Archived News:

One thing lead to another and we decided that getting married was just the right thing for us to do, so here we are. We're going to have a small ceremony with family and close friends next month and we're looking forward to spending the rest of our lives together.

Most of my life I've been fairly clueless when it comes to interpreting the intentions of someone I'm interested in. I'm usually pretty good at observing other people and reading their intentions toward another person, but once I throw my own feelings into the mix, I'm completely clueless.

It turns out that I'm not alone in being clueless. A recent study by Indiana University's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences shows that "Young men just find it difficult to tell the difference between women who are being friendly and women who are interested in something more. And here I thought it was always just me! :)

Interesting notes from the study:

Now I've survived two weeks of work. I actually got to do some programming this week, which made me feel better. I don't like just sitting around watching someone else program. It's enough to put a person to sleep. I'm getting a little more comfortable with things, but we'll see how I feel after that first paycheck where they start taking out for insurance and stuff. :)

The weather here has been a little crazy. Last week it actually snowed, and for awhile they talked about it possibly snowing today as well. It looks like that is all going north of here though.

With life so upside down the last few weeks, I've still not quite gotten to the point where I'm eating regularly enough. I had two days this week where I didn't eat lunch at all, mostly because I forgot to pack a lunch and the smell of the food in the cafeteria just made me nauseous. I don't know if that's a statement of the food quality, or just a sign of how my stomach is feeling. On the plus side I'm down to 225 lbs, something I haven't been in a few years. With working 9-10 hours a day, it's hard to get on a decent schedule, but I did manage to get on the treadmill this week to help keep that weight down.

I'm still figuring out the layout of things around here. Traffic is crazy in the morning. My first day I left the house at 7:00 a.m. to get to orientation and made it to the building in about 20 minutes, being almost 40 minutes early. The next day I pushed it to 7:10 a.m. to leave and didn't get to the building until about 7:45 a.m. Ten minutes makes a huge difference here. Where I live in Bella Vista, the roads are all windy and crazy. I think someone said that there's over 600 miles of roads in an area that's contained by about 50 square miles.

I went out to Dairy Queen for a treat the other night, a place that's no more than 2 miles from my house as the crow flies, and the entire trip took about 45 minutes. Of course, I got lost once trying to find a place that google maps told me was closer. I don't think you can rely very well on maps that aren't generated from within this area. My car's GPS has misled me on more than one occasion already.

With the long hours, I haven't done much unpacking still. I did take some pictures shortly after moving everything in that I posted on flickr. Even though it's been almost two weeks ago, the house doesn't look much different now than it does in these photos: updated house photos

Just so everyone is aware: I can't access any non work-related sites from work, so the days of me responding to email between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. are pretty much gone unless I can work out a good data plan on my cell phone or something.

Other than that, I just have to say thanks to all my friends and family who've been in contact the last few weeks and listening to me ramble. You guys have kept me sane until life started to settle back into a routine. I appreciate you all.

If you're interested in some more pictures, here's some I took while looking the place over (though I apologize because they aren't great, my camera doesn't do well in confined spaces): House Pictures

As things stand right now, I'll be moving from Cape around 3/30 when I go to sign the papers on my house. I start work on that next Monday and begin a new life in a new town with a new job. That's a first for me even though moving to Cape ten years ago was similar, except that I had friends and family with me when I did it. Life has changed so much in the last ten years.

Looking forward back then, I would have never imagined life to be like it is today. People are gone from my life that I expected to be around for much longer. People came into my life that I can't imagine living without now. I'm sure more of the same will happen in the next 10 years and I'll be just as surprised looking back at that point as I am looking back now.

Every year that I can, I like to do a "surprise" Christmas gift. David was going to be the recipient this year. On one of my previous trips down he'd been complaining about the quality and shutter speed of his instant digital camera. Since he and mom bought me my first 35 mm SLR camera, and having made the transition from instant digital to SLR digital a few years ago, I had the perfect gift: A new digital SLR body camera. I was sure to get the same model he had in film so he could use all his lenses and attachments. I got my mom and brother in on it as well. Unfortunately, he never got the surprise.

The second and bigger disappointment is my desk. When I graduated college in 2000 Mom and David both hassled me about what I wanted for a graduation present. I'm not too big on receiving presents myself, so I finally just told David that I wanted a computer desk. Since I was living in a house with 4 other people at the time, I didn't have much room. Later I moved to the apartment with my best friend and still didn't have room. When Larry moved out in 2005, David started asking me about my desk.

Since I graduated college, I've been working as a contractor on a job that could have potentially been over in any given 6 months. That doesn't exactly lead to a stable atmosphere. When I found out my job was really ending, and then I knew I'd be moving on to a more permanent job and able to settle down some. Part of that settling down will include buying a house and therefore having room for an office. Several months ago I finally sat down and started making plans for a desk for David to build. I found some plans online that fit very closely to what I wanted, so I bought those and downloaded Google SketchUP and used those dimensions to build my own desk. Here's what I designed:

Before he went into the hospital, he told my brother that he was about two days away from having my desk finished. If life had worked out differently then I would have probably had a finished desk when I came down for the holidays just a few short days later. Luckily there's someone who did work with David on various projects and he's told mom that he would finish the desk for me. Here's the work my step-dad had complete when he went into the hospital that Friday:

On top of all of that, I came home to find out that the offer with my new company has been withdrawn because I failed the background check. Now, if you know me then you know how ridiculous that is. I used to be a deputy sheriff, I think I know what it takes to have a criminal background, and I know that I don't have one. I've never been arrested. I've never done drugs. It's pretty crazy.

