Some things about stuff and things.

Just random sentences here, mostly. Been listening to Cream and Eric Clapton lately, and friends and collaborators of his - Gilmour, Lennon, Winwood, Jagger, etc. That guy is like the "6 degrees of Kevin Bacon" for the whole rock industry, except that you could probably shorten that to about 3 degrees. If you don't know what I'm talking about, well, get a clue!

Also checking out genealogy software and sites, in a long overdue attempt to make a family tree and study my own ancestry a bit. Both my grandmothers are still alive and both have done some research in the past, so I'm going to relentlessly (or perhaps gently) email them until I suck out all their knowledge for my own purposes (which should make both of them feel good, in point of fact).

Malthus's 19th century ideas about the scarcity of resources limiting population explosion is hitting home in a big way, except that I don't want to explode and create more population, I just want to be able to afford to buy small things, especially with people's birthdays coming up, relatives having a hard time financially, and dollars generally being next to impossible to come by. And how exactly am I supposed to fritter away money if I don't have any to begin with? It's depressing.

I'll need to work to supplement or supplant this welfare bonanza I'm on. I want to study to become a medical technician (CT, MRI, etc.) so that I can buy groceries and things, but that takes time and money itself, so I need a job before that to be able to afford the schooling. I've found websites that will pay people to write content for them, which sounds good if the subjects are interesting. I'm more of an ideas (architecture) guy, but I can do content too, I'm bicameral by god!

I've also reunited with a bunch of friends from high school on Facebook, though not deliberately, and it's been pretty painless and even fun at times. Most people are surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) not much different from when I knew them years ago. The ones who have changed have tended to mellow for the better. The others were always mellow and have remained that way. Maybe we're all just getting old, but I like it, I guess.

I forgot, one of them has a kid who thinks he can punk me in chess. I'd better go take him out with a massive assault on his King-side just to teach him humility. Lol. I've got a 20-game win streak going in Scramble (aka Boggle) now against GOOD players - pretty amazing, I've just barely won some of those matches too. Very few handy wins or blowouts. I gotta have my wits about me now, everyone is gunning to take me down. I feel like Bob Marley or Butch Cassidy or Jesse James. [Ed. note: It's now been ended. Boo hoo.]

Last thing: YouTube officially sucks and long live DailyMotion, Imeem, and the others who provide better quality at larger sizes, and most importantly, haven't completely decimated their "official" collections of music videos and anything else desirable. What the hell? Haven't music labels learned YET? They distrusted MTV way back when. Then Steve Jobs came in and trampled them to death with iTunes, even though as their retail sales ( = physical merchandise, which costs THEM money) fell, their online sales went up. Now they're all hitting 'Tube with gag orders so we can't watch or embed any free videos of THEIR PRODUCT, even though said videos are easily seen for free on MTV or their own sites, and they presumably would like us to actually buy their products. They're not called promotional videos for nothing.

Oh right, advertising. Well guess what? Shove it, I'll keep on finding sites that have the cojones to actually promote my favorite artists so that maybe I WILL go buy their new CD, rather than end up in a bad mood because I can't find an official version of Clapton's "Tears in Heaven" which is like 15 years old now. What the hell do they think they gain by not allowing anyone to post that video on YouTube at this point? Hatred, that's what they get, and more people like me defecting to other, newer and better sites. Or outright downloading things in the Interweb's not-so-seedy underworld, which cuts out their revenue stream entirely. No, no, they haven't learned a thing.

And Google, as much as I love(d) you, you bought YouTube and agreed to all this, so screw you too!

Goodbye for now, dear audience. I am dreaming up a pub quiz, more polls and questionnaires, more expository essays on the topology of the universe (or at least, related topics), and possibly even... *drum roll* ...file downloads (of a legal nature, of course)! I'll do all that's possible in Blogger before ditching YOUR DUMB, AMATEURISH BLOG SERVICE, MR GOOGLE, and going to something much more elegant and powerful like Wordpress. Or anything else. Better think quick, Sergei and Larry, you guys are OLD now in the world of the young. So am I, but I'm a consumer. That doesn't count, because I control you guys in the mind of Adam Smith (RIP).

Rah!!!