Technology

I have more than a passing fascination with technology. As a child, I was given programs as gifts. Not the type of programs you can buy in a store, but programs actually written for me by some of the foremost guys in the game at the time. My parents built the first microchip computer, which ended up being a terribly unpopular product that everyone said would not catch on (much as Stan Lee was told Spider-Man would never work as a comic book concept). At one point I was even current on hardware and networking trends. I knew all the current BUS speeds, chip sets, how different processors handled data, and differences between Cisco and other companies' network schemes. It was good. A little useless given that I didn't work in computers, but cool. There was still plenty of information I had no real skillz with, like programming. I never have really been able to code in anything other than Basic. C++? Please. Only in my wildest dreams. I did take the time to learn a lot of the UNIX OS environment. However, as with most things, if you don't use it, you'll lose it.

Then something happened. I don't know if I ran out of time or just stopped paying attention, but suddenly I looked around and I was so far out of the loop. Technology had grown so quickly and I no longer knew what was good or current or better or worse. The technology world swirled above my head. I still knew a lot of the software development and where it was at and how it functioned and such, but that is sort of the easy part in the grand scheme of technology, in my estimation. The only technologies I really seem capable of staying marginally current on at this point is software, cell phones, and mp3 players - and even these are questionable.

As of late, I have been entirely fascinated by satellite music. I have no idea what to make of it. My gut reaction is why the hell would I pay $15 per month to listen to music? That seems ridiculous. However, at the same time, I feel seduced and drawn towards these new shiny devices with bright lights and sleek designs. I'm evidently also a technology slut. Well actually, I more lust after most technologies rather than buy them. So I guess I more dream of being a technology slut. For example, I have been eying the iPod for maybe 2 years now. I have watched at least one generation of the amazing device come and go and have witnessed the creation of its progeny - the Mini and the Shuffle. I have read the reviews and specs, considered my options, and been lured into almost buying one maybe a half dozen times. However, every time, I make a strategic retreat. I am always worried that as soon as I buy it, a better version will come out, or I will want more space, or it will break. I have trouble making such a large investment on something that does not have a replaceable battery. I did buy a flash player. It was a fraction of the cost and was perfect for my gym outings. However, it only renewed my desire for the iPod with its magnificent scroll wheel and easy to see display.

I was even more intrigued when I learned that the iPod may also offer satellite radio in the future, but this is merely a rumor and there a ton of reasons that it may never happen. However, the possibility danced merrily in my head. I could have a device that would seamlessly integrate two technologies that completely intrigue me.

I can't believe they are coming out with a new DVD format. I don't even know whether to buy any more DVDs until the new format emerges. Of course, one will need to have a new DVD player to play the new DVDs and there may be two different formats to make matters even more costly and confusing. The main advantage of these new formats, I hear, is that they will allow for far more data to be stored on each DVD and allow for HD technology. One would need an HD TV to enjoy the technology, but at least the option would be there I suppose.

Microsoft is still working on its new OS (Longhorn), which by all accounts will be amazing and fantastic and will allow for so much improvement. Why don't they just work on getting the current product right before moving on to a new one? In any event, many of Longhorn's features will not work on older systems. So once again, to enjoy the new technology of one item, you will need to have several related new technologies. It's a recurring theme. Technologies are now advancing not only too fast for me to keep up with, but also too fast for other technologies to keep up with. (Much like a motherboard with new chip-sets, or when processors moved faster than the programs that were written for the machines in which they were running.)

Ah, progress. I don't know what I would do without my cell phone or my Internet connection. As soon as I don't have an Internet connection I am out of touch with the world. Internet has got to be one of the coolest things ever. Without ever lifting up a phone, I can determine where something is, get directions to it, find out if there are more convenient locations, and determine how much money I still have in my bank account to go to these places. I can even renew my driver's license and vehicle registration and insurance so that I can drive to my many destinations. I honestly have no idea what I would do without my technology.

Incidentally, I added a counter type thing to my blog. It's absolutely awesome and helps me keep track of how many people visit my blog, where they come from, and even what browser they are using, and it's totally free. Good times. If anyone wants one for their blog or Website, you can get one here.

