I have some new pictures in my gallery. They include pictures that I took when I went hiking in Pima Canyon in November. I also posted some pictures I took today on top of the church. Enjoy.

-Trevor

I got all my grades in today. Overall I am very pleased with the results. Rather than focusing on grades as something to strive to do well in, they are more of an indicator to the students how likely they are to passing the preliminary. That is why there is so much weight on the final since many of those questions are similar to those in the preliminaries in June.

-Trevor

Artist: Artesion
Album: New Discovery
Genre: Neo-Classical Progressive Alternative Rock

Read more!

For those who remember here is the link for the great Christian Deathmetal band, Acoustic Torment. Maximum Pentecost does not have very long samples of their music so this is a much better example. Enjoy.

-Trevor

Updating the Dover, PA story which the townspeople voted over half of the school board out, a U.S. judge has recently ruled the old school boards decision to be unconstitutional. In my opinion, and I'm always right, this is a good thing for both those of religious and secular backgrounds. Intelligent design spits in the face of God when they claim his inability to design a universe in which complex molecules could form via evolution.

-Trevor

Well it's my first full day back in Minnesota and I definitely notice that it is cooler here than in Tucson. I think it is currently -2 below. It's relaxing, but at the same time sort of hectic around here as well. My dad and I visited my grandpa in the hospital. He went in with pneumonia, but they may also have found a tumor by his heart & lung. It doesn't look good, but he has been in poor health for the last few years as well. I should get going.

-Trevor

Well I am finally done with school for a couple of weeks and am back in Minnesota for a little R&R. The flight went by smoothly, I got a window seat and everyone around me all just wanted to take a nap for the flight which was just fine for me. I got home and we had my nephew's birthday celebration (his fourth) a few days late since he had just gotten over the flu. In other news, it's late and I should be thinking about going to bed.

-Trevor

Well I finished the finals and it looks like barring any unforseen circumstances, I will be on a plane in just under 14 hours from the time of this writing. The finals went by very well this semseter so I am leaving for home on a good note.

-Trevor

Finished my first final yesterday. I got done in around two hours (out of three allotted). I think it went well, but I have the next coming on Tuesday (Statistics). That should be the most difficult one out of the three due to the sheer amount of material that could be on the Final. Well, got to get back to the grind.

-Trevor

Hey Everyone,

I know it has been sparse around here in terms of posting, but finals have been coming up and haven't really been out in the real world. My first final is on Saturday and the last on Friday the 16th. I will be heading back to the frigid north on Saturday the 17th. Hopefully I will see everyone soon.

-Trevor

I thought everyone would enjoy this... We are having some "severe" weather which includes gusty winds of up to 50 mph and a high of 60 (compared to the mid 80's which we were having). There is a possibility that there it will actually get below 32 degrees tonight in parts of the foothills around Tucson. I went grocery shopping this morning and noticed that some people were quite bundled up for the cold streak.

-Trevor

Well I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving this year. As for me, it was very busy, but a great vacation. On Thursday, I went with Gabe and his girlfriend to a cabin his family had rented up in the Coronado National Forest south of Tucson. It was a great time and they made me feel like one of the family. The food was awesome with the standard complement of Thanksgiving goodies and of course, a healthy supply of alcohol.

I couldn't rest too much on that evening or the next day because we were having a pot luck Thanksgiving dinner for a few of Gabe's friends and a lot of people from the economics department. I had cooked a Turkey and made my mom's fruit salad. Gabe had cooked another two turkeys. We used a good recipe for the turkey off of the Food Network. Other people brought some great yams, mashed potatoes, stuffing, soup, pies, and of course, a healthy supply of alcohol.

Well hopefully everyone is doing great and I should be back in Minnesota in under a month.

-Trevor

Happy Thanksgiving everybody. I think I am grateful for a bit of a respite from homework for the next couple of days. Hopefully everyone has dinner planned with somebody this weekend. As for me, I've been invited to Gabe's family for Thanksgiving, which I think should be an awesome time. In addition, Gabe and I have been attempting to gather a lot of the first year students for a bit of a pot luck Thanksgiving party on Friday over at his place. We are expecting around 20-30 people to come, so we bought two 22 pound turkeys and have gotten some of the other grad students to pick up a couple of items for the dinner. Should have a good turnout and I'll try to get some good pictures.

-Trevor

You guessed it, another study, and this time it's none other than your ubiquitous drink, coffee. You can relax though knowing it's only decaffeinated varieties and who drinks that filth anyways. This is of course sponsored by the American Heart Association and the National Institute of Health (not that Peruvian guy with the donkey). Supposedly it comes down to the differences of coffee beans used to produce the coffee. According to the video on the website the reasons for these results are complex and is yet to be fully understood.

-Trevor

Not quite as bad as the French Riots, but nine were injured after girls rushed a stage at the Brookdale Center which was hosting a free concert featuring B5, a boy band (Click here for the link). I don't know, but when I go to concerts I have no particular desire to rush up to the stage to start touching the band members, male or female. Further from the looks of it, these guys are no older than 17 and thus should be attracting a crowd that probably needs parental supervision to even make it to the mall. Who knows, maybe they rushed the stage to get them to stop playing shit, but that would be asking for too much.

-Trevor

I finally took a bit of "vacation" today and went hiking for a few hours in Pima Canyon north of Tucson. It was very relaxing and good exercise. It was tad cool this morning (48 degrees), but warmed up to around 85 by the afternoon. Unfortuantely I didn't see a rattle snake, but maybe next time. I'll put some pictures in my gallery later. Hopefully everyone had a good Veteran's Day. I can be quite thankful because it allowed me an excellent time not only to play some catch up, it also allowed me to take in that hike. In other good news, Thanksgiving is coming up soon and I have yet to decide what I am doing for Thansgiving. I probably will not go too far, but may make it to Bisbee, AZ (south of Tucson). Well, I'm going to go take a quick nap and then back to the grind.

-Trevor

Residents in Dover, PA have voted out of office, the school board which had supported Intelligent Design. For those not in the know, it is that humans were designed by none other than the Almighty himself. According to Robertson who has a direct line with God, has stated that they should not worry if distaster strikes. Of course he isn't saying that anything will happen, but if it does, he will be he will watch all the video with the excitement that an adolescent male gets from watching porn.

All I can say is that if God punishes people for rising up against a government that tries to force religion down our throat, many of our ancestors are probably happily roasting in hell right now and probably enjoying every minute of it.

-Trevor

Eddie Vedder has stated recently that they are currently working on their latest album that is supposed to be due around April or so. It is delayed a bit since they will be going down to South America. He claims it is the best they have done yet. I am hoping for the best, but I have to smirk while wondering why an artist would produce anything that wasn't at attempt at improving what was done before.

-Trevor

I am going to apologize in advance for this rant, but sometimes I believe we are being lead by politicians that are just stupid or have a form of mental retardation. The U.S. senate had a hearing on the profits recently recorded by ExxonMobil which recently earned almost $10 billion in the last quarter alone. I do not know if I am alone in thinking this, but what did the Senators expect when the United States kept a blind eye on the mergers of all the oil companies recently. That in itself would not be so bad if there were other energy sources that actually competed against oil.

Maybe they thought that since the oil companies would never do anything to "hurt" the American public since they were lining the pockets of so many politicians. Now of course we can all thank the government for not only limiting competition in the realm of oil production, we can also thank them for limiting competition of alternative resources. But don't blame them, they are only looking out for our well being because it would be so hard to transition to a new way of life if we were no longer dependent on oil. The scary thought is, they may actually think they are helping the public. Of course they now believe the correct choice is to tax the oil companies. These funds would be funneled to those who are unable to pay their gas bills this winter. However, I fail to see how this will address high gas prices, but why ask questions when taxes will solve all of our problems.

One would imagine that government officials would occasionally take blame for their actions (and I'm not talking about Scooter Libby) and admit they do not know the first thing about economics. I particularly enjoyed the comment by Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore. FTC Chairman Majoras commented that "While no consumers like price increases, in fact, prices increases lower demand and help make the shortage shorter-lived than it otherwise would have been." Wyden then goes to comment, "That's an astounding theory of consumer protection."

No Senator Wyden, that is Economics 101. Here is a bit of economics for you, if you believe it is in the public interest to lower the price of gasoline, there are a few courses of actions that will help, first promote competition. Since there is little future in oil, I would like to suggest the possibility of exploring alternative fuels. Further, one can also lower taxes, but that would lower revenue going to fight a war to produce more oil, freedom, or terrorists, take your pick because it may be all three. However, that is neither here nor there.

Spacemonkey, I am assuming you can infer that this rant was inspired by a certain book whose author you would go back in time and kill.

-Trevor

In order to commemorate the trillionith premature study that have graced the news, I would like to pronounce the new miracle food: Sauerkraut. No longer only an ingredient of the greatest sandwich on Earth, Sauerkraut has risen to the ranks of penicillin and marijuana. A new study from South Korea has indicated that feeding sauerkraut to chickens will prevent exactly 84.6153846...% of chickens from dying (-80% margin of error). It is rare that any reports indicate just how many (or few [13 to be exact]) chickens were actually studied. In any case, there are no claims that humans will gain any immunity, but that hasn't stopped you Minnesotans from rushing to get all the sauerkraut your sausages can handle, around a 850% increase.

In other news, if you are a woman of polish descent, eating sauerkraut four times a week during adolesence will cut your chance of breast cancer by 74%, how's that for a wundernahrung.

-Trevor

Hey Everyone,

I really apologize for not posting more often, but I have been trying to catch up on all the work I didn't do while studying for midterms. I'll try to keep up with posting, but try to bear with me. In the mean time, I would just like to say that school is going great, but as Arnab (a guy in the program) would say, "It's hell tough." So anyways, I may not be posting too much, but that is the only thing that really makes me feel sad that I missed a wonderful Minnesota fall. As for the weather, it is fantastic down here, we are hitting highs around 85-90 down here, and of course, sunny. Been reading Atlas Shrugged again on my off time just to clear up the mind. Well, got to go, but wish everyone the best.

-Trevor

King Tut was recently cited for a minor in possesion of alcohol after being discovered lying in a tomb with red wine. King Tut kept mum for any questioning by reporters during the arrest. After confiscating the wine, police officer Harold Mitchell told reporters, "This wine came from a vintage 3300 years ago. I sampled it, but I think it is a bit past the pique." As punishment, LA County Judge Judy sentenced him to remain in public view at the LA Museum for three weeks to be gawked at like a circus freak.

-Trevor

I finally made it out on Tuesday night. A couple guys and I went to see Serenity. It's a sci-fi action adventure. It is based off a now cancelled television series that I have never seen, so cannot comment on. Overall the movie was decent if you enjoy science fiction, though there were clear references to the show that I missed.

-Trevor

In a truly heartfelt message for all those who love to hate, the new president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, made comments on the line of, if you acklowledge Israel, you will die a horrible death because God hates you. I always find it ironic that religion seems to be such a bringer of hate where the messages always talk about love. This is exactly why organized religion is such a sham, it breaks people apart rather than bringing anyone together. I would say that we should bring Barney into the picture to help bring everyone together, but it is likely this would come to blows as people argue whether Barney is 65 million years old or only 10,000.

-Trevor

Artist: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Album: Howl
Genre: Indie Rock / Religious

Read more!

I was catching up on all my political bs when I really started to look at Harriet Miers. See the comparison? Creepy...

Out with the old and in with the not as old. At 51 years young, Ben Bernanke is only a Senate confirmation away from being only the third fed chairman in my lifetime. As usual with the media, they always have someone question whether or not the "new" guy will do a good job because of some comment he made a couple years back about the cost of producing money is nil. They interpret this as saying he will allow our interest rates to go out of control as they were in the 1970's. So for those who care, here's a brief lesson about the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve is here to pursue the goals of promoting as much growth as possible while trying to keep inflationary pressures and interest rates as low as possible. For those who aren't too familiar with the concept, in general high interest rates lower money velocity (how fast it moves through the market) and therefore decreases the demand for money and lowers inflation. There are of course situations in which there are high inflation and high interest rates (stagflation) like that seen in the 1970's that are often due to some severe supply shocks.

Of course the policy of the fed does change as witnessed during the 70's in which the policy was as stated:

• To help counteract inflationary and deflationary movements, and to share in creating conditions favorable to sustained high employment, stable values, growth of the couuntry and a rising level of consumption.

In order to combat the problems of the 1970's, Paul Volkers tightened the money supply by raising interest rates. This of course had the effect of pushing the country into a recession. It was not a very popular move because if you try to tell someone who lost a job during the recession that it was necessary to get the economy back on track and they will probably tell you where you can stick it.

So now rather than encompass a huge array of strategies, the fed with Greenspan decided that they would try to merely maintain the inflation rate, something that Americans are now very averse towards. This also favors the current economic theory that stable prices fosters more growth than low interest rates alone. This is also to help minimize fluctuations from Monetary Policy.

There are three methods in which the Fed can achieve their goals, Open Market Operations, Reserve Requirements, and the ever popular discount(bank) rate. Open Market Operations is actually one of the most powerful tools as they purchase or sell securities in the open market and therefore have a larger control over the effect of their policies in this regard. Second, reserve requirements are requirements for banks to maintain a certain level of deposits in order to prevent problems if there is a run on the bank. Today the deposit ranges from 3-10% based on the type of account. This has a rarely used tool as it has a large affect on the velocity of money. Finally the discount rate is the interest rate at which the fed lends to commercial banks and financial intermediaries.

The rest is beyond the scope of this article. However, the media is afraid that Bernanke will not keep a close eye on interest rates and will let the inflation rates soar. If I were you and obviously I am not, I would not be too alarmed because the media tends to try to evoke fear in people. I think it is something that draws people back to their shows. Well I guess that's all for now, but have faith that Bush chose a good guy for the job.

-Trevor

After nearly a month preparing for midterms, I'm finally done, for now. I can take a couple days off before I need to start buckling down for Finals this December. I'll put up a couple more posts this month, so check back.

-Trevor

IMPORTANT: READ THIS BEFORE YOU CLICK ON THE LINK!

There are two nearly identical pictures that will appear on the screen. Almost 2500 people were tested to see if they could find the three differences in the first 30 seconds. Only 23 of these people were able to figure it out. I wasn't able to find a single one, but Brad found all three. Prove that you are smarter than him.

http://members.home.nl/saen/Special/Zoeken.swf

The Professional Organization for Editors of Magazines have released their list of the top 40 magazine covers in the last 40 years. It is interesting to look at what they deemed the best, but who am I to argue. Of course when don't I have an opinion, but this time I will keep it to myself. Well, I have a couple of favorites, especially #16.

-Trevor

Just when we were becoming accustomed to dealing with the fact that our food will kill us, a new study has shown that we will now face possible disease and death from pillows. No it is not similar to SIDS, but all that disgusting mold that contaminates your shower and pepper has been shown to thrive in that pillow of yours. We nowknow of at least three rooms in which death can occur, the kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom (The living room can be considered a way in which we can kill ourselves by spending many years of it watching television). Well, I guess I will never look at a pillow the same way again.

-Trevor

I received an e-mail the other day that requested I post these pictures on my site. I warn you that if you have puritan eyes that you shouldn't click on "More". For those who have no moral values, have fun...

-Trevor

Read more!

A group of Econ guys and I drove down to South Tucson today and ate at Mary's Lucky Dollar Market. While I have been there a few times already, I believe I have sampled a large variety of the food available to give a good review.

Mary's Lucky Dollar is in South Tucson in a "ghetto" part of town. The building is not much to look at, but if health inspectors eat once a week at the restaurant, I think it should be as safe as eating at home. The restaurant caters to mostly construction workers and day laborers with most of the customers having the food "to-go". The soup is one of the first things to go, which is unfortunate as I have yet to sample any, but have heard great things.

What makes it great is that the food is about as close to authentic "homestyle" Mexican food as I will ever get in Tucson. In addition the most expensive meal with only set you back $3.50. Gabe, our resident expert, informed me that this food is close to what is prepared in Northern Mexico and is different than the "hot" Mexican food that you will find in other parts of Mexico.

If you ever make it to Tucson, this is a must stop for anyone wanting to think outside the bun and say, "I'm Full!".

-Trevor

Everyone is talking about the new video Ipod, but in reality this is not the most important news that has come out of Apple recently. The big news is the fact that Disney has given Itunes customers access to some of their best selling series, Desperate Housewives and Lost. Of course this has the television affiliates and the director's guild of America up in arms about not getting their "fair" share out of the deal (link) I believe everyone is a little naive about the motivation behind Disney's move. It is obviously driven by "$", but I think Disney has a a longer term vision than what most critics of the deal believe. I think a fact check may be in order.

First, we must look at the state of one of Disney's cash cows, the family movie industry. Michael Eisner's reign as CEO of Disney drained to company of any creative talent. They couldn't produce a hit if their life depended on it. So along came Steve Jobs and Pixar and with a distribution deal came some great movies like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and the Incredibles. Of course their contract is just about up, and Eisner and Jobs had a falling out of sorts with Pixar wanting to find a new distributor.

Well Eisner left and in comes Robert Iger. He has a large mission of rebuilding Disney's fragmented image and needs to keep up the image of "producing" quality movies, but where is the talent? Working for Pixar, of course. How can he get a new deal? Well Steve Jobs is a shrewd businessman and isn't going to take Disney back without getting a little extra and he has a new video Ipod coming out. So what better way to promote the Ipod by having video streams that people would actually want to watch. Of course since Disney owns ABC and Touchstone (which produces Desperate Housewives and Lost) it is quite easy to make a deal.

Now we can see that while a new deal between Pixar and Disney has yet to be struck, I would be surprised if it isn't in the works. Everyone wins, even those in Hollywood who are bitching about not thinking of this first.

-Trevor

Wish me skillz on my midterm tomorrow. It will be full of fun questions to snare the casual observer.

-Trevor

We all know that chicken's will kill you, but the question now is whether fish are Christ risen? A recent study by "they" have concluded that eating fish will save your soul (or keep you from getting stupid) and therefore you need to incorporate more into your diet. However, they concluded that there was no evidence that Omega-3 was the reason that fish is healthy. Of course that does not stop KGUN 9 (ABC, a parent company of Walt Disney) news from reporting just the opposite while mentioning this report. This just makes me wonder what is going on in these reports and why they think they need to tell us what we want to hear rather than the truth (maybe we will switch to watch the liars, but as least they will be ethical). On the other hand, a report next week will clearly state that Omega-3 is the next cure-all and will even help with erectile dysfunction.

-Trevor

I know for all you guys up in Minnesota that it's fall and getting sort of cold, and so I would just like to mention that last night the low was 55 degrees and I was thinking, damn I haven't seen it that cold since last April or so. However, I would like to add that it is somewhat humorous to hear people complain how cold it is when it is 80 degrees outside with a breeze and see them wearing sweaters (seriously). You will probably get some perverse pleasure out of that.

