planetkris

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the crash…

Here’s a little something that I’d like to share with the world. It will make you a better friend and you’ll stop wasting your time on people that don’t value your friendship. I call it “The Friend Jar.” This idea has evolved over my years and I wish I employed it back when I was in High School.

The idea is: You view every friendship - male, female, romantic, platonic, employee, boss, couple, etc. as a jar of pennies. So you meet someone and the jar is created *poof. You make a gesture of friendship and your money goes into the jar. They make a return gesture and their money goes in. Now you don’t have to assign some actual number - just that some intrinsic value has been invested in the friendship. If they don’t take you up on your offer you lose your change (as in: the amount of time you have invested in the friendship is gone forever). Time is money after all. The jar can only grow when both friends are contributing. Some friendships, like future spouses, take gobs of effort and lots of change. Some friendships, like neighbors, only take a few pennies now and then and grow stronger over time.

You are invited for an event and you go and have a great time - their money in the jar, you reciprocate. You invite them to an event and they show up and have a great time - your money in the jar, they reciprocate. You probably already know when a friendship isn’t working or is one sided, but this will help you spot it a lot sooner. I usually give the jar 3 turns before I stop putting money in.

For example: You call up your friends and mention going out. They are too busy and can’t set a date. That’s okay, it happens. You run into them and suggest a movie night or other activity and they don’t show or forget and don’t call. People forget stuff. Now you are on your third round of putting some change in the jar without a return on investment. The jar is empty and you are about to lose more change. At this point you may want to make a big final effort. “What day should we go to that pastry shop that you love? Any day this week would be great!” Something that I know (from being friends) that they and I enjoy - that we could enjoy (as friends) together.

So, you go to the pastry shop, or play laser tag, or meet up in a brothel - whatever… You have a great time and as friends always say. “We should do that again!” Now is their turn. You are out of cash, my friend, and you’re not going to call them or email them until they call you. Nor should you try to arrange another meeting, get-together, gathering, etc. The ball is in their court. Time to ante up.

I will tell you that I can actually remember some of the final efforts I have made. Clearly my friendship was not that important - otherwise I would have got something in return. As I’ve only invested a small amount into the friendship, I’m not pissed when they never call and I run into them. Until they make some effort, they are wasting my time. When a friend does reciprocate, it’s even more special. That - “Hey we haven’t talked in a while. Why don’t we get together?” phone call or email is sweet and something I like to call “Money in the jar.” This concept works great with ‘couple friends’ and has weeded out and built some great friendships in the time we’ve been in California.

The headlines on the East coast newspapers read something like: ‘California Coast ON FIRE’ & ‘SoCal Burns!’ You can imagine the 1.2 million phone calls this generated as opposite coast families call in a panic.

California is a big ass state. If you were in Malibu and drove to the city of San Diego - it’s about 150 miles. That’s a trip from Boston, MA to Bridgeport, CT. Orange County (where 1 major fire is burning) is only 200 square miles smaller then the state of Rhode Island. San Diego County (where several major fires are burning) is 20% smaller then Connecticut. San Bernardino County (I-15 fires and still in ‘So-Cal’) is as large as the states of New Hampshire and Vermont combined. That’s 20,000 square miles, or 12,800,000 acres. The so cal fires are roughly 200,000 acres burned so-far. Yes, that is a lot - but the whole coast is far from ‘ON FIRE!’

Contrary to this argument is the above picture that we took from the I-5 heading down into San Diego on Tuesday night. They shut the highway down shortly after to start a back-burn. Camp Pendleton is just miles of wild desert brush. Because no homes, property, or military personnel were in danger they just let this fire burn itself out. Here it certainly looked as if the coast was on fire. Three miles of it anyway.

We had a blast with all our friends and family!
Don’t worry - I’ll link a gallery or two here when we return.
Maybe I’ll share a story or two… More likely it will be on the brides site - sunmoonstarsgirl.com

It seems as if every few years I remember I have a web log or *cough ‘blog‘ here at the home base - planetkris.com. I once again will remind you that I’m usually busy over at rallynotes.com with my rally adventures. As a spin off to rally, I recently got my amateur radio technician license and have been getting into a lot of new activities and clubs, etc. As an established geek, I’ll be posting about that from now on here. Check out the ham radio stuff on rallynotes if you want to keep up.

