After watching a pretty fair amount of the Democratic National Convention on TV, and reading a TON about it on cnn.com, nytimes.com, and various other news sources and even quite a few blogs, a few thoughts stick out in my mind.

First, the analysts and all of the major news sources repeatedly say “this is targeted at the swing voters”. Well, as I don’t especially like either of the candidates, I would definitely consider myself a swing voter. Based on that I would say that if the vote were tomorrow I would vote democratic. But do I feel that way right now because I just got done listening to Kerry, Edwards, and all of their supporters play them up all week? An interesting statistic would be to look back (in the modern nationally televised convention era) and look at all of the elections that were expected to be “close” and analyze who actually won the election and compare that to the chronology of the conventions. That is unclear… what I mean is that, if there are that many swing voters, and if the Republicans have a halfway decent convention that would put them at an advantage because the dems wouldn’t have as much of an opportunity to regain those “swing voters”.

On the other hand, after listening to first Edwards’ and Kerry’s speeches, I was pretty surprised at the level they were speaking. Sure they were both clearly practiced speakers, but I would have expected a much more “informed” or “educated” tone and wording in the content of their speeches. Not that I am some linguistics expert (Payne et. al, No I’m not trying to be hipocritical, I am sure there are plenty of grammatical and/or punctuation errors in this post), but neither of them really said anything profound in my mind. Are they purposely “talking down” to the masses? I guess it would make sense that most of the so called swing voters are in general the less educated, but I would tend to expect a fairly high level (which can at the same time be easily understood) speech from anyone as close to the White House as Kerry or Edwards.

Barack Obama for President?

So in my statistical analysis haze I turned on the tv to take a quick break. I watched the final couple hands of WSOP 7 card stud then began flipping channels. I landed on 34… Fox Sports Channel; or is it? Not at 10 in the morning it isn’t, it’s definitely a major info-mercial goin on.

So like any info-mercial it sucked me in. No, I didn’t buy a 24 speed blender with a carbon chrome tipped blade and a 400 year warranty and 3 juice makers for buying in the next fifteen minutes. Although, the info-mercial did draw me to the website of the product they were selling: Get The Edge.

Get the edge is a personal improvement/motivation/self analysis 7 cd set by Anthony Robbins. I remember seeing this guy on a movie or two and assuming he was just some schmuck extra, but after looking at his personal website I realize this guy is no joke. Apparently he is a pretty distinguished guy. He does seminars all over the world, and charges a damn pretty penny for attendance. One thing I was unable to find on the website was where the hell this guy came from!!

Does he have a psychology degree? Or did he just create a convincing self improvement method? Does he have a background or degree in public speaking or is he faking it?

I guess for only three easy payments of $69.95 I can find out.

pizane24: and i deleted ALL my mp3s on accident
mxtwo53: that sucks man
pizane24: 2.17 gigs of music downloaded in the past two days
mxtwo53: ha that is a high rate.. what kind of internet connection do you have there?
pizane24: porn is on hiatus right now
pizane24: that was certainly not intended for you
mxtwo53: weird.

OK OK, so I’m not invincible afterall. Mom says that we are going to get caught downloading all the movies, music, and software through the internet. I tell her repeatedly, “oh please, i’ll tell the RIAA or any of those schmucks to stick it”

Then last week I received an email saying that some one is unhappy with the fact that we are downloading every simpsons episode ever made. Feel free to click on “continue reading” below to read the email, its pretty funny actually.

None the less, motion creates motion, and this required a response. A few moments ago I purchased this: NEC Dual Layer DVD Burner and these: 100 Blank DVD+R’s.

So the MAN wins again… I will delete all of my movies from my hard drive.

In other news, if anyone wants to come over and watch the Simpsons with me, just give me a call!
(more…)

That is my record in the AKPsi poker night challenge. The first week I cleaned house coming home with $43 more than I started with, enough to make me the clear winner. Last week Justin flat out took me. Him and I were playing heads up and I tried to take him down but he was drawing magical cards… I lost… Then last night, I sucked it up for most of the night before finally getting a card or two and moving into a dead heat for the chip lead with Josh. Josh and started thinking that we had both done well enough and it was getting to be pretty late so we counted the chips and called it a night, I was $38up, Josh took $42.

Next week I move back into the win column. That is a promise. Will I take YOUR money?