I Thee Wed

My friends are getting married all over the place.  For this weekend, I’m making a trip up to the Bay Area to celebrate the union of two college friends.

You’d think that this would be a post about how being single makes me think I’d really like to get married but that’s just really not in the cards for a long time.  Or at least until I can get to where I want to be in my career.

Or, perhaps, this post would be about what I think about my friends getting married.  Nope, not doing that either.  After all, I’m not married.

But wait, maybe I am already married.  To the interwebs?  Or maybe to my guitars.

Well, the net is my career, so I’m probably married to my guitars.  It is, after all, my guitars that I love. It’s too bad that I can’t think of anybody I’ve dated that I loved more than the feeling of pressing strings onto frets.  And I’ve fallen in love before - hard, and once for a long time - and still, the guitar wins.

I remember practicing guitar in my college dorm room and falling asleep with it still in my hands.

I remember naming my acoustic guitar Lillian, after my paternal grandmother, who reminded me of purple orchids and Mu’umu’u sun dresses and afternoon naps.

I remember naming my electric (a black Stratocaster) Estelita, after my maternal grandmother, who reminded me of ballroom dancing and putting on a show, swearing with zeal and vitriol, laughing hard at a good joke.

I named my Telecaster Pandora, knowing full well that it was the indication of a musicianship which would definitely compete with the rest of my life at the time, taking me many places and putting me in interesting situations.  In both, equal servings of good and bad.  Serves me right, seeing as how that guitar was stolen before it made its way to me, and I’m still unclear on the details of how that happened.

Then there’s being on stage.  Lord, how I miss being on stage.

Perhaps my priorities are out of line.  I mean come on, how does one fall in love with inanimate objects?

Maybe I should put it this way: How many of you have fallen in love with learning another language and the culture that came with it?  How about letting your guard down, and dancing your ass off under dazzling lights to the thump of a darkened dance floor?  The wind in your hair on the open road?  Getting runner’s high in the pouring rain, when the air starts to smell like the taste of sugar?  Getting dangerously close to that delightful nausea on the spinny cups at Disneyland?

Yeah.  It’s a lot like that.

So I guess this turned into a post about guitars.  Huh.  Interesting.

So tomorrow I will be around a newly married couple.  Being around people who are in love remind me that I am in love.  My heartstrings stretch over frets.

Maybe I should play a show soon and I won’t pine over this so much.

Yeah.  That’s a good idea.

Go with the Flow

Have I been showing my geekery lately? Not as much, sadly.

But oh, what do we have here?  (There!–>)

Aside from immensely enjoying Firefox 3 now that I’ve tricked it out (See Lifehacker), there hasn’t been anything I’ve found worth talking about concerning geekery other than video games. I mean, web development changes as far as the content you create goes, but the means to do it are usually pretty consistent.

Not today, kiddies. If you are a web developer and you need something way lighter than the nightmare that is Dreamweaver* (you see what I did there?), you might want to look into something that was just recently brought to my attention: Flow by Extendmac.

I have it, I love it, I like how I can edit remote files and use an FTP AT THE SAME DAMN TIME WITH ONLY ONE PROGRAM, and I am really digging concurrent FTP connections.  And did I mention that it’s light as a feather on your OS? Oh, about that: It’s for OS X Leopard only. So, Mac power users rejoice! We have a simple solution, and it’s about damn time.  BBEdit is great too, but it’s nowhere near as light as Flow.

Web dev is a blast with this little app.  I feel so much lighter!  Dumping Dreamweaver was like taking a long overdue poop.  An interweb poop. (an interpoop?)

…Maybe I should refrain from referencing bodily functions when talking about a program called “Flow”, but whatever.  No point in editing that out.  If I have the image in my head you might as well, too.

(PC user? I didn’t forget about you guys. Try EditPlus, which has been around for a while but it’s still notably effective.)

*To be fair, Dreamweaver has made some significant improvements since Adobe bought it. But it’s still heavier than a Scandinavian death metal band and slower than the continental drift, so that’s one tall glass of fail as far as I’m concerned.

Poop Much?

I work in marketing.  So it’s a forehead-slapper when I see someone screw it up.

Take, for instance, targeted advertising.  Based on algorithms that scan sites’ respective content for certain words and themes, an ad generator can create a targeted banner ad that might appeal to that website’s visitors.

I visited the 20somethings today and discovered a “targeted ad” that may suggest something about our personalities.

Maybe we all say “shit!” and “I’m getting old” a little too much, because the targeted advertising is reacting this way:

It’s All Of The Good That Won’t Come Out Of Me

It was in a conversation over drinks last night that some friends and I were able to unearth who exactly it is I become in my alternate personality, Shadow Nicopolitan.

A shadow personality is not necessarily just the opposite of one’s default personality, contrary to what I initially believed.  I haven’t been Shadow Nicopolitan for a while, and only after establishing some distance between my shadow and myself, I’ve figured out that the shadow is more accurately defined when particular reactions complement my personality under special circumstances.

Case in point, Shadow Nicopolitan is:

• An attention whore on the stage.  He loves it when your eyes are on him, and he will flail violently, jump around, smack his guitar like he’s trying to break it, will whip his hair around like it’s on fire, will cut himself and bleed all over the guitar pedals to make sure that you are paying attention to him.
• Someone who can and will actually dance (!), especially if he standing next to a gigantic subwoofer at a drum n bass show.
• Probably on drugs when he is dancing.
• A good public speaker - he will become erudite and eloquent, will gesticulate emphatically, will smile artificially, and snap his fingers when he thinks you’re not paying attention.
• Someone who will retaliate getting pushed into a mosh pit by giving you a shoulder check with his entire upper body, or at least a violent elbow to the chest.
• Fantastic under pressure.
• A bullshitter who can talk the talk, a networker who can read people, and a witty, friendly person who can work the room.

Regular Nicopolitan is just some guy with glasses and a positive disposition.  Shadow Nicopolitan is a rockstar and a badass.  He even comes out in relationships, and will probably be the first one in the relationship to say “I love you,” and he will mean it.

However, Shadow Nicopolitan also has many negative qualities.  He will speak before thinking when faced with an emotionally jarring situation, he will inadvertently raise his voice, he will guilt trip you into saying things you didn’t want to admit, he is jealous, and his defense for his insecurities are often an offense.

In my personal opinion, Shadow Nicopolitan is a weirdo.  A lot of those qualities I would say I don’t possess, even if I know I’m capable of them.  I really don’t like to dance.  I don’t enjoy being fake when I network, nor do I ever do it on purpose.  And by and large, I rarely run into having to turn into Shadow Nicopolitan while I’m in a relationship.  It weirds me out that I know that I can do these things, that I will rarely have to do these things, and that it always shocks me when I do do these things.

A shadow personality is not your opposite.  It is that portion of your id that comes out when someone shines a spotlight on you and you are compelled do something.  A shadow can only be seen when someone or something casts a light on you, and your shadow will be more defined the brighter the lights.

So I want to ask everyone:

Who is that person you have as a shadow?

Nicopolitan - your personal creative suite

When people figure out you know how to Photoshop, you get asked to hack together weird shit all the time.

I have discovered that during those times, weirder requests = better results.

[actual conversation is edited for brevity]
vince: hey
nico: yea?
vince: Interested in hacking together a photoshop montage?
nico: a montage?
vince: I request you combine the following elements in any way you see fit: BBQing, Super Soakers, Swat team.
nico: lemme see what i can do

[an hour later]

vince: OMGAwesomezozrz
vince: That is better than I could have possibly imagined
nico: i like how we’re cooking a swat team