The Blog with No Title

Last night I had a dream that I was at a gas station. Apparently I was in the past (time travel?) because we were discussing gas prices in the future and I tried to bet the store worker $1000 that gas prices would rise to $4 a gallon in two years. I even told him I would let him have the $1000 for those two years, I was so certain I would be right. He declined though, but I was going to write his name down in my cell phone so I could come back and say “I told you so” nonetheless. I had went out back to do this and then was going to walk around the building to the front. Near the gate (there was a fence around the back enclosing the area behind the store apparently) some guy started hassling me for being on ‘his property’ and I kept walking away. He then accused me of spying on him and taking pictures of his business activities. I said I didn’t and then offered to show him that I had no pics.

For some reason, he did not think my phone sufficient to look for the pics since I could ‘just delete them off the phone’ so he wanted to look on some computer discs of mine. He ends up back at our place and I can’t find the discs in question. I eventually sneak off alone and dial 911 really quick and just let it ring without saying anything. I go out to tell him I can’t find the discs, but by then the police are there and he has his hands over his head. I am worried now that he will try to kill us when he gets out of custody even if he was not going to do it before because he will be extra mad. Also, he now knows where we live. In the end, he ends up getting into a shoot out with the officers and I try to get out of the way of the bullets. His gang shows up near this point and they shoot out with the officers as well. I do not remember how it resolves, but Lori and I end up back inside and I then find the stack of discs immediately. I lament for a moment that he might not have had to die, but then think he was being unreasonable and it really was his own thought. About this point, I woke up.

I have mentioned to people that I should blog about my dreams. I have made no progress on it though. The thing that makes is particularly hard is that my dreams tend to be muddled, make little sense in retrospect, and even when they kind of do, it is hard to describe. Take my dream last night for example. I was out of town with the whole Shackley clan. I think we were at Andy’s wedding or there for it in general, but I don’t think Andy or Kristin were ever in it and it was definitely in no place from STL that I visited in real life. Regardless, I specifically remember there being someone that kept wanting to talk to me, but I kept delaying calling them back for whatever reason. Also, during the course of the dream, there was a least one small car accident in a parking lot that I caused (I tend to have dreams where I cause a small car accident in a parking lot because the brakes fail).

The only two events that particularly stick out are that I ended up, for a short period caring for a kid, but rather than Emily or Katie, it was Benjamin Gerrald. I guess Susannah or Matt were somehow there too? I have no idea how this came to be. The end of it kind of sticks out too. I ended up leaving the wedding area and going toward this mall-like area. They were blowing up all these hot air balloons for some sort of flyover. At first it reminded me of when I used to see the balloons fly over in North Augusta, but I was not in the Augusta area. It turns out I was in France apparently though no one ever spoke French. I kind of wanted to take a balloon with Lori but I worried it would be too expensive. That said, I ended up going inside and they had this weird thing that was like a small platform suspended between two balloons that flew around the top of the mall. You were supposed to stand on the platform and hold both balloon strings and it would fly you around. It looked cool, but it cost $310 US! (or $370 if you were gay. I am seriously not making this part up. I just remember thinking “how would they know?” in the dream, and also thinking that the only reason I could come up with for the extra price is that some homophobic people would refuse to ride if they knew a gay person had ridden on it.) I ended up doing it though, and it sucked. I did not get on the platform right and spent the entire ride (which only lasted like 30 seconds apparently) trying to get into a good position. It was 0 fun. I went out and the others were there and was left pondering whether the real hot air balloon ride would have cost much more in actuality.

I got the chance to taste both Mountain Dew and Pepsi Throwbacks recently. I feel pretty similarly about both of them as compared to their original counterparts, so I will fold it into one review. In both cases, cleaner flavor if you know what I mean (I have seen others describe the flavor as ‘clean’ as well, so I do not feel completely alone here). Also, the body of the soda was completely different, more of a wateriness to the texture. I am pretty sure this is a result of sugar making the drink less syrupy than the HFCS. Additionally, there seemed to be a little bit less of an aftertaste left on your tongue, but there was sweeter taste left on your lips when you lick them.

