'nuff said.

Can you believe it was a year ago when we saw our first movie together? We were supposed to take the whole group to that show from Pixar, but it was sold out so we all settled on that other lame movie instead.

But it wasn't lame. It was crowded and we had to sit off by ourselves.

And we've never looked back (except to see when that actually happened – June 27, 2008.)

Happy 1st Anniversary Timmy. I love you. When are we getting married?

I don't know why, but it's like I'm on mission to take everyday snapshots around town and name them things that make me think a bit. This one rang a little too true for me though.

What does it bring up?

It digs up thoughts for me about isolation and over-protectiveness. I mean, here's an empty store, the doors locked and the curtains drawn.

I presume the curtains are drawn in case someone rents it out and they start to develop a store inside so they can keep it a secret until they make the big splash.

Why is springing surprises on people at the right instant important? I don't know. Ask Apple, Inc.

But the irony for me is not the curtains. It's that the place is empty and yet it still has the shoplifting alarm thingy poised to catch anyone who dares to steal anything from the empty store.

Now I can come up with 50 or more reasons why it looks like this, why those alarms are still there. But that's not the point.

The point for me is simply stated, but very complex: our society values stealth and security over simplicity and truth. The truth here is that the store is empty. There's a recession going on and it went out of business. And now the Mall Management is hiding nothing, literally, so we can't see there's nothing, and they'll punish us if we try to steal nothing.

For some unknown reason that reminded me of America. Hence the name of the photo.

Let's all do nothing but be sure that we don't share the glorious secret with anyone, and let's punish anyone who tries to steal it from us!

I know I sound cynical, but I am kind of just that today.

All I can say is "You Go, Alyck!" I had no idea we were in any competition, but now that I do, it's on. Of course, Alyck has a substantial lead since he already had 34 followers to my 20 before I even knew we were racing. So I guess I'll just have to catch up.

You can see my tweets in the side bar right under the photos from Flickr, or you can choose to follow me here:

twitter.com/pumasalad

So there you go. If you're not using Twitter you just don't get it. But you will. Someday. I promise.

We can see giant snow capped volcanos from here (yes, there's still a little snow on both Mt Hood and Mt St Helens), and even though it's late June we don't even have air conditioning on in the house.

So I'm sitting there trying to figure out if it's the laid back-ness of it all, or if I'm gonna get any ice cream, or what exactly is so Texas-like about the moment.

Then I swat a mosquito and it all comes racing home, just like that scene near the end of Ratatouille where the food critic sits down to eat. It's the bugs. I think I may have donated around a pint to the local economy while we were sitting out there.

Still, it was pleasant. And I was with my partner just enjoying the Oregon-ness of it all. So I guess it's worth a few bugs here and there for moments like these.

Gizmodo has an article talking about the new phones and the speed. Here's an excerpt that made me laugh:

Like we said before, the iPhone 3G will still run most of the games for the near future. That 40 million unit potential market of iPhone/iPod Touch devices is too big to just ignore and put out an app just for 3GS phones, so your old phone will still be able to keep up. But developers are like alcoholics. If you put more system resources in front of them, they can't help but use all of it just because they can. Also, they drink a lot.

Read the whole article, and watch a video of side by side iPhone 3G and 3GS showing speed related issues over at Gizmoodo.

Gizmodo: iPhone 3GS Review

I'm sure it had something to do with that movie where they let Pearce Brosnan sing. And knowing that Pearce Brosnan had anything to do with it probably made Coldplay feel even worse.

Oh well. it's just pop history now. From last August.

About the new 3D experience: OMG! It costed $14 APIECE to see it in 3D at a matinee show on Friday. I've seen Star Trek 3 times for the same amount of money I spent on 2 tickets for Up today. It's way too expensive. And it's not worth it at all. Sure, it's the best 3D experience ever at a movie theatre (technology and all that), but it's still just a 3D movie. I felt like my head was crooked all the way through, and the cheesy plastic glasses, while lightweight, became uncomfortable about 20 minutes in.

