Yesterday evening I was standing in the lower living room of the house and I noticed a closet that I knew was there but had never been in before. As a result of seeing and becoming immediately curious (I was discussing the new thermostat I acquired and installed on Saturday with one of the roommates – not the Hawaiian), so I opened the closet and saw a world of wonder, a wonder of worlds, sitting right before my eyes. In essence, swag that had been left behind by a succession of roommates that no one thought to clean out. As a result of this I started to go through the closet (I need to clean it out now) and discovered a video projector, kind of old, sitting there. I immediately claimed it under the Finder’s Keepers clause of Playground Rules and Etiquette and then proceeded to see if it worked.

Seeing it if worked meant hauling it to me room, unplugging DVD player from computer it is currently attached to, find open electrical socket to plug projector into, discover which, of the many, RCA terminations was the right one to plug into, pressing the power button, and then waiting for it to come to life. The wait was short, an image projected across my bed on a blank wall; and roommate with whom I was speaking, who’d come with me to my room, and I proceeded to see how well of a picture it broadcast ok – which had me pull out my Ipod and the AV cables (as the DVD player is not in a position to easily be moved or removed) so that we could properly test the projection capabilities of the unit. They is good.

Anyway, after all of that I started talking about things like canvas and PVC framing, eye hooks, and a bunch of other things as I was thinking of a way to optimize the usage for general enjoyment and movie watching AND so that it could be put into use for as little money as possible. Now, I am sure this is all really boring and it kind of scares me, sometimes, to think that I have the background and intuitive knowledge necessary to make modifications to things to make a projector screen work; but I do, and roommate (who’d last tried to get me to run wires through walls and send owners a bill) kind of fell into the whole, “let’s figure out how to make upper living room into a movie theatre,” syndrome as I talked and planned and schemed and then had him say, “You should check eBay.” I hate eBay. Stated as much. Went to a dinner that I was invited to. Came back. Opened a web-browser, pulled up eBay, looked at what they had to offer, and reminded myself why I don’t go to eBay.

What I did do, after eBay, was to do a simple Google search using “projection screen” as my keywords and then started working my way through the top results. I ended up at TigerDirect, a reseller of all sorts of interesting gadgets and widgets and such, as well as five or seven other places, until I discovered that I could spend upwards of $250.00 on a screen or $100.00 for same screen through TigerDirect. I went for the $100.00 option, got a 6′ x 6′ screen and it should be here later in the week. Anyway, the outcome is a screen a projector, and me having some pretty good fun for a bit last night as I considered the myriad of possibilities.

That is all except to say that the Hawaiian informed me he was thinking of moving, last night; and this morning told me he was no longer thinking he was moving, had called landlord and spoken to him, spoken to his parents, and was going to spend a little time in California before heading back to Hawaii. He’d also quit his job this morning and when I left the house he was in the process of packing his worldly possessions to take with him.

Denny Crane – John Hattaway

It is no secret that there is no love lost between G.W. and myself. You know, the current president. I don’t know the man, but having voted for him twice makes me rather squeamish. When you cast that vote and determine who the next president is going to be a part of the justification for voting for the man is in part: lesser of two evils. I honestly felt that G.W. was the lesser of two evils. I mean, look at Clinton. As an individual I hear the man is amazing, I would actually like to meet him; would never vote for him, but I’d honestly love to meet him.

However, G.W. has progressively proven that any Christian principles through which he claims to govern this country are as real as saying Hitler was a humanitarian. I don’t mean to liken G.W. to Hitler. That is not the intention, but merely that I no longer believe that there is any Judeo-Christian principle at work here. I don’t believe he is a religious or righteous man. In fact, the more we move toward allowing torture in warfare, the more we allow the aggressive practices in this country. We are moving father and farther toward war and continual violence in the mid-east and the far east. Before 9/11 we were moving our strategic military reserves to the Pacific and Asians countries. It doesn’t take a genius to see that Bush and his advisors are pushing us in a far more violent and far deadlier direction than is necessary.

