So much has happened over the last two weeks that I hope I jam it all into this post without having to edit it!

The drive to San Antonio was as usual uneventful.  Podcasts kept me awake and lively for the duration but I realize that the TWiT broadcasts probably border on too long.  The Blizzard podcast has the perfect length of time almost before I get bored.  I’d say for me personally, about an hour is my limit.

My Thanksgiving break was short and I was honestly kind of out of it.  It was one of those vacations where I simply tuned out and needed rest.  This was at the expense of actually hanging out with the family.  So this time going down I was more focused on knocking out Rock Band 2 achievements and spending time and doing things with them.

My first day we killed Rock Band 2.  Knocked out a ton of achievements and played until we were sick of the last tier of songs.  I think if I have a gripe with Rock Band 2, it’s that the challenges are so static amid an ever changing library.  Instead of Painkiller/Panic Attack/etc for the last set every time, it should know based on difficulty rating of other songs you have bought to swap things up.  It was great and it wore us out for Christmas the next day.   Well, it wore me out anyway.

This year I think they let me sleep in actually.  I feel like I woke up at 7 or 7:30 and they usually have me up at 6 or something crazy.  When I was a kid I had to wait patiently for my Dad to wake up before I could tear into things.  We had a ritual actually.  We had to get the fireplace started, get coffee, be somewhat presentable for him to record Christmas on the camcorder, THEN I could tear into presents.  However, now it’s like “Is Tim up?” Although I know the stark contrast to the old days is that my Dad now works a night shift so he’s actually awake during this time anyway and it’s really us that hold up the whole situation.

When I go home, I’m actually surprised to find gifts for me since I’m old enough not to be considered a part of the household.  But it’s really heart warming to see my little brother and sister have taken time out to get me something.

The Loot:

• Mom/Older Sister: Western Digital 500GB Passport external hard drive
• Brother: Travel bag (the kind you’d put your toothbrush/razor in)
• Younger Sister: Shirt
• Aunt: 2 liter Pampered Chef pot
• Uncle: Long sleeve shirt

So the hugely cool gift they got me, which really is very cool since I did comment last time I was down there that I needed another drive, was the external hard drive.  It’s so small and awesome.  My younger sibling gifts were also pretty great as far as something I needed (from my brother) and something I’d wear (from my sister).

My aunt has this trend of getting me kitchen stuff which is always great.  Before she’d jump from clothes to cologne to totally random stuff.  Then she got me a set of pots and asked me what I thought of them and I said I loved them.  Since then she’s very consistently gotten me great kitchen stuff.

My uncle without fail has gotten me clothes, but sometimes surprising because it’ll be family related like something relating to Indiana, but this year it was a standardized gift.  Our family is pretty big to shop for (3 kids and 2 adults) and so it goes back to the surprise of seeing any gifts for me at all to see that he’s still mindful enough to get me something.

The kids got a 160GB Playstation 3 and with it, Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, and Uncharted.  My sister said that my brother had been into the zombie shooters, so I figured Bioshock would be great considering they already got him CoD4.  However, I realize now that it’s a bit too scary for him and so he hasn’t even started a game yet, but he watches his oldest sister play it for him.  When we’re all huddled around the TV we have a sort of narration that cuts into the mood so we’re not all at the edge of our seats sometimes when playing games.  But playing alone is probably too immersive.

GT5P unfortunately is probably too small a snippet and lacking some of the key features my Dad probably really loves about the series.  The shame of it is I thought the full game would be out this year, but it may be pushed back to 2010 according to Wiki.  Last I heard he had basically played all the tracks and bought some of the most incredible cars already.  I hope the last saving grace is the online play but to my knowledge he’s never played anything online and playing a game like that which is full of computer controlled cars vs other people like him who sort of abuse the collision mechanics might not be appealing to him.  It should be interesting to hear his feedback on it though.

