Yes, this CD was released in 1997 and was tough to track down a copy. It’s been out of print for years. It was the first Dogwood album I heard and is also my all-time favorite. I just bought a copy for 30 bucks. The album is a lyical and musical masterpiece and completes my Dogwood collection.
It’s interesting how most of my my all-time favorite albums are also the oldest in my collection. Were the late 90’s really the golden years of Christian punk/hardcore music? The same thing goes for concerts. The absolute best concert I have attended was a Blindside/Project 86/P.O.D. at Cane’s in Mission Valley. Project 86 played from their self-titled CD - my all time favorite hardcore album, and P.O.D. played from Brown, also a favorite. The energy level was insane. The company was good too; I went with Angela, my crush at the time. Angela was my link to Gateway Church, where I met VJ. At Gateway, I met Scott who was for a short time played Bass for Dogwood.
The process of loading my new MacBook with all my stuff has turned out to be a trip down memory lane. It has caused me to reflect on life and such.
As I was moving my music from my old PC, I came upon some Trance music I got from Emily. I miss her very much, and more so than some other people I would have thought that I would miss more. I think that she ‘got’ me more than anyone has so far. I’ll miss those times we would just talk during working so-bored-I-could-die hours. Hmmm… chat with Emily or work. Tought choice. I have gathered a few friends in my lifetime, but I’ve never really had a good friend who I could relate with on both a personal level and the work/school stuff. *sigh*
About a year ago I accidentally erased about 1500 songs from my computer, so I have begun the task of ripping my CD’s back into digital form. Each CD was another trip down memory lane. I remember the person I was and what the CD meant to me in the years past. I have all that punk/hardcore music from bands such as Project 86, Dogwood, P.O.D., Blindside, MxPx, and Noise Ratchet. Yup, back in those days I went to a lot of local shows. Never did get the obligatory tatoo or piercing. It seemed a little to obligitory for me. Now I’m just too out of shape to jump into the mosh pit. It wasn’t the music of rebellion, just that of latent anger and frustration. Then there is the equally powerfull music from Jennifer Knapp. Few artists can write so clearly on the Christian experience. Her music would comfort my soul. Then there was the music that reminded me of specific friends of years gone by. Anyways, it became obvious that I had little music recently purchased. Few new artists have found their way into my library. It’s almost like I quit living for the last year or two that I was in San Deigo. The new CD’s I have purchased now reflect my recent cynicism.
So, now to The Present. For all of my life, the present has been a time of preparation for the Future that I want. 2005 was a year of preparation for my move to Colorado. Well, now that I’m there it’s time to start constructing my Future, whatever that is. Indeed, the Future is no longer so well defined. It’s more of a question mark than anything else. If nothing else, life is a thrilling ride full of unexpected twists. I’m only 2 years out of college and my life is drastically different than I had intended. I suppose this is what makes life worth living.
I bought my first Mac by accident. I saw my beloved iBook on ebay and I put in a bid as a way to track the state of the auction. Well, I was the only bidder so I was the owner of an almost new iBook with a 20GB hard drive and 256MB RAM. That laptop was the most versatile computer I have ever owned up until now. Amost two years after brutally crushing my old iBook with my foot (on accident), I am the proud owner of the brand new MacBook. I’ve already installed Windows XP and it dual boots into either OS X or pukeows XP. Alas, some things just don run on OS X, so the dual boot feature is quite nice indeed. I bought Quicken 2006 for the Mac, but I quicky found that the interface is not nearly as nice as the PC version. Additionally, I coudn’t import my data from the PC version to the Mac. For now, I’m only booting into Windows XP for my experimentation with GoogleEarth and for Quicken.
Now for my initial observations. The magnetic power adapter and magnetic lid are quite interesting. It is also kinda cool having a web-cam built into the lid. Tiger is quite the memory hog. With nothing running, it was sucking about 500MB of RAM. This is in comparison to the 130MB that Jaguar sucked up. I have the feeling I will be upgrading the memory sometime in the future.
