We were in Phoenix for 5 days visiting Tracy’s brother and parents. It’s a nice town, everything there is new, and the metro area which includes Phoenix, Mesa, Tempe, Scottsdale(ie pretty much every city in Arizona you’ve ever heard of) is huge. You need a car to get anywhere. Tracy’s parent just bought a condo there, so we spent a good deal of time shopping for furniture for it. It made me remember why I let Tracy do all the furniture shopping.

Thankfully I got all my workouts in, even though I wasn’t feeling 100%. They have a super nice 24 Hour Fitness in Tempe, much nicer than any of the ones we’ve got here. The pool is a full 25m with 4 lanes, and they have 30+ treadmills.

Despite the fact that I’ve never done any sort of home improvement work in my life. I want to get a home theater put into our house. Our house is kinda small, only a 3/2 with about 1400 square feet. The only thing I’ve ever wanted out of a home is a sweet home theater system. The problem is space of course, the system I want would probably take up all of a 20×20 room, so it needs 400 sq ft right off the bat. We can’t fit that into our house right now, so we’d have to build up our hill or on top of the house or something. Having a separate, detached structure works best because that way I can crank the system up really loud without bothering Tracy so much. Also we can add an extra bedroom on top of the home theater so we can add some value to our house. I want a 60″ plasma tv and some Martin Logan speakers. Every time i listen to a pair of them, Martin Logans impress me. Of course that’s a lot of dreaming on my part. It’d cost probably $150k to get everything I want, of which it could add about $150k to the value of the house, so I think as an investment it would come out ok. It’s a lot of work though to get there.

Star Wars Galaxies now has an official release date. Tax Day April 15, 2003. This is good.

I was talking with a coworker of mine who’s husband is a writer, and I thought to myself, gee I don’t really know any writers, so I was about to ask her what that is like. And as she starts to talk about it, it doesn’t sound like he actually loves being a writer, but more that he feels compelled to write. This struck me as odd, I always just assumed that people someone in a relatively thankless profession like a writer or an artist, really had to love what they were doing, because obviously it’s not the greatest living in the world. Maybe there is a gene that determines if someone is going to be a writer.

I’m pretty arrogant sometimes I admit. I think I’m smarter than the average bear, not smarter than everyone, but most people. However, I’m certainly not the smartest person I know. I was reminscing briefly and I happened to think about the smartest person I’ve ever met. I am pretty sure that distinction goes to Brian Ewald my old college roommate, he had a mind for math that was literally astounding, and this is coming from a guy who considers himself smart.

So while digging around for addresses so that Tracy can do some Xmas cards, I came upon my old friend Toby Lee’s home page. Not really anything that interesting there, other than some baby pictures and stuff, but it was good to make sure that he was still in boston and alive(well as of his last update in November of course).

It looks like the US is going to lead the world into war against Iraq. This is not good. It’s only a small consolation that the US appears to at least be getting an international coalition together and world support would be behind us in an armed conflict.

Kojo has decided that in addition to the two triathlons that we’re doing(the California Half-Ironman and the Escape From Alcatraz), he wants to sign up for three more. They are all just international distance, but 2 are in september( the Pacific Grove and the Sentinel) and another one in June, the San Jose Triathlon. That’s a lot a damn triathlons to be doing in my first season.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers opens today. A couple people at work are taking off early to go see it. My mom was hoping that she could get $6k for the Maxima which seemed wildly optimistic to me. The best offer she has gotten so far was for $3k.

I have been reading up on Star Wars Galaxies and I am liking the way they designed the skill system. It’s sort of like Diablo II skill trees. You have prerequisite skills which may not be that useful, but you need them to get to higher/better skills for your class/profession.

The big advantage of the SWG system is that if you decide you don’t like a skill, you can give it up at a later date. In D2, when you got a level, you got a skill point, and the skill points could not be changed around, and of course people got pretty unhappy when their favorite skill was nerfed or another skill was later discovered to be better. In SWG, you use your experience points to buy skills, but there’s a hard cap of 200 on the total # of skill points you can have. So if you decide you don’t like basketweaving, you can just give it up, but it takes a bit of time to get experience so you can buy new skill points. The weird part is that there are many different types of experience points.

What is means is that if your one super skill is too powerful and suddenly they gimp it so it’s useless, you won’t be stuck with a character that sucks, because you can reallocate your skill points. In D2 and DAOC, it used to suck because everyone would just have to make new characters everytime their favorite got gimped.

Kojo has promised to read my blog more if I mention him, the only problem is that he’s kind of a tool.

Ugh. I think I’m getting sick. I’m tired, I have a fever and I’m cranky all the time. Nothing sucks like getting sick. Also my last few workouts have sucked ass. I think a new bike would make me feel better. I think I’ve narrowed it down to about 4-5 brands. I like Quintana Roo, Cervelo, Felt, and Softride. The Softrides are pretty interesting, very different from other bikes, I’ll definitely have to test ride them to see how they feel.

Also Raven Shield has global statistics, so you can see how good you really are… You can fear my l33t sk1llz.

I’m hoping to organize a trip to the local velodrome(a bike track) some time next month. It turns out that San Jose has a nice one called the Hellyer velodrome.

So my parents were in town this weekend helping me sell the car that I’ve been trying to get rid of, and I learned that they voted for GW Bush. They claim that he would support an independent Taiwan better than Gore would have, but I’m not entirely convinced of that. I’m tempted to go to work with a bag over my head now that I’ve learned this. I blame them for all the worlds problems right now.

Tracy made some great cookies, that are pretty much just peanut butter cookies, but stuck in the middle of them, there’s a tiny, bite sized snickers bar. Just got email from Ed Lai, saying that he’ll be moving to Boston either this or next summer to start a GI(Gastrointerology) position in 2004 there.