This guy has got to be one of the dumbest humans on the planet. Porn surfing while the students take a test? No problem! Overhead display still on? Oops! Big problem!

We like to pat ourselves on the back when we talk about the pre-eminence of American economic might. This article may cause you to question your assumptions about the pillars of our economic system. A quote to get you interested:

American growth has been largely driven by consumer spending creating ferocious and unsustainable debts at home and abroad…

Ask yourself – how much credit card debt are you carrying?

I don’t consider myself sufficiently knowledgable about economics to say whether the commentator is right. I did find his point of view thought provoking though, and I am troubled by how souless our ruthlessly capitalist system has become. What’s worst about it is that we’ve (the general population) been effectively co-opted by the industrialists. We all own stock now and our retirement funds rely on the system continuing to wring ever greater returns. Our parents didn’t face such conflicts of interest.

The irony is that according to the article, the system’s ability to wring ever greater returns relies on all of us digging ourselves deeper and deeper into debt. So I’ll be spending my pension checks on debt service I guess 😉

Hey all,

Sorry for the downtime. dyndns expired my domain on me. It’s probably my fault for not watching my email more carefully, though I think what actually happened is their warning notice was eaten by hotmail’s spam filter.

The wonder-barons at Time Warner screwed me over with channel selections, selling me acccess to 3 HBO, 3 Cinemax and 3 Showtime and then halfway through the deal moving 2 of the Showtimes and 2 of the Cinemax’s over to digital channels I could not get. Of course they kept the price the same though. Then they raised my rates across the boards. My monthly cable bill jumped from $45 to $72.50 in the space of three months. Monopolies are wonderful, let me tell you. So I was left either cancelling cable back to the basics, or changing my channel setup since I was not willing to spend that much a month on tv.

I ended up switching to digital. Now I get over 200 channels of stuff, it’s unreal. My conclusion after my first experience with it last night is that there are too many channels. I tried to find something I wanted to watch by looking through Yahoo’s tv listings but they’re so frigging long that I gave up and just started surfing. Now I can spend over 15 minutes making one cycle through the channels. Ain’t the advances in technology great? 😉

The only other issue is it takes longer to switch channels. More in a week or so after I’ve had it for a while.

And the first casualty is the living room aesthetics. Ugh. This is a temporary solution though, I’m getting a new tv which would not have fit on top of the old home entertainment center, so I got a new cabinet for the stereo and built the rig you see here. As soon as I get the new tv the egg crates will go and the center channel speaker will sit on top of the new tv or maybe I will build a shelf for he wall and mount it there.

oh, and I fixed the leaning tower of crates on the right, no worries there 😉

I’ve complained about this before. Check out the wiring running into my stereo, this is without the outdoor speakers wired in too. This took me about 4 hours to deal with last night, though to be fair the wiring only took about an hour and a half. Still though, damn!

Check this out. Homer simpson goes to town with about 100 sound clips. Imagine the prank phone calling fun you could have with that piped in through your telephone. It reminds me of a prank I pulled in college. A guy who was hosting the night’s party had a little doohickey hooked into his phone that could play a variety of sounds over the phone, about 20 of them, including barnyard animals, police sirens, ambulance sirens, doors slamming, windows breaking, and so on. The host had never held one of our frat parties at his place before so people were calling to ask for directions and the host was out on the beer run, so a friend and I were left in charge…
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Looking for a cool desktop picture? Or maybe you’re interested in looking into aerosol accumulation in the atmosphere on the west coast of the US? Possibly you’re concerned about deforestation in South America? In all cases, this is the site for you. Tons of cool pictures of the eart from space in all kinds of spectrum, scale, and so on. Very cool stuff.

I had lunch at one of my favorite places in portland, the vermont flatbread company. The occasion was Marcia’s birthday. I missed her surprise party a couple of weeks ago for lack of a safe ride home, so I took her and kevin out for lunch instead. The beer was great and the Gorgonzola, Pruciotto and roasted asparagus pizza was awesome. I snapped a pic of kev and marcia as well:

I won a signed copy of Hope Muntz’s Golden Warrior, which also came with a signed invitation to a new year’s party from the author himself. I thought it was pretty cool, the card itself is excellent too as you can see below.