It ain't worth it folks. I hope this 3D fad passes soon just like the last one did somewhere around 20 years ago.

About Up: It was good. It wasn't great, but it was good. I don't want to spoil anything, but I don't have to because everything is in the trailers. Of course, where they showed you stuff in the trailer, they expanded upon greatly in the actual film.

I giggled. I laughed. I smiled. I got all choked up and almost cried at one point. But that happens in every movie, especially Disney ones – they have the formula down pat.

It wasn't Pixar's best, but it's still better than almost anything from Dreamworks. I'd place it somewhere between The Incredibles and Wall•e, just next to A Bugs LIfe.

For reference, my favorite Pixar films are Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo.

So it's worth going to see, but it's not worth paying the 3D tax.

Well, yesterday at Kah-Nee-Ta, a Native American resort, where I was walking down the road with Henry and Tim and Reilly, I managed to fall off the edge of the road. Again, I was wearing sandals, and again I appear to have broken two toes. Only this time they're the ones on my left foot.

Oweee.

Oddly enough, when I collapsed in slow motion, I managed to skin my left hand on the palm and on my knuckles. How does one manage to skin both sides of one's hand?

So anyway, I'm still alive and kicking, but only with my right foot because it hurts too much to move my left foot. My toes are all swollen and blue. It looks really nasty.

The irony of it all is that Paul's Law reads "You Can't Fall Off The Floor", but apparently that doesn't apply to perfectly level, paved roads.

"You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of missiles, or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons"

So, let me get this straight. If I were going to use my music collection to create "missiles, or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons," it would violate my license agreement and Apple could revoke my use of iTunes.

That's harsh.

That makes Apple the first target, doesn't it? If they don't invalidate my license then I can keep making "missiles, or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons" until I can't makes no more.

Since iTunes is the perfect tool for that anyway.

Sheesh, talk about lawyers and broilerplating gone bad…

Torture is wrong, and it pisses me off. Why can't we stop?

"So it's ok to waterboard a guy over 80 times, but God forbid the guy who could understand what that prick was saying…
…has a boyfriend."

Bill Clinton's "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy must end. Obama said it makes no sense. He's squirling out and doing nothing to end it. How do we put enough pressure on him to make it happen?

Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus or is it Giant Octopus vs. Mega Shark? who cares! It's looks to be as good as Snakes on a Plane, and it marks the return of The Renegade, Lorenzo Lamas. Wahooo! Seriously, you don't get a sense of how big Mega Shark or Giant Octopus really are, until Mega Shark bites through the Golden Gate Bridge, or leaps at a 747 in mid air. Just when you thought it was safe to get back on an airplane… mooohaha. I'm so gonna buy this DVD when it comes out two weeks after the movie starts.

It's a side scroller where you don't do much besides walking along and hacking up the enemy. Chop chop!

It's the first game from Kris' own Pocket Monkey Games. It's fun.

cool, and cool. very amazing stuff. And I don't think I can really do this. My bike is 7 years old and only has 4 miles on it.

yes. there's a lesson in there for all of us.

This morning while I was peeling my boiled egg for breakfast I flashed back to sometime around 1969 when I was sitting with my Grandmother Dot eating breakfast. Grandmother Dot was definitely a woman of her time.

Her real name was Dorothy, but we called her Grandmother Dot to keep from confusing her with any of our other Grandmothers. Even though it's an abomination to some to have two dads or two moms, somehow it is perfectly normal to have three or four grandmothers.

Back in '69 I was 5 years old and spent lots of time with my grandparents. I guess having two working parents meant the grandparents got to step up to the plate…

So back to Grandmother Dot. She believed in doing everything her way. And the reason I think of her every single time I have a boiled egg is because of this one time when she was teaching me how to eat boiled eggs.

