Sunday, April 30, 2006

Depeche Mode

Their concert last Thursday at the Shoreline was fun, but nufin exciting. They started off with some newer stuff, then went into the classics. Stranger wasn't played, but they did play Reach Out and Touch Faith (or whatever the name of that song is). Allie and I enjoyed it, but there's really not much more to talk about.

Friday, April 28, 2006

Zebra Lounge Friday

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The Zebra Lounge in SF was great last Friday. My cuz, her b/f and her classmate, along with Allie and I meet up there around 10. My friend Maria is part of Sugarbeats which is a promotional group that threw the party that night. My cuz and her friend are seen here (the pic to the left) on stage dancing. Can you guess which one is my cuz? I'm asking cuz it ain't obvious. :) Kris (the classmate) was up on stage most of the night! Anyways, we all had a great time. BTW, the photo is deceiving. Kris is actually over six feet tall, and my cuz is under 5'6", but they look almost the same height in the pic.

I'm looking forward to getting up to SF again. Oh wait, I'm heading there tonight with some friends!

Saturday, April 22, 2006

Selfsexual

Imagine a person who's is turned on by flirting with themself. Yes, there are people out there that are like this. To this point, I think that pop culture and science have both ignored this class of sexual orientation. No longer!
Selfsexual is a term I had to create to describe how a certain friend of mine is, at least at times, attracted to herself. It goes beyond just looking yourself in the mirror to check if everything is in place. It goes to the level of actually turning yourself on by doing nothing more than looking at your own yourself.!
Now, I have to admit that I may be selfsexual curious at times. I mean, even though I'm happily engaged, I do make love with myself quiet a lot. lol That doesn't make me selfsexual, of course. Simply masterbating doesn't make one selfsexual. Masterbating while looking at yourself in the mirror does show some tendencies.

Friday, April 21, 2006

I got an old camera working

I've lost an really cool camera a couple years ago. It was a digital Canon. I loved it. But even before that camera, I had others. One is this old Advantix thang. It's never been lost, but I've kinda lost track of it since I don't use it. I ran across it today. It's the only camera I got these days, and I prolly only have it cuz it's the one I stopped using before. I didn't stop using cuz its usefulness of expired though. The camera's flash is one of those hide-a-way ones. There's really no reason that it is a hide-a-way, but some engineer at Minolta musta thought it would be a good idea. Pointless for sure. Anyways, the automatic mechanism that pops the flash out stopped working years ago. When I use it at night or in-doors, I have to remember to pop the flash out manually before the camera will take a shot. Ghetto, huh? What's even more ghetto is that if I do use it, I actually have to go to the store to process the pictures.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

So I'm addicted

I got Civilization IV almost as an afterthough to my recent visit to Best Buy. Well, I've loved the Civilization game series since the initial version was released back in the day. I remember playing it on my old Tandy computer, which didn't even have a hard drive. I was pimping it out by having two 3.5" floppy disk drives so that I didn't have to do as much disk swapping for the bigger games (like Civilization).
My favor release is Civilization II. The producers expanded the scope of the game perfectly. I felt Civilization III was good, but it came across as not as well balanced for length and type of game play it offered. Civilization IV scales back much of what made Civilization III too looming, while at the same time offers more depth of game play.
So, I've been playing Civilization IV about every chance I get now. So far, it's my second favorite release. There's not a whole lot of waiting around for thangs to happen, so the pace is quicker, but it feels as though I'm still playing with the same level of control as the previously releases.
I very highly recommend this game! I'm a bit surprized by how much I'm enjoying it.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

It's sunny

Today it's sunny.

Ketchup

Isn't it funny how drive-thru fast food places with either give you no ketchup at all (if you don't ask), yet they give you enough ketchup packages to allow one to survive a nuclear winter (when you do ask)?

Trouble with Bush

It's funny, people dislike Bush Jr. so much that in an informal poll online, these are the running results when he's compared to Jimmy Carter.


Who will history judge more favorably?
Carter
77%

Bush
23%

Total Votes: 32,283



What the hell? LOL

In other news, this is a recent story about yet another retired general speaking out against the administrations (particular Rumsfield) approach to the Iraqi War. Read article

Monday, April 10, 2006

A player's trouble

So, I was at this party one time at a friend’s house in Monterey many years ago. There was a few guys that lived in the same place, and they always had some friends over. It was a den of players. At this party, a female friend of theirs had brought over some fresh meat, a cute 18-year old blonde girl. I had started talking to her and even got her number, but couldn’t hang out too long. Anyways, the king player had his eyes set on her, and hung out with her for awhile too.

The next day, I get a call from him. He went into this short story how he liked her and that she said she liked him too and he was hoping he could get her number from me. I was thinking that’s a pretty slimy move, but hey, it didn’t really matter to me. So I gave him the number, or at least I thought I did. It turns out that I misread the number when I gave it to him. By some massively strange coincidence, I gave him the new number to his ex-girlfriend’s new place. When he called, he got cussed out by his ex over the phone.

I get a call back from him like 20 minutes later. He was kinda pissed, but he was a trooper. He still wanted the blonde’s number from me, even though he thought I intentionally gave him his ex’s number to fuck with him. His friends thought I was a genius for that maneuver, even though it was completely accidental. I never met his ex, nor did I know her number. However, I think the accident ended up working in his favor anyway cuz he was able to use the incident to suck his ex back into his game for a little while longer.

