However, after the past week of people harassing me on campus and trying to buy my vote for UCF Student Government Association with pizza and drinks, I’ve realized nothing changes.

Seriously, student governments everywhere are ineffectual, worthless organizations filled with holier-than-thou, small-minded, self-important douches. Stop acting like you’re anything more than glorified event planners and shut the fuck up.

I mentioned this to one of the UCF candidates in my class and he absolutely lost his collective shit. He began lecturing me on how important SGA is, the difference they make in the lives of students, etc.

It blows my mind how important these people think they are. As if SGA is this bastion of respectability and icon of professionalism, what will we do without them? Who will govern us? Who will lead?!?

SGA changes every year and no one notices, why? Because the people in it are interchangeable.

Student Governments are a popularity contest, and that’s fine if people would just take it at face value. Aside from President and Vice President, most of the positions are almost always UNCONTESTED anyways, so who cares?

Someone please show me an example of a student government making a difference at a school? I have NEVER heard of student government going to bat for a student who needs their help, let alone me a student government taking a stand against the school administration. It just doesn’t happens.

If you really want to go make a difference why don’t you go TAKE ACTION. Find something you are passionate about and without relying on dogma or conventional wisdom, figure out what the real issues are and think of ways to solve them. Then start implementing them. It’s that simple.

I recently purchased a pair of Vibram Five Finger shoes. I’m a little late on this bandwagon – Tim Ferriss wrote about the in May of 2009, my good friend Dream has had them for about 8 or 9 months, and we both heard about them from Tynan who wrote about them in June of 2008.

I was a little skeptical of buying them because I have really fucked up feet.

To start off I have morton’s toe – My index toe is probably a little less than 1/4 an inch longer than my big toe.

Morton’s Toe (via whitneybee on flickr)

Next on the list is I have extremely wide feet and must always get special shoes that have extra width.

Finally, my pinky toe is almost a 3/4 an inch shorter than my 4th toe.

I recently read though that the CEO of Vibram has Morton’s Toe and their solution (for now) is to just measure your by your longest toe.

I found a place that sold them about 35 minutes away, TravelCountry.com so I drove out there and got fitted.

My foot was just over the 41 size line with my morton’s toe, I thought about getting the 42 but I went with the 41 because the 42 was out of stock and I figured it will stretch. Plus, Travel Country has a 30 day return policy so if they don’t work out I can return them, which was one of my concerns before buying online.

I thought about getting the KSOs because they stay on in water, but instead went with the Classic’s because they seemed more practical, if I do go traveling I’ll probably pick up the KSOs though.

They feel very snug. It is a little tight on my index toe because it is longer than the rest but all of the others fit pretty well, even my abnormally small pinky toe.

So far I have no blisters which seem to be a problem when they are too loose or too tight. It took me some time to get the sizing right, but now they work just fine. My recommendation? Check them out, but make sure you can try them on first.

While there I was talking to a friend of my parents who has been divorced for a couple of years now. He has remarried to an awesome woman and they just had their first child. I was amazed to find out that two years later he is STILL paying his ex-wife $2200 a month in alimony!

Learning about shit like this only serves to reinforce my thoughts on marriage – it is just about the dumbest thing a guy can do.

An old page I had bookmarked goes over this pretty well. You can read the whole post here, but these are the parts that stuck out most to me.

If you really want to have some fun, try this sometime. Tell a woman the following story.

“A guy and girl are dating and super-duper serious. The guy comes to the woman one day with a piece of paper and says ‘Darling, I love you so much. Will you sign this legally binding contract that states that if I ever break up with you, you will pay me $400 a month for the next five years, and if you don’t you’ll go to prison?’”

What do you think that woman would say? Of COURSE she would refuse. Not only that, she’d probably be insulted, WOULDN’T SHE?

What if the guy then said “OMG, I can’t believe you! You are so horrible! Don’t you love me? Don’t you want to be with me? Don’t you value this relationship?”

Here is the verbatim response I got from some of my girl friends…

girl 1: I would think he was psycho and I would never talk to him again
girl 2: umm, hell no
girl 3: wtf, no sounds like a prenup

Telling this story really hits home the silliness of women expecting men to marry them under the traditional system. WOMEN would never agree to a system like that. Then why should WE?

I am convinced that if women made more money then men, and had to pay men child support and alimony when the man left the marriage, things like alimony and child support would be abolished in a heartbeat.

Women would never tolerate that shit. They would be out marching in the streets in front of the courthouse. They’d leave work early to vote for the proper politicians. It would get done…alimony, child support, communal property, no-fault divorce…all of that would be gone.

