The Lewis Show

So I attempted to post all 28 days in the month of February. Here's my random recap of the month: I got 25 posts out of 28 days, only a handful of them were meaningless.  It's been a cold month and I have declared February to be the suckiest month of the year. I have a birthday coming up. I'll just leave that right there. I am looking forward to my trip though in a couple weeks. There will be music, sleeping in, seeing family, more sleeping, and bad foods. It is a vacation. I haven't really had any significant time off since the wedding and after this, we can focus on planning our honeymoon. Which will happen this year. I got 0 yard work done. I'm so ashamed of myself. It has rained every Saturday this month or it has snowed. I have a lot of work to do in a couple week's time. I have a cat sleeping on an ironing board against a window with the curtains drawn. Only in this house can a cat find so much accommodation.  For a short month this did not fee...

I guess I'm not done with Oscar posts. I have held two thoughts about the state of comedy and political correctness over the past two years. I believe we've gone too far and are on a path of massively restricted speech on one end, and a strange exception for someone to say whatever he or she wants under the guise of being a comedian. The exception being, if it's funny and I agree with the political stance, it's funny. If it's not on par with my worldviews  it's insensitive and that comedian needs to be silenced. I don't think there should be an exception. We should really all be free to joke and make fun of things that go on in this world, provided it's in good faith. I think, going back to some earlier posts, there's one ingredient that we're missing still: Respect. It's still not okay to bully, to make racist, sexiest, or ignorant statements. It shows a lack of respect for other people. I am no people person by far in fact as a ...

It's going to seem funny that someone who has not watched the Oscars since....ever is going to post some thoughts about it. I freely and openly admit to watch only scant tidbits about the awards and that's centered around who they pick to be movie of the year. I was more than interested this year because I actually enjoyed most of the movies that were nominated. Normally I've seen one or two of these nominated movies and avoid the circlejerk of the industry by watching movies that will never ever get awarded an Oscar. What can I say? I like popcorn action flicks. If I'm paying north of ten dollars for a ticket, I want my eardrums blown out. And the winners were.... I am pleased that Daniel Day Lewis won best actor for Lincoln. If there is a biographical movie ever made, he raised the bar to impossible heights with his portrayal of our 16th president. It's also a nod for Richmond, where a considerable chunk of the movie was filmed. It's been almost 150 ...

I've found I have many wishes for my friends. A few months ago, I pleaded with people to attempt to write more. I have found that it is a great outlet of feelings by not only helping one get acquainted with those feelings, but it allows them to elaborate and build on their beliefs. The goal is self betterment. I know we are probably the most selfish generation in the history of humanity, but I think that energy can be better utilized. It's not a shallow exploit to find out who you are, it's a selfish venture to spend a considerable amount of time trying to paint a facade for others. Having a better outlet is the second step. Understanding what we consume is the most important prerequisite to self awareness. We need to fix the point of intake to create a better outlet. We live in an obnoxious 24 hour news cycle. My first bit of advice would be that we all separate ourselves from that cycle. I'm not advocating we never watch news, virtually ...

Do I have to say that I'm no stock expert and this is not stock advice? I probably should. I'm the last person people should listen to about what to do with their money. That said... I read an interesting article today, published on Wednesday from analyst Clem Chambers at Forbes. He basically states that Apple's stock is indeed a bubble by comparison to Microsoft and Amazon's history. This agrees with my less educated assessment of Apple back in August when they were riding an all time stock high. My reasoning centered around the 2012 Apple approach to stifle innovation through litigation. They had just won a multi billion dollar lawsuit against Samsung for similar trade dress. I predicted that this would not look good for Apple and leave regular people with a bad taste in their mouth. I was in the right forest, but barking up the wrong tree. It appears many feel that Apple's best days are probably behind them. With rapid innovations comin...

