It has its very own operating system that is not windows.

I also just started my trial version of .mac, so my until March 10,2008 I am trying out the email address of tarraguna@mac.com and I have a mac web site that should be at web.mac.com/tarraguna. Suppossedly just sync it with iWeb and it is real easy to use. It will probably be too easy to use for me so much that I will over analyze it and be like "why isn't this working". I have had to learn how to use verious ftp clients, learn html, javascript and all the Adobe CS3. I will be doing it backward by learning the hard way first and then doing it the easy way. Oh well we will see...

Some people operate on the idea that the less that you tell people the less that they have to discriminate against you with. Don't construct your own prison. You can not control the image other people have of you. The image other people have of you really has little to do with you and more to do with how they feel about themselves.

9 Enero 2008 MiŽrcoles
I arrived at work today to be called in to a department meeting where our boss could tell us his last day is Friday the 18th of Janurary.

Enero 8 2008 Martes
Today I was wondering to myself, "is my writting more authentic because I don't get paid to do it?" I tell myself yes because that is what I want to hear. I am really too emotionaly involved in this question to answer it honestly. So I put the question in more general terms. Do people do tasks/ jobs/ hobbies more authenticaly / honestly / truthfully / better when they are not making a living off of it or getting paid to do it. I thought of prostitution as the first example. Having sex with someone you like has got to have more feeling in it that of having sex with a stranger for money. I don't mean to imply any judgements on career choices here. I am just examining the authenticity of what we do. I can not honestly use prostitution as an example as I have not worked as one.

In my case I have always had the stuff that I enjoy to do very seperate and different from my work. I have always had rather boring jobs. I have enjoyed some aspects of them like people I have met or the environment. But I have never actually enjoyed the work part. I mean who really enjoys serving customers, unloading boxes in a trialor or working in collections and playing with Excel. Maybe if I ever had a job that I would actually do outside of work hours while I was not getting paid then I would have some way of answering the question. I think that when you first start out working you are just working to make money and you are either trying to climb the ladder of success to make more money or you are trying to get more seniority as to have a position you more enjoy. I hope that as you get older and wiser and push yourself through school and gain more skills you start to have more choices of what you can do as a job. With this plethura of choices you increase your odds of actually enjoying something you do for a living.

Enero 7 2008 Lunes
Ein Taxi herbeizuwinken ist Ÿberall das Gleiche.

Enero 6 2008 Domingo
Ramona, mi compa–era del trabajo, me acuerda de la amiga Kristin del colegio. Debo alejarme de ella. Creo que quiero enfocarme en la soledad, para pensar y contemplar. A quien le importa si no tengo amigos y no me invita. No tengo amigos entonces nadie se lo va a enterar.

I was feeling down about leaving the coast, la playa but I was excited to return to my apartment. Now it is sunday night and I am really feeling down about having to return to work, and not just any "work". I have to return to a negative and boring environment. But I really do not want to write about work and explain why I don't like it, it is a long story. I have noticed that I have too much stuff. I won't be giving away all of my earthly possesions like the origional buddah did years and years and years ago but I will be getting rid of those things not used everyday. I have started to feel bogged down by my belongings. I should own them not the other way around. I feel liberated just thinking about who I will give some of the things to and what I will donate.

I found some interesting blogs today; Boing Boing and An entirely other day and Cultured

Enero 4 2008 Viernes
I am exhausted. I can no longer stay up until 3 am and then wake up at 6 am the following day and expect to function. Maybe I never really could. On another note I am halfway through reading the three books that I purchased on the first. I tend to do that where I start reading 2 or 3 books at the same time. At least this time all of the books were written in the same language. :)

Enero 1 2008 Martes

These are the books that I purchased the day before yesterday.
1. Awakening the Buddha Within: Eight Steps to Enlightenment by Lama Surya Das
2. The Universe in a Single Atom; The Convergence of Science and Spirituality by his holiness the Dali Lama
3. The Book of Secrets by Deepak Chopra

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