Corporate Congress, Internet Edition

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I thought this site was pretty interesting – sopatrack.com

I mean, we’ve known for ages that Congressmen make quite the bank from political contributions by corporations looking to buy themselves the upper hand, but just how bad does your Congress person listen to his or her wallet rather than the voices of his constituents???

Essentially what Sopatrack does is match up political contributions with Congress’ voting history to paint a pretty vivid picture of how closely aligned any given politician is with the issues that just so happen to be in favor of their own sponsors.

Certainly not surprising by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it just drives home the fact even more that we need to get the almighty dollar out of politics if we ever want the general public to get its money’s worth from this group of corporate sellouts…

Space Shuttle Discovery’s Retirement Flight

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So anyone who follows sciencey news and whatnot was probably already aware that today was the day for the Space Shuttle Discovery to take its commute up to Washington DC to find its new retirement castle at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. Sure, it’s kind of a bittersweet topic, but just for today let’s try to focus on the awesome and keep our fingers crossed that Florida’s Space Coast will still see its share of exploration long after the shuttle program is behind us…

Here’s a cool video of the shuttle and its carrier 747 in its final descent over the National Mall in DC:

Along with a nice, close-up view of the pair still on the ground from yesterday after NASA finalized securing the two for flight:

And finally, this one is thanks to National Geographic – click through the image below to pull up an incredibly detailed panoramic view of the entire orbiter’s cockpit, allowing you to zoom all the way in so that you can even check out the individual dials and buttons across the massive control center! Not sure how close guests will be able to get up to the shuttle once they get it situated at the museum, but I’m kinda guessing probably not this close…  😉

Pretty awesome stuff – happy exploring!

Thin Post : Quick Summary, Week #WHATEVER

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I guess I haven’t really been very good at doing these in the month of April.

They seemed to help me in February, but kinda died out in March and I haven’t had much luck as resurrecting them here in April, either.

Then again, I think I had more of my weight loss in February than I did in March, and April has been pretty stagnant altogether, so maybe that should be telling me something here!  😳

I’ve actually found that I waver with a lot of these things, though – one thing will help me along for a month or two, then I’ll get tired of it and want to seek out something else to help motivate more ground beneath my feet and less food between my lips. I think it’s going to be really interesting to look back at all of this when I finally reach my target weight who knows when to see all of the different methods that I employed to make it actually happen. Lots of writing, plenty of different workout routines, rewards and distractions, and modifications to my diet.

I probably won’t be doing any more of these summary things for a while, though I did really like the quarterly summary so I’ll probably put another one of those together come July to sum up my last three months of effort – that was a little more encouraging to me because I could see the culmination of my efforts instead of just a week at a time. Not sure what I’ll do next, either – maybe just go back to some more random posts on whatever’s on my mind on a given week or if I come up with a new strategy altogether, it could very well be that, too!

Such a long road to travel – I suppose one needs more than just a handful of things to help pass the time…  8)

Home Maintenance Headaches

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I don’t want to go off on too much of a rant here because I certainly don’t want to alienate things with our landlord should he happen to wander across this here bloggy post, but I’ve kinda been getting a little frustrated with the state of affairs around our house lately…

We moved into the new rental house that we currently call home just about a year ago, and obviously as things normally are when they’re new to you, everything was pretty much awesome. We found a few minor problems and just assumed that they’d get taken care of shortly, so we didn’t really make a big deal about them. The biggest one was a leak where the lanai meets our house that drips water into the living room when it rains really hard – it probably sounds worse than it has been, but it was typically only noticeable during hurricane season when it rains every single day to the point where we didn’t dare unpacking anything underneath the window in question where the water falleth through.

That said, our list started slowly growing … and growing … to the point where today I’ve literally got a full page, double-spaced list of items around our house that need to get repaired. And they’re not likely cheap, simple fixes, either – like recently we discovered a hole in our pool filter, or for the longest time we’ve had one of the jets in our hot tub that’s been broken. And admittedly a lot of them are more creature comforts, as opposed to more serious concerns like the leaks that risk damage to the house itself, or in the case of the pool filter, just jack up our water bill and waste a ton of water.

