I haven’t actually managed to make New Year’s Resolutions in a couple of years. I was so tied up in Chaplin being sick last year that all I could manage to get out was this post, a sentiment I’m tempted to share again this year.

For some reason, though, I’m not as angry. Probably helps that Chaplin is sleeping on my feet right now and not in an animal hospital, doped to the gills and recovering from surgery.

Probably helps that I’ve finally made a decision to move forward on getting out of showbiz. Probably helps that I feel like I’m on the right path, trying to learn something new instead of just flailing around.

I also think I’m done with actual weight resolutions – I’ve lost 86 pounds and would like to lose the 14 more that would a) take me to an even 100 and b) put me at a BMI of 25, but I feel like that’s going to be a long, frustrating process that’s not really worth making New Year’s Resolutions over. Better to focus on time goals that, while promoting weight loss, feel somewhat more achievable in the space of a year.

So, in the hopes that publicly stating what I want to do this year will give me some motivation to actually do it, my New Year’s Resolutions:

1. Finish redesigning my damn website by the end of January.

The blog is actually fine – it’s the main site that’s a travesty, not updated since 2003. I’ve taken about four stabs at redesigns that have never actually launched, and I am completely out of excuses for why it hasn’t. Happening by the end of January, dammit.

2. Lower my 10k elliptical time to consistently under an hour.

The frustrating part about this is that my ability to do this varies from machine to machine – I’ve actually done this on a couple of machines, but on the machine I use regularly, I’ll need to cut a minute a mile off my time to make it happen. I think over a year, I can do it.

3. Lower my 2 mile swim time to under 1 hour 10 minutes, and start swimming 4km from time to time.

4km is about 3/4km farther than 2 miles. I want to be swimming 5k’s at some point, but I know I’ve got to get my stamina back up quite a bit from where it is now – having the flu absolutely killed a lot of the progress I made this year in terms of building up stamina. Just got to keep putting down the building blocks.

4. Learn as many new programming languages as possible, with the goal of having a working iPhone application before I go back to school in September.

I’m going to be doing a lot of self-directed learning over the next few months, so I think I need to set a goal to give me some motivation to actually get off my ass and learn things. I think I’ve got a good idea for a program, so we’ll see how it goes.

5. Remember that if my plans and resolutions don’t work out, there are always more plans to be made.

I’m already moving from Plan B (TV mogul) to Plan C (professional nerd), and Plan C has many sub-plans of its own. I just have to remember to keep going with the flow, and try to make enough money to keep myself and Chaplin fed and sheltered in the meantime.

And that’s it. Hopefully everyone has a fun evening tonight, and hopefully 2010 starts off with a nice Northwestern Outback bowl win tomorrow morning, and next year we get into an even better bowl that doesn’t start at eight in the goddamn morning.

Happy New Year!

And now, in honor of the holidays, a slideshow of some of my (heavily, heavily cropped due to all the cars coming through) photos from the LA DWP’s Light Festival:

Full sizes of everything can be found at Flickr – I realize some of the cropping doesn’t make for the best viewing in the slideshow format.

I’ve been rather bad about blogging consistently, so in case I don’t get a chance to post again until after the holidays, I hope everyone travels safe and enjoys the holidays.

I’m a little behind the times on this one, but while I was actually working for a couple of days last week (helping my union set up and tear down their holiday party), one of the oddest reality show concepts to actually make it to air got thrown at the screen last week.

I speak, of course, of ABC’s Conveyor Belt of Love (Variety’s photo illustration at that link is priceless). How does it work, you ask? According to The Hollywood Reporter:

“If a woman is interested in someone, that man will step aside and wait as the rest of the men go by.  But if another man comes by on the belt that seems better than that woman’s first choice, she can swap out the man waiting off of the belt as many times as she wants until the last man has passed by. If two or more of the women are interested in the same man, the tables turn and the man on the conveyor belt gets to choose which one he would like to wait for. After all 30 men have made it through the ‘Conveyor Belt of Love,’ each woman is left with her final choice as they embark on a date in the hope of finding a true connection.”

The description is pretty stupid, not to mention overly complicated to the point where my eyes glaze over about halfway through it. The trailer THR dug up looks infinitely stupider:

Something that explains a lot about the current state of the airwaves: Television executives watched that 86 second video and determined that, stretched out over an hour, it would be even better.

