Life and stuff

Lately, I’ve been getting pretty darn annoyed with my mp3-cd player. It works fine most of the time, but the random song function isn’t quite what I expected. For starters, it only considers songs 1-99 when its “randomly” choosing the next song to play. It also seems rather biased towards playing songs in the tracks between 30 and 70. I wouldn’t have too much issue with that, except to top it off it’ll occasionally get into a “top 40″ mode and play the same song 3 times in 20 minutes. Repeatedly. Now, I’m not all that great of a programmer, but jeebus it can’t be THAT hard to write a friggin’ rand() function that’ll hit everything, can it?

I swear, one day I’m going to get annoyed enough with it that I’ll lay down $150 on one of those new iPod Shuffle thingies — if nothing else, Apple should have the “shuffle” down part down right.

George W. Bush has been harping on Social Security since the beginnings of his political aspirations (talkingpointsmemo) — he predicted crisis “in 10 years” in 1978 and hasn’t stopped since. I suppose that private accounts sounds enticing in the potential for better returns than the treasury bonds that the current system is based on, but Bush doesn’t mention the fact that there’s the possibility of the private accounts earning half the amount. Hard to believe it’ll be that bad, but thats just what happenned (nytimes) in Chile, “which President Bush has cited as a model for his plans to overhaul Social Security”.

I think I’ll stick with my 401k and whatever I can get from Social Security, thank you. Incidentally, after all the market fluctuations of the last few months, I’m currently at a net gain of 0.8% — one of those Orange Savings Accounts at ING would’ve given a higher rate of return.

I didn’t get a chance to listen to Bush’s second innaugural speech, but I suppose I didn’t miss anything after finding a video clip of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show commentary (http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/). ( local mirror) Good stuff for all of us who “solemnly swore” the same time Bush did.

Had a pic of the Golden Gate Bridge ready but forgot to link it :p

I’m too lazy to really finish a day-by-day recount of the trip, so I’ll try to hit a few things to wrap this up.

Stuff
You’re probably wondering “what is this ’stuff’ that you keep referring to?” Either that, or you think I’m being really lame and vague and all that Anyhow, for some odd reason we kept on seeing places that had the words “things” or “stuff” in them.

And of course, that just made us want to wander into the restaurant or whatever and order a plate — “Hi, yeah, I’d like to order some things, with some stuff on the side.” The “Real Food” was also quite amusing.

“You got joy!” — Mimi

So we were at Pier 39 in San Francisco and had to validate our parking. We wandered into a restaurant / wine shop and Mimi showed me this bottle of wine called “Joy” — “its sooo cute!” Ray had just found out that we could validate by buying a bottle, and I suggested to him “Mimi wants the cute bottle.” We left Ray there and wandered into another shop. A few minutes later Ray shows up with the bottle, and Mimi exclaims “You got joy! You’re so cool!” For choosing it for mainly aesthetic reasons, it was also a pretty decent wine to boot.

Later that night at Jen’s apartment…

Yeah, I know I’m bad …

random pics
Maybe I’ll fill in a few more stories later, but I’ll just devote the rest of this post to random pics:

F-14 Tomcat inside the USS Hornet

External view of the Hornet

Oakland skyline along Lakeshore Ave. across the street from Jen’s apt.

Our traveling companion / mascot Thumper

Random person Mimi wanted to take a picture with

Swan at the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts

Point Lobos (just south of Monterey and Carmel)

another shot of Point Lobos

two bucks running away from a guy with a camcorder