Jake’s Life

Well, this is my last post of the year. This year has been good and bad for me. Well, actually mostly bad. The only good things I had going for me was finding an employer who actually valued my service and appreciates me (which in itself does affect the other portions of my life), and focusing on bettering my grades in school more. I am not sorry the year is over.

I’ll be going over to Jamie’s tonight, watching him get drunk and make an ass out of himself. Not that he needs to get drunk at all to do that.

Just kidding.

So the other day while I was getting ready for work I was inspired to take a typical top-down photo of myself, a la MySpace. None of my photos are really that recent, the most current being about 3 or 4 months old. Here’s the result.

I’m still tinkering with my Dash. I know Shelly, I know, but I’ve talked about my Dash way less than you’ve talked about that issue, so it’s really not a fair deal. I’m on a quest to find the best free programs for Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone Edition, and so far it’s pretty difficult. There are many paid programs which I am sure work great, but I’m never the type to go with an expensive commercial app if I can find a similar free one. Cheap? Maybe. Here’s what I have found so far:

• Agile Messenger: A paid program but in beta right now and is the Trillian of mobile IM clients.
• BT Audio: When the Bluetooth headset is paired all of the sound gets routed through it instead of just call notifications.
• PHM Registry Editor: It’s Windows, so you can edit the registry.
• SetJogBar: For some reason T-Mobile decided to use the touch sensitive jog bar on the side to only control volume. This app allows it to be a scrollbar and app launcher.
• SmartSS: Screenshot tool.
• Virtual Earth Mobile: Mobile version of Virtual Earth. Very handy.
• TCPMP: The Core Portable Media Player: PLay several video and audio file formats. Handy for watching downloaded movies and TV episodes. Or porn.
• WordPad: Smartphone Edition only lets you view text files, not edit them. This helps.
• Toggleview: Toggles the icon view to list view.
• Adobe Flash Lite: Mobile version of Adobe’s Flash Player. (Think downloaded YouTube videos.)
• SUPER: Okay, this isn’t a WM5 app but it does let you encode just about any video or audio file format into one that plays well on WM5. WMV if you’re a fan of the mobile version of Windows Media Player, AVI/MPEG/MP4/FLV if you’re not. (One episode of COPS which was a WMV file at 181 MB was turned into 40 MB AVI.)
• Audacity: Another app not for WM5, but you can slice up WAV/MP3/OGG files and export them to use as ringtones. Here’s my current ringer.

Speaking of police, here’s a Ford commercial that I never saw before. Kind of funny, except the stereotypical portrayal of police officers as fat old men. Although when I become one, I hope to still be able to drive that well.

http://www.youtube.com/v/WX03KAWhVwc

Well, Christmas was interesting. Shelly and I both woke up early and went to Shari’s. I know, fantastic holiday. There was nothing but old and/or blind people there. Just waiting for a table was like a game of telephone:

Server: “John, table for two.”
Someone: “Sue? Table for Sue?”
Someone else: “No, Don, table for two.”
Someone else: “Did they just call Lou?”
Me: “Shelly do you smell poo?”

That night at work was fairly slow. Well, okay, absolutely slow. Not a damn thing happened. Every 24-hour Starbucks in the area had round-the-clock protection that day. I worked the 0200-0330 shift there.

I broke down and replaced by Sidekick 2 with a more “grown up” phone this week. I figured it would be a nice holiday gift to myself. It’s the HTC Excalibur/T-Mobile Dash, and not a very photogenic phone. It looks way bigger in photos than it actually is. The keys aren’t as spaced out as my SK2 was, but it hasn’t slowed me down much. Plus i is Windows Mobile 5 so there are many more progams available for it, which is a huge plus. And of course I have already customized it.

Not really much else going on, as usual.

This week has gone by so slowly, and brought with it more than I care to deal with right now.

The wowness seems to be gone, instead replaced with more familiar feelings and questions. Always the typical: Did I do something wrong? Did I overstep my bounds? Was I too honest? (I have issues with that one.) Is it a purely physical issue? Do they think my photos were better than the real thing? I don’t know, but I sure wish this shit would work itself out. I just don’t understand how something can be good one day, bad the next. But then again I’m still trying to figure out why bad things happen to good people, and the baddies get the good stuff.
The windstorm also knocked out power here for almost a week. That’s no laundry, no electricity, no internet, and no showers (after the first night anyways). Even though I was at work most of the night, it was tough finding a way just to wake up. One day I took a radio home and kept it on, so every time I heard it dispatch would give a timestamp. One day I had an officer come by my house and wake me up.

