Checking In

Hello All,

I'm full of thoughts but I'm tired and I don't think I have the energy to process said thoughts. I'm at the end of a longish day. I woke up at 5:30 this morning to get a jump on the day and it was great to get ahead of things. The problem is... now I'm tired and well... I got nuthin. Maybe tomorrow, I'll blog while I'm getting a jump on the day rather than the end of it while I'm falling behind.

2 things before I go. First, Apple's Motion program F-ing Rulz! Second, as for you Mr. Xchair, I've got some stuff to do b4 I give up my chair. Still, I'll keep an eye on the Arizona real estate market and when the time is right, I'll let you know when I'm coming.

Nighty Night.
Dave

Missing In Action

Hello Everyone,

Long Time No Chat. I think it's been about a week or so. I've sort of been in a complete different mental state of mind and haven't been in a blogging way. Funny story though. You see, even though I have readers consisting of friends, family, and people I've never met, the one closest to me, my beautiful fiance Kristine, hardly ever read the blog. So, to make sure she never missed a new entry, she had me set up Safari (her web browser) so that this very blog, The Grande Scheme Of Things, would be her start page when she opens the program. Of course, as soon as I did that, I lost the uge to blog and her start up page became uneventful. Yesterday, she told me to get my ass in gear and get back to blogging so here I am.

So what have I been up to lately? Exercising? Well, the pizza's on the way, so uhhh...no. However, the first of the month is this week and I'll have 6 months from then til the wedding so...I've got 1 or 2 more days to eat pizza.

This past week, my head has been spinning. I decided it was time to learn my expensive software seeing how I've paid for it and all and it would probably improve my career potential. I've spent the last few wrapping my head around Final Cut Pro 5 and the rest of the FCP Suite. As opposed to the common person who absorbs knowledge slowly over time, I have to learn it all RIGHT NOW or I just friggin lose it.

Now, of course, you can't just learn everything in a few days and I'm learning to cope. However, I've very excited by what I've learned as well as the potential for what I'm capable of doing with my software. By the way, for those of you not part of the "industry", Final Cut Pro is Apple's video editing software.

OK. I'm 3 glasses into a bottle of wine and pizza's on the way so I'll chat l8r. Honey, if you're reading this, I promise to keep these entries coming. You're the best and I LOVE UUUUUUUUUUU.

Chat w/u l8r
Dave

Time Traveling

Kristine needed to scan some documents today so I got the scanner out of the closet and hooked it up to the computer. Deciding to test it out first, I grabbed a stray photo of my parents I found while emptying my boxes after I moved. According to the edge of the photo (which you can't see here), this picture was taken of my parents Dale and Craig (at the time, he was Clarence) Novak on December 1971. That was 2 years before I was born.

Exercise Day 3 Light

I didn't sleep well last night so I slept in a little this morning. I would have slept in longer but I knew I had to report to all of you how I was doing today on my fitness training so I did get out of bed and spent a half hour on the cross trainer. Here's today's tunes.

OH WAIT!!! The first song of today's workout mix is a tune from Alanis Morissette's latest cd which is the aniversary edition of Jagged Little Pill. She redid the entire album in acoustic versions and I like the cd a lot. Regardless, I went on a google image seach to get a picture of Alanis and found this really cool story. Go and check it out. Back to my workout mix...

All I Really Want(acoustic) - Alanis Morissette
Come Clean - Hillary Duff
Hollaback Girl - Gwen Stefani
La La - Ashlee Simpson
Maria - Ricky Martin
The Middle - Jimmy Eat World
Rag Doll - Aerosmith
Staring At The Sun - The Offspring

Day 2 of Exercise

Today marks my second consecutive day of exersize on my journey to drop a few pounds. Here's today's workout list.

