I have always despised the taste of aspartame. Its flavor is entirely unlike that of natural sugars. Its sweetness never reaches the intensity that natural sugar does, and it takes on bitter taste when consumed in quantity. It also leaves a sickly sweet aftertaste that never entirely disappears. The first time I consumed an artificially sweetened product, a Diet Pepsi, left me nauseous.

Typically I avoid aspartame whenever possible, but it was not to be on this particular day. Some time ago I was at a party. I’m not a fan of parties, but they are a necessity to ensure that I don’t miss out on any interesting bits of information. As always, I ended up drinking a bit. My friend (or possibly acquaintance) is the self styled mix master. He decided that he would make me a raspberry martini. After making the martini, he dumped in a full packet of Raspberry Crystal Light. The packets he had dumped in were, unfortunately, 1.3 ounce (36.854 grams) packets designed to mix up a full 12 quarts of Crystal Light. All of this went into a martini that could not have been more than about 300 milliliters. The unnaturally dark fuchsia color of the martini failed to scare me away as one too many drinks had deadened my sense of caution. I downed the entire drink and all was well for the night.

Morning came, welcoming me with what I believed to be a horrible hangover. Aside from a pounding headache there was a dull pain behind my eyes along with muscle and joint aches. The eye pain disappeared after a day, but the aching in the rest of the body did not disappear for a full three days.

I found this extended “hangover” to be out of the ordinary, but it was only a few days later that I suddenly realized that it was not a hangover but aspartame poisoning. That night I had consumed over 40 grams of aspartame. Even if I weighed 200 pounds (which is around 90.718 kilograms or 91 kilograms), the FDA acceptable daily intake of aspartame of 50 milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight would allow for only around 4.55 grams. I had consumed a little over 8 times that amount in a sitting. Today there do not seem to be any side effects from the incident, but who knows.

Just an interesting anecdote about aspartame poisoning and associated symptoms.

I have never had dandruff until I started using a bottle of Pantene Shampoo. A month in, and my hair looks like the woods on a snowy evening. Horrible stuff.

Hello, 2012. My how time flies!

Now that I’m blogging on crestind.com, I need to set some goals. It’s a clean slate. If all goes well, the following will occur.

• Posts will be well thought out, fluid and thorough rather than disjointed and messy.
• Posts will be free of grammatical errors. I will still capitalize all articles in titles despite this being incorrect because the rule is too complex, and I can’t be bothered to memorize that.
• I will stop using cheap intensifiers like “very”, “quite” and “rather”.
• Posts will be (allegedly) insightful and substantial to some extent to prevent the blog from degenerating into another awful activity feed.

I will be revising all the old posts. While the authenticity of the moment is lost, I can’t have incoherent messes like that on this blog, especially when it has its own domain. Some revision of history is necessary.

As for the export, everything went smoothly except for some comments that didn’t transfer over properly.

There was some amazing snowfall the last two days, and I woke up this morning to find everything completely blanketed in thick snow. I haven’t seen this much snow in years. Usually there’s about 2 inches of icy snow, but this year nature delivered 6 inches of powder to the area.

Building with snow is a mixed blessing. There’s a desire to build something amazing, but doing so completely destroys the pristine landscape which is always more amazing than whatever you build. But with 6 inches this year, I didn’t have to destroy nearly as much while building because there was sufficient accumulation on the roads.

6 inches? Am I in Canada?

Now this I'd like to see every year.

There was enough snow to build an awesome arch. I intended for it to be 6 feet tall, but the structure was unstable so I had to downsize it. The arch is roughly 89 centimeters tall and 70 centimeters to the base of the keystone. It was constructed from compressed snow blocks formed in plastic container. The weight of the arch caused the legs to fracture twice causing the arch to collapse, but eventually the whole thing balanced out and it was pretty fun.

Building the arch.

Still building the arch.

Shaping the arch with an old kitchen knife.

The completed arch.

