Life Goals

I usually discourage myself from writing when I'm feeling down but perhaps it good to so i can see a different side of my thought pattern... I'm contemplating the reason of my life. What am I living for, what do i want to accomplish with the rest of my time here on earth? I found an article titled, "How to set a goal when you don't know what you want" that's exactly how I feel right now. Even if we attain our dreams I believe there still comes a point where you feel, ok now what? Like you'll never be satisfied with anything. Part of that article listed goal ideas such as, becoming closer to your partner, working a job you love, owning your dream home, getting to a healthy weight... the list goes on, full of typical goals people wish for. I feel like I want something more, something about us humans. The human instinct of attaining these typical goals just isn't there for me, I don't know what I want out of this life! Nothing sounds exciting to work toward. I think what I'll have to settle for are just the typical things of life. I really need to plan more activities, sitting around the house on weekends is a major waste of time... Let's think of a list of things I'd enjoy...

• Camping with family (do when it's cooler)
• Swimming in a river or water park (do now during summer)
• Visit Anclote island
• Relax near a waterfall
• Try to see family in Ohio more
• This one should probably be #1, find a girlfriend, maybe start my own family? I think ultimately this will lead to the most fulfilling life. Sometimes I wonder if I would make a good boyfriend/husband, a good Father. I'm a loving person but there's a side of me that's also unloving and can easily lose interest. I don't know...
• Create special experiences, what do I mean by this you ask? Well as a child I used to looooove Christmas time and going to my Grandmother's to see all of the animated Christmas figurines, munching on cookies, buckeyes, peanut butter fudge! Last Christmas when I lost 2 grandparents and while my Grandmother was pretty out of it, I just didn't feel the Christmas spirit. I didn't decorate or put up a Christmas tree, it was depressing. I need to realize that I should do this for not only myself but for others as well to spread the Christmas spirit, to create memories.
• Print photographs of fun memories. I have a wall just waiting to be decorated with memories, get to printing them!!

Things I've accomplished:

• Own a home that will be paid off in less than 12 years
• Captured family video and created Blu-rays from both sides of my family. Although I wonder if either have actually sat down to watch any of it...
• Have a job I love! I do admit there are times it's not so loving but as of right now I love the people I work with and I love the feeling of finishing a project, knowing I made something better for others.

Breaking the mold

As I begin another weight loss journey in my life I begin thinking of the type of life I will lead when I'm skinny, how much more fun and out going my life will be, how friends will always want to hang out with me. I'm not sure why I think these things will change, some things like the way you're treated by men and women are definitely different (been there once). In reality though to greatly effect your way of life I think there needs to be a mentality shift. The things we have become accustomed to need to be changed, the mold we based our lived around needs to shatter! Losing weight really is all in the mind, it's even more difficult doing this completely alone. I've been trying to work out with someone from work but I may look into using a trainer again. Having the person motivating you and someone to be accountable to is soo much help.

Weight loss was one of the reasons I bring up the topic of "breaking the mold" but another reason is because something else was bothering me. I was thinking about childhood and how I did more as a family. Back then my Dad just seemed a lot more outgoing, we'd go camping, travel to the family's cabin in N.C., play Mario Kart, football, baseball... now it just seems like we do nothing. Both of my parents are consumed with working, I'm not sure if it's for the extra couple of bucks or just to keep them busy with something.

Since all of my grandparents have passed, the shortness of this life just seems much more apparent to me. I literally lose my breathe when I think of them no longer being here. They were the people I could reside in, my maternal grandmother was also like a good friend. We'd see movies together, go out to eat, share some wild stories. Nanny was so intelligent and lived a colorful life with so many great experiences. I hate to think of all the lost memories and stories that went with her. I wish so much that she'd just come back. Sometimes I feel like I should've been there near the end with her more. I know she realizes I loved her but I wish I said it more, I wish I expressed it more. I wish this for all of my grandparents. I want them all back so badly... I'm different without them here. I care less about life some times but I'm doing my best to deal with it. The thing I need to remember most is to create new memories with those I still have around me. Try to give other people the joys my grandparents gave me.

