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I've tried to stay with a weekly update similar to Rick's, but with my long posts these days I've exhausted a lot of the tech posts I've had in mind. Less than a month until aphelionsites.net expires, so I've got to get all the sites moved over. Obviously this is my new blog site, the dgs is backed up here at /dgs/ and my flight instructor wiki got moved over to ksuflightteam.net/cfi. The index page of merkur.aphelionsites.net now redirects to this site. Instead of making entries, I find it an acceptable alternative to work and improve different features of this site. Some updates are small, such as new icons for the apple and flying posts. Another little update inspired by my longer entries is clicking "comments" at the bottom takes you down the page directly to comments posted and the entry form. Little cosmetic changes are nice and all, but where's the beef? Well for the major update made last week, click features at the top of the page. What you'll see is the original idea behind having a features page. Before it was just a few links w/entry titles. I didn't like this for many reasons. It was way too plain with no creativity. The only good thing about it, I could edit the entries and switch it from "weblog" to "featured" and it would automatically move itself over. Problem is when you went back through the history of the weblog, those posts were now missing. It interrupted the history and now has a much better integration with the site. The idea is, if you were coming to the website for the first time, and wanted to know what it's all about, you go to "Featured". The second big update I did today, and involves the "Friends" page. From version 1.3 to 1.4.1, the friends page can now detect how long it's been since you posted via RSS. Now the friends page will color code people based on how long it's been since you posted. If it's been longer than 2 weeks, your name turns purple and the entry is hidden. There shouldn't be any time where I go longer than 2 weeks without checking it, so it's not like I'm not seeing your post, but I can only look at that guitar you're planning on buying for so long. Jo suggested a grey color if it's been longer than a year, which sadly, I may need. You get a light blue color if you posted today, dark blue up to two weeks after that, and purple for longer. Red means RSS error. Your site could be down or the script timed out, etc... I like it organized by name, but someday might change it to order of entry. RSS is tricky to program around, because it's very flexible. For example, Livejournal doesn't require you to title your post so that field is sometimes missing. I use the title as a link to the post on its home site. So I have to have a backup idea which is to use the link itself as the title. The content:encoded tag which I discovered on schultz's site gives me problems too. Which do I use? Content:encoded or description? What if there is no date? What should the script output? What color does it use? All these things have to be thought of and still make the script small and fast. I'm pretty proud of the script. It uses magpie RSS to actually grab the entries, but the output and design is all mine. I don't think any other people actually use the page, but who knows. So now all that's left to do is make entries....but that seems to be getting done too!
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Today's rant is about MSNBC's Christopher Elliott. Christopher Elliott, you have no idea how the airline business works. You need to sit down, shut up, and be happy your country has a transportation system as unregulated as ours is. Spreading your fear, uncertainty, and doubt will only further confuse our revenue passengers and ultimately leave them more confused and unhappy than they were before. Unfortunately for us, someone even stupider than Christopher Elliott gave Christopher Elliott a job as a FUD writer and now we have to deal with shit like Dump This! 7 things airlines should jettison (Local Backup). In his article, which I shudder to call an article, he explains how the airlines are so stupid and if they only followed his advice, we could all be profitable and happy. Now in the aviation industry I am just a lowly pilot and nowhere near management, but I do have an inside look at what goes on and can easily tear through everything he has to say. Especially his bullshit headline: Why not remove the pilots to cut weight? That's hitting a little close to home there Christopher Elliott, but that's a bad idea no matter who you are. Now I know you will say "Well Mike he's obviously using a little observational humor to deflate a source of copious amounts of stress" but there are people out there who believe this....trash, this...vomit from MSNBC Christopher Elliott. These people buy the cheapest tickets available from expedia.com or some shit, expect to be treated like gods, give themselves 15 min to connect to a different freaking airline on the other side of the airport, and even if they make it complain about how their bag didn't! No shit! A bag can't make it from through the baggage system at a hub in 15 minutes! Then they cry foul for years about a