She smashed a spoon into the side of it and then in about 2 and a half quick fell swoops, she had the entire egg out of its protective coating, leaving the shell unceremoniously in three or less pieces. Total time from intact egg to completely de-shelled: 2.3 seconds.

Meanwhile I'd sit over and carefully peel every single little chip away from the egg. Instead of ending up with boiled egg chunks and three huge pieces of shell, I'd have a perfectly smooth round (well, egg shaped anyway) glistening egg, ready to be bitten. My time for shelling each egg was more like 5 minutes.

She told me I took so long because I must not like the eggs.

Au contraire, the reason I took so long is because I really enjoy biting into whole boiled eggs. Maybe even a little too much.

Oh, and it still takes me 5 minutes to defrock an egg.

If you've never been to a Naturopath (or NP for short), then I recommend trying it out. It's a good way to figure out exactly what your body can tolerate.

The process is kind of cool. I held a metal rod in my left hand while he touched an electrode to my right hand. I completed the circuit and made the little readout gauge go up to 100%. When he dropped certain vials of foodstuffs into the machine, if I had allergies to said foodstuff, the needle in the gauge pointed at numbers less than 10.

Here's what the good doctor found, with no prompting from me:

I am indeed allergic to olives, both green and black. Yuk. No secrets there. I am also allergic to tomatoes. I've always known about the olives and tomatoes, but now I have an actual doctor confirming it. He told me to stay away from cooked tomatoes as well – in the past I've always just avoided raw ones like the plague that they are.

It also turns out I'm allergic to wheat. I think I knew that. Bread, even though I've always eaten it, gives me indigestion. Lately I've been wondering if I was gluten intolerant, but no, it turns out I'm not. I can eat gluten, just no wheat. That means I have to stick with breads made from spelt, barley, oat, rye, corn, rice, millet, quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat, triticale, kamut and teff.

I'm allergic to refined sugar and corn syrup (see my previous post on HFCS). But I am good with molasses, sucanat, turbinado and fructose. The fake sugars are out, too: no nutrasweet, saccharin or splenda. bad bad bad. Oh, and no MSG. So I'll have to start being more picky about my chinese food to go.

Also out are the alcohols. I can't drink grain alcohol, beer, white wine, red wine, tequila, or sake. So all you drinkers out there stop trying to make me drink alcohol. My doctor says I am allergic.

And while I won't miss alcohol a single drop (since I've never had any), the toughest one on the list is this: I'm allergic to caffeine, cocoa, chocolate, coffee, black tea and decaf coffee. Yes, you read that right. No more caffeine. No more chocolate.

Between the wheat, tomatoes, caffeine and chocolate, it's made me realize how small our palettes really are in North America. Try removing any of those completely from your diet, or worse any two of them (remember I'm trying to remove all four!). It aint easy.

Interestingly enough, it seems that wheat is a common cause of headaches, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

High Fructose Corn Syrup.

Wendy's, Arby's, Panda Express, Big Town Hero and McDonalds are all offering alternatives to soda with High Fructose Corn Syrup for my beverage choice. They all offer brewed tea. Sugarless. HFCS-less. Fruity-sweetner-less. I can choose to put sugar or chlorine in my tea, I don't have to just take it the way they offer it.

This is huge. I used to frequent Taco Bell a lot because they always have the best Dr. Pepper in town, but since giving up sodas with HFCS in them, there's not much reason to go there any more. The one tea they offer has raspberry flavoring and HFCS. Ewwwww. who'd want that?

Taco Bell, if you're listening, you better jump on the 2009 bandwagon and start offering things without fake sweetener in them. Other fast food chains, you should be paying attention too (I'm looking at you, Subway, with all you're "we're so healthy" attitude).

Lead singer Gary Lightbody fought back with these gems:

Nothing will offend me. It's all been said. And you can't give us more than two middle fingers.

and my personal favorite:

We're like the Village People, only slightly less gay.

