(Link dead, never to be seen again…)Interesting article on the difficulties of transitioning from the Soviet no-competition system to a free market system.

When my wife and I were voting for senate last year, we couldn’t really decide so we ended up splitting our votes. Not between Coors and Salazar, but between the Libertarian candidate and Salazar. I’m actually glad that Salazar won despite my Republican-leaning libertarian ideology. He’s show now that he’s not going to bend over for the democrats and he’s going to think independently. I don’t agree with him on every issue, but on several such as the confirmation of the various Bush staffers, the Patriot act (that it needs adjustment) and on social security he seems to be pretty close to right on with what seems logical to me.

Currently: RDM59/BST31/BLM29/WAR20/THF16/RNG2 All other jobs 1. (Yes, I have them all.)AF Status: All but gloves. No coffer key yet for eldieme. Can wear all but hat. 1.2k exp from that. /cry.

I went to the game store again.Newly acquired games (for me):Galactic Civilizations: Altarian Prophecy (expansion) $10The Political Machine $7Half-Life 1 $20And my wife asked for:Smackdown Vs. Raw $50Altarian Prophecy is a nice addon so far. Although it does make the universe a slightly less friendly place with the addition of one neutral and one very evil race. Below is a sample of my exploits in Galactic CivilizationsI’m nearing the end of a rather interesting game for a small universe in it.

And I think FFXI may be part of the problem. Not all of it though, because I still didn’t have enough time before I started playing it. I’m up to 54RDM and 29BST and nearing 30BST now in it…But I’ve ended up with a number of video games I have yet to even put in my game system. Last year, I believe, I rented Okage and played into it a bit.

After a multi month break, I’m playing that game again. Managed to get to lvl 53 with my RDM the first day back, and finish mission 5-1. Not too bad. I’ve been working my BST up toward lvl 29 this week, and I’m only 800 exp away.I can’t believe I didn’t try fighting Wights before this with BST. They’re cake with either GlowBats (best), Clippers or pugils… They do beat up on my poor little Bottlebunnies (HareFamiliars) though.

If you haven’t seen it already you should check out the animated show Venture Bros. It’s probably one of the most entertaining shows ever made for cartoon network’s adult swim programming block. Not only that, but the writer keeps a blog on livejournal as well. Check it out at http://jacksonpublick.livejournal.com/ .(Note: Some of the Anime on there is as good or better. I’m only commenting on the rather slack quality of the other made-for-adultswim shows like aquateen hunger force and sealab 2021…)I’m really enjoying the Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex series as well.

It’s 4 am…I managed a successful test of the GPS speedometer, after an unsuccessful test earlier yesterday. The recieve buffer was too small…Figured out that the speed in Knots was one thing already provided in one of the gps strings, cut out a bunch of my own speed code that way.Figured out how to combine the GSA and GGA sentances to get fix level and satellite count easily. I’m using these to make a nice little bar graph like you see on cell phones.

It’s been awhile since I seriously worked on PHDD, the digital dash for my car. I managed to get a few things working this weekend. First was the Logo display. It needs some polishing up to make it more like the text screen buffer, but it’s showing my Bitmap now.Second part was the GPS Speedometer code! I did some test values (like 22.2222 meters per second, and 27.7777 meters per second) both of which came up with the appropriate MPH reading on the screen.

Finding out that one of your favorite portable electronic devices has a fast emulator on another one of your favorite portable electronic devices. :)http://www.hpcalc.org/details.php?id=5898Yay!I’ll have to try it when I get home.