I would really like to know what kind of wonderful, powerful drugs these executives were on at the time so I can get some for myself. They are clearly the best drugs ever.

I was watching a documentary in ESPN’s excellent 30 for 30 series about the University of Miami’s football program in the 80′s and early ’90s, and like many documentaries, there were a few shots of newspapers of the day, with the stories related to the program highlighted.

In one instance, however, I was much more intrigued by a story that ran alongside the one that I was supposed to be looking at. The documentary was concerned with a story about Luther Campbell, who was a big booster of the University of Miami teams, getting arrested for obscenity after performing with his rap group 2 Live Crew.

But running right next to that story in the newspaper (unidentified, but I presume it was the Miami Herald) was a story headlined “Pilot Nearly Sucked From Jet”, with the following text from the New York Times News Service:

The pilot of a passenger plane was partly sucked out of the cabin window onto the nose cone of the jet today after its windshield blew out at 23,000 feet. But he was saved by crew members who clung to his ankles for 15 minutes until the co-pilot landed the plane safely in southern England

Several of the aircraft’s 81 passengers said they watched in horror as crew members frantically wrestled to pull Capt. Timothy Lancaster back into the cockpit. The plane went into a dive, but with half of Mr. Lancaster’s body hanging outside the co-pilot flew the aircraft to Southampton Airport, 70 miles southwest of London.

Wait, WHAT?! I have a few clear memories of incidents from the news around this time frame, but I had zero recollection of something like this. Which is probably good because I would have been pretty reluctant to get on a plane after hearing about it.

I was so distracted by the story that I paused the TiVo so I could Google the headline. Turns out the New York Times actually has this story in their archive, albeit under a less eye-catching headline, and it’s just about as insane as you could imagine.

The pilot basically was hanging out the front windshield of the plane unconscious for fifteen minutes while the crew desperately hung onto him by his ankles. The man somehow wound up only needing to be treated for “shock, a fractured elbow, wrist and thumb, and frostbite on one hand.” After hanging out the broken windshield of an airplane in flight for 15 minutes.

A little more Googling turned up a 2005 first-person recollection the Sydney Morning Herald published from one of the flight attendants who saved the captain’s life, with the spectacular headline This Is Your Captain Screaming. That link is well, well worth a read – The abject terror the poor guy captures makes you understand why he had difficulty flying again.

The ironic part is that the pilot, who was unconscious throughout the ordeal, was back at work within six months and was still flying as of 2005.  I suspect someone will track him down next year for the 20th anniversary of this bizarre incident, and I’ll be interested to hear what he’s up to now.

A screencap from the Northwestern Online Store, who were apparently just as surprised as the rest of us by the upgrade to the Outback bowl:

To be fair, the email they sent out that I clicked on to get to that page had the properly photoshopped hat with the Outback logo on it….though all the shirts had the date a little off:

Dude, we totally got to the Outback bowl last year! Go tell Missouri they have to re-play last year’s Alamo bowl against Iowa now!

The first, both pretty and telling, comes courtesy of the New York Times’ photography blog’s feature on Dubai. Lauren Greenfield, who had mostly been documenting the way the recession hit here in the States, went over to Dubai and snapped this telling shot:

The juxtaposition of the impotent palm tree next to an empty McMansion, both of which are on a man-made island built in the shape of a palm tree, is just too fantastic.

The second is just a random one from a story on the LA Times’ local breaking news blog about a Shetland pony that was found wandering around the streets of Norwalk. Just an outstanding shot by the Times’ Don Bartletti of an animal control officer trying to calm the pony, gorgeously backlit by the sun.

Sometimes it’s just the random stuff that happens around town that turns into a really amazing photo.

The Washington Post has came up with a couple of doozies – the first being one of my personal favorite corrections of all time, which has already made its way around the internets a couple times for its sheer ridiculousness.

The second contains one of my favorite kicker quotes in a while:

“I’ve been on the job for more than two years here, and this is the first time I’ve seen a chicken stuffed with cocaine.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there are probably guys who have been there significantly longer who also have never seen a chicken stuffed with cocaine.