Jeremy's Blog

I’m not rich. Far from it. I get by pretty well from being self-employed, but there are breaks in the income and sometimes I have to make my money stretch across multiple months, depending on what I’ve got going on.

My dad helped me buy my laptop because at age 20, I still have no credit and can’t finance anything more expensive than a peanut. I went to go get him a portion of the money that I owed him out of an ATM and it decided to give me the money in five dollar bills. This is the result:

I almost want to just keep this until I get the entire amount that I owe him and wrap it all up to see how big it is …

I picked up Portal a few days ago, because I’ve been hearing from just about everyone that the game is amazing. I became a fan pretty much instantly. I played through 18 ½ levels just on the first day.

For the uninformed, Portal is basically a puzzle-shooter. The basic premise to the game is that you can place two portals on certain surfaces. You go in one portal and come out the other. You keep your motion and velocity when you come out of the opposite portal, so you have to keep that in mind when solving a bunch of the puzzles.

It’s very much a game you have to think about. I got stuck a couple of times and had to get some help from other people in the room that could take a fresh look at what was going on around me. The ending is pretty cool and there’s a lot of humor throughout the game.

If you haven’t tried it yet, you can pick it up for $20 by itself or for $40 with The Orange Box. With the Orange Box, you also get Half-Life 2, HL 2: Episode One, HL 2: Episode Two, HL 2: Lost Coast, Peggle Extreme, and Team Fortress 2. Not a bad buy for all that, but I just bought Portal separately because the others would probably just take up space and I’d never play them.

Give the game a shot. It’s pretty fun and funny at the same time.

If my theme appears weird to you, do a hard refresh. I finally got fed up with WordPress reverting my theme and deleted the default theme and renamed this theme’s folder to “default”.

For those of you who care, RescueTime has an interesting bug with Firefox 3 Beta 5 where it’s reporting something like 95% of browsing as "Unknown URL" … Which has made "unknown" my top activity for the past couple of weeks, I believe. I’m hoping to get a Beta build soon which is supposed to solve the issue and hopefully this build will be released before too long to help everyone else who’s having this problem.

I’m giving Windows Live Writer a shot so I can see how this is going to publish to my blog. It looks pretty good, so far, but we’ll see how it publishes. It looks like it posts just fine, without any sort of trouble. Retrieves entries just fine and everything. I’m editing this again now, from within the desktop interface. The great thing is that it even shows you what your blog entry is going to look like, in your own theme, before you even publish it.

Not bad.

In case anyone was wondering what those tiny entries with no titles and such are, I stole Seth’s idea for “asides” which are essentially “mini entries” … I’ll use these to maybe just mention something off-hand, link to something that doesn’t merit further discussion but I want to have greater visibility than del.icio.us, or maybe just to put in a small thought that I want to have more “permanence” and greater visibility than twitter.

In any case, these are included in the RSS Feed as well as imported into my Facebook profile. I’m just styling them different in the theme’s templates.

For some reason my theme keeps reverting to the default. It’s really starting to get annoying. If anyone has any idea why this is happening and what I could do to fix it, please let me know.

I know, another post on Politics. I’m writing this on the 26th but scheduled it to be made public later so they don’t all hit at the same time.

At the beginning of this month, Dutch posted a link to an article that mentioned that Senator John McCain did not participate in the extremely common act of political “Pork-Barrel Spending” or “Earmarks” … For the confused, in a nutshell, this is where politicians request federal funding for projects. I promise, I wasn’t ignoring you Dutch, I just sorta forgot about the comment and lost track of it in everything else that was going on.

Anyway, the point of this entry is to point out that Obama does participate in this practice. It’s also to point out that he made his earmarks for 2008 public to improve government transparency. I was poking around earlier trying to find this particular list and noted that it was a little tough to find unless you were actually looking for it. Since I already did the leg work, I thought I would share the information with everyone.

Obama’s 2008 Federal Funding Requests

Read through a bunch of entries on that list. I believe the sum total of funding requests that he made came up to around $300 million, but specifically note the type of requests that were made. I read through most of the list before my eyes got tired, so I did note a few questionable ones, but I did note a lot of places where some federal money could go to some extremely good use.

I don’t necessarily agree with pork spending, especially in excess. Although, if it’s gonna be done, I like the way he does it. Not only is he honest (his list is public), but a lot of the projects he would see the funding invested in are (what I would consider) noble efforts.

To hit the point of economic policy, because Dutch also brought up policies that McCain supported, I’m just going to post a link to Obama’s Economic Plan. I think it sums things up far better than I could.

Obama’s Economic Plan

xkcd is awesome.

Heck yeah. That article could not be more true.