The biggest question is if the story is compelling or this is just another piece of eye candy. Can’t be any worse than Unobtanium can it?

Wikipedia

I want to watch the US World Cup game online, BBC streams it but like all BBC stuff it’s UK only. But US isn’t exactly lacking for sports channels and websites, ESPN3 proudly advertises that they’re the home to the World Cup here.

So I goto the live streaming section of their page to watch. I’m willing to put up with all the BS commercials and advertising that I’d get on ESPN TV as well; I’m looking for an illegal download or anything. But ESPN only has deals with certain ISPs so unless you’re with a service provider that has a deal with them you don’t get the game.

When your ISP doesn’t show up or you choose one that isn’t supported they have the gall to tell you that if you want to watch the game to change to somebody that has a deal with them. However it’s not like opening the page in a different browser or going to a different access point, changing ISPs is like changing phone providers only worse. And what about when we’re on a corporate network that doesn’t go through a consumer ISP? Many businesses get their internet from AT&T or Verizon, but they get business connections so they don’t have “V-cast” logins to get to the streaming site.

It creates an environment hostile to small businesses that want to compete with the big players. If I start a small ISP and want to provide for my customers I can’t compete on the same level at AT&T, and if ESPN doesn’t work on my ISP customers will flock to the huge providers (local ISP Xmission wasn’t even listed as an ISP on ESPNs site). So users stay with the big players which consequently are the ones that charge awful rates and use deceptive business practices to bleed their customers dry.

There is a movement in the government to basically level the playing field of the internet by passing laws to guarantee Net Neutrality. The idea is that all traffic is equal for people who pay to be online. ISPs can’t restrict what or where people go online, just like if you have a car and a license you can drive to a different city; companies can’t say, “Sorry, you’re from New York. You can’t drive through Kansas, and if you go through Nebraska you have to stay under 10 MPH.”

Opponents to Net Neutrality say that by putting laws on how internet providers and businesses work will be putting restrictions on internet freedom. This is a red herring, America has freedoms but we need laws to guarantee those freedoms, it’s like saying that making a law that guarantees free speech you’re restricting freedom of speech.

But the ESPN3 issue proves that monopolistic businesses create an environment that restricts business and consumer freedoms when laws don’t exist to guarantee those freedoms. Our internet is getting more and more restricted because the big boys only play with the big boys, and then lobby congress to stop laws that would allow other companies to get a foot in the door.

Anyway I’m pissed that ESPN wouldn’t let me watch the game from their site, not only was I willing to put up with their commercials but the option to watch wasn’t even a possibility since none of the local ISPs had made a deal with them, even Qwest was cut out.

And they wonder why people go to illegal means to get stuff.

Pac-Man Facts:
Like most games of the time Pac-Man is Japanese, Paku Man. “Paku Paku” is a Japanese mimetic word for the sound of eating, like “Doki Doki” is the sound of a fast beating heart. So the name comes from the act of eating; converted to latin the Japanese name パックマン becomes Pakkuman, which we simplified to Pac-Man.

The ghosts Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde are of course American names. The ghosts original Japanese names describe their attack personalities; roughly translating to Chaser, Ambusher, Fickle and Stupid.

Pac-Man only has 255 levels, all are the same; but due to a programming issue the game won’t work past 255. Because computers at their core work on binary a certain number of bits is required to represent the data. In binary 8 bits has a maximum number of 255 (this is why IP addresses don’t go over 255 per octet). Pushing for that 9th bit to be able to count to 256 causes Pac-Mac to only render half the screen.
Perhaps this was a deliberate oversight by the programmers, after all who would ever play a game through 255 levels?

Along with the Atari ET game, the port of Pac Man to the Atari 2600 was one of the reasons for the video game crash of 1983. As good developers fled Atari due to publishing rights arguments games with known good potential like Pac Man were cranked out as pieces of garbage and the gamer market responded by abandoning systems. Nintendo would pick up the pieces 2 years later.

“Back in the day” it was common for a game to be produced by only one or two programmers who would get billing on the title screen. One of my favorites was “Floyd of the Jungle” by a certain Sid Meyer in 1982.

Atari wanted all their games to be “by Atari” on the title screen. Hard working programmers felt they didn’t get the recognition they deserved and fled starting up their own programming companies like Activision.

But unfortunately news moves too fast for the comics to be too topical. So these comics will never see the light of day.

