2008-12-23T08:00:32-06:00 M. Scott Williams http://infinitethinkings.com/ tag:infinitethinkings.com,2008-12-23:101 2008-12-23T05:35:00-06:00

That's right folks, I'm coming off the market! :) Aileen and I have known each other for almost as long as I've lived in Bentonville. We flirted back and forth a few times before we decided to take a stab at dating for real earlier this year. One thing lead to another and we decided that getting married was just the right thing for us to do, so here we are. We're going to have a small ceremony with family and close friends next month and we're looking forward to spending the rest of our lives together.

Scott tag:infinitethinkings.com,2008-03-30:100 2008-03-30T07:12:00-06:00

Most of my life I've been fairly clueless when it comes to interpreting the intentions of someone I'm interested in. I'm usually pretty good at observing other people and reading their intentions toward another person, but once I throw my own feelings into the mix, I'm completely clueless. It turns out that I'm not alone in being clueless. A recent study by Indiana University's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences shows that "Young men just find it difficult to tell the difference between women who are being friendly and women who are interested in something more. And here I thought it was always just me! :) Interesting notes from the study: 67% of university women reported they had a male acquaintance misperceive their friendliness as sexual interest, 26% of which happened in the last month Both men and women were more sensitive to cues signaling friendliness than to cues signaling sexual interest Interestingly enough, how provocatively a woman dressed had little impact on a guy's sensitivity to friendliness; but if she was provocatively dressed, men were more sensitive to her nonverbal cues when signaling sexual interest Not surprisingly, women are more likely to report incidents of attempts to be friendly being misperceived as sexual interest, rather than incidents where they attempt to show sexual interest and are misperceived as being friendly

Scott tag:infinitethinkings.com,2007-10-01:99 2007-10-01T17:56:00-06:00

Wow, okay, apparently it's been awhile since I've updated anything. It's been almost 6 months. Let's see, what all has happened since the middle of April? I've finally settled into a routine which usually consists of working late at least one night a week. Generally I go out to lunch or dinner with a friend on Saturday or Sunday. I'll try to play World of Warcraft at least one night a week. Sunday is usually reserved for mowing the yard and various housework that I feel like. That's pretty much been my life in general the last few months.I rounded out April by spending time trying to get a driver's license in Arkansas. Apparently the same guy from NJ that was causing me issues getting a job was also causing issues getting a driver's license. I spent a few weeks dealing with their DMV to prove to them that I wasn't some 5'5", 120lb guy that they've arrested a few times. That was fun. When I finally did get it all straightened out they filled out my license saying I was female. I was officially female to the state of Arkansas for about five minutes. Luckily I looked at my license as they handed it to me.In May my birthday came and went fairly quietly. I think I stayed home and treated myself to some pizza, ice cream and World of Warcraft. I went to visit mom and got to see my nephews playing ball later in the month.In June/July I had visits from several friends and family. First up was my brother's family, including a trip to the local "drive through safari" I had a few weekend visits from various friends as well. At the end of July my mom and my aunt came up to help me decorate the house and make it look a little less like a bachelor pad.In September I bought a new camera, but haven't really had a chance to use it enough to take any really interesting pictures. I also bought an iPhone in either August or September. That's been the biggest purchases I've made, outside of decorating the house.I can't think of anything else particularly interesting I've done the last few months. I've pretty much been in "nose to the grindstone" mode. It's definitely been hard adjusting from an 40-hour "hourly" schedule to a 45-hour "salary" schedule.