We had no need to go into Iraq, and yet there we are. The news, daily, isn’t on Afghanistan or the search for Bin Laden (which is what took us into this series of conflicts) but on Iraq. The deaths in Iraq. The deaths of civilians. The trial of Saddam Hussein. Think about that. We aren’t fighting the war we intended to fight. This isn’t the battle we intended to be in on September 12, 2001, but rather the war that our president, G.W., and his advisors have decided we should be in. Who knows why – outside of those men and women. The outcome is merely that we are in a battle that we didn’t intend to be in. We are continuing through courses of action we never wanted to go down. There is something about the Bush family that suddenly makes me want to do anything to keep them out of federal office.

The problem with this legislation is that it will affect the way our fighting men and women are treated in combat situations. I would imagine that it will be overturned by the Supreme Court of the U.S. with prejudice. The moment it gets to that court it will prove to be a decisive moment in the history of this presidency. The president should’ve quashed the tactics. He should’ve stood up for the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Convention. He should’ve put human rights above that of the perceived safety and security of this nation. What good is freedom and security if we give up what makes us a God fearing nation? What good is it to be the moral equivocator of the world, the police, the bank if we are known as bullies, brutes, and thugs by sending our overwhelming forces and firepower out into the world to put down what we don’t agree with.

We need to start standing up for the rights of the people of the world. That includes the Arab world. We need to put human rights first. We need to change the direction and course we are on to better reflect the morals and foundation this nation was built upon. We are giving away our national identity and rights. We are giving away what makes us different from the rest of the world. We are giving it all away in the pursuit of something we can never achieve. It is a vain quest and yet our president, G.W., continues to push and push in that direction as though he has purpose and direction and yet the evidence, the circumstantial debate indicates that he has nothing to stand on and nothing to hold onto.

It is time for the Congress to step up and stop what he is doing. It is time to begin pulling troops back if we don’t have a clearly defined set of objectives for Iraq. It is time to begin the diplomatic process and remove the military. It is time to make this president a lame duck. He is not someone who is a moral center or has one. He is someone who should be stopped until his terms are over and then anyone who follows his beliefs or ideologues should not be voted for. I am no fan of either party, but the loyal Republicans, regardless of time in either House should not be re-elected. The tide of power needs to change to allow this nation to heal; and the removed civil liberties need to be returned. We need someone in the presidential office who is a lame duck for four years; we need to reset our international appearance and it would be better to have men and women in office who are more focused on the world view rather than on the alleged safety and security of this country.

In a free nation bad things happen. The worst thing that can happen is to give away our freedoms when we become scared. We’ve done that. As a result, we need to go back to the beginning and start to take back our freedoms and the only way to do that is to remove power from the group that currently wields it like a bully in a playground.

I would like to think that I can ignore the noise going on around me. This weekend we had a new roommate move in. When I got home Friday night – late – he was sitting in front of his television in the front room watching something. I sat down to speak with him for a moment, but he didn’t seem really open to talking and so I went to bed. The next day, as I was working on my computer (before going to Salt Lake) I started talking out loud and the goober couldn’t figure out to whom I was speaking (if anyone) and wanted to know if it was him. Sorry to say, I speak out loud when I work and as such, my initial reaction to him was that he would know if I was speaking at him. I softened it.

By Sunday night, late, he has proved himself to be a rather loud roommate. That is somewhat frustrating as the last loud roommate I had was also a convicted sex offender and I never saw him and rarely heard his noise. He had a drum set and liked to come him at weird times of the daylight hours to beat on the drums before going back to jail (not prison). The outcome was that he was annoying, but not really bad even though his worst trait was coming into the house before six in the morning and banging as many doors as he could. I was happy that, when I decided not to stay, he was evicted.

Anyway, noise is noise is noise. I know that doesn’t really make a lot of sense. I am not exactly the most quiet person in the world, but I’d like to think that I am sensitive to the noise levels around me as well as what I add to the noise levels.