How Do U Want It - 2Pac ft. K-Ci & JoJo
Welcome To The Jungle - Guns N Roses
Lit Up - Buckcherry
Rhythm Nation - Janet Jackson
Down Rodeo - Rage Against The Machine
Attack - 30 Seconds To Mars
Tribal Dance - 2 Unlimited
What About Us? - Brandy
Pollution - Limp Bizkit
I Will Be Heard - Hatebreed
Pump It - Black Eyed Peas
Stay(Wasting Time) - Dave Matthews Band
Right Next Door To Hell - Guns N Roses
Jigga What/Faint - Linkin Park & Jay-Z
Sugar - System Of A Down

Here We Go Again

So my beautiful fiance, the lovely Miss Kristine Czarnomski has begun to lose weight. Now I did not request this of her as she has always been beautiful in my eyes. Also, being a man of 250+ lbs., I have no business asking anybody to lose weight. However, she informed me the other day that we have just 6 months before our wedding and apparently, we are supposed to look our best for that day.

Now, I have the reverse thinking when it comes to this weight loss for the sake of life landmark events. The reason is because there's going to be a lot of pictures being taken. Now I realize that most of you are thinking that you should always look your best for pictures. My problem with this is that say, I'm showing you a picture of me from 5 years ago where not only am I looking younger than I am now, but I'm also looking better in the picture. You're first thought is going to be, "Oh how sad that Dave has let himself go." However, if I look bad in that picture, then you're natural reaction is to give me praise for how much better I look now and thus I will feel very good about life in the now rather than longing for the days when I looked better. I'll admit...not the best philosophy I've ever had.

Oh, and one more thing. If you grab a picture of yourself from 5 years ago and you think about how good you looked back then..., you know darn well you didn't feel that good back then. Odds are that the second after that picture was developed (for you youngin's, that was something we used to have to do in order to see our pictures), you looked at that picture and thought there was something wrong with it. Whether you thought you needed to lose weight or you weren't thrilled with how your facial skin was represented or you just didn't like the angle, odds are you had no problems finding flaws and saw a need for improvement. Now, 5 years later, you look at that same picture and long for the days when you looked that good.

So whatever...I'm going to long with this. Long story short, I'm am now excersizing again. Oh joy.

So I went to the NY Sports Club down the street because I thought the best thing to do would be to join a gym. I was mistaken. Ya know, the whole rap on the gym thing is pretty much bullshit. I mean, sure, there's a small percentage of people who really want to train their bodies on a regular basis so that they can be all they can be. Those people are the exception to the rule. For the rest of us, it's like..."Hi there. I've spent my life eating way too much food and not really doing a lot of moving around. Also, I like to drink and as we all know, light beer is for wusses. It's come to my attention that if I looked more like Tom Cruise and less like...well, me...that my life would be so much better. So uhhh...what do I need to do and how much is that going to cost me?"

That's the real question we're all asking. We don't care about all that other stuff. It's all just a bunch of fluffy words. Cardiovascular? What am I, a friggin doctor over here? I don't need to know that word. What I need is the information so that I can get that call from People magazine where the guy says, "Hay uh Dave. We're getting ready to put out our annual sexiest man alive issue and we were wondering if you were available."

The truth is gyms can't give you that information. They don't have it. At least they don't have anything that you don't already know. You need to eat less and excersize more. That's it. That's all you have to do. And in the end, you will look the best that you are capable of.

But of course, they can't just tell you that. No, they gotta do some other stuff. They gotta take some tests. They gotta check your blood pressure and measure the amount of fat you have and weigh you on their special body mass measuring tool...I think they call it a scale. They gotta set you up with a trainer who specializes in giving you the direction you need on how to lift some things that are heavy. It's too bad cash doesn't weigh very much as you would lose a ton of weight based on how much of it gyms and trainers take out of your back pocket.

So anyway, I have a LifeFitness eliptical cross trainer and I have some weights and last time I checked, you don't need a machine to do situps (although, I am aware that they do have machines to do "crunches"). I've decided to work with the tools that I have to start my journey down the path towards excellent good lookingness. After a couple of weeks, I'll decide what I want to do to move forward.

Here are the tunes I listened to while I spent an hour on the cross trainer today. The image to the left is the cd insert that iTunes created for this mix.






Rhythm Nation - Janet Jackson
Monkey Wrench - Foo Fighters
Eat You Alive - Limp Bizkit
Pipeline - Anthrax
When I'm President - Extreme
Gold Digger - Kanye West ft Jamie Foxx
Get It Poppin' - Fat Joe ft. Nelly
Sugar, We're Goin Down - Fall Out Boy
Hollaback Girl - Gwen Stefani
This Is How A Heart Breaks - Rob Thomas
St. Jimmy - Green Day
Come Clean - Hilary Duff (OK so I'm not proud but I like this song.)
La Tortura - Shakira Featuring Alejandro Sanz
Mosh - Eminem
Alive - P.O.D.