I watched my brother play a large portion of CoD4 and yes, it really was awesome.  I think the coolest level was going through the past Chernobyl.   My brother plowed through it but I was eager to see how he’d play online since he plays very well against an easy computer and sort of knows the tricks to playing against a scripted enemy.  Of course, he was terrible at first, but by the time I left, every game he left he was in the top 3 if not top spot for his team.

Over the course of 3 years, my parent’s house has truly evolved to modern day living.  The only cool thing before this was that they had cable tv.  Now they have a computer for every family member, huge HDTV, Wii, and a PS3.  My main gripe now is that while they have “high speed” net access.  The truth is they have the lowest tier DSL package which is unbearable.  The max download speed is like 60 or 70KBPS.  Turning on the PS3 and seeing that it needed updates for nearly every game in the sizes of 200MB was a heart breaker.  It was confusing to my parents who thought it was broken and needed fixing.

Speaking of broken and needed fixing, I have basically a travel kit for my 360.  It consists of an ethernet cable, an HDMI cable, and all the rest of the Rock Band stuff I don’t normally use like the mic and the hub.  Plugging in the PS3 using it’s composite cable on the nice big HDTV seemed like a slap in the face, so I used my HDMI cable.  I was thinking that I should probably buy them an HDMI cable since going to a physical store will only get you some massively overpriced thing.  If you don’t know, HDMI is a digital signal and as such, doesn’t require fancy gold plating or anything like that.  The cheapest HDMI cable should still give you a great picture.  Anyway, I never got the cable, and as such, we spent the week swapping the HDMI between consoles.

One day though, my Dad is up at 8AM wanting to play GT5P but for some crazy reason the TV doesn’t like the input.  I go down, and in his frustration he’s plugged in both HDMI and composite.  Interestingly, neither of those inputs had a picture.  After many resets and plugging in and unplugging things, it finally worked.  However the time I spent doing it, my Dad is getting increasingly angry at this broken thing he’s bought.  I thought he’s going to be fairly angry if I leave with the HDMI and they don’t have one, so I ended up leaving it and now have to order myself a new one.  Not a big deal, but I’m temporarily unable to take my 360 anywhere.  Well I could take it, but unhooking the component cables from my TV is painful and annoying, which is why I opted for the spare HDMI cable.

Ok so now when I visit San Antonio I try to make a point to eat somewhere cool that I either don’t have or that’s a local dive that people rave about.  Though less of the second item, I usually end up at nicer places that facilitate the young taste buds of my brother who’s diet is mostly anything with cheese or anything that tastes like chicken.  My visit this time took us to Macaroni Grill (kind of a staple it feels like), McAlister’s (to introduce them to quality tea), Culver’s (because who doesn’t want to try something called a butterburger), and Carino’s.

Carino’s we have in Lubbock which fits none of my main topics for eating out in San Antonio.  But it was late, on the fly, and close.  The problem with Carino’s though in San Antonio and not in Lubbock, is that the last 2 times I’ve been there, this time included, it’s like we get seated in an area where the waiter has no idea where we are.  So we wait for 10 minutes before anyone even comes by!  In Lubbock, the service is great though.  Ah well.

Culver’s wasn’t anything fancy unfortunately.  The burgers were alright.  I feel like if they did something like toast the bun or something, then it would be awesome.  I think only my Mom noted that McAlister’s tea was great and that it was just tea to everyone else.  Macaroni Grill was interesting because out of the blue, my little brother gets handed to him a sundae out of the blue that didn’t appear on the check.  So random and so funny as he looks at me, I shrug my shoulders, and he tears into it.

That wraps up the bulk of my trip but not all of it.  I went to Houston and had car repair troubles which actually isn’t what you think it means after hearing that, also I bought Left 4 Dead and a pur water dispenser.

Smallville (Contains Spoilers)

This season is as usual a roller coaster of events for our pal Clark and likewise each episode has it’s ups and downs, but overall I feel like this season is doing pretty well.  The hardest part about the show is knowing once he becomes Superman, it’s pretty much over.  Knowing this, I don’t know that there was really an epic tale telling us how he became the person he is which makes it sound like why even watch the show?