I ended up running a background check on myself and found that there's someone in New Jersey with a very similar name (different middle initial) and the same date of birth as me. I'm trying to get this straightened out with the background check people, but that could take as much as 40 days or more to get fixed.

P.S. Something is wrong with Blogger and my dream log posting to t

I went to a job fair in Little Rock earlier this month that didn't work out quite like I had hoped. Apparently employers that hire computer programmers would rather you just register on their website than meet them in person. Some people even refused to take my resume in person. Crazy stuff. I've got a couple of interviews for the first of December, but if those don't pan out, I'll have to start looking towards St. Louis and some bigger cities.

Other than job stuff, my job itself has been quiet. I'm wrapping up a 6 year stint at the same job using the same technology and apparently I've been just a bit too lazy on keeping up technologically speaking. The last few months I've tried to do some catch-up, but I'm not where I'd like to be.

Of course, it hasn't been all work. I've got a new project I've started with a friend that I'm not ready to announce yet. I've visited with family some this month. I even downloaded a ten day trial of World of Warcraft this weekend to try it out some. But I won't get addicted to it, because I've cut off all entertainment expenses until I've gotten a job and found some place to move. No new DVDs, no games, nothing. To be fair, though, I haven't spent much on entertainment expenses in the last several months anyway. My life has been on hold for awhile now and I'm ready to get going.

The funeral service was very nice considering the minister didn't really know her. Todd and I both laughed about how much better of a service it was than the one for our father. I had to explain to my cousin and his wife that at least the minister didn't imply that she was going to hell and use the sermon as a way to save everyone else in attendance, which is what happened at my dad's funeral. I could tell that this service was a big comfort to all the family there.

It was interesting watching my grandfather, a product of a generation where showing emotions was not only frowned upon, but was a major sign of weakness. This was his last remaining sibling and it had to be hard for him. I made sure to hug him more than once this weekend.

There were some fun times this weekend, though. I spent some time in the library looking through some old newspaper microfilm. There was some joking with my cousin and his wife about any number of topics; I always enjoy hanging out with them. Laughing about not being able to hit on the cute girls that were there for fear that they would be family (although it might not have been too serious an offense; it was Arkansas after all). Looking at the cute blonde girl at the funeral and arguing with myself over whether she was painfully cute or painfully thin.

The dinner after the service was nice. It was just family and some close friends of my second cousins. There was a lot of laughter and stories told that focused more on the good times than the bad. I've found that those are the easiest kinds of funerals to go through and when my time comes I want everyone crying from laughter, not tears.

Every once in awhile I go through the surveys that have been taken on my site and do some clean up. One of the biggest problems I have is the religion section. I make categories for everyone to use, but leave "Other" open as a possibility so that people can put in whatever extenuating circumstances they want to list. The thing that causes me the most problem is misspellings.

Faith is a very important part of ones life as you might imagine. You would think that something that defines the very core of your being, your very essence and your entire moral core would be something important enough to remember how to spell properly. I've got several routines I use to clean things up, but at the end I'm just walking through reading the various entries and deciding if it does actually fit in one of the categories.

To be fair, I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that about half of the people who list a particular religion (other than "Non-Religious/No Answer") say that they don't practice that religion. I guess if you grow up in a particular religion, but don't really practice it anymore, you don't have a lot of incentive to remember how to spell it. Of course, "Christian" is something that I imagined a lot of people would know how to spell whether they were religious or not.

I went to see a movie today. That's random because I hate going to movies alone. I feel terribly self conscious. It's silly and I know it's not true, but I feel like everyone is looking at me saying, "Aw, that poor loser can't get anyone to go see a movie with him." :)

I went to see "Man of the Year" with Robin Williams in it. It was pretty funny, but not quite as good as I had hoped. I won't spoil it for anyone wanting to go see it, but I'll say that I walked out of it kind of depressed because it just reminded me that the political game is not likely to change until people decide to wake up and take charge of their future. The only problem is that not enough people have fought for their freedom enough to understand how important it is. Everyone's too willing to say, "But I don't do anything wrong, why should I care if they take that little freedom. Only criminals would care."

While I was waiting for the movie to start a middle aged couple came in with what I assumed was their daughter. She was in her late teens / early twenties, but I didn't get that good of a look at her. What annoyed me was that she kept sending text messages throughout the movie. She was polite enough to have the phone on vibrate, but I just happen to be the type of person that can hear the vibrate noise better than I can feel the vibration going off, so I think I knew when she had a text before she did. And, man, cell phones are awfully bright and distracting in a dark theater.

I think the poor girl really didn't want to be there. The only time she laughed through the whole movie was when Robin Williams made a joking plea to women who are getting breast implants: please implant squeaky toys. Because, really, what better way to keep a guy entertained. It made me wonder whether she had breast implants or just a really handsy boyfriend.

Speaking of breast implants, can I just take a second to say this: Women, please don't get them. While I can't say that I've ever had my hands on a pair of implants, they just look terrible to me. I would much prefer a pair of smaller breasts to a pair of DDs that make you feel like there's a third person in the relationship. But then again, I *like* small breasts; I doubt there are a lot of guys that feel that way.

Let's see, what other random information do I have to impart? I learned today that water pitcher filters can g

I guess I'm just noticing things today. Like the fact that I tend to let random chance control my life just a little too much. I stumbled across a comment on a blog posting where a guy was offering information on how to make a good living through hard work and integrity. So, I emailed him. I stumbled on that for a reason, right?

Take my leg for instance: Apparently I walked a little too much yesterday, but it didn't really start hurting until I got home to walk again today. So, I took a couple of aspirin and didn't walk on the treadmill.