Scott tag:infinitethinkings.com,2007-04-14:98 2007-04-14T07:41:00-06:00

I'm officially all moved. I packed up everything I own (with the help of friends) on Thursday, March 29th. That Friday Todd and I drove about 7 hours and showed up to my new house about two hours before closing. We took my car to run some errands, closed on my house, went shopping for things we'd need, and came home. We unloaded a few things until about midnight. On Saturday, March 31st we had people help us unload, had the phone, internet and cable installed, had appliances and bedroom furniture all delivered. Sunday was a lot of unpacking and Monday, April 2nd was my first day of work on a new job. It was a large house of cards that could have collapsed if any one little thing had gone wrong, but we managed to pull it all off. Now I've survived two weeks of work. I actually got to do some programming this week, which made me feel better. I don't like just sitting around watching someone else program. It's enough to put a person to sleep. I'm getting a little more comfortable with things, but we'll see how I feel after that first paycheck where they start taking out for insurance and stuff. :) The weather here has been a little crazy. Last week it actually snowed, and for awhile they talked about it possibly snowing today as well. It looks like that is all going north of here though. With life so upside down the last few weeks, I've still not quite gotten to the point where I'm eating regularly enough. I had two days this week where I didn't eat lunch at all, mostly because I forgot to pack a lunch and the smell of the food in the cafeteria just made me nauseous. I don't know if that's a statement of the food quality, or just a sign of how my stomach is feeling. On the plus side I'm down to 225 lbs, something I haven't been in a few years. With working 9-10 hours a day, it's hard to get on a decent schedule, but I did manage to get on the treadmill this week to help keep that weight down. I'm still figuring out the layout of things around here. Traffic is crazy in the morning. My first day I left the house at 7:00 a.m. to get to orientation and made it to the building in about 20 minutes, being almost 40 minutes early. The next day I pushed it to 7:10 a.m. to leave and didn't get to the building until about 7:45 a.m. Ten minutes makes a huge difference here. Where I live in Bella Vista, the roads are all windy and crazy. I think someone said that there's over 600 miles of roads in an area that's contained by about 50 square miles. I went out to Dairy Queen for a treat the other night, a place that's no more than 2 miles from my house as the crow flies, and the entire trip took about 45 minutes. Of course, I got lost once trying to find a place that google maps told me was closer. I don't think you can rely very well on maps that aren't generated from within this area. My car's GPS has misled me on more than one occasion already. With the long hours, I haven't done much unpacking still. I did take some pictures shortly after moving everything in that I posted on flickr. Even though it's been almost two weeks ago, the house doesn't look much different now than it does in these photos: updated house photos Just so everyone is aware: I can't access any non work-related sites from work, so the days of me responding to email between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. are pretty much gone unless I can work out a good data plan on my cell phone or something. Other than that, I just have to say thanks to all my friends and family who've been in contact the last few weeks and listening to me ramble. You guys have kept me sane until life started to settle back into a routine. I appreciate you all.

Scott tag:infinitethinkings.com,2007-03-14:97 2007-03-14T09:44:00-06:00

I'm finally moving forward again and oh at what a pace. I've finally straightened out my background and convinced the world that I'm not a criminal in NJ or MT (or any other state for that matter). I spent last week in Arkansas looking for a new house and after 3 days of driving all over the place, I made an offer on this house: If you're interested in some more pictures, here's some I took while looking the place over (though I apologize because they aren't great, my camera doesn't do well in confined spaces): House Pictures As things stand right now, I'll be moving from Cape around 3/30 when I go to sign the papers on my house. I start work on that next Monday and begin a new life in a new town with a new job. That's a first for me even though moving to Cape ten years ago was similar, except that I had friends and family with me when I did it. Life has changed so much in the last ten years. Looking forward back then, I would have never imagined life to be like it is today. People are gone from my life that I expected to be around for much longer. People came into my life that I can't imagine living without now. I'm sure more of the same will happen in the next 10 years and I'll be just as surprised looking back at that point as I am looking back now.

Scott tag:infinitethinkings.com,2007-01-09:96 2007-01-09T11:48:00-06:00

Life has been crazy these past few weeks. I had planned to work my last two days of work on the 18th and 19th of December, then head down to Mom's house for several days of Christmas festivities. That all changed about 2:00 a.m. on Saturday, December 16th when my step-dad passed away after major heart surgery. I got up that next morning and threw everything in the car and headed for Arkansas. In the end, I was down there for two weeks and it wasn't all that festive. This is fairly tragic with my mom being disabled, my step-sisters losing their dad and my nephews losing their pawpaw. After all of that, though, there are a couple of things that left me very disappointed personally: Every year that I can, I like to do a "surprise" Christmas gift. David was going to be the recipient this year. On one of my previous trips down he'd been complaining about the quality and shutter speed of his instant digital camera. Since he and mom bought me my first 35 mm SLR camera, and having made the transition from instant digital to SLR digital a few years ago, I had the perfect gift: A new digital SLR body camera. I was sure to get the same model he had in film so he could use all his lenses and attachments. I got my mom and brother in on it as well. Unfortunately, he never got the surprise. The second and bigger disappointment is my desk. When I graduated college in 2000 Mom and David both hassled me about what I wanted for a graduation present. I'm not too big on receiving presents myself, so I finally just told David that I wanted a computer desk. Since I was living in a house with 4 other people at the time, I didn't have much room. Later I moved to the apartment with my best friend and still didn't have room. When Larry moved out in 2005, David started asking me about my desk. Since I graduated college, I've been working as a contractor on a job that could have potentially been over in any given 6 months. That doesn't exactly lead to a stable atmosphere. When I found out my job was really ending, and then I knew I'd be moving on to a more permanent job and able to settle down some. Part of that settling down will include buying a house and therefore having room for an office. Several months ago I finally sat down and started making plans for a desk for David to build. I found some plans online that fit very closely to what I wanted, so I bought those and downloaded Google SketchUP and used those dimensions to build my own desk. Here's what I designed: Before he went into the hospital, he told my brother that he was about two days away from having my desk finished. If life had worked out differently then I would have probably had a finished desk when I came down for the holidays just a few short days later. Luckily there's someone who did work with David on various projects and he's told mom that he would finish the desk for me. Here's the work my step-dad had complete when he went into the hospital that Friday: On top of all of that, I came home to find out that the offer with my new company has been withdrawn because I failed the background check. Now, if you know me then you know how ridiculous that is. I used to be a deputy sheriff, I think I know what it takes to have a criminal background, and I know that I don't have one. I've never been arrested. I've never done drugs. It's pretty crazy. I ended up running a background check on myself and found that there's someone in New Jersey with a very similar name (different middle initial) and the same date of birth as me. I'm trying to get this straightened out with the background check people, but that could take as much as 40 days or more to get fixed. P.S. Something is wrong with Blogger and my dream log posting to the website. If I can't get that finished, I'm going to have to find something else, or just post it to the site myself like I do with the news entries.