-Trevor

We are all going to die a horrible horrible death. The flesh will melt right off your gangly arms while you are looking in the mirror about how all of your hair fell out. Well maybe it will not be that bad, but did you know that a flu pandemic will sweep the world and you will likely die? Or that's what the news tells us and they have no reason to sensationalize what is happening. Everything has gone a foul since the fowls over in Asia decided to start breeding up a super flu that will surpass the deadliness of the flu of 1918. Wait, wasn't the flu supposed to become a pandemic last year? It was, but only after sharks stopped killing people off the coast of Florida and they are not done yet, so the chickens have decided to wait until this year to unleash their deadly virus amongst us.

And why do we not do anything about it? Well we are, but it will not be enough and so you might as well give up now. In fact, if you wish to ensure your eternal soul will reach heaven, send your life savings to me because I have a direct connection to God and will certainly send him your cash direct.

-Trevor

Got my midterm back for General Equilibrium. Not great but got a B+ on it, so it could have been much worse. In reality, I did quite well when looking at the fact that I missed an entire page of theorems that he provided us to use on the problems. In absolute terms, only five others did better on the exam than I did in a class of 28 so I think I should be in solid footing. Not too bad in my opinion.

-Trevor

Here is one of the test questions for those who care:

Art and Bart sell ice cream cones from carts on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. Each day they independently decide where to position their carts on the boardwalk, which runs from west to east and is exactly one mile long. Let's use xa and xb to denote how far (in miles) each cart was positioned yesterday from the west end of the boardwalk; and we'll use xa^ and xb^ to denote how far from the west end the carts are positioned today. Art always positions his cart as far from the boardwalk's west end as Bart's cart was from the east end yesterday (xa^ = 1 - xb). Bart always looks at xa (how far Art was from the west end yesterday) and then positions his own cart xb^ = xa*xa. Prove there is a stationary pair of locations by Brouwer's Fixed Point Theorem.

Note: I really don't think it is worthwhile to give you Brouwer's Fixed point theorem, but this was a decent problem and not too hard as long as you remember to setup the function correctly.

I forgot to post about the Local H concert on Monday. It was over at the Plush Lounge on 4th Ave (the happenin' place in Tucson). It was a great concert, but unfortunately there were only 30 or so people who made it to the concert (maybe not so happenin' after all...) Anyways Local H put on a great show. If I had to describe it in one word, I would describe it as intense. In addition to their great singles, they played a cover from the Queens of the Stone Age (Feel Good Hit of the Summer) in additon to a few covers from Tommy. While not being a huge fan of the Who, they did a great job. And who says a two man band can't rock?

It is unfortunate that more people did not make it to the concert. I could think of nothing worse than to take five hours to get to a show in which so few people show up. Ironically they have more air time on the radios down here than in Minnesota but attract a significantly smaller audience. God can be so cruel as to allow people to go to boy bands but miss what great rock sounds like.

-Trevor

Sorry for taking so long to post, but I've had been pretty busy. I took my first of three midterms on Monday. Probably could have done better, but could have done much worse as well. Not too many worries since this is meant to be a very difficult test. My next midterm is on Thursday for Statistics. I do not think it should be too bad, but will require a decent amount of studying.

In other news I won the lottery for a season ticket for U of A basketball. I seem to have a lot of people in the department telling me that I shouldn't sell my tickets. Supposedly this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I believe they may have a biased opinion based on their interest in college basketball. For me, I'm thinking it could make a tidy profit, but if the price isn't right, I think I should enjoy the games myself.

-Trevor

So I am listening to online radios in order to broaden my horizons. However, I got more than I bargained for when I was listening to an old ?jazz? station. They decided that Bette Midler fit the genre. Here are the opening lyrics for those who care (it has a ?Christmassy? tune):

"Sue wants a barbecue. Sam wants to boil a ham. Grace supposed to baste your stew. Jake wants a weenie bake steak and a layercake. he will get a tummy ache too. We will rent a tent or teepee?"

Anyways, the whole point is that I get sick just listening to the song, but seem almost unable to stop because I keep on thinking, why? Why would this be considered a song that would be played for legitimate purposes? Sigh. Some things in this world will never make sense.

-Trevor

The media appears to be fascinated with blogs recently. They are constantly posting articles about the number of Americans who write/read blogs. This article is interesting because it brings up a good point about the majority of blogs generally having a very limited scope (such as hemeac.com). It just brings back memories of the beginning of the www and the news that spouted information about how big the web was back in the day. I will have to agree that since my blog is not really intended for a large audience it really should not be considered in the same scope as those that try to reach out for a national audience. However one could argue that those that try to reach a national audience such as a political blog may be more of a public forum rather than a web journal due to the rather impersonal nature, but whatever.

-Trevor

As an eBay seller, I find this quite amusing ....

http://cgi.ebay.com/Amy-Brown-Art-Book-Volume-II-fairies-fairy_W0QQitemZ6980200976QQcategoryZ268QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

edit: Nevermind, the seller found out and ended the listing.

You will probably hate me after reading my thoughts, but this is something that to me should be brought up.

Families of the victims of 9/11 are complaining that those who died on 9/11 should not have to share a memorial with other Americans who have honorably died for their country.

Governor Pataki of New York has given in to their demands.

For crying out loud, will the world end if we can mourn multiple subsets of the population at one time, or will my cries of sadness be wasted if I am saddened over those who protected us from Hitler and those who died for no purpose at the World Trade Center?

Going over these designs is an absolute waste of taxpayers money and that is really something to cry over. Rather than giving that money to the victims of Katrina and Rita, we are spending significant amounts to design the various skyscrapers and memorials that get shot down because they do not symbolize the pain of 9/11. The truth of the matter is if you tell Americans that a building symbolizes the struggle for freedom, the majority will say that is awesome and look at it in a subdued respect.

We can see that for these victims, they have been bonded by a common disaster and rather than dissolve when their collective task of remembering the dead is done, they will live forever on, haunting us by reminding us that we are stomping on the memories of the fallen. The terrorists are laughing at the unintended consequences of their actions.

-Trevor

Yesterday I went to the driving range to relax a little bit after studying this weekend for midterms and doing some homework. What did I learn? Well, a beginner who has not went golfing for a few months can revert to a lot of bad habits. However, I think I was getting a tad more consistent, so watch out Tiger.

-Trevor

Gizmodo has a hilarious commentary on a new product from Quaker. What won't they think of yet?

-Trevor

Hey Everyone. I just wanted to let you know that I am studying for a midterm next week and do not know if I will be posting much. Don't worry I didn't drop off the face of the Earth.

-Trevor

I was so blue the other day when I received another credit card application from American Express. How could I live when I had to keep on disposing of the wasteful credit card applications? Of course something happened to me that rocked my world. I received a solicitation by Household Bank. They informed me that I was elite and therefore should not lower myself by using those dirty platinum cards. I am told this card will grant me instant status and recognition. Therefore in my charity, I have decided that you may still worship me and revolve around my heavenly body. After all, I deserve it. Thank you Steven Mattics for opening my eyes.

-Trevor

Local H decided to put out a live album. While I have yet to listen to it, the benefits of releasing an album will soon be felt by me. Local H will be hitting the local scene (Tucson) on October 3rd at Plush for $8. I am feeling quite excited about the prospects of seeing a great band playing great music. While many do not hold with the same conviction that they are great, it should be a great time.

-Trevor

A new company hopes to have a colony on Mars within a couple of decades. They are hoping this independent of any national government. While I applaud the efforts, I could not help but laugh at the quote at the end of the article by Bruce Mackenzie (a cofounder of the company), "I really hope we get started before we have an economic decline that delays it. I'd really hate to have something like the Great Depression, or the Dark Ages that lasted several hundred years, delay getting into space."

I think if we have another Dark Ages there will be other problems than trying to establish a colony on Mars. Further, I would hate to be a settler on Mars needing vital supplies from Earth, but to find that we have entered a dark age.

-Trevor

A few guys in my micro courses were going to get together and make a Indian dish (Can't remember the name for the life of me) and do some studying before the Arizona-Purdue game on Saturday. They invited me over to help with some of the menial labor such as peeling potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and of course, washing dishes. Realistically they were not going to let a white guy touch a dish that required six hours of preperation! While I think we didn't get as much studying done as we would have liked, the food was great. For those who have actually had Indian food before, they said it turned out great, so I will have to believe that it is all downhill from here. If you're interested, I posted some pics of the dinner annd the football game. Unfortunately Arizona lost, but put up a good fight.

-Trevor

I was working on campus tonight (I still am, sort of) and a colleague who noticed I was computer literate (again, sort of), asked about ripping music off of the internet. I never had really thought about the possibility, but it was a way to test my abilities to keep up on the latest technology, so I ended up finding Streamripper. It is a plugin for winamp that it can take the stream from the internet (has to be a mp3 stream) and record it. The great thing about it is that if ID3 data is also streamed, it can automatically cut the files into the appropiate tracks. It is definitely worth looking into. If anyone is interested and needs help to get setup, let me know and I can write a tutorial.

-Trevor

I recently received a solicitation from American Express telling me that I was preapproved for Blue and I would get 0% APR for the next 12 months. I sez to myself, hot spit, that be the greatest deal that ever be. The brochure told me that my groceries will pay for my new flat screen, as seen in the photo below.

I was confused initially about the direction of the next page in the pamphlet. It appears to tell me that my groceries will literally pay for my television. I really hope they are hard at work by saving the world or being used as insulation.

I decided that this card may be uber-awesome and I hope that I will find that it will have a credit limit of a few million and so I can afford to take a lengthy trip to Asia.

Note: This stuff is way too real to make up. For those who do not believe the legitimacy of this article, I suggest you search for the truth in the middle of a freeway at night. Those lights are God's way of letting you know I am right.

-Trevor

Just wanted to let everyone I posted some new pictures. Check them out in my gallery

-Trevor

While you have probably noticed that I have been working on my site recently, there have been little noticeable changes to the outside world. I decided to make sure my css is valid via the W3C. Unfortunately having a valid code for both xhtml and css does not make all errors disappear, such as those found in loading my header in IE. It was worth a shot.

-Trevor

In order to try to minimize referral spam from my website, I'll be adding an extension (hidden to regular users) that can ban ip addresses from using my website as a referral to move up the ranks in search engines. I'll be implementing this feature on Sunday, so if you happen to notice that my website is no longer accessible, I highly recommend that you contact me and inform me of your plight.

-Trevor

Since I refitted my skin to work with the 1.0.x version of Firefox, I could not determine why the text of my Last Comments Page (beneath the calendar) posted the last comments in black. This is obviously hard to read considering my background was black. I now fixed that problem due to one missing line in my css file. It just goes to show when you are rewriting a 464 line file, it is easy to make a mistake.

For those who do not know, the last comments posts all of the last comments on my blog. Do note however that I have been receiving comment spam again (I do try to cull any unwanted data out), so do not click on any links on the comments!

Now my next bug is to see why my logo does not display on IE. I will admit however that this is low on my priority list since I do not use IE and it technically should not affect the usuability of the website. One possibility is that when Firefox 1.5 is released in the final version, I will revert to the old skin which is displayed correctly which is displayed correctly in Firefox 1.5 (I am using 1.5 beta and the old version displays correctly, so I am assuming that it will continue with the final release).

-Trevor

Gillette is planning on upgrading the Mach 3 next year with the Gillette Fusion. With the addition of two additional blades and each positioned 30% closer together, they theoretically will provide for a more comfortable shave, especially when you slice open your jugular.

According to the president of Gillette, the analogy between the "power" of the blades and the definition will lead up to the hype, thus I am hoping to purchase a Fusion in order to power my home and make sure to save money on my next electricity bills. This is a product to keep your eyes a few inches away from.

-Trevor

I just wanted to let everyone know that I upgraded the blog to b2evolution 0.9.1 from 0.9.0.10. You should not see any changes in the look. Let me know if the site opens faster/slower and if any broken links and things that used to work and things of that nature.

-Trevor

I just wanted to let everyone know that a newer version of b2evolution has been released. With this release, the performance of b2evolution is supposedly double, thus making my website load faster (should be a good thing). While there should be no loss of information or required modification to my skin, I will upgrade this weekend on the chance that a problem arises, in which I should have time to fix it.

-Trevor

I had one of those days yesterday in which reality seems hellbent on your misery. To begin, I discovered I can no longer read a schedule and I went to class a half hour late today. I blame it on that quirky five day schedule. After four years of having odd and even days and majors that did have quirky meetings on some days and not others, I am having a hard time adjusting to this whole new shift. I then spent an hour on a problem in which if I bothered to look at a theorem I used YESTERDAY, I would have saved myself infinite amounts of pain. To top it off, I discovered 9/4 ? 6/4 + 1/4 does not equal 4, but rather 4/4=1. Crazy. My whole view on reality has shifted now that I have realized that I need to factor in the denominators. One (myself included) should be wondering how I ever survived the math major in undergrad. Let us hope for my sanity that I will learn how to add and subtract fractions by tomorrow, then I can begin discovering what that giant S thingy is in front of the equations in my notes for calculus.

-Trevor

Fictitious Update by Charlie: It?s an integral.

Update: I knew I heard that word before.

Well I see that got your attention. That's true in a sense. Do you know how some newscasts like to promote their greatest stories by featuring short clips of them with swooshing sounds to make them look important? Well if you do not, you should. Anyways, while I was watching this morning, I saw a clip that was all to funny. It featured what appeared to be a swat team breaking in a door on the second floor of the Howard Johnson, likely very close to where we had stayed that most fateful night. Of course it was hard to place when it could have happened since the season changes in Tucson are hard to place. This leaves to see if I can discover some additional news on the subject.

-Trevor

As I sit here writing this, I am currently huddled in a blanket. For those of you who may be concerned, I don't have a fever, it is just that I have come to the realization that I have adjusted to the warm weather in Tucson. Within the last couple of days, I have noticed a profound change in the weather here, especially in the morning. For instance, this morning, it was only 64 degrees outside compared to the usual 75 degrees or so. When you haven't experienced weather for over a month that is less than 75 and when the highs can hit 116, you would be shivering too when it hits these lows and it is that cold in your place.

-Trevor

Don't you hate that wet dog smell? I do and so should you. Well now you can do something about it. That's right for a limited time offer, you can buy the Infrared powered pet dry room. It can dry that smelly dog in just 30 seconds and they leave with a crispness you can taste. But WAIT! If you order now, we will add our pateneted dog comb that can eliminate any of that snarled fur. A $1.01 Value.

.

The Pet Dry Room can be yours for only 3 Easy Payments of $3.14159.

-Trevor

Microsoft has claimed that they have designed their new shining hardware with security that the evil hackers in the world have never seen before. Of course hackers probably did not see much in the way of activating software when Windows XP came out and it did not take too long before they hacked a noncorporate version of Windows. While I do not know much about hardware, I am assuming that we should see a mod chip within a few months of release, but since I doubt I will get the new Xbox for the forseeable future, it does not make much of a difference to me anyways.

-Trevor

Vern recommended I link to this site which features a flash applet in which four horses sing in quasi-doo wop (it's interactive as well). If you have a couple minutes, it probably will not kill you if you check it out, but you never know.

-Trevor

Ars Technica has posted an article mentioning seven different flavors for Windows Vista (the next version of Windows after XP). It appears that the Microsoft wants to confuse consumers over the difference of trivial details. I noticed that the Starter Edition looks horribly crippled and will probably cause plenty of difficulties for those unlucky enough to either buy it or have it bundled with their budget PCs.

-Trevor

Genre: Noir / Drama
Rating: Unrated
Starring: William Holden / Gloria Swanson
Released: 1950

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Genre: Comedy / Action
Rating: Unrated Version
Starring: Trey Parker & Matt Stone
Released: 2004

Read more!

There is a bit of everything in the last couple of days. One of my colleagues was so grateful to borrow me a USB floppy drive. I was able to use that to get my hard drive up and running. While I got Windows setup fine, I seem to be having difficulty in getting a IDE hard drive running with my SATA hard drive. I am not a 100% positive what the problem is, however, I know from hooking up the 40GB hard drive to my external enclosure that is still working, but I cannot say the same thing about my main drive. After closer inspection I noticed that my main drive?s casing appears to have melted slightly, I can only imagine how hot it must have been, but I am not exactly sure why. This is only speculation that the rough plastic had actually melted, but it appears to be worse than a manufacturer?s defect.

Luckily there was some retrievable data from it (such as my undergraduate papers), but until I make a few more attempts at getting data, I am not going to dismantle the drive. So far the damage (lost files) seems to be about 10 GB of music and about 20 GB of episodes of Ducktales, Red vs. Blue, and Seinfeld.

I have discovered some software, GetDataBack which I will look into further in order to use to recover the data from the damaged partitions. This software appears to be useful, but that remains to be seen.

In other news, I was planning on making the Arizona football game on Saturday, but that was cut short since my body decided I was going to run a fever in addition to this nasty cough I got earlier this week. The cough appears to be going away with no signs of what I would have sworn would have developed into Bronchitis, so I will count that as a blessing.

-Trevor

I received my new harddrive today, but I seem to have realized that I created way too much work for myself. First, my motherboard was not detecting my harddrive. Luckily for me, I checked online and noticed that motherboard cannnot detect SATA II, however, luckily a jumper setting on the harddrive can slow it to the regular SATA 150 MB/s setting. Nicely enough, the harddrive does not come with a jumper since it is not necessary for a jumper setting to determine a slave/master on a serial connection, so I needed to take a jumper temporarily off another harddrive. Second, I realized that Windows XP does not natively support SATA so I need to setup a "boot" disk to load the drivers via floppy during the setup in order to detect the harddrive. If my case had not had a hole built in, I would have installed a floppy, so I guess I can count myself lucky, however, I need another computer with a floppy and unfortunately, my laptop does not have a floppy. So I will have to be on the lookout. I'll keep everyone posted.

-Trevor

Apple has recently introduced a new Ipod, the Ipod Nano. While I cannot fault great marketing, one has to wonder about the new slogan for the Nano, "1,000 songs. Impossibly small. Ipod Nano."

Dictionary.com defines impossible as "Incapable of having existence or of occurring."

This leaves me with a huge question, does it really exist? Clearly CNN believes so because they wrote an entire article on it. However, if it is incapable of existence, what happens if I see someone use it? Will it be real or merely a figment of my imagination. I hope this dilemma will be solved soon. Of course this may be saying that it is actually an Ipod Mini which is merely saying that an MP3 player cannot be as small as what the Nano could be. I think this question should be left up either to philosophers or the marketing department of Apple.

-Trevor

Recognize this character? Well even if you don't he will soon be a theater near you. Marvel Comics has recently procured around $500 million dollars to produce 10 live action movies in the next seven years. Wait, aren't all the popular comic books already taken? Yes, but like this guy above (he's Ant Man by the way), Captain America, The Avengers, Nick Fury, Black Panther, Ant-Man, Cloak & Dagger, Dr. Strange, Hawkeye, Power Pack, and Shang-Chi will be saving America soon, so you better watch out because they will certainly involve a lot of destruction around the United States, but it is to protect you, so it is ok if they destroy half a city to do it.