I’m sure coming up with hilarious comics every day is pretty taxing, so having a comic that writes itself has to feel great:

Take a moment to marvel at the fact that I didn’t need to add anything to the story as it has been told in the media. All it really needed was Wally. I don’t think any of us will ever know what really happened. I based the comic on the media’s speculation of events. Remember that I’m in the parody business and not the truth business.

Original iPhone story.

The Next Web

@victorchamp According to publishers, the iPad will revolutionize magazines by turning them into websites, or CD-ROMs from the 90’s.

Twitter

It also goes well with the plot in that the digital world has grown by leaps and bounds since the first movie and has become a dangerous place. I’m actually half way though writing a blog post about how this is happening in real life so a movie about it coming in December is fitting.

A few cool things from the trailer: of course the light cycles are upgraded (light car?) and the image of a guy wiping out in a light wall is excellent.

They also kept the Recognizers!!!! I was wondering because in TRON 2.0 the recognizers had been converted into packet transports. That had some excelent quotes for tech and network geeks like me.

“In the event of sudden archive decompression, a subnet mask will rez into your overhead memory. If you are accompanying any subprograms, please install your own mask before assisting them.”

“You would probably lose your header if it weren’t compiled on.”

“8 bits short of a byte.”

Grab the HD version here. Thanks Giz.

It’s also going to be 3D but I’m hoping it was filmed in 3D and not 2D->3D converted like Alice in Wonderland which I hear is a sub-par alternative.

I can see the legalities for when you hire a singer to sing songs that aren’t theirs in a bar or club if that’s what they exclusively do. But Casual covers or public singing should be allowed in my opinion.

I really noticed this as a problem in Japan at Karaoke bars, many songs couldn’t be played in the same version as broadcast so they had crummy midi versions that were nothing like the original. It really ruins the fun and makes me not want to listen to the song. Which seems like a bad thing for the people who are trying to promote it.

Problem is that RSS import didn’t work so that the posts have to be moved by hand and have their dates changed to match the original posting date. Also the links that linked within the blog don’t work anymore, or until I fix them. Plus comments were lost but there weren’t many; I do read them and still remember and since most were messages to me the info is not lost.

That reminds me that tomorrow I’ll be doing more work on prepping next years hydroponic garden. I’ve been tracking this one from day one to make up a list of parts needed, how much they cost, and where I got them.

Anyway sorry about the mess, I hope the new look is an improvement.

I also might be testing out new features so if weird stuff appears and disappears it’s just me farting around with stuff on the back.

Old internal links might not work so well, and images may be lost until I can fix them.

One is the overuse of the “citation needed”.
I understand the need for accuracy and that’s what that tag is for, however some people go on sprees throwing it at any sentence that doesn’t have a link to an external reference even when the comment itself is speculative. An example is a sentence like, “Some people even think the moon landings were faked by the government “.
Besides the fact this can be proven by reading the idiotic comments on youtube, how about the guy who made the edit? There citation made, no need to get equally unreliable proof linked off the internet.

But what got me riled up this time was how some people feel the need to see inferences and connections where none exist and then spew the nonsense online like having it on wikipedia somehow validates their idiotic ramblings. It’s those same people you see in a coffee shop spouting false pseudo-philosophy to an ignorant wide eyed freshman girl because he just watched “What the Bleep do we know?“. Although in the girl’s defense she’s probably just playing along because she knows the guy is a virgin desperate for attention and will be an easy lay.

Anyway in the entry for Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll left the following references to the field Mathematics:

In chapter 1, “Down the Rabbit-Hole,” in the midst of shrinking, Alice waxes philosophic concerning what final size she will end up as, perhaps “going out altogether, like a candle.”; this pondering reflects the concept of a limit.

Yeah it COULD be a mathematical reference to limits or just a simple comment that she doesn’t want to shrink to death.

In chapter 5, “Advice from a Caterpillar,” the Pigeon asserts that little girls are some kind of serpent, for both little girls and serpents eat eggs. This general concept of abstraction occurs widely in many fields of science; an example in mathematics of employing this reasoning would be in the substitution of variables.

I know that substitution of variables is common in math but it’s more common in real life, even by people (children) who have now idea of the mathematical concept of variables. Just like when how all mathematicians I know apply math to things that don’t warrant it, thus when I meet somebody making making more out of circumstances than there really is I ask, ” By chance are you a mathematician?”

