Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

It wasn't the type of snow that sticks around - which is a good thing if you're traveling by car to your friend's house for Christmas dinner, but we had a White Christmas in Portland (and the general area).

Dogs love snow. It has to be genetic or something; it takes but a short moment of recognition and then they're off to run in the snow.

And it never got below freezing so the freeways were clear of ice. Works for me.

I think my dog loves Christmas (or at least he's thrilled about getting new toys). He was so excited to play with each of his 3 new toys, and with each new toy I pulled out his frenzied glee seemed to grow. I flashed back to being a kid and having that same sort of excitement about each toy I unwrapped on Christmas morning.

Anthropomorphic perhaps...but today he started groaning like he wanted to talk and bitch about the kids running outside in the hallway.

Merry Christmas to All.

If I only had pine nuts. And natural chicken broth. I forgot to pick these items up at the store when I was shopping for ingredients for stuffing (INO - we don't actually stuff the turkey). I still make a mean-ass righteous goodness stuffing that beats anyone anything anyhow anyway.

My stuffing rocks - it's the stuff of 10 years of annual development.

I had a bunch of revelations (or they could be delusions) that black doesn't exist except for the absence of light and the pigment of black, and that love can save the world, except the most deranged people whose minds are terribly abnormal and does not respond to normal stimuli.

I know, the black thing is perfectly true and obvious, but as I stared intently at the choir's smocks against the black pants, I realized how true this was. The shadows of the multiple layers of lights create not a shade of gray, but a shade of color that is darker or lighter, imbued by atmospheric tones.

As for the love conquers all idea...the bottom line for what drives most of us, is in fact love. Love would drive us to do things we couldn't or wouldn't do, it drives us crazy, fills us with temporary insanity, to perform acts of courage beyond our abilities, and to persevere with great patience. Used properly, love can will people to do good things...and that is the point.

Anyway, Merry Christmas...and if you don't believe in Christmas...have a lovely day off and enjoy this day of Winter.

Greed as a Deadly Sin.

The age of wisdom and virtue has long left the Republic and we are merely left with the vices of wealth and greed. A Capitalist will tell you that greed is good, but that Capitalist is not really thinking about your benefit; he is thinking about HIS benefit, and uses the argument of your potential profit as the means to defend his gain: "The more wealth I create, the more jobs will result!" Well, a Capitalist does not hesitate to eliminate jobs to increase profitability for both he and the shareholders.

The worst of the worst are those Televangelist that would have you give them money (to drive in expensive cars and live in large mansions), because God told them to do so. Not only are they Capitalists, but they wear the clothes of God to deliver their message of Greed.

Wanting to make money is not inherently bad, but wanting so much of it that you would do anything to gain this monetary wealth is bad. What turns from wanting to profit from your hard work to wanting profit at any cost is to enter the gates of Greed.

No one riles me up like King George.

It is hypocritical of King George to complain about:

• The budget and pork; he did NOTHING to stop the GOP from increasing pork, the past 6 years.
  
• Increased spending; it is the King's wars that have put us in the position of spending nearly half-a-trillion dollars on Iraq.
  
• The safety of our Nation; it was King George's disconnect with national security before 9/11 that put us into the situation we're currently in.
  
• Democrats wasting taxpayers' money; it was under King George that we've had one of the largest expansions of Federal Government in our history.
  
• Democrats blocking legislation the previous 6 years; the GOP have blocked more bills from getting a vote this year than what the Democrats did in the previous 6.
  
• Illegal immigrants not following the rule of law; his own administration is incapable of following any laws.
  

And the newspapers repeat his lies without analyzing what he says? That's complicity to King George's rule.

Christmas stress.

It's such a laborious effort to find things for everyone on my list. I make my own Christmas cards too. I put a lot of effort in wrapping presents. All told, I spend way too much time on Christmas gifts and other people.

I ended my relationship with Comcast. They're a bunch of idiots in the customer service department, I have to say. But it gives me a lot of free time to do things that I wouldn't have normally done. Well, there's that and there's hardly a damned thing worth watching. We're in reruns until probably early February at the earliest. Spring TV season might be cancelled! Oh heck, I don't give a rip anymore...I've gotten in on Hulu.com. :D

I think the other key is to detach the video game from the tv, too. I just sit in front of the TV and play games to relieve my work stress, all night long.

