Month: September 2007

“Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.”

— Edward R. Murrow

Here are some numbers from the U.S. Treasury Department:

09/2001 $5,807,463,412,200.06
09/2002 $6,228,235,965,597.16
09/2003 $6,783,231,062,743.62
09/2004 $7,379,052,696,330.32
09/2005 $7,932,709,661,723.50
09/2006 $8,506,973,899,215.23
09/2007 $9,016,288,006,279.21

That’s the total outstanding debt of the United States over the past six years. Note how it’s gone up more than 50% in that time… the causes are varied, but I think even Bush apologists would admit that the Iraq war, the War on Terror, the crumbling economy, and the poorly-planned tax changes have all contributed to this economic nightmare.

Who’s going to pay for all of this?

Today I made some cinnamon rolls, layered with a quarter-inch of frosting apiece. Awesome.

Every now and then I get the urge to make some, but they’re a bit of work and involve the bread machine– the one piece of technology in our house that I don’t understand– which means I more or less have to convince Laralee to fire it up and make the dough for me. And she always refuses because they’re so incredibly delic– err, unhealthy.

But today I broke her iron will, mostly by rubbing her shoulder. Go figure.

(Her shoulder was sore because we spent yesterday afternoon tossing a frisbee and a baseball around, and apparently her arm wasn’t up to the task. So a bit of massage felt heavenly and after a bit of negotiation she agreed that in exchange for a good shoulder rub she’d make the cinnamon roll dough.)

“If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?”

— Scott Adams

There’s exciting news in the entertainment world today: Disney is working on a sequel to the 1982 classic Tron. Sweet. I remember watching that as a kid– I would’ve been ten at the time– and being astounded by the amazing computer graphics. We might laugh at that kind of stuff now, but it was landmark work back then.

And a factoid that I learned: the video game was so popular it actually earned more than the movie. Speaking as a guy who plays Armagetron (shown below) every now and then with the kids, it’s a simple but strangely addictive thing.

In a shocking survey, 59% of Americans think our country is “worse off” than it was prior to September 11, 2001.

I think the reaction of jsager on Digg sums it up nicely:

Now that’s a funny ad.

Fall doesn’t officially start for two more weeks, but I think today heralded the first day of it. The weather is grey and overcast, and only about 60 degrees. Compared with the 90-degree sun two days ago, it feels downright cold.

Even Zack thought a jacket was needed to bounce on the trampoline.

The Xbox Media Center is soooo sweet. I’ve had mine for about six months now, and I absolutely love it. I use it mainly to stream music from my computer– we never drop CD’s into our stereo any more because we have our entire 9,000+ song library right there on the XBMC and can pick any song we want with a few clicks of the remote control.

Of course it also has a ton of other spiffy features, like showing lyrics for any song, downloading album information from the internet, streaming video and TV shows, playing hundreds of old (think 1980’s) video games, displaying the weather forecast, and on and on. The Xbox itself cost me around $60 on eBay, and all of the software is completely free (with many thanks to Chancellor for letting me borrow a few hacker parts). I imagine you can get something equivalent with the Apple TV or some other media center, but those things cost a few hundred bucks.

It also helps to have a 62-inch TV.

Everyone’s familiar with M.C. Escher’s woodcut Relativity:

But check out this awesome Lego version of it: