Archive for September, 2008

Most people initially think I’m crazy for not voting.  Throughout history Americans have been fighting for the right to have their voice heard in their own government, to be a part of and to give their personal opinion on how their government is dictated.  I mean it’s my right to vote so I should respect that right by exercising that right, right?  I’m not convinced.   There are a couple of things that I am skeptical on.  First of all, how much is my opinion really worth?  Would my vote really count?  Second, what am I really voting for? Do these people ever really follow through with what they claim they are going to follow through on?  And is this just a popularity contest at it’s highest level?  And last and most importantly, I don’t feel anyone should vote unless they know exactly what they are really voting for.  Most people have no clue.

OK, so how much does our individual vote really count?  Is it worth anything at all?  Out of all the people voting all over the nation, how can one vote be worth anything.  It seems to me that Al Gore won the election a few years back.  America sat back and let it happen and we get four more years of Bush and four more years of war.  But maybe it’s just Florida’s votes that don’t count.  Either way, if the government counts the votes, don’t they have the power to accidentally miscount to favor a certain candidate.  It seems to me that the more computers run the world, the easier this will become for our government.  The only reason one would believe our individual vote would count towards anything is because our government says so.  And I can’t say I trust them to begin with.

I caught a small portion of Republican VP candidate Palin talking to the masses at her Republican Convention, and all I could think of was, “This is all bullshit.”  She is up there running her mouth about how much better she is then her democratic competition.  Then pauses.  Then the crowd cheers.  She could say anything, then pause, and the crowd would cheer. Then Obama gets quoted saying ”You can put lipstick on a pig,” while the crowd cheers “It’s still a pig.” (referencing a remark made earlier from Palin.)  Then McCain publishes an ad claiming Obama wants to teach sex ed to kindergarten kids.  It says: ”Learning about sex before learning to read?  Barack Obama. Wrong on education. Wrong for your family.”  (this was a total misquote from McCain.  Obama specifically mentioned teaching Sex Ed to appropriate age groups.)  This is a joke and it amazes me that people don’t see it.   It is one low blow after another used only to discredit the competition.   This election is a true popularity contest at it’s best. It’s sad.

But honestly the main reason I don’t vote is because I just don’t REALLY know the facts.  Truly I don’t think anyone really knows.  A lot of people vote because of someones skin color or gender or where they are from or the way the talk.  Some people vote for their political party which boils down to conservatives and liberals.  The thing I don’t get is that people don’t care enough to really look at what each person represents.  I may want Obama cause he is “for” freedom of choice, but what I don’t know is that he is “for” higher taxes.  All I care about is freedom of choice so I vote for Obama, yet if I really knew all the things he represented, I might have chosen differently.  People are naive (including myself).  It seems to me that the government wants America to be naive.  Vote for Plain!  She’s cute. (for a pig with lipstick)

Priscilla and I just got back from another wonderful trip to Jacksonville, Florida.  Jacksonville has always been a fun trip because it’s only a meager 5 hours away from Atlanta and it’s got water.  Jacksonville is cut in two by the St. Johns River and is butted up against the Atlantic Ocean.  It is the United States largest city in actually land mass.  It is located in north eastern Florida only  2 hours from Savannah, Georgia and twenty minutes to the South Georgia border.

We were in Florida visiting Priscilla’s sister Ashley, her husband Jay, their 3 year old Kent and they’re new addition, 3 month old Elle.  Ashley and Jay have recently remodeled their home by adding an extra guest room (for us), a full outside patio with a built in grill, and a full on theater with a 105 inch HD Projection TV.  Awesome.  So it was a fun filled trip full of babies, babies and giant TVs.

One of the things that really makes Jacksonville so enticing to me, is the water element.  It seems like every time we visit Jay takes us out on his boat.  Honestly it’s super convienent because he has it docked just two blocks away from his house at his sister’s boat dock.  We usually just take a couple of hours to cruise around Jacksonville past Alltell Stadium, the Maxwell house factory and the Landing. 

The Landing is a downtown square that includes several restaurants and bars and is located right off the St Johns River.  It’s a cool little area that pertains mostly to tourists and business lunch meetings, but is always a fun place to visit in the boat.

Jacksonville is smaller than Atlanta, but not in a bad way.  It actually reminds me a lot of Sacramento, in that it has a river, is smaller in size and is not directly adjacent to the ocean.  It also has an extremely high property value which is also similar to Sacramento. 

All in all, I would definitely move to Jacksonville.  It most likely would be number one on my list if I had a choice on where to move.  But the main reason is that Ashely and Jay are there.  Plus, when P and I are ready to have kids, our kids will be able to have a relationship with their cousins just as I did with mine.  It definitely is something to consider.

