Cowboy Hazel

Is it a rule that you can’t make New Year’s Resolutions in late February? If there is, I’m about to break it. For those of you who don’t know, Saturday is my last day at Saks and next week marks the beginning of my days as a full time web developer at the helm of my own business, Lantenengo Industries. So, what better time to reflect upon my life, where it’s headed, and where I wish it was headed? Sitting here in my sweats, nursing a lingering hangover, and listening to old Pink Floyd albums, I’d like to document the following resolutions I’m making for myself:

1. I’m going to run at least 100 miles a month, starting with March. (You can check my progress here.) I just entered the lottery for the New York City Marathon. If the fates allow it, I’ll be running my first marathon this fall. And, even if not, I’m going to step up my running a notch to try to get in better shape and to counteract the sedentary nature of my new profession.
2. I’m going to drink less booze. This is mainly referring to the casual beer and wine that I have in the evenings here at my house. Why? One, it’s expensive. Two, it’s a lot of unneeded calories. Three, it doesn’t really do anything beneficial for me, so why keep it up? Of course, this also refers to drinking less when I do go out with friends. I just spent my entire day (after calling out sick from Saks) eating takeout Chinese food and watching bad television. What a complete and horrible waste that was. I’d be pretty happy if I never lose another day because of a hangover. It’s just not worth it.
3. I’m going to take two days off every week. I’ve been working seven days a week for the past year and it’s starting to take its toll. I’ll put as much time as it takes Monday through Friday, but the weekends are going to be mine.
4. I’m going to start reading smarter books. I’ve been reading a lot of garbage lately (I’m reading yet another Irvine Welsh novel at the moment) and it’s not really enriching my mind. I want to read more business, history, classics etc. instead of pop-literature. I’ll return the mind-numbing entertainment role in my life to movies and my newest guilty pleasure: television series on DVD.

There you have it — my mid-year New Year’s resolutions. Are you inspired?

Alright, you won. I was indeed crazily trying to reinvent the wheel. And, I failed. I made a sweet oval type shape (please, try to follow the metaphor here) but not a real wheel. Given enough time and energy, I am fully confident that I could generate my own RSS feed that is compatible with all the big blog directories — but why should I? I did a little time analysis and came to the conclusion that going with Blogger is a better option. I need to be spending my time doing more useful things that writing blog software when there’s already a million tools out there. Plus, Blogger seems to allow for more customization that WordPress did and I’m actually fairly happy with how this thing turned out. So, no complaints.

I’ve been trying to promote this blog a bit, but I need some help. Use the little links on the right to add it to your favorites and rank it highly. Muchos gracias.

Unfortunately, my hours of setting up, copying and pasting, and submitting have left me tired and cranky so I will be writing nothing further tonight. Farewell.

It’s been a week since I’ve written and almost two since I’ve written anything of significant length. Hopefully, the lack of my mediocre words didn’t cause you too much discomfort. So, what have I been up to lately that’s kept me so busy I couldn’t write? A lot, actually…

Most recently (i.e. tonight) I finally figured out how to automatically generate an RSS feed out of this thing. So, for the first time ever, this blog entry will be automatically posted to my Facebook and MediaPost pages. I’m going to spend a little time submitting it to RSS directories in the next week in an effort to boost my SEO presence. I’ve been accused of “trying to re-invent the wheel” with this whole build-it-from-scratch blog approach. That may be so, but I got it done. There’s nothing that those fancy blogs can do now that this one can’t. And, this is a hell of a lot cleaner and is much more suited to my needs and wishes. Plus, now I know how to generate an RSS feed. Do you?

Okay, so apparently my RSS feed wasn’t perfect. I just tried posting it on Technorati and it’s coming up all screwy. I guess there’s a standardized file naming convention or something. I suppose that’s more research for this weekend. Eh…

What else did I do this last week? Let’s think… I launched two new sites, did some work for Precision Prospects, and quit my full time job at Saks. Let’s elaborate:

I launched Five Fish List, my own directory. Right now I only have 200 links up there, so it’s definitely on the small side, but I’m going to put up a Suggest URL tool and maybe people will post stuff. If not, I’m not going to stress. This is more of a links page for me than anything. Well, that and a first step in a big link-getting scheme that I’d like to start. I’m not sure exactly what direction that’s going to take. I’ll probably have a better idea after I got to this presentation on SEO at IBM’s offices on Tuesday.

I also launched Plant Ink. Plant Ink is actually not so much a launch as a rename of Old Lantenengo. Looking over my web statistics the other day, I realized that I was completely neglecting some of my heaviest hitters. The humor pages that I had relegated to Old Lantenengo were bringing in considerably more traffic than most of my full sites. I’m really starting to question the whether this whole advertising experiment is going to be profitable (I’ve made like $2 in the last two weeks) and therefore didn’t want to create a specific humor site. Plus, I’m realizing that I may have made a mistake by spreading out the old Lantenengo.com onto different sites because each site has an individual search engine strength weaker than the old site as a whole had. So, instead of branching out further, I decided to just create Plant Ink (which sounds much more alive than Old Lantenengo) and may even bring back some of the now external projects to it.