Speaking of sweeter, I think both drinks were sweeter than their HFCS counterparts, but the Pepsi was far sweeter than normal Pepsi. It reminded me a lot of the real sugar Coke or real sugar Pepsi Gold that I had in Jamaica (Pepsi Gold was a gold colored Pepsi variant that was a promo for the World Cup in 2006. It also apparently contained a hint of ginger not in normal Pepsi).

As I am not a big fan of Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew Throwback did not do enough for me to switch to it. I would drink it again though if given the chance to do so for free, and I would be interested in drinking it side-by-side with some Mountain Dew to do further flavor comparisons.

Pepsi, being my soda of choice, is what I am most picky about. I am not sure what to say really. Part of me is really used to the HFCS version and almosts misses the texture of it when drinking Throwback. That being said, I do like the extra sweetness and the other perks with the aftertaste. I think that if it stayed on the market and I got used to it, I would probably prefer it to normal Pepsi. I do not like it so much as to pay a premium to purchase it on more than a yearly basis though.

It has been a while since I have written about soda. Nothing much has come my way in the soda front lately except for the fact that I found some Livewire in Columbia a couple months ago. Disappointingly though, it was only cold 20 oz. plastic bottles (one of the most overpriced forms of soda available), and I have not seen it again since. This makes me really glad I got some that day.

But anyway, I have some news today. Apparently Pepsi has started producing Pepsi Throwback. It comes with a classic logo (the new logo sucks btw) and real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. I am really interested to try it, but I am not sure that I will LOVE IT like some people do. Since I am relatively young, I have only rarely experienced soda with real cane sugar (in Jamaica). It almost was a bit weird in taste since I am acclimated to the texture of HFCS, but that could have also had something to do with different water supplies and/or bottling practices in Jamaica. Therefore, if you see Pepsi Throwback, get one for me! I definitely want to try it and review it here.

A while back, I spoke with Lori about the idea of getting rid of our cable. As our discounts have ended, our bill has slowly creeped up to $123 a month for cable and internet. The way they structure things now, it is harder to get onto a discount without signing a contract service agreement. Anyway, we both had some reservations. Even though 95% of our TV watching is on networks, there were a few shows that we watched on the cable. Additionally, Lori and I very occasionally enjoy channel surfing and watching something random (usually on Food Network in Lori’s case). Despite this, we decided the saved money might be worth it, at least to try for a while.

This left two problems: Getting reception over the air and replacing our beloved DVR “box”.

I will cover replacing the DVR box more extensively in another post, but the long and short of it is that it basically will cost about $500 to come up with an acceptable solution that is not laggy and does not require tying up one of our computers or our network all the time. This is a bit of a hard expense to bite, but even if we went back to cable, we would save $9.95 a month in DVR fees and eventually break even. Also, it will allow us to bring Blu-Ray into our house without paying a premium price for a standalone player.

First though, I wanted to share my experiences thusfar in getting over-the-air HDTV. Our HDTV has an ATSC tuner (the type needed to pull in HD channels), but I never understood how it worked. Whenever I opened it up, it had like two blacked out channels that were not even network names for our area (KABC and something else). After some research, I realized that with HD, you have to scan for channels first. I realized that I did not have an antenna though. In the past, for analog TV reception, I have jury-rigged one from a coat hanger, or even more primatively, from a paperclip. I knew those gave weak signals though and did not even know if they would work with digital broadcasts. Then I remembered that I have a UHF/VHF signal booster from college (the signal to our apartment was really bad because they split it so many times). I combined these two into a small paperclip boosted antenna (I have heard that a booster is no substitute for a decent antenna, but I figured what the heck did I have to lose?).

After a scan, I had 6 channels show up: CBS and two weather related subchannels and PBS and two subchannels (South Carolina TV and something else). The CBS channels were choppy (but hey, I was watching free HDTV for the first time!!!) and the PBS channels were ‘no signal’. I upgraded from a paperclip to a paperclip wrapped around a metal clothes hanger and retried it. After this, CBS and its subchannels were completely watchable and with a little adjustment PBS and the subchannels were coming in pretty good as well. I could not get it to find anything else though.