But mostly just terminal boredom - a LOT of boredom. For some reason I thought my flight out of Boston was at 6am. So I got myself out of bed at an ungodly hour and found myself at the terminal at 5:30. Looking at my boarding pass I discovered my plane didn’t leave until 11:20 am. Damn, 5 hours to wait.
So, I break out the laptop and start writing some code for work. Unfortunatly, the clock on the laptop was on Mountain time so it showed two hours early. Well, I got really involved in what I was working on because it was cool, and I got up to get some lunch. I looked at my ticket and I saw that my plane departed 5 minutes earlier. CRAPOLA!!!! Could you believe I waited all of 5 hours just to miss a plane? This was the moment of terminal panic. Lucky for me, I really didn’t miss the plane because it never arrived due to mechanical problems. Yay, it was canceled and I didn’t have to advertise my stupidity to a ticket agent. Well, the hotel put me up at the Hilton for the night and booked me for an 8am flight the next day.
Next day rolls around, and guess what. Yup, my 8am flight was ALSO canceled. I was re-booked on a noon flight - damn, more waiting.
Well, I made it back home a full day late, and I am really sick of looking at Logan Intl Airport. Well, at least I got lots of work done.
Well, I’m off to Boston - with my keys!
Yes, I got all the way to the place where they cavity search you, and I found that I didn’t have my keys with me. I let out a curse that made the 250 pound guard giggle with glee. Ahh yes, I am/was a moron. It turns out that I left my keys in the shuttle bus. What a relief! Walking back into the terminal with the crisis averted, my mind turned to try to spin the situation so that I am not a moron. Ah, yes, the keys FELL out of my pocket. Yes, that’s it. Or perhaps the keys LEFT me at the shuttle. Isn’t it funny how I will assign blame to the inanimate and unintelligent keys just to avoid being a moron.
On a side note, a big difference between Colorado Springs and California is the number of freely available wireless networks. You gotta pay for every little service in California, while I can sit here in the airport at Colorado Springs and blog for free.
Stupid keys…
3-4 years ago I was subjected to a polygraph test … and flunked. My friends just laugh and ask what question I failed on. That’s a secret I’m keeping just to maintain the mystery of it all. Just a little something to make my friends suspect that I really am not all that I seem. muahaha.
In my email box there was a job posting at Northrup Grumman for a software engineering position. Apparently it requires a Counterintelligence of FullScope polygraph test as a condition of getting the position. Whenever I see something like that, I hit the delete button and send the posting to the round file. Working with government contracts means the goverment gets to keep a thick file on me, tracks my whereabouts, watches my bank accounts, and knows who I talk to, and watches me as I sleep. It’s also funny how I keep seeing that same white van…*shrugs*. This is fairly annoying, but I can live with it as long as the work is fairly interesting. I draw the line at the polygraph though.
You know what though? Perhaps at my next polygraph I should do something insane. Like walk into the test with a turban on my head and talk with a middle eastern accent. Or perhaps I should bust out with the chicken dance while squalking ‘ca CAW, ca CAW’. Those things are videotaped, so I could be famous among some stiff goverment types with bad suits (remember Mimi?), and who like to flash their badges like it makes their boring job less pathetic.
The church I have been attending had a group of tables set out for some of the small groups that are starting up this summer. My interest was initially drawn to the ‘Biblical Creationism vs Evolution’ table, but I glanced over to the right and saw an equally obsurd table. The flyer for this one read something like:
YOU DON’T NEED MONEY TO MAKE MONEY
We will study the basic strategies in Real Estate Investing. At the end of eight weeks you will discover you don’t need money to make money, understand cash flow and how to find the right property.
Now, the leader of this group is living in the zipcode of 80922, which is where it takes 15 minutes to get to a freeway, and where there are an increasing number of forclosures. Honestly, the smart money left the real estate market last year leaving the ignorami who still believe in the 7 day creation account side by side with the ponzi scheme suckers who think their path to riches is paved with real estate.