In other news, Kristine, her brother-in-law Curtis, Tim Beeber and I are going to Bridgeport this evening to see the Nicks play the Nets in an exhibition basketball game. Very exciting. Talk 2 u soon.

Dave

A Lack Of Snoozing

Good Morning,

I woke up 15 minutes ago and I was still quite exhausted plus I was in dire need of a do over when it comes to waking up. Before the first song of Fiona Apple's new album woke me up (the iPod is our alarm clock), I was dreaming that I was late to my own wedding. Great! My first weddding anxiety dream. That's just wonderful.

Anyway, I should've been able to fall back to sleep immediately except that I felt just bad enough about not having blogged since Tuesday that I couldn't fall back asleep. But now I have blogged. Yay. Back 2 sleep for me. Talk 2 ya'll next week.

Dave

A Cool Rainy Train Ride Home In Connecticut

Hello Everyone,

I guess you can't say it's raining here when you compare it to the last 3 days. It's more of a mist. My weather widget has the temperature at 67 degrees and the daylight leaves us sooner now that summertime has passed.

I can't tell you why but as long I can remember, I tend to listen to more tunes of a hard rock nature when this time of year comes. It is temporary. This phase won't last more than a couple weeks if the tradition holds true. Right now though, an electric guitar and a hard hitting drum are...well...music to my ears.

What follows is the list of tunes I listened to on random from the five star playlist on my iPod while taking the train home this evening. First, you may notice that Welcome To The Jungle appears twice in the list. That is because the first is a mosh pit like cover version and the second is the GNR original. To know me is to know that 9 times out of 10, if a GNR tune is playing on my iPod, I will listen to it.

The second thing I'd like to point out is that one might think a Melissa Etheridge song has no business being part of this mix. I don't listen to many Etheridge tunes but for whatever reason, I love the hell out of Breathe. The following mix is 54 minutes and 15 seconds.

Have A Nice Day - Bon Jovi
Live & Let Die - Guns N Roses
Welcome To The Jungle - Zombie Apocalypse
Ænima - Tool
St. Jimmy - Green Day
December - Collective Soul
Boom - P.O.D.
Wecome To The Jungle - Guns N Roses
Breathe - Melissa Etheridge
Dirty Little Thing - Velvet Revolver
Big Weenie - Eminem
Stay Together For The Kids - Blink 182
Counterfit - Limp Bizkit
Online Songs - Blink 182

Jack Torrence is a Writer Looking For Inspiration

Hello Everyone,

Remember The Shining? That beautiful film about a troubled writer and a lonely boy desperately in need of a father figure. Yeah, I didn't remember that film either. I can only imagine that Stanley Kubrick is rolling in his grave right now. Here's why.

A post-production house organized a competition where assistant editors ‘re-cut’ trailers for famous movies to try and make them seem like different movies. This is the blog where I found out about the trailer. Click here for the movie.

The Sunday Check-In

Greetings All,

Ya know, I had so much that I wanted to get done this weekend but I just never got around to doing it. Kristine is visiting family in Long Island so I've had the place to myself since Friday. I figured it would be a perfect time to just do some things. Instead, I bought a video game. More on that in a sec though.

Speaking of video games, meet Chris Kory. Chris is a good friend who I play Madden football with sometimes on the Xbox. The thing is though that we don't play against each other. We realized a long time ago that Chris was never going to beat me at the game so he came up with the idea that we would play with one team and one of us would take the offense and one would take the defense. This year, per Chris's request, we are playing with the Broncos. He's offense and I'm defense.

Chris came over Friday night and we played for a few hours. When all was said and done, we didn't do very well. We did however have some rum to go with our diet cokes (I need to go shopping) and we had a lovely time. By the way, lest anyone try and think I'm trying to show Chris up by saying he can't beat me in Madden football, let me just say that, unlike me, Chris is financialy stable, has a retirement plan, and owns his condo.

