Travis's profileWright AttitudePhotosBlogListsMore  |  Tools Help |
|
September 30 Stop Mailing Me Junk!I'm sick and tired of going out to the mailbox and lugging in 3 pounds of junk mail every day - a bunch of useless catalogs, flyers, credit card applications, etc. People - dont you get it? I dont want your junk! I dont even want your junk you send me to solicit me buying your junk. So - this may sound crazy but I was reading about this the other day in some magazine or something that you can pay money to get your name off these direct marketing lists so they stop sending you junk mail. It's probably only a matter of time until they pass legislation like the National Do Not Call Registry (which if you are not on yet BTW, you should be), but until then I am actually willing to pay money and waste my time sending these stupid companies postcards to stop the madness.
Here's some interesting facts about junk mail:
More than 100 million trees’ worth of bulk mail arrive in American mail boxes each year – that’s the equivalent of deforesting the entire Rocky Mountain National Park every four months. (New American Dream calculation from Conservatree and U.S. Forest Service statistics)
Incredibly Popular with Industry, Not with Citizens
Copied from: http://www.newdream.org/junkmail/facts.php That's lame. I for one am going to do my part. Here is what I did... 1) Went to http://www.greendimes.com/ and paid my $15 for their kit and they plant 10 trees on my behalf - sort of like a reparation payment or something. They will send me some stuff I have to sign and send to the marketing companies. If you do sign up send me an email and I can claim a $5 referral bonus which I will redeem for 20 trees! 2) Then you go to this site and register to be removed from a bunch of the mailing lists in one go: https://www.dmaconsumers.org/onlineform.php (costs $1 per name/address) More info on the DMA here: https://www.dmaconsumers.org/cgi/offmailing 3) Sign the Green Dimes petition: http://www.greendimes.com/do-not-junk-mail-petition.html 4) Sign the New American Dream petition: http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/newdream/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=5076&t=default.dwt September 26 Halo 3 is AWESOME!Halo 3 is the best video game ever created. Period. Second period for emphasis. I could end it right there but then you would be wondering what is so great about it. I only played through two levels tonight but here is the stuff I saw so far....
I was playing with my new buddy Sean Douglass. He played as a defector Covenant Arbiter and I was playing as master chief. Sweet! First off - a..mazing graphics in the cinematic movies. No really - it looks real. Really, really real. And the gameplay graphics are super smooth. Smooth like silk. The graphics are the best I have ever see in a video game. Ever. Hands down. There is no equal, not even close.
But the graphics are just the beginning. How about the new ability to take the machine gun cannon off the mount and carry it around with you?! Well, that is AWESOME you say. Well how about you can do the same thing with a Covenant plasma cannon. Yep, you can. That's right. Oh - and the covenant bad guys have a new weapon - some kind of wicked cool looking battle axe that blasts out a wave of energy when you swing it. Ummm, yeah. That is sooo cool. I can't believe how much I am geeking out in this post.
And there are FORCE FIELD BUBBLES that you can pick up and use now. You just throw them out in front of you and nobody can hit you inside the bubble. And the boxes and other stuff that you hide behind for cover actually rock back and forth, tip over etc. when they are blasted by the bad guys. And there are these other new Covenant bad guys that fly around like gigantic fireflys or something. And there are radar jammers that you can pick up. I dont know what they do other than "jam radars" obvioulsy but it sounds cool.
Well - at any rate - I am sure there is lots more to come. I haven't even gotten far enough to get to the new vehicles, all the new weapons, etc. or get through much of the campaign plot but so far this game is shaping up to be the biggest selling, best game ever created for any gaming platform, ever. No really, ever.