But at the same time, our rent isn’t exactly cheap and we do kind of have an expectation for what we should actually get out of the house that we’re renting. It’s not really very fair to us to sign a lease with a certain level of expectations, only later to find that X isn’t working or Y doesn’t quite work the way you might expect.

I guess that’s kind of the problem that you have to battle when you rent – the landlord may technically be responsible for maintaining the house, but the likelihood of him just having an open checkbook to fix every issue the moment it comes up may not necessarily be so good. I’ve had to struggle with previous landlords over repairs before and it’s never fun – you would think that in addition to my rent paying their mortgage, they’d set aside some money each month as a reserve to cover the same kinds of repairs and maintenance that you’d do to take care of your own house, but I think instead they tend to get disconnected from the property itself because they’re never actually there themselves and thus as a result they tend to replace more things altogether than actually maintain them along the way to prolong their lifespan.

On one hand, I can certainly understand – the reason why we don’t own a house of our own today is because we’re simply not in the right place financially right now and if we did, all of this kind of crap would be ours to take care of and it’s definitely very expensive, but on the other hand, it’s still not fair to rent us a shiny, red apple, only to later discover that parts of that Delicious Red more closely share resemblance to a lemon…  😥

Super Mario Kickstarter, Lego Edition

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It seems like I’ve been coming across a lot of intriguing Kickstarter campaigns lately, and this one certainly adds to that legacy!

Basically the guy wants to make a gigantic Lego mosaic mural of the very first level of the original Super Mario Bros – a feat that will clock in at a daunting 6 feet x 90 feet and use upwards of 780,000 bricks in the process! Hence the fundraising drive because even if he can find the colors at $0.02 a piece in the massive quantities that he needs, that’s still over $15 grand just in Legos alone … not to mention the base plates, glue, and whatever else is needed to orchestrate a project of this epic magnitude!

Granted, I’m still not entirely sure what one does with a 90′ mural when all is said and done – hopefully it can find a home in a museum somewhere after it makes the convention tour because I’d kinda doubt that few people aside from Miyamoto himself even have a wall in their house big enough to hang 90′ of video game history!  😯

As an aside, this has kind of inspired me to try my hand at making a Nintendo-oriented Lego mosaic of my own, so stay tuned for more on that…  :mrgreen:

New Mystery Project…

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Boy, do I really want to talk about this, but at the same time I know that I really shouldn’t talk about it!!!  😮

It’s a common adage amongst creative type people that it’s best not to talk publicly about a new project that you’re working on until you’re actually done and ready to unveil it to all of your adoring fans. The reasons are plentiful – you don’t want to waste your promotional enthusiasm now before there’s actually anything to buy, you don’t want your fans to both ramp up and subsequently get over an idea before there’s anything of substance for them to enjoy, and hell – for all you know, it might not even end up getting done!

That’ll sure leave you feeling red in the face, when somebody asks you two years later, “Hey, what ever happened to that Super Awesome Thing-a-ma-jig that you were working on?! I was really looking forward to giving you boatloads of my hard-earned moolah for that!”

That said, at the same time it’s really hard to resist blabbing about a new project that you’re excited about because, well, you’re excited about it and it’s big enough to be worth your time, so why not?!

So anyways, I’m going to do my best not to spill the beans on this new one that I’m undertaking, except for these few tiny morsels that I just have to get out of my system before it bursts … creatively speaking, of course! This new thing that I’m working on is something that I’ve never done before, although I’m sure there was a point where the concept crossed my mind in the past. But it’s definitely a first, and it’s going to be very colorful, and the current goal is to have everything done by the end of the summer.

Also, it’s a collaborative effort that I’m doing with my sister, who you may remember from the comic’s fame.

But that’s it – no more chatter until it’s done!

Whew – believe it or not, I actually do feel a lot better now.  🙄 It actually has been a whole lot of fun with even the little bit that we’ve completed so far, and I hope that five months from now you all find it rather enjoyable to, well, enjoy, too!  :mrgreen:

Google BBS … didn’t actually work for me…

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Neat concept, although apparently it’s getting so much traffic right now that they’re maxing out the API calls to Google Search and all I got back was “Try again later…”

Still, a fun reminder of the good, old days of ASCII art and 2400-baud modems and waiting an hour and a half to download the latest mods for Doom!