Or dinner tonight: I went through the drive thru at Fazoli's to get a salad and some dessert. The woman in front of me ordered spaghetti with meatballs. Can you guess what I made it home with? Of course, I could have checked the bag in the drive thru. Or I could have gone back once I got home. But, no, I just accepted it that maybe I just really needed spaghetti with meatballs.

It's either that, or maybe it just wasn't my day to get the dessert. ;)

The girl on the other end instantly replied, "We need to trim some trees around the power lines at your dad's old place, is that OK?," without a pause to look up my account or anything.

I didn't catch the name of the person who answered the phone, but with as many people that came in and out of dad's house over the years it's entirely possible that they were someone that intimately knew the house. Of course, that's made more difficult because there's not actually an address to Dad's house. We would always get our mail through our business or through a post office box in later years.

You've got to love a small town where everyone knows everyone else and all business is transacted on a first name basis.

Another interesting thing happened while listening to NPR on the way to work this morning. I was listening to this story where they reported on a television program in Iraq and there were this Sunni cleric and Shiite cleric discussing whether or not Iraq was currently in a civil war. Both agreed that they were, but that wasn't the interesting part. The part that caught my attention was one of the translators on the radio had this odd accent that felt almost Scottish. I started immediately wondering what would cause someone Scottish to learn Arabic.

The very next story was about one of their correspondents, the very same one that I noticed. He was Iraqi and apparently learned how to speak English in Scotland. What a fascinating mixture of cultures that would be, except for the fact that he had to leave his wife and daughter in Iraq for their safety because they are a different religious sect than he is.

So, let's see, it's been a few months since I've posted here. Life has changed a lot in some ways, not a lot in others.

On the job front: I'm still working at the same place. My relocation has been delayed by a few months and there's talk again of moving me to another project so they won't lose the benefit of my 5 years of experience in the various global projects I've been involved with. I'm not sure that's going to happen, but they are talking about it. I'm still expecting to be in a new job before the end of the year.

On the personal front: I'm single again as of a few weeks ago. Just shortly after our one year anniversary Kerriann and I broke up. I miss her more than I expected to, but I know that in the end it's the right decision for both of us. It's weird adjusting to being alone again after spending so much time with one person. With most of my friends in town having moved in the last few months, it's a very thankful thing that I have hobbies. :)

Of course, with my job up in the air, I'm faced with not really being able to settle down in life in any fashion. I hesitate getting someone involved with my life when I'm almost certain to be leaving in a few months. That thought almost stopped me from dating Kerriann over a year ago and had I listened and put my life on hold then, I would have missed out on that experience. Although, I have to say that I don't even really feel like dating at the moment.

Of course, as things always go with this job, it looks like things are going to be extended a little bit. I don't see that this off-shoring thing is going to stop, although my management did make a big push at stopping it. What's sad is that we can all see that this is going to fail and there's nothing we can do about it.

I had a great birthday a few weeks ago. I spent the weekend with my family and the day of my birthday with close friends. What more can a person ask for? :)

At the beginning of the month they brought in a contractor from India to start the process of off shoring our work. What's insane is that this is a huge intranet project with 600+ programs, all with medium to high complexity and they expect it to be done by June 30. It's really kind of laughable.

But, I'm being all professional about this and doing my best to help this transition occur... at least until I can find something else. I'm polishing up my resume and then I start the process of trying to find some place else to live. I'm not even really sure what I want to do yet, or where I want to go for that matter. I just don't see staying in Cape as an option if I want to have any kind of career in programming.

Happy Birthday, dear friend, wherever you are.

Life is still busy lately. I got a "sort of" promotion a few weeks back, so I've been working and doing a lot of overtime, which is nice when it comes to buying a few toys here and there. Larry and I are working on an idea for an IPTV type show and I need to collect up the cash to buy a video camera. Overtime can be really nice for that. :)

Other than being busy, life is generally good. I've been dating someone and that's going well. As horrible as I am about follow through on side projects normally, it gets worse when I'm dating for obvious reasons... not that I'm complaining mind you! Is it a consequence of getting older that you feel like you don't have as much time to do things as you used to?

Take care to all of my friends out there, and remember that no matter when the last time we talked, you're on my mind.

...
I really need to get better about keeping this updated, don't I? :)

Anyway, I've got a couple of ideas I'm playing around with in my mind for the survey. Once I get caught up on the paying jobs, I'm going to start looking at it some. I'm thinking about picking a few topics and doing some in-depth research into the surveys to write an article on each topic. If you've got some ideas you'd like to see researched a little deeper, feel free to send me an email.

And, for the curious: I'm still loving my car!

After a 10 month wait, I took delivery of my 2005 Toyota Prius two days ago (12-Oct-2004). It's a gas/electric (full) hybrid. That means that it can run completely on its gasoline engine or its electric engine (or both). According to EPA estimates, it gets 60 MPG in the city and 51 on the highway. Yes, that's right, it gets better gas mileage in the city because it will completely shut off the gas engine. It's a very eerie feeling when you pull up to a stop light and the engine just shuts off.

For more info on the Prius, check out Toyota's website.

Well, screw it. I'm going to tell everyone anyway. After 10 long months, it looks like I'm finally going to be getting my car! Theoretically there is a 2005 Toyota Prius on a train to Kansas City as I type. Within about two weeks it should make it down to my fair city and I hope to be driving it soon.

I'd say wish me luck, but I know that I'm already pressing it by even mentioning that I could be getting my car. :) Even the people I've told about it coming in I've still been careful not to *say* that it's coming, I've just said something like, "Well, it looks like my car might finally be on its way," or something generic like that. Hell, as I go back and read my last paragraph I even did it here!

