Where have you been?

Its fucking everywhere and always has the same shit. Take our living room for example. Notice the lovely white zebra stripe area rug? How about the three-in-one wodden picture frame or the single picture frame on the dresser? Also must have items. Ikea floor lamp anyone? I even saw a television stand I owned in a previous life about 5 or 6 years ago in the local Ikea. They had the same stain avaliable as well.

Anyone ever see the moive Fight Club?

Jack:
"There's always that. I don't know, it's just...when you buy furniture, you tell yourself: that's it, that's the last sofa I'm gonna need. No matter what else happens, I've got that sofa problem handled. I had it all. I had a stereo that was very decent, a wardrobe that was getting very respectable. I was so close to being complete..."

Tyler:
"Right. We're consumers. We're by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty -- these things don't concern me. What concerns me is celebrity magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra..." "Fuck Martha Stewart. Martha's polishing the brass of the Titanic. It's all going down, man! So fuck off, with your sofa units and your green stripe patterns. I say never be complete. I say stop being perfect. I say let's evolve and let the chips fall where they may. But that's me, I could be wrong, maybe it's a terrible tragedy."

While living in Munich I found out the hard way that televisions in Europe needed to be tunned to receive signals properly. The last few weeks I was there a friend just about died laughing when I told him my TV sucked. He showed me how to tune it and all of a sudden I had several new channels, all with perfect reception. Okay, so you live and learn.

I was asking my girlfriend about tunning our television here and she had no idea what I was talking about. She knew of three or four channels and assumed that was all. I quickly scroll through the TV menu and find "auto-tune" and voila, 30 more channels. Guess its not just Americans...

A few weeks back I used a well for the first time in my life. Just outside our apartment building there is a small building where one can take empty containers and draw water from a deep well. Unfortunately there were taps and not one of those sweet buckets on a winch setups but it was still a novel experience. My girlfriend explained that in many small towns and villages there are wells and, according to the notice posted, the water is much better quality then what you can get in the markets. Whoa, if a posted sign says something its got to be true! Photo from Emmanuel College in Cambridge.

You've got to love the gun culture of America. Although I am sure not all of them are correct, my students have interesting facts & statistics about everything gun related in America: How many people own/use them, how many people are killed by them every year, how much less the cost then elsewhere, everything!

Does anyone have any ideas about how healthy this culture is or isn't and a site the post accurate gun information? Post below!

This photo, taken from the top of Joshua Tree National Park looking over the Palm Springs/Indio valley below, makes me think of peace. Strange...

I covered a class the other day for someone who was on vacation. I told the students that I had just moved from Cambridge England and they had a funny story about people from Cambridge. Turns out that their normal teacher, who is from London, told them that people from Cambridge and Oxford seem to think that they are better then everyone else in England. I had to laugh and told them: "Not really, everyone in England is a c*^t."

This is St. John's bridge.

Humm, sunshine. This was taken August of 2005 at San Onofre State Beach. My friends and I meet there to enjoy some surf and a bonfire when we get the chance.

Kobra seems to have made himself at home pretty quick. He sleeps comfortably in bed with us at night, eats and drinks well, and behaves pretty much like a normal cat. We gave him a bath this past weekend which went surprisingly well. He didn't mind the water so much but when it came time for the blow dryer he wasn't having any of it. Fortuantely it was sunny so we had him sit in the kitchen window to dry off. He no longer smells like the shelter and his brown fur is almost all white!

Although I have never really paid for a full software package like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office I know they cost a bundle. In this day and age, however, that is completely unnecessary. A student of mine recently turned me back onto open source software which is publicly developed software that is free! These Open Apps (as they are often called) are comparable to the costly "professional" versions and often operate much better. I am currently making the switch to OpenOffice and GimpShop (a Photoshop clone) and recommend both! I am looking for a good video editor as well.

Another neat (and new to me) feature of some Open Apps is their portability - you can run them from a pen drive (USB memory stick) without having to install them at all! These are (naturally) called Portable Open Apps. My portable version of OpenOffice works wonderfully and includes functionality for spreadsheets, text documents, and presentations. All for under 200megs of memory space and you never had to install anything!

OpenOffice
Portable Open Apps
Linux is open too!