Read the whole whole article: Exclusive: Snow Patrol hit back at Manic Street Preachers over 'most boring band in Britain' tag

I've ordered from Apple many times in the past and have always been completely satisfied. This time, however, I was less than 100%.

I paid an extra $10 to have the order expedited. I wanted to be sure I had it by Saturday. I mean, if I had known it was going to take until Today to receive it, I would have just forgone the engraving and gone to one of the three local Apple stores here in Portland and picked one up – and saved the $10 expedite fee.

The website implied that it would take until today or tomorrow, unless I paid the extra $10. So I readily paid it. How long does it take to ship it from some secret place in California to here, anyway?

So as I anxiously watch the order status. Within minutes, the website said it had been engraved and placed for shipment! Wahoo! There was hope! There was even a link where I could track it via FedEx.

Uh oh. There's where the problem started. It was being FedEx'd after the FedEx pickup time from China. Damn. It's never going to arrive on time now.

Sure enough, it floated around China until Friday morning when it magically appeared in Oakland CA. Still not fast enough though, because apparently FedEx delivery dudes don't work on the weekends. So it sat in Oakland until 10:30 AM today when it materialized in the lobby of my building.

The amazing part to me though is not all of that. The amazing part is that Apple sent me to a web survey on Friday to tell them how my "recent purchase at the Apple store" went. So I told them that I was disappointed that my gift didn't arrive on time and that the website didn't explain that paying a $10 expedite fee wouldn't really speed up the process enough.

And they called me back.

Apple actually has employees that pay attention to these things. Big corporate America is paying attention, or at least giving lip service, to us little folk.

So whether I ever see my $10 again or not, I'm more-or-less a happy customer. I might not rank their website order process a perfect 10, but I do think it's the best one I've dealt with.

it's 9 minutes and 35 seconds long, featuring slides of me and Tim in Munich, Füssen, Planegg, Austria, Regensberg, Berlin, Prague, Dresden, and the roads in between. The tune is by one of my favorite German bands, Camouflage, and it's called "Rhonda's Trigger."

Go Tim!

this is the link, in case you want to go check it out: http://www.jessicamagill.us

What if you financed a car for $30,000 and the dealership found out they made an error and refunded you $5.82. Would you give that money back to the finance company?

What if you went out to dinner and it cost $26.08 and you wanted to tip the waitron 15%. Would you give them $3.91 or would you round it up and give them $3.92?

In all of these instances the percentage is 0.00019412.

When it was first suggested that a government bailout is a bad thing because the government can't run anything, some of the opponents' fears centered around micro-management.

What could be more micromanagement than seizing on 0.019412%.

Assuming the bail-out is $850,000,000,000 (it's way more than that, actually, several news sources are saying well over a trillion…), why is the government and the media going on and on and on and on about these stupid bonuses paid out that amount to so little?

Now let's do some other math:

With our senators and congresspersons making $169,300 a year and 535 of them all yelling about this since at least March 10, the total it's costed the American People so far is $2,481,520.55 ($463.83 per day x 535 people x 10 days).

Add the handful of other staffers and that guy, The President, etc etc, it's easy to see we've already spent over $5,000,000 of tax payer money to play the blame game. It's Obama's fault, it's Bush's fault, it's the Republicans, it's the Democrats, it's the lying bastards at AIG, it's Citibank, it's Wall Street, it's the KKK. whoever.

Now start considering what Bill O'Reily, Keith Olbermann, Anderson Cooper, the other guys at NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CNN, ETC, all make, how many untold millions are being spent on this?

Sure the American people are mad. Sure it sucks to be in a recession. Sure it sucks to lose your job or for your company to go out of business right under your feet. But let's quit yelling at stuff from weeks and weeks ago and figure out how to fix the things weeks and months into our future, so we don't have to suffer like this forever.