The Cheshire cat fades until it disappears entirely, leaving only its wide grin, suspended in the air, leading Alice to marvel and note that she has seen a cat without a grin, but never a grin without a cat. Deep abstraction of concepts (non-Euclidean geometry, abstract algebra, the beginnings of mathematical logic…) was taking over mathematics at the time Dodgson was writing. Dodgson’s delineation of the relationship between cat and grin can be taken to represent…

God, please just shut up!

Sometimes somebody slips in a math reference for the nerds out there and sometimes a story is just a story.

By the way did you know that the upcoming Tim Burton “Alice in Wonderland” movie with Johnny Depp is not a remake or an adaptation but a sequel to the books? I didn’t. In them alice is all grown up.

One thing I miss from Japan was the themed restaurants bars shopping centers pachinko parlors love hotels gaming centers.

The weird drinks in the bottom right looks like the strange “cure all” vitamin C drinks they sell there. The commercials claim results similar to taking some Mentats.

via gizmodo

“The charge is bank robbery. Now, my caddie’s chauffeur informs me that a bank is a place where people put money that isn’t properly invested. Therefore, robbing a bank is tantamount to that most heinous of crimes, theft of money.” – Judge Whitey (Futurama)

Maybe that quote is a bit extreme. It is after all a joke made by a fictitious pompous rich WASP judge from the future; but it sticks in the back of my head when people tell me they plan for their future by stashing money under their mattress or buying gold coins.

I’m not a fool when it comes to money. My parents had a lot of financial issues while I was growing up and through their mistakes I was able to learn how to be responsible with my money even before I had enough money to worry about.

But one thing I always dragged my feet on was planning for retirement. What kid in their 20’s plans for what they’ll be doing half a decade in the future? We’re worried about getting a cool car, socializing with beautiful women, and finding out where the party is at Friday night (new lesson learned, the appeal of a cool car wears off early but the need having reasonable transportation will stay).

There is a lot of good financial advice out there but let’s face it, your attitude to financial planning at “25 and single” is a worlds different from your financial planning at “45 and married with kids”. I even try more than my peers to listen to all the advice given but retirement seems like such a small problem when I’m busy trying to figure how to get the bank to give me a loan so I can purchase some transportation to work. I’m not worried about retirement if I can’t even maintain my job to begin with.

A few years ago when my father was trying to organize his financial mess I learned a key item about retirement accounts I never knew. My parents had been slowly digging themselves out of decades of debt and the future looked bright but some emergency issues had cropped up and the only way to cover them had been to pay by credit card (new lesson learned, keep a healthy emergency fund for emergencies over $1000). It would take over a year to make up the credit debt and the 25% interest rates in that time would be murder to the newly balanced budget. My dad told me he was going to take money out of his 401k.

I didn’t know much about retirement accounts but I did know that pulling money out early leads to massive fees. I told him that losing money in early retirement fees wasn’t any better than losing money in credit interest, plus with retirement only a few years away it was damaging for his already small retirement (he had started saving late, another lesson learned), and that if he could just hold out a few years he’d have more help.

Then he told me he wasn’t withdrawing his 401k, he was pulling out a loan against the 401k.

It’s a key difference. In one case you completely remove the money, it’s taxed; and if it’s early additional fees are tacked on. The loan is not taxed, and there are no fees; the key point being that you will pay it back into the 401k like any other loan.

This allowed me to see retirement accounts in a different light. I’d always thought of them as basically like a big savings account that you can put money into but you can’t touch until you’re 65. And while treating it like this is ideal for retirement, when you’re 25 taking $60 out of your paycheck and not seeing it for another 40 years is a big deal. I could seriously use that money now.

So dad got the loan, there is no approval process and no loan officer to beg for money. If you want it it’s yours so long as you pay it back before retirement. Having learned this I finally took the plunge and started my retirement account while in my 20s. Of course now that I’m in I don’t know why I didn’t start earlier, I barely miss the $60 a paycheck and employer matching has caused the 401k to balloon faster than I ever imagined. And the fact that I now have a pool of money I can responsibly loan to myself makes it mind boggling that people still don’t immediately start building their own retirement accounts.