It took me awhile to get started on the whole peer to peer thing. I was just like everyone else when it came to this stuff.  It took an old intern at Indigo to finally get me in, and when I got in there was no turning back.  Now, I started with MySpace as most people do.  It’s easy and fun and once you start customizing, it’s over.  You are hooked.  Then you find your friends from high school, old jobs, kindergarten, then your Mom joins.  Wow.   Anyway Peer to Peer networks are the best thing since the internet.

OK, like I had said, I started on MySpace.  I dug MySpace for a really long time before I even considered joining Facebook.  I felt that if I stuck with the most popular network, then the other one would eventually fade away.  I was wrong.  Plus, you can’t have Pepsi without Coke right?  So I joined Facebook and ended up finding all the people I couldn’t seem to find on MySpace.  The other half of the world.  I also found that this Facebook thing might not be fading at all.  It might be MySpace that will be doing the fading.  Or at least transitioning.

Ok, I like MySpace.  It’s easy, functional, easy to find people you know, and everyone, I MEAN EVERYONE, has a MySpace.  This is because it is so easy to use.  But from what I have learned this is also it’s downfall.  You can update, customize, change, modify, and pretty much do anything to your MySpace page.  You can change your entire page to not even remotely resemble anything close to MySpace page and that’s ok.  There are no restrictions.  This lets all those teenyboppers and crazy kids that have no idea what they are doing pt tons of crap all over their page.  They add songs and galleries and widgets and applications and on and on and on.  It get so bad that you don’t even want to visit their page cause it’s just annoying.  All in all, MySpace is good, but it’s too easily customizable.

Now, Facebook isn’t perfect either.  I still don’t really understand it, but the one thing I like is that you can’t mix up the look of the pages.  I mean, you can add widgets and applications, but none of that ever effects your viewer.  I mean, you can read someone’s app’s but you don’t have to if you want to write them a message.  It’s simple and i like that.  On the other hand, it’s straight ugly.  The newest update has done wonders for it, but it still needs some work.  The worst thing about Facebook is it’s horrible user interface.  Frankly, it’s too hard.  The layout is confusing and retared.  I swear it takes me five minutes to find my notifications half the time.  The Instant Messenger thing is cool, but why is it at the bottom of the screen?  The inbox is great, but too hard to find and not clear enough when you have a new message.

If I had to suggest either MySpace or Facebook, I would have to say both.  There are a ton of different people on both.  I believe though that MySpace will soon evolve to where it began.  Bands.  It will soon only be bands and Facebook will be for everyone else.  If I had to bet though, I think that there will be a new Peer2Peer network that will come out and blow them both away.  There are too many things fixable on both.  MySpace needs to ton down and facebook needs to function better.  The problem is is that they already started and now they can’t make that drastic change in order to progress.  (Sounds like our government)

Check out my MySpace here 

Check out my Facebook here

There has been movies made about it, countless books have been published about it, and a million people talk about it everyday, yet no one REALLY knows the truth.  What is the truth?  It’s all a conspiracy.  And it’s all about the money.

I’m not the smartest guy in the world and I most likely don’t know what I’m talking about, but I do know that everything in the world revolves around money.  It’s the one thing everyone wants and every business is after.  No matter what.

So I have thought up three major problems with three major entities in the world.  But honestly I think this same idea runs through ALL major corporations.  But maybe I’m wrong.

First up, the pharmaceutical companies.  All I’m going to say is this:  If there is a company that sells headache medicine and they make billions of dollars a year on that product, do they want the magic pill that cures headaches?  Does the Cancer Society want a cure for cancer?  How many jobs will be lost and how many rich people will go broke if this magic cure is found?  Is there an answer?

Next up, the oil companies.  If there are billions upon billions of dollars made on oil every year in the oil industry, what happens when we find the secret formula to an alternate power like Antimatter?  They say that you can power the earth with one drop of this shit is they can figure out how to harness it.  My point is that if there is a better fuel solution out there, wouldn’t the oil companies pay billions of dollars to prevent it from surfacing?  If they didn’t, wouldn’t millions of rich people all over the world be broke?

OK, I could go on forever about this but I have one last “company” that has to be called out.  Our government is full to the brim with politicians.  We trust them with our lives everyday.  We trust that they do the right thing and make the right decisions with our money, our homes, and our well-being.  Yet, these are the people that will do anything to get to the top.  I mean, if I was a farmer in Oklahoma that gives McCain five million dollars for his campaign to become president, then wouldn’t he side with that farmer when it came to tax cuts.  It’s like “I scratch your back and you scratch mine”.  So how does that make it fair for anyone else.  Politicians are funded by companies.  Companies want money.  It’s always all about the money.

The only reason I wanted to write this, is because I can’t think of one solution to the whole mess.  It’s like a circle that will never end.  And the only one who suffers is us.  I don’t blame the corporations or the government for doing what they are doing, because I am in business just like them.  I am just like them; I am all about the money too.  But it sucks to think that the world is going to have to wait til we find that answer before we can progress.  Before we can figure out when we should do something right, and when we should do something for the money.