-Trevor

I was watching television the other night and I saw a Kia commercial. What I saw will possibly upset me for the rest of my life. The commercial began with a man using a megaphone informing people that they do not have to live within our concrete prison any longer. The means in which you may escape this horrible reality is through the Kia Sorento. This silver 4x4 monstrosity is going to save you from claustrophobia and various forms of hatred towards society. Of course they fail to mention that with substandard gas mileage, you will only add to the rampant environmental destruction with your dirty dirty smog. While I am not suggesting whether or not this product is inferior, wait, I am, but don't take my word for it.

-Trevor

For those who are curious, the guesthouse at St. John's is finally in the process of construction. My dad sent me this picture showing it's current state. He also mentioned that there was a recent $2 million donation to help what will be cost overruns.

-Trevor

Mark your calendar for the greatest event of the world... Well maybe, no, nevermind. Anyways, I just wanted everyone to know that I'm heading back to the land of over 12000 frozen lakes on December 17th and will be there till January 4th. Flying Northwest, supposing that the strike (even though they are still flying) will have ended and there will be no delays, so I'll keep my fingers crossed. Let's just hope the scabs can keep these planes together.

In other news, just ordered a new harddrive. This time it is a Serial ATA and I noticed that they are no longer doing the one year warranty thing, so if this happens again, I'll be protected.

-Trevor

Genre: Comedy
Starring: Jude Law, Naomi Watts, Jason Schwartzman
Released: 2004

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A rather unfortunate event (not a series of events though) has occured, my desktop's main harddrive has crashed leaving me without the use of my desktop computer for the next few days until I receive a replacement harddrive from Newegg. I am currently downloading Knoppix on my laptop in order to see if I can survey the damage done and determine if any data is recoverable on a partition that was home to some music and other files. Luckily I had a large portion of that data on my laptop hard drive so the critical data was backed up, but there were a few things on the drive that are going to be sorely missed such as my saved games of baldur gate 2 with nearly 60 hours into the game will likely be lost forever.

I believe the problem is hardware related due a noticeable burning electronics smell, which does not bode well for the integrity of the data, but we will see.

-Trevor

A few people have asked me these questions and here is my response if I haven't already responded:

Q: How is school so far?
A: It is going pretty well, but extremely busy. Arizona has a unique way in which it seems to like one to learn, through extremely difficult examples. While the quantity of problems is not too bad, each problem tends to take a while to solve due to the large number of steps involved or a particularly difficult function to anyalyze or merely not recognizing the steps to correctly solve a problem. The people, including the professors, are very friendly and helpful and the "competitive" nature of this program is fairly minimal in comparison to other schools because Arizona does not attempt to weed out students. However it should be noted that a rather large number of second year students just failed their second attempt at prelims and will not be able to proceed farther than their masters, but that is an exception rather than a rule.

Q: Have I met any girls down in Arizona?
A: Yes and no. Girls in economics programs in the United States are rare, and Arizona is no exception. While I have talked to a few around campus, there is not likely to be a Ms. Kollmann at this time.

Q: Are you worried about school?
A: I have mixed feelings. The level of difficulty is substantially higher than undergraduate, however, I do not feel like I am behind many of my colleagues, so I am not too concerned.

Well that's it for now. Take care.

-Trevor

Hey everyone. Jenny alerted me to creating quizzes on Bebo. It is a novelty, but sort of enjoyable. Check it out at http://hemeac.bebo.com

In every big city, crime is to be expected. Here is a bit of a local crime update:

Sometime this week, 1/4 tank of gas was siphoned out of my car. Luckily no damage was done to it, so the $10 or so in gas is minimal damage.

A woman who sells steering locks and bike locks on campus had her car stolen right outside of the University's police department.

A man was killed about two blocks from my place after a high speed chase. After smashing his SUV into a pole, he ran and dropped his gun. The gun fired and hit him. There was no news why he was running from the cops, but it said lived a little over a mile from my house.

-Trevor

Scientists have recently created Aggregated Diamond Nanorods which have been discovered to be harder than diamonds. They are created via the same basic process as diamonds, intense heat and pressure. They haven't shown any pictures of how the diamond nanorods look, so don't go over the jeweler to wait in line for the one ring to rule them all.

-Trevor

Cancer or Heart Attack?

California has in it's health fanatic fashion decided to sue companies such as McDonald's and Burger King alleging that French Fries when cooked at high temperature produce low levels of acrylamide which "they say" cause cancer or at least according to a 2002 study. While California is not suing to stop the selling of French Fries, they say that the restaurants failed to properly warn consumers of the potential danger. I think by now everyone knows that if a food is not a fruit or vegetable, it causes cancer and WILL kill you. No matter what you do or how you try to live your life, your useless pathetic attempt at living healthy will only kill you sooner.

In other news, CNN has claimed that coffee has high levels of antioxidants to help prevent you from getting cancer. In other words, stop eating and just drink coffee.

-Trevor

For those who made it to Greg and Jenny's Bachelor/Bachelorette Party in July, we played a drinking game (can not remember the name) in which one of the requirements when one chose a particular card is to make up a story, one word at a time. One item that came up more often than one would suspect is a wang machine. Lindsay has so kindly "invented" this wang machine for our viewing pleasure.

-Trevor

Update: Jenny says it is Categories. Thanks

I was going over the movie trailers over at Apple and I noticed that Oliver Twist is being released in September. I was thinking that it might be an adaptation of the musical, but alas, it is an adaptation of the book, thus they do not break into a song after Oliver asks for more... Oh well. It is hard to tell whether or not this movie will be any good. I have a fear that it will be too much of a feel good movie.

-Trevor

I was formatting my newspaper for my job the other night when I came across a most interesting picture. It doesn't really show anything due to the lack of resolution, but it is still interesting that Europeans are not censored from seeing it. While I am not actively seeking out pictures of this nature, it is one of the things that the FCC wants to make sure that we never catch a glimpse of outside the bedroom. In case there are sensitive eyes, you must click the "more" button to view this picture. Please note the shoes though.

-Trevor

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Looking for a viable cheap alternative to Itunes and something less tedious than piracy, I decided to check out Allofmp3.com. The selection appears to be good and the download times are ok, but fast if you use their music management software (which appears to be free of any unwanted spyware). The music is only $0.02/per MB downloaded and you can choose from a variety of codecs and bitrates. Further they come in an unprotected format so you can do whatever you want with them.

Of course you may asking about the legality of the mp3s. I think it is currently in a murky state with the legality not being wholly defined. From what I gather, it appears that it is legal in Russia (the location of the company) due to the lack of copyright laws against it. As for United States citizens, I suppose it is not much different than importing CD's from out of the country until I am told otherwise. Check it out if you get a chance.

-Trevor

I was not quite expecting fireworks and people bowing before me, but I did expect something a little more structured than our first day of classes. Two of my three professors are gone for the next couple of days and so the third filled in order to give us a lecture that was critical for what he was to go through. I guess it is sort of nice to be brought in slowly, but after my math camp I think I was ready for something a little more intense than a review of undergrad micro. Maybe I should be careful for what I wish for because I am assuming I will be busy enough soon.

-Trevor

Genre: Epic Story / Fiction
Author: Michael Chabon
Released: 2000
Notable Works: Wonderboys

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I was thinking about what I could say regarding a review of Solyaris, a movie based on the book of the same name by Stanislaw Lem. While I thought I could give a good review of the remake starring George Clooney, I do not think I am anywhere near qualified to remake this movie. While I will admit that I found extremely difficult to follow, I believe it is because of the pace of Hollywood films. This film has a very deliberate pace that no one is going to stop for whatever reason. I find the pacing to be similar to Once Upon a Time in America, often found to be a difficult movie to follow. Overall I think the movie has a lot of potential but I was unable to interpret much of the symbolism present in the film (which I believe that Russian movie goers are more accustomed to). It is a good film to watch once at least to be exposed to the film even if one does not particulary care for it.

-Trevor

The moment I've been waiting for this whole summer is finally upon me, the start of the first day of the rest of my life. Sorry for the sappy clich?, but I thought it would be appropriate. I finished the final for my math camp yesterday. To say the least it was extremely difficult, but pleasing in an almost perverse way. In just under three hours I completed seven questions spanning calculus, linear algebra, algebraic structures, real analysis, and constrained optimization (Lagrange multipliers).

It is all over now and I can finally look forward to my fall classes. I did not think I would be this excited for this, but sometimes I even surprise myself.

In order to relax a little bit, Brian and I hit Gentle Bens with some of my Econ colleagues and just chatted for about 4 hours or so. Then this morning I got up early and went to the Pima Air and Space Museum. I was awed by the sheer number of planes they had out there. I also surprised the cashier who doubted that I was a AAA member (which saved me $1 off admission).

This afternoon I did a little of Bender's least used word. (I thought I would let you struggle over what word that would be, but assuming that not everyone watched that episode from futurama, antiquing). One of the dealers at an overpriced antique furniture store gave me a dirty look of why is a kid doing at this store. I even overheard her telling the owner that they should keep an eye on me. That is why I took personal satisfaction when I saw her dog pee on the carpet of the store. I must have forgotten to say anything to them.

I then made my way over to 4th Avenue which is known for it's bars and trinket shops and I stopped into a used cd store which also sells political posters and tshirts. While they were very liberal in nature, I could not help but laugh when I saw them portray Anne Coultier as a Nazi whipping a poor helpless "liberal". I do not think the kids working in the shop liked me either. I think grad students just are not appreciated in the antique/punk world anymore.

I ended up in an Irish bar for some lunch and was entertained by a local who was hopelessly hitting on the bartender, who I gathered was a U of A student. I had a feeling that telling her how much she reminded him of his little niece was not going to score any points. Well that has been my day and I'm just relaxing in McClelland for a bit before I head back and pop in a movie.

-Trevor

Genre: Science Fiction / Romance
Starring: George Clooney
Released: 2002

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Genre: Science Fiction
Author: Bruce Sterling
Notable Works: Schismatrix
Released: 1994

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Jenny so kindly e-mailed me this article referring to my forever favorite topic, gaming marathon deaths. The poor fools who for whatever reason decide they want to game so much that they die of heart failure due to exhaustion. I think they are always candidates for the Darwin Award.

-Trevor

For those of you (Spacemonkey) who watch when I post, you can see that I modified the post times to reflect the Arizona timezone standard. That way people do not think I'm always a night owl.

-Trevor

Took it easy today. Brian and I went to do some plant shopping and other miscellaneous stuff. Finally found some relatively cheap corned beef and made a reuban. Mmmmm. However, today was pretty cold and the high only hit 75 in central Tucson. Pretty cold from what I've adjusted to, but overall a very comfortable day outside.

-Trevor

Thanks Binkyfinder for the article on the Fedex furniture. I was planning on posting, but unfortunately you beat me to the punch. A very funny story though.

-Trevor

You you never have to waste hard-earned money again on furniture. I thought this was kind of funny, but I don't think FedEx has the same sense of humor.

http://fedexfurniture.com/

Just a note - when shipping FedEx, the employees are reluctant to allow customers the use of company packaging tape. Brad found this out the other day when he realized he didn't close one end of the packaging properly. He asked if he could have just a small piece. He was told it was against company policies, and the clerk directed him to their merchandise where he could purchase a small roll of tape for $3.00. He then asked them how much it would cost to insure the package for $100 and was told it would be $0.50. When he stated he would just rather have the package insured, the clerk happily finished the packaging himself, free of charge.

While I'm assuming a couple of the more tech savvy readers know this is old news, I can't post as often as I would like so I've read that the x86 version of the Apple's OS x has been ported (not officially) to regular x86 machines (read: the ones that run windows). To appear to make it as compatibile as possible it seems that you need to have SSE3 which does not include my laptop or desktop. While this sounds like it could be a lot of fun, I have my doubts that I will be testing it out on my systems any time soon.

As a little history lesson, Apple has recently decided to switch to Intel's x86 architecture for their processors rather than IBM's PowerPC. I guess IBM shouldn't be too angry since it is selling a significantly larger share of processors to Micrsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.

It will of course be interesting to see if the prices of Mac's will become more favorable due to the switch in a more "standard" processor or will the price premium remain because of the stability of Mac's.

-Trevor

I finally have two consecutive days off in a row, thank God for International Orientation. Have some homework, but I can take it a little more laid back. I think I've realized finally what is so different from undergraduate to graduate students (besides being older...) I've noticed just how dedicated and excited everyone is about economics in the program. Maybe it is because they are older, but the difference between anyone in economics that I've known is almost at a whole new level. It has really helped me feel confident that I will fit in. However, I am quickly realizing that cramming for math is getting boring and I would definitely enjoy having my fall classes start.

In other news, my shower finally got fixed today. I was almost so excited that I was going to take a shower, but then I realized I could beter utilize my time writing this mini novel. Also I should be getting some nice decorative gravel in my backyard so I won't have to look at dirt when I go outside and they are hooking a irrigation system to my trees so I won't even have to remember to water.

On the social front, a couple of guys in the program and I went to a authentic Mexican in South Tucson (a seperate city like South St. Paul). It looked pretty grungy and a bad part of town, but the food was great and cheap, only $3 for a quesadilla with rice. It was some pretty good food and I know it was clean because one of the guys I went with has lived here all his life and knows health inspectors eat there (good enough for me). Definitely better than fast food.

Brian and I went to a bar last night that we went out to with his friend last year. The food was pretty decent and the price wasn't too bad. We then watched a movie and took it easy last night. It is definitely good to know someone pretty well down here. It seems that strangers do not always appreciate my stabs at humor, or at least those who know me well put up with it, but Charlie's ode to me suggests that some enjoy it. Thanks Spacemonkey.

Take it easy everyone.

-Trevor

On Friday, I was finally thinking that after my class on Saturday, I should be able to relax on Sunday and catch up on some casual endeavours. Unfortunately the homework (and I wasn't alone) was very time consuming and finally finished after a long day yesterday. So after hoping to utilize my free minutes, I ended up doing little but homework. Not that I am complaining too much. The class is getting exciting, especially now that I am getting to know a few of my fellow students. We went out for a couple of drinks on Saturday night and it was definitely a lot of fun. A lot of students in the program if they aren't international students, are only first or second generation Americans. I find that is pretty suprising that few "settled-in" Americans are in the program and am kind of wondering if that is a trend in economics in general. I don't think that would make a good economics dissertation because that would be better handled in the realm of sociology, a field I did not choose. Anyways I'm rambling and should get to work since we are talking about Lagrangian multipliers and constraints and all the other fun stuff that we get to cover in a day. At least I don't have class on Wednesday and Thursday.

-Trevor

Update: I completely forgot about the storms Saturday and Sunday night. We had some wicked storms and some serious flooding in the streets. On Mountain Avenue which has drainage pipes (unlike most of the roads in Tucson) it had up to 6 inches of water in the low parts. The rain was coming down harder than I have seen before with huge wind gusts. Last night the lightning and thunder were pretty loud. It almost sounded like a bomb going off. I know this is somewhat unusual because I was walking through campus and everybody was talking about it.

In a verdict surely to relieve millions of avid fans, Dan Brown did not infringe on the copyrights of the book "Daughter of God". While I really don't care one way or another, it is simply a way for me to show my dislike towards a book that has transcended what it really is: fiction. It's a story, but many people seem to give place on a pedestal of religious importance, something one should probably try to avoid when reading. Living in a fantasy world from reading is nearly as harmful as pumping round after round into a person which some parental groups think will happen after playing GTA. Anyways, that's enough for today.

-Trevor

Have you ever wondered what you would look like as the opposite sex?
Are you worried what will become of your apperance as you age? Well, here's your chance to find out . . .

http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~morph/Transformer/

(Trevor, I'm sorry for ruining your forum with junk.)

I found this bag on ebay. I was thinking this is great, exactly what I've been looking for, a leather "man purse" that I can carry around and look totally cool. But of course I did not notice at first the prohibitive price. I know everyone worships me and should be thinking, how can we get together and buy this bag for Trevor. Reality has just struck of course and people will worship me the day that pigs fly from their own power (possibly due to natural evolution, but not man-made). Anyways, I'll just stare at this bag and dream up all the possibilites that I could use the bag for, that is almost as good as the real thing.

-Trevor

Genre: Action / Animation
Starring: Craig Nelson, Holly Hunter, Samuel Jackson
Released: 2004

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Tonight I decided to substitute social interaction by going over to the Barnes and Noble. Had to drive since I was not really in the mood to bike 4.5 miles each way. Getting there was uneventful, I only overshot my target by one block. On a side note, I found a JC Penny and Target that I believe is closer than the ones I knew about at the Tucson Mall (which is very similar in design to Ridgedale for those who care). Anyways, I picked up Heavy Weather which was highly recommended by Vern and I think I will begin that since I have been stalling on finishing The Name of the Rose. I picked up a couple of other books and wrote down the titles for a couple others for future consideration. Luckily a B&N giftcard came in very helpful today.

On the social front, I met a 2nd year student who seems pretty cool. I think once the actual classes start, it will be a little more laid back. At this point it is really hard to get a lot of conversations started because everyone is pretty focused on the homework. I seem to at least be ahead a little compared to most, since I am one of the few who is going to grad school right out of undergraduate. I was a little surprised, but I think that will ultimately bode well for me.

I think I have finally discovered how to get the wireless internet working at McClelland Hall. At this point I've been doing all my internetting (a horrible raping of the word...) from my house borrowing another guys connection, but I'm not using too much bandwidth and all is for completely legal reasons, so the owner shouldn't mind too much if they ever find out.

That's all for the daily update. Hopefully will hear from people soon (I think I'm starting to talk to myself more than usual...) My minutes for my phone is low for the month, so I really won't be able to talk until after the 6th and no one was on AIM when I signed in earlier.

-Trevor

Well I'm currently done with the first day of classes. Fairly anticlimatic as it was quite reminiscent of well, class. Interestingly enough however, one guy in the incoming freshman has relatives from St. Joseph and has spent a couple of summers in St. Joe. It really is a small world...

-Trevor

Atkins Nutrional is filing for bankruptcy protection because it is currently $300 million in the red. I guess the craze that his produced stickers on hamburger that it is naturally low on carbs is finally dwindling. Maybe if we are lucky all that bull about the South Beach or whatever diet craze will pass as well. Now Dr. Phil's weightloss solution is guaranteed to get the media attention it truly deserves.

The future business plan of Atkins appears to be murky, but they are planning to slim down by only selling shakes and bars to those who are supposed to lose weight by eating only those bars. Qu? lastima.

-Trevor

I know everyone is probably already sick of me giving updates on Tucson, but other than unpacking, watching movies, and doing homework, there hasn't been a lot to do when I don't know anyone down here yet. It is crazy though to think I have been down here a week from today, but I think that indicates that my time here will fly by, but that doesn't mean I have any clear indication of where I am going after this, it just means that I will be caught unprepared. I think I am as ready as I will ever be and I have done something that I rarely do, work ahead on my homework. I felt surprsingly ambitious today and worked on about 10 problems for the next assignment (meaning I only have 10 left). If I work on it for a couple more hours tonight, that may mean that I could basically be a day ahead of schedule (a good thing). The homework isn't really hard, but I have a distinct feeling that public schools (and U of A being no exception) love busy work. Hopefully this will be a trend that will not continue once my actual classes start.