So, like I said, I bought a video game. On a whim, I decided to go to Best Buy on Saturday morning after a great breakfast at the Paradise Pizza Diner in South Salem, NY. I can never go wrong with the Western Omelette with cheese, rye toast, coffee, water breakfast but there's just something so good that Jimmy does with it up there that I love to drive the extra few miles to eat it there.

I had no reason to go to Best Buy but I knew I'd probably find something that I wouldn't mind having. When I saw Activision's World Series of Poker video game, I decided to take it home. I figured it couldn't hurt to have the practice for my next poker night with the boys. What I didn't realize was that I was bringing home a new addiction. Even as I write this now, I can't truly explain how difficult it is not to tear myself away from here and go play some more online poker. It is so friggin cool.

When I got home from Best Buy, I popped the game into my Xbox and started to play. It was beautiful. I loved playing it from the moment I started. Then I decided to try it's online features. This proved to be difficult. Basically, there's a lot of wires that will have to be picked up before Kristine gets home tomorrow. But dammit, I got it to work.

Going online started out great but then I was faced with another dilemma. Just about everyone in these rooms is talking on their Xbox headsets. Now I bought one of these a while back but I've since moved and I couldn't find the thing anywhere. That little search is another reason why I have plenty of wires to pick up before Kristine gets home.

So I had to go out and buy another headset. No biggy. I can afford the 30 bucks (plus tax and the dollar I had to pay to park at the Target garage). What sucked about this little trip is that A. I had to leave the poker game and B. the rain here yesterday was insane. When I did eventually get the headset and was telling my poker table that I lived in Connecticut, a Pennsylvania resident ventured to ask if I had built my Arc yet. I got CRAZY wet, but I got my headset and boy did I have fun.

In conclusion, my review of World Series of Poker is that it is F-ing great and you should run out and get it today. By the way, my screen name on the game is medavecool so if you get the game, look me up and I'll play with you.

I need to wrap this up soon as my friend Mr. Beeber is coming over and we're heading into NYC to see Robert Klein. Somehow, Tim got himself on a mailing list and he scored two free tickets to Klein's show. The show we're going to see is being recorded for and HBO special and it's called, "The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue". To be honest with you, Robert Klein has never been one of my favorite comics, but I've always been impressed with the respect he gets from other comediens. Hopefully, the show will be very funny and if nothing else, I love that I get to stop by Two Boots in Grand Central Station for a slice of "The Bird" which is a buffalo wing pizza. OH! It is soooooo good. Maybe I'll have two.

Hay, and for all you Lost fans, you can bet your ass I'll be talking about Lost come Thursday. The number of visits I got on this blog last Thursday simply for wondering who Alvar Hanso was...well, it was just insane. For about a day, I contemplated making this an all Lost blog. I decided against it after I realized it would drive me insane.

Time to go. Talk 2 u all l8r.
Dave

Who Is Alvar Hanso?

As many people know, Lost is the best show on television. For those of you who saw the show last night, you're going to want to take a look at this. The marketing people at ABC have decided to occupy our time by providing a website that tells us little but keeps us guessing. WHO IS Alvar Hanso? Click here to find out.

By the way. On the Active Projects page, under the last project link, is a hidden link that reads "Dharma Initiative". As far as I can tell, this link does nothing. If anybody can get this to work, let me know.

The Quick Follow-Up

You just have to love friends and technology. It's because of all the time, hard work, trial & error, and billions of dollars Adobe has invested over the years that my "good" friend XCHAIR was able to take 5 minutes of his time and use his pirated version of Photoshop CS2 and make a pretty little girl out of me. Isn't that speacial?

Actually, thanks to his hard work, I'm becoming fond of this look and thinking of persuing it. Thanx Mr. Chair. You're so sweet.

Quick Check-In

Hello All,

Last night, my friend Tim Beeber finally got a bunch of guys together and we had our first poker night. It was my first time playing and it was HUGE FUN. I don't want to sound like the bragging type but I was blessed with some good cards and I took the jackpot. Also, I was the only one who didn't have to buy in twice. I can't wait to play again. Mucho Thanx to Tim for putting that together.