Find a way to fix it so big companies can't hold the world economy hostage. Find a way to fix it so people can save a little and spend a little. Getting people spending money again is the only thing that's going to make the recession go away.

Find a way to make it work instead of blaming people for why it doesn't. Stop being politics as usual, just like the past 20 years and figure out how to really make a change happen.

Would you believe that I couldn't remember how to spell Helmet when I was making the above bumper sticker? So I to look it up. This is what my built-in Mac OS X dictionary had to say:


…I couldn't resist. Firemen are always hot.

In the meantime, might I suggest subscribing to the RSS feed so you automatically know when the posts resume.

Love you, mean it!

You know the one, it says we're all evolved over millions of years. It suggests a concept known as natural selection.

Wikipedia says:

Charles Robert Darwin FRS (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist[I] who realised and demonstrated that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through the process he called natural selection. The fact that evolution occurs became accepted by the scientific community and much of the general public in his lifetime, while his theory of natural selection came to be widely seen as the primary explanation of the process of evolution in the 1930s,[1] and now forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory. In modified form, Darwin’s scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, providing logical explanation for the diversity of life.[2]

I think it's insane that in my Jr High School days, The Theory of Evolution was taught side by side on the same blackboard as the "theory of creationism". Seriously. And that was 1977.

I find it completely unconscionable that creationism is still taught in science classes today. Crazy man. Why do we only teach one version of creationism (one of the ones in the Bible) and not stuff from the ancient Greeks and Romans and Egyptians? Even the Flying Spaghetti Monster makes as much sense.

But I digress. So happy 200th Birthday to Charles Darwin. Let's not even start to consider what the term "naturalist" has evolved to mean over the past 200 years.

btw, honorable mention 200th birthday wishes go out to Abraham Lincoln today too.

With age comes wisdom, right?

Styx is old now. But unlike the bands from the 80s that I've been to see in the past few years (I'm looking at you, Flock of Seagulls), Styx has not gotten fat. Better than that, they have retained their talent.

Older and wiser, they put on a show reminiscent of a show in a High School auditorium. The venue was small, about 3000 or so people, and there were no light shows or pyrotechnics. Just Tommy Shaw, James Young, and those other guys. I thought it was brilliant, because 90% of the people there were remembering them from high school, so the setting was perfect.

I also have to say that I was very pleased that they didn't care if we took photos. Thank you for that. Everyone was snapping pictures with their cell phones and cameras. It was like we were all there just to have fun and relive some memories, while making a few new ones.

 

It's been foggy in Portland. So foggy that I can't see the ground. At one point it was so foggy I couldn't see the crane they're using to erect the high rise next door. It was super odd.

I'm used to coming into my living room and looking out the window at the city of Portland and the bridges over the Willamette River. But with the fog, there's nothing on the other side of the window.

It kind of makes it feel like an episode of 1960's style Star Trek. Not in lost in the cosmos sense, but in the low budget "there's-not-really-a-whole-universe-on-the-other-side-of-that-cardboard-wall" sense.

The picture above is from this morning when a lot of the fog has cleared up, but yesterday at lunch visibility was about 15 feet.

Imagine my surprise at noon yesterday when suddenly in the fog, that crane twisted around and poked it's long end thru the whiteness into my face. I swear it's only 5 feet away from the balcony when it's aimed right at me. I could only see the tip end of the crane thru the cloud, like some cheesy video game where they were too lazy to render the background.

It kept spinning and was out of my view almost as quickly as it had entered. It happened so fast I didn't have a chance to snap a picture. So I thought I'd write it down here to help me remember the dream-like state that was my life in 3D yesterday.

Thank you to all you who've helped make this birthday stand out. The party Friday night was fabulous, and I've gotten dozens of birthday notices on Facebook today.

The gallery of photos from the birthday party is hosted at my Mobile Me account, you can check them all out there. These are the same pictures that were snapped all night and ended up on the big screen as the party progressed.

Thanks again!