The loan is really like any other (I have Fidelity but most companies are similar):
-You arrange a payment plan of X dollars a month over Y years and the money is automatically deducted from your paycheck before you touch it, removing the temptation to spend it and the problem of not paying on time.
-You still pay interest but you get a decent rate, usually better than any bank will give you.
-The interest you pay goes back into your own retirement account.
That’s worth saying again.
-The interest you pay goes back into your own account, not the bank and not the company holding your 401k. It goes back into your own pocket, even if you don’t really get to pull it out of that pocket it until retirement.
-Than means that the only money unrecovered is the ~$30 processing fee to make the loan.
-And depending on who your 401k is through all this can be done online.

Now obviously this isn’t something you want to make a habit of using but it’s an excellent tool to have at your disposal when compared to paying 25%+ interest to a credit card or paying hundreds of dollars in interest to a bank loaning you money.

There are caveats of course:
-You can only have two loans at a time.
-You can’t take out more than 50% of your 401k in loans.
-If you lose your employment with an outstanding loan the company holding the account has the right to demand immediate payment (but will usually work out a payment plan with you).
-You can’t make extra incremental payments, but you can pay the entire remaining balance early.
-Unless you stop it, you will still be withdrawing X percentage to you retirement as usual, in addition to the loan payment.
-While your loan is out that money is not invested, same as if it was withdrawn from your 401k completely.

A lot of people say that that last caveat is the reason you should avoid 401k loans, as the money that is loaned out it is not invested, thus hurting your future retirement.

However the door swings both ways in this case. In the summer of 2008 I had my own emergency; a few weeks before a 3 week vacation to Japan a relatively trivial medical emergency cleaned out my vacation fund. Rather than let a poor healthcare plan stop me I pushed onward and went on my trip…
Paid mostly on credit.

I got home and had my chance to put the 401k to the test. In less than a week had tapped my now $8,000 401k for a $4000 loan avoiding the interest fees from the credit card. Before you freakout I knew I had about $1500 in reimbursed school funds coming soon, and calculated the other $2500 could be paid in about 8-6 months if I buckled down. I had set my repayment options to the bare minimum stretching out the loan to a few years but with small withdrawals per paycheck but planning on paying it off early. Various things cropped up and I still had a lot of that money out on loan in September 2008 when the market nose-dived.

I decided to follow the old adage of “Buy Low” and waited till the market plunge leveled out in April before paying off the loan with money I had been saving in the intervening months. As the market bounced back that $2500 loan pay off multiplied along with it.

So yes money on loan isn’t invested but in some cases that’s not a bad thing, especially if it’s being put to good use eliminating a more pressing financial emergency. Obviously I was lucky in my circumstance and nobody should try to game their retirement accounts playing with loans to get the same outcome. But it does prove that a negative can be turned into a positive with a little bit of planning.

The main thing I hope people take away from all this, especially those of us in the under 35 age group, is that not only is it good to plan for retirement now but that your retirement account can still be useful in the intervening 40 years. The quicker you start the bigger that cushion will be to help you out of a jam.

As long as you’re responsible and don’t abuse it you have a source you can loan to yourself, pocket your own interest during the payback, and have it all waiting for you as a retirement account when you reach 65.

Terrorists may kill a few people and temporarily scare everybody but it’s fear mongers like him who allow the “Terrorists to win” by keeping that fear and hatred alive and strong far longer than it would normally exist. Now our great country is a laughing stock where people coming from dictatorships are shocked at how many stupid ineffective hoops we have to jump through in the name of “national security”. I mean we can’t even bring nail clippers with us on vacation because they’re afraid we’ll use them to hijack a plane. You know what you do when somebody with nail clippers attacks you?
Anything.
Anything will do more damage that nail clippers. Punch, kick, even screaming is a better attack.

That’s why as a decorated war veteran and proud citizen of the United States I’m happy to see somebody hoist Beck on his own petard, making obviously baseless claims to put somebody on the defensive against something that doesn’t exist. If only it would teach him to shut the hell up about how we can never trust another living human being (it won’t).

Ars has a nice writeup of the Glenn Beck issue that Glenn Beck hasn’t denied that he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. Currently he’s trying to get the domain to the above site shuttered to try to eliminate the issue because it makes him look bad worse.

I agree with most people that regardless of the truth or satire, bullying domain registrars into shutting down websites that compete with you for making the most idiotic baseless claims on the net is the wrong way to deal with everybody’s opinion that you’re an asshat.

