Seconds after taking this picture, the very young manager of Pier 1 came over to see what I was so amused with. He smiled wanly, obviously assessing damage, wondering how long it had been there, and debating whether it should be fixed immediately or if it could wait. Five seconds later he was calling associates over and tring to fix the new decorative labels before going to get a wet cloth to finish the job.

I have realized over the last while that I have utterly no clue what I want in life.  Yes, I know of many things that I want or activities which I would like to do, but I don’t have a clue as to what I want of myself or my experience in the long-term.  Maybe I’m wrong in thinking there is a distinction between the two because our lives are ultimately the sum of our smaller experiences and achievements.  It just seems to me that having a larger overarching goal, or at least direction, would be useful when weighing out choices or decisions.

Part of this mindset probably has something to do with having been raised as a Mormon in the Utah culture.  My existence from now through eternity was clearly mapped out.  When I was part of the church I didn’t just have a life-goal, I had an eternal game plan.  At the time I parted ways with the church, the rest of my eternal existence was looking something like this:

• Serve a mission
• Go to college
• Find eternal companion (spouse)
• Have children
• Raise children in the gospel
• Send children on missions and to college
• Serve a mission as a senior couple
• Die
• Be reunited with family in heaven
• Live for eternity in paradise

Yeah, there would be smaller varibles along the way which would have been up to me, but the goals and milestones were set out clear as day.  I’m not passing judgement on this plan, nor am I stating that it is a 100% accurate representation of what all Mormons see as their plan.  That just seemed to be the jist of how things were to go down for me.

I made peace with my parting from that path years ago and in the years since, I’ve been so very busy with some of my immediate goals that I was really passionate about.  I bought my home, I’ve worked hard at my job, I’ve built a solid circle of friends whom I love dearly, and I’ve learned a ton about myself and my capabilities.  These goals and achievements were inspired by needs and situations which arose from my life organically.  These were also very complex tasks, some of which are ongoing, which really occupied the bulk of my time and thought.

I’m now at a point where I’ve accomplished a lot of the meat of these goals and I find myself at a certain point in my journey.  It’s not what I would call a crossroads so much as an alluvial plain.  I chose a rushing river, jumped in with my kayak and navigated the rapids and cataracts and now I’ve emerged from the tight canyon walls and rushing waters into the flatlands.  (No I don’t kayak and yes, that even made me a little ill.)

Along the way I forged some really solid guiding principles but they do not really constitute a solid direction or heading.  They will do well to keep me out of trouble, but won’t provide a destination.  For now I will have to content myself with staying out of trouble (which I am more than thrilled to do).  I think my next big task will be the one of chosing what I do next and keeping myself in motion.  I am amused by the irony of this choice; my next big goal is to determine what my next big goal will be.  I don’t doubt that as with all things in my life, it turns out to be significantly different than anything I could expect at this point in time.

My Caesar salad at lunch. Even now, the Ides of March do not bode well for him.

A delightful restaurant in downtown Salt Lake City. Mister Frisky approved!

My life pretty much rebooted four and a half years ago when I came out and the events which took place over those first months left me in a state where I had to start my life over from scratch. I had almost literally nothing. My car was totaled, I had no job or money, I was living in a new and unfamiliar place, and I felt very much alone in this world. All I really had were my laptop, cell phone and a month of rent paid up front. This was the beginning of my very literal renaissance, my rebirth.

Four and a half years later I have a lovely home that is my very own. I have a great job which I’m now beginning to see as a career. I have a reliable car which is something I’ll never take for granted. I have good friends who I love dearly and have been there for me more times than I can count. All of this adds up to make my full and satisfying life which, in many ways, is still just getting started.

Tomorrow I will be 25 years old and as implausible and extraordinary as that seems to me, taken in the context of my implausible and extraordinary life, I suppose it makes sense.

Why are you so terribly disappointing?.

Have you seen how many things there to be disappointed about these days? Love. Sex. Marriage. Stock market. God. Gas mileage. Death. Air travel. 5/9ths of the Supreme Court. It’s all just a big goddamn letdown. The list is endless. And getting endlesser…

But we don’t stop there. Not only are we disappointed, we need to express it. Vent it. Hiss it and spit it and hurl it like fistfuls of mental manure at the great wall of hey, screw you.