Friday, March 24, 2006

Just some thoughts on U.S. war capability

For a long time the U.S. had a policy of keeping a standing military ready to fight one full war and one half war at the same time. This means that the U.S. can engage in one all out war in one region, while still being able to do peacekeeping missions and smaller scale operations in other regions at the same time. There was a time when people viewed the need for this with skepticism. Following the Persian Gulf War, some believed the world was becoming more united and less tolerant of rogue states.
After 9/11, many began to realize that the proper approach was neither a single war policy or a war and a half policy. So the U.S. adopted a two war policy. This allowed the U.S. to fight the Iraqi War and the Afghani War at the same time. Of course, here comes my criticism.
I've got the sense that the U.S. is barely able to fight one all out war right now. It seems to me that the politicians and bureaucrats have significantly underestimated the resources required to fight a war. It's my opinion that the current chaotic situation in Iraq could've been avoided had we sent in the appropriate number of forces from the beginning. In additional, the Afghani War never got significant U.S. forces at all. In reality, it was a half of a war. So, the U.S. really is fighting and rebuilding nations from one and a half wars. Yet, our ability to do this was based on trying to implement a two war policy. It seems to me that maybe our leaders don't really have a sane grasp of reality when it comes to what's really involved when fighting a war. We haven't learned from many of the biggest mistakes in the Vietnam War. Mistakes like never making a formal declaration of war, underestimating the enemy's ability to stay entrenched, or working too closely with the existing powers within the occupied nation. We succeeded with reforming Japan and Germany, but these were two nations weary of wars they started. Right now, we are occupying one nation that is weary of the war we started, and another nation that's not had a strong central government in modern times.
These wars need to be finished. In my mind, the Afghani War will not be done until Bin Laden & crew is captured. This should be our main focus. We should've been fighting the Afghani War as a full war. We need to get Iraq on its feet so we can finish our job in Afghanistan.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Trouble with time again, or not

So far, this evening is going pretty much as planned...well, not really planned, but as I intended for each task that I thought of doing. So, I had to leave work a bit early to drop off some components for rework. I left that machine shop around 4 and headed home. As I headed home, I figured out that I could possibly have enough time to do all of my laundry at the nearby Laundromat. I get home, gather the laundry and head over. I got all the loads started in the washing machines and headed next door to discover a sandwich restaurant at around 4:45. I finished my sandwich, walked back over to the Laundromat and started moving clothes to the dryers. As the last load was transferred, I looked up to see the time was about 5pm. I thought about the nice shirts and sweaters that I need dry cleaned. I headed back home and gathered my dry cleaning load and drove to the near by cleaners. After dropping off my dry cleaning, I'm thinking about how hella low on gas I am. Ok, I head down the street to the gas station and pump a nearly full tank, 15.25 gallons. Ya'no, I went 365 miles on that 15.25 gallons. That's pretty good. Anyways, after that I head back to the Laundromat. As I walk up to my dryers, the first load finishes. Talk about prefect timing. While I'm folding my clothes, the second load finishes. Just as I'm done folding both of those loads, the third and final load finishes. I get all that done, and everything back to my home at just about 6:55. That's 5 minutes before my grocery delivery time window starts. And here I am blogging about the whole journey.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

How many thangs are wrong with this?

Recently, a disc jockey was babbling away on the radio. During her show, she reported that Donald Trump just had his new baby which was born on March 18th, 8 days early and at 8 o'clock. She then added, "That's kinda like 7 degrees from Kevin Bacon, but with 8 instead."

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Vancouver Visit

From my visit to Vancouver, I can say it seems to be a cool place with plenty to do. I definitely want to visit again. Dave, little Miriam, Allie and I drove up from Seattle Saturday morning this past weekend. Dave picked out a great hotel, sep the bed situation was a little strange. The hotel only had two “deluxe double beds” per room available. I’m not sure was a deluxe double bed is, but my guess is that they are somewhat smaller than a queen bed. From sleeping in them, my perception is that they aren’t quite as wide. Anyway, in Vancouver, we headed down to the famous Public Market on Granville Island. It’s a place where one can get tons of fresh food from around the world in the style of a large European market place. We really just walked around; didn’t do any shopping. At the food court, we settled on German style sausages and hotdogs for lunch, with crepes for a dessert. We then walked down to the small ferry launch and took a ferry ride around False Creek. We got of at Yaletown, which (upon close inspection of the stores and inhabitants) seemed to be the gay centric area of Vancouver. We were in this one fancy knickknack boutique that had hella gay-ass photos as samples in the picture frames on sale. It was pretty amusing. I wouldn’t have expected overt stereotypical displays like that, regardless of who the target cliental was to be. Other clues regarding the homosexual friendlessness of the area were many of the guys walking around the area. After exploring the area for a bit, we got back to the ferry and headed back to Granville Island. One thang that Dave and I noticed is that time seemed to be slipping by without notice. We lost track of time several times, realizing each time that it was later than we though it should be. Very strange.
After that minor adventure, we headed back to the main shopping area in the region near our hotel. After getting thangs figured out, we found an area of shops near the Sears. The Sears in Vancouver reminded me more of an upscale dept. store in the U.S. We also checked out this one comic book shop that had a lot of interesting items, and a few other boutiques as well. All the stores in that area began closing around 6 to 7, so we drive on a hunch to find another area. Eventually we found a street where all the shops where open late. There we found the restaurant where we had diner. That’s another story. Anyways, after dinner we did some shopping, and then headed back to the hotel. The next morning, we headed back to Seattle.