I finally got my camera!

I'll tell the long sordid story of the awful pain involved in getting it another time, but for now, I'm just playing with it like any geek does with a new toy. Mmmm, toy.

I've tried all the cool features, like making a movie of myself being an ass and mailing it to people, and making a 360 degree panoramic shot of my apartment, which the Canon software automatically made into one single shot. You can even make a Quicktime VR of a panoramic shot that someone can 'explore'.

It's nice and small and fits comfortably in my pocket, which is the whole point. Once I get out and start taking pictures of things more interesting than my apartment, I'll add a photo section to the page.

Here's the first shot I took: Big Brother is Watching You. My little brother immediately put it as his desktop shot, because the big brother reference was literal in his case.

So if you really want to make my day, send me a picture of you posing with this shot as your desktop. If enough people do it, I'll make a little collage out of it for the webpage, and it will amuse me greatly.

I'm playing a new game on Xbox (or as my friends have affectionately labeled it, my no sex box) called Shenmue II. I highly recommend it.

This is the kind of game that only comes out every once in a while, and it's not for everyone, but I always end up obsessing over it. It's a full and complete world. You emerge from a ship with a note telling you to seek out a person in Hong Kong, and that's basically all you know. You start to wander around, and you can converse with every single character you see, every old woman on the street to every child. You can make money arm wrestling, or gambling, you can get a job moving crates or running a gambling operation. You get a hotel room and have to pay to stay the night. You can wander the streets and buy trinkets from vendors. It's amazing, and I've only played a few hours.

There's a plot, but it meanders, and you can spend as much time as you like just exploring new parts of the city. Right now I'm wandering around looking for martial arts experts to help me figure out the four tenets of some martial arts philosophy to allow me to meet with a Master, who I was referred to by the note I got upon arriving off the ship. This kind of thing is fascinating for me, it's the same reason that I'm very excited about the advent of massively multiplayer online games that don't involve hacking and slashing. It's a dumbed down simplified version of the cyberspace envisioned by Gibson and Stephenson, but it gets better all the time. Exploring and interacting with a real virtual world is tremendously interesting for me.

I'm surprised that it works so well on a console, I enjoy console gaming, but there are lots of game types that never translate well. First person shooters just don't work, because they require a mouse, and I really don't enjoy sports games, and I'm kind of tired of the "military person tracks down dangerous alien threat" genre. Anyway, I've gotten off track, but the game is incredibly innovative, and if you've got an Xbox, I recommend picking it up.

You all may have heard about the uproar about the new Miller Lite commercial called "catfight".

It involves the old Miller argument schtick of "tastes great, less filling", with two women eventually tearing each other's clothes off and wrestling. At the end you find out it's just the fantasy of two guys in a bar with their girlfriends.

Now, people are screaming that this kind of thing "exploits women". How so? Did someone hold a gun to these actresses and force them to do a commercial? Were they not paid for their time? Where is the exploitation? If you watch the commercial and have any sense of humor whatsoever, you'll realize that it's simply meant as a spoof of the stereotypical male fantasy, and the women that the men are with look at them with disdain, so it's honestly not even encouraging it.

There are just some people out there, most often middle aged married women, who see a scantily clad woman on television, and they're writing a complaint email before the spot even finishes. Get a damn sense of humor and shut the hell up.

If anything, you'd think that most intelligent women would laugh at an ad like that, and complain about crap like the Oxygen network, which portrays women as shallow idiots who do nothing but watch Oprah and think about getting married. That's the kind of stereotyping that does the real damage to women, the type that's not tongue in cheek, but quite serious, and effective not because it's in your face, but because it's subtle and pervasive. If you want to complain about anything, rail against romantic comedies and "women's networks" that brainwash poor girls into being mindless diamond consumers and baby factories.

Or better yet, stop writing all these whiny letters to networks, and just stop watching the things that offend you, or don't buy the products. The only reason these things exist is because people watch them and purchase what they sell. Don't watch Oxygen, it will go away. Don't buy Miller, it will go out of business. Live your life, instead of spending it protesting things that other people enjoy.

Opposition to human cloning confuses and annoys me.

I've yet to hear an argument that doesn't either fall back on some strange religious foundation. Apparently to some people this is "playing god", where "playing god" is defined arbitrarily. I'm not sure how a heart transplant or a pacemaker isn't "playing god", because if god has a plan for us, that must certainly include you dying of a heart attack. You using technology to thwart god's will would certainly seem to be a sign of arrogance, but yet these same people don't have a problem with these other uses of god-like technology.

What's strange is that most opposition is Christian - so even though most Christian ideology centers around making you feel bad about having sex, it's apparently even worse to circumvent the sexual act and create a human without it.

