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Today I registered both my vehicles at AAA. Turns out my truck had $490.00 worth of parking fines attached to it. Damned street sweeping. That’s about what I paid for the Mazda!

Struck with a bout of insomnia, I rode out to Mae’s Cafe in Garden Grove. It was surprisingly crowded at 2:30am. I looked around at the customers and workers and I noticed an interesting “coincidence”

It seems all the servers were middle aged/older white ladies, and all the bus boys and cooks were Mexican guys.

Odder still, all the customers were Asian, mostly Vietnamese I think. I tried to think of all the ways this could have happened but decided all possible explanations pointed to a breakdown in the system. Segregation was deprecated as our system long ago, but something went terribly wrong.

I don’t think this is what MLK had in mind.

I signed up with Blockbuster Online. I haven’t figured out if they’re evil for essentially copying netflix and trying to put them out of business by undercutting them, or if that’s just the free market. All I know, is I had a netflix account for a year and a half, and they raised the prices on me so I quit. I don’t think they would have raised their prices if they had had the competition they have today. The funny thing is, I had it for one and a half years, and I had the same 3 dvds they initially shipped. I’d probably have never quit if it wasn’t for their greed.

Anyway, I’ve been watching a lot of movies I probably would never actively pay money for with this new all you can eat movie system.

I like the service a lot; especially since at my new apartment it’s a lot easier to send outgoing mail.

I wish I could put my history and / or queue on this website fed through some sort of RSS feed, but they don’t have that functionality. I sent them a note requesting that feature; I doubt it’ll go anywhere.

If there are any movies you think I must see, go ahead and drop me a a comment.

At the National War Museum in Tokyo, Japan, you’ll find this display:

Apparently, according to the text in the museum, the Japanese “expanded their defensive concerns” into Korea, helped “establish order and control” in China, and then were “forced into war” by the war-hungry American government.

Either Japan rewrote history, or my 10th grade history book, China, Korea, and the Nazi’s did.

Okay, so the JWZ thing really bugs me. Bugging me to the point of “Desktop Linux is Dead” level of bugging me. It doesn’t help that Danny Silverman wants to get rid of all linux on the desktop as well. Nor does it help that I bought an iMac for Final Cut Pro, introducing the first non linux OS to my computer usage in years.

But the fact remains, I actually think Mac OS X is sluggish and retarded in many ways. The DVD player is atrocious. It seems ridiculous to me that in order to do a lot of little things you have to pay $15 bucks for some application written by some guy which will probably be abandonware in a year, and basic upgrades to the OS cost $150. Or you can do a lot of piracy. The Dock is really really dumb. Task switching in OS X is dumb. No SFTP support in the finder. Quicktime Player is one of the worst things ever. iTunes is cludgy for music playback and doesn’t play ogg. iDVD crashes like a son of a gun constantly. The System Preferences panel is ridiculously organized. I can’t figure out a way to turn off the screen or blank it without suspending the damn machine because it doesn’t seem to have a simple “blank” screensaver.

The good things about OS X are, expose (!!!!), zero hardware configuration, I never have to open up vi for anything, iTunes for CD ripping and mp3 organization and burning, a reasonable way to actually backup video dvds, the iLife suite existing even if it crashes, and the finder is pretty damned awesome. None of these would justify owning one for me due to the high prices and lack of hardware compatibility. What would (and did) is Final Cut Studio. It is unrivaled in feature set and usability. It is the only reason I own a mac.

More later.

So JWZ switched to Mac. That’s got to be a bad sign. If an ubergeek like JWZ can’t make linux work, we’re in big trouble. He’s been using Unix since FOREVER.

So in keeping with my new musical mood, I recently aquired some nice computer speakers and a pro set of headphones.

The speakers are the Klipsch Promedia 2.1 THX certified computer speaker system. These bad boys have gotten awesome reviews everywhere and are well deserving of the praise. The subwoofer is capable of neighbor destroying tight bass, and the satellites bring a depth to music that my old speakers just wouldn’t deliver. When I plug my pro headphones into the headphone jack of the speakerset however, there is a slight hiss, which makes the headphone jack somewhat useless. Maybe ne day I will have a 5.1 system attached to my computer for gaming or dvds, but these are great for listening to music.

The headphones I got are the Sennheiser Pro 280HD closed headphone set. I know open headphones are superior to closed ones, but the apartment walls here are pretty thin, and I needed to be able to isolate the sound. These headphones are perfect for that. The point of getting these pro series headphones is for mastering and doing audio editing, but music doesn’t sound half bad through them either. They’re were designed to send the audio through without any enhancement and do this job fairly well. There are better headphones out there, but these are great for the price.

As an aside, “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera is my current favorite song, if not simply because the recording is so awesomely mastered.