Yesterday, I reached my 30th birthday. I guess this means I should be looking back at where I've come and ahead to where I'm going; I mean, 3 decades is a nice, even, round number to act as some important milestone, right?

Naa, that's just cliche, and birthdays to me are about as meaningful as the passage of another calendar year; an indication of time passing as opposed to some stepping stone on the path of life itself.

In the past few weeks, however, I have been thinking of some major changes. For my whole life I've lived pretty much out of a single room. Growing up I had my bedroom and small toy room. In college I had a dorm room and then university apartments which really mean a bedroom and a shared room. Later on, I continued that trend by basically living out of a bedroom for my first 5 years post-college.

For the past year, I've been living in my own apartment; 2 bedrooms, living room. This is a lot of space for me to expand into, especially after nearly 30 years of being pretty comforted by the confines of everything being close to me. And now I'm planning on how to expand into my second bedroom and living room, which means some temporary expenses for furniture and fixings. This past weekend I actually got pretty excited about it, as I finally had a plan.

To set the stage more, I spend a lot of time on my computers, particular my laptops. I have a gaming machine as my desktop system, but it is only used for gaming. I don't watch television, but I do watch a lot of movies and love having one running in the backround. Interestingly, I don't watch movies while gaming, since that is pretty distracting.

I don't have a desk and haven't had one for about 2 years now, mostly working on my computers on a couch, chair, or my bed. In fact, I've moved my television and main computer into my bedroom, making it the room I spend 95% or more of my time.

I've decided to reclaim the rest of my apartment. I'll start by getting a desk for my computers, which I will put in the second bedroom. This will be matched with a comfortable chair (I don't skimp!) since I'll still spend a lot of time in there. If I want to watch a movie, I have spare systems/laptops to play a DVD in them next to me.

In the living room, I'll be able to use wireless to stay on my laptops while also watching a movie or reading a book. I really have no need to game on my gaming machine in my living room, so I don't need it around.

Really, this is the best plan I've had in a long time as far as living conditions go. It sounds like a bit of a no-brainer, but really I've done nothing because I didn't know where I'd end up. I didn't want to buy things and spend money without the plan moving forward, and until now, I just wanted everything in one room and split myself up.

So, that's what turning 30 has brought me; a sense to expand my living conditions beyond living out of one room.

Driving to work from lunch today I saw a car with the bumper sticker, "Jesus is my friend." It immediately make me chuckle and think about how we deal with imaginary friends in children, or even as adults (adults who talk to themselves, I guess). One is tolerated, one is tolerated with a lean eye, and another is not tolerated. Makes one wonder what our standards really are.

I've needed to write about a couple of things here lately. What better time than during the early parts of spring with introspective rain showers popping up regularly. These two items are slightly related and involve not just my personal life but my professional one as well.

1. What you are going to do is nothing compared to what you are doing. Only when you actually do great things does anyone care what you are going to be doing. Do; execute; be.

2. Do the good things first. For pretty much my entire life, I have typically held off on doing the things I really want to do. As a kid and until recently, when eating dinner I would eat the things I like the least first, saving the tastier portions for later in the meal. I think this tendency has pervaded more of my life than just my eating habits. As such, I am now taking action and giving effort to make sure I do the things I really want to do first, and if I have time (or appetite) left, then do the rest. Rather than save that awesome but lengthy technical paper on the latest, greatest computer attack for a more convenient time or until after I read some smaller, less interesting papers, I need to just read that paper and do it.

("Do, or do not..". is a Yoda quote from Star Wars.)

Wow, of all the things we could and should be upset about in our affluent culture, I cannot even believe people are outspoken and serious critics of the Pizza Hut BookIt program. This program is one of the formative programs of my childhood and some of the best memories of accomplishment in school, especially in my 3rd and 4th grade years revolve around what this program started.

