1. Be more open and honest about my feelings rather than bottling them up.
2. Drink considerably less soda than I did last year.
3. Exercise considerably more than I did last year.

Basically, be healthier. I want to put eat more vegetables and make better choices for meals, but that's something I've already started doing long before today. I may not have the best diet, but it's much better than it was years ago. Also, thanks to my christmas gift from my family, a Keurig coffee maker, I've made considerable progress on #2 already. It's been a full week since I've had a soda, and I was drink 3-4 Cokes/Dr. Peppers per day.

So there's my list.

One thing I've been trying to cut back on is my soda intake. I certainly don't want to eliminate soda from my diet, but I'd like to reduce my intake to at most 20 ounces per day. I've been getting really frustrated with a recent trend at fast food restaurants. The sodas are ginourmous! Today I ordered a small soda at El Pollo Loco and they gave me a 32 ounce soda. If that's not bad enough, yesterday at lunch I was told that the restaurant I was at didn't even have small cups anymore, so they instead gave me a 32 ounce cup. What the hell is going on? At almost everyone of the larger chains a medium soda is 32 ounces. What ever happened to a small being 12 or 16 ounce cup and a medium being 20 ounce cup? I started noticing a few years ago that cars were starting to be made with larger cup holders, and now most cars can easily accommodate a 44 ounce cup, and many can even accommodate a 64 ounce cup. What's next, a 128 ounce bucket? Are we going to be ordering soda by the keg? Why the hell is it so damned hard to get a small soda these days? Maybe I should just kick the habit after all.

I made two mistakes that evening. The first mistake started on our way over to our friends house, and continued on our way to West Hollywood, and then ultimately continued at the restaurant and even the club where we ended up. That mistake was drinking. No, not alcohol, but water and Coke. I drink a lot of liquids through out the day, and even more so when I know I'll be consuming alcohol that evening. I'm particularly fond of a brand of bottled water called SmartWater, and I drank a 1 liter bottle on our way to the restaurant. At the restaurant I had two glasses of water and 2 cokes. Even when we got to the club I decided to take it easy on the first drink. I had the bartender put some raspberry vodka in some sprite and add a squeeze of lime. Mistake number one, I consumed a lot of liquid prior to dancing.

The second mistake was a small series of mistakes in dealing with my glasses. I can handle a couple hours without them, my eyes just get tired, so I shouldn't have worn them into the club. I then topped that off when I took them off while dancing. Dancing with my glasses on isn't normally a problem, but Kristen was just so darn cute, and I wanted to give her a kiss. I decided to take my glasses off, because when you're bouncing up and down like a kid in a bounce house and calling that dancing, moving in for a kiss with glasses on is a recipe for pain for the target of your kiss. I took my glasses off and hooked them on my dress, in the middle of the dress in the spot that often shows off a womans ample bosoms, or in my case, my less than ample bosoms. Kristen and I kissed, and it was life affirming the room span and the whole nine yards. Ok so it was just a kiss, but we were having fun, it didn't need to be one of those movie moments.

Everything caught up with me maybe twenty minutes or so later when I realized I had to pee. I excused myself and made my way to the restroom, which was packed. There were only two stalls and there were four women in front of me. The four women were clearly drunk. One of them was easily the loudest person I have encountered in a very long time. The two stalls opened up at almost exactly the same time. To my luck the four drunk women filed into a single stall. I entered the free stall, latched the door, hung my clutch up on the hook, checked my phone and my glasses were still in place and then finally, relief!

The four women were either olympic urination sprinters, or I'm crazy slow. They came out just after I did, four flushes to my one. I'm at one of the two sinks washing my hands when the extraordinarily loud lady hits me in the back really hard, causing me to lunge forward catching myself just before I hit the mirror with my head. Then she proceeded to push the bathroom attendant over, and fling her tray of towels, and all sorts of cleaning products all over the bathroom. This woman was beyond drunk, she was officially belligerent. She was yelling at me and the bathroom attendant for being in her her way. The lady was so loud that she didn't even hear the bathroom attendant call security in. I dried my hands and got out of there. As I was leaving, security came in an escorted her out of the club.

It wasn't until I got back out to the dance floor that I realized something had gone missing. Sure my back was a little sore from where I was hit, but something didn't feel right. I immediately grabbed my chest, only to feel that my glasses were no longer there. I ran back to the restroom, my partner Kristen following closely behind me. The stall I was in opened and I checked it, no glasses. I told the bathroom attendant what had happened and she helped us look. Nothing, my glasses were gone. I talked to security, they told me to call back the next day because they do a sweep of the club after hours looking for lost items. I was able to salvage the night at least. I didn't let the loss of my glasses ruin my night.

