You know you're fat when you tear two pairs of underwear at the seam in one week!!

The New Zealand government was actually planning on taxing farmers for flatulent gases from their farm animals which contribute to global warming! I just heard about it on TV, though this happened in 2001.

I feel a bit discouraged at my progress. I conveniently started to "burn out" after 4 solid months of reading and practicing. I spent a week on it and for the past 3-4 days I've been relaxing, barely even reading. I think it's because of my multiple large projects at work that use up my brain all day, then I come home to hours of study at night. Hopefully I can do this for new years :/

Something I'd like to put on my site, that I haven't done for many years, is my dreams. Every few nights I have wild dreams and I'm very good at remembering them while I'm awake. When I'm not being lazy I write it down. I've been writing the best down for years but haven't put them on my site because people might think I'm crazy. Now I think everyone has dreams that don't make sense like I do, but most people don't remember their dreams. I'll use last night's dream as a sample. This dream is much shorter than most, and is nothing compared to most but it is kinda funny:

I was having a shower.. it was a really nice and large built in shower. I finished and was looking for the towel. Since I wasn't at home, I wasn't sure where the towel was so I walked around a bit looking. Suddenly I realized that I was at the Pharmacy desk at Shoppers Drug Mart! Girls behind the counter were staring at me dripping all over the floor and naked. I covered my privates and quickly ran a few isles down back to the shower. I'm not sure if I found a towel or not.

I'll likely post them as blog entries. The new site has categories so there will be a dream category. You'll be able to filter by category and see only dreams if you want. Most of them are way out there and are pretty funny. Others are terrifying.

Today I went to the grocery store to buy some food. I didn't have any quarters so had to take a cart from another store that I found in the parking lot. Inside I was filling up the cart and not paying much attention to what I was doing. At one point I switched carts with someone else and kept shopping until I realized there were other things in the cart that weren't mine!! I wonder what the person must have thought turning around to find their cart gone! It's not like they had already paid for the food. I could barely contain myself and quickly hurried back to where I remember seeing it last. I found my cart, moved a bunch of stuff from one to the other, then left the wrong cart in place.

In other news... nothing is new. Months have gone by and I barely post anything anymore. Why? Because I consume my nights and entire weekends reading J2EE books. I spent 10-15 hours/week studying. I got this gut feeling about this and my future and that's why I've been able to sustain this amount of reading for this long. Seriously though, it's not like you can read 1 book and get started and learn other things later. You really need to have the big picture, and study patterns in multi-tier design. Just about 3 months into it and there are still gaps here and there that stop me from actually starting my project. However about 300 more pages of this patterns book and I'll be finished :) Then I think I'll be armed with enough knowledge to start. I know there will still be lots of things I'll need to study before I can consider myself a serious J2EE developer. It's hard to explain, but I can really see and understand why this stuff needs to be complex. Once you understand it, it is not complex. There is just so much to learn it's hard to know where to start, what to learn, what not to learn etc...

Last night's dream was kinda weird and fun. I was in some mall with my grandma. We came around a corner and she told me how she had lots of memories of this part of the mall and took a picture. We then went in an elevator. I saw people coming so I pressed the button to keep the doors open. They came in. We started going down and I noticed we were speeding up. Next I realized that the walls around us were windows and that we just exited below the building into open space. I looked out and it seemed we were miles high in the sky above the city. I tried to stay calm. Next something happened the floor moved around and changed into chairs, which everyone was forced into. The walls and ceiling disappeared, then the whole thing leaned back. It had turned into a roller coaster with no seat belts or anything but a chair. We were going VERY fast, and we were facing backwards so couldn't see what was coming. Everyone was screaming and we were going around bends and curves. I thought it was quite thrilling, but was concerned for our safety because there was nothing holding us down. Eventually we got to the bottom and it was some sort of airport? We were on the ground beside a hangar. I saw a guy on a motorcycle FLY out of the building and he must have been flying about 50 feet high. He was pulling some sort of GoodYear advertisement behind him. He landed far away and came back. I saw people lined up outside as if it were some kind of ride? We kept walking and I saw a small prop plane but the prop was made up of hundreds of long wiry things.. kind of like feathers. There wasn't 3 distinct prop blades.. but hundreds that went the full 360 degrees around. I don't remember anything after that.