When did I get so superstitious?

Anyway, I'll be sure to post pictures just as soon as it gets here. If it gets here, that is. :)

This fall so far has been fairly busy. I've been babysitting for a friend two nights a week and helping her with calculus homework at least as many nights of the week. This summer I photographed a couple of weddings professionally, and while I think they look extremely amateurish, both couples liked their pictures. I know that my distaste comes from me being hyper-critical of my own work.

I'm hoping in the next few weeks to start finishing the work on my dad’s house so I can get it sold. It's been this burden hanging over my head that keeps me from looking too far into the future I think. I'll be glad when it’s done.

That’s pretty much it for my life lately. How’s yours going? :)

The survey is supposed to be set up so that if it sees an error, it emails me what was being entered. Apparently my "fix" was so bad that it couldn't even send me an email and for the last 10 days I've been oblivous to the fact that nothing was being submitted.

Anyway, sorry about that folks. Hopefully everything is fixed now and I'm going to try and fix that part that's not emailing me when there's a problem. Oh, and I've still got that cleanup to to finish one of these days. :)

Because of people's reactions, I’ve switched to almost exclusively using my yahoo account for communicating with potential dates. Most people don’t dig around to find my yahoo profile (which links to the site) and it’s nearly impossible to google for Scott Williams by itself and find me any higher up than about link 200 or so. Of course, you can throw in a few other keywords and find me much more quickly, but most people don’t seem to dig too far.

So why did I go to this trouble? When people first come to my site the common reaction (assuming they even continue talking to me) is something like, “So what’s the deal with your sex survey?” I’m almost immediately on the defensive trying to explain that I’m not some freak who obsesses about sex all the time. I just have a very healthy *intellectual* interest in sex. Well, obviously I have a physical interest in sex as well, but it certainly doesn’t happen enough to make me a freak. Or maybe it makes me a freak because it doesn’t happen enough? :)

The page Why? under my Sex Survey menu was one of my first attempts at explaining myself, although it was a bit more focused towards explaining to one person in particular. Even though the message was sent anonymously, I had a strong suspicion it was this girl I had a bit of a crush on and I was doing my best to keep her interest. That didn’t really work out, but the principle of the page I wrote still holds: trying to explain to people I’m not a freak.

I don’t force my survey on anyone, especially anyone I’m first meeting. My website is a completely personal site. I like taking pictures; I’ve got photo albums. I like researching my family; I’ve got genealogy pages. And, yes, I like talking about sex. I don’t think we do enough of it in society these days, at least not the kind of talk that’s productive and educational.

Of course, my survey isn’t exactly overly scientific, but I’d like to think that it’s at least somewhat educational. I’d also like to think it sparks discussion. I know that friends have taken it together. I know that couples have taken it together. I know that there are even a few classes that have been directed this way. I’d like to think that any of those event lead to some good discussion about sex. That’s the whole point of the survey, really.

I know that the majority of the world could care less how my day went. The people who do care probably don’t want to (or shouldn’t) know my inner thoughts, so I just leave nearly everything in my journal and call it even. I don’t have much anonymity with this site. My friends read it occasionally. My family reads it occasionally. I have days where I’m depressed and frustrated at the world and if I posted a journal entry from one of those days I’d get an email from my mom asking me if everything is okay. Seriously, does anyone want to hear how I’m a horribly sappy romantic and cried while watching an episode of Roswell the other day? I didn’t think so.

Besides, my journal entries mean next to nothing. I’ll go back occasionally and read older entries and I’ll be amazed by some mundane detail that I described exactly, while leaving some major life event out. At the same time they are very dangerous. There are certain time periods that I stay away from or I’ll read entry after entry, consumed by the thoughts and feelings that plagued me at the time.

I guess I’m less afraid of posting my dreams to the world because on the surface they don’t mean anything. The scary part is that they are a lot more personal than some journal entries would be. I do my best not to censor what I remember of my dreams, but occasionally I’ll leave a name off to give my subconscious a thin layer of protection from the world. What’s more dangerous: Giving your thoughts to the world or exposing your subconscious to the world?

Here's hoping 2004 is good for everyone.

But, before we head off into the future, I thought I'd just share one more little piece from the past. This is from a *little* more than ten years ago (more like twenty). It just goes to show you that I'm truly a child of the 80s. Enjoy!

Hover over a thumbnail to see a description. Click on the thumbnail to see the full sized picture.

Cleaning up Dad's

In the near future I'm going to be playing around with putting the survey on a different database to try and see if I can speed the site up some. I've noticed a bit of a slow down at different times. If that doesn't work, I'm going to have to do a lot of work on the results page to try and get some performance improvement there.

Click here for pics

Anyway, if you're interested in 1997-1999, hit the "News Archive" below.

Oh yeah… the first version of the sex survey was finished on October 10, 1996. I forgot that in my bit about 1996.

Most of 97 was a depressed blur, but ironically the first date I had since April broke up with me ended up being on her birthday. The date really didn’t go that good though, and I’m not sure why really.

I spent a lot of the next couple of years becoming nearly obsessed with a whole lot of different women around me, but never go the guts to ask any of them out. Yes, I am pathetic. What’s really sad though is the sheer number of women I make mention of in my journals. If I just had the guts to ask even one of them out, I might not be complaining about it here.

April: Bought a new computer. What did I get? I got a Pentium 200 MMX w/ 64 Megs of ram and 512K Cache, a 12x min/16x max CD Rom, an internal Zip drive and a 17” monitor. I think I paid like $3300 for it. Insane.

