Not quite ready...

I have it in my head to buy an e-reader, like a Kindle or a nook. Out of curiosity I visited the store sites for the Kindle, nook, and Sony e-reader, only to discover that they are seriously deficient in sci-fi books that I would read. Granted, WarHammer 40K may not exactly be the target demographic for these things, but I bet you a lot of geeks that buy these e-readers for free 3G access would also be the ones reading these type of books.

ROKN Corvette sinks.

A South Korean corvette has been sunk, possibly by North Koreans. It's a rather large asset, so if it really was sunk by the Norks than it isn't something the ROK can just ignore.

All Hands meeting on the Death Star

This probably resonates more if you were in the military. I remember a time when the CO called people back to the ship on Holiday Standdown because someone got into a barfight. Yeah, it's kinda like that.

Religiousity

Because I'm a socially stunted shut in graveyard shift worker, I end up reading a lot of random blogs on the internet. One of them was the Freakanomics blog, and this entry gave me some thought.

Once upon a time I was extremely to the right, conservative Christian. I even read the Left Behind series avidly. At this same time(in San Francisco) I had joined the HS Debate team and was introduced to the Onion. . At about this time Harry Potter was starting to pick up popularity, and so the Onion ran an article about how it causes satanism amongst kids, witchcraft, etc. It was so over the top it was hilarious. I posted the article on the Left Behind message boards think the other posters there would agree that it's funny...only to find people taking it at face value. In fact, most people were taking it at face value. I guess you could call that my "Road to Damascus" moment where I knew something wasn't right with that crowd. I mostly kept the dawning realization to myself, and when I went to Texas A&M I found myself involved with someone whose idea of a good time was to go to a prayer-christian-rock-concert hall thingie on campus every Tuesday. It was bizarre. And probably did even more to make me switch it off.

My rapidly dimming lack of faith in organized religion was something I continued to keep from my family, because I suspected that it wouldn't be a good idea to mention it to my folks or let it slip to my grandparents. I would never use the term atheist to describe me, but I was well and truly in the closet when it came to my family and some of my coworkers.

Since I've gotten out of the navy and been on my own I've dropped enough hints that my mother has read between the lines, my Dad I told flat out I wasn't interested in church, and my Mom's Dad has indicated he knows where I stand(and he's a Deacon in his Southern Baptist church!). Sadly, I've run into enough people that I fully understand what the person in the blog post is going through, and don't expect the general societal mores to improve a whole lot anytime soon.

Fun fact

Want to know something that is horrifying to me? There are 18 year olds out there who were born after Beauty and the Beast came out. Later on the year it will be the same in the case of Aladdin.

Yesterday(I work the graveyard shift so it often seems like "Today" for my internal clock) I opened my mailbox to see a packet that contained insurance papers in there. Well, two packets. One was big, wedged in there good, difficult to extract, from GEICO...and didn't belong to me. The gentleman had neglected to tell GEICO which apartment he lived in so there wasn't an apartment number, although someone at the post office had helpfully put a "?" next to the address. I was cheesed off that the postman couldn't be arsed to compare the names of the mail going to my mailbox and that oen, or spend the 30 seconds to look at the mailboxes in my building and making a probable match with the Kumar on the Far end.

So I did what anyone would do in that situation. I wrote a note on the packet along the lines of"This person does not live in #204. If you had looked at the names on the other pieces of mail you might have figured it out. Alternatively you could have spent 30 seconds looking at the names on the 12 mailboxes for the building and matched it up. But I guess if you could figure that out you wouldn't be a poastal employee. Yours in Christ, MBB".

Hope he doesn't mess with my mail.

New radio in Car

So a few days ago the tape deck died in my car radio(I know, I know). I used the tape deck in order to listen to my iPod or XM radio, so I was mildly cheesed off. I sat around for a few days trying to decide whether or not to bite the bullet and get a new radio head, or wait until whenever I get a new car(which I have defined in my mind as "The weekend afetr the engine falls out on the Beltway).

This morning my boss came in and handed me a AMEX gift card, because I was one of the few people stupid enough that had enough dedication to the mission that came into work during the Snowpocalypse of Feb. 2010. Add this to the Best Buy gift card my little brother gave me for building him a new computer not too dissimiliar from this one I had enough to go ahead and get a new radio plus install. In fact, I got the install done today, and I haven't really had a chance to play with the radio yet. I might need to, as it tends to flash different lights and stuff and maybe I need to set some settings.

Fake Processors

I'm glad that this didn't happen to me. It was originally reported that D&H was the supplier of the bogus processors, now it looks like it's a company called IPEX?

Moustache March

Awwww yeah. We're doing this.