Merry Christmas and Happy New Year's!

Living life is about perspective. No two people can sense exactly the same realities around them. If you limit yourself to your own perspective, you will miss the beauty of the world. Just a thought...

For Christmas I went to Cincinnati first and then Rachel and I drove up to her Grandma's house in the northwestern most county in Ohio. It's cold and flat and there's nothing there. But there is Rachel's family. Rachel's parents and brother and sister came also, from Maryland, and we had a good time together. Rachel's Grandma is a sweet and quiet woman who is generous and thankful. I think Rachel will be somewhat like her when she gets older(that's a good thing). :-)

I saw a good movie called Tampopo which means "Dandelion" in English. It's a wonderful movie about food and noodles. It's about a widowed woman who garners the help of skilled noodle chefs and others to make herself a truly great noodle chef and be able to have a successful business. It's a work of art about food. The tagline is "The first Japanese noodle western!"

Another good movie that I just saw last night for the third time is What's Up Doc? It stars Barbara Streisand, and while I do not care for her music, she is quite an excellent actress. It also stars Ryan O'Neil. And for you ladies out there, I think back in 1972 he was something of a Ewan McGregor ;-)

"Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon." -Miro, Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card.

End of Semester

On Saturday at 6AM I finished my paper, thus finishing out my semester. I at least did alright in my classes. Can't say I did as well as I like, but then I have high standards for myself.

There's a nice service called del.icio.us that is a social networking site for sharing web links. They have buttons I can put right in my Opera web browser and post links to things that interest me. I can send the links to Rachel, or anyone else who uses the service. I can categorize the links by keyword or "tag" so other people can find them by searching for links labelled with a particular tag, or by subscribing to receive links with a certain tag. It's very interesting.

I'm also trying a new beta version of Gaim(2.0.0beta1), to see if I like it at all. AIM's ads have been getting on my nerves, screwing up my windows interface with those pop-up ads. They seem to have the effect that when I close the AIM buddy list window, I can't open it up again, and closing AIM from that point crashes the program.

The Bush administration needs to avoid the hilarious headlines it's been getting lately, like: Bush Vows More Eavesdropping.

Pigtails

I let Peggy Loo put my hair in pig tails. Looks pretty good I must say, although Chris my roommate strongly objects. So right after she braided my hair I did some one-armed pushups to reinforce the concept of my manliness despite my hair being in an apparently unacceptable state. Chris said it didn't matter. Oh well, I like it :-P