May: Dad had some sort of seizure related to a “bleeder” in his brain – and I ended up getting a D in calculus because of it. It happened the day before finals and I didn’t get the chance to study or to tell the professor and get an extension.

July: I finished my first short story for publication, ‘Curves of Fate’ – a particularly sappy story I wrote, in part, to help me work through all the crap I went through with April. The protagonist figures out the even with time travel possible, you can’t fix a doomed relationship, you only make things worse. No, I didn’t get it published.

August: Dad had another seizure. And, on a completely unrelated note, I make lots of mentions of how cute coeds with nice breasts make me lonely. :)

September: I met Janet, the first girl I seriously liked since April (the girl, not the month). Over the course of the next year or so, she messes with my head off and on and leads Larry to ask me how I always manage to find women that mess with my head, use me for whatever they need me for and never do anything for me in return. Our “friendship” went about like this: She’s single, she’s dating, she’s broken up, she’s not broken up, she’s dating, she’s broken up again, ‘stop talking to me, he’s getting pissed’, ‘can you help me with my homework?’, etc.

1998

February: I met one of the most intellectually compatible women I’d met to that point – only to find out she was gay. :)

Sometime around here I met my good friend Heather.

March: Todd and I learned that Elk sausage just does *not* work with Tuna Helper. I recommend that no one else ever try this. Geocities takes down my survey for “guideline violations.” I bounced my site around a couple of different free services for the rest of the year after that.

June: I dipped my big toe into the world of Genealogy.

July: A very good friend of mine from grade school died from complications due to AIDS. We “dated” in the second grade until Mom and Dad got divorced and I moved away. I wish that after I moved back to Doniphan that I hadn’t been so busy trying to be “popular,” because I could have been a better friend to her through those years.

August: Ryan, a guy I went to high school with, but never really knew that well, moved into the house with us. He proceeded to become one of my very best friends.

December: InfiniteThinkings.com is born!

1999

January: Heather came for a visit for a few days before heading out to the military and losing contact with her for a couple of years. This month I also met another person who eventually became a very good friend, Angela, as she started dating my little brother.

February: We all but confirmed that the house we were living in was cursed. Every person who moved into the house and was dating someone ended up being dumped within a couple of months of moving in. It happened without fail.

March: Farscape entered my life. What a great, great show.

June: I met StephtheGeek on ICQ, a

I’ve decided that to honor my third decade that I would do a little “last decade history” just as kind of a reflection of where I’ve gone that last 10 years. Some things are sketchy until 1996, because that’s when I started my journal writing again. One thing I’ve learned in writing this is that memory is a very funny thing. It’s amazing reading back through old journals and seeing all the things I’ve forgotten. I guess I really am getting old.

I had hoped to finish it all by today, but I didn’t quite make it… so you’ll just have to deal with Part One. Check out the news archive link below to read about 1993 - 1996.

August 1993, I’m working for the Sheriff’s Office back home. I was Office Manager there for a little over two years. I loved that job, even though the pay really, really sucked. I think I started out making $4.36 an hour.

1994
Sometime between August and September I broke up with Paula. I know I didn’t handle it the best of ways, which has been a pattern off and on in my life. I also made the mistake (later… about 1997 or 1998, I think) of getting a hold of her and attempting to apologizing. That’s never a good thing to do. Sorry about that Paula.

I bought a Saturn SC2 in September – my very first new car. Living at home had its advantages. Also in September Dad started buying a building to put in a bar – his second. He partnered with one of his best friends. We opened up sometime in the next month. I would work down there behind the bar on a lot of weekends, which caused a little friction while working at the Sheriff’s Office. Luckily the bar was in the next county over.

1995
For a few months in here I dated one of the bar maids at the club, Dianne. She proposed to me within a month of dating. It was a very unique experience and scared the hell out of me.

Around April or May I started dating April. We met through the friend of my dad’s girlfriend. She wanted me to take her to her senior prom (we’d only been dating a very short while when that happened), but I wasn’t too comfortable with the idea. Hell, I felt old back then, and I was only 4 years older than her. Of course, it didn’t help hearing the story about how she saw me at prom two years before with Paula and wondered then who the “old guy” was. :)

It was the most intense relationship I’ve had yet and it taught me a whole lot about love and eventually about pain. We dated for about 2 years or so. I also learned that it’s really, really difficult and frustrating dating someone who is a virgin when you aren’t. :)

At the beginning of December I quit working for the Sheriff’s Office and went to work for the Judge as his clerk. It was a much better job, but wasn’t nearly as exciting as working for the Sheriff’s Office. I worked there until August of 1996 when I quit to go back to school.

1996
On February 10, 1996, I got this new fangled invention that I had been hearing a lot about – the internet. Until then I had been getting email through a friend’s bulletin board service (BBS), and he hadn’t had it hooked up to the net all that long. I would call up once a day or so (long distance before I got the net) and get all my messages, hang up, reply and sign on to send. I think I was running my Gateway 486-66DX2 back then. It probably had something like a 350mb harddrive and 16mb of RAM. Man, I had a sweet machine. :)

Throughout the first part of this year I spent a lot of time categorizing all the pictures I’ve ever taken and putting them in a database to help me keep track of them.

In July Todd moved to Cape to start looking for a place for us to live to go to school.

In August one of my brother’s best friends (and someone I grew up with) died in a car wreck. A few weeks later I quit working for the judge and Larry, Joey and I joined Todd in Cape to go back to school. So began a very interesting four year experience.

