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I was lucky enough to receive both a kindle fire and an ipad 2 for christmas this year. I also have a nook color that I use for testing apps for work. I have an abundance of tablets at my disposal. I use them all for different things. The nook is used primarily for testing and I find it to be the most klunky of the the tablets. The interface is not set up as nice or seem as well thought out as the kindle fire. The kindle fire was, for the week that I had it before I got the iPad, my comics tablet. I used it primarily for reading older comics that I can’t find in graphic novel or collection form at the library or online (Marvel 2099 I am looking at you).

I use Comic Reader Mobi for this. It reads .cbz and .cbr nicely. It keeps track of where you are in a series allowing you to switch between series easily and go back to what you previously read. The only problem I found, which I am not sure if it is a Fire problem or a Comic Reader Mobi, is that at times the selection of different folders doesn’t work and there have been occasionally crashes that force you to reopen the app. Not a deal breaker but annoying none the less.

Overall the kindle fire has been enjoyable. Surprisingly I haven’t actually read a book on it… I have a regular first generation for that. My one complaint is that the kindle fire is the menu system. Amazon seems super obsessed with the whole book shelf thing. I don’t really need book shelfs on a tablet. I need app icons. It also seems that most of the applications I have downloaded don’t have properly sized icons. I think that amazon neglected to tell developers to make a large sized icon when developing for the kindle fire. Super disappointing as it just looks bad. When I first received my kindle fire I was able to use a free month of amazon prime to watch movies etc. It was nice and quick but it certainly not a deal maker. Overall the amazon fire is a poor man’s ipad.

The iPad 2 is an unfair comparison but unfortunatly for teh Fire and Nook color they have painted themselves as being just that. The iPad is quicker, prettier and overall smoother to operate. Here are a couple of examples. On the kindle fire I needed to take a screenshot. The only way I found to do that is to install the Android SDK and work trickiness. Pain in the Ass. On the iPad 2 it is simple and just like doing it on my iPhone.

Comics on the iPad 2 are very different then on the Fire. There isn’t a better way to load .cbr/.cbz on to the ipad that I have found and I primarily us the fire for those tasks. However new comics are so much easier. Finally there is a way to get comics that is actually easier then downloading .cbz/.cbr. Sure you have to pay for it but as someone who has to drive 30+ minutes to get to a comic books shop I am fine paying for comic downloads as long as I can get them at the same time as they are released in store. It is magic. I use graphicly for all of my comic needs, partially because I work there but mostly because it just works.

One of the apps I use most is Air Video. It is  great app that lets you stream videos from your computer to your iPad 2 to watch anywhere in your house… or with a little extra work you can stream from your computer to your ipad anywhere that it is connected to the internet. Sarah and I use this all the time to watch movies in bed and I use it to watch movies whilst I work.

If you are thinking about buying a tablet don’t be enticed by the lower price point of the kindle fire or nook color, save your money and buy an iPad 2. It works better, runs faster and is much prettier.

Harper recently sent me a link to this article. I read through it and found it interesting. A lot of people in it talked about what they learned while at MIT or other universities and how their successes came not from being smart but learning how to be smart. Looking at the way successful students applied themselves to course work and figuring out what they were doing to be successful.  Another portion of people where the “I’m X years old and universities were hard when I was 20 and I dropped out and heading back to school because I now understand learning.” This is where I am.

I am 30 (soon to be 31) years old. I don’t have a degree in anything (other then being awesome), and my experience with school has been both bad and good. Activate time warp.

The year is 1996, I have just started my sophmore year at Greeley Central High School. My brother, world famous ginger, was a senior that year and this was the first time since elementary school that we were at the same school. Harper was a super cool dude and as such I was cool by association. Unfortuantly I had to deal with the “oh you are harper’s brother” comment which I found irritating.

I was not a good student. I never did homework but was lucky enough to be a good test taker and to be an absorber of knowledge. I could sit in class and listen and be able to pull facts out of my head to pass tests. This meant that if I was in a class that required homework to pass I failed, I was an active student who always participated in class I just hated homework. This continued all through high school. I barely graduated.

What I learned from high school was how to make friends, how to bull shit teachers and how to look ashamed when my parents would ask why I was failing. I also learned how to juggle, unicycle, make balloon animals and clown during this time, so it wasn’t a complete waste.

We have now traveled to Fall 1999. My freshman year at UNC. I started at UNC and had no clue what I wanted to study, only that I hated math. I had interesting roommates assigned to me: The Neo-Nazi and The Drunk. I say Neo-Nazi because he had swastikas tattooed on his body and he hated everyone. He was basically a dick and I was thankful when he met a girl and moved out of the dorm because I have not always been the straightest of companions and I didn’t really want to get killed by some idiot.