I called the club the next afternoon. By this time my eyes were hurting because I had gone the entire day without my glasses. I was so flustered recalling the events that I said it happened, yesterday April fourth. Ooops, I said April, not June! Argh! It's so frustrating because there were any number of decisions that I could have personally made that would have led to a different path than that night took. I could have left the glasses in the car. Sure the car could have gotten stolen and I still wouldn't have my glasses, but at least I wouldn't have lost them while they were in my posession. But I'm not going to focus on what I could have done differently, a person could go crazy thinking about that stuff. Instead I'll look at what led up to me getting knocked over in the first place, uncontrolled drinking.

I understand the allure of consuming alcohol. It make me feel really really good, and I know it does that a lot of people as well. I also know that I can feel it when I've had too much, that oh so pleasant feeling fades quickly. There's a difference between being drunk, and being shitfaced. The woman I encountered was two steps beyond shitfaced. What I'd really like to know is why the hell would someone want to keep drinking after they've hit the shitfaced mark? It really wouldn't surprise me if this woman got alcohol poisoning that night. And where the hell was security before she went to the bathroom. I know it's a loud club and everything, but if she was that bad in the bathroom, I can only imagine her up at the bar or on the dance floor. Where was security then? What the hell makes her think that just she was so fucking entitled to washing her hands first that she had to knock over two people just to get to an open sink. Some people just have absolutely no respect for anything, and that makes me really really sad. That lady is the kind of person who would run someone over with her car and then bitch about them leaving a dent. It makes me really sad to know there are a lot of people out there like this woman. Whats worse is that all they have to do is exercise a little self restraint. The world really would be a better place.

My true sentiments were echoed in the movie Men in Black. Agent Kay was talking to Edwards and he said "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." If aliens ever come to earth, we're getting invaded because as a whole, we do not represent intelligent life. It's all our fault too, because we put up with belligerent people in bathrooms who very likely cause us to lose our glasses.

What I really want to talk about is the futuristic kitchen concept, where food is prepared in seconds and the dinner table gobbles up the scraps. I'm not going to go off on the table that cleans itself up, sure it's a little scary, but it's also a little cool. It's the instant preparation of food that annoys me. It seems like we have been obsessed with the smart kitchen for decades. What set me off today was the news about the edible RFID tags. These things have been mentioned on countless tech podcasts and blogs. Renewed are the discussions of refridgerators that know when something is about to spoil, and androids and ovens that do all the prepwork on cooking for you, and even to the extreme the machine that reads your mind and materializes what you're thinking about as demonstrated in countless science fiction movies, tv shows, books, etc etc etc. All of these concepts drive me bonkers.

Put simply, I love to cook and I don't want to have to fight my oven for control. I don't care if the people who designed it think they can do a better job, I promise you, they can't. I'm not claiming to be some amazing chef or anything like that. Instead I rely on experiences, the experience of preparing, cooking, serving, and consuming. I'm sure a machine could learn that I like to put a little extra garlic and oregano in italian dishes, but it will never give me the pleasure of chopping an onion, or experimenting with my spaghetti sauce which is a modified version of my mothers recipe, which I'm sure she modified her mothers recipe. I seriously find a great deal of joy in the preparation and consumption of a meal. This is not because of some feminine duty or and horse pockey like that, I simply enjoy it, and I don't want technology messing with that experience very much.

Where I'd like to see the futuristic kitchen concepts go are towards energy efficiency. I'd love to see even higher efficiency refrigerators, and stoves that use less natural gas. Better yet, stoves using high efficiency convection surfaces. I'm not saying stop innovating on ways to make parts of the process more efficient, I happen to be a fan of electric blenders and mixers. I just don't want to the activity I love become utterly obsolete. And one other thing, I know for a fact that my partner does not particularly mind the source of her food, she's still going to enjoy it. But I know that she enjoys her food that much more when I'm the one who prepared it. On more than one occasion she has cooked using some of my recipes and not been happy with the result, but every time I cook for her, she gets a special little gleam in her eye. I'm not going to go all cheesy and say that's because I add a special ingredient called love, nope. The only thing that is different is that I deeply enjoy the process, and she recognises that. That is something that no machine will ever be able duplicate. I'd hate to admit it, but I think that really does mean that the secret ingredient is indeed love after all.

The next day the item arrived at my office and I was like a child at Christmas tearing it open. According to the packaging it could amplify the sound of the iPhone by 10 decibels and I couldn't wait to find out. Assembly was simple, I just had to put the insert for the iPhone 3G/3Gs and then dropped my phone in. The effect was immediately apparent, it very clearly was amplifying the song I had playing, and the best part was that it was doing it with out any additional electricity. Since the AirCurve is clear you can see inner workings. I don't want to diminish the efforts of the engineers that designed it, but it looks incredibly simple. The sound chamber starts small and gets progressively larger. I'd imagine it's a similar concept employed by some musical instruments.