While grocery shopping, I found a new peach schnapps since they did not carry Phillips and I was glad I did. This schnapps was reminiscent of the flavorful schapps at Jenny's wedding. It mixed very well with the usual Sprite and Orange Juice making for a relaxed Saturday night, but not too relaxed since I wanted to work on homework as well. I took a couple of pictures of myself drinking it for a review later. If I get a chance I'll work on it tomorrow. Further, I would like to get a review of the Incredibles up, but I am not feeling that ambitious right now. I'll talk to everyone later and hopefully everyone is having a blast up in Minnesota and whereever anyone else may be.

-Trevor

I have photos of my house up in my gallery (check link above). Let me know if you have any decorating tips/comments.

-Trevor

Well it was bound to happen, but I confirmed that my old Panasonic DVD player decided it was time for the big sleep. However, this occured before the move, but I wanted to play around with it some more so I brought it on down to sunny Tucson. So I decided originally to buy a budget DVD player, the Philips DVD622. This should have been an obvious bad buy due to the 90 day warranty. The component video out was not working right out of the box and it had difficulty playing unscratched DVD-R's. So I did what a good consumer would do, bring it back for an exchange for a Sony DVPN550P/S. For only $30 more, the quality of the player is apparent, better even than my old Panasonic. Yes, this was a great choice for a DVD Player and was quite happy. Since I do not have cable, watching DVD's is going to be a critical part of my "down time". When I get a regular attenae, I may at least have local access, but for now, I'll have to make do.

-Trevor

I posted a few pictures, click the title for the link. I'll try to get more useful information later when I'm all unpacked. Sorry for those who have tried calling, but I've been busy, but I thought this would be an ok substitute. Hopefully everyone is doing great and surviving those severe storms.

Thursday:

It was the last day @ work and so I was pretty excited to get out of there. I was surprised when Fr. Roger gave me a nice card and was very pleased when it came nicely equipped with cash. Took a few pictures around the monastery before I left for possibly the last time (but Br. Xavier always says I look so good in black, sigh?) Got a picture of Saint Peregrine (sp?) Looks pretty ghastly, but I guess that happens when you?re dead. NaLeah stopped over with the kids. It was pretty hard to see them go. Hopefully I won?t get too homesick because December might be a long time. We had a great hug when she left and I noticed that we both had a strange moisture coming out of our eyes.

Friday:

It was crazy busy all day working on homework and a couple of other things such as trying to get paid from the Prep School for taping the commencement (but I blame St. John?s lack of communication mostly). Jenny text messaged me to me her at Davannis in St. Cloud @ 7:15. She surprised me because I had no idea that Mike, Jessica, Ashley, and Lindsay would all show up. That was absolutely awesome. I did not expect it, but was completely glad they made it. Got back and finished packing. We realized we couldn?t fit one recliner and a bookshelf so had to leave them. Got to bed about 1:30 am.

Saturday:

Got about at 4 am. Pretty awake, but decided would be a good idea to take a shower. Packed up computer and decided that it would be good to take a couple of pictures. I talked to Becky for a bit. I didn?t think it would be this hard to go, but I?m definitely excited. To make a long story short, I almost hit a deer just North of Wilmar, MN and somewhere along the line got another chip in the windshield (it must be bad luck). Otherwise the trip went as smooth as a whistle.

Stopped over at the Best Western in Oklahoma in a city I can?t remember now. No internet, but at least I had my laptop for a little comfort. We averaged about 57 mph on the trip with me getting about 28 mpg so I consider it an efficient little trip. Well I should get to bed since it?ll be another long day.

Sunday:

We got up about 5 am Central time in Oklahoma. After a fun filled drive through a rather smelly and flat Texas, we went through the rather plain New Mexico. There were definitely a few sites to see, but overall it was pretty boring. However, I should mention that the White Sands National Monument looked to be pretty cool and it may be good to do a little siteseeing there someday. Overall, I rate this state above a rather boring Kansas, but it has nothing on Minnesota or the Southeast.

We made it into Arizona around 3:00 or so. We hit some monsoon storms on the mountains. They were pretty heavy and there was some pretty intense lightning. We saw a bit of a wildfire about 70 miles to the West of Tucson. It was likely due to the storms but appeared to be in the process of containment. We also were able to witness the INS searching an abandoned car along the road and a car that must have rolled in the ditch.

Once we got into Tucson, it got pretty anticlimactic quickly. There is only so much excitement in moving stuff in. Well I should get going again. Hopefully everyone is doing great.

Monday:

Worked on unpacking and getting all the fun stuff done. Got a mattress and my CAT card. Definitely warm out, but it sounds like Minnesota has some strong storms. The high for Tuesday should only be 98 degrees, but from I've heard (and witnessed today), it hasn't been raining much in the evening so it is staying pretty warm at night, currently 87 degrees as of 10:00 AZ time (AZ since no daylight savings like the rest of the US with exception of part of Indiana.) Met my neighbor in the other part of the duplex/house. He seems like he's a great quiet guy. Well I should get going. Hopefully will get a chance to talk to everyone soon.

-Trevor

I just thought I would quickly post and let you know that I survived the trip down to Arizona. It was a long and hectic 1600 mile trip. I'll post a longer segment later but I am currently hijacking someone's unsecured wireless network (poor fools).

-Trevor

I just wanted to say goodbye and I'll hopefully see everyone soon. Taking off at 5 tomorrow morning.

-Trevor

While I have had posting privileges for some time, I have refrained from posting because I was seeking a topic worthy and in the spirit of the preeminent Hemeac. I believe I have found such a topic. I know that the traditional first post/program/etc is suppose to be ?Hello World? as so wonderfully demonstrated by binkyfinder (or a welcome with no relevant info as so wonderfully demonstrated by the facetious Hemeac so long ago on an eventful Tuesday evening in January). So?HELLO WORLD.

Now, to move on, I would like to offer an ode to Trevor. In my humility, I realize that any ode I may offer is incomplete, slight, and unworthy of serious consideration. However, I offer it anyway?

Oh Trevor, you were always there for us with an odd tidbit of news so obscure we would have never heard about it without you. Luckily, you can easily post these to Hemeac.com and we all can stay well informed. Oh Trevor, you were always there with a rant or a tirade or just a mumble under you breathe about some moronic aspect of society or an advertisement or a person. Thankfully, you post your feelings on Hemeac.com (under both the ?Rants? and ?Absolutely Pathetic? categories). Although it is difficult to distinguish between the tirades and the under-the-breathe mumbles over in a blog, we can imagine. Oh Trevor, you were always there at 4 a.m. burning the late night oil with homework or computer games or even just a movie, even though you had an early class the next morning. It is reassuring to know that when I wake up each morning there is a good chance you will have posted on Hemeac.com since I last checked at midnight (just out of curiosity, what percentage of you posts are posted between 11 pm and 6 am?). Oh Trevor, you were always there to fix our computer or technology needs, to help us download software (legally of course) or kill viruses or install new hardware. And while I do not believe you will regularly post this sort of thing on Hemeac.com, fear not. We WILL call you with all our technological needs, complaints, desires, fears and hopes. We will call you up, ask how Arizona is and how you are doing, and then dive into the real reason for the call, ?Why is my computer dancing and flirting with my girlfriend and how can I stop it?? Oh Trevor, you were there many other times as well, and we will all miss you greatly. The state of Minnesota sends one of her finest out into the great big world.

On a side note, I do not know how much or what level of math you will encounter in grad school, but if you need any help, give me a call. I will most likely have a computer question for you too.

I happened across a rebate for a Canon IP 4000. It states that if you buy either a new Canon camera or any laptop you can get a $70 for a Canon printer. I decided it was about time I got a new photo printer to complement my Samsung ML-1710 laser. So I found a great printer in the IP4000 which will only by $30 after rebate. While I won't open it until I get down to Tucson, my Dad had just picked up the 5000 and the print quality is fantastic. Only a couple days now until the big day. Tomorrow is the last day for work, ever! Not quite ever, but at least for a little while. I'll try to post on Saturday night (depending on whether we get a room with internet) and keep everybody who reads this site up to date on how our first 16 hour leg of the journey goes and where we ultimately made it.

-Trevor

Here's a link to an article that mentions a new website which offers the chance to send blog messages into outerspace. I wonder how venture capitalists ever fund these shenangigans. I don't know about you, but I really don't know how exciting this blog would be to some random alien civilization that happens to pick up this message years after I am likely dead.

-Trevor

Hello World! This is Binkyfinder showing off my mad posting skillz.

I got the wedding pictures up for Jenny and Greg. Check them out at the link above. I'll write a little synopsis of the night later on but I should get some work done since I've spent too much time working on the pictures. I included the full size images as well. Leave a comment if you have any problems getting them.

-Trevor

Well here is the current style for now. I'll have to fiddle around with it some more, but I think it is good for now. I was wrong originally about when Firefox 1.1 should be released, supposedly should be released around late summer. If so, I think I will return to my "1.0" version of the theme. Let me know if it all the information is displayed from what you remember. Thanks.

-Trevor

My parents finished recovering my kitchen chairs. The old vinyl was cracking so I bought new vinyl to match my kitchen floor and walls. They look pretty awesome in their Red-Violet hue (Can't remember exact name at the moment). I also got a 6 x 9 rug to go in my living room from my mom. That rug will really fucking tie the room together, as long as no one pees on it, but I think I am ok since I do not refer to myself as the Dude. I leave in a little over a week, which is certainly coming up quick. When I get down there, I'll take some pictures with my house all setup pretty in salmon.

Writing this post reminded me of a stupid little joke that was posted on a reupholsterer that was a friend of my dads: Upholsterers never die, they always recover.

Now thinking about quotes, I'm reminded of one of those stupid lines that should never made it into movies. A couple of weeks ago, I was watching X-men and near the final battle scene, Storm asked Toad, "Do you know what happens to toads when struck by lightning...? The same thing that happens to everything else." I had to listen to it again to realize that was the punchline to the question. I think if this was a post on it's own, it would fall under the absolutely pathetic category, but since it is not the opening topic, I will refrain for now. Who knows, but I have a feeling that line gave Halle Berry the role of catwoman.

Got to get to bed now, it is getting pretty late and if I don't, I will dread going to the ever exciting housekeeping tomorrow.

-Trevor

I'm just about ready to unveil my updated theme on this site, Space 1.5.0. I want to pretend that I can actually code and this was a major overhaul of my CSS and _main.php files, however, I tried to change as little of the design as possible for the moment. Therefore, I thought Space 1.5.0 was the appropiate version number for the updated theme. Also I thought I would incorporate a version into the bottom of the page in order to show when I make small updates to the layout and whatnot.

For those who are wondering and care, I am using Crimson Editor as my text editor to modify my page. It's a great text editor that was designed for modifying php, css, and html files. Check it out since it's free.

-Trevor

I added a couple of new pictures. Check them out in the July 2005 folder.

-Trevor

Genre: Fiction
Author: Umberto Eco
Notable Works: The Name of the Rose
Released: 2005

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Worked on fixing the firefox bug, but it's not quite ready for the primetime yet. I introduced a couple of new formatting problems and still haven't got towards fixing the columns yet. I'll try to get the fixes in this week, but I think tomorrow I'm pretty booked.

-Trevor

After poring through some information on the internet, I found that Firefox 1.1 is scheduled for a release in the future (somewhere around early 2006). After testing out a candidate for Firefox 1.0.5, I found that my problem of my tables formatting horribly have not gone away with this release, so it is forcing my hand to do something about this. I'll try to work on it as much as possible, but even starting today, I do not expect to see immediate changes for the next week or three (getting ready to move and all that fun stuff). I hope everyone can put up with it for now, and if absolutely necessary, view it with IE for now. I know that IE may be viewed as devilish, but I guess it is better in this case. Oh the humanity!

-Trevor

I decided it was about time that I learned a little about wine since I have made a deliberate choice to try and drink more wine (it is all about the sophistication, sure.) Anyways, I found this site (it looks old, but wine is older so the information should be timeless...) that gave a good start that you may want to check out. It is definitely a long read, but it is probably worth it. While I wish it had a bit more information about the different wines, I learned a bit about how wine comes into existence which is probably half the battle. Take a look and if I find other worthy sites, I'll post them as well.

-Trevor

Jenny sent me this picture from a pool at Beijing University. Enjoy.

-Trevor

Just wanted to let everyone know who doesn't, such as SpaceMonkey, I leave for Arizona in approximately 14 Days 4 Hours from this post. In other responses to comments, I don't know how well any of the artifical sweetners are to snort, but high school principals are known to give you evil looks if you make nice little rows out of sugar.

-Trevor

My dell laptop made it to St. Cloud today! I found out that Dell requires a signature to leave the package and my mom had just left, however, I stopped over at the DC and picked up the laptop this evening. It works great, and I am pleased to announce that this is the first post written by the laptop. It is a bit bigger than I had imagined, but I guess it is hard to visualize a laptop with a 15.4" screen. I can't imagine someone trying to lug around a 17" laptop around, just impossible. Well I'll take a couple of pictures to show you, but I'm really happy with it. It formatted the papers on my side job just as well as my AMD64 3000, so I should have no problems working on the papers at school.

-Trevor

Well it was July 3rd and we were having a little party for a very good friend, piglet, no, I believe it was for a future bride and groom that I've known for the last four years, Jenny and Greg. We began the day going to the Twins games near the left field line and watched the Twins beat the Devil Rays due to some decent pitching and well timed hits on the offense. After that we went to go chill at the Holiday Inn. After watching a "great" movie, Greg finally got back from work and we went out to eat at the Old Spaghetti Factory. That was certainly some good food. After that, we went back to the Holiday Inn and drank and played a Categories. After becoming completely blitzed we finally headed to bed about 1:00.

It may sound that a whole day condensed into a paragraph doesn't sound like a lot of fun, but there was a lot going on between the lines. At least I enjoyed the evening and was certainly glad to see Greg and Jenny and others before I head down to Tucson. Of course I'll see them at the wedding since I'm the best man, but it is always difficult to just chat with someone when there are much more important things going on.

Among other things though, it was sad to admit that some of the things I did this weekend may be the last time I do them in Minnesota for a long while, such as watching fireworks in St. Cloud with the family and going to a Twins game in the Metrodome. Hopefully I'll be able to make it back to Minnesota during the summer at least once since there's a lot of stuff to do in the summer that one cannot do during the winter. I'm rambling, so I'll just stop now.

-Trevor

Genre: Action
Starring: Ben Affleck, Uma Thurman, Paul Giamatti
Released: 2003

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While at a fine eating establishment over the weekend, I noticed in the sugar container, packets of Splenda. This brought back recent memories of noticing that Pepsi One now contains Splenda. I thought to myself, what good is artifical sweetners? To consume? Of course not. Everyone knows that the whole point of having artifical sweetners at restaurants is so those who are bored can use the sweetners to create artifical snowshowers in their unused glass of water. Unfortunately for me, I had partially consumed my glass of water due to not wanting to guzzle my excellent glass of Bolla Pinot Grigio that had a scent of kiwi and a hint of cheddar cheese.

Well, so I used what I could and found the most amazing thing, the snow showers created by Spleda were much more splendid than those of Nutrasweet and Sweet and Low. Of course, these were initial results and have to be confirmed by additional research. However, I decided that my results and the subesequent taste test of the sweetened water was enough for a bit of a review.

Overall, I highly recommend using Splenda to pass the time due to the unique fall pattern of the grains. I would reconsider any thoughts of drinking the concoction however due to the very sweet nature of Splenda. If one has to drink sweetened water, one can never go wrong with the real deal, Sugar. I find the claims that it tastes like Sugar deceiving. This is compounded by the possibility that this is a carcinogen.

If you would like more information on Splenda, check out the link I provided which gives a nice little background.

-Trevor

Had a good fourth of July weekend. Getting ready for bed so I'll give a complete update later. However, during the fireworks this evening, my family and I met the most interesting character. I don't quite recall his name but he was most certainly a drunk. If my family had only listened to me that we should sit on the grass behind us, but of course there would be too many mosquitoes so we settled in for standing next to our cars. Well I have to save the good part for later.

-Trevor

As I was never a huge fan at the perceived rush at moving the Expos to Washington, I found this article from Clem's Baseball particularly intriguing. It mentions that approximately 7000 people a day purchase tickets for the game who ultimately do not show. The problem with this is that these people are not paying for consessions and parking and so do not do any of the high profit sales that help drive a team. So that is particularly bad when the phantom attendance numbers are being used to drive a publicly funded stadium. Well who knows, but I have a feeling there wouldn't be this problem if they moved the team down in Durham or Las Vegas. I mean these areas are screaming a need for baseball and sometimes AAA affiliates just won't cut it. However, I don't have an inside track for baseball and don't live in the areas so maybe I shouldn't poke my nose where I don't belong. I'll just leave you with that, but make sure if you like baseball to check out his stadium section. Absolutely fantastic and a lot of fun.

-Trevor

Has the world collapsed in a ironic twist of fate? I almost thought it would when I decided that a Dell would be my best bet for a new laptop. Ultimately I couldn't turn down 35% off. This appears to have the best balance between battery life, portability, perfomance, and design. Here's the specs for the new laptop. I thought I would wait to get a larger batter for now due to Dell wanting $100 for the upgrade (the going price for the new battery on Ebay is $80 shipped, so I can get it if needed).

Specs:
Pentium M 730 (1.6 Ghz w/ 533 Mhz bus)
15.4" Screen (Widescreen, oooh!)
512 MB Ram
128MB ATI Mobility Radeon X300 Graphics Card
60 GB HD 5400 RPM
8x DVD Burner w/ Dual Layer support

I also got 1 year of complete care accidental service as a just in case since my renters insuance does not cover accidents.

I'm hoping for the best with this laptop. It will ship around the 11th so I will get on the 14th or so and I'll let the world know if it is good as everyone claims.

-Trevor

Hey everyone,

I survived my trip up to Tettegouche and Cascade River State Park. I took off about 5:30 Friday morning and got back about 10:30 last night. The trip was absolutely great. The only thing I would have changed (if God) was to minimize the amount of mud on the trails, but it was still a lot of fun.

I got up to Tettegouche around 9:00 and hiked up for around four hours. It was fantastic because there was barely anyone else there. I met a couple of people who were serious hikers and they showed me a couple of things I would have missed completely (a couple of moose tracks). It was great for the casual hiker to get a little training in by them. It was just sad though to think they had the whole week to go hiking on the Lake Superior hiking trail and I had to make this a day hike.

I had originally planned to make it up to Nipisiquit Lake due to what I had originally supposed should have been a challenging but passable pass, however, I came to a very muddy trail which I ultimately decided was more than what I was prepared to tackle for the day so I turned around and decided I would hit up the Cascade River State park (I staple of my travels up there the last couple years and always a relaxing walk).

I made the hour drive to the Cascade River state park and got a couple of great pictures. I took a couple of new routes this time than I had in the last couple of years and was rewarded with a nice secluded area to have a little picnic and reading time. I also discovered that I can read maps if needed and my sense of direction isn't too bad when I put my mind to it. So after 3 1/2 hours at the Cascade River state park I thought it was a good time to start heading back home. It was really a shame that I couldn't stay longer, but as I would soon realize on my way back, what was fairly deserted on Friday would have been very crowded on Saturday. The traffic heading North on my way back was packed and I feel bad for the serious campers and hikers that will have to put up with all the amateurs (like me) who are vacationing up there for the weekend.