certain airline, turning all their friends away from it. I bet everyone reading this has that one airline that you just hate because something happened one time. Hell even I do, it's Lufthansa after they stranded us in Finland with no refunds. But you know what? It was because we bought a nonrefundable ticket off expedia.com and couldn't get back into russia to make the flight. You've got to listen people...listen to what the airlines are telling you and if you want options like refunds and transferability, you've got to pay. That's Capitalism. That's Deregulation for you. Your congress which you voted for made it this way in 1978. And the customer got much lower airfares while employees in the industry took a 66% paycut. Thanks a lot guys. But I'm going to approach the rest of this rant as if I were a paying customer. Like Christopher Elliott but with the common sense an infant would approach this subject with. MSNBC's Christopher Elliott assumes that airlines are trying to ditch everything on an airplane in an effort to save weight. A lighter airplane requires less lift to fly, and reduces the thrust (fuel) required. Simple to understand I suppose. So why not just just get rid of the whole plane! Think about all the profit you could make selling tickets and then not actually having to take people anywhere! No flight crew, fuel, catering, ATC and landing fees to pay for.. The real answer is that if it's still on the plane, it's 1) making money or 2) required for safety. There is nothing on that plane not required for safety that doesn't make money, with one exception: the bathroom. Come on Christopher Elliott, I think you're kidding when you mention getting rid of anything more than one bathroom, but with your other suggestions I'm not so sure. People can't even make it from the terminal to the aircraft on the jetbridge without having to go. For what little is decent in humanity, let us keep our bathrooms. You mention getting rid of inflight magazines probably because they are poetry compared to your drivel. Truth is, American Way magazine has to sell enough advertising to make up its cost in fuel. It has to earn its way onboard. Maybe it even makes a small profit. Imagine that. Something onboard the aircraft yet still making money. Same goes for your "duty free" carts, or the alcohol. Just because you don't pay for anything above the minimalist fare doesn't mean first class shouldn't get what they pay for. And I've heard what they all say: "Well I would gladly pay more for better service" - BULLSHIT - EOS Airlines, all business class with that idea in mind and BANKRUPT. You had better service for more money in the 70's and you all bought the cheap tickets. And here we are. Pay for first class or don't complain. Christopher Elliott doesn't understand safety either. To a passenger, safety is a given. All airlines are equally safe, right? The FAA makes it that way, right? What if we truely deregulated the airlines and took away the FAA? Bet you'd have your wish. I bet you 1000% that airlines would be flying around with one pilot and no other flight crew for that very reason. You'd have more issues like GoJets pilots falling asleep in the front. Or the Comair Lexington Crash taking off from the wrong runway. Two pilots up there is what keeps our system as safe as it is. We've already have our salaries slashed 50% at every bankruptcy crisis so that Christopher Elliott can fly for 99 dollars. And those airplanes are so sophisticated that they fly themselves...sure... The airplane I fly is older than I am, doesn't have GPS or a flight management system and has an autopilot with a minimum wage attitude, that is to say it doesn't like to work a lot. And some commercial airplanes still don't even have autopilots! Those that do can bring the airplane down to 100 feet above the ground. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want my pilot to let go at 100 feet. And even worse what happens when something goes wrong? An engine shreds itself or there's an electrical short and your precious autopilot stops flying? Just how much are those pilots up there worth now? Christopher Elliott also thinks very highly of flight attendants. Obviously their only reason for being aboard is to serve you drinks. Of course the FAA requires one FA per 50 seats so it doesn't take too long to get your drink, right? The real reason is that they are there for your safety, to regulate the cabin so that the pilots don't have to. They assist in emergencies and undergo a lot of training. Most of their training you never have to see but I am glad to fly with them for everyone's sake. It is hard to get people to pay more when inevitably the coach passengers arrive at the destination at the same time as first class does, so as long as there is even one company out there willing to give you a cheap ticket with no frills, the others have to match it or fly empty. It's like Rick's rant about cable. There is intense competition between companies, but the individual doesn't get a whole lot of say in the matter. When people buy their ticket based solely on the price of the ticket and nothing else, this is what you get. It's your free market. Put your money where your mouth is.
