Day 11

Today's task was to give yourself a testicular exam. Everything was... umm... where it was supposed to be. This being the only task of the that doesn't require a check-in, I'll leave it at that.

And no, that timestamp can't be right...

Goodnight.

Day 10

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting
Or, being lied about, not deal in lies
Or, being hated, not give way to hating
And yet don't look too good nor talk too wise

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat these two imposters just the same
If you can bear to see the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue
Or walk with kings - nor lose your common touch
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you
If all men count with you, but none too much
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run
Then yours is the Earth and all that is in it
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

In fulfillment of today's task, the above poem was typed from memory. I was going to leave this update at that, but then I remembered I had date details to fill you in on. So here they are: my date was Kristin, a longtime friend from school. We had dinner at a restaurant in town before going to see Harry Potter with the rest of our friends. I had originally planned to have the date on a different night, but I am glad it ended up this way. We were able to have a good one-on-one conversation, which is something I realize I don't have very often, but also got to spend time with our wonderful group of friends--adorable good-bye hug lines and all.

Speaking of adorable, it seems there is going to be a movie version of Where the Wild Things Are (I would embed the preview, but embedding is disabled and this is probably worth watching a large version of anyway).

Day 9

Oh dear... 1 am is a bad time to start doing challenges from hackthissite.org.

Contrary to earlier claims, today's task was to take a woman on a date. I said earlier that this was the task for Thursday. It is not. Appropriately, however, the date will be on Thursday, which is now today and a little more than twelve hours away. With that in mind I should probably go to sleep. I'll give you more details and tell you how it went in my next update.

Goodnight/

Day 8

Today's task was to start a journal. This was an easy one for me because I have been journaling on a reasonably consistent basis for about two years. I have used notebooks, text files, e-mail drafts, and this very blog to record my thoughts. All combined, I don't think I've gone much more than a month without an entry, and usually less. Brett, however, recommends journaling every day. So today was my first day of daily notebook journaling. I had to put some thought into the decision of whether to keep my daily journal on paper or on a hard drive. The latter has definite advantages, like speed of writing and ease of searching, which I do not want to give up completely. I will continue typing the occasional .txt entry, and of course will maintian my blog. But it's nice to be free from the distractions of a computer both when reading and writing a journal, and so away from it I shall stay every night before I go to bed.

Day 7

Today's task was to reconnect with an old friend. The corresponding (and linked) blog entry raised an interesting point: it seems like everyone today considers themselves busy. I've noticed this at school and believe it is also common of those in the workforce. But, Brett McKay asks, are we--with our computers, cars, and cell phones--really more busy than those in, say, Lincoln's time? Or are we just more distracted?

The friend I'm writing is named Nathan. We knew each other way back when my family (and his family) still lived in New Tribes, and before either of us entered Kindergarten. We spent enough time together at a young enough age that we heard more than once that our voices had become hard to tell apart. But one day Nathan walked into our 6th Grade Advanced Math course and told us that the reason he had been gone last week was because his family had been looking at houses in Texas, where he was moving at the end of the year. As the rest of the class mock-cheered, I sat in silent disappointment. Aside from a some sporadic phone calls early on, a brief visit from his family several years later, and a few messages when we found each other on Facebook, I haven't communicated with him at all in eight years.

The timing of this assignment might be perfect. There was a less-than-subtle indication that I will be expected to set up a meeting with him later in the project, and it turns out he is coming to Mizzou in the fall. Given that I also have other friends there but have never before visited, this could be a very good thing indeed.

Addendum: I couldn't help but notice the assignment for Thursday is to take a woman on a date. Hmm.

Day 6

Today's task was to update your resume. Unfortunately, mine is currently stored on my non-work hard drive which means it will be rather a nuisance to retrieve. Since today was kind of a catch-up day for me and I need to let my computer run for a while, I decided to wait on this one. :-O

I don't want to get into the habit of putting off finishing the assignments, so I'm going to have to be doubly sure to get tomorrow's task done on time. I would also like to get tomorrow itself done on time, which is to say I'm going to try to go to bed before 3 am.

Day 5

Today's task was to cultivate your gratitude. The first of the two subparts was to list 10 things you are grateful for. While I don't want to give you the whole list here, it seems lame to do nothing more than say I did it. So I'll compromise by giving you number three:

I am thankful for my dog's willingness to let me pick him up and play with him even when he's sleeping.

He's pretty adorable, and I had to add him to the list when I saw him doing his little lying-down leg stretch.

Part 2 is to send thank-you's to three different people. This is going to be completed tomorrow, but I'm ok with that because I plan to do at least six.

Day 4

Today my task was to increase my testosterone by completing at least three testosterone-boosting activities from a list. My first two--getting 8 hours of sleep and not eating any soy products--were pretty easy to handle. Meditating was also a simple task, though it took me two tries to keep it up for the full ten minutes. Given how stress-free my life is right now, it seemed a little superfluous anyway. Additionally, I ate fat, animal protein, and cruciferous vegetables, though perhaps not as much of any of them as I should have. Finally, I changed my exercise routine for today to use improvised weights, but after my "weight rack" fell off the deck and the handle on my salt bag broke while I was deadlifting it, I would have to say it didn't turn out to be a stellar workout. Maybe I should stick to my bodyweight routine until I can go to a real gym.

The only two remaining tasks were not smoking, which non-smokers were not allowed to count, and morning sex, which, well, requires someone to have morning sex with. Also of note: the fact that I am awake right now seems I need to learn to get better at accepting poker losses.

