I’ve been a ‘pirate’ for about 8 years now. Pretty much as soon as I set foot on a college campus, it was what everyone did, and this was during Napster’s hay day. After Napster shutdown, I resorted to stealing files from the UNM network that users left exposed (this was usually intentional on their part and almost all music files). When I exhausted that, kazaa/limewire was on the scene. I used kazaa for a long long time, and eventually I got tired of downloading one song at a time, only to have it turn out to be static that was planted by a record company in the network. It would seem that I quit that right before the RIAA started snooping on shit, and lucky for me, I never had an open share folder, I just downloaded. And then, Sloot’s brother turned me on to BitTorrent, which I perceived to be really complicated at the beginning. Since then, BitTorrent has gained public acceptance and they have super easy to use programs now for 5th graders and house wives. Consequently, more and more things are available via BitTorrent; music, movies, software, ebooks, and often times it’s used to legitimately distribute large files, like homebrew indie movies. When I got a laptop for work I started getting more and more into downloading movies, usually the ripped files from a DVD (as opposed to the handheld camera in a movie theater). One uploader has proven himself over and over again, that is AXXO, and his counterpart KLAXXON (who came to fame by ripping older movies when axxo took a break for a couple of months). If you google either of those terms, you’ll be greeted with a flood of torrents that are backed up by thousands of seeders, I downloaded The Bourne Trilogy this morning and at one point was rolling at 449kb/s, the fastest I ever remember in NM was 170kb/s.

Things in pirate land had been going just fine, and then the concierge asked me this morning why I couldn’t burn all those movies I had downloaded to a DVD so that we could watch them on the TV. I didn’t know the answer the that question, but in this day and age there must be a plausible solution right? Indeed, which brings me to the next level of piracy. To burn a video file you must first convert that file to DVD format. This was done by Xilisoft’s AVI to DVD converter, torrent provided here. The trick with that one is that the original file must be an AVI, and for a 90 minute movie the conversion takes almost 3 fucking hours, but it’s worth it. If you’re original file is not an AVI check out WinFF which is a freeware program that will convert pretty much any video format to any other format, this program is also useful for making videos play on your iPod. Alright, now that you have your DVD video files, you need to put those on a disc for which I recommend Nero 7, and of course there’s a cracked version here. Now what’s really amazing is the quality, it translated incredibly well to TV, I thought it would’ve been much worse, but from a couch’s distance away, it looks awesome, and it’s all mother fucking free!!!

The next step is for me to cancel my cable and use that money to get a netflix account and then rip every single one of those disc, which I’m told is also easily accomplished using DVDShrink.

Happy Plundering!

The 2.0 Brando upgrade taught me how to work with women, and presented one such woman that was in fact not pure evil, which I’m eternally grateful for. The 3.0 upgrade is a different realm altogether. I’m increasingly unhappy with my physical appearance and my health. That’s me to the right, not sucking it in, fat and sunburned. It’s time to make a change, it’s gonna be a bitch, but I’m at a crossroads where it isn’t horrible, but if I wait any longer I’m going to turn into one of those fat people I’m always making fun of. How am I going to do this you ask? Using the power of the internets, a few technological innovations and some creativity, I will pull this shit off. The ultimate goal of the whole ordeal? I’m not concerned with numbers really, I want the six pack abs by the end of the year, easy enough right?. I’ve never had them, I intend to achieve said abs and keep them for as long as possible. How am I going to this you ask? Starting today I’m putting myself on a low-as-I-can-stand-carb diet, but more importantly, I’m not drinking for 90 days. 3 months without beer and hard alcohol should do me good I think. My one exception for this will be half priced bottles of wine on Tuesday’s at Grimaldi’s, 2 glasses of wine for myself and the concierge. She consequently is also on the 90 day sobriety diet, her ultimate goal is to quit smoking, which I find incredibly sexy.

The Tools:

Heart Rate Monitor
I purchased a Polar FS1 for the purpose of making sure that during cardio training I’m staying in range of beats per minute thought to best eliminate fat. I can swim with it too.