Tonight, Kristine and I are going to a Bridal Show in New Rochelle so that we can gather information for our wedding this coming May. Oh Joy. Since going back to work, I;ve been trying out this new thing where I don't drink on weeknights. Obviously, I let that slide last night as it was poker night, but I think I might have a rum & coke or two tonight before the big event.

Talk 2 u l8r.
Dave

You May Be Searching For Me

Hello All,

Since I've started blogging on a regular basis, it seems that a few more people are viewing my pages as a result of search engines. It's nice to be aware of this info as I am able to see what people are looking for on the web. It's possible that in the future I will cater to some of these searches as I'm a big fan of giving the people what they want. You can rest assured that I will include some more photos of Miss Adrienne Curry as I have found that's what some of you would like to see (and to be honest, I don't mind looking at her either).

Here is what amused me this morning. In yesterday's entry, I had a quick one sentence message informing my readers that Call For Help was back on the air. Call For Help is a 1 hour daily show that is very informative when it comes to the computer world. One of the show's benefits is that you can call in and ask for help if you have a computer problem or if you need more information. Call For Help's host, Leo Laporte, is also the host of my three favorite podcasts. They are This Week In Tech, KFI's Tech Guy, and Security Now. By the way, the new Security Now is up and it is very good.

Call For Help used to be on every day when the G4 channel was called TechTV. As all of you geeky people out there know, TechTV was an awesome tv channel until G4 bought TechTV and made it a very shitty one. As a result, Call For Help was cancelled.

Now I don't completely understand it, but I guess Call For Help has been on in Canada. Since G4 is starting to realize they may have made some mistakes, they are running the Canadian reruns on G4 in the US. It's nice to have them back.

But like I was saying, yesterday, I mentioned all of this in one sentence. After work, I went home and watched Call For Help on my DVR. They had some great info on Imax movies and how they convert standard hollywood movies into the Imax format. They also had some good info about computer security. For those of you that don't know, if your internet is going through a router, then you have a firewall.

The other thing they mentioned was a great search engine called Technorati. I gotta be honest on this one and let you know that during this story I was paying more attention to my lovely fiance and the pork tenderloin she cooked me for dinner. Still, it was going on in the background and I heard enough to know that they liked it and thought I should use it.

I probably would've forgotten about Technorati except that it showed up on my webstats page this morning. It turns out that someone else must have watched the same Call For Help episode and then typed "call for help" g4 into the Technorati search engine. Here's what's amazing. As of this writing, when you type those words into that search engine, I am the FIRST story that comes up. I mean that....that is just friggin cool.

Based on these findings, I would like to say that Technorati is the BEST search engine ever and that I highly recommend it. Although of course, I guess I should also thank Google for providing me with the free blogspace.

Hay, last but not least...I've gotten some very nice responses, both in blog comments and in emails, to my blog entry about my Mother a few posts back. Certainly speaking of those who have passed can be a touchy subject as you walk a fine line between mourning the death and celebrating the life. I was happy to write that entry and I thank those of you who acknowledged it.

By the way, speaking of Mothers, I don't know if you've seen it yet, but my Godmother Lynn did finally post her second blog entry and she did so in an internet cafe in Ireland. You can read about it here.

Oh, and let me not forget to welcome all of you who arrived here as a result of Call For Help and my favorite search engine Technorati. I hope you stick around and enjoy what you see here.

Talk 2 u soon.
Dave

Quick Check-In

Sorry guys,

I just could not get out of bed this morning so I don't have an exciting new post for you today. I can tell you that it was a good weekend. I went to an Octoberfest party that was great. We hung out with some good friends on Sunday. Saturday Night Live had it's premiere this weekend and it was histerical. Also, SNL is now broadcasting in hi def which is great. The new TWIT is up and it's a good show. Also, Bon Jovi tickets went on sale on Saturday and I'll be going to the November 29th show at MSG. Actually, I think I've got a good blog post in me for that one so maybe more on that later. Anything else? Caught up on some tv. Last weeks Medium was great and not just because it involved an iPod. This season's survivor looks like it's going to suck. Oh! And for those of you who've been waiting, Call For Help is back on G4 tv.

One last thing. For those of you looking for a sexy podcast, check out Open Source Sex. It is both educational and entertaining.

Talk 2 u soon.
Dave