Against a Housing Purchase

The argument against buying a home at this time is here.

Sell in May

"Sell in May and Walk Away"

Politics

What is this?

Music

I'm not usually very educated on music.

This site seems to analyze the buzz around the net on various English speaking music producers. All but one of the youTube videos that I watched from here were well done and artistic.

criticalmetrics

comics

My father always thought that political cartoons showed the truth so much better than the news articles around them.

and another:

Political Competition

I wonder if there is a competition between Republican Presidents to determine how many soldiers they can bury in Arlington National Cemetary.

Movie: Casino Royale

rating: 4 stars

This movie would have gotten a 3 star rating but they tricked me into believing that there may be a happy ending....which would have totally sucked. Suffice it to say, that this had the typical Bond stuff. A cool calm and detatched charismatic psychopath who could play cards, drive amazing cars, and use cool gadgets while sweeping the pretty girls off their feet.

Movie: 300

rating: 4 stars

300 is an account of the legendary battle between the Spartans and the Persians thousands of years ago (465 BCE I think). It presented strong honorable men, next to powerful women and traitors. The persian army was impressive with references to the immortals of that ancient land. Said to be unstoppable the persian army was held at the pass for 3 days by a band of 300 Spartans and their King Leonidus. What I liked about this movie was that the cast acted like a team. No one actor stepped up and stole the spotlight.

Movie: Ghost Rider

Rating: 4 stars

I really liked this movie. The producer stayed true to the comic and used special cinematic effects to great effect. The end leaves things open with the hero not getting the girl (finally!) and choosing a life of action and adventure over one of stability and normality. Who wouldn't want to stay kick-ass and immortal for the rest of their lives if it meant sacrificing one cheating ex-lover?

Pens, and Chipotle

I came in to work today to get a jump-start on the week.

I stopped by the stores and picked up two things. Mont Blanc pen refills for 30$/4 and Chipotle Burrito. The Mont Blanc ink really is addictive and I'm becoming a snob about writing with anything else. The Burrito is buy one get one free tomorrow with receipt. So, its tasty.

Vista

So, I've been playing around with Vista a bit. It is visually improved over WinXP with a user interface like Apple OS X. It constantly prompts you to authenticate yourself or authorize an action which gets annoying when you're setting up a system.

Despite this, I've decided to use it as a base for a development environment vmware image that I'm building. Something interesting that I've found is that the defrag utility in Vista has removed all visuals and progress bars. I always liked watching these as they worked on organizing my data correctly on the disks...and now they're gone. There is no way to tell how long the procedure is going to take.

Book Review: A Year of Magical Thinking

Rating: 3 stars

This book was about grief. A woman lost her husband and her daughter. While describing the year she referenced many books on grief and healing. She seemed to go through PTSD.

Justice

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

On the surface I can agree with the quote. But when I think about it and its reflection on the human condition, I'm not so sure I want to champion the spread of justice at any cost.

You shouldn't kill to spread Justice.
You shouldn't hurt to spread Justice.
You shouldn't impoverish to spread Justice.

old works

I've been digging through a lot of the old work I used to do before I got too busy with the various jobs that I've had in the last three years. I've discovered a lot of content that wasn't really tied together very well. There were a number of home pages and personal sites that I had started but not much more.

Graphics Card: GeForce 6800 XTreme

My posts have been largely reactions to general news sites and not focused on Technology as much as I had initially imagined.

I recently upgraded my box to more suitable specs. One of the upgrades was a single GeForce 6800XTreme Graphics card from NVidia. The card comes with a new interface which allows the card to be linked to another card of the same type via a hardware bridge called SLI.

This article describes the performance benchmarks of one or two of these cards.

SLI may motivate me to purchase a second 6800XTreme video card, provided I can find some programming use for the processor on either one or both of them. I'll keep you posted.