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Hmm well I guess it's been a year so time for a PC post. My desktop computer is being more picky than an old car these days...Before Quakecon 08 it needed a speed boost. Hmmm Athlon 64 3500+, 2gb ram, 256mb geforce 6800gts, aah probably need a new video card. It's great living close to both a micro center and fry's electronics. Micro Center is having a deal on Geforce 8800GT 512's so I pick one up and when I get home it looks like everything is great. Quakewars and Flight Sim X look great! Lots of detail in flight sim and...what's that sound? My airplane's propeller sound should be constant but it's stuttering like it's going to quit... But it's not the game. My entire computer seems to come to a halt for just an instant, but it's constant. Every single second, exactly once a second there is a little stutter. It's most noticeable in games where smoothness is key, but it's happening in windows too. The mouse stutters, music is interrupted, and by a few days I'm paralyzed with rage at this little tick my computer has developed. It's unusable! In safe mode without drivers it works fine, so I'm thinking it must be a software problem i.e. driver or resource conflict. I would remove everything but the barebones components of a computer (Proc, 1gb ram, vid card, mobo, 1 hard drive w/windows) and it would work! The stuttering was gone! I would begin to add things back into the computer to see where the conflict was and the stuttering would come back randomly.   Sometimes I would start it up, it would work and when I rebooted it stuttered again! And removing whatever it was wouldn't stop it until I took away everything. Other people online had reported similar problems with driver fixes. I tried new drivers, beta drivers, 3rd party drivers... And I was so sure it was a software problem since it worked in a barebone config and safe mode. Not having another desktop system (Alison has an iMac) I was finally to the point of shelling out another 200 bucks for a new video card to see if it was really a hardware problem. So I got a new one and it worked perfectly... I had a bad card all along. I returned the old one disguised as the new one and got my money back. Woohoo. But that's not all! Just about a week ago my windows hard drive, the 200gb maxtor PATA drive (same drive) started clicking itself to death after a power outage so I went and bought a 350gb Western Digital SATA drive on the cheap to replace it. My computer wouldn't auto detect it and after a few hours of painful testing I decided that drive was bad too. A quick exchange at Fry's got me a Seagate 500gb for about 15 dollars more. Quality control is not up to par these days. Chinese products, gotta get rid of them. Anyways new drive works fine but reinstalling everything is a pain and there's some stuff on my old c: that I need to figure out how to access without it booting off that drive. I'll probably bring it to CLE in Oct and have Jo extract it to a flashdrive or something. Also my Razer Copperhead laser mouse seems to be quitting on me. It will suddenly stop for a few moments. You'll hear windows drop it and redetect it. Sometimes it'll drop and that's all you get until a reboot. Why can't I just play my games? :( :( On a more upbeat note, 50 bucks bought me a row of LEDs from ikea with some neat features and different colors. I laid them out behind my desk and they complement the blue light inside my computer pretty nicely. I can change the color depending on my desktop background or have them rotate colors automatically. Some pics and the one on the right is a 20mb video of it auto changing colors:   vid:Changing topics away from my desktop, Alison and I were recently trying to get a nice flatscreen HDTV. And well...sorry schultz don't mean to steal your thunder but I know you know your stuff. So we ended up getting the same one, the Samsung LN40A550. It looks great, and well..you can't just get an HDTV and not get an HD player. Enter....the PS3 That's right, I have a console. I got a Ps3 because it has blu ray. I guess I would have preferred the xbox360 since I could pay money to play online with friends despite being able to play with them for free on the computer. The fact that it plays games and acts as a decent media client is extra. I got gran turismo 5 and alison got harry potter. GT5 looks pretty good with the high res. There really aren't many good games for ps3. About half of them are sports games and the other half are GTA IV and Guitar Hero. Might get GH3 later though. Don't really have the money to grab a few games yet after the tv and ps3... I also don't want any games I'd rather play on the computer like FPS. The unit itself is pretty nice. I got it used on craigslist with 2 wireless controllers, a bluetooth remote and hdmi cable. It's a 60gb model so it plays most ps2 games also, a big plus. I like the black and silver and it complements the TV nicely. It sits inside the TV stand we have and when it has been on for a while it will get hot and the fans turn on and it's pretty loud. We had to rearrange the living room to put the couch a lttle further away from the screen cause it would give us headaches, so the wireless is nice. To get the media client stuff working, BobOmega pointed me to a program called tversity which is a streaming and transcoding service that runs on your PC and will stream video, music and photos over a LAN and even the internet. It also can connect my ps3 to steaming video such as Skynews and NASA TV. The best part is that it will reencode your divx, xvid etc files into a DLNA compatible format on the fly. So I don't have to reencode everything to get it to work. There are some downsides to it, such as the service can't run as an admin, only a local user. That means I have to log into my computer for tversity to start. I want to just be able to hit the power button, walk away and have the service run like file sharing. This way I could keep a password on my computer but people could still access media. The other downside is that tversity takes an itunes approach to content and builds a database of all videos and music. Now you can have a folder view only - and no streaming content, or you can use metadata to arrange everything and frankly who has the time for a beta program such as this. That's what you get for free I suppose. Ok some pics and then this post is finally over..   
