End of July, my birthday today-I’m 43. Woo-hoo. Not much going on-Erika and I are going out to dinner tonight.
Not much is happening-I’m down to twice a month on this… So, the journal sez…7/17-Saturday, we went to Pasadena for KidsCity at the Rose Bowl-hot & crowded, back to my parents & swam in the pool. Colin was sick the next week-they both are trying to get out of school by saying they’re sick. took the 22 & 23rd off the go through storage & purge things to take to a church garage sale-got rid of my NordicTrack and Ampeg SVT-50 cab 🙁 We also went to the Sawdust festival on Friday. Sunday was the Redondo Beach kite festival-we stayed at the Marriott on Saturday to make the day easier. We swam & ate at the mall there. The fest was good-I nailed my demo-even though I haven’t flown it since last year. I’m starting to actually go swimming and doing water aerobics to improve my shape in prep for Pilates class. I broke the rear latch on Erika’s car-we had it fixed, as well as a few other things-it came to $1,000. Ouch. Erika teased me on Tuesday night & I got really mad-I was just like in grade school being tormented by bullies-she didn’t understand. Not much else.
Well, the Democratic convention is over. Big whoop. Kerry actually did pretty well with the acceptance speech, but that Odama, he’s someone to look out for in the future. The polls are running pretty tight for Kerry-the solid states don’t change much on either side, but the swing states are totally up for grabs-Kerry’s stuff about helping manufacturing and outsourcing and healthcare might do the trick, especially if he can drive that message home and Bush doesn’t. He really is vulnerable on those issues. I read an interesting article on fracture points in either party-the GOP does a good job of hitting them for the Dems, but the Dems don’t, and the GOP definitely has some weak points where the Dems can slice some voters off. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. I’m convinced that my vote doesn’t count-California is pretty solidly Democratic…I’ll just vote & sit and watch it play out. I really don’t want the ugliness of 2000 again, but if it’s that close, that’s what’s going to happen.
I just downloaded a prototype of Looking Glass from Sun-it needs Linux, so I’m going to have to free up a computer somewhere. It looks amazing-you can tilt windows and make them partially transparent. I also got a copy of machinima, which is a toolkit of making animation using Quake II. Now if I can find some time to play with it… I also got a copy of Blender, which is open source 3d drawing. And the new version of Eclipse, and Beehive, and IBM’s interface builder. Open source ROCKS! Who knows if I’ll ever get enough time to use all this stuff, though