I ended up having to get two different jobs to try and give me enough money to survive in Cape. The first was a lab assistant on campus and the other was doing data entry for an accounting firm. I ended up staying with the accounting firm until 2000. I think I quit the lab assistant job after a year and a half or so. Actually, for the rest of the year I had another job too: I was helping the Sheriff close out his books for the end of his term, so I was working every weekend I was home there too

I also finally got around to putting a thing in my status box on the main page about what song I'm listening to. For awhile now I've wanted something that will send my current song in Winamp to the site and write some sort of script to handle displaying that. Now anyone who couldn't care less what I'm listening to can actually see what song was most recently playing in Winamp. Nifty, huh?

Lately I’ve needed something, but I can’t quite put my finger upon what. I’ve been uncharacteristically apathetic lately. I’ve got a million and one little projects that I never seem to finish, but I don’t have the energy or drive to work on any of them. I’m sure that being sick for the better part of last week was a large contributing factor – at least that’s my strongest hope.

I hope to do better in the coming weeks, but I suspect that work will be picking up again now that I’m feeling better and will cut into my free time. Such is life, I suppose. I’m really too young to think about retiring, so I guess that should be a good indication that I’m not particularly happy with my work life at the moment. Hopefully things will change in the near future to work at fixing that. We’ll see, I suppose.

I’ve spent most of the morning in front of the TV. I’ve heard it mentioned many times today that as a people, we’ve forgotten that space travel is an inherently dangerous business. I think many of us who are space buffs have never forgotten this. Apollo 1 reminded us that *anything*, even the routine, can go wrong. Challenger reminded us just how dangerous liftoff can be. Columbia will remind us how dangerous landing can be.

My heart, thoughts and prayers go to the astronaut’s family, friends and extended family that their co-workers are.

I support the space program in this country 100%. I fully believe that the value we obtain from our missions in space well outweigh any monetary cost to get us there. As much as I might disagree with our president on other matters in the world today, I’m very glad to see that he doesn’t want to deter us from the mission of the stars. The lives of these astronauts and the 10 who died before them should not be in vain. I don’t feel today like I did 17 years ago when we lost the Challenger; I don’t feel that this is going to halt our space program. Too many valuable things have been learned -- both physically and scientifically, as well as learning about ourselves -- to give up our search for the stars.

Again, I want to extend my thoughts to the family of Shuttle Mission STS-107.

What does that mean? It means I'm going to have to start doing some validation on the surveys to make sure one person (or person(s)) isn't trying to manipulate the data. If I figure out that it's one person, I'm going to kick out all the data from that IP Address.

I thought of something humorous this morning as I was getting dressed, 'my real life is infringing on my online life.' It's true, but not in a bad way. I guess I *do* have a life after all. I'll have even more of a life when I finally get the estates of my dad and grandmother wrapped up. That would be part of my New Year's Resolution if it wasn't going to happen without my doing anything anyway. I just need to get dad's truck sold.

Uhm, that's pretty much it for me lately. I'm winding down an end of the year vacation and I'm not nearly rested up enough. I *so* need to win the lottery. I guess I should actually buy a ticket, huh?

This is a much bigger task than I originally anticipated, but very necessary. A lot of the pictures were stored in old magnetic photo albums and the pictures were stuck to the pages. I ended up having to rip part of the pages off to get the photo loose. Everything is starting to fade, so I will end up doing a considerable amount of work on each scan as I make them. From there I'm going to either print out photo pages or take them all to some printer and have them done for me. I'm not sure which will be the cheapest option since I'm going to make three "books" of these; one for Mom, Todd and I. Once I get all the pictures scanned, I'm going to print them out on my laser printer and take them to mom to have her help me caption them all in some way. What fun!

Other than my huge photo project, I've been seeing someone pretty regularly lately. I've never really been one to date several people at one time. I guess I have a hard enough time getting to know one person and I don't want to get everything confused between two or three people. Yeah, I've always been a little weird. :)

First: You must write.
Second: You must finish what you write.
Third: You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.
Fourth: You must place it on the market.
Fifth: You must keep it on the market until sold.

I had a good time though. I need to get out and do some regular dating every once in awhile. I even learned a little something about myself -- I've gotten pretty boring. Really, I was never terribly exciting, but when she asked me what I wanted to do I had to reply, "I have no idea." See, my problem is that I've forgotten what I want to do. The last year and a half I've spent a very large majority of my time on the road going back and forth to Dad's to take care of grandmother and eventually take care of her's and dad's estates. Before that was college and working full time and homework and not having any money and the fact that there's just not a whole lot to do in Cape.

It's not like I don't have hobbies or anything, but it seems like most of my hobbies are solo hobbies -- computers, genealogy, writing, photography, etc. Either I need to find a place with some culture or I need to expand my hobbies to include something more public and group oriented than watching movies. :)

As a side note to an incredibly long entry, I must say it was refreshing to see a thriving downtown area. We drove to Columbia yesterday and messed around downtown. There were people everyone just hanging out, looking around and shopping. I'm sure part of it was because of the homecoming game yesterday, but it's nice to see a thriving downtown. That's one of the things I miss about the Doniphan of my youth -- downtown was active and there was a real community spirit going on.

Anyway, here are the pics. Enjoy!

The party that night was fun, although very long. One of Todd’s friends is a hypnotist and we watched him hypnotize this one girl and had her doing all sorts of (harmless) things. I managed to take a few minutes worth of video with my digital cam, but it didn’t turn out very well. I've decided that I'm ready to buy me a good digital video recorder and I was kicking myself all day Sunday for not having already done it for the wedding. I would have loved to be giving Todd and Dana a DVD of their wedding this week.