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 All behold the holy grail that is the iPhone 3G! Your prayers have been answered! It's sleek! It's fast! It has GPS! It's everything you ever wanted in a phone plus a bucket of chicken. And it even has 20 min of battery life! So how come when apple released the new and improved Jesusphone, I went and bought only a "Zeusphone"? On June 14th, Steve Jobs unveiled the old iPhone and arguably changed the cell phone world. As you might remember, I wasn't too pleased with it. I was upset (as upset as you get over non-essential things) that I didn't get my 12" intel powerbook, and that the iphone wasn't coming until june of 07, and that it was tied to Cingular. So I bought an 80gb 5.5th generation ipod and my Motorola PEBL to replace my old Panasonic x70. The pebl was a great phone and served me well. Now that the iPhone 3G is out, prices on the old one dropped and I finally bought a barely used one off craigslist. Now I know everyone knows about the iphone and all its features already, so I will try to keep to how I came to choosing a 1st generation iPhone as my next phone. Why even get a new phone? As I said the PEBL is a great phone. It's small, smooth, sleek, chic, and practical. I had a great looking OS X theme hacked onto it with the help of Jo, and it was easy to customize ringtones and alerts. I also liked the way it opened. You had to pull the lid down to release the magnets and it popped open. It provided me with countless hours of enjoyment when sitting around at the airport waiting for delinquent students to show up. But it wasn't a jesusphone. The camera was very fuzzy, it didn't have a lot of memory. Some of the buttons were small and hard to use. Not very uncommon complaints about phones. But that's the thing. The iPhone really is a game changing phone. When you fix complaints that people have about every phone, suddenly you stand apart. That's why apple is so innovative. They know what you want even before you know you want it. (Or maybe they gobble up innovative companies that know what we want even before we know they've gobbled them up.) When the new iphone came out, I decided to get an old one and unlock it onto t-mobile. By this time unlocking iphones was more common and less of a risk than the first days. I like my t-mobile plan and since I've gotten a plan that works better for me I haven't had any issues with them. I sold my ipod touch on craigslist and picked up a lightly used iphone for about $100 more than I got for my touch. Not too bad of a trade in my opinion. I easily unlocked it (with the 1.1.4 firmware) and instantly it worked on T-Mobile. I even get unlimited EDGE data through T-Mobile's T-Zones package for $5.99 a month. ATT wants 30 a month just for 3G speed. Not worth it in my opinion. T-Mobile's 3G will NOT work with the iPhone because it uses a different frequency than ATT. For the longest time I said "I just want my phone to be a phone". I think a lot of people think this way, but you know what? It's just so darn convenient to keep everything in one device. And I believe that is the iphone's greatest strength. You have to admit, it is not easy to carry around separate phones and mp3 players. I always need my phone, but I found it too easy to forget my ipod at home. Or to just reason that I wouldn't have time that day to listen to it. Not only the ipod, but I'd have to remember headphones and carry those too. Too much to carry around in my pockets and I'm a guy so I can't carry around a purse. Not that I want to....why are you looking at me like that? The iphone solves this problem beautifully! One device and you don't even need the headphones. They finally put a damn speaker on it. Now I'll be the first to admit that it's not the best speaker system in the world, but I'm not carrying headphones anymore. The iPod interface is good, though the coverflow interface is not a highlight for me. It works differently than iTunes. Say that you're browsing your favorite techno playlist and you want to look for an album via the art (coverflow). So you flip the iphone sideways and...well now it's displaying all music... Flipping it back returns you to the techno playlist, but why can't I browse a playlist in coverflow? The phone also has a tendency to flip into coverflow a lot which I find annoying. I wish I could disable the whole thing. I am also mad that I can't plug in whatever headphones I like. I bought an adaptor but that's just one more thing to carry around. The adapter stays in my car mostly since the Eos has an aux in port but not line-in. Having an iPod touch for a short while previously, I now appreciate the volume control buttons on the side of the iphone. This is a major downfall of the ipod touch. Of course, the screen size is awesome, videos look great, and album art looks great. Despite my coverflow woes, it really is the best ipod ever. The other apps come in real handy too. Maps is as useful as google maps on the computer. (read: somewhat useful for some things). It will show me if traffic is bad on the way home from work, but also i will search for something and drive there only to find it's not there. Useful for finding large monuments and maybe an address. Searching for starbucks or pizza notsomuch. I find the GPS unnecessary as I usually know where I am on the ground, so wake me up when you can fly a GPS approach into an airport in overcast clouds only 300 