Colorado is a dangerous place to ride a motorcycle. I’ve seen two serious accidents in the last 2 months. Besides the amount of dirt/gravel that is on the roads, the drivers here don’t seem to be terrible aware of motorcycles.
As I was riding back from Cripple Creek, I passed by an ugly accident. The motorcycle was a mangled mess, there was a large red spot on the ground, there was a totaled pickup truck, and a helicopter to take the poor chap away.
Oh yeah, besides the dangers of dirt/gravel and bad drivers, there is also nature to deal with. Some poor guy in Denver got struck by lightning, and another got BLOWN off his bike. Yikes!
I was called a losertarian (wordplay on Libertarian) the other day by a friend of mine. Sadly, I have joined the camp of libertarians. I say this sadly because I feel that the Republican party and conservative politics have been hijacked by horrendous leadership. I will continue to be a registered Republican just so I might have the privilege of voting in the primary elections.
I grow tired of hearing that a vote that is not cast toward either of the two major parties is a throwaway vote. I have news for everyone, everyones vote individually is a throwaway vote. The sheer number of voters makes a single vote virtually meaningless (except for the voters in Florida in the last election). I vote according to my conscience, and the price for selling out my conscience is much higher than a throwaway vote.
Over the last week I have been helping to integrate my companies software with Agile Delta’s implementation of Binary XML. I’ve met the CTO and the VP of Engineering for Agile Delta, and damn, they are good.
When I was in college, I was often in the company of people who were better than me. The professors were on the cutting edge and that sometimes worked its way into the curriculum. For instance, I implemented an XQuery interpreter for my first compiler class. At that time XQuery was still a language in progress.
When I jumped into the working world, it didn’t take me long to realize that I was more tallented than most of the engineers I was working with. That was a little depressing, especially since I was at the bottom of the pay scale. Besides that, the work I was doing was not exactly the cutting edge stuff that I was used to. Working with John and Rich reminded me of that college experience. If their company was based in Colorado, I’d be asking them for a job.
Emily, I know you will appreciate this. John Schneider, who is the CTO, did a lot of work integrating XML into JavaScript. In Firefox’s implementation of JavaScript, you can do something like:
doc = John;
alert(doc.book.author);
The technology is called e4x, and it looks pretty sweet. Anyways, I digress. I was a skeptic at first, but the Agile Delta implementation of Binary XML is pretty sweet. The Binary XML equivalent of a document is smaller than a serialized version of the Java object model and is even smaller than compression using gzip. Furthermore, the deserialization of Binary XML into Java objects is faster than deserialiation from a standard XML document. If Agile Delta was a public company, I would have dumped all my money into shares. The technology is so good that it might spell the end for plain text XML across the wire.
Well, I am finally home again after nearly two weeks in San Diego. First off, I need to apologize to VJ and Lola for ditching them on Tuesday. I left a voicemail on Lola’s phone claiming that I had to work late. Well, that was one of those ’socially acceptable’ lies. I had a choice about making up something that was plausible, or just coming out and saying that I had, in my absent minded nature, double booked with Emily and chose to hang with her that night. I really need to be more aware before I schedule things. My bad.
Oh yes, I am home. That’s right. After only four months here in the Springs area, it feels very much like home.
In other matters, I hung out with Sherri last night. We had a great time and I remembered why I ditched my Colorado plans three years ago just to see how that relationship would turn out. Obviously that was a dead end relationship, but I still enjoy hanging out with her anyway.
Ho Hum it is. Here I am sitting in my hotel room trying to plan my day. Only one idea sounds good - take a drive up to Julian for some lunch with some old friends. Hehe, I just can’t stay away from them mountains 
When I first flew into San Diego, I was thinking thoughts like ‘aww, palm trees’, and ‘aww, the ocean’, and ‘aww, Balboa Park.’ These were tourist thoughts of the image that San Diego projects. Well, I’ve been here for only 4 days and that old feeling of oppression and gloom has settled over me once again. It is funny how something like a geographical location could affect me so. I’m sure its all in my head. I’m sure that San Diego is a paradise for some people.
Perhaps it is just the big city life that vexes me so. Yes, I think this is closer to the heart of the matter.