When visiting Twitter I'm often nauseated by the trending topics. There is a weird mixture of breaking news and mundane, uneducated live TV tweeting that makes me lose some hope in humanity. I decided that I would take on each of the major trending topics in the USA with my own tweet here on my blog. This promises to be stupid, so if you stop reading from here, I would not blame you. #DontBotherMeWhenIm Jake and Fitz #MyRepliesToTextsWhenImMad Chino y Nacho #FakeRightWingHagelStories #Moda25 Mi Nina Bonita #Scandal Scott Foley Mac Miller #DontBotherMeWhenIm - I gave this one a lot of thought and have two answers: takin' a dump! or trying to think of a witty answer to this stupid fill in the blank...thing. Jake and Fitz - I realize I have the power of Google here to look that up, but I have no clue who they are. I'm going to take a wild guess that it's a team of private investigators that run their business behind a Ben and Jerry's.  #MyRepliesTo...

There's a beep going on in my house. It happens once every ten minutes. I have so far moved all smoke detectors and CO detectors into the guest room and I'm watching them like a hawk. I am hoping one of these devices is beeping.....I'll know soon. UPDATE: The beeping sound was not any of the smoke or CO detectors. My search will continue. 2nd UPDATE: I unplugged the microwave which  makes a similar sound. Let's see if that stops the infernal beeping... 3rd UPDATE: So it wasn't the microwave. I'm starting to run out of ideas. I have found some heavy duty aluminum foil and I have crafted myself a hat. 4th UPDATE: After a 10 minute discussion with citizens from another planet, I was told that somehow my battery backup for my FiOS became unplugged. I plugged it in fully now let's see if that stops the beeping that has driven me to insanity. 5th UPDATE: The aliens like Blue Moon beer. Now I'm out. You would think considering my generosity, they woul...

We just don't question some things around these parts. 

Being a Southerner, I feel I need to explain a phenomena to my friends that live deeper south. I live in Virginia which gets the best and the worst of all seasons. We get wonderful spring's and autumns going often into three months out of the year. We have very hot summers with steady temps in the 90's in the summer and very cold winters with temps in the 30's. For friends in Florida and the rest of the deep south, when temperatures drop below 60 degrees this phenomenon is called WINTER. Winter is a season that begins at the December solstice where we are further away from the Sun and the tilt of our orbit shortens the length of time we are exposed to said Sun. As a result, it gets a bit chillier. It's not unusual for it to even hit freezing in the northern hemisphere. Now there is a solution for this terrible and crazy problem or this strange thing that's going on outside. The first option is to move to a section of the earth called the equator. It stays hot...

Typically Saturdays are used for yard work. I still have a ton of leaves to move before March and with the past few Saturdays, I've been rained out. Actually, today I'm being snowed out, but just enough to keep me inside again. I'm really not complaining. This is the one day in the week where I can really unwind, watch my favorite tech shows, work on an article for Rootzwiki, read, and occasionally fall asleep on the futon for a few minutes.  Today, I did task myself with planning an upcoming trip to Virginia Beach. There's a concert we've both been looking forward to and I'm going to take time to observe my last birthday in my 30's. Yes, I'm going to be pushing the big 40 next year, so I'm going to savor every second until then. I'll focus on that crisis next year when it happens.  Of course tech is going to play a role in my agenda planning. For the past few years, I have been using Tripit to coordinate my itinerary  It's a si...

As I've grown older, I've become more appreciative of my upbringing. My brother and I were raised in the back of a convenient store. We saw things that many were not able to see up close. As I mentioned recently, we lived far into the country in a county of just over 1,000. It seemed that most of the people in my immediate neighborhood were quite elderly. They were also survivors of the depression and in a lot of ways they never really got over a lifestyle of not having or of having today but not having tomorrow. The people were all very shrewd with their money in ways that we don't even realize today with our own tight budgets. I look back with fondness and learned a lot from the people of the Tidewater/Sharps area. I learned how to interact and learned to understand social sensibilities of a diverse group of people. That and the strong push of my parents to teach me a culture of respect, I'd like to think I'm fairly sociable and outgoing. Yet ove...

With every year, whenever Valentine's Day comes around, I see a variety of responses in my friend's circles. I think a lot of us remember the innocence of sending out a bunch of cards and receiving candy hearts in school. Now we grow into a world where the conventional wisdom is to bring pain and misery for couples that try not to participate in this holiday. There's also blah and bitterness from a suddenly very vocal singles crowd. I really don't see the big deal in Valentine's Day. I've spent my share of them single or with someone. There's just a couple things I would advise everyone to do: If you're single, muster up some courage and feign just enough confidence to send a Valentine to another single person. Or, if anything, have fun with being single and send out 100 of them.  If you're married, no matter how much she may tell you she doesn't want anything, buy some flowers or at least get a card. But for couples it must be said, sh...

