Much to the amusement of many of the people I have bowled with, I can’t bowl in a straight line for the life of me. In an attempt to solve the problem I took up experimenting with throwing curve balls, and, after a lot of trial and error, eventually learned how to *occasionally* get the desired effect.

Now, I just want to take a moment to emphasize the fact that I’ve never been a good bowler, probably only bowling a couple of times a year (if that). Even with my best attempts, I have never really averaged more than around 115.

I *do* enjoy bowling, though, so I was pleasantly surprised when my Aunt Pam bought me a pair of bowling shoes as a gift. They are extremely comfortable (maybe even more so than my normal shoes), and fit me perfectly. Bowling shoes usually rent for $3-5, so bowling just got that much more affordable.

Since receiving the shoes, I have gone bowling a couple of times and have been amazed by what a difference they made. Each time I bowled, everything just seemed to click… Literally overnight, my average game went up over 20 points!

At any rate, last week I went bowling with my two buddies, Brian Shaler and John Murch, and I bowled a 201!! Now, I know that a lot of people out there bowl around 200 all the time, but for me that was a big deal (the highest I’ve ever bowled). I even got a print-out of the scores (upon Brian’s recommendation) as proof!

So, yeah. Go get yourself some bowling shoes!

I just finished putting together this fun little web site:

100 Facts About Literally Anyone

Basically, you put in someone’s name, and it returns 100 (funny) “facts” about the person.

Let me know what you think!

How is it that after all this time (10+ years), the vast majority of people still haven’t figured out how online auctions work???

The way a traditional (real life) auction typically works is something like this:
1. Seller defines their starting bid amount.
2. Auctioneer announces item and the starting bid.
3. Someone bids an amount they’re willing to pay.
4. Auctioneer calls out the new price.
5. Repeat steps three and four until nobody in the crowd is willing to pay anything more, at which point the item is immediately sold to the highest bidder.

The way an online auction (like ebay) typically works:
1. Seller sets up item for sale and defines the starting bid amount.
2. Seller sets a time and date when the auction will end.
3. Morons bid the price up and up.
4. The so-called “Auction” ends at pre-defined time, at which point the most recent high bidder wins the item.

Plain and simple, don’t bid on an auction a whole week before it ends! Don’t even bid on it a day or hour before it ends! There’s no reason to!! All you’re doing is driving up the price! You literally gain abso-freaking-lutely *nothing* from bidding early! The only thing that matters is the very last bid the second right before when the auction closes. Period. End of story!

Yet, to this day, all you have to do is a search on ebay to find hundreds of thousands of auctions (with a whole week to go) that have 30 morons bidding away, just driving up the end price.

How do so many people not understand???

Art, in my mind, is defined as the manifestation of creative expression. By “creative”, I mean “invented from nothing”. Creativity is a by-product of our intelligence, self-awareness, and seemingly random, un-explainable imagination.

If someone paints a picture by number, this is not art. They are not “creating” something from nothing. They are only following directions in the same sense that your printer might follow instructions from your computer. Would you call your printer an artist? No. It’s just a machine following instructions.

If a young piano player presses the keys on a piano in exactly the manner he/she is instructed to and hammers out a musical sequence, this also, is *not* art. It would *only* be “art” if the student were to connect with the music on some level and create a *new* song or variation using their imagination.

So when you ask someone what art is, why do you get so many different responses? Why is there so much ambiguity in the overall definition of the word? If you ask one person if a trash can is a piece of art, they might say “yes”, whereas another person might promptly reply, “No!”

I believe this problem arises from the way how humans arrive at definitions in their mind largely from context. They see an amazing painting and they hear it referred to as “art”, so they assume that “art” is defined only as “an amazing painting”. Another person might hear a piece of music or poetry referred to as “art”, so they come to the conclusion that “art” is defined as “music and poetry”.

As a result, if you stick the two people together, they might hem and haw and argue for days about what “art” is and what it means. Eventually they might arrive at the conclusion that “art” is defined as “amazing paintings, music, or poetry”.

The problem is quite simple. They’re failing to look at the true underlying concept that all these items share: None of these things would have been possible without human imagination and creativity.

So what about all the other paintings? You know, the crappy ones that never make it to a museum? Are they art? The people that created them would most certainly argue that they were! After all, many of the most famous paintings weren’t given proper credit until long after the artist was gone. It appears that “amazing” isn’t necessarily a requirement for something to be “art”.

You see, there are many different kinds of “art”, some of which are fascinating and amazing (the Mona Lisa, etc…), but there are countless other day-to-day creative expressions (an email written to a friend or a new spin on a pastry dish, for example) which are largely ignored.