Here's your human interest story for the week. Tip o' the Hat to John Allan for digging this one up.

Then out of the corner of your eye, you see it. A ghost.

Wait, it's not really there, it's just your imagination. The cabin is too relaxing. It's too easy to climb into your bunk and shut the world outside.

But there it is again. Grabbing for you.

It gets you. It won't let go. It's long octopus fingers wrapping around your wrist, pulling you from the bed. It's fingernails wrapping back around and into the bedclothes, catching and pulling threads, making ripping noises.

You scream! Again!

You pull as hard as you can to get away.

Then it stops. You roll over and once again are engulfed by a warm breeze and supermodels on the beach. Did you scream or not? Probably not. The memory is all faded now. No ghosts, no fingernails, just the surf washing calmly away the terror and bathing you with smiles.

• • •

Tim asked me when I woke up this morning why I screamed in the middle of the night.

For example, at 9:05 when I stopped at Starbucks, they weren't paying any attention and messed up my drink. So I got a coupon for a free drink next time. At 9:06 on Sirius Christian Satellite, they were voicing fears that anti-abortion laws would be overturned by (wait for it…) 2 pm today! How does anything in Washington happen in less than 2 hours while everyone's at lunch?

There is so much FUD still in politics. They even had a woman call in to ask if Obama is a Muslim. Do you think that'll ever stop?

The fun bit was watching on Facebook, and chattering with my friends from all over the country as it happened. I think this "may" be the future of news…

We drove past a field where some sort of performance was going on. A band, in my dream it was Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, was performing a cover of a Human League song. The part of the song that is stuck in my head was a non-verbal moan part that just keeps playing over and over.

I convinced my dad to stop the car so we could get out and see it. No easy task in real life, getting my dad to stop the car unless it's his idea, but in the dream he pretty much pulled right over. Of course, he parked on the other side of an old dilapidated building where we had to run across the tracks to see the performance.

Once we climbed thru the broken windows and ran across the street, we saw the actual performance. The audience was performing, the band was just singing. Everyone was in robes and masks. One guy was wearing an elephant mask with an animatronic nose and big soulful eyes. The chorus line in the audience was made up of people dressed like the classic painting called "The Scream." They all had big black eyes and big round heads and everything they did was perfectly in step with all the others.

Just as we walked up, they were breaking it all up, so we missed 90% of it. But what we saw was really cool. Of course I started snapping pictures on my iPhone, until some chick told me no photos were allowed. I said O.K. and kept snapping.

After we decided there was nothing else going on, we headed out, back through the building, trying to get back to the car. Along the way, the step monster kept asking me questions about an ex-boyfriend.

The actual song going thru my head when I woke up was "I am the Law", a Human League song cover by Momus. The non-verbal moan part sounds like it's being played on kazoos, and you can experience it yourself about 12 seconds into the preview over at the iTunes store.

So, anyone care to explain what it all means to me? It was a good dream.

I'm constantly reminded that the UMC the south is different from the UMC in the west. The interesting part is that we can use exactly the same language and be talking about two completely different things.

Its also interesting that in one sentence, the leaders say something about how cool it is that the UMC encourages us to think for ourselves and in the next sentence they tell us we should not allow gay couples to volunteer in our program because of loose morals.

I'm proud of my gay self and my gay partner who volunteers at the church with my youth and the children quite frequently. I'm proud of my church because they don't equate being gay as a sin and embrace us when we say we want to be Christians just like any other couple. I'm proud of my town because it's very supportive of individual's rights and because we're trying to be green and help the environment.

Dallas just feels more and more like Mars every time I visit. If it weren't for a few (semi)sane friends and my family, i'd probably never even miss the place.

But you see what I mean about using the same words? Things thay seem normal to me i'm sure are shocking to these folks. 'Go Obama!' is fightin' words here. The most important post-election thing down here seems to be stocking up on bullets because everyone says Obama is going to outlaw them. Never mind the recession or health care or anything else, we need our bullets!

