Category Archives: General

The Only Constant Is Change

By lytspeed Posted in Family, General, Non-Fiction, Poker Leave a reply

There has been another gap in my journal entries. Those who know me well know that this indicates a period of stress. Unlike many bloggers, I don’t feel completely comfortable dumping my personal life on the Internet for all to see. My Creativity Journal is intended to be a structured blog about creativity, and when things are stressful, I usually don’t engage in creative activities as often.

This time is kind of different. Sure, there has been stress, but I have actually been engaging in more creative thinking over the last month and a half or so. Being unemployed gives one that luxury.

Yes, unemployed. Their choice, not mine.

Immediately after returning from my honeymoon with Lannette, my employer of over seven years dismissed me with no severance pay. I was not entirely surprised at the dismissal, but I was shocked that they did not offer me severance pay. The company has a history of giving severance packages, but for whatever reason, they chose not to do so this time. However, this is not a bitch session, it’s a Creativity Journal, right?

As you may have seen from the opening page of my site, since becoming jobless I have been getting more writing assignments from ComputorEdge magazine. My band, Steel River Three, has been playing private parties and we have publicly debuted my song “New Guy Smell.” I have considered making a career out of computer consulting, freelance writing, and music, and have received nothing but support from Lannette while I explore this idea. (Thank you, honey.)

Another thing I have discovered is that I’m pretty good at Texas Hold ‘Em Poker. I had read Wil Wheaton‘s blog entries about playing in the World Series of Poker and landing a gig as a PokerStars.com team player. A few months before being fired, I had purchased Dataviz software’s Hold ‘Em High program for my Treo 650, and practiced in hopes of being able to sit down at a table in Las Vegas on the honeymoon. Alas, that was not to be due to lack of funds, but I enjoyed playing poker on the handheld anyway. When I found I had some free time on my hands (and no money) at home, I began playing in play money tournaments at PokerStars.

Now, PokerStars has decided to hold a free tournament for bloggers only. The prize package looks great, and I have nothing to lose except a few hours on a Sunday afternoon.

Registration for the tournament required pasting an advertisment on the blog, which I did on the main page of this site. Normally, I don’t go for that kind of thing on my site, but I’ll allow it temporarily as a condition of my tournament entry. Who knows? Maybe I’ll play *really* well and get hired as a blogger for PokerStars!

Look out, Wil, here I come. 😉

Rainy Sunset

By lytspeed Posted in Family, General, Music, Non-Fiction Leave a reply

I took this picture with my camera phone tonight while on a grocery store run.

Rainy Sunset
This is why I live near the Rockies. When mother nature contrives to create images like this, I remember to take a deep breath, enjoy the gift, and put everything in perspective.

Life has been rough at times over the last couple of years, with family illness, a divorce, very tight finances, and my job not going as well as I would have liked. But there are bright spots, and I think that is what Mother Nature is trying to tell me.

I’m getting married again in a few weeks, and in that marriage, I gain not only a loving, supportive, intellectual wife, but I gain a new son. I will never attempt to interfere with Logan’s relationship with his real father, but for those times when his Dad is not able to be there for him, I hope to be an able assistant.

Another bright spot of the last couple of years is my band, Steel River Three. We haven’t made much money, but we have managed to play several different venues and are starting to notice familiar faces at the shows. I’ve become much more comfortable playing and singing in front of people, and recently wrote my first song in over eight years.

The writing is taking off a bit, too. The articles for ComputorEdge are not only bringing in a bit of extra money, they have given me the confidence to submit more work to different markets. As I mentioned in the last entry, I submitted a piece to NPR, and yesterday I submitted a short-short story to the new science fiction/horror magazine Apex Digest. The response time for that market is listed as 20-30 days, so I hope to hear whether the story was accepted by mid July. I also have another story idea that might be right up that magazine’s alley, but I have to write it before I can submit it. 😉

Yes, there have been challenges in my life recently, many of them brought on by myself, but I need to remember that not all is dark and stormy. As people in the Pacific Northwest might say, the sun breaks are a reason for celebration.

Ten Things You’ve Probably Done That I Haven’t

By lytspeed Posted in General Leave a reply

I read on Andrew Nicolle’s blog about ten things that he had done that his readers hadn’t. Initially, I was tempted to copy him, in a sort of uninspired chain-blog way. But then, I thought about how I want to make most of these entries relate to creativity somehow, so I decided to flip it around.

