This morning I was listening to NPR. One of the lead stories was that George Bush is starting up his campaign in earnest now. He visited some car parts place called “USA industries,” where , I kid you not, the crates were painted in red, white, and blue. Then he went to a park for the ground breaking of a Sept. 11th memorial. Then he went to a different part of the same park and raised $1.7M for his campaign.

Now, I know a lot of people use blogs as a place to hash out political greivances, and, some might claim, have meaningful political debate. I’m here to say that this place won’t be one of them. Too much of what I feel about the political process and everything that swirls around it is negative. I hear about John Kerry, and I feel worse. I hear about Bush, and I feel worse. I’m frustrated by the apathy, the lack of sophistication, and the lack of independent thought that we as a populace possess. And life is too short for that much negativity.

I’m selfish. So, instead of focusing hard on issues and making myself an activist like I should, I’m going to just educate myself as much as I need, and try to focus on the things in my life that make me happy. This includes, but is not limited to, cooking and eating good food, playing outside, reading, playing video games, and plotting an eventual move to Scandinavia.

• Home-made chicken soup
• New books from Neal Stephenson
• Good jobs in the Bay
• Gran Turismo 4
• scuba diving in cozumel
• 20" flat screen displays (at last!)

So… since we have a tendency to rent a movie or two every week, I decided it would be cool to join netflix. The idea is you queue up a bunch of movies that you want to rent, they mail you up to three at a time, and when you’re done with them, you mail them back. You can do this as many times as you want for $20/month. So, we break even if we rent more than 5 movies a month (which I’m pretty sure we do). Also, since netflix is based here in the bay, I figure we’ll get the movies lickety-split. It also doesn’t hurt that I have *cough* a DVD burner.

One of the cool things about netflix is they allow you to rate all the movies on their site, and based on your ratings, they suggest future movies that you might want to rent. This is pretty cool, and I totally spent an hour and a half clicking through hundreds of movies and rating them. Now it recommends for me “the best of the muppet show” along with “apocalypse now redux.” Hmm.

In other news, my mother has shipped me all my old scuba-diving equipment from Austin. In combination with my brother’s, which is already here in CA, the idea is not to pay through the nose for the basic stuff (mask, snorkel, fins, boots, gloves) that they require you to have for the Open Water Diver class, but refuse to rent. If we were to buy all the stuff, it would be about $200-300/person. Blech. In any case, after this we will be duly trained/refreshed for our upcoming excursion to Mexico which I am so looking forward to.

What more can I say? See for yourself:

• Part I
• Part II
• Part III

The score seems to include bits from Requiem for a Dream and Radiohead. Wow.

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Comments

em — 2004-03-02 09:26:31

Arghh!  No ending in Part III !!!!!!!!

bryan — 2004-03-03 14:37:33

yeah, I know. Where I found them, they mentioned that these were the only three known to exist. I like to think of them as the back story to the original game. The life mushroom eventually revives Luigi, and you go on to conquer king koopa. Isn’t that better?

em — 2004-03-03 22:11:49

Ahh, much better!  Thanks!

This is the coolest thing ever!

http://www.xat.nl/enigma-e/desc/index.htm

Leslie can attest to the fact that when I was in Baltimore with her, and we stopped by the NSA museum, I was ecstatic to get to touch and play with an original Enigma rotor machine. Right behind it were the bombes that the English in Bletchly Park to crack the original code (they were led by Alan Turing himself).

Maybe the next time I have $150 lying around.