Hint: Lower right, second to the end, wearing a “Flight 23″ shirt. I look like a tiny Linus Torvalds, and apparently I’m holding hands with the foreign-exchange student beside me.

Random thoughts: Notice we had one black kid, and one Asian kid in the entire class. I was friends with both, but looking back these two were obviously fulfilling some sort of legal requirement held by the State of Nebraska in the early 90s.

According to FaceBook:
* 94% of this class drink at least 4 times a week. (I’ve only drank once when I was 16)
* Four of the men have children.
* One of the women has a child – possibly her own.
* 74% of this class experienced a family death in 2009.
* 100% of this class think I look weird.

Trying to learn how to create those vector graphics in PhotoShop. I’ve got a long way to go, obviously.

1) Quit smoking. (Smoked in high-school, then quit until I was 23-ish)
2) Work out, build muscle.
3) Get laid.

Laziness has never been an issue; I just don’t have time. Perhaps I just don’t have time skills, but regardless I’ve spent the past two years wanting to get into shape but nothing happened. So this year I decided to try it out, and took a shot at all three.

So far I’m still smoking and unlaid, but the initial workout strategy has been successful. Every day when I step into the room, I pick up the weights and move them somewhere else, and since it takes me forty-five minutes to move them ten feet I am regularly getting the recommend amount of exercise.

Thank you.

So what isUnFocus? It will be a blog catered to the types of web developers who enjoy a unique humorus perspective on many of the challenges and issues we face when building websites and web-apps. Popular versions of this concept employ monkies who write silly top-ten lists and mindless dribble about “How X Can Help You Do Y.” UnFocus will make fun of those sites on a daily basis, and sort of allow the reader to ‘unfocus’ on all the pure crap that plagues our space. I expect it to get slightly popular, even perhaps gaining two-hundred billion page views overnight. Maybe. It’s going to be a great web development site for sure.

At any rate, a lot of time will be spent developing UnFocus and there are plans for lots of cool stuff like URL shorteners which understand context and uses the referring page to know which link to redirect to (most url sites use a combination like http://bit.ly/EjeRi – my idea is to just use http://i.unfoc.us/ and parse page context to combat the stupid random letter issue). I have tons of ideas actually about what to do, so I’m going to end this post and actually start building them. Thanks for reading.

If you’ve ever been to Lincoln, Nebraska, you’ll notice that most of our citizens share a command thread: appreciation of the Nebraska Cornhuskers football team. Each Saturday during the game season, our wonderful stadium becomes the third largest ‘city’ in the state, with a general population near 80,000 people. Usually it’s hard enough to engineer roads and infrastructure to accommodate that many people when they’re spread out amongst miles of land, but when you condense an entire community into one ball field, things might get intense when the game is won and the community chooses to migrate elsewhere. Surprisingly, the University of Nebraska Lincoln did an excellent job building the stadium exits to allow everyone to get their move on in a timely fashion, without much worry.

Now the appreciation toward the team itself is not baseless; indeed, over the past 25 years or so we have had countless players turn intelligent practice into national championships, making a name for not only themselves, but for the State of Nebraska on a very national level. Some players have become famous during their collegiate run, but most have not extended that success into a professional football career. Most notably, Eric Crouch and Tommy Frazier have become local heroes, but their national celebrity quickly faded. It will be interesting to see what happens with Ndamukong Suh, however, as he was just named the national AP choice of the year, which will mean lots of professional football teams will be fighting for his skills to strengthen their defense lineup. In fact, Suh is so locally famous here that many fans have took to the web and created a Ndamukong Suh FaceBook fan page. I wish I knew more about the game itself to be able to expand on those three players, but unfortunately the rules and logic of football (and all other sports, save for PSF – Professional Snowball Fighting) escape my intelligence and leave me confused, but usually entertained.

Now since this is more of a personal battle I’ve created to test myself, there will be no life-threatening constraints placed upon me to feed reality-show obsessed gawkers, and such I won’t provide much theatrics for said nonsense. In fact, much of my success will require actual work, so if you’re interested in starting an online business you might learn a lot as the year progresses. Otherwise, you’re probably just wasting your time. You won’t see me grasping for breath on webcam, using my last thoughts to debate the economics of eating vs paying a webhosting bill.

Here’s the lowdown:

• It’s January 2nd, 2010 – 2:12AM.
• I have $0.
• I have no checks or other income coming in, at all.
• I will not file for unemployment, under any circumstance.
• I am allowing myself to keep any domains that aren’t generating income. This blog, and a small selection of others will be kept.
• I will never ask for donations, or run ads on this blog.
• No government grants or hand-outs, but I do plan on venture capital as the business I have in mind (which does not exist yet) is legit and will require it.

Let the life experiment begin.

Suppose you’re next in line at a bank, waiting to make a deposit. You hand the teller your check and ID card, which in this scenario, only displays your full name and phone number, which will be used as a password. Now which situation would provide more security for both you and the bank?

• After verifying that the computed sum of your name and phone number matched the secret ‘key’, the teller executes your transaction and discards your old debit card, issuing you a new one. This happens after every single transaction, even on the same day. Also it can slow transactions down.
• The teller will only acknowledge you once a trusted staff member vouches for you. This process only needs to happen when you enter the bank, but you have unlimited transactions available without the need for verification until you leave.
• You walk into the bank, decide the pressure is too much and cancel your account, vowing to live in a cave until Jesus appears.

I want to expand a bit more on this post later on, but for now I’m throwing it out there.

In any event, enjoy your holiday.

So I made the switch, and bought some cheap Android enabled phone, moved away from AT&T and have nothing but positive things to say. The Android OS is pretty incredible, and can be compared to how a computer enthusiast using Windows Vista would feel after switching over to Linux. It is a world of difference, and a lot of fun to program and hack up my own apps and games, and do things like creating my own calendar script that lets me schedule things in a way that makes sense to me. On the iPhone, I’d have to pay a $100 developers ‘fee’, and maybe require a lawyers signature, only to wait four weeks for Apple to allow my app into its walled garden of silliness. Of course, I could make money off it, but that isn’t the point.

Moving forward, when I find cool and useful things like Android, I figure out ways to help out other people who might find it interesting, and so I’m announcing a new site I’m launching, called DroidSDK.org. I bought the .com as well, and will use both, and hopefully grow the site into a popular destination for like minded devs who found out just how much better the Android is than the iPhone.