This morn­ing I find myself deter­mined to write a blog post. I’ve been up since 7, work­ing on Man­a­Na­tion, and as I fin­ished a small (but impor­tant) Word­Press tweak I felt com­pelled to blog.

So after I tried to log into this Word­Press site using the stan­dard array of pass­words I go dig­ging through my email. Sure enough there was a pass­word reset at some point, for some rea­son, so I have to use this to get in.

Enough stu­pid monot­ony for you?

Well it is pass­words I want to dis­cuss. After the Gawker data­base was hacked, I went through a fairly siz­able secu­rity rehash and have started using a pass­word stor­ing sys­tem. To some it seems para­noid and a waste of time as I fum­ble for pass­words, to oth­ers it seems a lit­tle over the top (usu­ally when they see my 128 bit pass­word get copy and pasted into the login field.)

But I regard it as smart secu­rity in the mod­ern age.

No, I’m obvi­ously not a hacker tar­get. I agree with you there. But I’m also not a car-jacking / house-robbing / identity-thieving tar­get either. Being a tar­get is not some­thing which is part of this equa­tion. If I waited until I was a tar­get, it would likely be too late.

So I use the open source KeeP­ass app, stor­ing the encrypted file on my drop­box, so that I am able to access it via my phone. This is a new piece of tech­nol­ogy and is still prov­ing trou­ble­some as I have had a few failed attempts to get the file open.

I think my biggest regret in this process was chang­ing the secure pass­words I already knew. I used a pass­word for my online bank­ing which was, for all intents and pur­poses, secure. It was alpha-numeric, with mixed case, and sym­bols included. I had it mem­o­rized so I was able to use it for log­ging in via my phone. But when I went through and did a mas­sive rehash of pass­words, I felt com­pelled to change it.

It hadn’t been com­pro­mised. It wasn’t a weak pass­word. I had sim­ply been using it and decided it was time to change.

There are cases to be made for rotat­ing pass­words, such as in cor­po­rate set­tings, etc. The longer a pass­word is in effect, the longer time a hacker may have access to sys­tems of yours. So when it gets changed, the hacker has to get in another way. But when it comes to some­thing like bank­ing, a secure pass­word should be a secure pass­word. Until proof of intru­sion,  you don’t really need to rotate it.

I made a very smart deci­sion a few years ago. And that is, I have stan­dard pass­words I use on the web. Four or five pass-phrases which I use when log­ging in and can’t remem­ber what the pass­word is. How­ever, I use one pass­word for log­ging into my email, and only for log­ging into your email. In some ways, your email is more crit­i­cal to your online secu­rity than any­thing else. It’s the cas­tle, if a hacker gains con­trol of your email, then he gains con­trol of your dig­i­tal life.

So when the Gawker data­base was hacked, I was only mildly affected. My email was secure, it was all the ancil­lary logins which mat­tered, things like online stores, ser­vices like Rdio.com, etc.

The pass­word stor­age sys­tem is both use­ful and annoy­ing, I use an absurdly strong encryp­tion and comedicly long pass­word to get to it, all to pro­tect about 20 pass­words which are used occa­sion­ally. It’s like car­ry­ing a comed­ically large key ring, and keep­ing an encrypted guide book to help me find the right password.

And there we have it, a mean­der­ing, kind-of-on-topic, blog post about pass­words. But hey, it’s a blog post!

Dear Skate­boarder whom I nearly hit with my car last night,

I real­ize that it was late, you were skat­ing across the straight seg­ment of road between two turns so your view hid any oncom­ing traf­fic, how­ever I must cau­tion you as I was going, at the time, below the speed limit and yet I came around the bend to nearly slam into your frag­ile form. Instead I chose to slam on my breaks, in doing so I also pressed the horn and held it.

I must admit I admired your abil­ity to trip off your skate­board, remain on your feet, stop the board with one foot, and never spill a drop of your mocha-latte-frappachino. How­ever, when you ges­tured dra­mat­i­cally for me to drive past you as you stood in the road, and I con­tin­ued hold­ing my horn, it struck me that you thought I was honk­ing to make you aware of my presence.