The reason I am writing this, in part, is because I was sitting there waiting for a classroom to be evacuated so I could go in, pull computer, sit down, and sit through the folklore class. As I sat there some guy sits down next to me and he’s got his Ipod in his ear and as I sit there the first thing, even before I notice the Ipod, is the noise coming out of the micro-ear buds sitting in his ears. I mean, there was a massive amount of noise, clearly audible to me several feet away, coming out of his ears. Apple has changed the way the ipod works so that there is a maximum noise level. Truth told, the reason for this is to avoid law suits from people, like this guy, who turn up their Ipods too loud and who, in effect, blow out their ears causing long term hearing damage. Great fun, baby.

I like things to be simple and non-intrusive. If I want loud noises I put on headphones and crank up the volume. That does happen. Not for very long. I just find it strangely odd, weird, off-putting, to have people crank up the music, crank up the television, crank up the noise and blast everyone around them out. And yet, as I sit here I think that my speakers, in my room, are turned up so I can hear them, but at the same time are probably a bit loud for the roommate next to me. It makes things interesting. He’s not complained. I should probably ask. I probably won’t, though, as I am more often than not (the other night was an exception) the first one to bed and the last to rise.

So, bought a computer from Jordan which has pretty decent video card, for a laptop, and is capable of doing quite a bit… anyway, bought this computer and put my hard drive in it from the previous computer since this computer had a smaller hard drive and I have a tendency (read habit) of downloading television shows to upload onto my ipod. Doing that required me to download a lot of drivers to run the various items on this computer, the wireless card, the modem, the video card, and other peripherals. Once that was accomplished I started messing with various aspects of the computer.

Which, inextricably, led me to yesterday where I was looking at the various applications on my computer and realized that I’d downloaded Second Life to try out and discovered that the graphics needed outpaced my other computers capabilities. Which, in turn, led me to think to myself, “Self, I should try out Second Life,” which I then launched and started to mess with. You see, the problem with trying something that is inherently complex and somewhat addicting is that you then become addicted, for a period of time, and what happened was that I found myself, the lone wolf, wandering the online world as I continued to change and modify my avatar in that world. It was rather disconcerting when I promised I would spend no more than an hour on it and ended up messing around with it for several hours. Where does the time go?

As an indirect result, I did finish season two of 24, which means my mother can now borrow the DVD’s and watch them; which means I may need to go out and purchase a copy of season three; and which means I can move on to the stack of DVD’s Jordan loaned me when he sold me the computer as I continue to see what is happening, in theory, in the world of Steampunk or was done in that world back when it had some semblance of popularity. Get an idea of how people dealt with the ideas and ideologues of applying the modern innovations to a Victorian age.

Which really leads me to a book I am thinking about buying. It is on personal mythology. One theory I have on the writing of fiction (regardless of what kind of fiction, genre, etc.) is that all fiction requires that a mythology be in place for the world the reader is entering in order for that world to make sense. I would guess that a majority of authors just adopt the mythology of the world around them and, with some non-linear adaptations, apply it to the world they are creating. Mythology does not necessarily denote the structured belief in God. As such, it is the rules, regulations, beliefs, etc., that make up the world in which the characters live. In Star Trek the mythology seems to remove religion from the human element and applies it, rather aggressively, toward the alien presences. Star Wars as mythology is centered around the Force. Science Fiction, in general, has a mythology where religion is null and void and where science, often, answers many of the questions that religion is purported to pose and/or answer. The outcome is that the worlds (fiction) that are created follow a set of rules where religion can play a roll, but maybe doesn’t.

In living our lives we often follow our own set of rules; we follow the guidelines that have been built into us through our religious (or non-religious) practices, what is important, how we choose to remember events and circumstances, etc. The outcome is that in our minds, in our heads, we have a personal set of morals, beliefs, ideas, ways of dealing and coping, and other aspects to our lives.

Anyway, I have two writing research projects that I am in need of doing. One of them requires me to interview a gaggle (or more) of people on break-up stories. People who are doing the breaking-up; people who have been on the receiving end of the break-up; and I am thinking of adding one last element, those who have had to get rid of a stalker and how they went about doing it. Mom says she’d read a book on this subject. Sounds like a challenge… okay, not really. Chances are, this will be something that is done with as little effort as possible for the best grade possible.