feet above the ground. That's all I ever use GPS for :) Stocks, calculator, and weather, yeah ok moving on...ah! Notepad! Even though it looks like it was coded the day before the phone was released, it's probably one of the most useful apps on the phone. I use it to store blog ideas right now, which will lead to more entries since I don't forget as often. I can also store radio frequencies for when Alison and I watch planes at Dallas Love Field, things to buy, etc... Mail is good for being a mobile client. I don't email people much these days. The camera is pretty good, though it lacks zoom and a light. Instead of displaying a bunch of huge pictures, I will link them: Pic shot with Panasonic x70. Pic shot with Motorola PEBL. Pic shot with iPhone. Getting better with time I suppose. Now Safari....oh boy Safari...It is awesome. So awesome that I don't even carry my laptop around when I'm flying anymore. The laptop is too easily damaged and I get almost the same functionality here. I used to carry my laptop in my flight bag, but I was always fearful of it getting stolen or damaged. I switched aircraft a lot so I was always on the move, it was crammed in the case with all my approach plates and manuals..it was bound to be damaged sooner or later. Luckily it can be safe at home when I work because my phone has safari. Obviously no java. We knew that. Moving on... Even the phone is great. It's a pain in the butt to add all your contacts into the phone but once they are in it looks great. Easy to use. Favorites, Recents, and the way it picks out phone numbers from websites, texts, and email is useful. I don't have visual voicemail because I'm on T-mobile but since I rarely have more than one voicemail anyways I don't really care. I do get ghost voicemails when my phone loses the network. When it picks it back up, it will chime and indicate that I have voicemail but when I check it there is nothing. At least the indication goes away after that. Alison has a hacked iphone as well and hers is normal. When I upgrade to 2.0.2 the phone will be reflashed and hopefully cured. Doesn't bother me too much. Texting is great too because the texts read like an ichat conversation. The pebl had incoming and outgoing texts seperate and it was hard to follow a conversation. This was one one of the biggest eye-opening "why didnt anyone else think of that" revelations on the phone. I kinda miss the flip phone, and I haven't had a brick phone since my original nokia from sophomore year, but the size is okay and its loud and easy enough to talk on. Bluetooth is slow to activate but works. Another great feature of the iPhone is actually not a feature at all. Hacking it. Installer.app is awesome. I'm running the old firmware, and of course these days there is the Apple App store. There are still major advantages to jailbreaking your iphone. Jailbraking is not unlocking. A first gen iphone can be software unlocked to work on other GSM carriers. An iPhone 3G cannot! This is a big reason to go with the classic iPhone. However, they can both be jailbroken. Jailbreaking is the hack of the BSD subsystem allowing you to execute code and add applications without going through the app store, and it's great. Installer (or Cydia on the 2.0 firmware) is easy to use to install all sorts of apps. Ones with real usability like themes that apple will never let you do though the app store. My iphone is themed with the Tiger wallpaper and it looks a lot better than just a black screen with icons. It's also nice to have an iPhone so I don't get charged for firmware upgrades like the iPod Touch (they say it's because of Sarbanes-Oxley but who knows). Not all is perfect in the iphone world though. There are some annoying things. A lot I've already mentioned like the headphones port and coverflow. You can't use it as a hard drive anymore :( It does get a little warm when talking on the phone. Not uncomfortable, but noticeable. And it does get face juice all over it so it looks smeary even to the point where it can't tell where you are touching anymore. One time I tried to call Alison but it thought I touched somewhere else and called my dad. Then I couldn't press "End call" and ended up talking to him for a bit. Not that I don't like talking to my dad or anything, but I was trying to call Alison back after a dropped call. It was...inconvenient. Battery life is decent. It will not go more than two days with normal use. Period. I charge it every night with no problem when I'm at home but when I fly I don't take a charger with me for the overnights. (Just one more thing to forget and leave somewhere.) Turning the brightness down and using it sparingly will give me about two days with an hour or two of calls thrown in. Not too bad considering all it offers. And, ITS EASY TO LOSE. Oh god this deserves a paragraph of its own. About a week ago I left my iphone sitting on the seat of the hotel van that drives us to the airport in Alexandria, LA. I remember because I was posting about Adam's RSS feeds and then it was gone. All of the above paragraphs were lost to me! I didn't even realize until I got back to Dallas and wanted to check my voicemail and texts. (couldnt while roaming on a,t, and t). I was freaking out because I thought I lost all my contacts (since I wouldn't be able to retrieve my sim card to put back in the PEBL) and of course the monetary value there. Later I remembered that my contacts are