Well, it’s November 4th, 2008, which is probably one of the most historic dates in election history. Instead of boring you all with my thoughts on the election, I’m going to go listen to NPR. I have one thing to say, and that is:

Again, another clipping I found online since I seem to be big on them lately. Not that I condone everything in here, but I think its pretty damn funny. especially since I live in the Northeast.

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Dear America,

We’ve decided we’re leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we’re taking the other Blue States with us.   In case you aren’t aware, that includes California, Hawaii , Oregon , Washington , Minnesota , Wisconsin, Michigan , Illinois and all of the Northeast.  We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California. To sum up briefly: You get Texas , Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole’ Miss. We get 85 percent of America’s venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama . We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their fair share. Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition’s, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms. Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we’re going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they’re apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don’t care if you don’t show pictures of their children’s caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq , and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we’re not willing to spend our resources in Bush’s Quagmire. With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country’s fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation’s fresh fruit, 95 percent of America’s quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners) 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.   With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia. We get Hollywood and Yosemite , thank you. Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we’re discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent believe that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties. Finally, we’re taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico .

Peace out,
Blue States

A little political jargon – I found this article in The Sun Times. Once again the media confirms what Sarah is proving to us each time she gets up on that podium.

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. . .Because his pick for vice president, Sarah Palin, is woefully unprepared to be Leader of the Free World.

Does this sound harsh? We know it does, though we mean no disrespect. Our sincere hope is that McCain, a good and brave American, lives a long and healthy life. But when the senator chose Alaska Gov. Palin to be his running mate, and in doing so deemed her fit to stand a heartbeat from the presidency, he either demonstrated phenomenally bad judgment or put politics ahead of country.

Palin has almost no experience on the national or international stage. She has virtually no qualifications to be commander in chief. She is the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a town about the size of a couple of Chicago high schools. She has been governor for 20 months of a wilderness state with a population of 684,000 — about the number of folks in Will County.

And the more Palin’s GOP defenders contort themselves to defend her credentials, attempting to inflate the uninflatable, the more obviously thin her resume looks.

Asked by a CNN reporter what qualifies Palin to be commander in chief of America’s armed forces, a McCain aide pointed out that, as governor, Palin “commanded” the Alaska National Guard. The reporter then asked, to no avail, for a single instance in which Palin had involved herself in the business of the Guard.

A commentator for the conservative National Review generously granted Palin “foreign policy” experience solely on the basis of geography — Alaska is next to Russia and borders Canada. If the commentator knew of any Palin-Putin talks, he failed to mention them.

Found these Product (Red) wallpapers online through someone’s blog and promply lost the address in the sea of my firefox bookmarks. Even though I’ve long since moved on from the Product (Red) theme, they are pretty nice. So for anyone who wants them, you can grab them here

If theres anyone out there who was all set to buy an iPhone, one of the coolest and classiest devices ever, only to get smacked across the face with the reality that although the iPhone 3G may seemingly be the same price as the iPod Touch, it is in fact, not. If there’s anyone out there that came to the realization that what apple was banking on all along was that its customers would find out about the extra monthly data fees/special package charges that can amount to around $100 per month AFTER the fact, and spent the night in their room crying because they realized that they would never be able to seriously justify paying that. If there is anybody that, in a moment of weakness, settled on the next best apple product down, the iPod Touch, which is in fact not a phone at all, defeating the purpose of their trip to the apple store in Boston entirely because now they had another iPod instead of a cellular phone, I know exactly how they feel. In fact – if you haven’t guessed – this happened to me pretty much down to the letter (well, maybe minus the crying part). The fact is, that I saved up for a snazzy new phone, took the train all the way into Boston, and came away with an empty wallet and a new iPod. How’s that for a bad spender.

anyway, letting past issues be past issues, I proceeded to jailbreak my iPod and wait for it to start working. Which i’m still in the process of doing today.

No, seriously though. I jailbroke my iPod with only a little trouble, which is about as much as I could hope for, and wasted about a whole day looking through Cydia and Installer to find the coolest applications. I didn’t find much, since there are depressingly few sources that are fully supporting the 2.02 update, but I did find a couple of apps that made me feel a little better about not owning an iPhone.

First, we have the mother, an app named Transformer, which, as its name suggests, transforms your iPod’s GUI into that of an… iPhone! The Cool thing about this however, is that it doesn’t just give you a fake. It actually replaces the iPod’s the iPhone’s, complete with ring settings, the phone and text message app, and camera roll, and the service bars, all of which work as if you were using an iPhone (you can’t acutually make calls and texts unfortunalty, but its fun to show off to friends) the other nice feature here is that instead of the music and video button on the dock you have an iPod button. Finally, if you hold the home button down for a second and hit the lock button, it takes a screenshot, which is stored automatically in the camera roll section of your photos.