There is literally nothing a confident man can get from marriage he cannot get by being unmarried. Literally nothing. This includes:

• Love
• Commitment
• Wedding rings
• A wedding
• Changing her last name
• Living together
• Referring to each other as “husband” and “wife”
• Children
• Shared medical insurance (via domestic partnership and various other legal means)
• Life insurance
• Joint ownership of assets
• …and everything else

Try to think of anything a confident man can ONLY receive if he’s legally married. Even one thing.

You can’t, there’s NOTHING for him to gain and EVERYTHING to lose. The guy incurs massive risk for zero reward. Of course women do receive something a man doesn’t… free money if the relationship doesn’t work out.

Marriage is no longer a sacred union. Marriage today is relationship-insurance for women.

When I told the three girls above about my friend, they all said the same thing, “He should have gotten a prenup!” but I ask, why get a prenup? Why get married at all?

Of course, no one has a good response to this.

Anyways, if you do decide to get married, here is the best advice I’ve read:

Spend some serious money on a divorce attorney and write up a GOOD, SOLID prenup, and have her sign it. Make sure she signs it well more than six months before the wedding, preferably a year, this will prevent her from later saying she was “under duress”.
Also, make sure she signs it while being witnessed by a judge. This will prevent her from saying later that she “didn’t understand what she was signing”, since the judge will literally explain every sentence to her, and then sign off on it himself.

I put an e-mail contact form on my site but didn’t put up Captcha on it. A spam bot got a hold of it and submitted like 100 emails through it. This made it look like my site was being used to send out spam e-mail, so my account was suspended.

“That’s reasonable” I thought, so I put in a help ticket to have it restored, I explained what happened, apologized, and wrote what I promised to do to ensure it didn’t happen again.

I logged in the next day to find my account had been deleted. I lost everything. Luckily I have weekly database backups e-mailed to me and I had all of my files on my computer.

Unfortunately Moxie Media will not be back anytime soon. I didn’t have the database backed up like I do with MoxieLifestyle and don’t feel like rebuilding it.

All I ever did was fall for you
But, if all I ever did was let you down
Ain’t nothing stopping me now

Divinity spelled correctly beneath the receding height of her late teens
Was Capital M.E. (I couldn’t subscribe)
Was Capital M.E. (But you can’t say I didn’t try)
You say what you want (Maybe you didn’t get your way)
So you say what you want (Maybe you didn’t get your way)
But I got, I got away

And all I ever did was fall for you
But, if all I ever did was let you down
Ain’t nothing stopping me now

Was it everything you hoped for?
Was it all of that and more?
Too much too soon? Or was it too good to be true?
Was it everything you hoped for?
Was it all of that and more?

Well all I ever did was fall for you
But, if all I ever did was let you down
Ain’t nothing stopping me now

For those of you who don’t know, New Again is the follow up album to Taking Back Sunday’s gold-certified previous record Louder Now (2006).

Their previous guitarist Fred Mascherino left and they added a new a guitarist in Matt Fazzi. I just listened to the album for the first time and wrote down my thoughts, stream of consciousness…

• New Again – First song we got to hear from the album. I loved this song when it came out and I still do, very strong opening.
• Sink Into Me – The first single, I was really into this song when it first came out, but now it is starting to lose some of its replay value. Dig the lyrics of the chorus.
• Lonely, Lonely – Its like they said in the interviews, relentless. I thought it was a little repetitive but think it will grow on me.
• Summer, Man – Love it, I imagined it to be a bit faster paced, but is definitely a perfect song for this summer.
• Swing – Was looking forward to this since Marrs mentioned it on in his interview with them. I REALLY like it. The guitar reminds me of a less in your face Spin (off Louder Now). First chorus that has really stuck in my head. One of the stronger songs on the album.

Note: Adam is absolutely killing it vocally so far – strongest he has ever been IMO

• Where My Mouth Is – unexpected slow down with this song, doesn’t really sound like TBS to me. Caught me a little off guard, not bad but not one of my favorites so far.
• Cut Me Up Jenny – Another song I was looking forward to hearing – didn’t really do it for me. I enjoy it but I think the “Cut Me Up Jenny’s” get really repetitive at the end. Edit: After a few repeat listens this song has really grown on me
• Catholic Knees – Didn’t really get into the live version that was released on vinyl but I like the recorded version better. Seems to kind of drag, like the tempo should be faster.
• Capital M-E – this song is about Fred, damn. I think I can connect better with this song because I know what its about, I think its catchy and I like it a lot.
• Carpathia – Most all of us have heard this. Not great, but not bad, just a good song. Noticed the tie into Everything Must Go at the end.
• Everything Must Go – Strongest closing track of any TBS CD and maybe one of the best songs they’ve written. I think it gets a little repetitive in the second half (after the “I’d be a fool to have asked for more”) but easily the most powerful track on the album.