This is not the case.

I am fairly cer­tain you noticed and were thus aware my Honda Ele­ment as I sat mere feet from your body. The horn was because we were in a stretch of road where peo­ple would be com­ing around curves and pos­si­bly not pay­ing atten­tion such that you, or more impor­tantly me, might be hit still. So my judi­cious use of the horn was intended to alert other dri­vers who might turn the cor­ner while we stood there.

I must say though, I did not appre­ci­ate your mim­icry of those with men­tal hand­i­caps as you skated in front of me. As you were clearly a genius, I felt it in poor taste to both make such an action, and direct it towards me. I under­stand you were try­ing to save face with your friends who had smartly stopped at road’s edge and were thus watch­ing your moronic actions unfold, but it still might not have been the best choice.

As you skated on and nearly were hit by oncom­ing cars in the next two lanes of traf­fic I pressed the gas and drove away, hop­ing you made it safely across the road. Since I heard no tires skid and no horns honked, I have to assume you did.

But fuck man did you piss me off.

– Patrick

I can’t believe I let the bald spot post rest atop my blog for so long. Wow.

I’m busy. As always. I write a lot, but now it’s not on here, it’s on Twit­ter and on Man­a­Na­tion. That being said, I’m going to be revamp­ing this blog to still be about me, but also a lot about my trav­els and life. I had a real­iza­tion that I live a charmed life and it mer­its using it for pur­poses of entertainment.

I’ll be shar­ing sto­ries from the road as I travel for Magic tour­na­ments, in fact I’ll be explain­ing just what it is I do, because to peo­ple who don’t play Magic: the Gath­er­ing, I just travel a lot — I’m like an inter­na­tional Man of Mys­tery. And as awe­some as it is to have peo­ple think that of you, unless you carry a license to kill, it’s best to dis­pel con­fu­sion and explain. Usually.

I’ll be review­ing restau­rants as I get to eat at a lot of unique places and, tak­ing a les­son from my bosses, one of the joys of trav­el­ling is find­ing the deli­cious places to eat and be social with others.

As a gadget-geek I’ll be shar­ing what­ever doo­dads and giz­mos I’m play­ing with, whether they be phys­i­cal gad­gets or online web­sites I might be beta testing.

I’ll be phi­los­o­phiz­ing, the­o­riz­ing and ver­bal­iz­ing thoughts, feel­ings, and beliefs.

And with that, I declare the new era of TrickJarrett.com, offi­cially underway!

You’ll notice that I’ve moved the blog to http://www.trickjarrett.com/blog/ — Don’t worry, if you sub­scribe to my RSS, then noth­ing is going to change. I just took the oppor­tu­nity to make trickjarrett.com a land­ing page that linked out to my var­i­ous pres­ences online.

I regret it every time I get a hair­cut, but it’s there. No, it’s not on top of my head. As Rite the styl­ist said this week­end, “Boy you’ve got four heads of hair on one head.” Indeed it’s true. I was born with a full head of hair, and I’m show­ing all the signs of tak­ing it to my grave.

But I do have a bald spot.

It’s man made too, that’s the worst part!

Out of stress and ner­vous­ness, at my old jobs, I plucked at longer-than-desired side­burn hairs until one day I real­ized I had cre­ated a minia­ture bald spot. Stress invaded me. It inhab­ited my mind.

And the worst part? It wasn’t all dis­tress, some of it was eustress that I sim­ply didn’t know how to process.

If no one has ever taught you to drink water or swim in water, all you know how to do is drown in it.

Learn how to process, ana­lyze and accept stress. I’m still learn­ing, but I’ve got it 95% licked.

Life is easy. Really.

Stop and think about it. Look how easy it has become to sur­vive in devel­oped countries.

Com­pared to Haiti or Uganda or some other third world coun­try our lives take mon­u­men­tal effort, idiocy or bad luck to truly screw up beyond repair.

What isn’t easy is excelling. Whether finan­cially or socially or pro­fes­sion­ally, being above the curve requires either sus­tained hard work, one time great­ness or knock­ing it out of the park on that one crit­i­cal time when it mat­tered most and where so many have failed before.