My Weekend Montage of News and Thoughts

Thomas Jefferson had an adulterous affair with at least one slave. Benjamin Franklin (I know he wasn't a U.S. President), it is suspected, was a homosexual. John F. Kennedy had at least a couple of extramarital affairs. Yet somehow I am supposed to believe that Clinton having sex with someone other than his spouse tarnished the entire image of the Presidential Office. Somehow I feel that it had more to do with the media and the political parties flashing the colorful images to the public at large everyday for months. With the three people I initially named, everything was kept very quiet. No one really seemed to make much of it. If there really has been a loss of respect for the Office, perhaps it was the conservatives' very lack of respect for the Office that led to the public having less respect for it. No real telling, but this has always bugged me.

Google is going to change the way it displays ads. No longer will they be nice little text ads related to what you are looking for. No Sir-ee-Bob. It is funny because I had just finished saying how much I liked Google ads for the very reason that they were not so audacious and were relevant to what you were looking for when I came across the news stories reporting the change.

I had a great comment weekend. My comment-whoring needs are feeling more satiated. I think I actually get more comments from my friends now that I post these things to a blog then when I simply emailed. Plus I get reactions form random strangers that I have never met. It's great because I get to hear what people are thinking even if I don't necessarily agree with it, and they get to see what others are thinking at the same time. Very efficient.

My weekend was good. The Jewish food cooking experience went off without a hitch. My girlfriend's mother loved the food. Her father couldn't really taste anything because he's sick so I'm not sure he enjoyed it as much. I made noodle pudding and potato pancakes. The rest of the weekend was spent doing pointless shopping and a reunion brunch. Nice.

There are new reports out now that say watching TV is good for you because it's very "high brow" with so many plot lines and requires more intelligence than in days of old. This is good for all of you that simply cannot bring yourselves to parting the covers of a book.

More reports are showing problems with the higher education system. It turns out that students are not all working hard to get great grades, and that half of the people that start college, do not finish. Somehow I thought this was old news. Now there's a push for reform to make students work harder because ... dammit college is supposed to teach and is not supposed to be fun. Teaching and fun do not go together. Sooner or later people have to realize that if people want to learn they will and if they don't, they won't. One point the article made is that a lot of college professors hate teaching. Many universities hire top academic scholars who prefer to research than teach. I think perhaps they should rethink this vision.

I found a Webservice called audible.com that allows you to get some of your favorite news programs and books in an mp3 or mp3-like format so you can listen to it wherever you go. I am so excited about this because I love certain radio programs but am often not home to hear them. I try recording them on tape, but my car only plays cd's and I only have a discman and an mp3 player for the gym ... so it is hard to catchup.

Oh, and I heard something on the news this weekend that I had heard on a blog about a month earlier. Drinking beverages out of those hard plastic contaners is hazardous to your health. (I am not sure about regular plastic containers - like Dasani water bottles - because the story only specified the hard plastic bottles.) Apparently, the plastic contains a chemical that acts like a synthetic estrogen, and it leeches out easily into the liquid that the container holds. The scientists that did this study were not surprised too much by all of this I guess. They were surprised at how much is leaches out, and the build-up of the chemical in the average person.

Oh, and by clicking on the "Next Blog" link a few times today I learned that there is a blog ... run(?) by NFL cheerleaders.

Good times.

Holidays

Holidays are confusing times. What makes them even more confusing is everyone has their own days, and when you take them all together, just about every day is a holiday. To make it even more confusing, half the holidays are not even on the actual days the events we are supposed to be celebrating actually happened. For example, the Fourth of July - the celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress on July 2nd, and by August 2nd it had been signed by almost everyone in the Congress. So why the 4th? Well we needed a day ... and the officers of the Congress signed that day so that's good enough.

Christmas - the celebration of the birth of Christ. This one is very big with the Christians, and with any kid that likes presents. However, most historians believe that Jesus was not born on December 25. In fact the date to celebrate this holiday has been debated for a very long time. (In fact I have read that in the 17th century some States banned its celebration entirely - the retailing industry eventually persuaded people that it should be celebrated.) No one really thought there would be shepherds tending their flocks in a field in the middle of winter. Why then is this holiday celebrated on that day? Well, the most accepted theory is that church really didn't like the Pagans and in order to compete with their celebration of the winter solstice, it was moved to that day. The date also coincided with a big Roman celebration date as well I believe. Santa Clause, or the image of the fat, red clad, jolly, white bearded old man was popularized by Haddon Sundblom, an illustrator for Coca-Cola.