We are transitioning from 05 Impalas to 06 Impalas at work. May as well go with souped up Ford Tauruses for the look of them. Comfortable, yes. Fast, yes. Authoritative? Nope. We also got a night vision unit, more to come hopefully.

This weekend has been boring as shit. Went to Jamie’s for one night, been here the rest of the time. Thinking. LOL, not sure why, but I have been.

Kitty has found a new place that she likes to lay. Curious as to why she waited until she was so big to lay here.

I got my new Blade-Tech duty holster. It uses their Tek-Lok system to attach itself, which is really just a fancy way of saying that it goes over the duty belt and snaps in place without having to thread it through. Wasn’t too terribly expensive, but it took them almost 8 weeks to make. With that long you would imagine they would have made it for the right size barrel (mine is 4″ Duty model, they made it for the 5″ Tactical model). At least I won’t have to clean dust and debris out of the barrel very often!

Good ol’ gun!

I always have the habit of cursing things, so I’m not going to this time. But wow!

This weekend began good enough. I have a new coworker who is gay and it was his birthday, so I spent most of the night at his place in Kent. Contrary to what he is probably thinking the morning after ingesting all of that alcohol, the worst part of my night was the commute home and getting stuck in morning rush hour. Other than that, I had a great time.

I worked on my final essays for both classes yesterday and today, and just finished both of them. I have one final exam today, one next Tuesday, then out until the next courses roll along. The second final project was a 95% by the way.

Today has been a bit odd though. I woke up at about 9am and began working on school stuff, and even though it’s only 4pm it seems much later. Maybe that’s because my back hurts and I’m cranky, but who knows. Speaking of back hurting that may be doing better after tonight, which I will discuss in further details later.

Okay, this video is different than the others I’ve posted but still good. You have to watch it all the way through.

Yeah, I don’t know. I installed a new WordPress plugin that will allow me to run surveys off of the site for school papers (for example: gathering a small survey group for projects, just in case you didn’t quite get what I meant). Also it is a better way (in my mind, at least) to conduct interviews with everything written and not having to search people out to interview, I can just post at Officer.com, MySpace, etc., and they can come to me.

So I have put a few things in perspective: Gay guys and I usually don’t play nicely in relationship ways for one or more of these three reasons; They are taken; They are enjoying the single life and dating (i.e.: sluts); or they are just way too immature. Now, since I am applying that criteria to them, I am wondering where I fall in. I’m single, so I’m not taken, unless you count work and school. I’m no slut, since my sex life is as dried up as a crackwhore’s lips. I also don’t consider myself too immature for a relationship, and neither do others I have run this past. Are there more categories? Not that I have encountered.

And before everyone gets all riled up, yes, I know that there are many types of people out there, and not all of them are like the complete assholes I have met but that’s just it, I am talking about those I have met. Every guy I have dated in the last two years can fit comfortably in one or more of those three categories. If you’re really dying to know, I’ll publish a spreadsheet of them all with little check marks. So…is there a gay firearms club? (Notice how I didn’t say “gun” or “shooting”?)

Also, just as FYI, I don’t check stats for my web site anymore since I’ve determined that I keep it for me and not to please a huge amount of readers (if anyone even reads it). That said, if you do read it semi-regularly to hourly (sitting on your ass all day like Vince…yeah, yeah, I know, I’ll wonder why my brakes aren’t working after you read this) let me know because I will be requiring registration to read some posts soon. I am finding that I’m restraining myself when I post things and it shouldn’t be that way, so some posts–and parts of posts–will require logging in.

I got my Police Operations final project on Community Policing graded and it was a 99/100.

For all of you who doubted me and thought I was being dumb, read this. Told ya so!

I have recently discovered some great portable applications that run from a thumbdrive. Where to get them? PortableApps.com.

Do you ever have someone who you just want to jump on and do really dirty things to? Yeah, I know how you feel.

More in a few days.