attics of my life

Much to my wife's dismay some days, I have really fallen in love with football(soccer). And now that I have, I can't really understand why it has never really taken off in America. Soccer fans are like crazy passionate, compared to other sports, except maybe college football rivalries.

But a new MLS season is upon us. So far, I've never really gotten to into our brand of football. Here's a list of my excuses:

1. We call it the wrong thing - The people, British, who came up with the word don't even use it
2. It's always so much slower - Seriously, watch a game on FSC (Fox Soccer Channel) or GolTV then watch MLS
3. Commercials in the middle of my game - football doesn't have timeouts, or breaks in play for 45 minutes or so at a shot, which really goofs up American TV (it's blasphemous to not have a commercial every 5 minutes)
4. ESPN, ABC and the rest of these networks need to go hire a couple of European broadcasters to call the games, once again the people calling it know very little about it
5. Get rid of the stupid mascot names, it should be the Colorado United or Colorado Football Club
6. MLS structure - The way other countries do it makes so much more sense, football has a governing body / association), any team can join the association usually and you play to move up and down in the leagues

Danny just put up the new look. Go over and kick the tires.

Turns out Kiva is also doing gift cards for Xmas.

Oxfam America opened up their Unwrapped campaign for 2007. My wife and I decided that this year we are each going to spend $100-200 of what we would normally spend on Christmas here, which is about 25% or so of our annual Xmas budget.

So put the iPod back on the shelf and head over and buy someone who needs it more a sheep, cow, seeds, or crocodile.

So I didn't blog on day 3 or 4 because they sucked so bad. Day 3 I had a hard time focusing on anything that took longer than 3 minutes at a shot and was grumpy the whole day. Yesterday was more of the same but a little lighter, luckily I had some easy work to get done.

I'm still not sleeping I think since I quit on Monday I'm probably only getting 4 hours a night. But today it doesn't seem to be bothering me that much, and I'm taking in too much caffiene.

To others who are quitting, take a multi-vitamin and some B12 that seems to help. I also picked up some detox tea from these guys. I don't know how much it helped but hey any port in a storm. The only other thing I've been using as a crutch now is sugar-free butterscotch.

Today is much better though, I finally feel on top of things again and have even been able to focus enough to get some serious work done. It's funny how when you smoke you think you are focused right after a cigarette but now my focus is mind blowing to me. Maybe even zone/flow like.

For the second day, I'm update at 4:30 in the morning having a nicotine fit. Seems like lack of sleep is going to be normal for the first few days I guess.

The last time I had Nicorette gum was at 9'ish yesterday morning. So almost a complete 24 hours now without any nicotine. I guess the magic number is 72 hours for most of the nicotine to be out of your system.

So for would be quitters, here's something that is working for me. It seems kind of corny but I've been listening to Jeffrey Thompson's Music For Brainwave Massage 2.0, Amazon Link, whenever I get a cigarette craving. And it's working for me.

I would also recommend that you buy and read this book by Allen Car, The Easy Way to Quit Smoking, Amazon. He gets bashed sometimes but overall I think the book is effective at helping you get through quitting. Here's a tip though, don't read the book unless you are really serious about quitting. If you think this book is going to make you want to quit then don't waste your money.

Today was my quit day, so about noon I ran out of cigarettes and have been cigarette free for 7 hours or so. I've only had one piece of Nicorette gum about an hour ago.

So far the biggest thing I have noticed is fatigue and lack of focus. The fatigue is probably a dual whammie, due to cutting down on coffee since I associate having a cup of coffee with having a cigarette. The lack of focus today was kind of a bummer since I was trying to upgrade an app to the Rails 2.0 Release Candidate.

On the bonus side, my sense of smell seemed to start returning a lot quicker than I expected. Can't wait to taste dinner to see if that's better also.

Yesterday, I ran into a situation doing integration with a security app of having to calculate a date to float for SQL Server. Dates as float in SQL Server are calculated from 01/01/1900 00:00:00 so here is the code I used:

  @date = (Time.now.to_f.ceil/86400) + 24105

Time.now.to_f.ceil will return the number of seconds at the end of the day since Epoch Time 01/01/1970. Diving by 8400 will convert that to days and adding 24105 will add the number of days since 01/01/1900.

So to get the time for SQL Server as a float for 30 days from now this is the exact code I used:

  @end_date = ((Time.now + 30.days).to_f.ceil / 86400) + 24105

I have decided after 20+ years of smoking that I should quit. So I got Xiban from my doc and have set a quit date of 01 October 2007. This way I should be over any major obstacles before my Lake Powell vacation.

Having come to the beautiful game during last years Prem season and becoming a Liverpool fan, I decided to learn more about the history of the sport. And one of the books that continued to come up while I was researching was How Soccer Explains The World.

Having read Thomas Friedman's, The World Is Flat and Nick Hornsby's, Fever Pitch. This review on the hooked me.

It's as if Nick Hornsby, author of the brilliant soccer book Fever Pitch, commandeered Tom Friedman's laptop.

There's a really good chapter on why soccer/football has never taken off in the US. It's as good an explanation as any other that I have found.