Finally Letting It Out

There's something I've been wanting to talk about but I've been doing my absolute best at hiding it for the past 13 years. I fear that if people know, they'll think I'm inadequate. Part of the problem is this mindset I've created for myself with the belief that I have to be perfect. If I have something wrong with me I'll let many people down and eventually I'll be tossed to the side, ridiculed or people will think of me as being helpless. I know this won't actually happen with most people but these are the thoughts I've created for myself.

The demon I struggle with is STUTTERING. I usually don't repeat syllables I have a problem with blocking. Blocking is when you go to say a word but it just doesn't come out. As a work around I will use the "uh" sound to start a word or simply use word substitution. I try my best at not letting this control my life but I admit that sometimes my decisions to converse with people or be in large groups is effected by it. Certain situations also effect my blocking, if I have to speak to a superior, if the person for whatever reason intimidates me, confrontations, speaking in front of people, talking on the phone, the need to state a title before someone's name, different situations have different effects...

So far I've been able to live a pretty normal life dealing with this but some days are A LOT worse than others. It can be excruciatingly unbearable at times but this is the life I live... I don't mind talking about this in person but all I ask is that you DON''T feel sympathy for me.

The reason I'm posting this is to perhaps help myself come to terms with my imperfection. Sometimes if I'm not talkative I think people tend to think I don't like them. It's unfair to some people in my life because they might never understand this about me. I've met and worked with some wonderful people but if I perceive them as intimidating then I usually break communication off with them, for the fact of having anxiety and blocking when speaking to them.

This whole stuttering thing is what I was actually referring to when I wrote about a dream 5 years ago, you can read it here: http://mp3markel.blogspot.com/2011/06/details-on-holes-in-ireland-and-oven.html That dream was a perfect representation of what it feels like having to deal with stuttering. If you have any questions feel free to leave them here, I need to work on opening up on talking about this.

Revenant: A person who has returned from the dead.

If you follow my blog here you'll know that movies inspire me. I watched the Revenant tonight and I feel inspired...

For a few days now I've been making it a point to read the Bible. I feel like if I'm going to claim to be a Christian than I should have read the Bible, at least once. I've written about this before but now I'm doing it! I've also been feeling alone which leads me to the thoughts of what exactly am I living for? From my observations around me I'm living for things. I'm living to buy stuff or to work and pay off debt for stuff I probably didn't need. Although I'm not here to complain about financial woes,..

I'm here to talk about, what are you living for? This past weekend my family had an estate/yard sale for my Grandparents stuff. It kills me when I think of them being gone and seeing the things they've accumulated over their life was a reminder that they weren't here. My cousin mentioned how a Tupperware container had an E written on it in permanent marker for my Grandmother's name Eunice. Eventually everything we possess will fade away... Today I was wondering, what can I buy to make my gameroom really hit the ceiling of WOW factor! Of course my gameroom is basically maxed out with no room to put anything else but I still need more... I need to feel happy by purchasing something, I need something that no one else has! Thing I realized today is, that's how everyone thinks. Everyone wants it all or the latest and greatest, we're just not successful if we don't have a lot of stuff! Right? Wrong...

What I read in the Bible today states that our treasure's should be stored up in Heaven, not here on earth. Here on earth things are prone to rot, decay, rust, theft... In Heaven is where you want to keep your treasures where they will stay for eternity.

So now I'm in a deep state of, what am I here for? I have to find what I'm living for, this life I'm living now just isn't it. I figure if I'm going to die I might as well die trying...

Home Video Archiving - Which media is best!?

So I'm going to post something different here, this will be a slightly technical post talking about the best archival method for future proofing your data!

When it comes to deciding what type of medium to use for archiving your data, no media offers a lifetime guarantee. Scientists can't guarantee the life span of optical disc, HDD, magnetic tape, flash or any other medium, I think simple because the medium hasn't been around that long to prove. The environment also dictates the life span of your archived medium.