Tweet What You Eat
A calorie counting bot that some genius weight freak wrote so you can keep track of the daily calories with out doing a bunch of math on a clipboard.

One Hundred Push Ups
A six week plan tailored to individual ability with the goal of getting you to be able to do 100 push ups in six weeks.

6 Minute Abs on a Couch
Perfect for a hotel room, stupid it sounds, but shit it looks effective: watch this

Hotel Room Workout
A plan of my own doing using resistance bands, a jumprope, and clever use of in room furniture.

Traineo
Super handy website for tracking calorie intake and output, gives you all kinds of pretty charts and graphs and whatnot that I’m sure I’ll post here in the future. View my profile/progress here: brandoncondrey.traineo.com

Starting Stats:

So that’s that people, wish me luck! I’ll post updates often under the category Three Point Oh! or you can check my Traineo whenever you’d like.

It’s come to my attention that as of last week, I’ve started snoring. To the best of my knowledge, I have never chronically snored ever in my life. No one has ever complained about it, there were plenty of opportunities for it to be heard. I was in ABQ last week, I spent quite some time in a hospital visiting my grandmother who was recovering from a heart attack. When I get home, I kind of have a mild cold…and suddenly I’m snoring. If it’s due to the nasal congestion, then one would think it would pass right? I don’t really feel like I have a cold anymore, and last night, in an attempt to get The Concierge a good night’s sleep (poor thing), I pulled out all the stops. I bought a nasal decongestant spray, I bought those funny nose band aids which pull open your nostrils to breath better, and I even bought ’snore relief mouth strips’ which purportedly “lubricate your throat” to make sure that things aren’t rattling around unnecessarily. And after all that, I’m still snoring.

I’m going to try a few more days of the remedies I’ve purchased, and after that? There’s a dental implant that you wear at night that keeps your tongue from relaxing, that sounds pretty comfortable. There’s a trip to the Otolaryngologist to see about a deviated septum, or some other underlying cause. And then there’s surgery. I’d really like all of this to just go away, I was a good sleeper before. I hope it reslolves itself soon, before The Concierge breaks one of my ribs from elbowing me in my sleep…

I’ve been in Vegas for almost 5 months now, and my routine goes something like this: I wake up at noon because my beloved concierge works nights and I usually hang out with her until the wee hours of the morning. I check my email when I get up, only to find out that I don’t have any real work to do. I hang out with my girlfriend until she goes to work. Then after she’s at work I toil with my various nerd projects. I try to go to the gym 3 times a week, sometimes for almost 2 hours because I have nothing better to do. When I travel for work I eat at restaurants and make friends with anonymous bartenders for a few minutes, then I go to sleep at the hotel and get up and go to work the next day. Then I come back home, love my girlfriend, and press on.

Before we delve further into this, I’d just like to let you know that I like it here very much. It’s great to be out of New Mexico for the first time ever, and my job affords me the ability to live the life I want to live and see all kinds of places that I otherwise never would’ve been. But most importantly, it is unconceivable how amazing it is to have found a girl that appreciates me for the loving-gross-caring-crass-emotional-judgmental person that I am, and I’m a thousand times better for having let her into my life.

My problem is this: all the lifelong friends I’ve made so far have been made in 3 places - School, Work, and Racquetball. The issue now is, I don’t go to school, and I work alone and even if I did work at the company headquarters, there are only 4 employees! So, tonight, I went back to my roots of racquetball. It’s been almost 2 years since I picked up a racquet due to my knee injury and deep deep hatred for dealing with adults that act like fucking 5-year-olds when in competition. I found a ‘challenge court’ at a local rec center on Tuesdays and Thursdays and tonight was my first night. I met some great guys that could be good friends if I were in my mid-fifties with gray hair and thinking about retirement. I met an orthopedic surgeon, a retired air force administrator, an economics professor, and my favorite was Eddy. Eddy is 88 years old and can’t hear a goddamn thing. I had to say my name 4 different times before he was convinced that I wasn’t named ‘Brandy’. But goddamn, at 88 years old, that man can still move and I can only hope that I’m that mobile at that age. So racquetball was a bust for the friend search, but those dudes worked me! And I fully intend to attend regularly because I love racquetball almost as much as I like sex, and there is no organized competition for racquetball in Nevada which is both a blessing and a curse.