This season has really touched on some of the cooler and more non-realistic points of being Superman like dealing with Doomsday and the Chloe memory wipe.  I’m looking forward to the Legion episode (Jan 15th) because maybe they’ll tell Clark how crazy important he becomes and it will jump start the Superman persona.  On the one hand, Clark still has to learn how to fly.  Knowing this may be the last season, he’s bound to have to do it soon I imagine.  However I’ve read they wrote the script for the last episode with 2 endings in mind: a season finale and a series finale.

Rock Band

Ok I finally started the drum trainer and man, it’s helped immensely.  We had a Rock Band session on Saturday and it got brought up that I was only playing on hard drums when I used to flip between hard/expert.  I only really play drums when we do the get togethers so I was pretty rusty and didn’t want to fail out the band, but then I thought about how unexciting the drumming must have seemed.  So I finally started up the drum trainer.  I beat the fill at 100BPM so I got the 60 and 100 achievements and finished the beat at 60 but am having real problems on some of the beats like tricky kicks.  Anything that alternates hand hits with kicks is just freakishly hard for me where the downbeat is a drum hit and the upbeat is a bass kick.  Of course my red drum head suffers from lack of sensitivity but I discovered on freestyle mode that the problem lies in the center of the pad.  The rim of the pad is super great on sensitivity and this is actually true for all the pads, they all seem more responsive on the edges.  Anyway, I feel like I’m pretty decent on expert up to about a 4 dot difficulty.  Anything more requires true skill, talent, and a drum kit that works 100%.

Website

Between my personal site and other sites I’m seemingly administering, I think I’ve conquered them!  I finally added my flickr feed to the right panel and changed out the twitter updates so it’s not stuck on last week.  I really want to find a nice WordPress template and call this site finished.  The problem is I don’t do main posts very frequently, most of the ideas I have can fit into a twitter posting and likewise interesting things I see go into flickr although that isn’t used as much.  With the current design both twitter and flickr aren’t highlighted and don’t draw the eye in.  I’m sure I’ll come across something sooner or later though.  It would be cool to find a plugin that allowed me to post flickr and twitter as main posts so they sort of all flowed into one.  I imagine these things exist and I’ve just been too lazy to search for them.

Tea Knockoff

I keep adjusting things and keep moving farther and farther away from McAlister’s deliciousness.  What’s worse is that I haven’t gone back in a week and a half so at this point I don’t even remember what it tastes like!  I’ll probably go back in a day just to refresh the palate.

Christmas

My sister sends me a text message saying “Don’t get yourself anything for Chrismas because Mom and I got you something REALLY COOL” which is an odd thing to say since usually my parents get me cash.  So the fact that they went out of their way to get me something has me both excited and nervous.  I mean, it could be like really amazing from the sound of it.  My imagination can’t comprehend what it might be.  A netbook??  A G1? ! An iPhone??!?  New Oakleys?!?!!!?!?!?  OR it could be you know, something for my cats like a cat carrier so I can bring them down to San Antonio.  I mean that would still be cool.  Although secretly, though not anymore, I’ve gotten my Christmas gift to myself and it was a paper shredder!  How sad is it when I don’t get myself anything fun, but get something practical and office-y.  Ah well.  I feel like after this Christmas, the total conversion of my parent’s house will be complete.  I have no idea what they’ll want next year because technology wise they’ll have everything and it’ll be so cool to visit them.

Like usual for Thanksgiving, I’m the designated turkey buyer, so I’ll be bringing that down.  I think I’ll take extended leave which means I’ll probably end up taking my PC down again but I need a cat sitter.  My stints back home have gotten shorter and shorter due to lack of care for the cats which makes the drive more and more irritating when I imagine that a bulk of my time is spent driving.  So I’ll stay longer and enjoy south Texas a bit more this year.  Turns out there’s a McAlister’s down the road from my parent’s house so maybe I can get them addicted to the tea there too!