I've also heard some incredibly hand-wavy arguments about the sanctity of souls, which seems to impy that your soul is bound up with your genetic makeup, so if you create a clone, he may not have a soul. This doesn't stand up either, considering that identical twins have the same DNA.

Bush's argument against human cloning apparently consists of the phrase, "We must not create life to destroy life.", which doesn't even make any sense. It seems to be one of those issues that people form an opinion about, and then create a reason as an afterthought.

I have no idea why anyone would oppose it. I suppose we'll start having the same arguments once we're able to do things like genetically tailor diseased genes out of children. God forbid we prevent someone from having a tendency toward heart disease or cancer by tweaking their genes. Once people hear "genetic tailoring", they flip out and start making the sign of the cross and waving wooden stakes.

I don't take enough pictures. I've taken maybe five shots in the last three years. This is unacceptable.

I need TOTAL COVERAGE!

So, I started shopping around for a camera I could leave in my pocket 24/7, and grab pictures whenever the opportunity arose.

I ended up with the Canon S200. I ordered it today, and it should arrive soon. You'll soon have pictures to supplement my words. Not only does it take amazingly nice shots, but it apparently also takes movies with sound. Excellent.

New toy! Must have nonstop incoming flow of new technology to keep my bank account empty!

So, I just got an email from my mom that she's going to Mcdonalds for McRib. That woman better not be toying with me.

For the uninitiated, the McRib is this McDonalds sandwich that's their equivalent of a cocktease. For some reason, about once a year, they bring it back for about 15 minutes, and you have to run into the store and browbeat the mouthbreathing employees into giving you as many as you can carry, and then they disappear until next year - when the McRib sticks its head out of the McDonald's headquarters and everyone waits to see if it sees its shadow.

Oh, some may mock me, but the McRib is fantastic. McDonalds employees fear me, for I prowl restlessly outside their buildings, waiting to pounce. They eye me uneasily, like an old western, but I won't blink first. Oh yes, I'll have my McRib again, and those savages can't get between me and the saucy goodness, and faking a child's grasp of the english language won't help you escape my wrath, employee. I don't know if I should call and ask them if it's there, or if that will give them warning that I'm coming, so they can pull it off the menu by the time I arrive.

I'm hosting some pictures of a party that I went to at Nina's last weekend. That was a blast, I was one of the only non-law students there, but I was pleasantly surprised at how cool the people were. It's weird that they would actually be less pretentious than the people I've hung out with up in San Fran. Course, it doesn't hurt to get dragged out on a dance floor and forced to dance with cute asian girls. I'm not much of a party dancer, but it's much more enjoyable that way than by yourself, strangely enough. Meeting new people that don't annoy the piss out of me is rare and good.

Thai iced tea recipe:

I stumbled around online looking for a reliable thai iced tea recipe forever, with no consistent results. This annoyed me, as I love Thai iced tea in restaurants. So after my experimenting, here's what you get.

Buy the dried tea. I got it at www.quickspice.com.

I also made my tea in a coffeemaker because I'm really lazy. You can do it however you want.

Run 8 cups of water through 10 tablespoons of tea. Once it brews, pour the hot tea through the filter three more times, to make the tea very dark and strong.

Add one cup of sugar, and stir. Put this in the fridge till it's cold.

Fill a glass with ice, and fill it most of the way with tea. Pour in 3/4 of an inch of whole milk. (You can also use cream, but it tastes just fine with fatty, all-american heart attack whole milk. Remember, if it ain't got a red cap, it ain't milk.)

There you go. Feel free to comment if you've done it differently and enjoyed the results, but I'm very happy with this recipe.

Mmmmmmmm. Thai iced tea.

Okay, I've been up for about 36 hours now. Commencing coma mode..

Christine just sent me this, I haven't seen it for a few years. What a great nostalgic college shot.

I've got several friends who are just now starting to invest, and when they've heard how happy I am with my choices, they've asked me for advice. I got tired of typing the same thing over and over, so I've made a page with some very basic investment advice, based on the ridiculous amount of research that I've done. Check it out here, or on the sidebar.

If anyone is interested in more information of this type, I'd be happy to flesh out the document with information about how to invest if you don't have much money, in spider funds for example, or any other investing advice for the curious, or the confused. Just leave me a comment below, or email me. No one should have to lose their ass on the market, like most of America has done.

What, you want all this design work, and content too? Pushy swine.

So yes, it's now about 10am, and I've spent the last 11 hours or so tinkering with this bastard. I'm pretty happy with the results, though. Please feel free to leave me comments with any suggestions of things missing or that you feel could be changed, or just congratulate me for being a geeky white guy with no design skill and still patching this thing together out of twine and stolen code. I do love the feedback.

Never fear, though, content is coming. Check back in the coming days.