Scott tag:infinitethinkings.com,2006-12-14:95 2006-12-14T08:33:00-06:00

Scott tag:infinitethinkings.com,2006-11-28:94 2006-11-28T08:27:00-06:00

So, it's been over a month since my last entry. I had been hoping to keep my entries more regular than that, but sometimes life interferes. For the most part I've been dealing with job related activities. My current contract ends on Dec 31 and I've got to find a new job in another town. Right now I'm focusing on moving closer to family, but I'm not having a lot of luck with that right now. I went to a job fair in Little Rock earlier this month that didn't work out quite like I had hoped. Apparently employers that hire computer programmers would rather you just register on their website than meet them in person. Some people even refused to take my resume in person. Crazy stuff. I've got a couple of interviews for the first of December, but if those don't pan out, I'll have to start looking towards St. Louis and some bigger cities. Other than job stuff, my job itself has been quiet. I'm wrapping up a 6 year stint at the same job using the same technology and apparently I've been just a bit too lazy on keeping up technologically speaking. The last few months I've tried to do some catch-up, but I'm not where I'd like to be. Of course, it hasn't been all work. I've got a new project I've started with a friend that I'm not ready to announce yet. I've visited with family some this month. I even downloaded a ten day trial of World of Warcraft this weekend to try it out some. But I won't get addicted to it, because I've cut off all entertainment expenses until I've gotten a job and found some place to move. No new DVDs, no games, nothing. To be fair, though, I haven't spent much on entertainment expenses in the last several months anyway. My life has been on hold for awhile now and I'm ready to get going.

Scott tag:infinitethinkings.com,2006-10-23:93 2006-10-23T08:08:00-06:00

I'm not a big fan of funerals; I've been to too many in the last several years. Yes, I'm well aware that it's only going to get worse as I get older. As funerals go, this wasn't a terrible one. It was my granddad's sister whom I'd only really seen once or twice since being an adult. The last time I saw her was about a month or two ago as Granddad and I were tracking down the family bible to get some genealogy information out of it. She was 94. The funeral service was very nice considering the minister didn't really know her. Todd and I both laughed about how much better of a service it was than the one for our father. I had to explain to my cousin and his wife that at least the minister didn't imply that she was going to hell and use the sermon as a way to save everyone else in attendance, which is what happened at my dad's funeral. I could tell that this service was a big comfort to all the family there. It was interesting watching my grandfather, a product of a generation where showing emotions was not only frowned upon, but was a major sign of weakness. This was his last remaining sibling and it had to be hard for him. I made sure to hug him more than once this weekend. There were some fun times this weekend, though. I spent some time in the library looking through some old newspaper microfilm. There was some joking with my cousin and his wife about any number of topics; I always enjoy hanging out with them. Laughing about not being able to hit on the cute girls that were there for fear that they would be family (although it might not have been too serious an offense; it was Arkansas after all). Looking at the cute blonde girl at the funeral and arguing with myself over whether she was painfully cute or painfully thin. The dinner after the service was nice. It was just family and some close friends of my second cousins. There was a lot of laughter and stories told that focused more on the good times than the bad. I've found that those are the easiest kinds of funerals to go through and when my time comes I want everyone crying from laughter, not tears.