We hear the phrase all the time, think outside of the box. I have never learned to appreciate that motto for creative thought. I also am not the most creative person in the world either. I have no artistic talent and my thinking is strongest in a support role, not an idea role. But alas, there are times where we have to think outside of the norms and defy conventional wisdom to construct the best ideas for our problems. To follow the analogy however, we're going to need to build a box. To think outside of this box we need to create better parameters. We need to create structure and routine. We need to create strong habits and organize our thoughts. Once that box is created, then will we be able to think outside of it. So let's build a box, shall we? Let's start with the foundation. Everything needs a solid foundation. If a box is not properly sealed and secured, the box is no longer a box. It's an awkward piece of cardboard. The key to a solid foundation is ...

I didn't have anything really going on today, but my attention was centered around an update within Android. I tasked myself this morning with keeping an eye out for what can essentially be called the changelog which highlights these enhancements. Sometimes I bite off more than I can chew, to my betterment.  When someone imagines a changelog, they think of an application on their mobile device. When the app updates, the developer posts a changelog which is a record of updates. Bloggers swarm over these updates like vultures, I know, I'm one of them, and post an article about these changes.  These changes are not typical within Android. When Android posts it's latest version, it does so in an open source repository called Github. In there you can see the commits and changes made by the development team at Google. To an untrained eye like mine, it's hard to spot any changes. One has to read line by line according to the date of that commit to see what's...

For those brave enough to venture onto your social networks Sunday night, a barrage of noise was flowing from the Grammy's, which are held each year at about this time. It's this time every year metal heads, fans of indie artists, real Euro techno/house, and other fans just laugh away. Are all genre's represented at this event you ask. Yes and no, not really. If you just listen to top 40, your world is very small indeed. Halestorm's Love Bites (So Do I) won Grammy for best rock/metal performance. This fast paced pop song (no offense to Halestorm....whatever) beat out Anthrax, Lamb of God, Marilyn Manson, and Megadeth all with far superior tracks to any generic metal head  Not only that blistering performances from stoner infused metal acts, djent bands, melodic death metal acts, black metal, and traditional death metal tunes were completely left out of the running. So, here's some proper nods below to some stuff you have certainly never listened to (unles...

It's Saturday. I've been a vegetable all day. Here's a random comedy clip. Mulaney's SVU bits always crack us up since we've watched so many of those episodes. Enjoy (some language, adult themed for sure).

I got a little reflective during my break today, thinking about how my life would have been different if I grew up in Virginia Beach instead of Warsaw. Would I still feel like a basket case on the inside? Would I be more or less of a social butterfly/extrovert? I honestly don't know, but it's always good to spend a minute and think about how things could have been, and then bottle it to be put away forever. I was always bitter at my parents as a child and especially as a teen for having to grow up in a town of 300. I could not understand the benefits of country living when I wanted to be a city boy so badly. I always enjoyed my trips to Virginia Beach in the summers and Richmond around Christmas. I thought it was much preferable to living in a house surrounded by three cornfields and nothing but woods for miles. I didn't have a movie theater to go to. Our school had few social functions outside of sports. I really didn't care for anyone at my school. I just g...

I was one of the fortunate few who signed up and received a Chromebook from Google in 2011. Janine and I have both been faithfully using it since. It has gotten quite long in the tooth but Google has pushed some impressive updates to this device over the past few years. I have debated getting a fully functional laptop the next go-round, and I still will do so primarily for Janine, but my next laptop will probably be another Chromebook. When it comes to laptops, I never really had one to use for any practical purposes, so using it for the web and cloud services works just fine for me. For a couple hundred dollars, I think they're a pretty sweet deal, but I am hoping they start to use some more serious hardware when making my next laptop. Here's hoping.