Sunday Ryan and I drove back home, except we took a 3-hour detour for him to check his mail at home before he drove back to St. Louis. He wasn’t very happy when we got there and all he had was his change of address confirmation in the box. As we passed through Doniphan I also stopped by Dad's house to pick up a few things.

I keep saying that my life is going to settle down now so I can work on stuff around the house (including this site), but there’s no real sign of it yet. I’ve got this weekend off (because I think I’ll go crazy if I don’t get some rest) but after that is a camping trip next weekend and a trip up north a little bit to meet someone new the weekend after that. Life would be so much easier if I could figure out how to meet more people locally, but I can’t complain about driving a few hours to meet people who have many of the qualities I crave in the people around me. I just hate all the driving I’ve been doing!

Finally, after the next several weekends I’ve get to start worrying about fixing up dad’s house to sell and of course the holidays are coming up soon as well, so who knows the next time I’ll get several weekends in a row to just goof off. I wouldn’t complain if it weren’t for the fact that I’m dragging ass tired all the time. I can’t remember the last time I slept in. I know it’s been a couple of months at least. Anyway, that’s enough bitching from me for now! Carry on.

Anyway, we went to this strip club and spent a few hours there. Now, I don't know how many people here know much about me, but I don't like the idea of strip clubs. I'd rather spend $30 taking some woman out for dinner and a movie and getting teased that way than to spend $30 on drinks and tips watching girls shake their stuff in front of me. I know I'm not the typical guy, but it was really kind of sad watching these guys drool all over themselves. And it wasn't even a really cool strip club like in Illinois, these girls had to wear bikini bottoms and pasties.

I also got to confirm my distaste for breast implants. Granted, I didn't get to touch any, but this was my first opportunity to see several fake boobies live and in person, and I have to say that the girls with smaller real ones looked *much* better. But, that's just me.

There was one really interesting girl there. Her stage name was Taylor and she apparently grew up on the streets of St. Louis. She did an amazing job on the pole and I had to tip her just on talent alone. Get this: She climbed the pole all the way to the ceiling, wrapped her legs around it slid/dropped to the floor catching herself just before she hit the stage. Then she did a kind of flip/dismount thing *very* slowly. Then a few minutes later she'd climb up the pole and would walk down it slowly like a cat. It was very interesting.

I have to note that no matter how cute the girls were, I didn't get turned on at all. God, I'm strange. :)

G'night/morning from Arkansas and everyone have a great weekend.

Yesterday was a really long day and my feet hurt really, really bad by the time we were done. Todd and I were up doing stuff at 8:30, it started raining by 11 and we had people already coming out to look at things by 11:30. The auction started at 1:00 and went till shortly after 7. They were totalled up and nearly everything was picked up by 8.

I'm just glad that's all over. We didn't do as well as we could have (someone pointed out that one lure [in a box that went for $300] was worth $300 alone. No one likes hearing that!), but over all I have no real complaints because it is *done* and over with.

I've got Todd's wedding ceremony next weekend (any volunteers to be my date???) then I'm going to take a few weeks off and just sit around and be as lazy as I can. Then we get to fix the house up to sell. I'll be so glad when this is all over.

If you can't guess, our microwave went out the Monday night just as I was trying to pop a bag of popcorn. I can survive though; I am a man of the world. I used to cook popcorn on the stove all the time in high school, so i just grabbed some oil and a skillet and went to town. Microwave popcorn just doesn't pop good in a skillet though.

So, right after work yesterday I marched down to our new Best Buy and bought a new microwave. It's kind of weird because this is the first "major" appliance I've bought for myself (not counting my TV :). It's just another thing in my life recently that proves to me that I'm all 'growed up' :)

Check out www.SaveFarscape.com for more details.

Please, Please, Please... if you get the chance, check out http://www.savefarscape.com/ to find ways of contacting the execs of all the companies involved to help us try and save this wonderful show. I've done my part. I've sent off letters and emails and petititions and bulletin board posts trying to get people involved. We need your help!

Scapers Unite!

UPDATE!!!

Coming up next will be formatting and clean up as well as trying to make the results come up more quickly. It takes about 7 seconds or so to come up from my house, and I'd really like to get that down to at least half that. We'll see. Now that I'm on my new web host, I've got access to SQL Server, and I might try migrating to that to see if that will help any.

I'm sure you've seen the ones where they complain about dish satellite and all the the trouble it is like:

Thanks,
Scott

Even though I never met you Dawn, I'm going to miss you.

My heart goes out to her family and all of her many, many friends.

So, welcome to my new host at www.webhost4life.com -- Yes, that link is a referral link for me. I have to whore myself out occasionally. Hosting all this stuff isn't free, you know ;) Go sign up, they've got some really great NT hosting packages for a low price.

take care all, I'm not gonna be around this weekend, so if everything isn't up to snuff with the site, email me and let me know so I can fix it when I get back.

I also got the start on re-working my genealogy page. Although, like always, I got distracted before I could finish by looking up some bit of information and ended up researching some of my Carsons for like 5 hours. I *seriously* need to focus. :)

Subject: Time Travelers PLEASE HELP!!! 10160

Hello,
If you are a time traveler or alien and or in possession of government or alien technology I need your help! My entire life and health has been messed with by evil beings! If you have access to the carbon copy replica model #50 3000 series, the dimensional warp, temporal reversion or something similar please reply! I simply need the safest method of transferring my consciousness or returning to my younger self with my current mind/memory. I need an advanced time traveler to work with who can help me, I would prefer someone with access to teleportation as well as a variety different types of time travel. This is not a joke! I am serious! Please send a separate email to me at: [address_removed] if you can help! Thanks

One big thing on my list is getting my genealogy page(s) re-written and updated. It is very far behind at the moment. This last weekend I did some interviews of my grandparents to help me look further into the Smith and Thorpe sides of the family. I've also been tracking down some Williams descendents in Oklahoma and California.