I won't go into many specifics on which media is best to use and why, there's plenty of article online that compare the pros and cons. What I'm posting this blog for is to tell you regardless of what you use to archive your media, create PAR2 files! What PAR2 files allow you to do is have data redundancy. If a few sectors of your data is corrupted instead of not being able to view the data, you can repair it by using PAR2.

I don't think there's a best method on making your data redundant with PAR2 but the way I plan to make my data redundant is to create a 25% redundant PAR2 files for my data. I archive home videos and usually when I archive an entire tape, I put the contents all into a directory on my computer and burn to a Blu-ray. Some people will burn an optical disc then create an .ISO of the disc and base their PAR2 files on that. I'm sure this would work for you but I think it seems more logical to create your PAR2 files based on your directory of data (in my case 1 VHS tape) and then burn the PAR2 files to a separate disc. With this method, if a sector on your disc gets corrupted you'll be repairing an individual file and not an entire disc.

If you do experience a bad sector on your medium of choice you must first recover everything as possible with a program like ISOBuster or BadCopy. Once you can recover as much data as possible you can then run QuickPar to repair any files with corrupted sectors.

In my opinion this is the way to go in order to have more reliable archives of your precious videos or photos!

To read more visit LifeHacker!

http://lifehacker.com/5120266/burn-more-reliable-discs-with-quickpar/

Where was I...

So wow, it's been a super long time since posting a blog! I admit that I don't want to share anything too deep since I'd rather have people I meet in real life discover myself for themselves. Besides that though, here I am writing another blog!

My grandparents health is not well so I've been staying a night on the weekend to help out. Yesterday I was able to borrow some old family videos to capture and eventually write to DVD or Blu-ray. It's interesting how watching older videos can effect your opinion about people still in your life and where your life is heading.

I'm 30 years old now and I can look back on my life and see how quickly things have moved. In these videos my Grandparents are in their early 50s. All of my memories of them don't seem to have aged. I see them today in their 80s, frail and needing a lot of assistance and I wonder when did this happen? When did everything change? It literally seems like it creeped up and surprised me, I didn't see the gradual change and this is something video points out.

I'm afraid that another 30 years will slip by without me noticing. The lives we live now offer more convenience and time savings but we're over looking our lives. We don't get outside and do as much, we stay inside and sit on Facebook, our phones, watch TV, movies... we don't socialize with family, some family I didn't know existed...

I was thinking about technology compared to that of the 80s/90s. VHS tapes didn't offer the best of video quality but it offered a way to archive video. Just recently my friend lost every single photo and video of her 1 year old son due to these images being on her phone and getting deleted with a tap of a button. I'm converting videos from the 80s right now so I ask you, what technology is better? If Facebook was gone where would our relationships with people stand? If our power grid collapsed forget about people not knowing how to stay alive, people wouldn't know how to communicate. Sure people know how to talk but people in the next generation don't know the soft skills, the people skills, the personality to be-friend a person in real life. This simply friendliness is being lost. People only look out for themselves and they get off on destroying others. America's becoming corrupted and we don't even recognize it. We don't live in a modern society, we are just living in a time period, a period of people that are losing touch.

I release you...

All the lies that I've created, the false image I've shaped myself to be. I don't know how this mentality came to be but it has to end now. I never believed I was an attractive person, thought I was hideous and an unbearable sight to see, looking back on the photos of myself weighing around 210, I realize it's been a lie.

Something I have yet to discover is why I've created and have these lies looping in my mind 24/7. I didn't meet my weight loss goal for last year but the rest of my life is going to be different now. I refuse to live my life in the background, in the shadows, cowering in the dark. I'm my own worst enemy and if I can overcome myself I can overcome anything!

Here's to that bastard I've been living with, you're dead now! Here's looking toward the rest of my life! C|iii|     Cheers!