synced with my laptop now (actually a good thing once I realized). Anyways I contacted the crew that was staying there the next night and they found it right on the seat where I left it. I used up a lot of good karma there so I have to be good for a while :D So in conclusion I am really happy I got the iPhone. Losing it made me realize just how much I have come to rely on it in a short amount of time. It may not have features that work for everyone, but if you like the ipod and don't need business tools like a blackberry, I really do believe the iphone is the way to go. Hopefully one day they won't be AT and T specific by the time I want another one. If I do lose this one it will only get harder and harder to find the classic ones. Of course they will probably be able to software unlock the 3G sometime. Hopefully you enjoyed reading this review as much I enjoyed writing it, which is to say, misery loves company...heh :D
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Quakecon came and went quickly this year. The usual group had grown a bit. Tim brought down 8 people from Ohio to stay at my apartment. Luckily it was only for the first and last nights. They reserved a room at the Hilton Anatole for the majority of the event. It was nice to see Tim and we had fun driving in my car, but as always I wish more of my friends would come down. This was the first year that I volunteered with Tim, Adam, March, and Matt. The day that is typically wasted standing in line I spent helping lay down cat5 cabling, crimping network cables (I suck at it) and doing check-in. It was a long day but it felt good to give back to the event a little. My main motivation however was the fact that I had no one to stand in line with this year. Overall the convention was pretty good but it seems to be stalling a little bit. 2005 was a huge year that saw us kicked out of the Gaylord Texan for being rowdy. 2006 was "almost a year without Quakecon". With only a month or so advance notice and a significantly smaller BYOC, QC kind of returned to its roots so to speak. A lot of the big sponsors and shows such as hard ocp were missing, and to this day it is still hurting. 2007 and 2008 have grown since then, learning to maximize the hilton anatole's arena for maximum BYOC and sponsor area. 07 was fun because Will came down. 08 was a year by myself again. Featuring Quake Live as the main event this year, I was disappointed at the lack of Quakewars! There were about 6 main servers, but it was hard to keep enough players in one. Hell this game was still beta during the last Quakecon! The problem in my opinion was bots in the servers. It's something that may turn into a rant in itself one day. Bots should not count as players in game servers! You would be playing the game like normal and all of a sudden you notice you are on a team of bots versus a team of humans. Umm...wonder who's gonna win that one? Of course no one wants to join your team to help because its full of stupid bots and you're going to lose. I played a little quakelive and it's fun and it's everything quake4 is supposed to be, but I spent most of my time in Quake 3 Arena servers. I played some really great players, even got into a 1v1 match which tied at one match each before he had to leave. The BYOC was its normal self, and is always great. Quakecon's problem now is how stale the events are becoming. Yes there's the quickdraw tournaments. But this year you have to be present at the stage to play. No more "Price is Right" style announcements to the BYOC with a happy gamer running down the aisle. There's the "what would you do for a geforce" or whatever where they are shaving people's heads for video cards. Seen that, didn't think too much of it to begin with. There was more Guitar Hero/Rock Band than Quake featured at the closing ceremony. Todd Hollingshead didn't even know the quakelive player's handles in the finals. ATI's swag shirts were embarrassing. Ventrillo had a corvette they were giving away, but not everyone who attended got a chance to win it. Raffle tickets for the vette were given away as prizes for other shit. Of course I won nothing like every year but if I was to win anything in the world it would be a losing ticket for a vette. Congratulations you didn't actually win anything! Think about how many people could have gone home with a video card and a new love for ventrillo instead of the one guy who now gets raped by taxes on a new car that will cost so much to insure. People shaved their heads, legs, and did all sorts of crazy things just for a chance at that corvette and the person who ended up winning got the very last raffle ticket given away. They threw it in a shirt during the closing ceremony. How's that for randomness? I suppose it's technically no different than any other ticket but you have to think they didn't shuffle very well. And a sinus show by another other name...well i still wouldn't go. What made this year good was that I got to spend quite a bit more time there and seeing my bro and adam and maybe even matt. I'm just surprised that I got so much time off work to be able to go. With '08 done, QC's 3 year deal with the anatole is expired and I hope they renew the deal because it's a nice location. As always, I would like to see more of my friends go next year. I think next year I'll spend a little more time on the suggestions forum too!
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