The next day, I decided to play with it a bit more, after some more antenna adjustments, I eventually got it to rescan and get 11 channels. CBS and 2 subchannels, PBS and 2 subchannels, NBC and 1 (weather related) subchannel, CW, Fox, and My Network TV. The CW and Fox channels came up as no signal when I actually tried to view them, but I was able to get variable reception on the remaining 9 channels. This leads me to believe that a proper antenna will be able to pull these channels well. I have ordered one to test that out.

The catch of course is that we are moving in June. I am going to have to go out there with a small TV, digital converter box, and antenna to try it out, but I believe I will be able to get tolerable reception with an indoor antenna. Failing that, I do not know what I will do exactly. We could go outdoor, but the up-front costs of that might make this adventure more expensive than it is worth.

So I am watching Twilight with Lori. I realized that there are a lot of people in the movie that I have seen in other movies or TV shows. I think it is pretty hilarious to try to think of each person playing as that character in that instead of as their current character. Here is a partial list.

Bella Swan - Girl from Speak
Edward Cullen - Cedric Diggory, but I never remember this normally.
Rosalie Hale - Party girl in Thirteen and/or girl who kills her mom in Mimi’s First Time
Jasper Hale - Nicholas Fiske from Beautiful People (THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE DUN DUN DUN)
Esme Cullen - Jane Doe from Grey’s Anatomy whose face is screwed up
Mike Newton - Joan of Arcadia’s little brother Luke Girardi
Victoria - Apparently she was in MTV’s Undressed. A show with hilariously bad acting.

I tossed a Netflix into it yesterday (I often do this), and it was received today. I did not expect that since yesterday was a postal holiday, but I am guessing they did a drop somewhere that actually got picked up and sent yesterday!

I wrote the following in response to someone’s Facebook status in which they argued that Al Gore shoudl be rethinking global warming based solely on the current cold snap in the US. I thought it was as insightful as I get, so I wanted to post it here.

What I always must say on the global warming conflict is, just think and consider, what if global warming is real and human caused? What if it really could change the climate enough to make a difference for the ability of life to sustain itself on earth? What if everyone realizes this too late because they are convinced it is just a plot of the so-called liberal media?

In the face of that, are considerations like cheaper gas and a stronger economy in the short-term really important? If making this assumption is wrong, then we are out some money, sure, but if the assumption turns out to be correct, many of the beauties of Earth could be gone forever even if humans find a way to survive the climate changes.

A January cold-snap does not make for an invalidation of subtle global trends.

Full disclosure, I am not certain that global warming is real and human caused, and I agree there is a lot of global warming hype, but I do really think that assuming it is real is a responsible choice as long as their is not a scientific consensus to the contrary. Besides, most of the remedies from global warming have ‘real’ advantages such as lower pollution and less dependence on foreign oil.

I am not even going to link to the post, but basically I sucked and did not even nearly meet any of my financial goals. To feel better, I want to try to blame unavoidable, unexpected expenses, but when it comes down to it, in several cases, I just did not have my eye on the ball like I should have. That said, even though the overall total did not go down as much as I would have liked, I did completely remove the balance from our Rooms-To-Go furniture card before the rate shot up to some sort of ridiculous 20+% after the no-interest period ends in two weeks.

Hopefully 2009 will be stronger financially, especially since Lori and I are really itching to try to get a house once we know what school she is going to be at.

I happened to be thinking about the “Bush Country” t-shirts that many conservatives bought in 2004. They were essentially based on this map:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap.htm

The implication of the t-shirt was the overwhelming amount of red meant that Bush had a mandate from America. Whether you were a supporter or not at the time, there are undeniably two main problems with this map:
1. It automatically colors a county red even if if it was 50.1% to 49.9%.
2. It does not at all account for the population of the individual county.

Anyway, compare this to yesterday when Barack Obama had a decisive electoral win and a substantial popular vote win.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/results.htm

As you can see, the map is not overwhelmingly different (excepting the Wisconsin/Michigan/Illinois/Iowa area of the midwest) yet the vote went such a vastly different way. I think that the problem is more related to the population distribution than the 50.1%/49.9% problem above.

Anyway, the site I will link below has some good maps of the electoral results of both states and counties and then “bends” them around population bases and blurs the blues and reds into purples to better represent sentiment.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/

All in all, I guess an “Obama Country” t-shirt would not be that impressive. I guess it is because the Dems lack support in large low population states