DISQUS

The best spring breaks for me are always going home from college in depressingly human Southern California to my parents' beautifully green country home in NorCal. I usually spend my time helping out around the house, getting my hands dirty building with my father, and gorging on my mom's home cooking.

Huzzah.

"Wanna know the secret to surviving air travel?" the businessman asks McClane, "After you get where you're going, take off your shoes and your socks, and you walk around on the rug barefoot and make fists with your toes."

--Diehard

Those are all beautiful bags. As a backpacker, my strategy is to always carry the food. There shouldn't be much on the return trip.

Don't!

Or at least thats what I decided after a few years with cheap disposables and easily-dulled and expensive electrics. I can get away with a beard, but I still use an electric razor for my neck and cheeks.

Saturday: Wake up early (6:00am). Farmer's Market. Garage Sale-ing. Finish homework from the previous week. Work on freelance webdesign. Play racquetball with girlfriend. Study/work/play UrbanTerror. Make gourmet dinner and watch movie.

Sunday: Sleep in (10:00am). Brunch. Study for coming week. Work. Hang out with gf.

I find the best way to convince someone of an idea is to convince them that they thought of it.

I would say a similar "underdog" role is filled by Apple in the Operating System market, whose products "just work" and similarly combat Microsoft's awful image with a sense of designer cool, all the while being arguably more restrictive than Microsoft. It doesn't have the market share that Google has, but I'm trying to keep it OS only. Look at the iPhone and App store, for instance. Apple doesn't license its Operating System for a reason: it sells a product, not software (a generality, but exceptions like iTunes for Windows fall within the realm of marketing and practicality). You know that they would run OS X like the iPhone OS if they thought they could get away with it. Do you see public outcry against it? Sure, a few people defect from Apple's BSD distro to another, or more commonly to GNU/Linux if they really have a problem with restriction. What percent of consumers care enough to switch to a less convenient solution (GNU/Linux) from OS X or Windows? Roughly 0.7-1.7%? A good portion of whom haven't switched from anything but HP-UX?

So 2007 was the first year there were more people in the States that cared more about complete freedom than convenience than people who are ignorant enough to still use Windows 98. The odds for this country's freedoms look dismal.

I have to think we're not the country of freedom fighters we romanticize. It takes a lot to get us to bite back, and by then it takes a lot to dig us out of the hole. I mean, last time it took the French. They have ONE aircraft carrier, guys. Is that who we're gonna call?