Thanksgiving is just a whacked holiday to begin with. We're celebrating the fact that the Indians (feathers not dots) helped to keep the European colonists alive long enough so that they could later take their land and kill them. Huh? What a way to repay people that save your lives. And every year we celebrate it. I wonder if Indians celebrate Thanksgiving.

The interesting thing is that even people in the U.S. that do not celebrate these holidays generally know their mythical history.

It was always confusing for me though when I began to learn that other cultures celebrated entirely different holidays on different days. All growing up, our systems - schools, work, whatever, are geared to the traditional Christian/European holidays - Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and the like. Everyone gets these days off. Banks and stores close and everyone goes home. However, I learned that there were people of other faiths that didn't even believe in these days as holidays but still got to go home *and* they got to stay home on other days to celebrate their holidays. (This is not always the case because many people in our society are not allowed time off to celebrate their own particular holidays, but in college it was not uncommon for a class to be cancelled or attendance to be very low on a non-Christian holiday.) Man, I totally wanted to find a way to get in on that action. (I have a friend that's a Jehovah's Witness and they don't celebrate any holidays. She really likes getting the time off though.)

However, it still seems unfair to an extent. I mean many other cultures in the U.S. don't get a day to celebrate their holidays. Then again, you can't celebrate everyone's holidays I suppose because then we would have to take half the year off ... wait ... why can't we celebrate everyone's holidays again? Part of me thinks that seeing that so many of our holidays do not even seem to be celebrated on the day the event we are purportedly celebrating actually occurred, we should move them. Consolidate each faith's holidays to the same days or days closer to each other. We should totally get more time off in the summer months. This Thanksgiving and Christmas thing being in the middle of winter?? C'mon man. Move it to a time where everyone can go outdoors and traveling is easier.

This weekend is Passover. I'm going to try and make some traditional Jewish dishes for my girlfriend to take to her parents. I've never cooked Jewish food ... so this ought to be really interesting. I hope you all have great weekends.

Disappointment

I'm a little disappointed in people. I'm a little disappointed in how easily people are misled and deceived. I'm a little disappointed at the utter lack of questioning on the part of people. Finally, I am disappointed at authors on all sides of the political spectrum who distort facts and numbers. I believe that if fewer people did this it would be easier to understand the situations that face us and would lead to less confusion, not to mention make the statistics easier to believe.

I learned this week, through a book published by two Yale academics that there is a very real possibility of the estate tax being repealed. I wasn't incredibly shocked by this. I think it's stupid, but I wasn't shocked. What I was shocked by was the fact that the majority of people leading the charge for this repeal were not the people burdened by this tax (their work was behind the scenes - paying for well placed ads and the like) but middle class Americans - people that will have to see an increase in their taxes to make up for this loss of government revenue. In effect they are pleading for the government to tax them more and spare the rich.

Let me explain for those of you that have no idea what I am talking about.

The estate tax (or "death tax") is imposed on rich people when they die. I think it's been in place since about 1916. Many rich people (including Rockefeller and Carnegie) at the time of its enactment supported this law's passage because they felt that inherited wealth stunted working drive of subsequent generations. They also didn't believe in a generational aristocracy being created in a country that was supposed to provide equal opportunity for all. Then in 2001, an estate tax repeal was adopted which would slowly phase out this tax, with a complete repeal in 2010. The way the law was passed, in 2011, the estate tax comes back unless Congress acts prior to then. Recent;y, the House passed a bill to permanently repeal the estate tax. This was nothing new. They've done it before. What is new is that the Senate may actually go along with it as most Americans are pushing for it.

The basic law, as of 2002 was that the first $1 million (now $1.5 million) a person owned at death was exempt from estate tax. Anything above this amount was subjected to the tax. Assuming people conducted a minimal amount of estate planning, a married couple could pass $2 million tax free at their death to others. (One significant benefit to this tax being in place is that it allows for a full step-up in basis as of the decedent's death - meaning that a person inherits property with a basis equal to its fair market value as of the decedent's date of death. With an estate tax repeal, this will no longer be the case and will subject people to extra capital gains taxes. Basis - in a simplistic analysis - is the amount you are deemed to have paid for something. So if you buy a car for $100, you have a $100 basis in that car. Hopefully, you followed all of that.)