Not to fear, tho, I'll be headed back to my own version of another planet on Friday. And all I can think of after spending a few days in Texas is how important it really is to "keep portland weird."

[UPDATE - We just completed the class on John Wesley and what it means to be a United Methodist, and I have to say, I feel much better about my denomination now than I did...]

• Rare Sea Turtle, Shark Strand on N. Oregon Coast – While it was raining cats and dogs in the Portland and inland areas, it was apparently raining sea creatures on the north Oregon coast.
• UPDATE: MACWORLD THREATENED BY DEATH RAY – Death-ray-wielding open source software supporters are expected to crash the MacWorld convention in San Francisco.
• Gay Marriage-Why we all need it! – a youtube video that's basically a voice-0ver from a book, thoughtfully talking about how when denying gay marriage is supporting random gay anonymous sex. take that, fundamentalists!.
• Snow Prints – These prints were made by simply pushing our faces into fresh powder on cars. They are all concave, but create a super cool illusion of 3D sculptures. Enjoy.
• STONEHENGE beneathe the waters of Lake Michigan – no really! Check it out! In a surprisingly under-reported story from 2007, Mark Holley, a professor of underwater archaeology at Northwestern Michigan University College, discovered a series of stones – some of them arranged in a circle and one of which seemed to show carvings of a mastodon – 40-feet beneath the surface waters of Lake Michigan.
  It kind of makes me want to take up scuba all over again!
  

Link Disclaimer: most of the links on this page go to external sites beyond the control of cliffdweller. Some of them may not yield the exact results over time that the original description on this page outlines.

Just curious. If anyone out there has any ideas why this is so, let me know.

And B&J's has it at the scoop shops.

So here's my shameless plug: send me iTunes Gift Certificates (via iTunes or Order Gift Cards on the web). It can't be any easier than that.

In the past I've received lots of iTunes gifts. Enough that it looks like I've spent way too much money at Apple's media store. Of course, that's not what happened at all. I got you to send me gifts so it's you that spent way too much on my iTunes habit. and for that I thank you.

Last year we broke all the records with a little over $500 worth of gift certificates. Let's aim for that again

• Melody Bell Turns iPhone Jiggling Into Ensemble Performance Art Who says iPhones can't replace all musical instruments by the year 2010? This handbell demonstration suggests that at least some classical instruments are dead already.
• Ryan Gosling's first music video, we do love Ryan Gosling altho his singing voice is not at all what we expected.
• An old UNIVAC ad from the 50s and the Spartan Parody of the same ad
• Bejeweled
• How to leave work at work from DumbLittleMan.com
• Making that novel into a real paperback is an article over at Macworld that describes how to self publish a copy or two of your great American novel.
• My friend and favorite bookkeeper has started a new company with a blog! CrackerJack Coaching has the subtitle "Portland Small Business Consulting & Coaching for Right Brain, Creative Thinkers". I think it's a great place to go and get information if you run a business.
• Styx is coming to Spirit Mountain Casino and I made Tim buy tickets for us to go.

Link Disclaimer: most of the links on this page go to external sites beyond the control of cliffdweller. Some of them may not yield the exact results over time that the original description on this page outlines.

I like where my life is and where it's heading, so I'm just going to stay the course.

It's certainly not boring, and it's not too aggressive, and it's not too crazy. So why not.

Happy New Year to all, and to all a good night.

It suggests (and expands on) these important points:

• Reflect
• Reward Yourself
• Reinvent Your Passion
• Reserve Time for Play

I especially like this gem:

The bad thing about working hard is it can be extremely time-consuming

hahahahaha!

Stay tuned, especially if you have a Mac. I plan to have a couple of visualizers posted here on the blog in the next few weeks… Sorry, but these compositions rely on the specific graphics handling of Mac OS X, so they won't work in the pc version of iTunes.

Happy Christmas everyone!