Category: General

To all of you who were in debate, here’s a little something from the New York Times.

Hopefully, this will make the next generation of debaters speak more clearly and over all improve the speed and clarity rounds.

I just realized how long its been since I posted an update. I’ve actually written several, but none of them made the cut. Here’s what’s new:

• I got a bitchen new cell phone. (do people still use that term)? Its a Samsung A620 and I switched over to Sprint. This phone is far more powerful than some PC’s I’ve owned. That is not an exaggeration. It has built in Internet access and a digital camera. I have a cable I got off of Ebay on the way that will let me get net access for my laptop via the phone at about 250k. The bandwidth isn’t metered either.
• I also picked up the new Earthlink USB GPS from DeLorme. This is so much better than their old one its a joke. Their old GPS a) used a serial port, b) required 4 AAA batteries, and c) had no on/off switch. Once you put the batteries in, they would run till you took them out or they were dead. In addition to being smaller, lighter, USB, and less power hungry, it is also way more accurate. Its WAAS enabled. I can attach the GPS with a suction cup to the back of my Vaio and have a small, neat little GPS mapping tool.
• I went to the McDonalds drive through the other day during the lunch hour. Rather than pulling up to the speaker, they had a guy outside with a wireless device walking up to the cars and taking orders. It was very slick and I enjoyed talking directly to a person, rather than through a speaker. It was also probably more efficient for McDonalds because the person taking orders didn’t also have to deal with money.
• I got a new shower head. This isn’t usually a big deal, but its a cool shower head. Its a 8″ diameter head that drops the water straight down. Its great. Especially since my water pressure sucks.
• I have a Mobile Weblog (moblog) set up at http://garndt.textamerica.com/ . Its not a real weblog, but just a place where photos taken from my phone will automatically appear. Because it has an RSS feed, eventually I’ll try to port them automatically to this site.

I usually never take these sort of tests, but thought this was sort of clever.

You’re Australia!
You’re easy-going, relaxed, and yet somewhat tough and hardy all at the same time.  You can appreciate culture, scuba diving, and even safaris.  This makes you pretty interesting and intriguing to others, though also really unpredictable and even wild.  Your knowledge of nature is unthinkable to most of those around you, even though your respect for it is sometimes less than perfect.  People really like your accent.
Take the Country Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

As to how well this fits my personality, I will leave it up to you.

I consider myself a movie afficionado, and I got the street cred to back it up. I dare say I’m a film snob.

This evening I went to see Bend it Like Beckham. Its a very good movie. Go see it, thumbs up, yadda yadda. However, while I was watching it, it dawned on me just how unbalanced the quality of indie movies has become compared to Hollywood. I’m sure there are plenty of crappy indie movies, but they never make it to the theater, whereas, there doesn’t appear to be any crap filter in Hollywood.

What I find amazing, is that you can smell a crappy Hollywood movie from a mile away, yet people still go to see them and they still keep churning them out. What’s amazing is that the entertainment industry seems willingly ignorant about the whole thing. They can’t say that Gigli is a hunk of crap, because they really just want an excuse to talk about Ben Afleck and JLo. So long as you have an A list star in the film, it gets a free pass. It doesn’t’ mean that anyone is going to see it, but good luck finding a negative word about it on Entertainment Tonight.

Its a real shame that so few people ever bother to see any of the good films that are out there. By failing to go watch them, they are just giving incentive to Hollywood to produce more crap.

One of my favorite questions to ask people is “what are your three favorite movies made from before you were born?” What answer they give isn’t as important as them just having an answer, and coming up with it relatively quickly. I’m even more impressed if they can come up with their three favorite black and white movies, and super impressed if they have even seen three silent films.

This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. A guy in Switzerland took a short movie of the International Space Station as it flew past the Sun. With the contrast of the sun, you can really see the detail of the ISS. It looks like a chinese character moving across the sky. I found the link on Spaceweather.com.