Overall based on my first listen I really enjoy the CD. More than I enjoyed Louder Now on its first listen. I think that it is being released at the perfect time since it is an awesome Summer Soundtrack.

Adam’s vocals are amazing and I am really digging the direction the band is taking with Fazzi, I think with some more time together the band will grow and their next album will be amazing.

The biggest down fall is length, three of the songs don’t even clock in at 3 minutes and two others are just barely over that. The length clocks in at 37:57, not as short at their first album Tell All Your Friends (~33 min), but significantly shorter than Where You Want To Be (~42 min) and Louder Now (~45 min)

Stand Out Tracks: Summer, Man, Swing, Everything Must Go

So use at your own risk I guess, make sure you have backups of everything. They are hosting you for free and don’t OWE you anything, so if you break the rules (even accidentally like I did) your shit is probably going to get the axe.

——————————————–

As some of you may know, MoxieLifestyle.net has never exactly been the fastest site around.

I’ve tried to fix this with no success.

After some quick Googling it looks like GoDaddy just seems to have a well known issue with WordPress that makes it unbearably slow. So, I decided to bite the bullet and move to a faster host.

Previously, when I would ping MoxieLifestyle (on GoDaddy), my ping would be around 200-300ms.

Now on my new host, it is about 80ms, which is normal.

Who Is My New Host?

My new host is, 0.00 Webhost and their service is absolutely AWESOME. If you own your own domain, they will host your site for FREE! Plus you get 1,500 mb of space and 100,000 gb of data transfer a month. These are extremely high limits compared to a lot of other free hosts.

Unless you are running a REALLY popular site (with lots of media) you will probably never touch the data transfer. If you do need more however, you can upgrade and get pretty much unlimited everything for less than $5 a month.

Why Is It Better?

The problem with GoDaddy shared hosting is that you are sharing a single server with THOUSANDS of other people.

Previously, MoxieLifestyle.net was sharing a server with 2127 other people according to YouGetSignal. Now I am the only person on my server. I don’t know if this is a unique case, or the number isn’t right because I am still propagating (moving servers) in some areas. But, my friend hosts his website on 000Webhost as well, CHImprovements.com, and it only shares its server with 54 other people.

My only complaint is that my FTP Client (Cyberduck) seems to be a little wonky. It seems slower than before and sometimes I get disconnected. I contacted 000webhost and they said since I just moved my site it might be having issues, but that after 48 hours or so it should clear up.

The Future of MoxieLifestyle.net

Things are looking up for MoxieLifestyle.net. New faster server, new databases should be quicker, and upgrading PHP5 should make everything just a little quicker as well.

Let’s not forget about the whole new part of the site I have coming soon. The server move definitely will delay the launch a bit but I think it will be worth it.

Regardless, the new database should get rid of some of the junk that piled up from all my experimenting with different things over the years and make the site run that much smoother.

Anyways, I had to import everything, since I can’t restore my old 4.1 database to the 5.0 system.

I think I got everything but let me know if anything is out of order.

Update (5/12/09): Added the friend links back. The twitter plugin is a little less ugly. I upgraded the server to php5 so I can use some really cool wordpress plugins, lets hope it doesn’t break everything.

-Tim

PS – I have been posting much because I have been working on a completely new area of the site that is coming soon. Get excited!

Frank, an old friend of my father, was in the CIA for fifteen years helped me come up with a different plan, “The best way to ditch her is go somewhere she thinks she’ll get attention. Go to a Sears and buy something small so you look like the sane one, then when she follows you in and starts making a scene let store security take care of their problem, and yours. She’ll probably be so embarrassed that she’ll leave you alone after that.”

What did I have to lose? Frank had been giving me random advice for ages. When I was 14 I got a paintball gun for my birthday. The first thing Frank told me was, “don’t ever turn it sideways because it’ll jam and it’ll stovepipe and then you’ll have really big problems.” “Stovepipe?” I replied. “Well that won’t happen unless it’s a real gun, but just trust me, you try an look cool and you’ll end up dead.”
—
Later in high school before a lacrosse game, someone locked my gear up with a MasterLock. No one knew the combination. As I was walking to find a janitor that might have bolt cutters I ran into Frank who had come to watch my game. When I told him what happened he laughed, “A MasterLock? Piece of cake, where is it?” he said.

