The Major

Blog

  • Don’t Be Alarmed

    I’ve decided to try a new way of waking up. A way that doesn’t involve an alarm clock.

    The past two days I’ve woken up naturally and it feels great. I set my alarm as an emergency backup plan but haven’t needed it so far. I guess the key is to just get to bed at a respectable time, which I hadn’t been doing lately. I also tried keeping my bedroom blinds open to have the sunlight wake me up, but instead I had my &^@$ neighbor’s &@#* outside !*@^ light wake me up several times in the @*#$ night. So the blinds will stay closed. And so will the windows. It got pretty cold a couple nights ago, as it usually does.

  • Planet of the Drums

    Last night, William and I headed out to Mighty to catch The Planet of the Drums. Dieselboy, Dara, AK1200 and Messinian were all there. It was the most amazing show I have ever been to. Those four went on together at 1am. Non-stop beats going the whole time. Great crowd. None of the guys there were trying to impress anyone…very relaxed. And unlike the show Alyssa and I went to a few months ago, the hardest drug I saw anyone doing was marijuana. And there were no guns 🙂

    Also, the bar was very accessible (you had your drink within a minute). Too accessible, I might add 🙂

    We didn’t check out the outside performance much, but we did check out the smaller room on the inside (there were a total of three acts going on at once). I’ll have to look up the other DJs and see when and where they were playing, because they were pretty good acts as well. I especially liked the guy who was DJing and playing drums.

    The only question is…when is the next Planet of the Drums?

  • Belly Still There

    Well I’ll have to admit that I am pretty happy with myself. Only 1.5 pounds to go and I will be at my goal of 165. Of course it has taken a remarkable amount of time to get from about 175 to 165. For some reason, the first 20-25 pounds fell right off.

    While I’m happy with this and I feel much better physically, the belly is still there. It isn’t a huge belly but there is no question that it is a belly. So I don’t know…I guess I might as well keep going with the diet until the belly goes away. Actually I am thinking that if I do some daily weights and sit-ups it might help.

    Or maybe I was just cursed with a body that doesn’t prioritize well. I would tell my body “ok take the belly off first and then you can take away from the arms, legs, butt, etc.” But unfortunately I don’t have that control. Not that it hasn’t gotten much smaller. It just doesn’t look like it has gotten 32 pounds smaller.

    And I looked at a BMI calculator. Evidently I have to be at 159.5 or lower to not be considered overweight. So maybe my ideal weight is around 155? I really don’t know. I guess I will just have to keep looking in the mirror.

    But for now I will just concentrate on those 1.5 pounds. That was my New Year’s resolution. I certainly knew I wanted to do it but I didn’t know if it was just something I was telling myself or whether I could actually do it. And if I am 165 on December 31st, I will be happy. But if I am 155 it will be even better.

    Sadly, or maybe not, I have already figured out next year’s New Year’s resolution. Get out of debt! Of course I can get a head start on that…it will ease the pain of next year.

  • Windows Vista

    So Alyssa and I picked out a new Dell laptop for her. It’s arrived and I have some time tonight to play with it (and install WoW and MS Office).

    I have to admit I was a little frustrated with it for the first 15-30 minutes. But it is starting to grow on me. It isn’t slow or anything. But I guess I am glad we got her 2GB of RAM. Because, for instance, Minesweeper is taking up 67MB. Wow. I am just glad it has over 1GB left over. But as a comparison, my Windows XP machine right now is using 1.2GB of RAM (out of 2GB). I have a remarkable amount of applications open, as I usually do. The biggest thing the Dell laptop has going is World of Warcraft installer. So yeah, I guess it is a little bloated. Seems nice, though, as long as you have the system to handle it.

    And it took a little hunting for me to find this one…to do the neat flippy thing you’ve seen/heard about, hit Windows+Tab instead of Alt+Tab.

  • Democracy Now!

    The past two days has brought two great segments of Democracy Now.

    Yesterday, they aired a segment they did with Ralph Nader in June at a conference called “Taming the Giant Corporation”. I think I am starting to realize that Nader is my man for domestic policy and Chomsky is my man for foreign policy and high-level analysis. Anyway, it is really amazing to see that at 73 years old, Ralph Nader has not lost any of his spunk, his ability to retain information, and his quick off-the-cuff speaking. Here is a snippet from the interview that really hit home with me (emphasis mine):

    AMY GOODMAN: How do you think mass movements should organize themselves and hold politicians accountable, make them more accountable to citizen, civilian, non-citizen movements than corporations?

    RALPH NADER: Well, let’s start with the easy things, like half of democracy is showing up. So why don’t workers who have lost their jobs or their pensions to industries that have gone to communist China with US Department of Commerce subsidy and encouragement, why don’t they mass and rally? I mean, who’s keeping them from rallying and massing? American Idol? Is that what’s doing it? I mean, let’s stop making excuses for ourselves. Let’s take the farmers, the dwindling number of farmers. They have great important causes that mesh with environmental causes at times, and the whole issue of genetic engineering and the dispossession of the small family farm by the big suppliers corporations and the big buying corporations. Why don’t they come to Washington, the way they did twenty years ago with their tractors? Show up!

    I have found that to be so true the past couple of months. In my efforts to get some sort of meaningful global warming group going in the city, I’ve found lots of interested people but almost no one that is even willing to click on a link to RSVP for an event. This is a huge problem.

    You can view the full transcript of the Nader segment here and the full show in video here.

    And today, another great show. They dedicated most of the show to the Jena Six, an extremely disturbing and ongoing story of unbelievable racism going on in Louisiana. You can view the full transcript here and the full video here.

    Enjoy.

  • Classic WTF

    A classic WTF: Employee shuts off A/C to computer room saying “I’m sure you can deal.” “…for two full days, employees of The State were unable to logon [sic] to their computers or access email, and that this caused business within The State to grind to a halt.”

  • Bad Fox News

    Any shred of respect that I had for Fox News just disappeared (I don’t think it was there to begin with). Check this out:

    Found on Think Progress.

  • Missed Opportunity at the Live Earth Concerts

    I wrote a short article on the Live Earth concerts yesterday. You can find it on the new blog for the group I am trying to organize, The San Francisco Global Warming Group.

  • VMWare Fusion

    Copy/paste from an email I sent out at work. In short, VMWare Fusion rocks:

    Two really cool things about VMWare Fusion for Mac OS X. First of all, it has an automated Windows installer. You punch in your preferred username, password, and product key, and VMWare Fusion takes care of the whole Windows install for you. It even updates all of your drivers for you. None of this “click, wait 10 minutes, rinse, repeat” stuff. VMWare has done the Windows installer better than Microsoft.

    Secondly, the “Unity” feature is really cool. It allows you to detach the individual windows from Windows and interact with them in OS X. For example, check out this screenshot.

  • Libby Fiasco Just Got Worse

    I was extremely pissed off when I heard that Scooter Libby’s sentence has been commuted. Why should this asshole be able to get off scot free for revealing the identity of an undercover CIA agent as part of the plot to quiet critics of the impending Iraq War, a war which has cost Iraqi approximately 1 million lives, cost the United States a few thousand lives, and resulted in millions of Iraqi refugees?

    As I have said to a few other people, if there were an immediate call for a demonstration at City Hall involving sleeping overnight in sleeping bags…I’d be there. Maybe if I don’t hear anything in the next day or so I’ll organize some sort of demonstration.

    The abuse of power that has taken place today is ridiculous. If it isn’t technically criminal, it should be.