Ok if you were following my twitter or talked to me in real life recently, you’re aware that I am in love with McAlister’s tea.  I actually hate tea in general, so to like something in the category of hating things let alone loving it is quite an incredible step.  So after realizing that it’s not cost effective to eat there 4 out of 7 days of the week like I had been, I needed to take steps that allowed me to cut some costs.

In my travels across the net, people have said that McAlister’s tea is actually just Lipton, which according to Hammeron is just insane because Lipton is like the cheapest and not-extravagant kind of tea one can buy.  But I thought I’d give it a whirl.  While at the store though I thought to myself, I know for a fact they brew this stuff, meaning I need some kinda method that allows for easy creation of said tea.  One website suggested just using a coffee machine so I strolled down the coffee machine aisle and found this Mr. Coffee Ice Tea Machine for $15 bucks.  $15 I’m reminded is 3 gallons of McAlister’s tea.

Anyway, machine in hand I went home and tried to make myself some magic.  My first attempt was 2 qt. line worth of water with 2 tea bags on full strength brew!  I poured it, had a sip, then gagged.  I realize that taste is the taste I remember of tea and hence the hatred of it.  So I added sugar and took another sip.  Still gross.  I continued to add sugar until it would no longer dissolve and it was not at all close.  This wasn’t working out so well.

I got some advice from someone at work about tea, and she said that the secret is disolving the sugar in the really hot tea after brewing so it disolves faster.  I read around a bit more and this time I felt like I’d be more sure in this calculation.  I went to the 3 qt line worth of water, switched it to medium brew, and added 2/3rd of a cup of sugar into the container for the hot tea to pour into.  I took a sip, and it’s not McAlister’s tea, but it is drinkable and fairly enjoyable.

So I feel like I’ve come pretty close, but at the same time am disgusted by the amount of sugar I’m using for this.  I wonder how much sugar is in the other stuff I drink though, because maybe 2/3rds of a cup for that amount of water (which I don’t understand because there’s no way that line indicates 3 quarts but then again, the pitcher is really huge) isn’t so much.  At the very least, I spent 17 bucks on probably more tea than I’d buy at McAlister’s so I’ll be alright on this investment I think.  I feel like I should be buying some lemons though to pop in there.

BSH says I oversold the tea though, so maybe it’s not as good as I say it is, but I tend to think so.  Hammeron is going to try it out in a week, I’ll get his reaction.

As is usual tradition, I picked up the turkey and headed down to San Antonio last Wednesday.  I’ve discovered the secret to lasting 6 hours is to actually kill time with podcasts.  Typically I have a random playlist going on while I drive, but I find that listening to a podcast is pretty great.  However, a little ADD creeps in if the podcast runs a bit too long and I have to fight the urge to change tracks.  After so many years of making that 6 hour drive, it’s good I can find new ways to not fall asleep and die at the wheel.  It was getting kinda bad there pre-iPod days.

Fighting the disgust of taking my whole computer to San Antonio, I finally caved and took it for WoW purposes.  I also took Rock Band as well and taking out the need to camp out for Black Friday it was a relaxing Thanksgiving.  Had a nice Thankgsiving lunch, we don’t do dinner, ran an instance, and rocked out.  Strangely, I didn’t do a lot of Rock Band, but my brother and sisters played it quite a bit.

Even though I didn’t camp out for deals, I still went to Best Buy and picked up an 8GB thumb drive and some DVDs.  The 360 wasn’t networked as usual so I couldn’t stream stuff from my PC to the 360.  By the way did you know you can use regular ethernet cables to connect a networked PC to the 360?  Additionally I gambled this would work with my computer, so I wired my laptop to my PC as a wireless card and it worked!  I guess crossover cables are a thing of the past.  Anyway, I got all these DVDs and started burning some flicks to them, but something crazy happened on the first burn which made it unplayable after 2/3rds of the movie.  It was distressing but strangely, I decided to move the movie to my thumb drive and plug it into the 360 and it worked!  So I have a useless spindle of blank DVDs now.  Ah well.