Overall if you have a chance to head up to either of the parks and want to do some hiking for a day or two, you really have to check these out. Tettegouche is definitely the more challenging of the two parks, but seems like it may get less tourists than Cascade River. Either way both of these are much more popular than the overly commercialized Gooseberry Falls (but Gooseberry is still fun nonetheless).

Be sure to check out a couple of the pictures I took. I'll get around the labeling them soon.

-Trevor

In case I don't get any posts in later today (Thursday), I will be heading up to Grand Marais on Friday for a little well deserved R&R. It'll be good to get away from family for a day after a long summer of living at home. Not that I don't greatly appreciate all the help they have been, but at 22, one isn't meant to spend extended periods with the parents, conflicts arise. Hopefully this will provide a little relaxation on all fronts and will come back on Saturday looking forward to the homestretch before I head out to Tucson.

-Trevor

I've been looking around for a laptop to tote around campus this fall. I'm always full of indecision and quite decide what I want. However, contrary to standard procedure, I'm looking heavily at the Dell Inspiron 6000. They seem to be having some summer blowout deals, offering the Inspiron at 35% off. This makes it quite a steal of a deal. Also a quick look showed the possibility of getting a $750 coupon, but that has recently expired (with rumors of it to resurface). However, the difference in the price of the laptop is minimal with or without the coupon.

I've also looked at an Acer laptop, but I'm hesitant due to the lack of knowing much about them and details specs are sketchy, at least I know what I would be getting with the dell.

The real question is if I need this much bang. I feel like I might be a variant of the soccer mom who buys that SUV when a midsize would suffice. Of course, since I haven't boughten it yet, my mind can change, but who wouldn't drool over the latest iteration of Centrino processors? A decent desktop replacement system with battery life of 5.5 hours cannot be denied for long.

Other options include the Gateway 460x, but this has been quieted due to the discounts on the Dell laptops, but we'll see if something comes up.

-Trevor

After a recent bash of Dr. Phil, I decided to uncover just who that dumbass really is. This was a definite entertaining read chock full of little tidbits of quotable information. If this is too much for your tiny ego to handle, you may want to try the babystep unbiased version at Biography.com

-Trevor

According to News.com.au which I do not believe has any affiliation to News.com, scientists have been able to bring back to life dead dogs. I guess this is supposed to be a good thing due to potential implications on human medical technology of the future, TODAY! or tomorrow. Anyway, hopefully all ethical implications will be viewed, but in reality, I probably will never look at this topic again unless there is a major medical breakthrough in my lifetime.

-Trevor

In the beginning God created the heaven and blogs. On the seventh day he created the wisdom that was Trevor. He created him such that he would know nearly the instant that some yahoo commented on his blog, that of Hemeac, even if the original post was that of one from the time of the ancients.

One day, God said to Trevor, "Why hath thou not allowed Charles to post on your blog?"

Trevor was initially perplexed that one such as Charles would want to post since he had a life.

God however commanded that this blog should be shared amongst friends who enjoy all good things in life and there was much rejoicing.

Anyways. Charlie asked whether or not he had permission to post on my website. Why not. I will soon (if not already by the chance you read this) give you permission to post if you so care. Check your "security clearance" as well.

So welcome aboard Charlie.

-Trevor

This is definitely a once in a lifetime opportunity, neswomen is selling 776 nes games on Ebay. As of this writing, the bidding is up to $5800 without the reserve being met. For those who aren't math majors (I was one, but still can't count) , that's only $7.47 per game. That would definitely be interesting to get, but I seem to have other things to spend money on. Oh well, maybe next time.

-Trevor

I heard about the Live 8 concerts recently on the radio about how they want to eradicate the 3rd world debt so that the impoversished people of Africa, Asia, and South America will instantly flourish into the industrial neighbors if only the greedy capitalists would stop forcing them down. You may already be able to see my slant on this item, but this stuff has happened before, and what has happened when we forgave the debt... ... ... nothing. Nothing at all. For those who don't remember, and I have no first hand experience, we tried this around twenty years ago, and nothing happened. The same problems will arise again and again because of one underlying problem, the governments of these countries are corrupt and don't care about the people, so therefore relieving debt that they don't pay doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

One would never know it from their website. They mention often that rich countries must pay NOW, if they don't pay, all these children will starve, and please, WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN. I particularly enjoyed their statement that we should stop forcing these countries to trade with the rich countries. I almost couldn't believe it when I read it. Isolationism is not the answer that we are seeking to help these countries. But I guess if we throw enough money on their doorstep then we don't have to feel guilty when we see who's picking it up.

Further, we need to stop subsidizing our farmers and subsidize "their" farmers, so that will allow the poor countries to feed themselves. That way our farmers and people can starve as well, but let's look at it a little closer. Europe and the United States have some of the most efficient farming operations in the world, however, if some of these subsidies no longer exist, there is less incentive to farm, since crazily enough, people need money to survive in this world. While it may then be true that there may be more farmers in the 3rd world countries, but they are ultimately less efficient than their 1st world brethren. While I am not saying this is the wrong solution, what I'm saying is that there is no conclusive evidence on their website to back up their claims, and give little indication on how I can further my knowledge of this very important issue.

The problem with activists is the same problem with religions, it requires large amounts of faith. Faith that change will be a good thing and that we should trust our minds to our superiors. We are but sheep following the shepard. I of course won't venture by saying that they are mostly anti-consumerists, but that is a rant for another day.

These are a bunch of people who want to ACT, but don't know the consequences of their actions. These are the scariest types of people in the world, because if there are enough of them, sometimes they are actually heard.

-Trevor

Stopped over at the 3rd Annual Georgefest in St. Cloud today and listed to Fred Savage and the Unbeatables. They're great everytime I see them. It was even better since they were playing a couple of new songs that I hadn't heard before. Rumors have it that they are recording again, so I'm excited.

The band before them (can't remember their name) played some alternative metal. They were surprisingly good, much better than some of the shit that's played on the radios, as I could actually understand the lyrics. Overall, the weather was great and it was a good time. If I'm real lucky, I'll be able to check them out again.

I'll be posting a couple of pictures I took of them in the gallery.

-Trevor

After noticing a strange fluctuation in the left window and my calendar not always properly showing up recently, I finally diagnosed that the problem is being caused by Firefox 1.0.4 being unable to properly render the website. Strangely enough, 1.0.3 and the new alpha version (and IE as well) have been able to render it correctly. After trying the new nightly build from Firefox, my website appears to be much more stable. While I don't necessarily suggest that you run and grab the newest version of firefox, it at least allows me the comfort of knowing that I won't necessarily have to redesign my website, but that might indicate some underlying design problems. I guess conforming to standards don't necessarily mean that a website will come up correctly, but oh well.

-Trevor

It has come to my attention recently that Sony and Macrovision have each come up with new protection schemes in addition to CSS to copy protect DVD's. After an increased rate of DVD's that are incompatible with some retail players, I have to wonder how the industry can justify these latest moves. I fail to see how a growing industry can force consumers to pick up a different player in order to view their favorite movies. The only other alternative is to force consumers to purchase computer software (currently illegal in the United States) to remove these protection schemes. It's outrageous, but in a society that is obsessed with protecting property rights, I guess that's the way it is going to have to be. It's pathetic, but I guess we can move to Canada, whoops, they just signed a DMCA of their own...

-Trevor

Artist: Foo Fighters
Album: In Your Honor
Genre: Post Grunge / Alternative Pop

Read more!

Check out this little article about the differences between work and prison. It's similar to all those little joke e-mails you get, but at least if you don't want to read this, you can not follow the link.

-Trevor

If you have noticed, I shrunk down the movie and music blog to one post and added a "more" link. Further, I added a "book blog". I've noticed a problem with the left table not always formatting correctly on Firefox and displaying very wide. If anyone who uses firefox (yes, you NaLeah), please comment and let me know if you are having a similar problem. It works in IE however, but I won't chalk it up as saying it is superior, but it means that I need to possibly find the culprit. Thanks.

-Trevor

I guess it is newsworthy to note that the Queen of England does not know how to use a remote control for Sony electronics. Of course I like her comment that they have too many arrows. It reminds me of at a clinic in St. Cloud that had two adjacent windows with the signs, "Window closed" and the arrows pointing to each other. I can see how that would be confusing for anyone, and possibly get trapped in an infinite loop searching for an open window. Anyways, I guess we will soon be a series based on what products that the Queen is capable of using.

-Trevor

To all those who care, and I believe I'm shouting into the wind... I now rank #1 in google for the keyword, Hemeac. Further, typing in my name gets me the rank of #3. Not too bad considering it took a while to get me there. Unfortunately, these terms are not often searched so I'm thinking I need to post new words into my blog in order to up the results of random keywords, such as Microsoft, Paris Hilton, and platypus.

- Trevor

FYI, I uploaded more pictures today. They consist of a variety of nature shots I have taken of Saint John's from the previous year. I noticed that I am curiously short of any pictures of Saint Ben's. I'll try to remedy this shortly before I leave for Arizona for those who care, and maybe nobody but me cares, so then I'll bore you with them anyways. I've also included shots from the Wobegon Trail since it's close enough.

-Trevor

As I was painting on Friday at work, I was listening to 101.7. Discovering to my dismay that besides playing Rush, 101 also tneds tends to repeat advertisements every hour or so. There was one ad that galled me to a great degree. It was an advertisement for Dish Network and began by stating that "some things just don't make any sense, such as the platypus and paying more for digital cable." That's it, that is the entire list of things that don't make sense! I do not understand how a list can contain only two references. To make matters worse, their digital cable package that is supposed to be cheaper than analog cable is in fact more expensive than the analog cable options currently provided around St. Cloud by Astound. Granted that digital cable has a larger channel base than regular cable, however, nobody at my parent's place would watch the channels. I guess somethings don't make any sense, such as the platypus and Dish Network.

If I was the marketing agent for Dish Network, and clearly I am not, I would begin by either finding one or two non sequitur items that do not make any sense, or possibly scrap the entire idea and focus only on the deal offered by Dish Network. The only thought that occured to me was that maybe Dish Network has incorporated the platypus into their corporate identity, but I could only find a picture of a butterfly on their website.

Dish Network really laid an egg on this advertising campaign.

-Trevor

Just a little FYI, here's the house I'm renting in Tucson and the surrounding block:

Further,

Here's the view from my house to McClelland in the lower left corner of the screen.

-Trevor

On Wednesday around 9:00, I came down with some flu symptoms. So after sticking around work for a couple more hours, I went home and slept till around 12:30 in the morning. To make an boring story short, I basically slept all of yesterday. At least I felt good enough today to make it to work today. I was definitely getting worried though since I had no appetite yesterday. I don't want to find myself blowing away in a blustery day, but I guess if I'm really worried about that, I should be eating more Hungry Man microwavable dinners.

-Trevor

I can't believe that the weather has been this nasty, but what can one expect when this will be last summer in Minnesota for awhile (or ever) and when I make it down to Tucson, it will be the monsoon season. I think it would have been drier had I gone to Seattle, but that's life. Sigh...

In other news, I got the new Audioslave, Static-X, and Foo Fighter Albums. My initial opinion is positive. 2005 appears to be one of those good years for music, unlike the relatively dead 2004. It's funny how streaky the industry can be.

Went to my sister's place on Sunday after work. Her husband was sick with the flu, so we thought it would be good to take the kids out to the nature preserve. We finally made it, no thanks to my sister's wonderful sense of direction. Unfortunately, the mosquitoes were patrolling the area in force. We made it for about five minutes before having to turn around and head to another park in town that had the sweet smell of puke. We then made it to a Dairy Queen for some hot eats and cold treats and I got the standard cookie dough blizzard(tm). Anyways, had a good time. I've posted a couple of new pictures that you may want to check out.

-Trevor

Here are a couple of quick business items:

If you want a full size photo (2272 x 1704) that is in my gallery, e-mail me and I make it available, but @ 2 MB/photo, I thought it would be safer for my bandwidth (not that I have that much traffic) to keep that @ 1024 x 768.

Further, I got my first legitimate trackback from Travel Blog. I was so sick of all the trackback spam that I was highly considering disabling trackback, but this will give it a new lease on life. Thanks. If you happen to read this, comment and let me know how you found the site because I am really to lazy to check the access logs.

Finally, I included Greg's name in the choir singer photo in my gallery. Clearly being the best man in a guy's wedding doesn't guarantee that he'll recognize him.

-Trevor

I posted my pictures for Arizona on my gallery, be sure to check them out. As for the trip, I would have to give it a mixed review. While I found a place that was in my budget, unfortunately Brian and I didn't get a place together. Thinking we had done sufficient planning, neither checked on Parking until Monday which we found wasn't available. This of course cut out options for both of us. To make matters worse, I've been limited since I will often be staying on campus after the busses shut down for the night and so it could be difficult and possibly unsafe to bike too far in Tucson. Ultimately Brian chose a 1 bedroom apartment at Briarwood (on the corner of Mountain and Ft. Lowell) due to the convienience of the Cat-tran that he can take advantage of, and I rented a house five blocks North of campus. Brian's living around two miles North of me, so it will be easy to go and visit each other. It was frustrating since had we known about the parking we could have spent more time looking at available options.

On the positive side, Brian and I got a chance to do a little sightseeing and we went with his friend Tom to a AAA game against the Colorado Springs Something or Other. We got great seats, just above the Visitor's dugout. We found out that Brian Buchanan (Ex-Twins) plays for the Colorado Springs team and I believe he knew who we were by the end of the game (Heckling was kept to a minimum). It was loads of fun.

I'll be sending an e-mail out on my new address, but I'll keeping my old cell number, but changing the plan. Hopefully everyone's summer is going well. Good night.

-Trevor

Thank God I got to use the internet. We are staying at a Best Western just south of Oro Valley (a suburb of Tucson) near the foothills. Well before I get started in the middle, it should be good to begin at the beginning, or start at the beginning...

On Wednesday afternoon my Dad and I left for Brians since our flight left at 6 am on Thursday. So just outside of Clearwater, a rock hit my windshield and left a chip on the drivers side. Hopefully it won't spider over the weekend and I should be able to get it fixed, otherwise that can be $300 that I can't afford.

When my Dad and I got down to Brian's, we had a good dinner and showered quick and went to bed. We left around 4:15 and got to the airport and had no delays. We had a layover at Chicago and my Dad and I had a "nice" and talkative guy who fixed recycling machines at the distribution centers at Targets around the U.S. Our flight down to Tucson was nice and quick with no delays or "nice" guys.

We spent Thursday looking at four different apartments. We then got to our "hotel", the Howard Johnson. I do not believe we could have found a worse place that was rated "3 stars" on Travelocity. I won't go into details, but I never expected to find a bullet hole in a window where I stayed at. Let's just say that we are no longer staying there and got a refund from Travelocity and the Best Western that we are staying in now is actually cheaper (go figure). I took some pics of the room which I can post later when back in Minnesota.

Today we looked at a couple of apartments and looked at where there were house rentals which we will try to look at tomorrow. Some are good and others are not so good, but we haven't found a clear winner yet. I need to get to bed since I'm exhausted and need to get up early tomorrow.

Jenny, I hope to hear all about your trip to Asia and good luck with all the wedding stuff as that is coming up quick. Everyone else, hope you are enjoying the weather in Minnesota because the weather in Arizona is absolutely beautiful.

-Trevor

Sometimes people get lucky, and for me it was definitely good that the sun finally decided to come out this weekend. I got in a good bike ride on the Lake Wobegon trail this afternoon and made it about halfway between Avon and Albany for a roundtrip of about 22 miles in 2:05. So just under 11 mph, which for me is a good clip on a mountain bike. I hit some sprinkles just outside of Avon on my way back which was a good incentive to speed up the pace, but luckily the clouds moved to the Southeast. Well I should go cut the dandelions outside before it gets too late. I took a couple of pictures which I'll post to the gallery tonight, if all goes as planned.

-Trevor

Sad but true, I sold the monkmobile (aka 1991 Chevrolet Corsica) to my neighbors for a cool $200. He stopped over one day and asked if it was for sale since I had it parked in the back and noticed I was driving a new car. I had been planning on auctioning it off, but I couldn't turn down an offer. I had some good memories, and of course some bad memories with the car. I wish only the best for it and the future journeys into the unknown be good ones.

-Trevor

As all of you should know by now, Brian and I are headed out to AZ on Thursday morning around 6 or so and checking out apartments. Because I finally have a chance to update my website, I'm including a plethora of information about the apartments.

I haven't had a chance to relate my daily "stories" with everyone so now since I don't see anybody, it will be easy for me not to have to repeat myself over and over. So to begin, Brian and I are talking over the phone about which hotel we should stay at. We had found a good deal, but of course in the time we began talking, the prices of the flight and hotel package went up a combined $80. However, for the four of us (2 of our parents), the combined total for flight and hotel came around $1300. Not too bad considering.

On Thursday, we are planning on checking out three apartments, Briarwood, Riverpoint, and Sunrise Ridge Apartments. Friday, we are looking at Saddle Ridge, Stonybrook, and Ashton Meadows. On Saturday, we have Sycamore Creek, Rio Cancion, and Cimarron Place. My particular favorites are Saddle Ridge, Rio Cancion, and Cimarron Place. The last two were recommendations from Brian's friend who just graduated from UofA, so I will definitely take his recommendation to heart. Rather than harass you with the details, I'll let everyone know next week what apartment we got.

It was my Grandparent's 60th anniversary today. They had a dinner over at this place called PJ's over in Avon. The dinner was about $15-$20 a plate, so while I love my grandparents, I can show it in other ways than buying overpriced food. Well, I am especially glad I didn't make it from the reports I got from my parents on the quality of the food. They had even messed up my dad's order. It's one of those things.

By the way, if you have any good pictures of graduation or what-not that you would like to post on the gallery, sign up for an account and I can get you hooked up with the proper instructions. My only request is that most of the pictures either involve you or me. I would prefer not having pictures that I have no idea of who the subject is.

-Trevor

As you can see on the bar to the left, I have my gallery up. It's not perfect, but I really don't have time to setup properly, so this will do. Check it out for some good and bad pictures. I'm going to try to post other pictures of my trips out to NC and AZ last year, but my target audience may not be overly interested in them.

-Trevor

Working sucks. What's worse when you top off looking for a new place. That leaves idle time at a precious low, which includes posting to this website. I've promised some photos, so I'm going to get to that right NOW...

-Trevor

I got my grades in the mail today and confirms that yes, I did pass all of my classes and therefore am now officially a graduate of Saint John's University - Minnesota, not the New York variety (Yes U of Arizona, I cannot show you a degree from SJU - NY). I've been keeping myself busy (working too much) so I haven't taken any pictures of my car, or much of anything for that matter. Hopefully that will change once I know the details of my loan package, but I feel it is better to play it safe. Until Next Time...

-Trevor

I graduated for those who don't know (and I don't know who wouldn't...) on Sunday. I can safetly say it felt pretty good, and it flew also which also can't hurt.