I’m in love with the iPad. It rather neatly resolves the dillema I’ve documented in the past regarding my computing needs. I have always disliked the idea having more than one computer. I like elegant gadget solutions as I can’t afford to buy different devices frequently and I’m amazingly OCD so I don’t like overcomplicating things. I’ll be saving a huge amount of money getting an iMac and iPad instead of an iMac and MacBook Pro.

The vitriol about what the iPad isn’t has been unending and I think the haters are all just missing the bigger picture. iPad is great, people who don’t like it aren’t required to like it. The people who weren’t planning on buying one anyway need to shut the hell up already, obviously it wasn’t made for them. I had a huge post coming together about this and even I began to get bored with it so I will let far more eloquent and geeky people say it all for me.

TUAW’s amazing Erica Sadun, writer/developer/geek extrordinaire, wrote In praise of the iPad: A contrarian view. Jon Armstrong over at Blurbomat.com made an excellent case for Casual Computing and very clearly explains Who’s Gonna Buy That?

We are not apologists. (I’ve been clear in criticizing Apple in the past and just recently discontinued my subscription to MobileMe.) We are lovers of technology, geeks, who can see a device for what it is and it’s amazing potential as it has been realized.

P.S. Flash is the devil, HTML5 will save us from Adobe’s ever-bloating evil. I’m willing to wait for more widespread adoption.

P.P.S. The Hulett Plumbing Disaster Part II coming tomorrow!!!

The stats for this new iPod were staggering. It had a four gigabyte hard drive, could run for hours between charges, charged and synced data with one simple FireWire cable, and most amazingly you could transfer an entire album to it in 30 seconds. 30 SECONDS!!! Surely this was evidence that we were living in the future. I couldn’t believe what I was reading because it was just all too amazing.

I also remember feeling an overwhelming sense of sadness. It’s original price point of $399 seemed to be far to high for mass adoption rates. It only would work with Macs which I saw as a major shortcoming, though I was an amazing fanboy even then, as that also would immediately disqualify the vast bulk of consumers. I figured that I was looking at yet another beautiful Apple flop à la Twentieth Anniversary Mac or G4 Cube. I put the newspaper down and resigned myself to the idea that Apple was amazing, but might never have a product that would captivate the world or hold a majority of any market.

Several weeks later I heard of a student at my rural high school not just getting an iPod from his parents, but an iMac in order to use the new device. This would have been quite the revelation for the geeks, but the news had trickled down through the mainstream grapevine. The iPod was causing a stir and soon enough, it hit critical mass. Less than 10 years later, the iPod had become not just any device, but the device responsible for shaping the digital music revolution. It’s companion software iTunes being just as transformative to the process of buying music.

A similar feat, coupled with similar awe and just a hint of skepticism (even from me) was accomplished with the launch of the iPhone and eventually the App Store. Both have done a huge amount to shape how consumers view smartphones, expect to interact with these devices, how we view the Internet from the point of view of mobile, and location based services. The iPhone and App Store have even influenced how the tech industry views the process of development and distribution of software in general as well as how we define the the role and responsibilities (for better or worse) of mobile operating system vendors.

This brings us to where we stand today. On Wednesday Apple are launching a brand new device. What was originally referred to as just a “creation”, which could be interpreted on grand or small scales, was clarified today during Apple’s Q4 2009 earnings call by Steve Jobs himself as “a major new product.” The rumor mill leads us to be looking forward to an iSlate/iPad/iBook relaunch thingamabob.

This new “slate” class form factor, which is to netbook as tablet is to notebook, is hoped to find a solid foothold in the consumer electronics market. Tablet PCs, which were hoped to be a transformative product class, became a mainstream disaster. They managed to find a niche in the medical field and other specialist fields, but really failed to change the world as expected by the likes of Bill Gates.

That accounts for my skepticism which has always been a prerequisite for any awesome and successful Apple product launch, especially one expected to be so novel. The level of potential awesomeness is off the charts for what has been bandied about, but I won’t get into all the details as they are scattered and range so far and wide. I would refer you to my sources for the rumor mongering:

Gizmodo

The Unofficial Apple Weblog

AppleInsider

Mac Rumors

9 to 5 Mac

So here is hoping this new device, whatever it is, manages to be just as amazing, implausible, and ultimately successful as the iPod and iPhone. It’s been too long since I’ve had a new must-have gadget to lust over.

(As a side note, does anyone remember the Nokia N770 “Internet Device”? Not totally the same market, but similar enough to cause me to worry.)

BeyondtheTech @ Gizmodo