Very cool place and having a great time so far. All the time on trains seeing the country has given me a lot of time to read, I’ve read 9 books in the last 3 to 4 days, reviews here! Just fun reads which is nice, almost like I’m at the beach.

My favorite Japanesism yet:

Ben: Do you have sandwich package x? (to train trolly girl)
Train Girl: (in broken english) Sorry we are out, do you want rice with crab flakes on it?
Ben: YES!!! (and i was thinking why did she even ask!!! I love rice with crab flakes on it!!!!)

They were delicious.

Great video on the idiocy that is Glenn Beck, this makes me want to go into TV if any idiot can spout this insane rabble and be so powerful.

John Stewart is an absolute genius.

This is the best music track I’ve heard this year! Just amazing! Read more about Nneka here.

Artist: Nneka
Track: Heartbeat (Chase & Status Remix)

Here is a nice dueling paragraph:

Health insurer WellPoint blames the Great Recession and rising medical costs for its planned 39 percent rate increase for some California customers. To President Barack Obama, however, it’s Exhibit A in his campaign to revive the health care overhaul.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who received the company’s explanation in a letter Thursday, said “it remains difficult to understand” how premium increases of that size by can be justified when WellPoint Inc. reported a $2.7 billion profit in the last quarter of 2009.

Read more here.

Of course their CA subsidiary could be loosing money but the MAIN POINT HERE should be that insurance companies are good businesses in that they are TRYING TO MAKE MONEY. I don’t blame them for that, I blame our government because they either need to slap some draconian laws down or they need to take over the health care industry. Health care is a right not a profit making industry.

Steve and Rose visited for a week from Ireland which was a blast! Big thanks to Chappy and Liz for letting us stay at their house and Liz for teaching us all how to snowboard and getting us a big discount on our passes! Apart from a small fluke wrist fracture Steve suffered we all did well and by the end of our second day were able to turn! A few more days and we would probably be falling a lot less. I’ll try to post some photos and videos when Rose posts them.

I had one monster fall where I hit the back of my head, thank god for helmets or my brain would be splattered all over the snow. I switched from Regular to Goofy on my second day and I think that is going to be the way I go in the future, but a bit tough to switch everything in your feet and mind. By the end of that day it was going well and I can see how addictive snowboarding could be.

Fantastic, what a strong person to go to them and call them out on their bullshit as well of some of his own parties bs. I’m so tired of the rhetoric on both sides, but especially the republicans as they seem to just want to do nothing when they don’t have the presidency. As if their job when they are in the minority is just to stop all forward progress, and to deny that the majority of Americans want universal health care!

I feel this is going to be an interesting year. Vegas.

I’ve decided to stay in Denver for another year, so I’ll be here through June 2011 it sounds like. We are going to find a new place to live in April/May, hopefully closer to a neighborhood we like a little better. Next week I’m heading to Vegas for a big ultimate frisbee tournament plus it is going to be Dmarsh, BBustin, and my brother’s birthday. Should be fun. And then when I get back from that Rose and Steve will be here and going to spend a lot of that week skiing with them! And hopefully I’ll be going skiing during the week a few times after that, and working on cross country skiing as I would like to be good at that.

Work is going well, and just got really busy as we took on some additional business which is quite fun!

Travel wise the year is looking awesome. In a few months I’m taking a few weeks vacation to explore Japan! Then in April I’m going to Italy for a short weekend trip as Iris got a bid to Paganello (massive ultimate beach tournament), and I’m going to play with her mixed team. Extra fun as it should be a lot of Arkansas people and hopefully Daniel and Joel go. And then me and a friend scored tickets to the World Cup in South Africa which I will be going too in early July. South Africa is being nuts on airfare pricing but its a once in a life time opportunity, so worth it.

Oh, and I’m trying to complete the 100 Book Challenge for 2010, which means I’m trying to read 100 books in 2010. So roughly 9 books a month, so far I’m almost done with my 4th and almost on track. I’m posting mini reviews as I go too.

Also, here is an interview we did a few months ago for Work, I’m pretty proud of it as we don’t sound like idiots. Although I did repeat a lot of words over and over and over, oh well, she was really nice and it was fun!

Watch it, it is amazing mini series on HBO. Probably the best show out there if you want to understand the frustration and pride of our modern military.

Watch this, great band, just wish they were able to come to the USA (border problems last tour)…

And one of their best songs and my personal favorite…

Here are some awesome mixes I’ve been listening too lately: Pogo – Expialidocious and Pogo – Alice. All of Pogos stuff is great too!

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and is ready for the new year! I certainly am!

I strongly recommend if you are in Denver to check out the Genghis Khan exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. It was really well done and their expedition health was really cool too. You got to take your heart rate, exercise heart rate, width and height, and a lot of other tests on this little card and print it out at the end. Really good for kids to understand how everything works. It was also sponsored by Kaiser Health (who is probably collecting all this info). They also let you take a snap shot of your face and they would age it and you could flip between different ages and see how UV exposure would affect you. I think it scared the shit out of some kids and they will be wearing heaps of sun block this summer.

My Predictions For 2010

1. I will switch to 100% Apple… Very likely, I do 90% of my work in FireFox and Firefox drags in Windows (even a fresh install of Windows 7) when you have tons of tabs open (10+). I don’t have this problem on my MacBook. Funny enough this is the reason I dumped Apple about 3 years ago.

2. I will buy an Apple Tablet. If the Apple Table actually exists.

3. Apple will make LCD playing cards and I will buy those as well.

Night.

Check out this cool new netbook from Japan, it has two screens and it expands out! I’m going to try it out and see how well it works.

The Kohjinsha’s Dual Screen Netbook features two 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 resolution displays, when used together give you a total resolution of 2048 x 600. The Kohjinsha’s Dual Screen Netbook is powered by a 1.6GHz AMD

I increasingly believe that people fundamentally never change, and if they do its very rare or they just mellow a little. I find this kinda tragic.