Writing Stuff

Yesterday the House of Representatives voted to kill a proposed $700 billion bailout of our financial industry and, while I'm not happy to foot the bill of mistakes of Wall-Streeters, my mouth literally flopped open and hung there for a while when I first read the news. I'm a Democrat, which should mean that I love it when the government steps in and gobbles up companies, increases taxes, and spends all of the taxpayer's money on things that we don't need or shouldn't be responsible for. I do absolutely agree that I want the government to intervene in my life as little as possible, but when the nation is on the brink of an even more enormous economic crisis, I think it's time for them to step in. The financial crisis is something that's affecting the American people in a huge way, even though we weren't the ones that created it. Some of the issues could have been prevented if current (and now former) homeowners didn't take mortgages and buy houses t...

Our building management is cheap... well, maybe expensive. I'm not sure. Whatever they are, though, is causing me to be sitting in my office with sweat dripping down because it's 84 degrees in here... at 6am. Sure, there's a special number that one can call to turn on the air conditioning manually, but that would cost ~$60 an hour. Since I get in here two hours before it kicks on automatically (the building offers it for free and automatically between 6am and 5pm daily, not including weekends) that would cost DreamHost about $120 for those couple of hours. Not cool. Hot, in fact.

I was really excited when I learned that McCain had decided to attend the first debate of the presidential election between the two candidates. Passing on this was one of the worst political moves, I thought, and McCain did himself a favor by attending. When I watched the debate last night, though, it looks to me like he should've skipped it after all. Obama did a fantastically good job at keeping things simple, well thought out, and mostly spin-free. McCain seemed to do the exact opposite, confusing us with his web of words that sounded like they came straight from the Bush Speech Preparation Department™. He was like an (old) broken record, seemingly forgetting that he was being asked different questions. Every response was somehow related to honor and pork barrel spending. Could he not come up with anything else? Sure, Obama repeated himself on a few things but, from what I saw, that was mostly because McCain kept sharing miss-truths about Obama's policy that needed to be co...

I've long sought a solution to protect my iPhone 3G from scratches, dings, and the like. Bulky (or any, from experience) cases just aren't my thing. The iPhone is a sexy device and I hate covering it up with any sort of case. Silicone cases definitely look the best, but aren't for pocketers . They make it a real pain to take out of the pocket without taking out the pocket itself, too. Luckily I found Zagg and their invisibleSHIELD s. They're a great company that makes an awesome product. It's a clear screen and back protector combo (also sold separately) that's made from the same stuff used to coat helicopter rotor blades to prevent rocks and stuff from messing them up. It's super strong, super clear, and super hard to install. That last part doesn't sound so hot, but they're still totally worth it. The story starts about a month ago when I first ordered my screen protector from them. I got it in the mail a couple of weeks later and decided to under...

I watched David Blaine's "Dive of Death" last night and, other than being totally disappointed by the ending, I noticed that the warning message they presented before his bullet-catching trick and before the finale of the dive itself. While I can't remember exactly what David said during his spoken warning before catching a bullet in his mouth, it was something like: Remember that this is completely an illusion. That kills it. I just spent the past 15 minutes watching all of the practicing, setup, and explanation of the steel container placed in David's mouth to catch the bullet in just to hear that it's all fake? I honestly don't think that it was fake, so I wonder why the lawyers (probably) insisted on such a damning warning that basically tells viewers everything they're about to see didn't really happen. If it was fake, I wouldn't think that they'd go through such great lengths to tell you, either.

I can never decide which email/calendar/RSS service to rely on. I'm in between a constant battle between Google and Yahoo! and I can't decide who to side with. Both have some great features that I really enjoy, and both are unique in ways that make some of their features unmissable. Google has been my long-time favorite. They've got an awesome service that's fast, reliable, and aesthetically pleasing. Now that I have an iPhone , though, I rely heavily on integration with that. Google does a pretty good job of doing this, though. iTunes easily syncs calendar entries with Outlook and Google has a great Calendar Sync tool that then syncs Outlook's calendar to my Google Calendar. Cool! Their email works quite well on the iPhone, too, but it's missing the ability to push new messages to the device (instead of it polling the server every hour or so). I really like push email. Yahoo! was probably the first free email service that I used after I ditched AOL and my...

I seem to always feel as if I'm missing out on something if I'm not blogging. I've been doing it off and on for over 6 years now (according to how long I've had my Blogger account ) but just can't seem to stick with it for any period of time. I think the longest I've gone straight is a couple of years, but that was back when I was working at Disneyland and my life was far more interesting. Twitter is something that I've tried to use as a substitute. I can share what I'm doing with my coworkers and I have my Facebook status update along with it. Reading what else everyone else is up to is also surprisingly fun. That's just not enough, though. I really enjoy writing and apparently I need to have some sort of outlet for it or I feel like something's missing... even if nobody is reading it, like you probably aren't. Being limited to 140 characters is a neat thing to work around but hardly let's me share my opinion on things, even if you do...