I’m not going to lie. And it’s all stuff I’ve said before, but I’m over­weight. I’m fat. This post is going to be a string of con­scious­ness post laden with pop cul­ture ref­er­ences and quotes. Buckle up.

Go home, take a paper bag, cut some eye­holes out of it. Put it over your head, get undressed and look at your­self in the mir­ror. Really eval­u­ate where your strengths and weak­nesses are. And be hon­est. — Joan on Mad Men

The sen­ti­ment here is clear, you have to be objec­tive. If you look at your­self, you see you, but when we look at oth­ers — peo­ple we don’t know, we judge them. We judge them based on how they look. The bag on our head, even the metaphor­i­cal bag, enhances your abil­ity to dis­as­so­ci­ate your­self with your body and look at your flaws, and your strengths.

The key to my exer­cise pro­gram is this one sim­ple truth: I hate my body. You under­stand that the sec­ond you look in the mir­ror and you’re happy with what you see, baby, you just lost the bat­tle. — Perry Cox on Scrubs

Change only hap­pens when we have become so dis­sat­is­fied with the cur­rent state of things that we must change. I left the com­edy club due to a sin­gle staff mem­ber who made my work­ing there unbear­able. And thanks to him I dou­bled my salary, then dou­bled it again the next year. All because I worked with a class-A rag­ing ass­hole. Now, I must find that equiv­a­lent in my body and use it as lever­age to cause change.

Here is the thing though, you can­not take a leap of faith with­out know­ing where you’re aim­ing to land. Oth­er­wise you end up being one of the char­ac­ters in Super Smash Broth­ers where you fall to your death, fall for­ever and never reach your goal.

A goal is akin to a dream. Sep­a­rated by a thin veil. Dreams require we admit to what they are, and risk to our­selves that we may not real­ize this dream. Like ask­ing a woman out on a date, chas­ing a dream exposes our­selves to danger.

I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
– W. B. Yeats

I first heard this in the movie Equi­lib­rium, and then I looked up the poem. Pow­er­ful stuff. It finds another risk in admit­ting our dreams, that oth­ers will crush them. Chil­dren dream of Santa, and it falls to par­ents to one day tread on that dream to edu­cate them about the world. If my dream is to have six pack abs and a body of a god, then there are hun­dreds of peo­ple who will tell me it’s impos­si­ble, I’d never get there. And here is where my resolve, deter­mi­na­tion and bull­head­ed­ness come in. To them I say: Fuck off. It’s my damn dream so get off my cloud! This post is what hap­pens when I stay up late watch­ing Fight Club and cod­ing PHP.

Earn your body.

I do not know where I heard this quote, I apol­o­gize to who­ever said it and came up with this great truth. In so many ways I’ve spent my life tak­ing the “free demo” of my body. Even dur­ing high school sports I strug­gled to push myself and earn it. For a short while after col­lege I was earn­ing my body. Daily work­outs. Eat­ing well. And I was earn­ing it, see­ing the pounds slip off. Then I didn’t fall of the wagon, the wagon exploded around me and my body slid back­wards to the worst shape of my life. Here is a sim­ple truth: Your body wants to be fat. Fat = sus­te­nance and in famine it means you can live longer. But unfor­tu­nately for your body, your goal is not to sur­vive famine, it is to sur­vive time. And sci­ence shows that time is con­quered by not accu­mu­lat­ing that fat. And so it’s time I begin earn­ing my body again.

This is your life and it’s end­ing one minute at a time. — Nar­ra­tor, Fight Club

The time is now. Not tomor­row. Not next week. I need to start earn­ing my body. Tonight. Aside from the desire to look appeal­ing, it has become more and more appar­ent that my future requires I make these changes. Both of my par­ents have fought dis­ease, my dad is a can­cer sur­vivor and my mom died from her dis­ease (for­give me for not going into more detail, I don’t need to delve deeper than I already am.) My fam­ily has his­tory of heart dis­ease, dia­betes, alco­holism, and more. A clear sign that I should get mov­ing and stop wast­ing time. So what stops me? Fear.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total oblit­er­a­tion.
I will face my fear.
I will per­mit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be noth­ing.
Only I will remain.