I'm wanting to start a project that will have me scanning and organizing every picture (about 5 albums and 4 or 5 boxes full of pictures) I have gotten from my Grandmother Williams' house. I've been doing research lately on trying to figure out the best way to go about that.

Then, there's always the survey to work on. I'm hoping I can eventually get the results page fixed up and looking nice and have all the data I want on there for the time being. I've noticed that it's certainly being used lately. That's a good thing. Now if I could just get Yahoo to put me back on their site then maybe I'd get my traffic back up again. We'll see. I haven't heard anything from them again this time around.

As far as my personal life goes... "Personal life? What personal life?" Exactly. :)

Take care, Scott

Feel free to look around though! I'm sure there's something interesting to see.

Anyway, I was out driving around yesterday and snapped a few pictures for everyone to see who is interested. Be sure and check them out Here.

All pages should now be accessable from the menu across the top of the screen. You will still be able to see what pages are new as you go through the individual menus. Things should be much more streamlined and as I go through and modify all the pages, the site map on bottom will change to the menu at the top.

There's still some other pages I need to work on, like finishing up my artistic page (which is linked in the new design, but not fully functional) as well as adding some style sheets to everything, so expect to see lots of little new icons popping up on pages.

If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to contact me!

I'm working on another photo album for the site, this time with some more 'artsy' photos I've taken over the years, including some of my favorite portrait and candid shots of friends. They aren't *that* great of shots, but I'm partial to them for one reason or another.

And, don't worry. If you don't like cookies and you've got yours turned off, then the site should work just fine without them. You just won't see when things are updated. Sorry!

Please be sure and email me if you have any problems getting anything to load.

And just by making my dream log public on blogger.com, I've already gotten two people to the site that promptly went out and filled out surveys. Amazing. :)

Oh, and I've finally got the start of an idea on a site redesign. It should considerably streamline the main page, and the stuff on the main page would more or less become a site map. I might even break down and use a cookie to show things that have changed since you were last to the site.

Hopefully this will all work like I want! :)

Thank you again to everyone for their thoughts.

Scott

What's new now? Seeing as how it's the beginning of the month I've put some of the best/strangest web cam pics from last month into the greatest hits page. What? You mean you haven't noticed the link on the web cam page to the greatest hits folder? Well, shame on you!

The new results are here. Enjoy!

Besides, perhaps it's time I move on with a few things for the time being.

NEW! Oh, this is funny. My horoscope for today. could it be *any* more wrong:
Good times are on the immediate horizon for the Bull. Whether you're being showered with gifts or spending time with loved ones, this moment is everything that you expected it to be and more. As far as you can tell, all is right with the world. This is the perfect time to immortalize your feelings in a photo or drawing. You'll want something to look back on after all of the festivities have come to a close.

[sigh] Can we skip forward to the part where we're looking back on this and laughing?

Unfortunately, this caused me to lose all my surveys back to July. I've been working on a backup solution that I can keep offsite, but hadn't put it in place yet. Hopefully I can do something to keep this from ever happening again.

Hope everyone is having a safe and happy New Year!

All the news I had backlogging is apparently gone, as well as most of the stuff from the forum and the counters. If anyone remembers where the page counters were, I'd appreciate letting me know! I'm gonna raid the cache on google to see how recent their pages are. Hopefully that'll give me something close.

If you see anything that's really messed up, just drop me a line. There's probably going to be a dozen things I that had tweaked on the site before I made the last backup, so I don't expect things to work perfectly.

Take care all,
Scott

My biggest problem is that I've lost a hard drive at home and I'm hoping that the website stuff was in the things I've managed to recover. if not, then I guess I'm in for a large redesign of the site!

I'll let everyone know as I get things more stabilized. Obviously my infinitethinkings email will be down until things can be fixed. If you need anything, email me at psinormal@yahoo.com

Take care,
Scott

Between my father passing away and all the crap associated with that, and taking on a consulting job to make some extra cash, the web site isn't going to get much work done to it. I apologize and I hope everyone understands.

Thanks,
Scott

I realized in the shower this morning that the above pretty much sums up my entire week. Last Friday I took off work and through a court order got my father put in alcohol rehab. The same day my brother and I had to put my grandmother in a nursing home because with my dad gone, there was no one to care for her. This week the staff at the rehab suggested to me that I might have to get a guardianship over my father… which effectively makes me the head of the Williams household. So, my week has been filled with being on the phone with attorneys and doctors and nurses and counselors and just about half the population of the town I'm from.

So, needless to say, I haven't had much time to spend on the site. It never fails that as I sit down to start working on the site, something hectic happens in my life preventing it. But, hey! I can still smile :)

Tonight I was going to go out and see some fireworks with friends, but they cancelled, so I decided to put the time to good use by working on the survey.

Also, I noticed a few days ago that Yahoo has dropped the survey from their listings, so I've resubmittedit and we'll just have to wait and see if they put me back in again.

Feel free to email me with any questions or comments, although I will be slow responding for the next few weeks.

Thanks,
Scott

Other than that, things have just been crazy lately. Ryan, my friend and roommate, graduated this semester and is moving to West Plains, Missouri and we've been helping him get ready and get gone. Today will be his last official day in the house. With the loss of him, that leaves just Larry (my other roommate) and myself in this big house and we're going to have to move to a smaller apartment, so I have all the moving things to worry about.

I thought my life was supposed to slow down after I got out of school?? :)

Thanks!
Scott