We also went to World Market to pick up some strange and exotic food.  I finally found some panettone bread.  I tried looking last year after the holidays and the stores were dry.  However, I found some among other oddities from Italy and some kind of chocolate log.  The chocolate log tasted familiar, but this odditiy from Italy was a white nougat bar.  It had a foot like aftertaste, but otherwise was good.  The panettone was TOTALLY AWESOME though after heated up a bit.  Man it’s a great sweet bread.  Giada De Laurentiis has some recipe for them which after finally having tried just the bread, can only taste great in my imagination.

The return trip was uneventful but I have noticed a horrible trend at my apartment complex.  I live on a side street on the complex and as such I always parked out on the curb.  I was the only car ever on the curb.  Everyone else parked in the lot.  The street isn’t busy at all so I’m not concerned with the safety or anything of doing such a thing.  However, last month they repaved the lots.  So people were forced out of their spots.  But guess where they’re parking now!  Yes, on the curb, and occasionally right in front of my apartment.  So I get back and there’s no spot for me.  I’m forced to park in the lot which is annoyingly far away compared to the curb.  I don’t even know where half the cars come from!!  There’s only 8 apartments facing that street yet I see all these cars on the curb now that can’t possibly be from the 8 apartments.  Ah well.

Hurry up and come out already!

This is a rehash of something from a long time ago.  I don’t know that I have a long winding list of pet peeves, but two quickly come to mind when someone says the words like word association.  I hear the words pet peeve and think wet socks.  I hate wet socks, they can ruin a day.  Slogging around in the grueling cold dampness is a cruel fate.  I feel like days in general can’t get worse unless my socks get wet.

But that’s not really the main point of what I’m about to complain about.  No, a far more life threatening pet peeve of mine is when people drive in the left lane and decide to slow down in it, then get into the turn lane.  It occurs every day I drive.  You’d think I’d learn maybe to just stay in the middle lane if possible or come to terms with people that just love to do it.  Most of the time I can pass on the right quickly and am alright with it.  Today was the worst I’d ever seen though.  Not because they came to a near complete stop in the left lane or anything, but because when they finally decided to get over, they didn’t change lanes completely.  No, this person decided that the best course of action was to slow down rapidly in the left lane, which I like to think is for the fastest traffic, however this might now be a forgone conclusion, then stop halfway between both lanes.

My first reaction was that hey, this person is doing that thing I hate.  No problem, I’ll slow down and they’ll finally get over and I can go by.  My plan reached a meltdown when I’m still going 25-ish and now slamming on my brakes because the distance is now simply too small between us to safely stop.  At this point, I had to pull a completely reckless move and just swerve to the center lane, reckless because I never bothered to look if that lane was clear.  This is certainly a weakness of mine but is probably how many accidents happen, when contingency plans go bad.  Today, I lucked out and it was clear.  But as I pass the person it became clear how insane they were as they had decided staying between the two lanes truly was the ideal choice for their navigation plans.

Why do people continue to do this???  Where has common courtesy gone!?!?!?  It’s possible perhaps, that people get into their cars and don’t realize that the world around them has to co-exist with them.  Self contained in their bubble, everything they see is more like something on TV or something and doing whatever you want is alright because everything just moves right past you anyway.  It’s possible the moral of this story is this echoing lately that I feel like everything in life I take for granted and it’s not until something is taken away that I feel its importance.  I’d be in deep poop had I wrecked the car, so will I learn my lesson and be more defensive when I drive home today or will I be in another situation that makes me reflect on the idiocy of everyone else on the road?