Fuck fear. Sim­ply. I’m able to do this if I become ded­i­cated and stop cheating.

I’m going to earn my body.

It’s not a secret, and yet when it comes up I am met with any vari­ety between shock and amuse­ment. It’s true: I don’t watch scary movies. Almost ever. I walked out on the Scream movies. I avoid haunted houses. And gen­er­ally I find no desire to see what I’m missing.

photo credit: DanielaNob

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I’ve been read­ing Twyla Tharp’s book, ‘The Cre­ative Habit.’ I bought it a few months ago in the Kin­dle for­mat so that I could test read­ing books on my iPod Touch. I have come to some con­clu­sions, espe­cially about read­ing on the iPod Touch, but those are for another blog post. Twyla Tharp is an Amer­i­can Dancer and Chore­o­g­ra­pher who has won both Emmy’s and Tony’s for her work. Her book explores the cre­ative process.

Twyla’s book is very inter­est­ing and thought pro­vok­ing. I began read­ing it and was really get­ting into it when she posed a series of ques­tions to the reader. The first of which I didn’t have an answer to. She asked “What is your best idea ever?”

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photo credit: Fer­nando Cuenca Romero

It shocks you into real­iz­ing that some­thing isn’t right. Often this results in fear, uncer­tainty, anx­ious­ness, and even­tu­ally exhaus­tion. That all hit me yes­ter­day when I took my dad to the Emer­gency Room. I had been at work for two hours when he called and said, “Son, I need you. I need to go to the hos­pi­tal.” He had blacked out three sep­a­rate times at home, result­ing in a very large bump on his head, what we learned was a bruised rib, and a hand­ful of scratches and bruises to show for it.

The prob­lem is not the hand­ful of injuries, but that dad blacked out three times. It turned out that his blood pres­sure is drop­ping quite dan­ger­ously when­ever he stands up. So they admit­ted him to the hos­pi­tal to see what is going on.

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1. Win the lotto.
2. Tell K the good news.
3. Call our rich­est acquain­tance in Orlando, get the name of their lawyer.
4. Get the name of the lawyer’s accoun­tant or finan­cial adviser.
5. Set a meet­ing with both to setup the pro­tec­tions and finan­cial plans for investing.
6. Set up trust for inher­i­tance money.
7. Pull aside a small per­cent­age for use.
8. Pay off all debt.
9. Begin plan to spread money among clos­est fam­ily, such as par­ents, sib­lings (and kids if we have any at the time.)
10. Give gen­er­ously to char­i­ties and orga­ni­za­tions we support.
11. With what remains of spend­ing money, depend­ing on amount, buy house, plan trips, etc.
12. Once I’m fully setup and ready, it’s time to pur­sue world dom­i­na­tion.

I would most likely quit my day job and begin plans to really roll out my own busi­ness. I’ve got a plan for a shop­ping cen­ter with a vari­ety of stores and busi­nesses I think I could run bet­ter than other peo­ple. Things like game shops, sushi restau­rants, after school cen­ters, and a hand­ful of others.

K and I could also go nomadic and uproot and begin trav­el­ing the world, that’s also a likely out­come, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Oh and I plan to give $10,000 to the first 5 indi­vid­u­als (who I know, sorry ran­dom vis­i­tors) to com­ment on this post. You know, if K and I ever win the lotto

Yes­ter­day I tweeted out how I have decided that I want to learn the Har­mon­ica. I tweeted this and asked for feed­back on where or how to learn. Some friends replied with peo­ple to talk to, oth­ers sent me links, oth­ers sent me book sug­ges­tions and to all of you I say thank you for your help.

As I read over the web of Har­mon­ica sites, the com­mon thing I saw was peo­ple say­ing ‘Just play it.’ The har­mon­ica is a glo­ri­ously sim­ple instru­ment, usu­ally 10 holes to blow through, keyed to C. So you just play, learn, refine and play more. It’s not going to serve me very well to just read about how to play the Harmonica.