The Drunk on the other hand had had a rough year. His dad had died the previous Spring and as such he had buried his sorrows in alcohol. A lot of Alcohol. He and our sweetmates would get drunk most nights and be loud and obnoxious. This culminated with one of them being blind drunk and peeing next to my head why I slept. It was awesome. The best part is that I cannot blame these problems on my failure at UNC. I blame Tony Hawk Pro Skater and the Sega Dreamcast. A kid down the hall had one and we used to play for days and days. Never going to class, never doing anything but playing THPS and listening to the Blade soundtrack. I quit UNC after a semester and a half

What did I learn at UNC: Video games are awesome. After that I kicked around a little, worked a little, went to a community college a little. Then I fond dive school. I had been SCUBA diving since I was 15 (maybe earlier I don’t really remember) and I love being under water. So one day when I was cruising the internet I found the College of Oceaneering. It was a technical school where you learned Hard Hat surface supplied diving. This is where I learned how to learn.

It is now Xmas 2001(I think), I am in California living with a dude I just met in a two bedroom apartment in Long Beach/Compton. The College of Oceaneering didn’t believe in half measures. You where dropped into the water your first week to experience what it is like to wear the equipment and be underwater. It was amazing. After that first day I was excited.

We spent the next 10 weeks learning about safety with rigging, knot tying, the many, many ways you can die underwater and how to run a decompression chamber. There is nothing like the possibility of death (and a really painful on at that) to make you learn things. I acceled at the COO. I was on the deans list for most of my time there and was a person that other students went to for help. I hated math and yet I learned all about the physics of magnetic fields and how sound waves travel through metal. It was awesome.

It was while I was at the COO that I learned about learning. I learned that learning is a skill that must be practiced. That when I really focused and set aside time for school work, not only was it enjoyable but I was rewarded for my hard work. This meant that when I finally went back to school to get a degree that I was ready to succeed. And when I went back I did succeed. It helped that I knew what I wanted to do. I no longer felt like I was floundering. I still haven’t received my degree, because… you know… life happened. But I know that when I go back I will succeed.

You may remember my post about Horror Comics and Echoes… you may not… the Dude who wrote Echoes, Mr. Joshua Hale Fialkov has done it again. Last of the Greats is a fantastic look at superheros. Fialkov takes the ideal superheros that came to earth to save us and shows how humans would turn against them. Not only that but he has done it in a way that is fresh. This isn’t Irredeemable or Invincible, in fact it doesn’t even start with an ‘I’. A nice thing about Last of the Greats is that it is a new series, which means if you start reading now you can keep up and not fall behind. Issue two came out last week and you can read both of them at Graphicly.

Today I took a break from work to go and get a slurpee. Normally this isn’t an event that requires a blog post. In fact I wouldn’t be writing this post if it weren’t for the hateful people that apparently frequent the same 7-11 that I do.

I was walking across the parking lot after getting my slurpee wearing plaid toms, green sweatpants and a hoody that has rainbows on it. I hear someone behind me say in a contemptuous voice ” I like rainbows. ” In my mind I thought: oh goodie some cool people. Then I hear the hate word ” FAG!!!” It wasn’t mumbled under breath, it was said with force and hate. At that point I turned to see who it was that was full of so much hate. I was not surprised to see that it was the four Greeley West High School students (remember boys and girls when being hateful try not to wear anything that affiliates you with where you go to school) that I had followed out of the 7-11. The windows on the mini-van they were driving were open so I told them that their word cause people pain. I asked them if they like to be singled out and called names. The only response they could muster was to flip me off, call me a fag and drive off. Awesome.

Here is the problem: I am pissed, upset and a little scared. I am not a big dude. All four of these boys were at least 6″ taller than me and had probably 50 lbs on me and a lot more of that is muscle. I worry that with the amount of hate that these boys exhibited for a complete stranger who had the audacity to wear rainbows that a fellow student of theirs would be an easy target for bullying and possibly more.

Part of me is sad for these boys. They are obviously so uncomfortable with who they are that they feel the need to lash out at someone. Another part of me wants to lash out. That part of me wants to go to Greeley West Highs School and see if I can figure out who these boys are and contact their parents about their behavior. Of course most of this behavior is learned at home so I am sure that would be awesome. All of me is upset. As I am writing this all of my memories of high school bullies is coming back to me.

I remember my sophmore year I was wearing blue rubber pants and a shiny gold shirt and some members of the football team told me that if I dressed like that again they would kill me. I have been called gay, fag, queer and probably every other horrible name that has been given to gay men. And here is the kicker… I am not gay. I am happily married to a women but that doesn’t matter, no one should be allowed to call another person something that is loaded with that much hate. It needs to stop. I don’t know what will cause this to stop but please if you find yourself thinking hateful things about a person for things you don’t understand take a moment and stop.

I am not sure if this rant did anything other then calm me down and get some things off my chest and frankly if that is all it does that is good. If you feel the need to take action against this sort of thing check out It Gets Better

And, as Pete from The Muppets Take Manhatten says “Peoples is peoples.”

But I am not. I am speaking of course about video games. I haven’t been playing them very much lately. In fact I wasn’t playing them at all. Then I started working from home and needed something to relieve the stress. It started with Civ V, then Cities in Motion, then Arkham Asylum(again) and then Saints Row 2. I have made the mistake of looking at what games are coming out before Xmas and there are too many good ones. Modern Warfare 3, New Elder Scrolls, Saints Row 3, Arkham City, Bioshock 3(which comes out after Xmas) and many many more.

