Day 23 of 365: 300,000 Miles, CRAVING, Doing Away With Months Of Work

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This is one of those little bits of awesome that probably doesn’t even really deserve it’s on spot on the blog, but, it’s my blog and I find it to be awesome, so here it is.

The Joker, my 1982 Mercedes 300 Turbo Diesel, hit 300,000 miles.  The engine has never been rebuilt, and there’s still a whole lot of original parts on the car.  Not bad.  (Heck, the turbo wasn’t even modified when I got ahold of it – I changed that.)

Now, of that 300,000 miles, I think I may have put just under 4,000 of it on there in the last two years I’ve owned the car.  It’s just an in-town car, and it’s not even a daily driver.  I work from the house, so I don’t have to go out of the house most days.  Heck, some days I find an excuse to leave, just so I don’t feel so cramped up.

I’d love to say that I’ll have and drive it for the next 300,000 miles.  But, at 500,000 you have to have the engine rebuilt.  That’s not too bad.  However, the last time I washed the car (last weekend) it has rust developing on both of the passenger doors, and some rust developing on two seams where body repairs were done (it’s been rear-ended at least once in it’s lifetime.)

That doesn’t mean I have to replace it anytime soon, just that I doubt it can reach the half-million mile mark unless I start replacing a whole lotta the car.  I’ll probably drive it until it falls apart :-)[/text_output][custom_headline type=”center” level=”h2″ looks_like=”h2″ accent=”true”]CRAVING[/custom_headline][text_output]So, yeah, this was an odd day, addiction wise.  I was doing fine all day.  I had been by QuikTrip and Dillion’s with Kat, and I never had any problem with all those people who smelled like cigarette smoke.  It was just no big thing.

Then, setting on the couch, I can’t explain it: I could smell cigarette smoke.  It wasn’t on me, and it wasn’t on Kat, and I couldn’t find the source.  But, man oh man could I smell it.  And it was tempting.  I just set there and twitched about it, watching TV with Kat.  I musta sucked down half the juice in one of my eCigs.

I seriously contemplated going to the store and picking up a pack of smokes.  I’d only have one, then throw the rest in the trash.  Of course, that’s how it starts – it’s only ONE cigarette, right?

Somehow, I managed to keep myself calmed down enough that I didn’t do it.  But, sheesh, I woulda killed for a cigarette about then.

Thing is, that’s probably only the third or fourth time I’ve had that level of craving in the last five days.  If it averages out to once a day, well, I’m going to consider that a win 🙂  And, I DIDN’T have one, so that’s a serious win 🙂

I’m only focusing on this at the moment – I should be working out, and there’s a couple days where I ate less healthily than I should.  But, for now, I’m only going to stress about this :-)[/text_output][custom_headline type=”center” level=”h2″ looks_like=”h2″ accent=”true”]Doing Away With Months Of Work[/custom_headline][text_output]I’ve been working on CloudPages for close to a year now – the project didn’t start the funding process until April 2013, if I remember correct.  We’ve had a fun process, trying to build a product large enough to require an entire team, but only doing it with one guy (me) and a really small budget.

Every Thursday Ryan (the owner) and I have a meeting to go over progress, examine where we are, and what our next step is.  Today, we made a really weird decision: we’re cutting one of the major features.  I spent a couple months building up a customization system for user profiles like no other.  It’s pretty impressive, and it’s getting close to deployment.

While reworking the entire image for the project, I realized something horrible:  the customization system basically does away with our branding when a user customizes their profile.  There’s a reason why places look the way that they do – and it’s all about branding.

After a 30 minute meeting, we hashed out the idea, and looked at other services ranging from Facebook to Twitter to Google’s products.  User customization isn’t very heavy on any of them for a reason: it kills branding.

Well, after all this time, we’re killing the customization system.  It’s not that it’s being deleted – we’ll keep it hidden in one of my development directories, accessible any time I want to make it go live (and only I can hit that switch).  It’s just that we’re not going to make it live.

That wasn’t an easy choice, really.  But, it was the right one – and right isn’t always easy.[/text_output][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][line][custom_headline type=”center” level=”h2″ looks_like=”h2″ accent=”true”]Today’s Stats[/custom_headline][text_output]

• Workouts:
• Cigarettes Smoked:
• Healthy Eating:

Projects Worked on:

• Worked on info for Residential Aliens Magazine / Fear And Trembling Magazine distribution
• (Still Un-named) Android / iOS app
• Jumpman Forever Ouya integration work

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