Do I remember the pizzas? Barely. They were the kid versions, not like huge pizzas that I could engorge myself on. They were personal kid pizzas. But pizza aside, that was just a side benefit and nothing more. Maybe these days the program is different, but back then you could only get one pizza a week and the program only lasted about 2 months or something to that effect.

I don't even remember the first books I read, but I can tell you I didn't read books for pleasure before this program. Due to this program, I ended up accomplishing some things and feeling great about them, while also discovering reading. I think I soaked up over 100 Hardy Boys books over the course of the next 2-3 years!

I just can't believe how anal and pitiful our culture can become in denouncing such things. Maybe they have kids they think are slightly overweight and are looking for something to blame. I wonder what sort of vision of reality these people are trying to accomplish and if that is even attainable. There are so many other worthy things to criticize and be ensconced about versus going after a very successful and amazingly formative program that has sparked mine, and many others into reading and learning.

One last note, while these people are using rising rates of child obesity to support their claims, I wonder if there is a correlation between a decades old program and a years old problem. Gee, I really freakin' doubt it.

This is the best laugh I've had in weeks: CNNs 101 dumbest moments in business in 2006. The Chevy Tahoe viral act gaffe sets the stage, especially once I went to www.youtube.com and looked up some of those Chevy Tahoe ads. It just gets better as well! I didn't realize so many funny and awesome things happened in 2006!

One thing I've realized slowly over the years is there are a lot of people in this world and country with the name Michael Dickey. I've made attempts in the past to search out old buddies and friends and classmates from various times in my past, and typically, those searches yield very few hits when using their first and last names, even shortened versions of them. But a search on Michael Dickey or Mike Dickey yields more hits than I even care to go through. And maybe one or two end up referring to me! There's a number of artists, a few professors (one a woman), even some weird hits on some Linux forums.

That's kinda mindboggling and surprising. Although, about 5 years ago, someone was arrested here in Des Moines for holding up a grocery store with a gun whose name was Michael Dickey. There's another of me right here in town! Maybe I should consider using Michael L. Dickey in the future!

As much as that is a bit annoying, especially to anyone who might try to look me up like I do old buddies, that little bit of added noise is very helpful when trying to maintain some sort of anonymity online. It also helps that this site links out to very few other sites, and likewise gets linked to from very few sites. This keeps it relatively low on search engine results.

In other major news, all my tech stuff from this page has been moved over to my new site called terminal23.net. This is where all my tech, geek, security, IT, and other specialized stuff will go. Now I can stop dilluting my personal news and thoughts with all the technical stuff that makes sense only to other techies.

Yeah, I still do maintain this site. I don't know why I never did this before (maybe the previous MT version I used didn't allow publish date editing), but I have added all my old site posts into this site, with appropriate date entries. This way they build and export just like any other news posts. This will ease maintenance and restorations in the future. I also sometimes find new quotes that I want to put into my random quote generator for the front page. I added that text file as an MT template, so I can update it from anywhere. Basically 2.5 hours of work that I won't ever have to do again!

Of course, it is easy for people who have found this happiness to say it, but I like this quote:

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle.

"As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

- Steve Jobs in his commencement address to Stanford in June 2005.

Words of wisdom can be heard pretty much anywhere. This morning an email list of coders and security persons (daily dave) saw a post with a few excellent words.

Never consider yourself bigger or better or greater than others. In my dealings with people who considered themselves great or small, I always treat them as real people equally valuable to God.

Judge people by their attitude and effort and not by their output.

Pray for everyone in sight.. Forgive those who hurt you unreasonably .. understand that healed people heal people and hurt people hurt people.

Reading these, particularly that last one, brought another bit of wisdom to my own mind. Too often we live our lives and then die, defined by our enemies when in fact we should be defining ourselves by the friends we keep. We pick fights, criticize, and otherwise get bent out of shape about so many other people and things that we'll end up getting old and wondering on the purpose of it all and wishing we had cultivated the friendships instead of the hurt.