TV really causes a lot of stress...especially local news. There's always something that you're being warned on, or someone has been murdered, raped, shot, or otherwise beaten. I'd say that reading the news online is bad too, but at least you don't have to watch the news broadcasters at the scene repeating the same story over and over again.

Life without a dog would suck really really bad.

George is smarter than the rest of us.

"You want to figure out a way to slow this economy down, just start taking money out of people's pockets."

Unfortunately for us, he's referring to the elimination of the tax-cut of the richest people in the US, that he and the Republicans installed in 2001/2002.

Warren Buffet doesn't agree with him. Buffet's own federal tax rate is 17% while his workers pay around 30%. The President and the GOP love to argue that trickle-down economics really works, except that it doesn't, and never has. The rich don't suddenly spend more money because you gave them more money. Their money goes right back into their investments, and those investments don't necessarily create jobs, but generally just create greater wealth on paper (or electronically).

It'll only be a matter of time, if the GOP continue to redirect wealth into the upper 5% of the population, that the 95% will revolt and those 5% may end up losing it all.

13 is cool.

Hulu.com is cool, too.

My faves of PC World's 15 biggest disappointments-2007

• #14 - Municipality WiMax. They kinda blurred the lines between WiMax and WiFi, and lumped them together. From my experience in downtown Portland, there's hardly enough APs to cover the city on every block, so to save MetroFi money, you're forced to use a directional antenna. That really defeats the purpose of having free WiFi access.
  
• #13 - Social Networks. They should have come up with an interoperable schema for their individual networks, don't you think?
  
• #10 - Wireless Carriers. These companies cannot decide whether they want to compete with cable/copper internet access or not. They charge you an arm and a leg, and expect you to stick around? No freaking way, man, that's just dumb. Churn, baby churn...cell phone inferno...churn baby churn.
  
• #9 - Office 2007. I don't have any sympathy for anyone still using Office software. If you haven't even tried Open Office, you're an idiot. If you've tried Open Office and still want to stick with MS Office, you might as well hand your credit card over to me - I can spend your money better than you can.
  
• #8 - OS X 10.5, aka Leopard. No one is dumb enough to upgrade the day they release the software, right? You know, I warned my parents NOT to do exactly that, but they did, and now they're screwed.
  
• #4 - Yahoo. Boy oh boy, that's a biggie. I stopped using Yahoo's search a long time ago. Their only bright spots are Flickr (but that could easily go by the wayside), and their portal. I couldn't stand the flaws in their new email UI, so I had to switch it back to the classic UI - I'm not going to wait 30 seconds for the damned UI to load.
  
• #2 - Hi-Def war. Yeah, no one's old enough to remember the beta vs vhs war...because Sony lost. Sony's at it again with the BluRay. Did Sony win the flash card war with their Memory Stick? I think Sony is only going to delay the adoption of HiDef DVD. I'd bet most people prefer to use an upscaling DVD player instead!
  
• #1 - Vista. See Leopard.
  

First post here.

It's not like I don't have a blog elsewhere, but I like google, so I figured why not move myself over to Blogger? Gen-Y has Facebook and MySpace, Gen-X gets to have Blogger, or at least that's how I see it.


Attack of the Rhetorical Language.

It's amusing to read personal ads, especially on craigslist. C'mon admit it, you know you enjoy it too...it's your vice and you know it!

Have you noticed the pervasiveness of rhetorical language?

• "Looking for that special one" - as if you'd be, "Looking for that run-of-the-mill kind of guy?"
  
• "Looking for a good guy" - really now, who isn't? I want someone that is all wrong!
  
• "I'm looking for someone that likes to have fun" - that's my favorite; do men have russian hands because they hate it? Are there women that are passionately drawn to boredom? Who doesn't like to have fun?
  

Besides the rhetorical language, isn't it funny that most people think they're intelligent? I love that one, by the way. If you advertise your intelligence but proceed to use the wrong homonyms in your ad, the smart people will only think lesser of you - and spell checker won't correct your homonyms for you either! Yes, I have seen these ads.