For the last two years, I’ve basically given up my Thanksgiving Thursday in exchange for a long cold sidewalk outside of Best Buy.  My parent’s house was a wasteland of non-technology, but in the two years that have transpired, they’ve gone up to the HDTV lifestyle, multiple modern day computers and high speed Internet.  No longer do I feel like trips back home are on a farm.  So now I wonder, is there a point going for year 3?

www.blackfriday.info has the Best Buy ad as well as the Circuit City ad up.  I’ve gone through the BB one and noticed absolutely nothing worth spending nearly 18 hours in the cold for.  I think the last piece of digital wizardry I could use is a camera, but even that isn’t too big of a deal for me since I’m not one to take a lot of pictures anyway.  I could also stand an upgrade from my 256MB thumb drive to an 8GB one.  But I don’t need black friday deals to buy those since they continuously drop in price.  I imagine in 6 months I could get a 32GB thumb drive for these prices.

So for the first time in 3 years, I can look forward to a day of turkey and possibly a whole lot of Rock Band with my family.

I find lately in conversation, whether it be casual or professional, my worst habit is that I always, in my mind, try to anticipate where someone is going in a conversation and then interject before they end their statement.  Not only is this just incredibly rude, but who wants to talk to someone like this!?  I usually try to temper my speech so that I do wait, but I find myself more and more impatient as people spit out their points.  But it makes me wonder why I’ve developed this habit?

I think to start with, a lot of my communication comes from either instant messages or forums.  Generally it comes in a readable response format where you have back and forth and even if you interrupt someone they can generally continue their train of thought.  It’s a less disruptive form since you’re afforded the ability to ignore someone temporarily and then respond.

My second medium of choice in the verbal warfare comes from ventrillo which is real time voice chat software.  So in real life, you’re confronted with people where you can see literally when they’re awaiting a response or if they’re pausing, you can see why.  For instance, someone saying something, then takes a drink or eats, this is a fairly appropriate time to interject.  However, it’s not perfect, and one usually akwardly interrupts often.  It’s a difficult medium when you remove the human element but still try to maintain the back and forth.  Eliminating faces and expression makes it hard.  I imagine it’s like a conference call gone bad sometimes with everyone yelling over each other and it becomes a battle of sheer willpower to not stop what you’re saying and attempt to be the alpha voice among all others.

Ok so translating those into real life makes me somewhat of a nuisance.  Where I can sort of jot down an idea, see if it’s palatable to the the conversation and then if it is, hit the enter key doesn’t work well in real life conversations.  I did this the other night where this sort of malformed idea came out, but then I had to spend several minutes backtracking it out loud to everyone to see if I could justify my pointless point.  Had it been via IM/text, I would have simply not hit enter and it would have never boiled over into some sort of rediculous topic.  Coupled with the fact that people are trying to disprove my notion before I finish with my counterpoints interrupting them before they finish where they’re going, it was sort of a mess.

I wonder though if I’m not alone though in a sort of transitory period of life where we migrate a lot of our interactions through text/web 2.0/etc..  I feel like the business sharks of the world will hold mastery over conversation while the masses will be dumbed down to text message styles of speech with “lol”‘s and “u r”‘s all over the place.  It’s interesting to me that American English is so far developed differently from British English over the span of roughly 200+ years that I wonder what our next evolutionary jump will be.

So I woke up two days ago thinking this exact thing: “You know what, I could go for a bowl of Oreo-O’s.” Knowing it had been a long time since I had purchased said cereal, I jotted it down on my list of to buy items.  Yesterday when I realized I had nothing to eat anywhere in my apartment, I made my trip out to the old Wal-Mart and went up to the cereal aisle first thing.  I went up it once.  Then I went up it again.  Then I decided I lost the ability to read.  I double checked by trying to read my list of goods.

Oreo-O’s

Ok I can still read.  So I did a triple take.  But on this triple take, I decided to scan the price tags to see if I was just really unlucky and someone else had the same craving and stocked up.  To my dismay, said product was completely gone.  So I came home and did what anyone would do in the Internet age.  I wikied it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oreo_O%27s

According to an email from consumer relations, this product was discontinued in 2007.