The amazing thing to me is that most Americans believe the estate tax affects them - that they will have estate tax exposure at the time of their death. This is entirely false. In 1999, when the exemption was just $650,000 (not even $1 million), only 2.3% of all estates were subjected to the estate tax. Generally, that meant only estates worth more than $2.5 million were subjected to the estate tax. More than half of the revenue collected that year came from the people with over $5 million estates (or the richest 0.1% of our society). The amount raised was enough to fund almost one-half of our entire Education or Department of Homeland Security budget.

What does this all mean? It means the American public, as usual, has been hoodwinked into believing that supporting this tax repeal will benefit them. This is just like when they were coaxed into believing that George W. Bush's last tax relief package would benefit them. The way the numbers broke down - and this is according the U.S. Government, which does a study on how every tax measure will affect the population - the people that really benefited were the top 5% of the American population (and in fact really only the top 1% got the big benefit).

The problem is that this type of tax break does not stimulate a consumer lead economy. The people getting the tax breaks are not going out to buy Big Macs and beer. They are keeping it. Saving it. Investing it and the like, and somehow it has reentered the general public's mind that this benefit will trickle down to them. Trickle down economics was tried throughout the entire Reagan administration and it didn't work. It was concluded that this theory really only works on paper.

The other problem is that the average American, about 75% of them, supports a tax repeal that will not benefit them, but will instead force a tax increase on the average middle class American. And I have to suffer for their ignorance.

Career moves

I am so fascinated by jobs that people have. I hear about so many people that have taken such interesting career paths. I think my favortie was the box tester. Yup ... he is an engineer that tests the strength of boxes for certification purposes - did you ever notice that boxes you buy have such things? There are people out there that make their careers maintaining blogs or surfing the Internet or some other random sort of job. My friend has a boyfriend that's a poet! A poet. I never even considered that I would remotely know a poet - at least one that writes professionally, for a living.

I wonder how people end up in these jobs. I cannot think of many people I knew growing up who dreamed of testing boxes or creating the flavoring chemical that would be used to make hamburgers taste like ... well ... hamburgers. (I've been reading Fast Food Nation" now for two years. Why two years you ask. Well because I read a bunch of other things before I picked it back up again.)

I have tried a lot of jobs. However, there are certain ones that never appealed to me. For example, I never had any desire to be a waiter. This could have been a mistake on my part given that I have learned that restaurants are breeding grounds and everyone working there is sleeping with everyone else working there and the patrons and who knows who else. Ahh, the days of my youth squandered in meaningless jobs like IT help desks where no one was sleeping with anyone.

The entire working culture is interesting to me. A lot of people work extra to get ahead and many families ended up needing both parties to work in order to make ends meet or to get ahead. Some people work for less (illegal immigrants, women, or other minority groups) for a multitude of reasons. The funny part is that the people that work extra to get ahead and such will not actually get ahead in the grand economic theory. I forget the name of this theory but it runs as follows: a person or company that does something to get ahead will only get ahead if no other company or person does the same thing. However, everyone is trying to get ahead so the person trying to get ahead never actually gets ahead - relatively.

As an illustration, it used to be you "got ahead" by getting an advanced degree. This was when it was more uncommon for people to obtain advanced degrees. Now many more people get degrees so such people are not such a valuable commodity. Moreover, some price themselves out of the market with the advanced degree as the employer can hire one of the other people willing to work for less because they are less qualified.

Economies and market efficiencies are not as efficient as we are sometimes led to believe. In theory, outsourcing will not stop, without government intervention, until it costs companies more to outsource than to keep them here. Presumably, this will not occur until all global economies are on an equal playing field and everyone demands the same amount of salary and working conditions and such. This may or may not be a bad thing. There is economic theory that this is good for the economy, but the real numbers seem to indicate otherwise.

However, before I get into some larger pontification on market and economic theory - let me ask the question I was considering when I began this - how many of you are doing what you expected to be doing when you were growing up? For those of you that haven't reached that "grown up" stage of your life - do you know what you will be when you grow up? I was positively convinced that I knew what I was going to be when I started college. Yet, I ended up becoming something entirely different (as is very common).