The bad news is that pundits like Beck love this attention, especially when it’s negative, because it makes them finally feel like the victim they always pretend to be. It’s likely that now they’ll just sue the owner of the website or drag him through enough court cases that even winning will leave him penniless.

But the exercise, involving speeding boats and at least one helicopter, probably would have passed unnoticed except that two TV networks confused simulated chatter over a Coast Guard radio for actual events and reported that the Coast Guard had opened fire on a suspicious vessel near ceremonies attended by President Barack Obama.

Here’s the simple version:
The Coast Guard was running a routine practice drill.
CNN and the news media overheard the drill while eavesdropping on scanners.
Rather than verify what was going on and providing proper journalism they jumped to conclusions and claimed that a possible attack was happening.
Other equally lax organizations copied the erroneous news creating a false mass hysteria.

The best way to deal with this is boycott Cable News stations. I’m sure you’ve already noticed they don’t really provide you with anything of use. They blow small things out of proportion and make things that shouldn’t be a problem into an actually problem.

Actually it was scheduled to come down but I don’t think undoing the bolts around the middle and knocking it over was how they were planning on doing it considering how it went up in many pieces like a giant constructor set.

Via Danny Choo and Hatimaki.

The OpenDPI engine will identify a huge list of non-encrypted protocols, however:

• P2P File Sharing: BitTorrent, eDonkey , KaZaa/Fasttrack, Gnutella, WinMX, DirectConnect, AppleJuice, Soulseek, XDCC, Filetopia, Manolito, iMesh, Pando
• Voice over IP: SIP, IAX, RTP
• Instant Messaging: Yahoo, Oscar, IRC, unencrypted Jabber, Gadu!Gadu, MSN
• Streaming Protocols: ORB, RTSP, Flash, MMS, MPEG, Quicktime, Joost, WindowsMedia, RealMedia, TVAnts, SOPCast, TVUPlayer, PPStream, PPLive, QQLive, Zattoo, VeohTV, AVI, Feidian, Ececast, Kontiki, Move, RTSP, SCTP, SHOUTcast
• Tunnel Protocols: IPsec,GRE, SSL, SSH, IP in IP
• Standard Protocols: HTTP, Direct download links (1-click file hosters), POP, SMTP, IMAP, FTP, BGP, DHCP, DNS, EGP, ICMP, IGMP, MySQL, NFS, NTP, OSPF, pcAnywhere, PostgresSQL, RDP, SMB, SNMP, SSDP, STUN, Telnet, Usenet, VNC, IPP, MDNS, NETBIOS, XDMCP, RADIUS, SYSLOG, LDAP
• Gaming Protocols: World of Warcraft, Half-Life, Steam, Xbox, Quake, Second Life

BitTorrent, DirectConnect, ORB, VeohTV, SHOUTcast, IPsec, GRE, SSL, SSH, RDP, WoW. I know a lot of people who don’t think these can be identified but they can. This is also connected directly to your IP address so they will know that YOU sent it, what it program it was, and where it went. Using DPI they may not know what you sent over Bittorrent, but they will know that you did torrent something from point A to B.

I first began learning of DPI when I was on the security team working for Cisco in 2004, Cisco’s implementation is called CBAC and at the time is was installed in most currently sold routers and switches. Now it is in most all Cisco devices and added into many old ones through IOS updates.

DPI isn’t a way to reconstruct data streams and recover files that cross the internet, it’s simply the act of opening up the packet further, more than just seeing the IP addressing or what port it is destined for. DPI looks close enough to see what type of application the packet is used with. Imagine it as opening a traveling packet enough to see that it is a “.doc” file; you can’t tell what the doc files says from this one chunk, just that part of a doc file crossing the net from point A to B.

While this may allay fears that ISPs are reconstructing your data as it passes through their devices it’s almost equally alarming how much control ISP can use to rate limit and control what traffic you send and receive.

Like I said, most all Cisco devices can now check and filter this traffic; even my little 871 at home can do this so you know the big backbone routers can do it too. And being that Cisco devices make up 86% of the internet it’s virtually guaranteed that your data will pass through a CBAC capable device at some point. ISPs currently have the ability to pick and choose what you send over your connection and drop the rest if they want.

The saving grace is that DPI is more processor intensive than basic routing. The more inspection they do the higher the overhead moving data across the network. And as it stands now they’re trying to cut overhead as much as possible. Most backend routers don’t even act as routers so much as highspeed switches, they check once to see the layer 3 IP address of a packet then send the it and the rest of the datastream on it’s way.