Earlier this week one of my best friends passed away. I hadn’t spoken with him in ages since he attended a different college. I checked his Facebook to see what he was up to, and I learned he had passed away. It’s unbelievable, surreal. Same age as me, still young, had a whole life to live, and then he was gone. I had only met him two years back. He was a great guy. Someone you’d rarely get the opportunity to know. It’s not often I can meet someone with his character. There are so many people with pretenses, fake people. He was the most real, the most down to earth. I remember meeting him for the first time, going to his dorm room, shaking hands and everything. I can remember what he looked like, his mannerisms, his voice. He was generous, talented, intelligent and had the greatest sense of humor. He was always smiling and upbeat, and he would always lift your spirits. We’d always be in his room, joking around, talking about random things. I went to a baseball game with him, I was hoping that I’d get a chance to play golf with him. It’s saddening and frightening to realize that somebody I had known so well is gone. I’m left with vague feelings of dread and unhappiness I can’t seem to shake.

Internet marketing is fascinating, especially when you’ve got a campaign with enough volume so that its performance reflects trends. My campaign wasn’t doing too well today, but then I realized, everybody’s partying it up since it’s Halloween. But there are other trends, weekly, hourly, and it’s fascinating because it’s like looking into the minds of others. Surfing the net is a private activity for the most part. Nobody knows how you behave online. But when you are advertising, you get the chance to collect information about people through your advertising campaigns. Its performance is a result of the behavior of others, and with volume it gives insight into behavior. Marketing psychology I suppose. Facebook makes this especially cool because once a campaign has sufficient clicks, it shows the common characteristics of those who have clicked based on the content they have listed under “interests”.

Psychology is fascinating as well. With a good grasp of psychology, you can better understand yourself and others. By understanding yourself, I assume it must improve self control because it explains your own behavior. Better planning and other good stuff must come as a result of this. Plus there’s also the benefit of better understanding of others. It’s all a matter of understanding the big picture. By understanding yourself and understanding others you can achieve a great deal. Unfortunately, as a career it does not have the insane potential for income that I desire, a figure only business can reach. Once I get that house, and that stable income, I will have so much more time to read and learn.

Information. There’s so much of it and I don’t have enough time to learn it all. Psychology, electronics and of course all those random interesting articles from the internet. If only I could read it all. I finally had time to organize my stuff. 224 favorites, at least 10 receipts with scribbles of crap. Now it’s all sitting in folders. Wonderful.

I also realized that my dreams are not nearly wildly crazy enough.

Previous Outrageous Dream

• Decent (No more than 4,000 square feet) sized two story house with a pool somewhere near San Francisco
• Basic economy car
• Lambo or Ferrari

Updated Outrageous Dream

• Decent (No more than 4,000 square feet) sized two story house with a pool somewhere near San Francisco, Texas or Africa
• Helicopter
• Private jet
• Private island
• Nuclear powered yacht

Also of note is that I recently posted about how Facebook would be an excellent platform for applications. I knew what I had in mind, but I failed to put into words the scope of what I was thinking. Luckily GigaOm had an article on this exact trend.

I had always jokingly considered creating my own internet, Internet 2.0, where there would be no anonymity and only websites with acceptable quality would be allowed. But the social web is partially like that because of its decreased anonymity. Many sites are integrating a Facebook login to allow for a social element. Where in the past someone might be hunched over a comp playing a Flash game all alone, now he can (Surrogates) play with others socially.

It also mentions that the social web generates more information and the need to index it. Much of the information is absolute garbage, useless status updates, mindless babbling and other junk, but it might be vaguely useful as aggregate data somehow.

I want to work and work right now. A little bit tired, cold and hungry and all motivation is lost. All this pampering through life doesn’t do any good. There should have been an element of struggle. When you don’t experience it early on, it’s tougher to get through it later on.

In the end it all comes back to the same thing. I want to be doing whatever I want on the spur of the moment. I want to wake up in the morning, and if I think, "hey, I feel like drawing today", I will be able to do so. I’ll be able to whip out paper, chair, pad sit down and draw and draw with no regard for time and no worries, stopping only when it’s dark. Sure, I could draw right now. But if I did, I would not enjoy doing so, for all the while in the back of my mind all the things I have to do would be distracting me. It would not be enjoyable. My mind is just buzzing with all the wonderful things I could be doing, learning to cook, play golf, drawing, playing piano, reading. But again, this is only possible with time. And time can only be acquired with money. Money I don’t have. Feeling a bit better now that I’ve organized this thoughts. More motivated.