New shoes

I bought new shoes this weekend. They even came with a new leather wallet (it was a special sale) and my girlfriend got her shoes for 75% off (partially as a result of me buying my new shoes. So she was also very happy about my purchase). :-) I needed new clothes and shoes for work and so I had a bit of a shopping afternoon, and received some very impressive deals.

I also met my girlfriend's closest friend, or at least one of them. Her friend is the sister-in-law of my girlfriend's ex-boyfriend. Interesting. We didn't "hit it off". She is a teacher, which I think is great. I really enjoy teaching, and always wanted to be a teacher on some level. I think teaching is a noble profession, and a very thankless job where one has to play politics with the administration and the parents and everyone else and doesn't receive a salary comensurate with the amount of effort they put in. I also feel that there are many teachers that are not qualified to teach and those that because of the terrible working conditions and pay, no longer really care about teaching, but merely hope to collect their paycheck and go home. Afterall, they are tenured. This attitude is not limited to teachers of course - see Office Space.

In any event, the friend brought up lack of funding. This is a problem of course. Schools often do not receive an appropriate amount of funding. Oftentimes, classrooms are held in these structures called "portables", which was a foreign word to me until I came to South Florida. Who ever heard of putting kids in little trailers and teaching them there? Talk about lack of security and terrible resources. Pitiful. The class of people our society purportedly cares about most relegated to trailer park school yards. Go team. So of course the friend's solution to this was an increase in taxes. However, no one wants to increase the taxes. Is there any wonder why?

There are so many problems with a tax increase. One, there's no guaranty that the money will actually go to schools or if it will simply be misappropriated. If it does go to the schools, what will the schoolboard actually do with it? Will they squander it? Will they hire more unqualified teachers? Will they use it to make their new boat payment? Where will the money go? How much of it will end up in classrooms? And why the heck do we need a tax increase? Florida does not have an income tax. The cities, counties and State generate much of their monies from property taxes (including something called stamp tax) and sales tax. I don't know if any of you have been keeping up with the financial market, but real estate is where it's at - property values are going through the roof. Well as these property vales have increased by about 26% in the span of one year, the government has been collecting more money, as the tax is based upon the value of the property. Seems odd that our state somehow does not have a surplus of money as a result. An increase in sales tax seems like a terrible idea as well, as it will impact an already struggling lower and middle class - as they are the classes most strongly hit by sales tax - or any consumer level tax as a higher portion of their income is subject to the tax (they are most likely to use their entire income stream to purchase consumer products).

Finally, there is no evidence that the school systems in our country really work. We seem to be having a terrible time educating our youth. World scores indicate that our students are not exceptionally successful with math, science, or reading. Perhaps this is due to teachers with lousy salaries not wanting to teach. Maybe this is due to unqualified teachers being hired and retained because they are cheaper. Perhaps it's due to the fact that schools get paid more for having special-needs students - monetarily incentivising having learning disabled students. Wow. Maybe it's a lack of parental involvement, supervision, discipline, or caring. Did this occur as a result of the failing schools or did the failing of the family unit fuel the failing of the schools? Was it a two way street, with each impacting the other? We assess our students in Florida with standardized testing. I believe this is the national movement though. No Child Left Behind and all. Statistically, you have a better chance of determining who will be successful by flipping a coin. These tests show nothing but who can take a test. However, administratively, how else can we show who will be successful? We need immediate concrete results in the age of microwaves, fast food, and instant gratification.

The friend did not like my opinion ... as my girlfriend pointed out - no one likes to be accused of being in a failed system with a bunch of corrupt and inefficient people. Police, priests, government workers, attorneys, doctors, big corporate (tobacco, Enron, Worldcom), etc. Many professions have corrupt people in them and no one likes to be associated with being corrupt or inefficient. Unfortunately, it only takes a few bad people in a large beauracracy to destroy the whole system and its credibility. For example, most people on the lower levels of Enron had no idea that there were any accounting irregularities. Hell, Wall Street didn't even know, why would the worker. However, a few greedy people found a way to make the numbers say what people wanted to hear and there we had it, a recipe for disaster. However, the people that aren't responsible for the disaster necessarily still carry the mark and the stigma for what others have done. However, in this situation, I was not saying the friend was corrupt or inefficient only that she worked in an overall system that seems to be failing (on a whole). I agree that the system needs work, but I do not think we can trivialize how terrible it is with the simple quip of "increase taxes". She didn't see it that way and did not greatly appreciate my opinion. Who the hell was I to be saying such terrible things. Like I said, we didn't "hit it off".

