Vacuous

My fiance was vacuuming our room the other day. She accidental sucked up a
shoe lace. Normally, string type things get hung up on the belt drive.
Normally. Well, the string made it past the drive and all the way into the
blower. When the motor stalled, it took out both a secondary house breaker
and one of the main breakers in the box outside our house. Needless to
say, it took a while for us to hunt down that issue.

So yesterday, I set about to repair the dang vacuum. Allie watched as I
methodically took the vacuum apart, piece by piece until I had the blower
in two pieces.

At that point I let Allie have the fun of digging the string out from being
wrapped around the axial with scissors. I hate doing that, and she's
pretty good at it.

So then I reassembled the vacuum, with no left over parts. :) I plugged
it in and it ran great again.

Allie hasn't seen my mechanical skills too much, so she wasn't all that
sure if I could take the vacuum apart. Apparently the fact that I'm an
Engineer and I build devices for a living didn't register. Women are
funny like that. Quick to assume a guy can't do sumfin just cuz they
haven't seen it for themselves. I mean, it's fun to impress a woman, but a
little faith in the first place is nice too. This is a lovingly critical
comment about all the women in my life. :)

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Transformers 2

Transformers is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. It was a great action flick full of battling machines. But it's not gadget porn. It's better, much like Jessica Alba never does full nudity but is the hottest women on the planet. This fill is kinda like the Jessica Alba of sci-fi movies. I went into this movie with some fairly high expectations, and I was actually surprised that it surpassed those.

The only enjoyment flaw in the movie is near the end in the final showdown. Because of the way the robots are made in the movie, the view might lose track of who's who in a couple of the battle scenes. Other than that, this movie is great. One particular point I enjoyed is that it has the best car chase scene I've seen in a movie in a very long time (with near perfect mix of pacing and excitement).

Now, here's the spoiler. There's seems to be a teaser trailer for Transformers 2 before the Transformer movie. Did anyone else catch that?

Economy America

It seems a lot of Americans really don't understand economy nearly as much as they've been told they do. Many seem to confuse economy with government, falsely believing that Free Market is intrinsic to Democracy. Of course, many Americans are under the false belief that America's economy is Free Market. America has a Mixed Economy based on Free Market principles, it does not have a pure Free Market.¹

Although government and economy work together, one particular type of government does not require one particular type of economy. It is possible to have a free society yet have an economy based on the sun worship. That's not an ideal mix, but it's not outside the realm of possibilities.

Free Market has its place in our country. It is necessary to regulate that Free Market to prevent abuses. Anti-trust, monopolies, rigging or hording of necessary supplies are examples of possible abuses that hurt both the individual and the market overall. However, redundancies in a Free Market can also lead to inefficiencies. Examples of these are if a city privatizes services such as water piping, garbage collection, electricity routing, and other infrastructure services without a central contract giving one entity the sole right and authority to provide such services. For example, it is OK to have more than one source for water, but it is bad to allow one property to be serviced by 4 separate pipes that bring that water in from the outside. In such as case, the city is responsible to regulate infrastructure services efficiently to prevent wasteful redundancies that can drain the overall resources of the city.

More on this some other day. :)

Bad vision

So, I went into the eye doctor the other day to have my eyes checked. I've been noticing that over the past few years, they've degraded a bit. My vision degraded all the way down to 20/20 in one eye and "20/15" in the other. (I used quotes because I think the doctor just used a familiar term, as the normal correct term is 20/16.) Normal uncorrected human vision is actually 20/12 to 20/16. 20/20 is considered the low end of normal, but it is actually slightly off. This is what've been noticing. My eyes being slightly off. So, as it seems, I've just been spoiled with really good vision before, and now I just have good vision.

Superman vs. Spider-man Mac/PC Spoofs

Here's some funny Superman vs. Spider-man Mac/PC Spoofs on YouTube.com.

Paris Hilton back to jail?

What a bum rap. I got to go against the main stream on this one. It seems ridicious to waste tax payer dollars to teach Paris Hilton a lesson. She is getting specially harsh treatment for what she's done in comparison to others (not famous people) who have done the exact same thing in the exact same way. The normal punishment for first time DUI offenders is house arrest. The normal punishment for someone driving on a suspended license is...get this...a ticket! Even with Paris' nose-thumbing to the law, 45 days or even the lesser 23 days in jail is hefty for this charges. Not only they, they choose to put her high security type prison cell? Normally (from my understanding) for "special" persons, they are put up at the "country clubs". She is totally getting shafted here in two ways. Ok, and who's complaining that house arrest isn't harsh enough? I've had a friend under house arrest for a DUI. Sure, it's not jail, but it's also no picinic either. It's not getting off easy by any means. She is getting special treatment; it's especially harsh! This is more an example of a judge who's trying to prove a pointless point, rather than a rich girl getting away with something.
That said, I do believe she does have to pay for her crimes, but that punishment should be in line with punishments handed down to her peers and normal folks for the same charges and behavior.