So now, a part of my late teenage years is gone.  My most beloved and probably unhealthy breakfast ritual is gone and has been gone for over a year!!!!  I’ve idiotically replaced it with OATMEAL!  A sign of old man-ism.  Actually you know what else I added was toasted english muffins to breakfast.  Anyway, goodbye Oreo-O’s.  You were my favorite sin.  I ended my shopping trip with double stuff oreos though in consolation.

Ok to start off with, I didn’t vote.  I have one incredibly stupid reason for not voting that I don’t want to tell you about, and one important reason I didn’t vote.  The important reason I didn’t vote was that I don’t live in a swing state, so the vote I would have cast would have fallen in line with how my state voted anyway.  While my friends already chastised me about it, I refer them to my incredibly stupid and secretive reason for not voting.

Ok so now we have Obama as president.  I will admit that yes, this is historic.  But the degree to which we emphasize that we will have an African-American as a president is sickening.  I’m definately part of a new generation where I look beyond race, however maybe my Dad’s generation sees this as a sort of “Oh wow” kinda moment, but not me.  I feel like if there were such as a thing that is the opposite of racist, if there were some word for it, that’s what I’m feeling too much of right now reading through my feeds.  Also if you voted for him solely because of race, shame on you for not being more informed.  If it turns out his agenda matches though with yours then whatever.

Democrats, as far as this election goes, the one person you have to thank for this victory is George Bush.  He did so terribly these last few years, that in my mind, you could have had a horse on the democratic platform and he would have won.  The fickle nature of America is predictable enough to see that when you’re unhappy with the current party, you’re probably going to go to the other for a bit.

Republicans, what the hell were you thinking?  My news sources are crazy biased for Democrats and from what I’m reading, I feel like your whole campaign was set up to attack Obama as opposed to distance yourself from Bush.  However, there is something to be said for how relatively close the election turned out to be.  Last I looked McCain lost the popular vote by 7 million or so out of 110ish million votes.  For an election where I feel was going to be an easy win for the Democrats you still made it fairly narrow, but again, I think the people in charge went with a poor strategy.  In 4 years I hope campaigning moves away from attacking the other guy and focusing more on issues.  The “landslide” could have been much much worse and even I was thinking it could have been something like 70/30.

The election process in general seems really horrible.  We vote on a Tuesday unless you vote early which is weird.  It should be a national holiday so people in lines aren’t pressured to get back to work.  It should really potentially be on a weekend where you have lots of time and availability to go vote.  And the process should be refined anyway to be a quick in and out affair.  I threw this idea out and a few guildies said it was too prone to fraud, but I don’t think it’s an unsolvable problem.  It would be sweet if you could register to vote.  Then vote online which then has the government send you a paper scantron doodad.  This would take you to the regular voting thing on election day where you just drop it off and it gets scanned and matched with your online vote.  In the age of technology, why we do things so archaically makes no sense to me.  Clearly I know that few people trust voting machines, I’d agree that they shouldn’t be closed source and they should be opened up for inspection. However, please note, that I didn’t vote so I don’t know the process or improvements made over previous years.  Reading about how it happens for other people seems really dumb though to me.

Anyway, now that I think about it, this is probably my first and one of very few political rants.  Unlike all the reddit dudes who claimed doom and gloom if McCain got elected, I’ll be staying in the nation unlike a petulant child.  I think Elizabeth Hasselbeck’s recent statements are taken out of context.  She’s not changing sides all of a sudden but clearly saying that despite differences between parties, the most important thing we do as a nation is galvanize so we don’t look like a bickering married couple.  If anything, the most irritating thing is how divided we are in the terms of if my side is right, then your side is wrong.  Though I know one person who reads this will say I just read reddit too much.  Anyway, I’m done.  I don’t like talking about politics and the next time you see anything like this will probably be in 2012.