Thank you honey for letting me play tonight. I dedicate this post to you! :)
And because I am soo excited I am changing my theme temporarily to a Halo 3 theme. Sweet! September 25 Heroes is back!Yeah! Last night was the season premier of Heroes. Nicki and I love that show. Looks like it is going to be pretty cool. Dad Nakamura and the creepy Petrelli mom are going to die (did theyjus kill each other by falling off the roof? - couldnt tell), and the petrelli brother is a drunken loser cuz he thinks he killed his brother, but no, his brother is chained up inside a cargo container!! What? Where do these guys come up with this stuff? And Hiro encounters his hero - Kensei and Kensei is a loser white guy - dang - who would have thought!? And Claire moves to another city and happens to run into another special powers kid (kinda creepy kid). And then Suresh gets a job with the company. Sweet revenge! This is going to be a good season. New Videos!I added a couple more videos - Ryken saying his "first word" - Wow! and Ryken "singing" Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. September 20 Quotes of the dayI was working on preparing our emergency supplies tonight (more on that tomorrow or something) and was going through our packet of "important documents". I've kept a few pieces of paper in this packet with different inspirational quotes.
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion,
or it will be killed.
Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle,
or it will starve to death.
It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up in the morning, you'd better be running!
-- African proverb
I am hurt, but am not slain.
I'll lay me down and bleed awhile,
and then I'll rise and fight again.
-- old Northumbrian fighting song
That last one was a sort of motto for my dad and he shared it with me in one of his notes to me when I was going through a rough time. Yes mom and dad, I keep those letters.  September 17 The Beauty Academy of KabulNicki and I watched The Beauty Academy of Kabul last night. It's a documentary about some American women (some of whom fled Afghanistan 20+ years ago when the civil wars broke out) that go to Kabul to help train Afghanistani women how to do hair, makeup, and massages. At the beginning of the movie they showed clips from the 1960s and early 70s in Afghanistan. You really couldnt tell the difference between Americans and Afghanis in those clips. The Afghanis are wearing similar attire, the women are decked out in stylish hairdos, wearing makeup, dancing with modern dance moves, and the whole bit. Turns out the the repression of women really only started back in 1996 when the Taliban took control and implemented a very strict form of Islam. Many of the women in the movie remember what it was like back in the '60s before all the civil wars and the war with Russia devastated their country and the Taliban set them back 100 years. The thing that was kind of eerie to me was how these women would tell of horrific things they had seen with a smile on their face. It was really odd to see these women smiling while talking about how they had personally witnessed women having their hands/feet cut off for showing too much skin or have their burkas doused in gasoline and burned alive. I can only attribute this to the absolute joy that freedom brings and that they no longer have to worry about that kind of thing.
Between reading The Kite Runner and watching this movie, I am so glad we sent our soldiers to Afghanistan. Nobody likes to go to war, but I, for one, am glad the Taliban got what they deserved. We liberated those people from a seriously repressed society. Our soldiers are freedom fighters. I dont claim to unserstand Islam, but I know when I see evil and what the Taliban was doing over there wasnt Islam, it was just plain evil.
The Afghani women in this movie that were being trained to do hair and makeup are the pioneers of a new era in Afghanistan. September 16 Doritos Collisions!How is this for new age marketing...
So Nicki and I are reading one of our favorite blogs tonight - Poop and Boogies. The guy wrote a post about these new Doritos Collisions. Nicki and I decide we have to have some right now! .... So I jumped in the suburban assault vehicle and drove down to Safeway in the middle of the night in the rain to get some. I love living only 1 minute from Safeway. We may never move from here. But I digress...
These chips are sooo good. The buffalo wing chips actually are pretty hot and it feels like the Blue Chees chips kinda cool your mouth down just like the real thing. I even picked up a bag of the Zesty Taco/Chipotle Ranch - 2/$5.
 Anyway - read Poop and Boogies (If you dont mind a bit of crass humor) and try Doritos Collisions! Blogging Again - I'm baaaack!OK - I am back! I have rededicated myself to blogging. I've got a new theme, a new book list (what I'm reading now and what I have read recently), a movie list (last 10 movies + top 10), and a friend list. Want to be my friend? Mostly I did this so I could keep up with the family (or help them keep up with me I guess is the better way to put it). I love the new Soapbox embed ability so I can share our family movies right here on my blog.
Nicki and I are going to try to write almost every day. |
|
|