I have no social group to belong to here. The Concierge has a few friends that we hang out with from time-to-time, but it’s not like I can call them up on a tuesday night and go grab a beer. The other issue with vegas, is that all the local people in my age group tend to work at night, nobody has a 9-5 here. I actually have a really good friend from high school that lives here, and occasionally we speak on the phone, but he’s a craps dealer (with an accounting degree from pepperdine) and he just doesn’t keep the same hours.

I even browsed the ’strictly platonic’ section of craigslist only to find out that those people clearly do not know the definition of platonic:

Subject reads:
Young Guy looking for friends - m4m - 22 - (las vegas)

Body reads:
Hello how is everyone doing. Hope everyone has had a good day. I know that its a bit far fetch posting an ad in this website, specially looking for “friends,” but this is what I have to resort to, since i am very discreet about my preference. Well im just looking for friends that can hang out with me and my other friends. someone that is maculine and discreet like myself. Be very down to earth and laid back. As you can tell i am not out and dont expect to be out anytime soon. eventually it will happen but not right now. i have so much going on at this point and that will ruin everything. i dont care if you are gay, bi str8 whatever just act like an actuall dude that you are. There is so much that i canwrite about but i dont want to get you bored. if you feel the same way or know where I am coming from then reply to this ad, if not please dont be rude and reply with shit talking. i dont have time to hear ur bs. this is not a sex ad just friends and maybe more but freind for right now. oh and i am a pretty cute guy and try to take care of myself. please be the same way. it would be nice to get a pic with your reply but not necessary. looking forward for how this goes. Oh yeah one more thing .. PLease be around my age … <3 >10

So, I’m out of ideas for the moment. I tried racquetball, I tried craigslist, the people at the gym look like snobby a-holes, plus how weird would it be if I approached a bunch of guys at the gym ‘wanna hang out later’. I can’t take a class because I leave town for days, sometimes weeks, at a time at the drop of a hat. Any thoughts friends?

To all of you in the 505, I miss everyone quite a bit, I’ll come back at some point this summer for sure, it’s just a matter of time and finances. And to all the displaced 505 members that are scattered all over the place, we’ll see each other soon I hope…

finding friends = wasn’t this hard since the first semester of college (before I moved into the dorms)

Sometime in April 2002, Emo Boy and I took it upon ourselves to have our nipples pierced at Sach’s in Burque. The caveat here however, was that the piercing was free, on the condition that you let the staff perform the piercing whilst sitting in a chair facing central, with a decent size crowd of onlookers. The crowd was there because the local media had picked up the story because Sach’s got in a bit of legal trouble given all the exposed breasts and whatnot. But they did it anyway, and it was a great publicity stunt, and here I am 6 years later singing their praises.

At any rate, the title of this post is “The End of an Era” because my nipple piercings have been voluntarily removed. I was on a business trip in Columbus, Ohio and had just gotten out of the shower after having cleaned my piercings as per usual. However, the right one seemed to be experiencing a bit of discharge, bloody nasty mess it was. No big deal, this does happen from time to time. The problem arose because I had neglected to bring undershirts with me on this trip, so if I put on my freshly pressed shirt without an undershirt, I would end up with a nice bloody spot where my right nipple should’ve been. I opted to where one of my t-shirts, it’s bright red and says “meet me at second base” and was totally visible under my collared shirt, but what other option do I have?

It was at that point that I felt it might be a good idea to get rid of the barbells. They’ve gotten gross in their old age, and The Concierge wouldn’t go anywhere near them in the sexual sense…so what good our they?

So, I had pierced nipples for almost 6 years, it was a good time, I highly recommend it, I’m looking forward to no longer snagging them on my messenger bag or my seat belt, and when my a-hole friends decide to bust out the purple nurple, it wont be as painful…