Scott tag:infinitethinkings.com,2006-10-14:92 2006-10-14T18:31:00-06:00

I've got some more random thoughts for you today, just because I feel like it. Or, more likely because I went through the drive thru at Fazoli's again and didn't even bother checking the bag. Don't worry; I got what I ordered this time. :) Every once in awhile I go through the surveys that have been taken on my site and do some clean up. One of the biggest problems I have is the religion section. I make categories for everyone to use, but leave "Other" open as a possibility so that people can put in whatever extenuating circumstances they want to list. The thing that causes me the most problem is misspellings. Faith is a very important part of ones life as you might imagine. You would think that something that defines the very core of your being, your very essence and your entire moral core would be something important enough to remember how to spell properly. I've got several routines I use to clean things up, but at the end I'm just walking through reading the various entries and deciding if it does actually fit in one of the categories. To be fair, I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that about half of the people who list a particular religion (other than "Non-Religious/No Answer") say that they don't practice that religion. I guess if you grow up in a particular religion, but don't really practice it anymore, you don't have a lot of incentive to remember how to spell it. Of course, "Christian" is something that I imagined a lot of people would know how to spell whether they were religious or not. I went to see a movie today. That's random because I hate going to movies alone. I feel terribly self conscious. It's silly and I know it's not true, but I feel like everyone is looking at me saying, "Aw, that poor loser can't get anyone to go see a movie with him." :) I went to see "Man of the Year" with Robin Williams in it. It was pretty funny, but not quite as good as I had hoped. I won't spoil it for anyone wanting to go see it, but I'll say that I walked out of it kind of depressed because it just reminded me that the political game is not likely to change until people decide to wake up and take charge of their future. The only problem is that not enough people have fought for their freedom enough to understand how important it is. Everyone's too willing to say, "But I don't do anything wrong, why should I care if they take that little freedom. Only criminals would care." While I was waiting for the movie to start a middle aged couple came in with what I assumed was their daughter. She was in her late teens / early twenties, but I didn't get that good of a look at her. What annoyed me was that she kept sending text messages throughout the movie. She was polite enough to have the phone on vibrate, but I just happen to be the type of person that can hear the vibrate noise better than I can feel the vibration going off, so I think I knew when she had a text before she did. And, man, cell phones are awfully bright and distracting in a dark theater. I think the poor girl really didn't want to be there. The only time she laughed through the whole movie was when Robin Williams made a joking plea to women who are getting breast implants: please implant squeaky toys. Because, really, what better way to keep a guy entertained. It made me wonder whether she had breast implants or just a really handsy boyfriend. Speaking of breast implants, can I just take a second to say this: Women, please don't get them. While I can't say that I've ever had my hands on a pair of implants, they just look terrible to me. I would much prefer a pair of smaller breasts to a pair of DDs that make you feel like there's a third person in the relationship. But then again, I *like* small breasts; I doubt there are a lot of guys that feel that way. Let's see, what other random information do I have to impart? I learned today that water pitcher filters can go stale if they aren't used shortly after they are opened. I learned that not turning the heat on after two days of 30 degree lows makes my toes cold, but that I'm too stubborn to turn on the heat when the temperature is going to be back up in the seventies for the next week or so. I think that's enough randomness for today.

Scott tag:infinitethinkings.com,2006-10-10:91 2006-10-10T18:12:00-06:00

So I woke up this morning from a dream where I'm making out with someone. Just as it's starting to get to the good part, I wake up. It's crazy and I can't explain it, but that's what *always* happens when the dream starts to get "good." Not only is it crazy, but it's annoying too. Frustrating might even be a good word for it. I guess I'm just noticing things today. Like the fact that I tend to let random chance control my life just a little too much. I stumbled across a comment on a blog posting where a guy was offering information on how to make a good living through hard work and integrity. So, I emailed him. I stumbled on that for a reason, right? Take my leg for instance: Apparently I walked a little too much yesterday, but it didn't really start hurting until I got home to walk again today. So, I took a couple of aspirin and didn't walk on the treadmill. Or dinner tonight: I went through the drive thru at Fazoli's to get a salad and some dessert. The woman in front of me ordered spaghetti with meatballs. Can you guess what I made it home with? Of course, I could have checked the bag in the drive thru. Or I could have gone back once I got home. But, no, I just accepted it that maybe I just really needed spaghetti with meatballs. It's either that, or maybe it just wasn't my day to get the dessert. ;)

Scott