Christine pointed out to me that I still have posts from 2005 on the main page.
Speaking of the SunMoonStarsGirl, she has a new gallery up.

While you’re busy checking that stuff out - I’ll be working on my ARRL Field Day post.

Other top items:
I’m getting married in August. Honeymoon in Tahiti.
I started a motorsports company. I’m doing contract tech work in the mean time.
I still live in California.

-and we’re done here!

For Christmas everyone pitched in and got me a 27″ Sony Wega. With about 1/2″ to spare I slid it into our entertainment center the other night. We warmed it up by watching “Serenity” and playing 8 hours of Katamari on the PS2. I’m so happy to have that silly switcher box off the top of my TV, and to hear things in STEREO *gasp. I lived with a 19″ bubble TV for 10 years - it was about time…

We have some friends coming over for a New Years Day - Rally Marathon party. I can’t wait!
Thanks Mom, Dad, Joyce and Don!

rec.aviation.ultralight newsgroup post I did. Found on google. Dated November 13th 1995.

Christine passed her PreQualifingExam today! w00t! We went out to celebrate and she told me about a conversation she had with one of the organizers. “Wasn’t this supposed to be two full weeks after finals?” She asked. “Where did you read that?!” The organizer asked. “On the programs UCI website…” “Oh, no one ever read that… Until your class.”

I suggested that Tine let them know that from now on, all of their students had access to the Internet in High School. So they should consider what they put up on their site and consider keeping it current.

I wrote a script to port FirstClass BBS messages back and forth from usenet - I have a strong feeling that was sent from my BBS. No search for ‘PCMacNet’ turned up anyhting relevent. Brake out the Hayes Accura 14.4, we’re using WinSock to make a PPP connection to the World Wide Web!

My monitors lurched twice and the glass door shook behind me. I am no longer a virgin.

I need to scrounge the eco-yards for one of these. The thing had a beam scanner the size of a loaf of bread inside. I’ve worked on a few in my day and we got into a ‘how old are you by what hardware you’ve worked on’ type discussion at work. This occured naturally because my cubicle was happybirthdaybombed with sparkles, streamers and balloons. Any good geek will tell you the most they’ve ever paid for the least ammount of HDD. Example: I once bought a 250MB for $270. Another favorite is the first computer they hacked. Example: I turned my Atari 400 into an alarm system for my room. God I loved solid state controllers!

I’ve spent the last few nights reading ‘The universe in a nutshell’ by Stephen Hawking. It’s a ‘heavy’ bedtime book, but I digress. In one of the chapters, Hawking talks about the exponential population explosion that’s happened in the last 1000 years. He brings up his concern that;

Now Hawking has been often compared to the likes of Einstein and Newton when it comes to his understanding of the universe. So, when he makes his concerns for the future of humankind known, it carries a little more weight in my mind then some greenhouse gas study picked up by the associated press.

But it seems that this idea may be wrong. This morning I caught an article by Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth catalog, that brings to light the U.N.’s data on population.

He goes on to suggest embracing Nuclear power such as the same way we embraced clean automobiles. We need cars, lets make clean cars. We need power, let’s get the cleanest power per dollar. Check it out:
Environmental Heresies - By Stewart Brand

I believe in the cosmic universe of balance. Where random positives and negatives cancel out to nothing. There is as much white as black, heat as cold, big as small.

I’ve spent the last few days riding the cosmic waves. Starting a temp job that I thought would be boring and tedious, turned into a good challenging full time gig. (awaiting the “official” announcement - i.e. to cash the check) Listing the Subaru in AutoTrader for 3 weeks and getting zero calls, so I popped it on eBay and now have a serious buyer. The boat is lashing to and fro. Hang onto the mast or we’re going swimming!

There was some pretty low fog here this morning and I didn’t see the shiny tangle of sharp metal on the right side of the road until the last second. Shkrrrring! POOF. Thud, thud, thud, THUD, THUD, PULL, OVER, THUD, flap… fwip. I’m like 1/4 mile from work. Shit.

The rear right tire on the Malibu has a 2″ gash in the sidewall. There is no way I could plug or save the tire. I get back in the car, put the hazards on, and thud to work. I’ll go out during lunch and change over to the spare. I’m glad we just rotated the fronts to the back two weeks ago. I can get away with getting only 1 new tire at $112 mounted and balanced for Christine’s car. This, plus the new job and the sale of the Subaru brings the cosmic tally back to zero.