Wait a minute – 2400-baud was 1 kb/s?! Whereas today I have an always-on cable connection into my house offering up 20,000 kb/s?!?!?!

Ok, so maybe not all of it was necessarily “good,” albeit the “old” moniker still definitely holds up strong…  😉

Pondering FiOS, Part 80-Bajillion

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As it seems like I am pretty much every other month these days, I’m up in the air once again entertaining the idea of switching over from cable to FiOS.

It’s mainly the money that’s got me curious this time – I know that I’ve bitched in the past about promotional pricing being a giant racket, but we’re paying an embarrassingly obscene amount for cable these days … the service arguably hasn’t really even improved (more so worsened, if you ask my wife!) and yet their prices continue to inch up a la inflation like just about everything else except my income, so I guess I’m just at the breaking point where I feel like something’s gotta give!

P.S. It also probably helped that while visiting one of Sara’s friends last night, I got a chance to finally see the FiOS TV interface for myself and wow, does it just look so much better than the clunky, spreadsheet-esque guide that our cable company is still drudging us through! I saw a handful of features right off the bat that just seemed really smart – stuff like better organization of recorded programs and pretty station logos you can browse for the different channels – and it made me feel a little better about considering the switch because one of my biggest fears has always been going through all of the hassle of changing over, only to find that the experience is a) virtually identical, and b) 6-months in, actually costing me more than cable had before I jumped ship…

Thankfully, it looks like Verizon finally got it in gear and re-wrote their checkout system to better spell out what to expect of their promotional pricing, so maybe this won’t be so bad after all.

Even after trimming off a couple of unneeded channels from our cable package first, the year #2 price for FiOS is still about $10 cheaper than what we’re paying for cable now, and you can see for that first year it’s more in the neighborhood of a $30/month discount, which would be kinda nice! My wife is eager to switch literally tomorrow because she just despises that the on-demand channels never seem to work with cable for her. I myself see it a little more lax because I hardly watch any TV at all right now, although we have been having ongoing issues with our router and I’m pretty sure we get a fancy, new one with FiOS so that might be my incentive to make the switch.

Everybody who I talk to about FiOS says that once they got it installed, they’ve never even looked back, and I was even excited about it myself when it was first announced … I just found myself gradually soured when Verizon completely failed at their attempt to install it in my apartment about five years ago. But maybe it’s time to give it another try – clearly they’ve done a lot of installs between now and then, and no apartment means no crumbling walls this time to have to deal with … plus, it might be nice to actually use HBO On-Demand at 2am instead of seeing Bright House’s clear as mud Error 1 – Try Again Later when all I want is a little Curb before drifting off to Never Never Land!  🙂

Pride of Accomplishment (and also cake)

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Anyways, aside from fighting with Walgreens, this afternoon I’m cutting out a little early to go listen to my wife give the keynote speech at graduation for the university where she got her nursing degree a few years ago!

Pretty sweet, huh?!

I was kind of taken aback by it myself when Sara first told me a week or two ago – granted, at the time I think she was a little more petrified about public speaking than enamored at the idea of all that she’s accomplished, so I was happy to beam a little extra pride on her behalf.  Also, I wasn’t the one who had to stand up there behind that podium, so why not?!

But in all seriousness, it really sounded like a big career-milestone when she told me – here she had abruptly decided to change careers from teaching into nursing right around the time we first met 6 years ago, she dove head first into 2 years of nursing school, and then in her 3 years since has risen up through the ranks at her hospital from an entry level job on the night shift to now teaching (nursing, this time!) for the entire hospital … to now be asked to come back and talk to the new graduating class about what their own futures in this ever-expanding field are going to be like really seems like a huge honor to me!

Also, did I mention that there’s probably going to be cake???

What can I say – I’ve got a particularly awesome afternoon ahead of me today!  :mrgreen: