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“There’s a time to rise above principles,” Republican John Lehman told NBC’s “Today” show, in a blatant bid to alienate his voters in posession of a moral conscience… What could possibly rise above principles? Loyalty to the Party? Love for Big Brother? Moral conscience is about all we have left, and I commend Condoleeza Rice for having principles. Just because a few people are scared about different-looking people doesn’t mean that principle should be thrown out the window … in fact, I feel it should be quite the opposite. If those people entrusted with our national security cannot have a measure of confidence with the President and others, what good is national security? There’s no open-source national security, no national security by the masses. If we can subopena anything from anyone, our security, our confidence, and our freedom are at stake. We entrust certain people to perform the duties of managing our Republic, and we must trust in these people’s judgement. If we do not trust them, or if by some wise they lose our trust, we exercise our right to vote them out of office. We do not subopena classified conversations, we do not ask them to tell secrets, and most importantly, we do not ask them to betray a confidence. Call it apolcalyptic, but if the National Security Advisor is made to betray the confidence of the President, the end is, as they say, nigh.

In less principled and happier news… someone’s cellphone went off in Economics today. And kept going off. For over a minute. The guy was holding it in his hand, looking at it like it was made of Mars ice and making a strange face. And somehow, he’s in upper division Economics. Fool.

Today was Lisa’s Birthday (Observed), and we had a little party at her place. It was fun. I have pictures. Adelle came, which was outstanding. I miss her. Mike and I (and possibly Lisa) will visit her on our way through LA on Friday en route to Santa Barbara to hang out with Naj (Spring Break postponed, scheduled, and revisited) Yes, I schedule my fun. I’m busy. Deal with it.

So I’m sitting at starbucks, drinking a Coffee. It feels kind of strange. It’s just coffee. Plain, black coffee. And it was still $1.60. Hopefully I’ll be able to replenish my starbucks fund when I sell my computer. It’s 99% done. I’m happy. But now, it’s time for Global Security in the Nuclear age, the most apocalyptic of my three national security classes. BOOOOOOM!!!

So I’m finally getting to hang out with the people that live on the other side of my wall. This is monumental to me since I have lived within thirty feet of them for most of the school year and now, with 8 weeks remaining, dialogue has opened. In retrospect it kind of bothers me that I didn’t talk much to them before, but they say hindsight is 20/20 or 20/10 or whichever’s better. This realization has brought me to a new, more assertive way of dealing with people. Not five hours after I decided to be more assertive, my car stereo was stolen. Karma? Maybe. Can’t tell yet. Anyway, I’m working on a police report for it. I’ve decided that instead of replacing the deck, I’m going to go to Radio Shack and get a female of whatever adapter it is thats dangling from my dash and a minijack and I’m going to jerry-rig (who’s Jerry?) a thing so I can listen to my iPod in the car. Why not? Plus, I won’t leave my iPod in my car… and if someone wants to steal my $5 creation from Radio Shack parts, they need to find something better to do. I keep looking at the little hole in my dashboard to see what time it is when I drive places. Whoever stole the damn thing did a good job at it … there’s no damage anywhere else. I just hope they were good about leaving prints.

That aside, school is pretty busy. Very busy. I’ve actually started scheduling fun in my day. Lisa has the 10-spot on Monday, Wednesday and Friday wherein we get coffee between classes. Tommy and Kristina split Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11 to 12. And other than that, I pretty much have the day tied up.

Strangely enough, I get a chance to go to sleep at a decent hour tonight. So I will. Good night.

So as much as I promote technology and all that jazz, I’m really starting to think that people should have to get a license to use a lot of it. Comptuers are a given, and today at Wal-Mart I found two more.

Self-checkout lanes are such a bad idea it’s not even funny. You can steal from them. You can trick them. They don’t work the way humans work. They don’t really even work well at all. I was standing behind this ten year old kid (parents, don’t let toddlers try to use the self-checkout thing…) and the kid didn’t get it. He kept scanning the stuff over and over, even though the screen had some error on it and the machine kept beeping at him. His mother was just standing there looking at him, almost proud that he was being completely inept. The Wal-Checker had to come fix the thing twice, and neither she nor the mother lifted a finger to keep the little punk from messing up the machine.

I switched lanes to a real, old fashioned, honest-to-god human being. The line moved quickly. There I encountered the second piece of technology that people ought to have to have a license to operate: the credit card thing. The three men in front of me couldn’t seem to figure out the thing to save their lives. It took them two minutes to get to the part where you sign, and then they had to do it over again. They’re grown men. The buttons are simple — ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ present just about the toughest decision you have to make when using the thing. Say it with me now… swipe, poke, poke, sign. Not that hard.

Anyway … after that fun trip, Mike and I walked around Horton Plaza… the shopping mall designed by a madman. Or a behavioral psychologist. It’s a freaking mind-trap. You can’t get anywhere you need to be, you can’t get out, and the walls are all crazy-colored.

Hmm, I’m getting hungry. What to eat?

OK, so I’ve been bad about blogging recently.. I’ve been busy.

Tuesday, Mike and I drove up from Santa Barbara and picked up Kristina. We went to get pizza with my Mom and brother and Matt and Karri. Following that, Mike met up with his friend Erik and went to San Francisco.

