I will be attending SXSW Interactive this year before heading to Boston for a vacation.

I was going through the panel list and there looks to be some really interesting ones planned. Hopefully I will get to meet a few people that I converse with regularly online (you know who you are) and talk in person.

See y’all in Austin.

I am back in Dallas after a refreshing Thanksgiving with my family in Sugar Land.

There is a lot on my mind regarding a few different issues and I want to wait until I am really back into the groove of work before I address them. Right now I am extremely busy at work (rarity) trying to push out a demo but being forced to use technology I neither understand nor enjoy. So I want to wait until I am under a little less stress to write some of these things out. I may just set some time aside one evening this week just to get everything on paper and try to post from an “outline”.

Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday with family and friends!

Yes, it is true, I have clothes in my closet that I have had since high school. That is not the worst of it, I actually still wear some of these clothes. There are shirts from Structure before it became Express for Men.

I will be honest, I hate shopping. I hate going to the mall, going through stores, hoping to come across something that I sort of like, and then paying a lot of money to make it mine and then watch it shrink in the washing machine. I just hate that.

If something is not comfortable, I will not wear it, no matter how fashionable it is. I have found things that I really like, tried them on and realized it was sort of like wearing a straight jacket while being dropped in a pool.

Today I realized that I need to shop. Badly. Maybe I will go this weekend… nah, I will wear my jeans with holes in them for a little longer.

With the Democratic party now controlling the House and the Senate the one question I have has to do with the people who are adamantly against the war and show it on their website(s).

The next time that a budget increase or policy change occurs involving Iraq, will those folks, the ones with the “Cost of War” and “Death Toll” counters on their websites, remove them? I mean, now that the Democrats are making the decisions does that not mean that they are supporting the cost?

Maybe I am just way off base, but this should be interesting. I’ll take some screenshots of different page featuring the counters soon and then retake screenshots after the policy change.

One of the hardest things that I have had to learn being a consultant is the fact that I am the bad guy in the eyes of the full time employees. When an e-mail from me hits their inbox I can just imagine the looks on their faces, a rolling of the eyes, and a sigh that proves how annoyed they are with me.

I am not trying to be the bad guy. I am trying to do the job that I am being paid for and sometimes it is hard to prove to people that I am not here to steal their job. The truth is, that is the last thing I want. I am simply here to improve process and help install some kind of structure in the programming methodology.

Sometimes that is just too difficult to understand I guess.

So again I have been questioned on whether or not I was going to bring badice.com out of the 90’s as far as the design goes. Soon; that’s all I can say.

My “busy” factor has been at 10 since I started working in Dallas and has not dropped. I am hoping that over the next few weeks my life will slow down a little bit and I will be able to devote the needed time to this site and my projects.

For one thing, I am not in school anymore so the “Classes” link needs to go. One thought that I had was to turn that into an area for software projects that I completed while in school.

I would like to get some of my writing up on the site and I am still figuring out exactly how I want to do that. Maybe something will finally change on the site. . . Maybe.

I am now trying to decide if I’d rather just catch a flight to London and skip Boston all together. Flights to London are only $40 more each way and I can fly direct into London Gatwick and catch a train into downtown.

Now to get my passport updated…

I have been trying to finalize plans for a four day trip to Boston sometime in March. I really want to see the northeast part of the country and this would be the perfect opportunity.

Airline prices are not too shabby and according to FareCast now is the best time to buy.

I am going to keep planning the trip, hopeful that I’ll be able to go.

I am at a point now where the politics of this country have become so skewed and unrecognizable that I am ready to give up on the system. On one side we have the political left, the democrats, who have made every attempt to take any issue and make it a political stance. On the other side we have the political right, the neo-con, a term I hate. They have a habit of not living up to their word or fully educating themselves about the issues.

The problem that I see now though, is that it is just a back and forth between both parties to try and smear the other one. There is no honor in any of this and the people who fully support either side are ignorant to the simple truths of this mud-slinging that is doing nothing for our country. I can say that I am disappointed with the way the Republican party has handled certain issues but I am more disappointed in the fact that both sides just point fingers instead of trying to actually work through the issues.

What is the most disturbing thing is the audacity of posters on the internet who so adamantly attack the president without knowing all of the facts, or knowing them and simply ignoring them. Let’s get one thing straight, Congress voted to go to war in Iraq based on the same information that President Bush was using to make a decision to go to war. It wasn’t President Bush taking the information he was giving and massaging it to get Congress to vote his way. There were emotions running high in Congress and the vote reflected those emotions.

My plea now is for former President Clinton and his wife to keep their mouths quiet unless what they say is actually constructive for this country.

So for now, I’ll continue to be a moderate.

I was looking at flights this evening and a flight that departs at 7:25am and then returns the next day at 5:55am is $176. Another flight that departs the same day at 3:25pm and returns the next day at 5:55am (same flight as before) is $476. How can this be? Is it just because they are desperate to get rid of tickets for that specific earlier flight?

Just seemed strange.