Here’s my list of Ten Things You’ve Probably Done That I Haven’t.

1. Watched an episode of The X-Files, Survivor, or American Idol. (There are several years in my life in which I have spent less than 1% of my waking time watching TV. I’m pretty proud of that.)

2. Saw the ocean before the age of 35.

3. Watched Gone With the Wind.

4. Had some kind of surgery (yes, wisdom teeth and tonsils count!)

5. Had sex before the age of 22. (I’m not saying that waiting is a bad thing, it’s just a bit unusual to wait that long.)

6. Attended a high school football game.

7. Owned fewer than four handheld computers.

8. Met more than one of your grandparents.

9. Read The Da Vinci Code. (It’s on my list.)

10. Resisted the urge to car dance at red lights while people are staring at you.

Out of Context

By lytspeed Posted in Family, General Leave a reply

“I like the architecture of Plum Pudding, but the interior of Apple Blossom.”

Before you think I have a Stawberry Shortcake fetish, I should probably explain; the sentence relates to dollhouses.

My girlfriend wants a dollhouse so bad she can taste it, so it’s probably appropriate that she is looking at dollhouses with cute food names. She pointed me to a website, and told me the Apple Blossom was her favorite. You can see where it went from there, I’m sure, and taken out of context, I think the result is a pretty funny statement.

Context — or lack thereof — is a big part of humor for me. Though I usually don’t have a hard time maintaining a thread of conversation, there’s always a separate thread in my brain processing the conversations, looking for little chinks in context that I can pry open with a pun. As a result, I do spend a lot of CPU time out of context; that’s probably why so many of my jokes fall flat. Recipients (or victims, if you prefer) of my puns are usually not as far out of context as I am, so my humor comes across as frustrating to them.

Does that mean I need to change my style of humor? Mmmm … no, I don’t think so. I much prefer out-of-context puns to humor that takes advantage of others’ misfortune, as most modern humor seems to do. I’m not perfect; I occasionally say things I think are funny and later realize that I’ve yielded to the temptation of humor at someone else’s expense, but I try to keep an eye on myself.

No, I don’t think I’ll change my humor style. I’ll just continue to fish for groans and avoid the sharp objects people throw at me.

A Little Too Creative

By lytspeed Posted in General Leave a reply

Hello again. It’s been a while. Sorry I haven’t written.

I do have a small creativity-related anecdote to share, though. I have a really cool chair at work. It’s a mesh back chair with lumbar support and adjustable armrests. The armrests are the really cool feature, because not only is their height adjustable, the top of the armrest is formed to fit a forearm and can rotate inward or outward to allow good typing posture.

I love this chair. Until recently, I had one small problem with it, and I was determined to solve it, even at the expense of some of the chair’s functionality.

On the left side of the chair is a lever that moves about 1/2″ in and out. It allows the chair to lock into upright position or release into recline position. Unfortunately, the 1/2″ throw is too short, and occasionally the lever would work itself out and pitch me backward in the chair without warning.

I examined the lever and determined that there was some kind of pin inside the housing of the chair that kept the lever in its limited range of motion. Since I don’t have much of a need for the reclining position, I tried to figure out a way to hold the lever in place so it wouldn’t pitch me backward. After removing the base from the chair and taking apart the housing, sure enough, I found a pin on the shaft of the lever.

Thinking back to the section of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in which Persig’s character uses the metal from a beer can to create a shim for his motorcycle’s handlebars, I found a tin can in the break room trash. Then I borrowed some tin snips from one of the people in the warehouse and proceeded to cut a couple of strips from the can that I could wrap around the shaft of the lever between the pin and the housing, effectively holding the lever in the locked position. I wrapped one piece of tin around the shaft, and it fit almost perfectly. I felt pretty proud of myself for coming up with such an ingenious idea.

About that time, our safety director, who was visiting from another facility, walked in and asked what I was doing. I began to explain what the problem was, and how elegant my solution was. About halfway through the elegant part, he interrupted me and said, “Why don’t you just tighten up the spring so it doesn’t tip back as easily? Then you don’t have to make any modifications and you still have the full functionality of the chair.”

I guess sometimes it’s possible to be a little too creative.