On a related issue, I often wonder why I am so counter-cultural. Actually, I’m counter-cultural to the typical counter-culture. I don’t have any piercings, tattoos. I don’t wear spiked belts and I don’t paint my fingernails black. I don’t own any black leather, and I’m not a hippie or belong to any cult. I’m also not a communist (the socialist party meetings at UCSD were rather interesting nonetheless). Hmmm….
Ah well, enough strange musings. Time to go.
I was going to visit an old friend of mine tonight, and I kinda heard that she and her husband had moved. Turns out that they haven’t moved yet, but will be in some months. Well, the house I showed up at contained another old friend of mine. So now you have some context.
Well, I said ‘hi’ and made some small talk for a few minutes. All of a sudden, she breaks out with ‘I’d invite you in but my husband is not home.’
It would have been better for her to keep her mouth shut. That was a pretty hurtfull thing to say by what it implied.
The only time my baggage is searched while flying is when I have my laptop stuffed inside. That makes sense and all, but they claim that it’s random or something.
Anyways, I would imagine that my particular suitcase was particularly interesting and I might have gotten some inspectors excited. I had TWO pieces of electronic equipment, and some suspicous looking leaves. Imagine their disappointment to discover that everything was on the up and up. Next time I will label a bag of oregano with ‘REEFER’ just to give them that added short lived excitement of a bust. Hehehe. Perhaps something on the laptop as well. Perhaps a warning sign about spontaneous detonation. Oh, even better. Perhaps I should put inside something that ticks.
Kind of reminds me of time I was stopped by the Utah state trooper for speeding. Well, my friend was driving at the time. The trooper took a look at me with my long hair, the California license plate, and the snowboard in the back, and figgured he had nabbed some tweakers. We dissapointed him something fierce. After a search of my car, he told me to get into the police cruiser, it being REALLY cold out.
Trooper: looks around back seat. Picks up some leaves from the rear ash tray and starts sniffing them.
Me To Kevin: *nudges Kevin and points at the Trooper*. What is he doing???
Trooper: *Pulls me into his car*
Trooper: Son, I found some leaves in the back of your car.
Me(in thought): *giggle* what a dork…
Me: *puts on a serious face*. Um, my car is dirty. Thats the leaves from my front lawn.
Well, the state trooper probably just couldn’t believe that a couple of California snow boarders were NOT carrying weed. I mean, we SO looked the part.
I did a search at blogsearch.google.com for ‘2007 recession’, and I was surprised to see my blog show up on the first page. I’m not surprised that I was indexed with those keywords as I have written some postings on the subject, but I am not so pleased that I am on the first page.
I’ll take this to mean that there are very few economic bloggers out there, and that even fewer are predicting a recession. That puts me on the fringe of the blogsphere. Furthermore, it’s not like I post any good information like hard numbers and statistics. For the most part, I just jabber on with my commentary without any hard reasons given for my opinion. You wouldn’t exactly come to my blog looking to be convinced. In fact, I wonder how many would conclude that I am just an idiot just based off of my spelling and grammar errors.
I would love to thing that more people play Lemmings as opposed to BEING a lemming. Sadly, things like my ranking in google point towards the huge lemming population in the US.
Of course, I could just be that crazy guy who lives in an alternate universe. You know, the guy who spends way too much of his time in front of a computer, and not enough time in the company of real life people. Hmmm….
It appears that Los Angeles is going to put a ‘Housing Affordability’ bond program on the ballot.
While I am all for housing affordability, the absolute wrong way to go about it is to have a publically funded bond program. This is NOT free market economics and is horrible public policy to boot.
The best solution to high house prices is for everyone to stop breaking the bank to get a house. The market economy gave us these high prices, let the market take them away.
Bond programs are a hugely expensive band-aid. By giving low and middle income people assistance, you are hindering the decline of prices. Just think about what happens when the money dries up. Are you going to put ANOTHER bond program on the ballot?
I view such program as a general tax-payer funded subsidy of the profits made by people who bought and sold real estate in the last 5 years. I’d like to say that the moronic public officals are restricted to California, but my own county of El Paso already passed a measure before I moved here, and were disbursing the funds this summer.
I’m just a character in my landladies alternate universe. She thinks that my 72 year old neighbor and I have something going on. Apparently, we are moving in together.
It’s interesting how close this alternate universe is to the alternate universe of daytime soaps.
I got a good giggle out of this one.