I walked him down to the locker room and he proceeded to open the lock just by putting it up to his ear and listening while he turned the dial. To this day it is still one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. “Next time that happens, just get a can of compressed air that you would use to clean a computer keyboard, turn it upside down and freeze the lock, then you can just smash it. Good luck in the game.” He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
—
A few weeks into college I got into my first bar fight and broke my hand. When I came home to visit the following weekend my hand in a cast, Frank lectured me, “In a fight you have to be careful not to break the little bones in your hand on someone’s face. That’s why I like bathrooms, plenty of hard surfaces.”
After my first year of college I transferred to a University closer to home. At a welcome home party some friends threw for me, my friend Mark had his laptop stolen. We knew who did it and I consulted Frank for advice.

“If you really want to get it back yourselves don’t be stupid. Its cool at night now so he probably leaves his window unlocked to open it at night, that’s your entry point.”

“Alright thanks Frank, now we just need to go get some black clothes and a ski mask.” I joked.

“Are you kidding me? Don’t run around in a ski mask, if somebody catches you, what are you gonna say? Just dress normal. Bring a soda or something with you. If you get caught just act confused and apologize like crazy for taking the soda. Use their confusion to get the hell out of there.”

The plan worked. The laptop was right inside the window on the desk. We were in and out within a minute; I didn’t even have to open my soda.
—
It didn’t even occur to me that I was only experiencing one part of Franks life until just recently when I sat down to interview him about his life in the CIA for this paper. I asked if he still had a lot of friends overseas and he got deadly serious…

“Tim, you and your parents are some of the only friends I have. I’ve known your father for 25 years so I trust you guys; but, if tonight I sit down at a bar and meet someone – even if I had the greatest night of my life, I can never talk to that person again. Since they found me, they could be a plant. And this is life AFTER I retired. To this day there are still countries I can’t visit because if I did and the wrong people found out they would try to have me killed. I love my country and I don’t regret a thing about my career but given the chance to do it all over again, I can’t say that I would.”

“Wow Frank, I never realized it was such a lonely life.” was all I could come up with.

“Yeah, it got lonely at times, that’s why I value your father’s friendship so much. Here’s a funny story. On one of my first missions I had to parachute into a jungle from a really high altitude. So I bought this cool NorthFace jacket to wear, but when I got into the jungle I had to toss it. I only needed it because I was parachuting through the upper atmosphere. I had fun picking it out and I liked the way it fit but I had to leave it in the middle of the jungle. I tried getting another when I came back but they didn’t make it anymore. I still miss that jacket, I didn’t really have anything else in my life at the time.”

I laughed in spite of myself; Frank always had a way of getting a serious point across using humor. Talking to him though really shattered the view I had of Frank and I looked at him with a whole new respect. Until that point I never really understood what he gave up for his country. Growing up I was always so excited about spies like James Bond and he fed into that to amuse me. I keep in regular contact with Frank and I father figure and a friend. He inspires me to be a better person and not take advantage of things, like traveling and meeting new people, that someone like Frank doesn’t have the luxury of experiencing.

One day I was walking on campus and a girl handed me a flier for a speed-dating event at UCF. It was $10 and normally I would have just thrown the flier away, but today I had to say yes, so I marked it on my calendar for later in the week and ended up going.

How it worked was, whenever you met someone you were interested you checked their name on your sheet. If they checked you back then you got each other’s e-mail address when your results were e-mailed to you. Not wanting to miss an opportunities I decided to check everyone I met.

I figured that most of the guys there were going to be super boring, after all – they’re speed dating. After I watched the “example interaction” they showed us it became painfully obvious I was right.

“Hi I’m Tim, nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too, I’m Cindy Lou Who…”
“So you go to UCF? What’s you’re major?”

It was painful to watch. I didn’t want to fall into this trap so when I sat down I immediately started using cheesy pick-up lines and telling jokes.

A few excerpts:
• “Do you know how much a polar bear weighs?”
“Uh… no?”
“Enough to break ice, hi I’m Tim.”
• “So, do you want to hook-up or should I apologize?”
• “Did you invite all these people? I thought it was just going to be the two of us.”
• “Do you believe in love at first sight or should I walk over again?”
• “Before we start, let’s just drop the whole guy/girl thing and get to know each other.”

I turned in my card and waited for an e-mail with my results. I absolutely killed it. I met speed dated 25 girls and when I got my results back, 22 of them wanted to hear from me again!