Schoolteachers, however, were not the only people that did not like me this weekend. There was my girlfriend's other close friend who did not like me saying that people are awkward around each other when they first start dating. My point was that they do not, necessarily, act the same way around each other in the begining as they do over time. For example, most people will get dressed up for their first date. They will not burp in front of one another. The make-up will be in place. Legs will be shaved (just in-case). The apartment will be cleaned. ... This did not appeal to her. However, in the end she relented and felt that I was right but I had definitely used the wrong word - "awkward" - even though she could not think of the correct word. The whole thing had me feeling pretty awkward. As I hadn't meant to start a disagreement.

I suppose there really are no safe topics out there. Some are just safer than others and every now and again, you still get kicked in the crotch.

You're right ... no I'm right ... eh

So there I am cruising the Web and passing by some of my favorite virtual haunts, and there I find a story about a guy that is living in a Starbucks. This totally reminds me of something my friend Doug would do. In any event, this landed me on another person's blog. Ok, I know what you are all thinking: 1) my mad skillz at linking just rocks and makes my entries all that more interesting to read ... seriously, I know you are thinking this, and 2) what the hell do we care? Well ... you probably don't, but I'm getting to a point here, and it's always wildly exciting when I get to my point. Yeah, I know you aren't very excited by it but I know you are at least glad for the pain of my journey to be finally over. :-)

So I was intrigued by this story and I thought I would read more. Find answers to some of my burning questions like who are these people that conducted this interview? And how the heck did they stumble upon some random kid living in a Starbucks? In any event, the more I read of this Stephanie Klein's blog the more my brain started to get blurry. It was either in direct relation to the reading or whatever I had eaten for lunch. (I think it was a combination.) I felt that she sounded familiar ... her tone. She sounded educated. How educated? I wasn't sure, but smarter than a lot of the other bloggers I have read out there. However, she also sounded like some friends that I have that are mildly off and like a Sex and The City episode with her periodic outbursts of open female sexuality. I also learned that she had a book deal - for two books! What to make of it all.

I was struck by the fact that a lot of her blog reminded me quite a bit of another blog I had read once. That one was by Jessica Cutler, a D.C. intern that allegedly had several torrid encounters with some high ranking government officials (ooo la la) and spoke rather openly about it. (There I go with my snazzy links again.) She also had her smatterings of fame, in a Playboy pictorial, which I think you may be able to locate at Uselessjunk.com. This got me to thinking, what do these people have in common? I dove deeper and found out that this Stephanie woman had been pregnant when she discovered her husband had been cheating on her. (Personally though, she didn't seem to trust him before their marriage (assuming I'm following her posts correctly) so I think she probably should have seen it coming.) Both bloggers seemed to be somewhat intelligent, and just talking openly and blatantly about sex. Huh. Sex and The City did that too. Jessica's was, generally, more centered around sex, and Stephanie's seemed to have more to it. However, it seemed, overall, that what I noticed most about her writing was that it was an intelligent woman being edgy and raw about topics that women are conventionally less than open about ... usually.

I'm still left pondering the why of it all. Whether she is merely seeking attention or approval still and that's what fuels her topics and her blogging. Whether she is just a part of some quiet underlying sexual revolution of women. I have read articles, as of late, that talk about studies showing that more intelligent women are having a harder time finding mates. Perhaps they are unsatisfied with more men, wanting a man more successful or intelligent or driven than them may limit their dating pool overall. Perhaps they simply lack the time to date given their careers. Perhaps there are all kinds of other issues up there. Maybe the very things that motivate a woman to be that successful make her less attractive to a segment of the male population. Who knows. My personal assessment of Stephanie had to end at this question as I have never met her. I mean it would be fine of me to say that she is attention starved and still desperately seeks male approval or some such stupid psycho-analysis bullshit, but it is unclear. I have no idea and at the end of the day it really didn't matter. Besides, irrespective of why she does it, I appreciate that she does it as I respect open and honest people.

