Welcome my friend, welcome to the blog (with apologies to Pink Floyd)

Ah, welcome to my blog.  Set down, relax a bit, have a cuppa tea or beverage of choice.  Comfy?  Good.  Because I gotta warn ya’ – I talk a lot.  I mean in copious volumes. 

This isn’t my first blog – you can find me on Garage Games posting about game related topics (back when those were referred to as “.plan files”), and Xanga posting about business-ish type stuff behind one of my ex-businesses and my TV show stuff.  Even before all of that I used to keep a LiveJournal.  Eventually I abandoned my personal blog at LiveJournal, and move on to blogging about “important stuff” like game development.

For some reason though, I’ve keep thinking about setting up a personal blog again.  Well… um, here it is – once again I write about my personal observations on life, how things are going, who’s pissed me off this week, that sort of interesting drivel.  I’m not very emo – so, if you’re lookin’ for someone who cries on their blog every time something goes wrong, well, wrong place.  I’ll just rant a bit about it instead 🙂

“So, who are you?” you ask, “and why should I set around drinking tea, which I hate, and reading your blog?”

Yeah, see, I can’t give you a good reason why you should read this thing.  Maybe to bear witness to the planet sized ego?  To be entertained by someone else’s life?  To snicker and nod your head when I go on a rant?  Who knows.  For some reason whenever I blog about stuff, be it business or otherwise, people tell me how interesting it is, and try and convince me to write more.  I should come equiped with a sign that says “Do Not Feed The Ego – He Just Writes More Then!” 🙂

There’s your answer on why to read my blog – there isn’t an answer.

Now for who am I… that’s pretty easy.  I’m a Leo, in every possible way.  Need something to fill the void in the room?  My ego will do that nicely. 

Need a complicated structure like a bridge built?  I’ll build it – even if I don’t know how to build a bridge, you’ll assume from my confidence that I know how to build it.  Heck, not only that, you’ll assume I’m an expert at bridge building.  You’ll wonder if you’ve ever seen one of the many bridges I’ve built before.  To quote Monk:  “It’s a gift.  And a curse.”  I’ll never lie and say I’ve built bridges before – that would be just wrong.  But I’ve got a couple of ideas how to build a better one, based on the last one I drove across.

Even better, hand me a couple of workers to help out with the bridge.  90% of the time, they get the same impression – even when I’m changing the plans right in front of them when the bridge isn’t quite working out as planned.  And if the bridge catches fire?  I’ll be right there directing traffic telling the workers what needs to be done first – leadership is just a natural thing.

A good friend of mine and I were talking about that the other day – my ability to be confident and lead, reguardless of if I really know what the hell I’m doing.  For anyone who works with me, and realizes the power of such and ability… they really don’t nessisarily want to work with me anymore :-)  Simply put, following me could lead to an archetectural wonder of bridge building that rivals the Golden Gate Bridge.  Or it can result in the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. (BTW – I actually picked those two as random examples of spectucular success and spectacular failure.  Little did I know until I looked at the Wikipedia entry that one of the engineers worked on both bridges.  Go fig.)

And if it does go Tacoma on ya, and you ask me – I’ll find out why, and if it’s my damned fault, I’ll tell you it’s my damned fault, with a minimum of excuses.  If it’s in the process of falling, there’s a good chance I’m probably in the middle of the bridge, trying to quickly assess the situation, figure out why the bridge is acting weird, and how to fix this.  Yeah, I’m one of those people – I frequently have more balls than brains.  Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes that’s a bad thing.

That gives you a little idea about my personality – anything more you’ll just have to glean from my entries. 

Now as to where I am right now in life…  well, I had a Tacoma Narrows Bridge moment.  A business of mine failed, and caused it’s own little collapse.  Had I been brighter, and followed the advice I have given others about owning a business, I would have been just fine.  But I didn’t.  I had been doing contract work, but it dried up – instead of pulling out of the business,  I put my balls on the line, and went for broke.

Damn, my balls still hurt.

“Broke” was definitely the right term for it – lost my house, my car, most of my possessions (though honestly that last part was more of a Buhdest moment where I realized much of what I owned offered me little pleasure or inspiration.  Of course it helped that I had no where to move ALL of my copious amounts of crap to.)  And, the final blow – I got a divorce. 

And there it is – everything lost.  Now, the business failure did have a hand in my divorce, but it wasn’t the root cause of it.  Simply put, we had two different directions we wanted to go.  “If you go there you’re gone forever, if I go there I’ll lose my way, if we stay here we’re not together.” Enya, Anywhere Is – that line sort of describes it a bit.

After such things have occurred, one might assume that I’m depressed, broken, and hopeless.  Eh.  Life goes on.  I had a short time (around a month) where my extreme confidence was lost, and my ego deflated.  I got better.  I began planning one thing after another.  I applied for jobs (unsuccessfully) before, during, and after the collapse, and no one would touch me (hey, here’s a cool thing for ya – if you work with computers for a living, and start your own business, do you know how employable you are after you move on from your own business?  Yeah… it gets ugly. :-) 

Right now I’m somewhere around $60,000 in debt.  I suppose this should be a soul crushing amount, based on the fact that I have no constant income at the moment, and no assets to leverage like, say, a house.  Nothing that I’ve planned has managed to quite come together yet.  So, I’m doing something rare – I’m building someone else’s dream for the moment.  A partner of mine is building a resteraunt – well, actually, I’m doing the actual building portion, coordinating with the various trades, etc.  Basically, putting what I know to work, and using my talents in a totally different way than I have before.  Eventually it does benefit me too, by helping a friend who’ll be in a better position to help me in return, but that’s not the point behind doing it.

Now I find myself living with a couple of friends, building someone else’s work, and entering the world of dating.  Amazing how many things can change in a person’s life in the course of just one year 🙂

Well, that tells ya where I’m at in life.  Congratulations to anyone who actually set through the whole thing – just because of that, I’ll leave you with your moment of Zen (phrase stolen from The Daily Show, because the video was swiped from The Daily Show.  Hey, if you’re going to steal stuff, just steal the whole damned thing :-)