Some­thing the Inter­net breeds a lot of are ‘key­board jock­eys.’ Peo­ple who write, post, and blog about a topic but who forgo the actual expe­ri­ence instead choos­ing to work in the realm of the­ory based on read­ings and other mate­r­ial they’ve seen. Rather than doing it, they talk about it. Usu­ally a lot.

What does that say? This is some­thing they’re inter­ested in. And that the­ory is safer. So long as it is just the­ory, there’s almost no chance of fail­ure unless your the­ory is patently wrong.

The term ‘key­board jockey’ does not refer to peo­ple who do have real life expe­ri­ence and who are skilled in the area, it refers to the anony­mous masses who gain a fol­low­ing for their writ­ing or discussions.

Can peo­ple learn purely in this way? Sure. Magic the Gath­er­ing has a huge online key­board jockey audi­ence. Peo­ple get paid to dis­cuss decks, game the­ory, play­ers, the game itself, card indi­vid­u­ally, all sorts of stuff. Can a player learn the game and get bet­ter by read­ing these arti­cles? Sure. But the rate of growth is minis­cule as com­pared to actual true 100% com­pet­i­tive and var­ied game play. What you can learn play­ing in one tough tour­na­ment amounts to more knowl­edge and skill than you’ll gain in weeks of read­ing online.

Could I learn the Har­mon­ica just by watch­ing instruc­tional videos and read­ing about it? Pos­si­bly. But noth­ing can train me for the feel of the Har­mon­ica, how to hold my mouth and cup my hands. Learn­ing is a lot of suc­ces­sive fail­ures before I can even play ‘Mary had a lit­tle lamb.’

But when I do play it, you can be sure I’ll tweet about it.

One of the many things K has done for me, is intro­duce me to Rev. Run. Not face to face, but before that I only knew of Run DMC, I didn’t know who they were. Rev. Run is a good guy. He’s a father, an enter­tainer, a preacher, and a pretty stand up guy. He has been send­ing out a daily email with moti­va­tional and sup­port­ing mes­sages for years now and just recently joined the Twit­ter revolution.

Remem­ber this.. Youre not oblig­ated to win… but youre damn sure oblig­ated to keep try­ing EVERYDAY — Rev. Run

I love this quote. It’s some­thing I’ve strug­gled with. I hate los­ing. Or even I hate not win­ning. This quote reminds me that we all lose some­times and it mat­ters more that we keep get­ting back up after we get thrown down. Good stuff.

Three tips for trav­el­ing from day 1 of my vacation.

1) Don’t set­tle. The staff at the hotel tried to put us in a room with two-doubles as opposed to a king. We had made a reser­va­tion for a king. I imme­di­ately called down to the front desk and they sent up a bell­man with new room keys. I sus­pect the major­ity of the time it hap­pens they are doing it because peo­ple won’t speak up or say anything.

2) Be gra­cious and polite to every­one. When we got on the plane after our two hour delay (though it felt much longer) K and I were still up beat and pos­i­tive. We sat down in the row and it wasn’t the exit row as expected. Appar­ently they had changed planes on us, but the stew­ard had a sharp eye and invited us to sit on the real exit row. The plane had plenty of empty seats so there weren’t any issues with doing so. But we were polite and upbeat. If we had come in snarling and grip­ing about the delay, he would have been less likely to offer us the bet­ter seats.

3) Get a Flip cam­era. I got one when it rolled up on Woot a few weeks back and it’s amaz­ingly fun to be able to whip it out and shoot video with ease. Then to take it back to the hotel room and plug into the lap­top to imme­di­ately upload.

It’s not hard to be happy when life is good. The real task is to be happy when life isn’t good. Like this econ­omy. Stress, frus­tra­tion, the feel­ings of help­less­ness com­bine to make a for­mi­da­ble oppo­nent to hap­pi­ness. I’m a happy guy, and so far I’m doing okay in this econ­omy, but I’m lucky. And I know it.

What weapons do we all have to find happiness?

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