I’ve been building a big reporting section for the Precision Prospects intranet. It’s caused me to think back to some high school math knowledge that long laid dormant in the recesses of my brain. Nothing too exciting to report there.

And then there’s the whole quitting my job thing. That’s been on the horizon for a while. It felt really good to finally make it official. I put my two weeks notice in on Sunday and now have just a little over a week to go before Lantenengo Industries becomes my sole source of income. Yikes! I’ll be a little more confident about everything after a couple months go by and I see some jobs come in. The whole idea of not having a steady paycheck is still very unsettling. That could be why I don’t ever sleep any more…

I got yet another reminder of the fact that I’m a boring grown-up the other day. I was helping this guy at my store (only because he asked me to) and resenting his cocky attitude with no idea of who he was. When I wandered behind the counter to check something on the register, Jennylee told me to be nice to him because he was the new Carson Daly guy. That didn’t really change my opinion of him, though. He came back the next day with a cute girl who paid for the clothes we picked out with an AmEx in MTV’s name. Seeing that on the card reminded me of what Jennylee had said and so I typed the guy’s name into Google when I got home. Turns out Tim Kash is “the new face of MTV and MTV News.” And I didn’t even know who he was, even when he told me his name. When I was working with Joaquin in Pleasanton back in high school, I used to schedule our breaks for 12:30 so I could watch TRL while eating my lunch. I don’t think I missed an episode all summer. Now, I don’t even recognize this guy and, frankly, don’t give a shit who he is. Wow.

I found the tattoo that I’m going to get. It’s an eagle that I found on Shutterstock. I’ve been looking for a good eagle to get tattooed on me for a while but haven’t come up with anything. This one turned up, though, and I was very happy to find it. I’ll probably get it done later this week. One of my friends suggested a place in the Lower East Side, but I looked on City Search and it only had 3 stars. I found another that had 17 ratings and 5 stars on 36th Street. I’m going there instead. Red Rocket Tattoo, I think it’s called. I was going to go today, but they closed early because it was snowing and nobody was coming in. Good thing I called.

Also I made plans for my trip back to Colorado in May. I registered for the Bolder Boulder and am going to keep that in mind as I step up my running. I’m going to start running in Central Park more for the hills. The East River is nice because it’s so close, but I get no incline work there. I ran at the gym today on a treadmill and wanted to do some incline, but it didn’t happen. I liked the idea of the incline, but not enough to actually make it happen. I’d like to finish the Bolder Boulder in 43 minutes. That’s just under seven minute miles. I’d try for a more ambitious goal, but I know that the elevation is going to mess with me. I’m entering the NYC Marathon lottery in two days (when it opens). I really hope that I get a spot this year. I want my first marathon to be here in New York, but I also really want it to be this year.

I’m actually feeling a little tired so I’m going to try to get some sleep. Good night.

I found the solution to the music question… This is going to sound like a promotion, but it’s actually not. I just love this idea and want to share it with you.

I haven’t wanted to do those download services because it still takes so much time to download music and plus they’re expensive. I had been listening to online radio quite a bit, but there are too many ads and the stations tend to play the same songs over and over again. Plus, it requires a fair amount of time and energy to seek out the good stations. To add to the problem, I’ve been tiring of my own CD/MP3 collection because of repetition too. I thought of getting satellite radio, but I didn’t want to deal with the equipment and subscription hassles. There’s regular radio, but there’s nothing good on it (at least here in New York City without KYGO).

So, now that I’m embarking on a mission that involves me listening to music 10+ hours a day, the music question was becoming a big issue. Then, a couple days ago, I stumbled across Yahoo’s Launchcast radio. I paid the thirty-some-dollars annual fee to get rid of the commercials and ever since I’ve been listening to a great, personalized playlist without having to put in any work other than rating the songs and artists as they come on.

You can listen to my station here: http://music.yahoo.com/launchcast/station.asp?u=1670571632

Something is amiss. It’s early February in New York City and I chose not to wear a coat to work today. I’m not crazy. It turns out that the high was 68 degrees Fahrenheit. For those of you keeping track, that’s 10 degrees higher than the previous record. Ten degrees! That’s not breaking the record; that’s shattering the record. We don’t have 68 degree weather in February in New York. We have snow and ice and people complaining about how cold it is. Not today. It was muggy and rainy and almost 70 degrees! Why are people not alarmed about this? It’s not like today was one freakish day out of an otherwise normal winter. The entire winter has been freakishly warm and then we have this incredible anomaly and still, the front page of the New York Times web site mentions nothing about it. The Post doesn’t have it on their homepage either. Are we hiding something? I mean, everyone was talking about it today, why didn’t you include it as news? This is a pretty big deal. Are you covering something up? I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist here, but I do think that something is going on. How can we break the all-time temperature record by ten degrees and have no mention of it in the papers? Who’s telling them to tone this down? Is no one as freaked out as I am? Seriously, I’m tempted to moving back to Colorado just because I know it won’t flood when the ice caps melt. Please, someone in Washington, cut the bullshit and tell us what’s going on with this whole global warming thing. Should I be looking for someplace higher to live? Should I sell my winter coats? Was Al Gore right?

