Dear Future Girlfriend

“Dear Future Girlfriend, here’s a couple things you need to know if you want to be my one and only all the time…”

This list is a living list of things I have come to know over the last 11 years of serious dating. I don’t include any girlfriends in or before High School and I didn’t do much dating in the Army. Shortly before turning 22, I met a girl and then less than a year later we were married. That was my first of many mistakes in dating. I don’t regret much in my life and try to learn from everything that happens. Here is my list and note to my future girlfriend. I am not ashamed or afraid to say that I want to be married again so that future girlfriend could be my future wife. (More on this in another posting. – note to self to write more on this, lol)

  • Don’t be crazy.
    • This one is self explanatory!
  • Make it easy to date you.
    • No guy wants to be forced to act like a boyfriend. They just want to do what they want and love you the best way they know how.
  • Laugh at my all my jokes
    • Don’t force it but if you think something is funny then don’t be afraid to laugh.
  • Recursively, make me laugh
    • I have a very loose sense of humor, this won’t be hard
  • Accept Sarcasm as a second language
    • If you don’t know it then learn it, quickly.
  • Makeup – less is better
    • I get it that women these days feel they need makeup, and it’s not that I don’t appreciate the way you look but know what looks good and how to enhance your features without adding a whole new layer of skin. Later on when this comes off I don’t want to date two different people.
  • Accept my son. Period.
    • You don’t have to love him, initially, but if you aren’t absolutely sure you can date/marry a guy with a kid then I have no purpose dating you. Simple.
  • Don’t afraid to hold my hand or let me kiss you in public.
  • Updated 8-29-16

I will add to this list as I think of things to add…

If you are wondering, yes, I know this is the public internet and anything I post on here could be read by anyone in the world, but this is my blog…How could you expect me not to be extremely personal on a website with my namesake? Jason Lamb dot ME!

Job vs Career

It’s interesting to me when people complain about their job. For me, I have a career, a career in Information Technology (IT). I don’t have a Monday to Friday 8-5 job. I go to work to get the “job done.” I have a task or project (usually several at a time) and I prioritize them and complete them in a organized manner. It really boggles my mind when someone is surprised that I don’t get done the same time every day. My work changes from day to day so how can I expect to start and stop the same time every day?

I love what I do, else I wouldn’t do it. I recently changed employment for the better, both for environment and pay. It has actually migrated me to a different city, a much bigger one. I was raised in a big city my whole life and I finally feel at home with where I am and what I am doing.

Back to this job vs career thing. That difference should be abundantly clear to people who are older than 23 and out of school. When I was 15 I started my first tax-paying job at a hotel. I was a glorified bell boy. At 16 I foolishly changed jobs to work at Meijer (the mid-west version of Walmart). At the time the minimum wage was $5.15 in Indiana. At the hotel I was earning $7.25! That was a very respectable hourly wage for kids my age. I got bored with doing all the chores they had for me at the hotel. I worked M-W-F 5p-10p or something similar. I was limited on the hours because of my age. When I started working there I remember my mom or dad dropping me off at work because I only had my permit and couldn’t drive alone. When I quit there to work for Meijer I earned a whopping $5.40! I worked more hours but made less money. At the time being 16 I could work more hours, and did. In hindsight my schooling started to struggle about this time because of the hours I was putting in. I did pay for a cell phone and my own auto insurance. It wasn’t until a year later that I would pay for my own car payment, a ’96 Chevy Cavalier. That first car was a “gimme”, a ’88 Ford Thunderbird in 2000.

At that time I had a job. I was paid an hourly wage for a clock-in/clock-out job that would not end up being my life long employment. It wasn’t until after I got out of the Army that I felt I had a career. not that you can’t make a career of the Army, many people do. When I first joined I thought I would be a “lifer”. I loved my time in the Army and wouldn’t trade it for anything. After 5 years I let a pseudo childish love interest ruin my life and my mind changed which led to my leaving the Army.

My average employment after the Army is right at 3.5 years, not including the 8 months I have been with my current employment. I wish I would’ve been at one place longer than 4 but life happens. Each time I have left it has been for a good reason. The reasons differ each time but at those times it was a decision I had to make. I have gained much knowledge from each place that I continue to carry with me where ever I go. I appreciate all my previous employers, some more than others. I feel right now I am in the best place I could be for several reasons that I am not going to go into. Thank you to all my employers that allow me to continue to grow and pursue my goal of being an IT Guru.

Internet Usage

I was curios how much of the lovely internet I was using in a given time. The report I was able to pull up was quite revealing. I have Time Warner and my speeds are 20mbps download and 2mbps upload. I was curious how much do I use given a certain amount of time. I was able to see usage starting from May 4th, 2014. I guess Time Warner doesn’t allow the user to see any usage longer than 5 months or maybe they just don’t keep track.87-3

Over the course of this time I used 1093 GB (gigabytes) of data. That is 1.07 TB (terabytes)! I have my TV hooked as my monitor to my computer and I do not pay for cable TV so everything I watch comes from the internet via streaming or other methods. Also, as soon as I get to my house my two iPhones (one for work and one for personal), and one iPad connects to my Wi-Fi. Between my work laptop, home desktop, 2 iPhones, and an ipad I have 5 devices that are always connected to my internet connection when I am home. When I am away from home my desktop is always on. All that being said I am going to get deep with some of these numbers because I love math and, well, let’s face it, I am a nerd.

I have figured out that I use 87.3 kb per second. That is like downloading this picture (my face) every second of every day for 5 months. Yes, this image file is 87.3 kb in size. I actually took the time in photoshop carefully sized it down to that size. eye100-5If you take in consideration that I had my internet shut off for 20 days while I was on vacation. Then you take the original 152 days from May 4th to Oct 3rd;and get 132 days. If you take the 1093 GB divided by the 132 days you get 100.5kb per second. That is like downloading this image of my eye every second for 132 days. Bored yet? As you can see below the amount of data in GB, MB, KB per DAY, HOUR, MIN, SEC.

data

To sum it all up, I was kind of impressed with how much data I used and the fact that I could see that data usage in a nice little chart. Below are the actual screenshots from the data charts from Time Warner’s website. If you have Time Warner you can see your data by downloading the MyServices section on iOS or Android. UPDATE: They have moved this function to a mobile app.

Usage by DAY from 5/4/14 to 10/3/14
[This chart is best viewed when clicked and once it loads clicking it again to expand to full size.]full history

Usage by MONTH (May to Oct)
monthly usage

Usage by DAY (September)
daily usage
Usage by HOUR (Sept. 17th)
hourly usage

I hope you enjoyed this very nerdy look into my internet usage data. Let me know what you think below in the comments section.