Hopefully most ISPs will keep their lines an un-policed cloud where people can use the connection they pay for in the method of their choosing. But as the backend gets filled with bandwidth intensive Hulu streams, and torrent downloads they may put filters on these kinds of traffic to allow only permitted traffic through. The point is that everything is already in place, the only thing that need to change is ISP corporate policies.

Two statements of wisdom from me today.

In other news I’m on vacation this weekend so I REALLY need to fight off this bug! And my new job is paying for my Cisco certification tests the week after that!
Yay!

Now maybe they’ll let me go home so I can curl up in the fetal position under a pile of blankets.

I got this Early Singles Box for about $40 at the time, and was charged another $30 in shipping!!!!

Nuts to that so I’m signing into the Yes Asia affiliate program because believe me I speak from experience, if you’re going to buy Japanese products they’re the way to go. For one thing the price is about the same you’d get buying from a commercial store in Japan, and if you spend more than $20 the shipping is automatically FREE!!! Not even amazon.us is that good.

Again speaking from experience a newly released Japanese single costs about $10-$11 from HMV or Tower Records. The same single is available on Yes Asia for about $12 with the same release date and it’s the Japanese version, not some Hong Kong overseas version or a bogus Taiwanese bootleg like you get on eBay (I should write a blog entry on that whole world…).

Anyway I finally have a way to recommend legal Japanese items of stuff I review for less than the 500% markup it would cost to purchase them through amazon!

Speaking of which here are a couple so I can test the system out:

The one of the CDs I purcahsed a few months ago was SCANDAL – “Doll” which although being very “poppy” is a great song with a ton of energy.

And one I just got done listening to right now that I was impressed with is Orange Range – “Oshare Bancho”. Like most Orange Range stuff it’s very rock/hip-hop that is well done. The show has a great music video too.

Good Stuff. And it has that one taranto in it, I call him “Annoying McShouts-alot” (You’ll know who I’m talking about if you’ve seen him before.

Finally a banner test (will it survive when the promotion ends??)

And their main banner:

EDIT: Hmm. Seems to work, but I like amazon’s tools for building links and sidebars better. Definitely need to explore this some more.

The next time this sequence will come up is in exactly 100 years (hope I make it).

Ignore the blog timestamp. Their server is east coast, my reality is that 12:34 is right now!

Spilled food is a given for any yard party or get together that involves loading up a plate of food and taking it to your table. How can you hold a drink in one hand and fit a hamburger, hotdog, handfull of chips, and two servings of Pork and Beans on one plate without spilling it?

At family parties I love to watch people do the paper plate balancing act from the food table back to their seat while a bunch of 4 year old kids run around their legs screaming. It’s like cirque du soleil with the possibility of somebody getting a facefull of potato salad and ranch veggie dip.

Hamburgers and Hotdogs at the park on a hot summer afternoon is about as American is it gets (eat that Baseball and Apple pie!) And now there is an invention that will keep people from having to hose off the grass when the party is over.

Viva the 4th of July!

From Uncrate via gizmodo.

It’s going to be a bit different this time, not about politics but more about me.  What I’m doing, my philosophy (if you wanna call it that), and things that interest me that others might want to know about.

Beyond that I’m still not really sure what exactly this is.  Hopefully things will get more interesting as I go on or maybe people will find interest in something I talk about.  I know that sounds kind of conceited but in these days where reality TV dominates the airwaves and people subscribed to twitter accounts to keep up on the banal minutiae of eachother’s lives, maybe it’s not such a bad idea.

Personally I’m at one of life’s little crossroads right now; I’m trying to move up in life and make some changes but the economy in my job are working against me.

As of May 29 I won’t have a job anymore so I’m currently looking for a new one.  I’ve been testing for my CCNA certification to get a better, higher paying job.

I also recently downsized my car from an SUV to a smaller road friendly car that gets better mileage but the timing of the payment doesn’t play well with my recent job loss.

Also out of personal interest I set up a hydroponic garden this year.  Partially for personal knowledge, partially to save the world, partially to make money, but mostly because it sounded fun.

And as usual I’m still struggling at learning Japanese, and wishing I could go back to Japan for some time, listening to music, attending concerts, hiking in the mountains, playing video games, tweaking and upgrading my techno-gadgets, etc. etc…