I find this irritating because I thought I had moved past video games as a hobby and now I know that I am smack dab in the middle of them again. Like I said irritating. However, in all fairness, I have to say…

Thanks for Bob King I have started reading comics again. The problem was that when I first started I didn’t know what to read. Through his suggestions I started reading a lot of DC comic issues. I have really enjoyed them and all that but now there is a problem. They are relaunching everything. I find this irritating because I had just started to get into the books I have been getting and now they are restarting everything. So all the things that I loved are starting from square one again.

I realize that this is a trick by DC to get a whole pile of new readers, but at what cost. Maybe if you didn’t make your mythology so insane you wouldn’t have to reboot all the time. As was pointed out to me Marvel also does this. Which is great for Marvel. My problem is that they are killing off comics that I love. Like Batgirl. Sure they are relaunching it with the original batgirl again… which is great except I have no history with the old batgirl.

I think this is why I like independent comic book creators. They don’t do stupid stuff like this. You don’t see Robert Kirkman saying hey it has been a lot of fun with the Walking Dead but I have killed off too many people and so I am going to start over again with issue one. At least I hope not. Robert Kirkman if you reboot anything I will punch you in the throat though the internet. If you wanted to write more astounding wolfman I would be ok with that.

What makes me laugh is that I am not upset with the rebooting of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Why? Because the turtle kick ass and haven’t been comic booked in a while. Plus it has gone back to a darker/weirder time. And they aren’t just reintroducing the same thing again. They are attempting to take the turtles in a different direction. Which is called growth and is a good thing.

I hope that DC is successful with this reboot, mostly so I can read batman and batman related comics. If not I hope that Image comics takes over the world. Now on a completely different note, I give you The Boys, a comic that is not for everyone but for people who are sick, sick bastards. I really enjoyed what I read so far. Please keep in mind that it is not safe for work or even to read around other people. Enjoy.

I have recently been trying to figure out life. Not in any sort of deep way, just trying to figure out where I am headed… or at least the direction I should go next. Whenever you try and figure out where your life is going you tend to look at where you have been so far and use that as  a basis for where you are leaping off too next. Typically you look back and have a few momments of “Well Crap I shouldn’t have done that”. As I look back I didn’t see very many of those. And the ones I did see had more to do with accruing debt then actual life altering mistakes.

I think that we should judge our success in life not based on money or power or anything like that, I think we should judge our success based on how much fun we have talking about what we have done in the past. For instance: I started entertaining people for money and studying clowning when I was 15 years. That means that I have 15 years of experience making people laugh, which is half of my life. On top of that I am(though it may have expired at this point) a certified commercial diver, a real estate agent (though my liscense isn’t currently active) and on top of all that I also like to draw.

All of these things lend themselves to having a really strange resume and can make getting jobs difficult. It is hard to explain to someone how being lead tender on a dive crew demonstrates leadership or how being an entertainer makes you good at sales. But it does.

Back to figuring out life. I have been working for an office store in retail sales and while I enjoy the people and helping them become more awesome it isn’t an awesome part of my story. Recently I have been lucky enough to start working for a start-up in Boulder and that has introduced me to an entirely new world of insanity. This is where I want the next part of my story to be from. I don’t want to be that guy who had a fun and crazy life when he was younger and then packed it in and worked retail. I want to create something that people enjoy… or alternately be able to live like a rich person with out resorting to a life of crime.

The question is how: How do I bring to bear all of my vast experiences into something more? That is what I am working on and I can say that I have no idea how I am going to do that. Working for a crazy start-up has taught me one important lesson that I think everyone should learn. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. I’ll say it again, this time bold. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. Don’t let life hold you back, don’t let your ideas be limited by what you have been told is possible. Believe that anything is possible, it just takes work. Lots of it. I haven’t even started focusing on one idea but I have seen the amount of work that goes into realizing an idea and can say that it isn’t for the faint of heart.

I am standing up, right now, and saying that I will not fade into mediocrity. I will become something, not sure what yet, but I will become it. Wish me luck.

• We are never going to play Ocama Gamesphere again are we? #
• Headed to old C's. Stop by and say hi if you want. #
• what sarah is making for breakfast: http://t.co/m7Z2ruS @CookItForUs #

• OMG I Drew a Picture: Goober http://dylan.la/lAM0NB #

• Strawberry upside down cake we made. Thanks @joythebaker #
• I will be at centerra making balloons toady from 11am to 2pm. Come and visit #
• Balloons are tiring. But no sunburn today #
• Whenever I see weird children I feel bad for how it must have been for my parents with @harper and I #
• Drawing is fun #
• OMG I Drew a Picture: Laserball-3001 http://dylan.la/kn8pr3 #
• Jealous? We made these http://t.co/KDdQcva #
• Sarah and I have been trying Zumba. And I have learned that my hips do lie. #
• Happy Saturday!!! Probably going to be full of doing stuff and things #
• OMG I Drew a Picture: Space Gophers in Space http://dylan.la/jlmTaz #