Denny Crane – John Hattaway

So, when I am in the mood, which is somewhat frequently, I spend a bit of time messing around on Amazon.com. It’s what I do. I keep thinking that sooner or later when I enter some new variable or add another book or series of books that I own to the database they have on me, that it will somehow reflect in what they show me that I might be interested in. Knowing my personality, and having tested some of the Amazon.com waters, I’ve been mostly nonplussed by the suggestions that company has for me, but still, I go back again and again under the hopes that the books and DVD’s and such suggestions will change favorably.

I go because eBay owned Half.com took forever to fix a problem I had and then tried to do it in a way that I found rather backward and unethical – and it is my opinion that they did it intentionally the way they did so that the company would not be forced to refund money because some seller decided to sell something online and then run with the cash. Things like that happen, but at the same time, I prefer new books and not used books and I prefer a company with a proven track record rather than one with a shady track record. And since I am in the mode of really hating eBay I think that Amazon.com is a rather nice alternative, though they have their problems as well.

You see, there have been recent news articles on the popularity of and success in suggesting movie titles by Netflix. Yes, Netflix. The upstart company that mails you movies based on those you’ve preselected for a set price every month has developed the ability to often suggest movies you will like before you even know what it is you like. Think you know what someone likes. Check out their Netflix account and find out how wrong you are. I don’t know how Netflix does it. I don’t think I care. I am not a customer. I would prefer not to have to think about their monthly charge, and, honestly, even though I own a plethora of movies (minus several I got rid of recently) of all sorts of styles, genres, and nationalities, I am not big into watching movies to fill the hours. Books, writing, school work, reading news, updating the blog, acting, those are the things I can fill my time with. I hope for something to add to the list, but that steps into an area that I am not talking about and so we move forward.

Think about it, Netflix has developed a system that, based on movies you’ve stated you liked and watched, they can determine what you will most likely enjoy and want to watch. They are good at it. Why hasn’t someone acquired them? Or at the very least the technology?

Blockbuster had the chance, some years ago, when Netflix was starting out; but because of poor foresight opted not to invest in that company and is now in a restructuring phase and trying to find a way to directly compete with Netflix. And yet, the Amazon.com’s of the world, that company I can spend HOURS on a day tweaking what I own (it has a good portion of what I own but not nearly everything) and trying to get it to change my top suggested pick from Lord of the Flies to something I might actually want to read (again) has been an uphill battle. But to adopt a system like Netflix would be groundbreaking. I’d think if it were truly successful Amazon.com would skyrocket even further into the stratosphere of online sales and beat out, even further, competitors like BarnesandNoble.com.

And yet, I sit there, click on “John’s Amazon.com” and hope for something that catches my eye in such a way that I can’t help but buy it right then and right there. Compare my “Wishlist” to what I own. Come down with better suggestions rather than suggesting what is already a dominant theme in what I’ve purchased. I mean, come on, if we were to go back to when I was a teenager all Amazon.com would suggest for me would be Science Fiction. I don’t really read that anymore (even though I’ve recently picked up an entire SciFi series of Pulp-style books) and yet, I am nonplussed by the suggestions Amazon.com offers me at the same time I am really advocating using them as a principle purchasing partner (retail outlet, one of biggest sources to receive funds from me, yadda, yadda).

Fix it. Please. Please, fix the suggestions. Granted, I am sure I can sit in my room and review what I’ve told you I own compared to the list (hundreds of books) but the truth of the matter is I want to buy more and I want suggestions that rise to the top like crème from milk. I want to see things I would give my eye teeth for… and more importantly, I want to see things on the lists created that are not necessarily mainstream but would still appeal to my sense of what I want out of my online shopping experience.