Day 3

Today's task was to find a mentor. I've had a few men in my life start to play the traditional mentor role, but none have lasted more than a few months. I like the idea of having a mentor (or several, as many of the guys on the forum seem to have) but until today had never actively tried to foster that kind of relationship. So today I contacted someone who I think would be good for the job. I can't guarantee it will work out, but if it doesn't (or maybe even if it does), I will do everything I can to find someone else. Brett recommends having a mentor in four different areas of your life, so I suppose that even after today I have some work to do. =]

A Month of Manliness (not the Spike TV variety)

The Project

I had forgotten how much I loved the Art of Manliness blog until I visited it for the first time in several months on Monday. While there, I discovered I had just missed the "30 Days to a Better Man" project, which ran through the month of June. But after reading the first challenge, I reached the last paragraph and read the following:

Remember, these posts aren’t for passive entertainment! The 30 Days to a Better Man Project is about action! You have 24 hours to complete this task.

I knew I had to do it. Not just the first task, but the whole project. And since I'm more than a month late on it, I've decided the accountability group on the AoM forum probably won't do much to motivate me. Instead, I'm going to post my progress here. I read the Day 1 post at 6:00 pm, so every day by that time I need to have my assignment completed, though I'll grant myself four hours after that to post about it. This means that I want you, whoever you may be, to ask me what's up if you wake up one morning this month and I haven't reported progress the night before. E-mail me, text me, call me, or talk to me if you see me. But make sure I'm keeping up, all right? Even better, you can check in here and see just what it was that I was supposed to do.

Ok. Now here's my first report: I missed my first deadline. And my second one. I received a last-minute invitation to Springfield on Monday night and didn't get back until today at noon. I vaguely considered simply pushing back the whole thing by one day, but I knew that wouldn't cut it. I would just have to catch up.

Day 1

And catch up I did. This afternoon I locked myself in a closet with my little red Google Open Source Office moleskin notebook until I had completed the first task: Define Your Core Values. I came up with the following list, in order of importance:

Truth
Integrity
Close Relationships
Self-Improvement
Trying New Things

While I was listing them, I tried to decide which of my potential values were ones I actually found important and which were ones I just thought should be important. I think I arrived at an accurate result, but I'll be thinking about it a lot this month and reserve the right to make changes if it seems correct to do so.

Day 2

I finished the first assignment shortly before my parents came home from work, and decided to wait for my dad before tackling the second one: Shine Your Shoes. After retrieving his shoe-shining kit, I sat down to work on my two pairs of dress shoes, asking questions about some of the instructions I had read on the blog.

As I was working, I felt like the experience was exactly what Brett McKay was hoping for. First, my dad's kit is little more than a few cans of Kiwi and old rags, but it is exactly was was prescribed on the blog. Second, as I was putting on the polish, my dad told me how when he was growing up, people used to polish their shoes every week before they went to church, and that his family would all polish their shoes the day before they went to town. He went on to comment that it seemed most people don't shine their shoes at all any more. It's true. I never had until today. It's just this kind of generational difference that is frequently pointed out in AoM, and this kind of interaction that it encourages. While things like shining your shoes or shaving with a single-blade razor may seem somewhat unimportant or even antiquated, looking to past generations of men as examples certainly is not, and is one of the reasons I like this blog so much.

Today's song: Have You Got it in You? by Imogen Heap



The note about lyrics at the beginning of the video is only true of the YouTube page.

System Themes and My Contribution to the World

I sat down at my laptop to write this post and when I started typing I saw nothing. Well, almost nothing. There was an almost imperceptible motion of something across the screen as I typed, but I certainly wasn't able to resolve it into letters. I've had this problem before. I recently started using a dark system theme on this computer, which features light gray text on black backgrounds. This works great until I get online and access websites that can choose to specify their own colors. Sometimes they make sure to say they want black text. Awesome. But that means I fall back on my default black background and can't see what I type. Other times (like here) they specify white backgrounds. Sweet. But my default light gray text doesn't show up very well.

It turns out this has been a known issue for over a year, but has yet to be fixed.

And as I type that, I follow my own link to get a little more familiar with it (because I'm coming back to it later--you might want to at least queue it up in another tab if you haven't looked at it yet). And what do I discover but a fix? A fix that, unlike other fixes I've seen for this, works for me! And uses files that actually exist on my machine! Good deal. I shall continue typing this back in my wonderfully gothish theme and not leaning in until I'm two inches away from the screen, only to find I still have to highlight what I just typed to confirm it's actually there. Isn't contrast wonderful?

Now, still have that tab open? Launchpad, the site hosting the bug report, is also hosting 628 lines of veritable C++ written by none other than yours truly. That's right, this week I published open source code for the first time in my life (ok, I guess you didn't really need the other tab for that). It feels good to finally have something to show for my work, and it feels crazy to think that this could some day be a small part of some incredibly revolutionary technology. Even better, this is exactly what I've been learning to do in school and could be what I do for the rest of my life.

I've been tossing around the idea of devoting my next three decades (or however long it takes) to helping create the world's first artificial general intelligence. If I do I have a lot of learning to do before I can make really serious contributions, and even then I will only be playing a small part. But if I do, you can, right now, see the first 628 lines of my life's work. And if I do, I would be taking part in the most significant human advancement ever. How incredible is that?

For that to happen, though, I should probably at least complete the Summer of Code in good standing. And part of that is completing weekly progress reports, which I have not done yet. I suppose I should get on that...

This week's song: I'm Still Here by Vertical Horizon

Pardon the Smallville; It had the best audio of the videos I found.