So then I got back to the meat of the matter. What makes these women so popular? What made the show that popular? Are there just a ton of women wanting permission to be that edgy? Are they just saying what other women are thinking? I have posed this question to some of my friends, and I got minimal response. Lisa doesn't like Stephanie's blog and so refuses to read it. She got to the front page saw "Greek Tragedy" and "More Pictures of Me", thought "ick" and ran away. She didn't want to be trapped on some whoa-is-me blog listening to some chick bitch and moan about how terrible her life is. An understandable reaction. I think she was also somewhat put out at the openness of the writing style. However, she was able to confirm to me that her original interest with Sex and The City and such, was strongly related to intelligent women discussing topics that they were formerly forbidden by society to discuss in the open, and not doing it in a way that made them sluts.

So I leave it to you, my faithful ... and not so faithful readers, to figure out for yourselves what's happening here.

I got a new random person to comment on my blog. WOOO HOOO!! I am such a comment whore.

5 more minutes ...

Did you know we were supposed to turn our clocks ahead this weekend? Well I guess people in Indiana, and perhaps some other States did not have to participate in this hair raising adventure invented for farmers, but I did. What I want to know is why must I suffer because the farmers need more daylight. Can't they just adjust their own damn sleeping patterns?

I woke up at 8 on Sunday only to find out it was 9 and I was late. I had known that the clocks were to be turned ahead this weekend, but somehow on Saturday night, it never occurred to me to actually turn the darn thing forward. Oh sleep, oh illusive illusive sleep. Growing up, I never thought I would miss sleep as much as I do now. I still feel that in college I missed soooo much sleep that my body is still trying to catch-up from there and just never quite does.

The weekend was pretty cool, aside from my clock trauma. I made it to the gym on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday - go, me. On Saturday we got our daily allowance of shopping in, and went to dinner with my girlfriend's cousin. Her husband was out of town and so she was lonely. Her bearded dragon took great interest in my feet without my knowledge until I suddenly felt this odd thing crawl onto them. (For those of you who do not know this, I was wearing sandals, which I am wont to do because I live in South Florida.) I got to watch an hour of the NCAA tournament while waiting for our table. Good times. Then on Sunday, after much tossing and turning and finally convincing myself that it really was an hour later, I woke up and made it to the gym. Then a few of us went to a big arts and crafts festival. I got some really cool things. Then we all went to see Sin City. I liked it. I like comic books though, and I love Frank Miller. So I figured I was bound to like the movie. Tarantino does some guest directing in it. Overall, a very cool flick. It was a very low budget flick too, but you would never know it.

My fish (Mitchell) died last week. I knew it had to be coming soon. I mean ... a fish has to eat to live and his hunger strike had been carrying on for quite sometime. It has been suggested that perhaps I should get a new fish, but I really don't think I'm cut out for the fish lifestyle. It seems rather ... fishy. So while I have allowed the thought to swim through my head a bit, and have scaled it, ... I feel I should limit my fish tales (tails). I know all these puns may get some of you feeling green around the gills ... and give you a ... bone to pick with me....

I'm still exhausted. This whole clock change still has my body rather confused. It didn't really want to go to sleep last night, but then it didn't want to wake up this morning. So I'm struggling through sleepiness in an attempt to update my blog with something new and exciting. Not going too well is it? Terrible.

Last week I got into a little blog battle. I had found this woman's blog last week. When I had first browsed to it, she had a post about car shopping and it seemed kind of like a cool site. Then it took a dramatic turn. As it turns out, she's rather ... adament on her views regarding "right to life" issues when it comes to Terri Schiavo. Actually, she takes the more "right" position on issues, in general. I would say "conservative", but so much government involvement in States' rights and people's private lives does not seem in keeping with traditional conservative views. In any event, it was an interesting debate. As with most debates of this type though - they ignore half the facts and half of the arguments so that they can try and make their points sound better. The only position I advocated throughout was that it should be a private matter. However, because I wasn't saying what they wanted .... In any event, I stopped posting on it sometime last week, and never really intend to return.

I got plenty of other blogs upon which to shed my dim light. :-)