I've been enjoying the AirCurve the last week, but today I really began to love it. I like to listen music, and sometimes podcasts while I shower. I used to use an iHome iH2O, but it started having issues a couple years ago, and now that I keep everything on my phone, the GSM noise made it too annoying to cope with the other issues. One trick I had been putting my phone into one of those SOLO plastic cups that you can pickup at just about any store in packs of 50. This solution worked for a while, but I was never comfortable with how close I needed to place the cup and phone to the shower with out any protection for the phone. Enter the AirCurve. From across the bathroom the sound clearly cut through the din of the running water. It's official, I love this gadget!

One additional feature that I haven't mentioned is that there is pass through option for an iPhone sync cable, which allows the device to be a fully functional dock. The only drawback I've found is that the audio quality does change a little bit, but it's not enough to bother me. Honestly, I would assume that audiophiles wouldn't be using the iPhone's internal speakers in the first place. I give the Griffin Technology AirPlay 2 thumbs up, 5 stars, and the top rating on any other scale you can imagine.

Since I have the iPhone 3Gs I bought the original AirCurve. Griffin Technology updated the AirCurve for the iPhone 4 and the newer device is called the AirCurve Play. If the next iPhone has the same form factor as the iPhone 4, then I'll definitely be picking up the AirCurve Play as well.

I first learned about Mark Russinovich when I had an issue on one of my computers and I found a treasure trove of utilities at the SysInternals site. Not only did I find a utility that would help with my issue, but I found so many other nifty applications that I felt like I was a 5 year old geek in a digital toy store. Years later SysInternals came up while I was listening to Security Now (http://twit.tv/sn), a fantastic security focused podcast on the TWiT network. The topic of the day was rootkits and the SysInternals RootkitRevealer application was mentioned. I immediately ran it on every system I could and to my horror it had results on some of my systems. SysInternals to the rescue again. I was so fascinated by the company I started reading about them. One of the founders was Mark Russinovich and that's a name I've paid attention to ever since.

While listening to Security Now fairly recently, Steve Gibson mentioned that Mark had wrote a fictional novel that centered around zero day exploits. Steve didn't want to reveal too much about the story, but any loyal Security Now listener could just imagine what kind of wild stories a highly respected security researcher like Mark Russinovich could dream up. It's true Mark is a brilliant researcher and developer, but brilliant doesn't always mean that a person can write, and I just had to find out. I needed this book.

I didn't start reading the book when I originally planned to, and I'm actually very happy about that. I had planned on starting it on the flight out to my sister-in-law's wedding. Reading the first chapter yesterday made me very happy that I decided to watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 on my iPad during that flight. Do not, under any circumstance, read this book on an airplane if flying scares you in even the slightest bit. 

I'm not the fastest reader in the world. I only got through the first few chapters before I was interrupted by my partner telling me it was time to head home. I wouldn't have noticed the time that passed if she hadn't interrupted me as I had absolutely no desire to put it down. I only wish that I had started reading it earlier in the day. Zero Day is amazing, If only today were a holiday as well so I could keep reading with out the distractions of my job. You had better believe that when my work day is over I will be continuing where I left off. I can't wait. Great job Mark Russinovich, I love your book so far.

I once chose iTunes over Amazon because I was thinking I was an audiophile and that I could hear the difference. I'm a bit more realistic these days now that I'm admitting I've probably damaged my hearing from years of marching band, proudly marching with my clarinet in parades while the entire drumline was hammering away at their drums behind me. I don't even know that there is any quality difference between the files encoded with the modern Amazon MP3 encoder or the Apple AAC encoder. Since I'm unable to tell a difference I'm running out of reasons to use the iTunes store over the Amazon MP3 Downloads service.

Amazon's solution has some intriguing benefits. First, MP3 files play on just about every device out there, including the media player in my car. This, unfortunately, still is not true of the AAC format. Second, the mp3 is very well supported in iTunes so I can continue to use iTunes to manage my music library. Third is the Amazon Cloud Drive, automatic free backup of the music you purchase. Apple iTunes does not currently have a solution for automatic backup. Rumors say this may be on the way, but Amazon has it today. Fourth, and finally is the Amazon Cloud Player, which can access the content stored in your Amazon Cloud Drive and stream it to you computer or mobile device. This helps with the problem of not being able to put certain songs on my phone because I'm out of space.

So, now I have to wonder, what is it that is keeping me loyal to iTunes? Am I just an Apple fangirl who can't bring herself to move to better solution because it's not shiny and made by Apple? Well, yes that may have something to do with it, I'll admit it. But I would really like to see what Apple's offering in the cloud locker space will end up being, and I'll wait until then to make my decision. So for now I think I'll just decide which to use at the time of purchase.

One last note on formats. I wish there was viable service out there that used a lossless codec on very high quality recordings. Yes file sizes are larger, but it would satisfy my inner desire to be an audiophile.

Update -- I just realized that this is essentially a don't stalk me post.