However, just because a “creative expression” is ignored as “art” doesn’t make it “not art”. All it means is that it’s not intriguing or amazing art. It’s boring art. It’s every-day art. Or… something.

Anyone who knows anything about me knows about my car trouble nightmares. As such, when I bought a used 2004 Nissan Sentra SE-R (with 35,000 miles on it) from a dealership at the beginning of 2005, I made sure to buy an extended warranty. Sure enough, within two weeks of owning my new (used) car, the fuel pump needed to be replaced. This repair alone pretty much excused the extended warranty that I had purchased, but after that everything was pretty much smooth sailing without problems.

At around 45,000 miles, I noticed that my car had developed a “ticking” sort of noise in the engine during acceleration. However, once the engine got warmed up the noise went away, so I didn’t give it much thought. My extended warranty wasn’t going to expire till 60,000 miles and I figured that if the problem got worse I would just have to make sure to have it checked into before then.

At around 55,000 miles (a couple of days ago), I finally decided to do something about it (that warranty expiration was getting too close!). So I drove the car up to a local Nissan dealership, where I left it overnight (so they could hear the cold engine ticking the next morning). At first, they couldn’t replicate the problem, but I persisted, and they were eventually able to hear it.

Turns out, my engine had developed “piston slap”, where the pistons were hitting the side of the cylinders when they went up and down. The compression in cylinder #1 was only 90 PSI, when it was supposed to be 175 PSI! Not only that, but there was scoring of the metal where it had been rubbing together, and there were metal shavings in the oil. So yeah, not pretty.

So they gave me a new engine.

How do you like that? 5,000 miles from warranty expiration and my used car gets a whole new lease on life! I hope it lasts me a long time, because I still owe a small fortune on that darn car.

Man, things have been so crazy busy lately. Everyone wants a piece of the Tornado Design pie, and it’s everything we can do just to stay on top of things.

Just this last Friday, we landed a job with Warner Bros. Records, revamping a multi-media CD for Green Day. The deadline was Tuesday, and we actually managed to meet it (although I had to work practically all weekend). Then, out of the blue, they referred *another* project to us, a multi-media cd for the Gipsy Kings. The deadline for that CD was Wednesday (today), and we managed to meet it, too! So yeah. Things have been pretty crazy lately.

In other news, I re-vamped my living room last week! I got a new entertainment center and a much-needed coffee table that I’ve been wanting for a long time. I’ll have to post some pictures or something.

Ok, so I just took the Myer’s Briggs personality test and, according to the results, it seems that I’m riding the fine line between eNTj and eNTp.

eNTj:
“Fieldmarshals will usually rise to positions of responsibility and enjoy being executives. They are tireless in their devotion to their jobs and can easily block out other areas of life for the sake of their work. Superb administrators in any field — medicine, law, business, education, government, the military — Fieldmarshals organize their units into smooth-functioning systems, planning in advance, keeping both short-term and long-range objectives well in mind. For the Fieldmarshals, there must always be a goal-directed reason for doing anything, and people’s feelings usually are not sufficient reason. They prefer decisions to be based on impersonal data, want to work from well thought-out plans, like to use engineered operations — and they expect others to follow suit. They are ever intent on reducing bureaucratic red tape, task redundancy, and aimless confusion in the workplace, and they are willing to dismiss employees who cannot get with the program and increase their efficiency. Although Fieldmarshals are tolerant of established procedures, they can and will abandon any procedure when it can be shown to be ineffective in accomplishing its goal. Fieldmarshals root out and reject ineffectiveness and inefficiency, and are impatient with repetition of error.”

eNTp:
“ENTPs are usually verbally as well as cerebrally quick, and generally love to argue–both for its own sake, and to show off their often-impressive skills. They tend to have a perverse sense of humor as well, and enjoy playing devil’s advocate. They sometimes confuse, even inadvertently hurt, those who don’t understand or accept the concept of argument as a sport.

ENTPs are as innovative and ingenious at problem-solving as they are at verbal gymnastics; on occasion, however, they manage to outsmart themselves. This can take the form of getting found out at “sharp practice”–ENTPs have been known to cut corners without regard to the rules if it’s expedient — or simply in the collapse of an over-ambitious juggling act. Both at work and at home, ENTPs are very fond of “toys”–physical or intellectual, the more sophisticated the better. They tend to tire of these quickly, however, and move on to new ones.

ENTPs are basically optimists, but in spite of this (perhaps because of it?), they tend to become extremely petulant about small setbacks and inconveniences. (Major setbacks they tend to regard as challenges, and tackle with determin- ation.) ENTPs have little patience with those they consider wrongheaded or unintelligent, and show little restraint in demonstrating this. However, they do tend to be extremely genial, if not charming, when not being harassed by life in general.”