Wednesday, Kristina and I got up early and rode BART into the city for a couple hours of walking around and shopping and such. We met up with Mike and Erik at Metreon, chatted for a while, and Mike, Kristina and I went back across the bay. Mom made a great dinner, after which we met up with Lisa at Starbucks. Mike and Kristina went *back* to the city (they’ve fallen in love with it), and I met up with Alex for coffee after that. And oddly, with all that caffeine in my system, I was still able to sleep.

Thursday, we all drove down to San Luis Obispo and went to the Farmer’s Market to have McClintock’s Tri-Tip Sandwiches. They’re worth the drive.

I suppose this spring break has been a little more stressful and active than your normal run of the mill break, but it’s great to be able to hang out with a bunch of friends.

I’ve consolidated a few pictures in Filmstrip 001 for your viewing pleasure.

So the drive to Santa Barbara went off without a hitch … flawless, I would say… not even any traffic in LA. That rhymed. I’ll try not to do that in the future. Anyway, we got to UCSB about 1 o’clock after lunch at Quiznos. We stopped at Naj’s for a while, and then walked around campus and Isla Vista a bit. I stopped by Kevin’s house, but no one answered the door. Mike and I then proceeded to Starbucks and then back to Naj’s place. Now we’re in the process of making food for dinner. Other than that, it’s been a pretty relaxing day overall. More later.

monday (15) - drive to ucsb
tuesday (16) - drive to bay area
wednesday (17) - bay area
thursday (18) - drive to slo
friday (19) - drive to ucsb
saturday (20) - ucsb
sunday (21) - drive to sd

…thats the schedule thus far. if you’d like to request any changes, please direct your inquiries to the Management.

It’s my brother’s birthday. Happy 19th, Todd!

Yes, it is 0-day of spring break. It’s Sunday, which means break technically hasn’t started yet. But I’m in break-mode anyway… hanging out at Starbucks using the internet thing. For all those readers of my blog, I’ve decided to cut my first night in Santa Barbara to wait for Michael to get back from Fresno, since he’s coming with me up to San Francisco and back.

John came down last night; he brought his brother’s car to Pendleton. We hung out for a few hours, walked around campus, drove around San Diego for a bit, and I got him to the airport just in time. More people need to come down here. It’s fun. And the weather is nice.

In other news, I’m starting to come to terms with my corporate nature. Apple. Starbucks. Abercrombie. AT&T. Sony. Canon. The GAP. I can’t exist without corporate America. I’m even using a T-Mobile internet connection and drinking Starbucks water. I should probably do something productive today. But it’s spring break.

So Friday was a fun day … spent most of the day packing up stuff to come home… It turns out I only could cull a box of stuff to bring home that I don’t expect to use in the coming months. So that’s in my car.

After the packing and such, I went over to Lisa’s to hang out (as I was homeless) and did some computery stuff… I hate computers. At least windows. But after that, we went to Sala Thai for dinner and Jason called and the three of us went to Alibi in Hillcrest to see The Millionaires play there. (Lisa’s friend is a friend of the band). They’re kind of like Queen with a little heavier rock influence.

The Millionaires at Club Alibi, San Diego

I’m still trying to figure out if I should upload the 4-megapixel images from my new Canon Powershot S400 or not, since the web browser isn’t the best of viewing places for large images.

So I came across this website, technosexual.org, that kind of fuses the idea of the metrosexual (appearance-conscious guys) with geeks. Finally, geeks are sexy. Go us.

Anyway, I need to burn some CDs for my trip and finish up my Oxford pictures.

So first of all, I finalized my Spring Break schedule. It is as follows:
Sunday - Depart San Diego for Santa Barbara
Monday - Santa Barbara
Tuesday - Depart Santa Barbara for Concord
Wednesday - Concord/SF
Thursday - Depart Concord for San Luis Obispo
Friday - San Luis Obispo
Saturday - Depart San Luis Obispo for San Diego
Sunday - San Diego
Monday - School again…

It looks like I’ll be having a nice laid back break, visiting some good friends. Additionally, Mike and Kristina might be tagging along for various portions of the trip. I’ll be sure to take pictures of the whole thing. Which reminds me, I need to clear some space on my hard drive.

Other things happening today: the Aztec Invitational at the new Petco Park, midterm exam in my National Security Policy class, and the winners of the AS elections will be announced. Lots of stuff today. Also, I get to pack for next week because I get kicked out of the dorms, er, Residence Halls at 4PM on Friday.

Well, Lisa’s here, so I need to go.

Everyone has an ipod. I’m not kidding, it’s ridiculous. And when the batteries in our devices die in 18 months, there’ll be hell to pay for Apple. $99 to replace the battery, yeah right. We’ll see how that works out.

I concluded again today on my walk to class (faithful iced mocha in hand) that I love the band Bad Religion. They’re about the only group that talks about their own songs (”You might not think theres any wisdom in a f***** up punk rock song”)… I’m just waiting for a new album with slightly more modern references (terrorism, Bush, Kerry, the EU, etc.)

In the news today, the US Government now owns the largest solid state storage device on earth:
“A RamSan 320 unit holds up to 64GB of RAM in a 3U rack unit. The US government order is housed in three full height rack units. There are over 320 2Gbit/s Fibre Channel ports and the aggregate I/O rate is 36Gbit/s. That is some serious hardware.

Hutsell tells us that “the customer has been happy so far”. He expects there may be additional purchasing later this year.”… yeah, damn well better be happy. I could do a lot with 2.5TB of storage. (link)

I’m still working on pinning down the exact nature of my spring break schedule. Comments, questions, you know where to find me.

Song of the Day: “Ready for Action” by The Crystal Method