At the end of every day I try to download all the pictures taken and do the first round of culling/commenting/geo-tagging. Given the vast amount of electronic pictures generated by myself and my wife there is no way I'll motivate myself to go through all of them once I'm home.

I still look through our vacation photos and wonder why we kept some of them. The daily cull needs to be more severe.

That video is good until the last 10% (starting at 9:20) when they lump "Too much government" to include welfare programs and "Soon a number of Romes producers could no longer make ends meet, and they went on the dole". Then it goes on to talk of wandering mobs demanding bread and circuses. So yeah ... goes from being informative to preachy.

In the end of the video it states the U.S.A. can keep a Republic, or move to a tyranny of the elite (oligopoly) and states that Democracy is a stepping stone to Oligopoly. Republican rules can be subverted as well and lead to oligopoly, it doesn't warn about that.

You lost me on the bold bit (emphasis mine). Having just come back from Vancouver Island I can assure you that cars stopping when you attempt to cross the street (no matter where) is very courteous and civilized.

I think the value in a helmet if more for the accidents that happen so quickly you don't have time to react. If you clip a car, sign, whatever, and have time to realize you are going down you drop the bike and roll. There is always the chance you won't see it coming: door prizes, ice on the street, pedestrians stepping out from between cars (of course then you make sure you land on them, nice and comfy), wet storm drain covers.

I was riding after it rained, turned a corner quickly and my front wheel hit a wet storm drain cover. Zip, no more traction and down I went. I felt my nose brush the tarmac then my helmet hit and bounced my face away from the street. No helmet would have meant me leaving my nose and face streaked across the tarmac. It's not like I had a modelling career, but holy f*ck am I happy I was wearing a helmet.

On a less serious note, you spend a lot of time as a bike courier rushing around madly and more than once I've rushed up to doors, pushed the bar and found them locked. I'd bounce my helmet off the door (not my head!), curse at whomever locked it, and move over to the other door.

Oh yeah, if you mountain bike, wear a helmet (assuming you are doing serious mountain biking, not just toodling down fire roads). I've messed up a descent and scraped my helmet across a rock face. No helmet would have been very, very ugly.

Of course, to each their own. I don't feel modern helmets are so restrictive that they aren't worth wearing.

1) I don't get ads at youtube ... could be my configuration of noscript
2) Thanks for pointing me over there, 30min of work time I can't get back ;)

I love the way the summary talks about the diseases this could help fix.

You know what the Scripps Ranch business types are really thinking: "OMG, we are going to *own* the diet industry!" cha-ching!

You'd think so, but I bought the original Fallout from GOG and was surprised by how slow it was. Anybody have any insight to that?

Wow, that's a pretty misogynistic comment, and the fact that it somehow got ranked up at *all* is just sad.

You sure you don't want to follow this up with a comment about how male CEOs just buy stuff to prove how big their penises are? Balance is good, if you are going to roll out stereotypes, do it for both sides.

I can two types of people who would jump at the chance for early retirement:

1) People actually close to retirement
2) People who are not close to retirement, but know they have the skills to get another job

The person who is barely scraping by at their job? Not going to jump ship (unless they are planning on changing careers). I see this as a fine way to lose some of the best and brightest really quickly.

Hell, every time our management talks about reductions or outsourcing my hand goes up. A nice package for leaving so I can coast for a couple weeks then look for a new job? Sure, sign me up!

To view the Apple patent diagrams on the US patent site my browser informs me I need to run Apple Quicktime? Why isn't the patent office using PNG images?

C'mon, who could possibly say this isn't cool? As far as I can tell it is 100% useless (somebody please tell me how this will further science) but damn, given the opportunity, who wouldn't?

We were up on Clairemont Mesa so we could watch a bunch of the firework shows around the San Diego bay area. When the downtown one went off it was spectacular. The horizon lit up for 5 - 10 seconds and the sound was wonderful! Everybody immediately started to check twitter to see what had happened and we all talked about it for 1/2 hr while we waited for the other firework displays to go off.

We watched two more displays (yawn) and you know the only one anybody is talking about? Yup, the one that all went off at the same time. You know which ones I'll be telling as a great story for years to come? Yup, the one that screwed up. Do you think anybody cares what the Sea World fireworks looked like July 4 2012? No, no they don't. Hell, I forgot them 10 minutes after they were finished.

The screw up was fantastic to watch and I'll still tell people about it years later: "Ever wonder what it would look and sound like if they all went off at the same time? Been there, witnessed that."

So it sucks people paid to park and sat in the chilly evening, but c'mon, now you have a great story. Nobody would care to hear about the fireworks if they had worked!

You would think that from their response, but I like my friends and I don't deal well with idiots. They're all university educated and lawyers or IT workers, so I figured they'd be smart, critical thinkers. You would be surprised (obviously) about how people tend not to think critically about things when emotions / loyalty gets in the way.
It doesn't help that the government is feeding the fear all the time. /sigh

I've been in the U.S.A. for seven years now and it seems to have gone more and more downhill.

- I was sitting in a room with a bunch of Americans during Thanksgiving and mentioned how much I disliked the TSA and the new scanners (back when they were new) and to a man they all said "We need the better security."
- I then tried to steer the conversation towards their rights to travel between states (in regards to if you refuse the pat down/scan they won't let you travel) and they said inter-state travel was a privilege. I was gobsmacked.

The socialist leaning, big government Canadian was more worried about his personal rights then the freedom loving Americans! Now if only the housing prices would recover ....

Is that all it takes to propose a bill? There is so little content to that PDF! I was prepared for some weighty legalese but it boils down to:

- Unsubstantiated link of violent video games and aggressive behaviour
- Request to put warning on all video games (except those for 3yrs old and younger)

This has to be something they tasked an intern with.