So for the next 11 weeks, I'll be working in the Abbey doing a little housekeeping, but I can't complain too much. I'll try to get some pictures up.

I'll be flying down to Tucson in the beginning of June to check out some apartments and will be most likely moving July 23rd.

Congratulations to all those who read this and also graduated this past weekend, you know who you are.

-Trevor

I know it happened last week, but Pinestock was last Saturday. Opening was the forever great Fred Savage and the Unbeatables. It was a great show, but kind of sad when I knew it was the last time I would see them play. Those other bands (Zambonis, Big Wu, and Guster) were alright too I guess, but I could have lived without them. In other news, QOTSA cancelled their show until this fall which is unfortunate considering I will be 2000 miles south and of cours they play down in Tucson on May 28th when I'll still be in Minnesota (Oh the Humanity).

I'm done with classes now which I guess is a good thing, and with just one final (Real Analysis) on Thursday I can see that the end is near.

Of course I have some good news. I got a newer car, the one and only, 1999 Chevrolet tan Lumina 4-door coupe with red pin-stripes (photo coming soon). My Corsica was dying, that squeal wasn't getting any quieter, so it will soon be disposed of. It was a good car, serving me faithfully for six years and nearly being sideswiped by Kara Schwartz of Maple Lake, may you rest in peace.

I'll try to keep this site updated with finals festivities.

-Trevor

This month has been pretty crazy so I haven't really had the time to post a whole lot. Well anyways, I went golfing for the first time this year over at Angushire's. That wasn't too bad, but it did take me a little bit to make consistent contact with the ball (I was never very good). While I won't report the score in the public, I was happy just getting out on a great day. Tomorrow is Pinestock and while I can safely say that I'm not really a fan of the bands (except for Fred Savage) it will be a good concert. I'll try to keep you posted on how the concert went.

-Trevor

Sorry to all my avid fans about the long departure from posting. It appears that I've been engrossed in the great weather and baseball and haven't been posting as frequently as usual. I don't have much useful to say at the moment, but if you are a fan of baseball you should check out Clem's Baseball. They have a great repository of information on the current and old baseball stadiums. I'll try to get more stuff posted soon.

-Trevor

I've had this site up for a while now and I'm pretty happy with how everything is running. I have a few updates that'll be happening shortly hopefully. The first is that I'm taking down the forums for now. It is pretty clear that they are dead and no use having it up if no one uses it. Maybe if my site becomes popular, then maybe. The second is that I should be getting a poll up sooner than later. I've mentioned this a couple of times, but keep on putting it off. Finally, I am still working a little bit here and there on a gallery. That is really a big goal for me as one of the reasons of having this site up is to give others info on what I'm up to, especially when I run off to Arizona in late July. Having visual evidence of what I'm up to is important to me, so it clearly should be part of the website. However, I've been having trouble integrating a gallery to the standards that I want, so I'm not putting up a substandard element on my website for now.

In long term, I'm going to look at the feasibility of converting from b2evolution to wordpress as my blogging tool. I've found that the community for b2evolution is not as actively involved in writing plugins for the software as it is for wordpress and I've always enjoyed having at least the possibility to play around with different options, especially when my ability to program in php is less than good.

Hopefully everyone had a good April Fool's Day. The weather out in Minnesota is great now. I've been biking a lot now so I'm finally getting in shape again with the warm weather. Don't forget to watch the Twins and Mariners duke it out on Monday (who cares about the Boston vs NY game, it's overrated).

-Trevor

A site has sprung up recently promoting a way in order to block Fox News from being shown on your television.

This method is theoretically simple, it takes the frequency that Fox News is broadcast from and uses a filter to block that frequency from reaching your television using a piece of hardware used between the outside cable world and your house. In reality, as Gizmodo points out, not only do different cable companies have Fox News on different frequencies, up to 8 channels are often broadcast on a 6 MHz band, and these filters are not advanced enough to block specific channels on a cable system.

Besides the point that I completely disagree with the logic of why they wish to block Fox News, I find there is a much simpler solution, and that is to use the power of television to block that station from appearing. However, this requires a lot of thought and the people buying these devices would rather not think at all.

-Trevor

Texas is claiming that Vonage has not been clearly informing customers that they do not have 911 access when they sign up, but can with an additional registration (a free service). This has come up when a girl in Houston was unable to make a 911 phone call after her parents were shot in their homes. Afterwards, the parents claimed that they were not informed that this service was not automatically available. While I feel sorry for the family, this is clearly a case where someone did not do enough research into a product they were buying. Looking at the Vonage web site, it takes less than 30 seconds after you enter the main page to find information on the 911 service and how it does not come configured, including the limitations of voip 911 service.

This is just a case of stupid consumers and I fail to see why a company has to hold the hands of every customer who wishes to use their services. Hopefully this is a lesson to read the user guides and other information included with these services. If it takes a 100 pages to point out critical and useful information, clearly it is information that needs to be acknowledged.

-Trevor

Update: I guess I must be an uninformed Jackass as my sister has let me know that this must be a recent feature to Vonage who did not have this available when she first signed up with them a few months ago.

Everybody and their mom have already heard this rumor (I guess it's actually news) by now, but it's been confirmed that Halo 2 is releasing an expansion pack, but of course it is only multiplayer content. Since I haven't really gotten into the multiplayer side of the game (where's the time when I'm posting on this site too much) it really doesn't do me much good. Oh well, since I'm pretty sure I won't be able to afford the next xbox, who knows when I will be able to play the next chapter of what is shaping up to be a great franchise.

-Trevor

Jay Leno always loves stupid criminals, and for a matter of fact, who doesn't? So when I came across this guy's blog post on catching an identity thief, especially those that ripped off his identity, it was a pretty cool read. Also check on his other posts to check up on the follow up stuff. I am definitely glad that I have never been a victim. I have one thought that sort of bothers me. He mentioned that they were using different needles and on of their purchases came from a Vetmart. I can sort of imagine what might come from there and it probably isn't anything good.

-Trevor

Hope everyone had a Happy Easter.

I picked up my sister today and I while not surprised, am very disappointed in people's driving. In a day that we are supposed to be celebrating, tensions surely run high while driving. Maybe they should listen to Jesus when he says, "Love thy Neighbor." For example, when stopped at a stoplight, a guy was taking a right and at the same time an old woman was trying to take a left. Well, the guy taking the right was clearly going too slow for this old woman who decided she should inform him by blaring her horn for a good second. I really don't see what she was gaining by blaring her horn as she was going to easily make it through the interesection. Sigh. These people make me wonder somedays.

In other lighter news, I took some good pictures today. My sisters and I were taking my niece and nephew out to the park to play since it was a beautiful day. After getting back in the car, we decided to go drive through the new housing additions to check out some of the colorful housing now available IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD. We saw this pretty nice house (my estimate about 200k - 250k). However, they had a really tacky deer ornaments on the corner. So clearly we had to take a picture. Of course, the owner of the home was next door talking and he did not seem all that pleased that I was taking pictures of his stuff. Sorry, but I didn't get any shots of him. However, I guess I felt sort of bad, especially when my niece said that we were being mean and should stop laughing.

My dad was driving me back to St. John's tonight since my car is acting up and it was too late to bike back and I saw my first glimpse of the Box on Wheels (aka Scion). Of course this had some really pimped out hub caps to distract from the fact that you are driving a box. Sorry for the bad photo, but I thought it would look funny to go outside and start taking pictures of a car especially after the incidence this afternoon.

-Trevor

Genre: Coming of Age / Comedy / Drama
Starring: Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, & Steve Buscemi
Released: 2000

Read more!

For those of you who have Firefox, the newest version was released earlier this week. This is a security update that fixes some vulnerabilities so you may want to pick it up sooner than later. If the automatic update on the program hasn't already alerted you, go to Firefox and download the newest version. It is not necessary to uninstall the earlier versions.

-Trevor

I've recently received some poetic spam comments in this blog that I thought you would find very interesting. While I deleted the original comments as they contained links to places I didn't want to have links to, I find that the comments should be harmless:
----------------------------------------
Posted by phentermine:

If some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer buy Viagra online.

Posted by Online Poker:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. by poker chips
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I don't know, but I guess maybe they are trying to fool people in overlooking these as spam, but I don't know if I would want to be turned into a clock merely so I knew what was true and right.

-Trevor

I was having a conversation about Christianity and the subject of a a guy I know from High School came up who was reborn a Christian. As I have stated to my friends, they really creep me out. Fundamentalists in general scare me through their absolute belief that they are right. While I won't say I believe in relativism in saying, how do we know anything is real, but I sincerely find it hard to have absolute faith in an supernatural being such as God.

I do believe in God, but I do not have a strong sense of what God wants/expects from me. So of course I enjoy wasting my time wondering about these things, and I came across a Born Again Christian website that preaches that Jesus claims that we all must be reborn and that if it wasn't for him, we deserve to die. I really have a hard time believing in that type of brainwashing. To me, it seems almost like God is blackmailing us to behave or he'll send us to an eternity in hell. If blackmail is illegal in this mortal state, why is justified in higher planes of being? While God is good since he is free from choosing evil, it certainly doesn't hurt to being an omnipotent being where you know the eternal consequences of your actions. If I had this kind of foresight, I certainly wouldn't fuck so much stuff up, but I cannot interpret God's word in telling us that we need to worship him above all. I see the Bible as much as a tool of dead men to control other society and I do not see much of what I believe God intended.

Not being able to stay too serious for this long, I must now point you to some glaring contradictions in this website. First, I thought I would check out the Sinner's Prayer. This prayer informed me that any religion or person should not be completely trusted to give you the word of God, but only God himself can do this. The contradiction occurs in the fact that this website is basically an advertisement for religious paraphenilia, such as many books by Smith Wigglesworth. I don't know about you, but I would be hesitant to believe anyone with a name like that, but I guess this prejudice will land me in hell.

I do have a goal that I would like to see in my life. I think it would be very interesting to see someone speak in tongues. I am hesitant to believe that this really occurs, so if I get the chance, it would be very interesting indeed. I think I should join one of those new age flavor of the month churches when I move to my new home to see if the message these chuchers spew allows us puny humans to have contact with the one above. I hope this doesn't condemn me to hell, but if God was truly forgiving, I think that this is an experiment that is in good fun, err, right?

-Trevor

I was browsing through an old book I had when I found this interesting picture. The woman looked very excited, but there wasn't a caption that I could read that would indicate what she was doing. However I noticed a bottle near her and I thought I would do a little investigative journalism. Using standard techniques, I was not able to distinguish what was on the label, however, I had at my disposal some powerful image manipulation tools. So I let them run their course and I came up with a blurred but readable image. I see that it is an old bottle of Goya Coconut Soda. Well, I wondered if they were still around, and sure enough Goya Foods is still alive and kicking...

Read more!

Here's a link where a guy was seeing how far he could go before a cashier finally looked at his signature. This is absolutely hilarious.

-Trevor

I generally don't think posting on hot political topics, but I find that I couldn't resist talking about this.

A Florida woman that has been brain-damaged and in a coma for a decade is finally taken off life support. This is great news for her husband who has had to see his wife in a state that she would never get out of. When the quality of her life is zero, I can't believe that they forced her to live so long, but it is unfortunate that they just don't kill her with an overdose of morphine.

These are one of those bittersweet cases. It is sad to see someone in that condition, but it is good to see that they will finally be allowed to rest in peace. Further, it gives me hope that if this would ever happen to me, that my body would not be stuck on life support for everyone to pity over when it would be much better to let me die and hopefully remember who I was before whatever tragedy struck.

-Trevor

For all those uber Twins fans, I found what may be a little more comprehensive than my Baseball Update. This guy has a blog that he updates with Twins news, and from what I've read so far, appears to be a good site.

-Trevor

I recently heard from the University of Minnesota, and the news was, shall we say, not so good. That makes me a blazing 1 for 5 for grad schools so far. Well, that is not good, but I guess it could be worse. I don't think I would have necessarily accepted at Minnesota anyways, but it would have been good to be accepted, at least I could have feigned a choice. I still have to hear back from Chapel Hill, they certainly are waiting till the last minute (March 31st) to contact about the status of my graduate life. I haven't thought seriously what I would do if I was accepted there, as I've been pretty absorbed in looking closer at Arizona. Looking at my current track record, I won't be holding my breath that I'll be accepted either.

-Trevor

I got a free ticket to As You Like It yesterday evening down at the Guthrie, so deciding to shave and donning some slacks and a dress shirt made my way down. It was a great play, this also being the second time seeing it at the Guthrie. This time, it was set in the style of the 60's which definitely fit the "love in the air" spirit of the show. I was glad to see this as also it may be one of the last times I make it to the Guthrie, and it is always a good show.

On a side note, the roads were pretty slick between Monticello and St. Cloud last night, clearly indicative of freezing rain, forcing me to drive about 30 on the freeway, not a whole lot of fun as it took me nearly 2 hours to get back from Minneapolis. That's Minnesota.

-Trevor

Mariners Update:

"Every Day" Eddie isn't quite as reliable in the sense that he has been injured ever since leaving the Twins for the Mariners in 2004. While his mere presence on the mound would raise the blood pressure of everyone watching the game, Eddie could still save games. He has recently pulled his hammie in workouts and could be out for 2-3 weeks. Hopefully he'll be back at 100% by April, as the Mariners need their entire pitching staff to be at the top of their game.

Twins Update:

Good signs, no significant injuries to report. While not being able to watch the spring training games, it is hard to know exactly how everyone is looking, but I have high hopes that we should again have a solid team to watch. If I move to AZ, I should be able to pick up MLB.TV and be able to watch all of the Twins and Mariners games, but so sadly miss the Diamondbacks.

In other news, there is a AAA team in Tucson that is affiliated with the Diamondbacks. That is sort of disappointing as I really have no desire to ever go see the Diamondbacks play, but if the price is right, I should make it to a few Sidewinders games. For the Diamondbacks, there real star standout is injury prone Troy Glaus. I wouldn't be surprised to watch them lose 100 games this season.

-Trevor

Battle of Bands was on Friday night. For those who aren't familiar with it, it is a showcase of the local campus bands duking it out for a spot to open for Pinestock.

Brian and I stopped over there are 7:45, figuring that they would open the doors soon. No, why would the JEC ever be on time, opening the doors 20 minutes late at 8:20. Without going into detail on each of the bands, it was a really good time. Of course, it was even better when I found out that Fred Savage won.

A former roommate of mine whom shall remain nameless, but I can say no longer speaks to me when sober, offered to me his opinion that the only reason I wanted them to win was that I knew the band members. Well, that may be true, but I can't imagine enjoying a band where the lead singer's voice sounding like he had yet to hit puberty. That's my rant for Friday. If you want to hear it, I have a whole new rant about last night that may be better left unsaid in this family oriented website of mine.

As for the bands going to pinestock, I believe there were three bands besides Fred Savage, however, I heard only two: Guster and the Zambonis. I will let you know soon about my opinions on Guster. I checked out the Zambonis, and well, it does not look good. They sing about, hockey. I would classify it as a They Might Be Giants crossed with a hockey fan crossed with a guy who can't sing. They'll suck, but that's life. You have to take the good with the bad.

-Trevor

Today is the first day of the rest of your life... Well, thanks Captain Obvious. I got some great news on Tuesday. After offically declaring to the universe on Monday that I had been forsaken and that I would not be accepted into a graduate school, the universe showed me that I have to recheck my assumptions by demonstrating that it is possible for Trevor Kollmann to finally be accepted to a graduate school. I know most of you know what it is, but for those who don't (insert drum roll here)...

I've been accepted to the University of Arizona in the nice and toasty Tucson, Arizona. I can almost start considering myself as a Wildcat, hear my roar, meow.

Being serious now, I am not 100% sure of how I feel about this. While I am very happy, there is still that lingering fear of making that jump halfway across the country, which effectively cuts me off from many of the support that friends and family have provided for 22 years.

I do not feel that this is any way a mistake, as I know that if I was to never leave, I would regret this decision. I am really going to miss Minnesota and all the quirks that define it, but what better way to put in perspective than to see what other states do/don't have.

I just want to thank everyone for being so supportive of me, it really makes me feel good.

In order to help minimize the number of repetitive questions, I'll create a little FAQ:

Am I happy about this? Yes.

Do some schools need to get back to you yet? Chapel Hill and Minnesota.

If accepted, will you go to one of those schools? Doubtful.

Is Economics something you know you want to pursue? No I don't know for certain. That's why I'll have a wait and see approach next year at Arizona.

Do you accept credit cards? Sorry, but I only accept cash and checks, but if you happen to have a 2004 Ford Mustang convertible lying around, I will gladly accept it as a donation.

Where will you live? This is still up in the air, but I'm evaluating many alternative options that comply with a predetermined number of factors...ahem... sorry, I have no idea, but am browsing some housing that is posted online.

Well, you know where I am now so you now have no excuse not to see me before I leave.

-Trevor

I was watching TV yesterday while doing some homework and I ran across some commercials that bugged me. The first was an Ocean Spray commercial promoting Cranberry Juice. These people were so happy and they were going to drink some good refreshing Cranberry Juice. In order to get the point across, they close in on the glass that is filled with ice. While watching them pour we can see cranberry juice hit the ice so hard it flies back out of the cup and off camera. I'm thinking, is this a two year old who's pouring this glass? They pan out and we see this 30 something woman (she was one pouring the glass) drinking this glass, but amazingly enough, NO MESS! I could only shake my head.

What's worse, as now my cynic engine was running, I was watching a Red Lobster commercial where they were promoting a shrimp basket. A group of people are sitting at a table enjoying their shrimp and we get a close-up of a guy dipping his shrimp. He puts it in there so hard the cocktail sauce is splattered all over. It is even slowed down so we can see the dramatic significance of the great shrimp at a value we can all afford (yes even those starving college kids).

I really wonder what the hell has happened that no one cares about spilling food anymore. Well I guess food companies make more money if you waste an entire bottle of juice or condiment on a single serving of food. This is not the most deceptive commercial last night.

The worst falls to a Clorox Bleach advertisement which promoted whiter clothes. They were showing us how white the bleach could get, but they washed out the color in the commercial so bad, it looked like they accidently had the film go through a wash cycle with Clorox Bleach. This runs along the lines of false advertisement to me. Oh well, I guess I could have been corrupted by seeing breasts exposed on television.

-Trevor

Category: Food / Yogurt
Nutrition Facts: Calories - 230, Fat - 3g, Cholesterol - 15mg, Carbs - 41g
Miscellaneous: Contains Active Yogurt Cultures with Lactobacillus Acidophilus/Bifidobacterium

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Carly is back in the news again. This time she is a candidate for the president of the World Bank. I did not think that she would emerge this quickly in the public arena, but with someone with misguided ambitions such as Carly, it is not too surprising. Of course for her, this could be a good jump into the political arena. She certainly won't have to worry about money for awhile considering her severance package was around $40 million.

-Trevor

Brian found this while checking out some news on the recent golf tournament (I don't know what it was). Either way, this recent picture of Phil Mickelson was a classic.