Here’s the real deal, folks, online shopping is only going to grow. There are things I can’t fathom buying online: clothes and shoes, as I have size issues with most clothes and actually have to spend time trying things on. However, when it comes to electronic gadgets and books and DVD’s, man am I there. I want to find a fast, easy, and convenient way to spend money I don’t really have to spend on things I don’t really need in order to enjoy my free time (when I have it). Amazon.com could do better. It sounds like Netflix is doing a pretty good job of it already. I think, in the future, most real and true online retailers will be forced to improve their protocols for making buying suggestions or people will do what I sometimes do (out of frustration) and walk into a store and ask the clerk what they’d suggest based off of some rather simple and shady requirements that really don’t encompass my tastes or interests in a way that Netflix seems to have stumbled upon and that Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com or a whole host of other sites (just to plug it Alibris.com) can do to get more return customers.

Retain the ones ya’ got because getting new customers is always an uphill battle. eBay and Half.com have lost me and to get me back to them is really going to be a struggle. Geico has lost me and I don’t think they can ever get me back. There are other companies out there under the same restrictions in my mind: McDonalds. Burger King, etc. (of course, in some cases I have dietary restrictions and until science creates a pill that lets me eat wheat…) the point being that I don’t have to shop anywhere in this day and age, I choose to. And in choosing to shop in some places in a consumer driven economy I want better results and more bang for my buck. In this case, I want a decent system that will make suggestions for books and movies and other things that make sense rather than fall into a similar publishing category or movie theme. Those are single criteria elements. Give me more!

I remember September 11, 2001 very well. The whole day. From the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed I remember that day and probably always will. It was a defining moment in American history. If you were alive and cognizant at that time you probably remember what you were doing and where you were at when you learned that the towers came down, that they’d been hit, that thousands of people were thought to have died; and that was just New York, what about Flight 93 in Pennsylvania or the Pentagon. Granted, those don’t hold the same spot for me, but I remember where I was when all of the news started flowing in… and I remember that I wish I had something to do rather than sit in my apartment and watch the news because it was rather traumatic.

Yes. I realize that September 11 was about a month ago. That’s not what is important. We all have events in our lives that will forever be emblazoned on our memories. Movies, books, websites, people, smells, they bring those back. If you were alive in ’63 you probably remember what you were doing when you found out that Kennedy was shot. Go back further. If you were alive in ’41 you probably know what you were doing on December 7th when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Big events. Things that change the way we look at ourselves, at the country, at the world have an effect on our lives and we become forever changed by them.

However, with that said, there are events that people want to have a national impact and don’t. You know, I don’t personally care one wit about Katrina. Yes, I know people in Louisiana and along the Gulf Coast, but it didn’t really affect the nation. It affected New Orleans, it affected the state, and it broadly affected the region, but the devastation and loss of life from that natural disaster doesn’t affect me. I am not affected by it the way I was by 9/11. I probably never will be.

That does not mean that I feel nothing for those people, or anyone who has gone through a similar circumstance. But think about it. It was localized. It wasn’t an attack by some partisan militant group or person whom we are still trying to capture and/or kill. And it wasn’t something that affects the public as a whole. It just wasn’t that big a deal and I am sorry to those who feel that it was larger than it really is. New Orleans is a sinking city that requires levies to keep the water out and full-time pumps to move water out that creeps in. The city is destined to be claimed by the sea and all we are doing is staving off the inevitable. If a long enough power outage were to take place, if a large enough storm were to blow through, New Orleans would be lost and nothing anyone would or could do would bring it back. Louisiana got lucky this time.

People have events in their lives that shape them. That shape the way they view the world around them. I grew up in Texas. I was there when the Branch Davidean compound went up in flames. I can tell you where I was when I saw the smoke. Not on TV in real life. Looking out an open door, eating lunch, and watching a plume of smoke rising into the sky. Yes. I saw it. I was that close. However, for the vast majority of people in Texas, in Waco, in the world, they don’t have a clue as to what they were doing at the time. To me, it was over and I didn’t have to worry about my dad being called to go and man the lines at the compound. Turn to the TV, watch people race to put out the fires. Learn later that children suffocated in a buried bus as they tried to escape. Yeah. It defines a part of my life.