Second, we have two apps, which do the same thing pretty much, but for different mediums. Instapaper free (this is actually a free appstore app) allows you to download webpages for offline viewing directly to your iPod. Mxtube, which is a Cydia app, allows you to download youtube videos directly to your iPod for viewing later. Instapaper is a bit of a pain to install, requiring you to create a special bookmark in safari and use it whenever you want to store a page for later reading, and then use the local app to download your stored pages, but they both work superbly.

Anyway, thats all for now,  but I can honestly say that these three beauties make me feel slightly better about owning a “lowly iPod Touch” when everyone and their brother is surfing the internet in the middle of shaws parkinglot, and I certainly hope they can do the same service for you.

I recently decided to upgrade my email address, for various reason, to a more mature/professional sounding variation. I wanted to stay with gmail, as I have recently become a huge fan of google products ( a topic for another post), and, seeing as my experience with said products is usually one denoting a well thought out, simple, and easy to use set of programs, I thought nothing of the move. Initially at least. I decided to start to move up to my shiny new email the next morning, and, after breakfast I began what at the time I thought was to be a quick and painless procedure. I created my new account with relative ease (although I did have some trouble coming up with a new email as it turns out almost all variations of my first and last name are already in use), and even was able to set up my old account to forward any new emails directly to my new account. Thats where the bomb hit.

As it turns out, gmail has absolutlely no tools or methods for transferring old emails up to a new account. Neither does Lifehacker. Or anywhere else for that matter. After several hours, countless google searches, and a couple of bottles of asprin later, I finally found a method for doing this that will make sense to normal human beings. The depressing thing is that its actually pretty simple, and painfully obvious (at least to me). Why I didn’t think of this is the first place is just one of those questions that i’ll never have an answer to.

Anyway, rather than explain this myself, i’ll leave it up to a guy named Dave, who runs a blog somewhere on the net and is better at explaining it than I.

So for the people that don’t acutally want to listen to me rant and just want a solution, the link is HERE

So I havent touched this blog in a few months. And no, it’s honestly not because I have had better things to do, I have just come down with a bad case of summer and social life combined, and as such have been doing alot of loafing, loafing being defined as not going anywhere near my computer. Now that the school year is around the corner however, that is becoming harder and harder to do. I have a big senior year ahead of me, filled with fun things like college essays. college essays, and…. college essays! exciting!

Anyway, my ramblings aside, the point is that I will hopefully be able to start writing again. occasionally. maybe.

Here are some goodies for all you Zune users… threw them together yesterday using photoshop when I finally got bored with the defualt zune background. I am acutally very happy with the way they turned out. also, if you check out my DA gallery while you’re there, you can find a widescreen “zune:” desktop wallpaper. Furthermore, you can download individual wallpapers if you dont want the whole package.

So I wanted to take a moment to take my hat off to the old school Minnesota hip-hop band Atmosphere, for releasing their new album entitled: When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold. It really is a piece of art. One thing that I thought was curious about this album was that the band decided that instead of releasing their [single] “The Things That Hate Us” as part of the album, they decided to prerelease it as leakage. in my opinion, this is one of the best songs of the bunch, so don’t miss it. some of my other personal favorites on the album (so far) are “Garuntees”, “Glass House”, and “In Her Music Box”. Anyway, enough of my own opinions. if you are new to Atmosphere, or a prospective fan here’s an excerpt from URBAN magazine that featured a recent article about them:

“Eleven years after becoming the first hip-hop act to put the Twin Cities on the map, Atmosphere has grown into one of the most accomplished MC/producer duos around. Between Slug and Ant, they’ve released six albums, 11 Sad Clown tour albums and various side-projects like Felt — amounting in well over a million units sold. And along the way have performed to sold-out crowds everywhere from modest sized venues in their hometown to colossal festivals in Japan. Since releasing their 1997 debut, Overcast!, Ant’s ASR-born melodic beats and Slug’s open book and observational style of rapping continues to evolve into hip-hop that’s more honest — more textured. And the praise for these Rhymesayers pioneers hasn’t stopped flowing in.”

And an interesting snippet on their new album:

“In fact, When Life Gives You Lemons… is entirely based around fictional narratives that deal with societal issues – many, which revolve around the theme of parenthood.”

as you can probably guess, I can’t speak highly enough of them. check out their myspace Here.

So i’m off to Canada to check out some colleges in Montreal, Toronto (which is acutally where I grew up), and Kingston. Also hopefully see some freinds. When I get back next week I wanna talk about the usefullness of RSS, which I have only just discovered recently, as well as some interesting virtual desktop programs. Until then, ill be snowboarding (if i’m lucky), and enjoying myself up in the land of the moose and beavers.