-Trevor

I've recently diagnosed myself with baseball fever. Symptoms include an intense desire for anything baseball. So regardless of whether anyone cares, I'll be posting info on my two favorite teams, the Twins and the Mariners. What's great about this is that they begin the season with a three game series at Seattle. It's almost too much excitement.

Mariners Update: Recently Jorge Campillo. He was playing in the baseball leagues down in Mexico. He's a good addition considering that a good prospect, Travis Blackley is likely out for the season. I doubt he'll make the 25 man roster, but I wouldn't be surprised if he gets called up if Ryan Franklin or Gil Meche are having a tough season.

Twins Update: Jason Kubel is still recovering from a knee injury suffered in the Fall Leagues in October. His season is already done before it began, but it looks like he'll be ready for 2006 to compete in already deep list of outfielders. Also, Minnesota lost their spring training opener to Boston. I'm not too concerned since it's only spring training, but it is always good to win.

-Trevor

Genre: Biography / Drama
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio & Cate Blanchett
Released: 2004

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I got my first comment spam today. I receive e-mails for all the comments that are posted on my website. I was suspicious when I see "Yellow Monkey" posting on my site. I was quite confused when in the comment on my Minnesota Stereotypes post, he said Thank You and then had a link to Chinese Apes. I'm not sure what Chinese Apes is, and I'm afraid to find out. I added him to the antispam list.

In other news, I got Major League Baseball 2k5 for the XBOX (formerly ESPN Baseball and World Series Baseball). Initial feelings are not good. This is a complete revamp of the game and has therefore made it more difficult to make contact with the ball. This may just need some getting used to. I'll keep you posted.

-Trevor

Saurabh Singh from India claimed he won NASA's International Scientist Discovery examination at Oxford. NASA claims however that this test does not exist.

This is a rather humorous story in which this 17 year old was able to hoax the Indian government out of more than $11,000 by claiming he won a competition sponsored by NASA at Oxford University. Too bad for him that he's now being investigated by the Indian police.

I am somewhat surprised that he was able to get away with as much as he did. His official document had typos and and he said he flew to London via Indian Airlines which doesn't fly to London. Further, he mentioned to a newspaper that he stayed in Buckingham Palace. I guess it got him his 15 minutes of international fame.

-Trevor

According to IGN, Halo 3 will be released the same day that the playstation 3 launches. So that means that we should be seeing Halo 3 next year. However, as it currently stands, I won't see myself buying the new xbox when it comes out, but I guess I'll have to see the price of the xboxes and Halo 3 when it's released sometime next year.

-Trevor

This year's Academy Awards were fraught with poor directing descisions. Many have argued that Louis Horvitz is one of the best directors of the Oscars, however, this year he must have lost his touch, having shots that should never have made it on national television. Maybe he lost his touch after directing A Clay Aiken Christmas.

All I can say is that the wedding videos I tape at weddings at Saint John's have more cohesion that the questionable camera angles at the 77th Annual Academy Awards. Maybe they will get Bill Foster to direct the 78th.

In other news, it was interesting to see an obviously drunk Dustin Hoffman (or maybe he was having a stroke) present the nominations for best picture. Also on the list for most obviously drinking goes to a personal favorite, Al Pacino. However, thinking about the children, they should lay off the booze until the post parties.

-Trevor

David Swanson from the Rolling Stone magazine posted a nice little article comparing the value of the violations of the FCC compared to other government regulatory bodies. According to the article, for the same price as it takes to tell a sex joke for Howard Stern on the air, he could dump toxic waste in New York's drinking water and still place an employee at risk of injury or death. This is pretty sad, but I guess I would rather die from exposure to radiation that to see Janet Jackson's breast.

-Trevor

Hugo Chavez has recently stated that his ideology is a form of socialism, he just has yet to figure out how to get socialism to work in the 21st century. Certainly, he's a man with a plan, so I have no worries that Venezuela will prosper and no doubt convert the world to the ideals of self-sacrafice.

At least he was aware enough to mention that the route that the former Soviet Union took may not be the ideal way to travel. He still has a long way to travel in order to convince everyone that people are better off living their lives for the benefit of others, I know I'm personally convinced that's true, GO CHAVEZ!. Capitalism, it has never helped anyone. I hope it dies.

In other news, 80% of Venezuela is currently in poverty with no signs of letting up, a clear sign that Chavez's socialist policies since coming into power in 1998 are helping the people.

-Trevor

I look at this article and I wonder what is the problem with Michael Gorman. He clearly has an axe to grind against blogs. What I don't necessarily understand is that he begins his tirade against blogs by starting about how great (or lack thereof) a search engine Google is. Anyone, but possibly Mr. Gorman knows that the information provided by Google does not pass academic standards. For this, one would need access to professional search databases, usually accessing journal content. However, the difference between these search engines and Google is money, and a lot of it. I sure am glad St. John's has provided access to as many journals and academic research engines for I could not come close to being able to afford the journals I have used in my research.

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The New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is raving about a new candy that is in the shape of road kill. Clearly they must be doing their job at preventing other cruelties such as using animals in labs or circuses that they have to worry about eating squshed animals. I wonder what the difference between that and regular animal candies are. I remember when I used to have animal crackers when I was a kid and I had them fight until they broke pieces off of each other. That of course taught me to hate all things alive and to swerve sometimes even over the median on the freeway if I even see so much as a squirrel. However since the NJSPCA has enlightened me, I have realized that this is wrong and I will live peacfully with my animal brothers...

-Trevor

edit: I forgot to be politically correct, I will live peacefully with my animal brothers and sisters.

Are you sick and tired of those women who actually want something out of you? Well now's your chance to find the perfect woman without having to worry about a police sting operation. Vivian will be coming soon to your 3G phone in order to keep you company during those long weekends when you are just too afraid to talk to that special someone of the opposite sex.

Unfortunately for all those who are just that desperate, according to the FAQ (and the 1st question), Vivian will not perform sexual acts, either real or virtual for you. Yeah, that does mean that if you are looking for some real action, you'll still have to have your parents drive you down to the red light district.

This is for those who love to carry bananas on the road or just can't afford an electric dildo. What won't people market for a few bucks. Oh well. On a lighter note, this brings back some good memories of one of my neighbors back in my middle school days. Most of you won't care so I won't relate the story here, but I know a couple of you know what I'm talking about.

-Trevor

I found this while doing my usual run through my electronic sites (no this particular site is not one of them). I found it hard to believe that someone would have thought of this. Despite the possibility that this is an absolute joke, I wouldn't be overly surprised that someone would enjoy this type of feedback. Are you curious what I'm talking about? Click "More" to see the pic if you dare, or check out the link on the title. I don't think my words will do this X-box modification any justice.

-Trevor

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Checking up on the stats is something that can at least keep me occupied for a bit. So far I have 131 unique visitors. This is up from 20 unique visitors last month. However, I noticed that for some reason Firefox is now registering as Netscape on my server as of right now, 56.9% of hits are registered as Netscape with Internet Explorer with 30.1% and Mozilla as 10.4%. Since I know that my recent changes to the layout of the site has contributed more than 10% of my hits and my knowledge that Netscape is not that popular, there appears to be soem misread by the server. BTW, Windows is accounted for 97.3% of hits, but I've had hits from Linux, Macs, AmigaOS, FreeBSD, and BeOS.

-Trevor

How pathetic is this. I'm riding on the bus this afternoon over to St. Ben's listening to some music and I notice a couple of people looking over at me. Whatever. So as I'm walking to class, I notice Jenny stops me and says she tried calling me on my cellphone, and I look at it and sure as hell she did. What's worse, is that I had left my ring on, and at the loud setting. Clearly I couldn't hear the ring with the music and bus noise, but clearly the guys next to me could. I sure as hell would complain about someone doing that, so I have to stay consistent here. This just goes to show that I need to be more careful with all of my settings on my phone/mp3 player.

-Trevor

So I'm watching a little TV today hoping to see some early reports of the national past time only to find a press conference held by none other than Barry Bonds on guess what, steroids. He had a lot of premeditated answers that began sounding very similar, so I said "fuck it", and decided to see what else was on the boob tube. I happened across MTV2 and decided to check it out. They had a show called Discover and Download which was playing some live music. It nicely informed me on the bottom of the screen that I could go to mtv2.com and check out the music that was playing. However, as I was watching the crowd, they were moving like hindu cows staring blankly at the band playing. While watching, I noticed a really annoying feature of the show. A flashing "DOWNLOAD" kept on appearing in the middle of the screen every 30 seconds. Could you get any more obtrusive?

However, their advertising is effective so I popped on over to the website to check it out. What I found was disturbing. After downloading some tracks I found a new trend in "pop" music today. I guess that music execs have decided that music can't get any louder than it was during my high school days, so instead, they are depressing a whole new age of teenagers by adding lyrics to elevator music and adding a drum beat. What's worse, is that they use a DRM wma file on some of the downloads, one of which refused to open in either Winamp or Windows Media Player and another crashed Winamp, a first for me.

I'll sum up the music for you, if you enjoy listening to elevator music or enjoy the movie Magnolia, you will enjoy the new music being broadcast to our teenagers of today.

Going back to the show, the crowd was the most humorous aspect of it. I don't think that the crowd looked very excited to be there, and I noticed a token black guy in the middle of the crowd who I knew didn't want to be there. Further the crowd was scary looking as only one male had any semblance of facial hair which by the time you get to college is much more commonplace. I'll go back to listening to some Smashing Pumpkins, thank you very much.

-Trevor

Artist: Ill Ni?o
Album: Confession
Genre: Alternative Metal

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I always get a kick out of Leno's headlines and luckily he has them posted online for viewing in case you miss it on Monday nights.

-Trevor

According to an interview by Gameindustry.biz, EA is working on developing the Godfather based off of the movies by Francis Ford Coppola which was based off of the book by the late Mario Puzo. I look at this project and I have my doubts. First, it is being developed by EA which I vowed to boycott due to their anticompetitive practices. Looking past it, I find that this game may be nothing more than a Grand Theft Auto clone based in the early 50's. I wouldn't find this overly surprising due to the publisher of GTA, none other than their biggest rival, Take Two Interactive. Further, I'm inherently skeptical of any crossover product. I've been burned too many times by movies and games that have crossed over from books and movies respectively to feel that any hype is justified. I'll take this as a wait and see. In these cases, I often believe than rather develop a quality product with a compelling storyline, the developers use the name recognition to garner sales rather than a quality product. I've been proven wrong before (ie. the crossover of the Godfather to the silver screen), but I won't hold my breath that it'll happen again in this franchise.

-Trevor

I realized I haven't been posting much except for mentioning this new skin, so I thought I would bring to your attention a little website I kill a couple minutes a day with. Jennifer Government is a quasi strategy game where you try to build the ideal country by voting on various issues. It takes some realism out of the game since you can't really get ousted from your nation unless someone steals your password, but it is good for a couple of weeks. For those who care, my country on the site is the Infinite Empire of Hemeac. Check it out if you have a chance. I know this sounds like advertising so I apologize in advance, but amazingly enough I am not receiving any financial or sexual incentives to plug this site.

In other news, my senior sem was cancelled for Tuesday due to the job fair. Over 3/4 of the class will be gone. I'm glad I decided to avoid that route for this year. The job fair last year was a zoo and feels generally degrading having to plead to the employers for a chance to be interviewed. Sigh. Well, we'll just have to hope the graduate school thing works out.

-Trevor

As you should be able to plainly see, this website has a new skin. There are multiple reasons for this, the first being that I had wanted a skin that was personalized by me. The previous skin was only a slight modification of a skin that was freely available on the web. The second reason is that I wanted a three column layout that appeared to be less "busy" in my opinion than the old theme and this I feel accomplishes that. The third and final reason is that I wanted a skin that conformed to web standards. I feel that one might as well follow the standards, otherwise why have standards? (Of course my opinion may differ if it limited what I could do...)

I tried previewing another theme, but my target audience (ie. roommates and family) mentioned it didn't look like me, so this is my heavy revision of that theme, but with the same basic layout. Let me know if you like/dislike it and/or what you like/dislike about it. This feedback is pretty important since it is only YOU who can prevent forest fires, umm.. know which styles you like. Anyways, I'll let you know if your feedback can be accomplished since I'm still in the beginner stage of coding a skin.

-Trevor

Rasheed Wallace was recently sued for displaying his tattoo in a Nike commercial. And no, it wasn't the FCC deciding to think about the children, but rather the tattoo artist is claiming that he was never compensated for displaying his "artistry" in a public medium. I guess in a world of the SCO, RIAA and MPAA including all variations of friviolous lawsuits, this should be viewed as normal behavior. Yes I know Wallace is a millionaire, but that doesn't mean he owes this man anything above the $450 he paid for the tattoo. This was a service and I do not believe there would have been a contract guaranteeing he paid royalties for public showing of the tattoo. Just because the man assumed he would get exposure does not give him financial leverage of Wallace.

I'm working on a new skin for this site that is a lighter than the current skin. The reasons, is that looking at the site through a variety of people's computers, this skin appears to be more brown than the intended red, so I thought I would find a lighter skin that incorporated two sidebars. The colors are currently the default, but I just wanted to get the skin up to look at it. Click the title for the link and let me know if the style looks good or if you prefer the current look. Also make sure to keep looking since I will be updating that skin.

-Trevor

I've been hardworking on a simpler design for this website. While I really think the site looks pretty neat, I feel that the design is overshadowing the content of the site a bit. Further, I wanted a design that conformed to web standards and the new layout is xhtml 1.0 transitional, unlike the current layout which has a number of problems that due to my inexperience at coding, has been unable to fix.

However, some initial reactions mentioned that they don't associate the new layout with "me". So while I disagree with their assesment of me, I fully realize that it's all about perception. So as a compromise, I'll be adding a skin switcher to let everyone choose which skin they prefer. I'll try working on modifying the skin that I'm working on to reflect the current "space" theme, but with a few changes to let it conform to the standard and have a 3 column design which I feel better utilizes space.

-Trevor

Johan has just signed a four year deal with the Twins for $40 million. This is great for the Twins as it is a sign that they are willing to still stick some money into the franchise. Further the fans know that we will be able to see Santana pitch here for probably 3 to 3 1/2 years before shipping off to a larger franchise. However, it is still a wait and see to see if the White Sox and Tigers can pose a threat in the AL central. I think Cleveland will make a good show with a couple of great young players such as Victor Martinez and Travis Hafner, but I don't think the whole team is quite ready for the prime time yet. The Twins are looking good to win a 4th straight title.

As for the Mariners, their future is looking much better. With the pitching of the A's slightly dismantled and the huge additons of Beltre and Sexson in the infield, the Mariners will have more opportunities to drive in baseball's best contact hitter, Ichiro. However, the Mariners starting pitching in my opinion is suspect since Moyer is certainly not getting any younger and is certainly lucky if his fastball even hits 80 anymore. Further, the Mariners recently lost Travis Blackley, a great prospect, for the 2005 season due to a shoulder injury, so we'll see how it pans out for the Mariners. The sleeper to look out for is obviously Bret Boone who couldn't connect with the baseball last year after having a couple of great seasons.

-Trevor

Genre: Biography / Drama
Starring: Jamie Foxx & Kerry Washington
Released: 2004

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I've finally reached somewhere on a search site, I made #1 if you search for Hemeac under Yahoo!. While I'm aware that this is not a widely searched term, it is a start. We'll see if this pays off anytime soon.

-Trevor

I came across the a new brand of Dr. Pepper the other day, and being the good consumer that I am, decided to run it through a bit of a taste test. Interestingly enough, I found out that like the ads that say how close Diet Dr. Pepper tastes to regular Dr. Pepper, I couldn't distinguish the difference between regular and Cherry Vanilla. I do enjoy the taste of Dr. Pepper from time to time, so there isn't necessarily anything to complain about, but one would think that if you are going to branch out into new markets, one would want to slightly differentiate the taste of various products.

The irony is that this pop contradicts the image that Dr. Pepper is trying to portray. For instance you have certainly seen those Dr. Pepper ads that say that it promotes individuality and originiality. So for Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper to just taste like the regular version is a mockery of everything Dr. Pepper stands for, while I'll have to wonder how if everyone was to drink Dr. Pepper would indicate individuality...

Overall, I enjoyed the taste of Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper, even after multiple bottles. Further, like its regular counterpart, the carbonation lasts throughout a day, so for those who sip on a 20 oz throughout the day, you will not be left with a flat beverage by evening. With that said, I recommend you try out a bottle for yourself, but I cannot recommend that you necessarily stick with it in hopes that maybe Dr. Pepper will rework the formula for a more original taste.

Miscellaneous:

Official Site

Brand Slogan: "It tastes so good, you'll get lost in it"

Magnolia is a movie about how lives connect. The movie begins by showing a twist of fate that leaves a man who while attempting to commit suicide was shot by his mother who was wielding a usually unloaded shotgun. The irony comes into play since there had been a net that would have saved his life from the fall and that he was the one who had loaded the shotgun. This prologue piqued my interest and I felt that while bleak, this movie offered potential.

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I'm trying to test out some external software to post to my blogs rather than use a web interface. I guess everyone will or will not see if this actually works.

-Trevor

I was just reading an article on News.com which was talking about how the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame out of Cleveland is suing a couple of guys who are in the process of setting up a website promoting Jewish Rockers. They claim that these guys have hurt the rock and roll's name and are seeking $100,000 in damages.

Just the other day I was looking for the baseball hall of fame website and I saw what said was the canadian baseball hall of fame website. I couldn't tell the difference between the two sites, I was so frustrated I had to leave the room. But then I realized they were different sites, but my faith in the baseball hall of fame had been shattered. I really hope that they lynch those involved in the Jewish Rock and Roll Hall of Fame...

Getting back to reality, maybe someday people will wake up and stop being so retarded. The world won't end for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame if a couple of guys want to show how those who are Jewish have helped the rock and roll genre, but my respect for the Cleveland based hall certainly has ended. Maybe I should start up a hall of fame myself for those of German heritage who have helped shape rock and roll, but while I can't think of anybody right now, I'll work on it.

-Trevor

Artist: Millionaire
Album: Outside the Simian Flock
Genre: Indie Rock/Post Grunge

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From the same demonic grin that was glad to see Michael Powell resign RETURNS in...

Carly Fiorina, CEO of HP Get the Pink Slip. This bittersweet story stars Carly Fiornia herself and the HP board of directors.

Sick of having a company with no direction, the board of directors gives Carly the boot in order to help revitalize the image of HP. This story features Carly running a large multinational company that has struggled to promote a positive image in the years after the large merger with Compaq and media disaster with stockholder Walter Hewlett. Is this the last of Carly? Who knows, you'll have to shell out more money for the sequel.

-Trevor

Note: For those who are looking for a one word audio review.

Ayn Rand turned 100 on February 2nd. This was a fact that I was not aware of. While I don't necessarily believe that everyone needs to approve of what she says, a lot of it is pretty controversial, but I will admit that I'm a basic subscriber to her beliefs. That does not mean that I agree with her completely. For instance, her philosophy has an elitist point of view. Read Atlas Shrugged, and I'll think you'll get a good idea of what I mean. However, this is not overly surprising considering her views on collectivism and what not.