Okay, so if you had told me two months ago that Manning was going to win the Super Bowl, I would have disagreed with you, saying that Tom Brady and the Patriots were invincible and a second Indianapolis championship was unlikely. Eli and the Giants wouldn’t have even crossed my mind. Seriously? The Giants are Super Bowl champs? How did this happen? I know there’s this whole American fixation with the underdog and Cinderella stories, but lately it seems like they happen so often that they’re the norm. What ever happened to the better team winning? I was really looking forward to seeing the Patriots win and secure their place in history as the best team ever. Let me back up a second… I am not at all a Patriots fan. I hate everything that comes from Boston, including the Pats. But, being a true fan of the game, I appreciate greatness. The Patriots two months ago were like nothing I’d ever seen before. That’s when we all started asking if it was possible… Could a pro team really be 19-0? I wanted to see it happen. I wanted, for just one year, for there to be no doubt in anyone’s mind who the greatest football team in the world was. Now, who’s to say? It’s certainly not the Giants. They lost 6 games this year, including one to the Pats, so how can you say that they’re the best? The other thing is, it seemed to me like the Giants didn’t beat the Patriots as much as the Patriots beat themselves. I may be wrong here because I was watching on TV and not at the game, but it seemed to me like there was never a sense of urgency on the part of New England. Early in the game, Bill Belichick wasn’t even paying attention to the offense. Maybe he thought they were so good that he didn’t need to coach them. Well, it’s over now, so I might as well let it go and start thinking about baseball season. After all, Spring Training starts next month.

If I sound different today it’s probably because I’m drinking Italian wine instead of French. If you know me, you already know that I’m close to OCD status in several areas of my life. Food and beverage consumption is one of these. Every morning, I get the same everything bagel with cream cheese from the same cart right by the subway station. The woman who works there grabs the bagel before I even ask for it and says, “How are you today, Papi?” Then, I make it over to Liberty Deli once or twice throughout the day and the woman there prepares El Café Gringo (coffee with milk, no sugar) and asks where Andres and Michael are if I happen to come in without them. Of course, there’s the Korean deli and Chipotle too. I’m tiring of this conversation, let me sum up… I am getting in a rut. I do the same shit every day. Part of that is drinking French red wine. When I’m at home, I never drink anything else. I switched that up a bit though and bought a bottle from an Italian vineyard called Falasco. It’s not bad. But, I’d rather have my Louis Jadot.

So, in that pompous preamble, I managed to lose my focus and completely forgot what I wanted to write about tonight. Oh, wait, I just remembered…

I had an interesting ride home on the subway today. I got on the 6 at Grand Central and managed to find a seat. It was fairly quiet as the doors closed and we started. I looked around and noticed a cute hippie chick and her boyfriend sitting across the way to the right of me; an ugly, fat, old woman with facial hair directly to my left; and an unremarkable woman to my right. I didn’t however, notice what was to become the star attraction. Let me pause here for a second to explain something. A creative writing teacher of mine, Carol Keely, once talked about listening to conversations around Chicago and even interviewing bums to get good story ideas. I don’t take it as far as interviewing, but I definitely keep my eyes and ears open for good content, especially on the subway because that’s such a good source. Anyways, back to what I was saying… We’re well on our way to 51st, when this crazy black woman straight across the aisle and to the left starts yelling. “Destruction is on the way…. Change is coming soon…. America is getting a new face… The change starts at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue…” She keeps going and going and some of the other people on the train either made an obvious effort not to make eye contact, others snickered amongst themselves. I, however, was staring straight at her. She returned the eye contact and said, “I know who you are. You think you can fool me? Why do you think everyone else is looking away? They’re afraid to see Satan… I know who you are… You don’t scare me… You know what America needs? Another Rosa Parks…. Jesus is going to conquer you… You know who I am, that’s why you’re giving me that look, but I know who you are too… We need to end all this prejudism…” And then, surprisingly, she got of at 68th Street. Weird. I definitely didn’t expect that.

I was going to write about how I became involved in the creation of a South American fair trade directory today and about the fact that I changed my mind about the whole Five Fish List thing and registered the domain, but I ran out of energy. I need to go to sleep. And, I’m going to do so now. Ciao.