I do enjoy sitting outside during my lunch break at work and listening to the quietness that is now our parking lot. Since the doctor's office moved, we have been spared the steady flow of people suffering from flu and other communicable diseases walking by our office. Some days, I thought the zombie apocalypse had begun. While sitting outside, I thought about how today was 'only Wednesday'. This prompted me to consider something I've been doing for some time. I have been in a steady stream of rushing days to get to the weekend. Boy, if it was Friday, today would feel a lot better,  I told myself. I realize that I'm losing days which stack into weeks and then months of my life. I know I cannot carpe diem every minute of my life, but I have spent far too long rushing days to pass. I did the same when I was 17, eager to turn 18 and be a man. My old man would not be able to tell me what to do again, I thought. The same carried into college as I rushed to be 21...

I come up with the most interesting ideas for blog posts around 4:30 in the morning. The past two mornings, just before sunrise, I have been awakened from a deep sleep. Both times I've noticed something about my thought patterns. I can still feel my mind constructing dreams. I don't think what I'm experiencing is a new phenomenon, it's likely a sign of aging or thanks to random bouts of insomnia that I've been having over the past couple years, but this is a new sensation for me. It's hard to explain really and I'm certain I'm not doing any kind of lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is the belief and practice that we can hack our minds to tell us we are dreaming and allow us some more control. I've had stuff like this happen, but it's usually in a response to my body attempting to wake me up. For some background, I don't give any gravity to dreams themselves. I have always believed they are simply a stimuli for laying on an arm, being ...

I had predicted the Super Bowl to be a snoozer primarily because I didn't care who won. I will admit I didn't have a favorite as long as the Niners were not victorious. I had a slight vendetta against them for removing my beloved Packers from the Super Bowl (as mentioned). Sunday night turned out to be more enjoyable than I predicted. The game itself was pretty good. The halftime show was actually pretty good. The commercials, though not memorable or timeless, were pretty good as well. Hanging out with friends and loved ones laughing at the commercials and yelling at the television though, was the best part of the Super Bowl. As predicted, the people that hate the game howled to their social networks. It was all a recipe for entertainment. Even the power outage created for an opportunity for entertainment. Oreo showed they have some crafty ad people who were on deck during the game. Social news sites such like Reddit lit up with memes and humorous quips about the Superd...

Like last year, I have very little interest in this year's Super Bowl. I mean, it was the Giants and the Patrios. It would be hard pressed to find a more convoluted match up. I have to admit I have the same lack of interest this year. We've kind of made this whole Super Bowl event a bigger deal than it should be. I am sure for 49er and Raven fans, this is a fairly important event. I've noticed a few trends around football and I just wanted to put them right here. Yeah, most of it involves social networks. Social media on Super Bowl Sunday is hilarious. People who normally do not watch or talk about football on their networks suddenly will. A lot. A whole lot. Those who hate American football with a passion will become this venomous vocal minority spewing their hatred of the sport early and often. Really often and really really snarky.  In reality, not many care about these two teams. Most people will be fixed on the performances and the commercials.  Ha...

I am probably certain that I'm not actually speaking for myself, but I am really looking forward to warmer weather. In Virginia, we get a true sampling of all four seasons. We do not get the Minnesota winters where the weather dips below 0, or the Death Valley summers where temps top well over 100 every day. February and August do represent our version of those extremes though. And I have to admit between the two, I'd have to pick summertime. I want my evenings back. If not, then I want all permission to hibernate through the rest of this winter. Just remind me in August when I'm talking about my preference for cooler weather what I'm declaring tonight.  Bring on that hazy, hot, and humid. I'd much rather be posting this from my laptop on my back porch than huddled up in my living room trying to find the source of this persistent draft.

The last thing I wanted to do on my journey of posting every day in February was talk about my cats. I do not want to appear to be that guy, but since we happen to have so many, from time to time, we have to deal with them, and take care of them. Today, our outdoor cat paid a visit to our new veterinarian. We picked up Dexter three years ago from Janine's co worker  He was a stray cat at the mall and we eventually taking care of him. He was too young for solid food still, so we would bottle feed him at all hours. Being mostly feral and not human friendly, he took to the outdoor life as soon as he could. Having a cat door was his great escape into our back yard. He's always been a distant cat, but when he wanted affection, he would aggressively seek it out with me. I probably spoiled the cat by holding it as a baby for hours or letting him sleep on my neck until he was too big to do so. It's funny though, at dinnertime, Janine is his best friend...