Oddly enough if you read some of her non-fiction, she is adamantly opposed to folk lore and what not. She claims that it promotes multiculturalism. I do not agree with many of her arguments, but I do see where some of the aspects of multiculturalism has led to the politcally correct atmosphere, which I have to say I'm not totally fond of.

This leads to a rather ironic twist though. For those who enjoy fantasy novels as a way to pass the time, and I'm one of the guilty, you may enjoy Terry Goodkind. The irony in this is that Goodkind is a huge fan of objectivism and has infused the main charachter with the ideals of Ayn Rand. I was thinking about it, and I would almost say that fantasy novels fall under the category of folk culture, as it is pretty entwined in American culture now (Think LOTR). I don't know if Ayn Rand is turning over in her grave, but who knows.

-Trevor

Scott Borton of Jay Oklahoma was recently selected for jury duty in a murder trial. The problem was, the trial was for the murder of Scott Borton. Last Easter, Borton was murdered by Roger Lee Lawrence as he was helping Lawrence's wife move out. I'll let you make your own comments...

-Trevor

I've been taking a look at integrating a photo gallery in my website. I've been looking at using Gallery. It appears the next version coming out soon (it's currently in alpha) will support integration in to b2evolution, the blogging software I'm currently using. It currently supports integration into phpBB2, but it doesn't appear that my forum is very popular and I haven't had time to work on it much, so I don't know if I'll bother integrating it there. For the mean time, I'll probably just set it up seperately. That's what I've currently done, but I want to test with it some more before I give out the address, but if you were real adventurers, you should be able to find it without a link. Well anyways let me know via the comments if you would think that integrating a photo gallery is something you would want to see. Also, I think that it would be good to add a little poll along the right column, as they can be fun and/or useful.

In the long term, I am hoping to be able to add a left column to this website in order to get a little more information on the screen without having to scroll down, as I'm aware that it's the bane of everyone, myself included. However, at that point, I may want to look at using a CMS rather than a blog such as PHP-Nuke or a variation, but we'll see. Again let me know what you think.

-Trevor

Well, there's some good news, Brian's Bird Sanctuary (Intramural Softball) are 4 time champs. The championship game was last night. Yes I know that it is pretty short season, but with only 3 other co-rec teams this season, there wasn't really a reason to drag out the season. So after a good defensive battle and 4 innings of shutout innings for both sides, we came out on the bottom of the 5th and crushed in 7 runs. The final score was 9-1. I went 2-3 with 2 runs scored. I can claim participation in only the last two seasons, but it is still pretty awesome to know we can kick some ass in the realm of indoor softball for 4 straight seasons (can you say dynasty?). Unfortunately, since everyone on our team is graduating, our team is effectively over. At least we got free t-shirts.

-Trevor

Hey Everyone,

As everyone remembered, yesterday was my birthday. I turned the big 22, I guess I'll have to start to look for gray hairs soon. I was plesantly surprised about the number of people who remembered which included a couple of e-cards so thank you to all that remembered. I went to Sals last night and I met a couple of others who also had birthdays on the 3rd. Of course, not being good with names, I don't remember one of their names already, but it's good to know that others have birthdays on the best day of the year (it's obvious, since it is the day after Groundhog's Day).

On a odd note, I came back from the bar to find that my bed was made. That was the only thing I believe was messed up in my room, but that sure as hell makes a drunk paranoid. I'll have to assume that was from Moldan, but Charlie and I got him back by removing one of the glass panes in the coffee table.

Also, I'd like to mention that I got my first referral from a search engine. While it was MSN and I can't determine the search terms they used to find my site, it appears to find my music blog. Further I've had over 20 unique visitors to my site. While it's a slow site, at least I know people are at least glancing at my site and I'm not preaching to blank space. I'll keep everyone updated on my statistics for those who care

-Trevor

Click on the title to go to a website that has a lot of Apple 2 roms available. If you really want to, you can use their ActiveX script to play from the website, but remember, you'll need IE to run it or get an unofficial plugin for firefox. Since the lack of ActiveX support was one of the reasons why I switched to Firefox (less spyware that way), I'll just have to find myself a good emulator for my PC.

-Trevor

Good news. I preordered tickets for the QOTSA concert on April 6th at the Quest. Opening for them is the Eagles of Death Metal. This should be a great concert. Last time they were here, we were able to get great spots right above the stage in the 2nd floor (The Quest is of similar design to Brother Willie's Pub). That way we were able to avoid the dumbasses who felt they were too cool to just listen to music and decided they needed to "mosh." People can go mosh at some death metal band for all I care, but it's a band that's actually good, I can't imagine why you would spend $25 to run and jump into other people. If I really wanted to do that, I could go do that at a bar and the only cost to me would be the alcohol. Oh well. Now I only have to wait till March 22nd for their new album which promises to be good.

-Trevor

I added a music blog to my site if you are at all interested in what I'm listening to. I may do a similar thing for movies.

-Trevor

On my way back from Cold Spring this afternoon with Charlie, we were talking about Minnesota Stereotypes. This came up since I've been methodically watching all of the Coen Brothers movies so naturally that included Fargo. Anyways, I was thinking of all the Norwegian stereotypes that come up, like "gee whiz" and "ya betcha"... Also that made me think of my trip this summer down to Arizona when one of the grad students mentioned how it was obvious that I was a Minnesotan due to my accent. I didn't know that I had a discernable accent from those who have lived in Washington State. Further I didn't know that those from Minnesota and of Germanic descent had a nationally recognizable dialect. He mentioned it was due to my pronunciation of my "a"'s. I always thought that any "dialect" on my part was more family centered such as dropping the "lr" in alright or making my r's sounding a bit more like a Barbara Walters "wuh". For an example, alright comes out more like a New Yorker "aight". For a reference, listen to Putting Shame in Your Game by the Beastie Boys.

I know this isn't a regional dialect as I got plenty of grief from the "popular" kids back in gradeschool. Don't worry, I'm not too bitter and I don't own a gun, so those who snicker are safe.

On another note, I find myself thinking about the sayings of my Grandpa. When discovering an item of interest, my grandpa often says, "Man Oh Man." I find that I mutter that to myself, or "I'm going to hit the hay" when I'm going to bed. Further, when eating a fancy dinner, I always think of my grandpa's saying when we've eaten out at restaurants, "Trevor, we're eating like kings now." While I try to avoid saying these things aloud, I have a bad feeling I'll eventually incorporate them into my conversations.

I'll finish however with my favorite phrase from Minnesota: Hot Dish. I cannot but help but mention hot dish rather than casserole. Everyone just shakes their head. I guess it is similar to parts of the south that use the word coke rather than pop (it sure as hell isn't soda).

-Trevor

Artist: Mondo Generator
Album: A Drug Problem That Never Existed
Genre: Stoner Rock

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These are always hilarious. Moldan ordered a case for his Ipod off of Ebay. It just arrived today from Hong Kong. For those who enjoy Engrish, check out Engrish.com

I could be happy with less, I guess
If they tell me that less is more

- Local H

And that's what both EA and Take Two are telling us when they are signing exclusive contracts to the NFL and MLB respectively. In both of their press releases they claim this will help produce high quality products. Who do I blame in this? I will have to blame EA for this move, but also I will have to look at both the player associations of the NFL and MLB.

This all began when Sega Sports (recently sold to Take 2 Interactive) reduced the prices of their sports franchises to $20. To counter, EA used it's large cash reserve to force other competition out. Rather than innovate and make a good product, let's just resort to pushing out a better product (In this case it was a roughly equal product in terms of content, but only half the cost). Take 2 was forced to act unless they wished to lose every sports franchise. However, this is also partly the fault of the players association. If they would get their act together, they would realize that exclusive contracts will not help out their fans and will likely stifle development. For instance, look at how little Madden developed until the NFL series finally came into existence (One could claim it still has barely changed in the last 3-4 years).

At least for the contract with the MLB, they did allow development by Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, which will at least allow a little competition, but I feel no remorse that MVP baseball will be effectively shut out. Maybe it would be good if a company such as Sony (which develops 989 sports) or Microsoft purchases the game from EA, which will keep the technology around.

Should the government do anything about it? It would be great if they could effectively do anything about it, but they tend to do too little or too much. Staying away from the obvious recent case featuring a man with the initials BG, we look at the case of AT&T. SBC is in talks to buy AT&T, and further, long distance rates actually increased after the baby bells split up, so it is clear that the government failed to make the split up into a competitive marketplace. So in reality, I think the government cannot do anything, even though I wish the would.

I'll just sigh and think back to the days when Sierra was still in the sports genre with Front Page Sports Baseball. Their baseball game was top notch, light years away from EA's Triple Play arcade fest of the day. I guess only time will tell how Madden and Take Two's franchise pan out, but we will always be left wondering what could have been.

-Trevor

If you are wondering what the hell the title means, you are not alone. Give it to someone who was in marketing and claims to be hip to come up with a lot of new techno-babble bullshit. This guy Markus Geisler who was once in marketing has decided to describe how Ipods have changed our lives. I'll agree that they have begun a change in the way we live, but I fail to see how they are technotranscending our existence from mere humans, to part electronics. I guess if this helps him get the moniker of Professor Ipod, his goal is complete.

So in an effort to be labeled Mr. Zen (No, I don't want to be known as Mr. Touch), I'll soon be releasing a journal article on showing how the Creative Zen Touch mp3 player has nanoutilized the zen of millions of Buddhists to gain a synergistic edge on the hybrid entertainment matrices. I can do nothing but shake my head.

-Trevor

Here are the stats so far for January. I should write a disclaimer that a good chunk of these hits come from me and my updating the site and what not.

-Trevor

Every once in a while a movie comes along that really moves me. Well maybe that happens more than I care to admit, and Million Dollar Baby is one of those movies?

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Hey Everyone,

As you can see in the post just below this, my site appeared to have suffered an unknown catastrophic failure. I was able to salvage the structure and the posts, but for those couple who created users, you'll have to recreate them. I also lost the comments. Sorry about that. I also went against my own rule about troubleshooting, search for help before trying to modify an unknown error. Oh, well. I'll be posting a review of Million Dollar Baby later today.

-Trevor

When I came home last night around midnight last night, my site decided to stop working for reasons I don't understand. I was able to export my data, but I don't know how to automatically import my posts, so those will be coming in manually. All the user data may or may not be lost, I'm not sure, but you may have to change your password.

-Trevor

I?ll begin with a disclaimer that I have never seen Phantom of the Opera in the theater. This will undoubtedly bias my review. However, if you wish to continue, read on?

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Here's the link to Brian's website with all the info on our Intramural Softball league. Unfortuanately , we lost yesterday, but it was against a team in the men's league, with guys who probably could bench me. What's worse is that they used a wood bat which makes it amazingly easy to hit the ball we use. It sucks as that bat was too heavy for me to use, which really gave the other team an unfair advantage. If I had used a wood bat, it wouldn't have been difficult at all to hit a couple homeruns. Oh well, it was an exhibition so it doesn't really count, but it is still frustrating. What's worse is that I pulled a muscle in my leg running the bases. It really hurt, and I was left a gimp for all of the last night. Luckily having Dr. Moldan as roommate, he was able to give me some recommendations, and they really helped. Now it only feels like I was hit in the leg with a baseball bat. Well, I'll see what it feels like tomorrow since we have a game scheduled.

On a side note, Queens of the Stone Age will be coming to the Quest on April 6th. I'm soooo excited, I'm already playing a lot of Queens to be mentally prepared for the concert. There new album is released on March 22nd. I got their new single, Little Sister. It's easily some of their best work and easily compares to Josh Homme's old band Kyuss (only the best stoner rock band of all time). However, this album marks the departure of Nick Olivieri, due to his drug problems (ironic isn't it), which is sad as his beard was unmatched by anyone except for Wayne Static of Static-X (and his musical talent was fairly exceptional as well). Luckily for me, is that Twiggy Ramirez is rumored to have recorded with Queens, so we'll see if everything pans out. The bad news is that the female vocalist from the Distillers (also rumored to be Homme's girlfriend) has also done a little recording. As I've said before and I'll say again, if you take all the musicians in the world and distill the worst members out and put them together in a band, you have the Distillers.

Also recently was released is an EP by Nick Olivieri called Demolition Day. I'll be looking to get my hands on it and see what he's been up to after he left Queens.

-Trevor

The Razzies recently released their nominations for worst actors and actresses along with the worst movie. While I think it is a rather great idea, but I have to wonder who's behind the nominations. For one, President Bush (in his appearance in Farenheit 9/11 which is a complete mockery of a legitimate documentary) was nominated as worst actor. Don't forget him and his pet goat were also nominated for worst couple along with another nomination with him and Condoleeza Rice. Let's still not forget Rice was also nominated for worst supporting actress. Wait there's still more, Donald Rumsfield was nominated for worst supporting actor. I'll be blunt, this is just plain retarded. Personally, I am not a huge fan of the Republican party, however, how can someone be nominated for archive footage? If that was the case, any single actor clearly has enough off camera footage that can be edited together to make them look like shit. This is just evidence of those in the United States who need to apologize for re-electing Bush.

They think that amazingly Kerry would transcend politics to save the world from the evil scum and villany. The last political party to play it straight was the federalist party and they died with the election of Thomas Jefferson.

In light of these nominations, I have nominated www.razzies.com as the worst website of 2005. The theme is clearly worse than hemeac.com, come on, look at that piss poor menu system on the bottom. Maybe they should be reading their own servicemarks and vote for the bad movies, not the archive footage inside bad movies.

-Trevor

Napoleon Dynamite was a unique movie. I swung between laughing hysterically and momentarily wondering if it is somewhat cruel to be enjoying Napoleon's absolute misery. However, in the end I couldn't help but decide that this movie was not any worse than satires such as Airplane.

This does not mean that the movie is without faults. It is almost completely void of a plot, with randomly shifting scenes that move the story forward in lurches. However, these lurches make for memorable quotes as anyone can quote this movie without having to worry about the context.

Overall this movie was good, but not great. I love this movie for the humor, but the lack of all the technical jargon that makes movies great were missing, leaving this with 3 galaxies out of 5. Due yourself a favor and watch this movie, but make sure that you leave your inner film critic behind.

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(I'm humming a song from the Wizard of Oz while writing this)

Michael Powell is resigning from the FCC. This will hopefully be good for all those who believe they should be able to make there own choices in the media. This all stems from the Superbowl fiasco last year. I personally think that was rather crude and should have no place in the superbowl which is quasi-family entertainment. However, unlike the fascists over in the FCC, I firmly believe consumers are able to make their own decisions. If you don't like it, stop watching it. If you don't like what's on television, don't watch it.

Now I can see where there is potential problems if you have kids, but here is where technology can come into play. There are V-Chips installed in televisions today that can filter out programs that aren't appropiate for kids. If parents care what kids watch, use technology. That way everyone but the kids who can't watch COPS (but maybe C.O.P.S.) will be happy.

Let's see if the next chairman can allow the freedom for consumers to choose not only in content but also keep cable and other broadband services free from useless regulations, which was the bright point of his career in the FCC, but this alone didn't make him a good chairman of the FCC.

-Trevor

On my quest to see if this blog happens to show up on Google, I decided to search for my name on Google. While I didn\'t find this site, I happened across another Trevor Kollmann in this universe. He apparently goes to a grade school in Monroe, CT. This website is poorly designed (And Hemeac's Blog is the pinnacle of web design) and uses what appears to be a cheap midi file of the theme song for Superman(?). If that's true it would be ironic as this kid made it to the 10 Pull-Up Club and I know I have a hard time getting to 10 Pull-Ups now. It's almost like Bizarro Trevor...

In this search you'll see the math society's website that I haven't updated and a comment requesting information on a Batman Forever Game for the PC (I have no recollection of this) back in 1996 which would have made me around 13 at the time. I see that I wasn't afraid to list the location of where I live, but I fudged my e-mail address using I@dont.know. This brings me back to nostalgic mode when back in the day the internet was free of unsightly ads..., but that's for another day.

-Trevor

Yesterday, I got my Zen Touch. For those who don't know and don\'t want to check out the link, it's a hard drive based mp3 player. For those who compain that the touch pad isn\'t as useful as the ipods, they're just full of shit, and should realize that maybe the advertisements and news media shoving ipods down their throats has skewed their prospective. While the ipod isn't bad, the smaller footprint and design is not worth an additional $70. The Zen is quite easy to hold and is not heavy, but I may be biased as sometimes I lug my TI-89 around in my pocket. Either way I'm happy that I have a player that I can hold a considerable amount of music that I listen to frequently and has a battery life of around 24 hours. People can claim I'm a troll, but we're not at /., and here I'm God...

-Trevor

In a world that includes Fox News, everything needs to be fair and balanced (at least from the point of view of conservative Republicans). In my balanced view, Democrats have their problems, well, now I'm rambling. Firefox is a great browser in my opinion, but don\'t take my word for it... Brian Briggs over at BBSpot gives an insightful comparison between Firefox and Internet Explorer. If you don't understand his methodology, read the fine print on the bottom of the page. As for statistics, Internet Explorer has just claimed dominance for the first time in my logs, taking 49.1% of browser hits, compared to 49.0% from Firefox. Netscape gets the rest. So at least I can sleep easy knowing IE hasn't completely dominated my website yet, considering the fact that 24 hours ago Firefox had 67% of my page hits. I'll close with my favorite quote on statistics:

?Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital?

-Aaron Levenstein

-Trevor

Well, I've updated the look of the blog, but the changes are mostly cosmetic. I've removed the track back which makes the site look cleaner. Further when looking at the comments, I modified the css file in order for it to look less cluttered and put all the acceptable xhtml commands in a separate FAQ (under construction) so the page doesn't look so busy.

I've instituted Jenny's suggestion that I have a "Home" Link that is easily accessible. Thank you. Future plans are to have my links as graphics at the top of the site, but that is for a future date.

Further, my future plans are to setup a forum and a photo gallery for this site. It was suggested that a forum would be less cluttered if multiple people wished to post information. These will hopefully come soon, but I'm hoping to keep a theme going so I'll want to work on that stuff before it becomes "public".

On a lighter note, I found out the first name of the guy in my senior sem that just pisses me off. For some reason, he wants to keep us all verbally informed of all his random thoughts throughout class. That's what a blog is for. I'll be nice and not mention his name here, doubtful that he'll ever read it though. Toussaint refers to him as troll-like which I can second.\r\n\r\nWe won our first intramural softball game today. That was exciting. According to our statistician Brian, we haven\'t lost a game since Freshman year (We are three time intramural champions). He's got a web site which I'll link when I get it from him. I thought I hit pretty well today going 2 for 3 with a triple (supposedly "cruuushed") and the game tying run. However my defense was lackluster at best missing an easy popup. Oh well, that's life.

-Trevor

Here's a test of the picture upload function.

It's beginning to look like I hoped it would. Any comments would be appreciated. Further, feel free to register your account, the link will be on the right hand side. If you think I should change the placement of any of the boxes, let me know as I think I can easily modify it now.

-Trevor

As usual, it is customary to post a welcome that has absolutely no relevent info.