My mom as always suspected me of being a 5th columnist in the church. This real estate investment group and the ‘Creationism vs Evolution’ group meet at the same night at the same time, damn! I’m gonna have to pick which group I want to infiltrate in my attempts to undermine stupidity. I think Wednesday night is going to turn in to my reality-comedy night. I don’t have a TV, so this could be my form of entertainment in the spirit of reality tv! Yay!
It’s not all about fundamentals all the time, but it is today. I’ve done my due dilligence regarding the housing market here in the Springs. I’ve learned that Colorado has the second highest forclosure rate in the country, but most of these are located in Denver. I’ve learned that Colorado Springs has this little problem with infrastructure in that it doesn’t like to build freeways. The eastern side of town which has the cheaper new construction is also not accessible by a freeway. New houses and townhomes stretch for miles and miles and are linked with nothing more than surface streets. I’ve also learned that rents are appreciably close to the cost of owning.
The fundamental to note for today is the ratio of rent/TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). There are some condo’s that just had their price reduced that I am looking at. I did a search for rentals and found two of the units up for rent at 975 a month. After the tax deductions on interest and propety taxes, I would be looking at something like 1150 a month to own. I can live with that.
The downside is that this is just a condo and not even a townhome. The problem is that for me to get a nice townhome, I would have to buy out in the east side of town with zilch in the way of accessible freeways. I really don’t want to drive 15 minutes just to get to the interstate. And I thought that getting to the freeway in Pacific Beach was bad…
While Colorado is ranked 2nd in the country in the rate of forclosures, I expect this dubious ranking to slip in the next year as forclosures in the coastal areas continue to skyrocket off their bottom basement levels.
In other news, I took a loss on my investment of USO, an oil ETF. It was indeed a risky investment, and risky investments just might and DO decline in value. This is a fact that San Diego homeslaves will find out in the next 4-5 years. But that’s alright, it’s a great time for me to buy some more precious metals as the market took a beating this week. Buy on the dips! Damn, those metals are REALLY, REALLY volitile!!!
taking advantage of the summer rain to wash my motorcycle. This is important because I don’t have a hose and I slaughtered a large number of bugs on my windscreen this morning. It was a bloody great idea.
I have been a tad paranoid about cops, but I haven’t seen any off the 67 out by Deckers. I was riding along, speeding but not so fast that I would loose my license if I was caught. Then a though struck me:
Myself: If you wanted to obey the speed limit, why didn’t you just get a damn cruiser?
Me: That is a good question!! Why did I get this crotch rocket?
Myself: Why, you got it because riding fast is really, really, fun!
Me: Damn Straight! *bumps knuckles with Myself*
*passes car at 100 MPH*
*explores the performance potential of the new bike around z twisties*
Woohoo!!!!
It’s a little harder to find economic data for the Colorado area than it is for California. I found a really honest site for economic analysis. www.coloradoeconomy.com. I was reading their economic forecast for 2006, and I was pleased to read that an economic think-tank also sees a late-2006/2007 recession. I wrote my thoughts on this matter previously here, and here. They also had some interesting quotes on the local business climate.
“ These are the worst business conditions we
ever seen. Our last good year was 2002.”
“ Business has never been this bad in the 44 years
that I have been in business.”
“ How can business be this bad for so many people
without having an impact on the statistics?”
“We are experiencing a hidden recession!”
And I especially like the closing remarks.
Rapid increases in asset prices confuse consumers,
encouraging too little saving out of income or too
much investment in the asset that is appreciating in
value. A housing bubble (price levels unsustainable
by economic fundamentals) has a bigger impact on
consumer spending than a stock market bubble, both
when the bubble is inflating and when it collapses.
Hence, we expect the next recession to be more serious
than the last one.
It’s not a question of whether this will happen, merely
when. We continue to believe it will not be until late
2006 or early 2007, but are increasingly worried.
The bigger question is how it occurs – does the air
seep out of the housing bubble slowly, giving businesses
and consumers time to adjust, or does it happen quickly,
as with the popping of the technology bubble a few
years ago?
There is an old Chinese curse, “May you be blessed
with interesting times.” This is the most interesting
business cycle I have observed in my 28 years as a
regional economist.
Ah yes, interesting times indeed.