In ’92 there was lots of rain, flooding, and the local lake rose high enough to flood the backup spillway that the engineers that built the dam had put in place precisely for such a catastrophe. The world watched as the lakes in the region could no longer hold the amount of water being pushed into them by all the rain and then watched as the magnitude of water carved out the areas below the dams. I watched. I went and was a speculator as the water tore down roads and carved up natural areas. I remember. It defined a piece of my life. I even remember my mother hitting a bird, or was it the bird hitting the car, when we left from watching the water flow over the flood plain and down into the lowlands beneath it? Small things. Inconsequential activities that defined my life. They don’t mean anything to anyone except for me and to me they are emblazoned on my mind and come up, occasionally, when something reminds me of what is going on around me… in the world.

I don’t care about Katrina and didn’t when it happened. I was sad because people died. I was sad because people suddenly lost everything. But that storm doesn’t define a nation, it doesn’t define a presidency, and it doesn’t define how I reflect on 2005. I almost have to be reminded that it was last year. Otherwise, the storm falls into the same category as Ruby Ridge or a lot of other events and places and storms and disasters and other things that some people are defined by and yet mean nothing to me.

We all have events that mark us. For some they are mostly happy. Marriage. The birth of a child. Graduation. The drivers license. A first car. A twenty-fifth car. Lots of things. Some are bad. Deaths. Divorce. Moving. Graduation. Flunking out. The first car. The twenty-fifth car. You get the idea. We define our lives, or aspects of our lives, through events in them. Our minds hold onto the minutiae of detail and in the end we can remember exactly what happened on 9/11 because it defined you, it defined a nation, and it defined our view of the world.

I remember, rather clearly, the events that led up to my deciding to re-apply to BYU one last time. It got me to Utah. It put me in a position to make more informed choices now that I am here. And at the same time I remember where I was, what I was doing, who I was talking to, the approximate time of day, and (if I try really hard) the approximate day of the week when that decision was made. It defined me and no one else. You can’t ask the person I was speaking to, at the time, what they were doing and expect them to know. They were a passive participant in the experience. It meant something to me. It means something to me. And that’s the point: It means something to me. I can see the connections and the outcomes and I can see, in part, where the future will take me; but at the same time I don’t expect others to recognize this as something particularly special in their lives.

With that said, Katrina, no matter how much we want it to, will never define a nation. Looking back over history the Floods of ‘92 will not define the nation and mean something only to those who they directly affect. Natural disasters don’t define the nation and they never will. Your special events are most likely not going to define the nation. And yet, what I choose to ignore by making these statements is that want aspects of their lives to be recognized as more than the sum of its parts and as such the news and politicians and pundits look for events to try and make them national, to make them more important than they are, and in the end, they will fail and in five years most people (outside of Louisiana) will not remember anything about Katrina other than it was a name and that something happened, but what? Does it really matter?

You remember Friday? If not, read the previous entry. Anyway, the whole reason the cheese queso was all over the backseat of my car was because I had an assignment. An assignment that was, gratefully, allowed to move to today (Monday) because of everything that went wrong on Friday. So, last night, kinda later than I was wanting to (but as a result of my trying to log into blackboard and not being able to) I made the cheese queso and then went to bed. Got up early enough, not as usual, this morning to warm it up in the crock pot, to finish what I didn’t last night, and then bring it all to school.

On the plus side, when I went to start my car it started right up AND I grabbed the crock pot box to put the crock pot in and then put a seatbelt around it so that it wouldn’t tip or slip. Then I had to go to the store because you can’t have queso without some kind of bread… well, I can… but it beats being sick because of something I ate. And I would be sick and miss more class and that really isn’t an option.

With all that said, I just presented the food item to the class, shared the Friday experience, in abbreviated form, and then let them at it. Hope they like it, this is only the third time in a week I’ve made it. The first time I had too much cumin. The second time ended up in the back of my car. Today it made it, I think it should taste right, it did last night, and the outcome is that I don’t have to beat myself up over this assignment anymore. Weeeee!!!!!