As a precursor, I have not seen the movie yet. I picked up the Book “Angels and Demons” after reading a book recommended to me by a co-worker named Teresa.

The book I read before Angels and Demons was called Deception Point. You followed the story of an NRO agent who was brought in by the President of the United States to help verify some information about a meteorite. As a reader, you knew there was going to be something really special about this meteorite because she knows nothing about meteorites.

She gets flown to the North Pole with a (not surprisingly) attractive man who later becomes the (obvious) love interest. The book is sparked with comedic relief in several ways, most notably by an old pal of the secondary main character, who is, if I recall correctly, a physicist. One of the premiere in his field.

If you’ve never heard of the Milne Shelf, (and I doubt most people have; I was vaguely familiar with it when I read the name in the book,) I think you’ll like the setting. While the book is about United States citizens, I believe most of the book, (Certainly the longest period of time for the characters,) is spent in Canada.

There are a few twists added into this book that I appreciated. One thing Dan Brown does when writing, (or, at least, what he did in the two books I’ve read that he wrote,) is he makes the story take place over the course of one or two days. It lends a sort of fast-paced excitement to books that are 500 to 800 pages each.

The Main Character is the daughter of The President’s primary foe for the upcoming election. The entire story weaves in such a way that the balance of who seems to be ‘winning’ shifts several times.

The ending wasn’t a real surprise to me. By the time we got to it, there were only a handful of characters that could have been holding the playing cards. In the two books I’ve read by Dan Brown, I’ve noticed that, whoever the Characters think is responsible for what is going on are not responsible at all, and are usually innocent. In this book, he managed to throw suspicion around to everyone and make it so that you wouldn’t know, for certain, who was responsible until they revealed themselves. It was very well done. I recommend Deception Point to anyone who knows how to read.

Insofar as Angels and Demons go, we get to follow the Illustrious and brilliant Mr. Robert Langdon on a trip through Rome.

The detail and intricacies of this story, including the pieces of artwork that were put into the book, (They are Ambigrams, for those who are curious.) are all well done. I was surprised at how deep the plot went, and I was actually expecting a similar ending to Deception Point when I was nearing the end of the book.

I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that this was not the case. To be honest, the “bad guy” wasn’t that big of a surprise to me, it was, instead, the motivation behind that particular “bad guy”, and how tragically he had fallen from the grace of his own God, whom he was trying to serve, that astounded me. In a few pages, the entire book seemed to change and I was pleased with the overall story.

I can safely say, after having read two of Dan Brown’s books, I will be pleased to read more of them. Angels and Demons netted him another fan.

The Dark Knight: Fantastic. Best Batman movie ever.

Carl, I’m sorry. Ledger was awesome; I should never have doubted you two years ago.

Please forgive me.

Looks awesome as hell.

There’re quite a few videos up about it on YouTube; I suggest taking a look at them.

Also, Blizzard knows how to build a fuckin’ site, man. Their Diablo 3 site is kick ass. So, by the way, is the video-demo they did of the game. Compared to the former Diablo games, this is an obvious improvement.

Blizzard seems to be cranking out yet another fantastic game.

I’ve been watching a lot of Late Night Television these past few days. Tonight I was watching the episode of Roseanne where Becky gets married and the aftermath thereafter.

It’s in the early 90’s, (Near the election, so 91 or 92). For a comedy, that show could be quite depressing. It had Dan lose his business, Becky moving out and getting married without help; both Dan and Roseanne out of work without any money coming in; bills were stacked up to the roof…

All in all, a pretty bleary outlook on life, but then the economy was doin’ pretty poor around that time.

It was a reflection on how a lot of people were living around that time. Paycheck to paycheck, insurmountable bills… just one bad thing after the other coming in and breaking down the human spirit.

I look at that, and how they pushed on and thrived, and I realize that my own mother did that for me too. No matter what was going on, she knew she had a responsibility to keep her children clothed and fed.

Sheer tenacity kept a lot of those people from giving up and calling it quits, which, to me, is a pretty damned amazing thing. The human spirit, (particularly in Statesmen) is a pretty powerful thing.

Our country has always been based on the idea that if you fight for something, you can achieve it. I’m getting pretty tired of people who make excuses for their situation. Bad shit happens, but that doesn’t mean you have a free pass to just give up hope. Maybe some of the old war veterans are right; maybe we haven’t had anything defining happen in our lives to give us the strong moral fiber that past generations, (like my mother,) had.

My friend is a postal employee. He’s insane about saving money, and he’s got, (roughly) $10k in investments. He’s been working for years, he has several clear cut goals in mind for what he’s going to do with that money in the coming years. He got that with hard work and careful planing.

He doesn’t complain about his station. He doesn’t complain about having to work, and he doesn’t have any aversions to working.

I’m wondering if my own outlook on work, (I’m fairly lazy) might have been tainted by my aunt. She didn’t work at all while I knew her, (my mother supported her for taking care of me and she dealt drugs for spare cash.) Having someone around all the time might have been a bad situation for me.

I don’t blame her, though. I make my decisions day-by-day and it’s up to me whether or not I change how I act/feel.

I start a new job soon, though. It’s going to require a hefty commitment from me. (At least two years of my time.)

Questioning myself and my own motives has been a problem of mine since before I can remember. I’m constantly wondering whether or not this is the right situation/career choice for me to get into. I also realize that, when I’m done, (if it is only 2 years,) I’ll be 24. If things go right, I’ll have a reserve of cash in savings of about $25k when I finish.

Half of that will be in a 401k program, which will actually have double whatever I’ve put into it. (Or so I’m told; the company says they’ll match whatever I put in up to about $1,000 dollars.) So in effect whenever I leave I’ll have roughly 35k in savings. At the age of 24, I think that’ll be a pretty good nest egg.

I think watching Roseanne and Dan on Late Night Television has actually helped catalyze me into serious action with my life. I’d originally been very depressed when I watched Late Night Television. Now, when I look at that show and draw the lines that correlate with my reality, I can see it as a catalyst for action.

Maybe others do too.

They need about 23k a day in 2008 to meet sales expectations of 10million. I doubt they’ll get that. That’s an increase of (roughly) 3k units a day.

There are a few reasons I don’t see that happening. A.) They think that they’ll get 1% of the overall market. That’s pretty nuts in and of itself for a single phone to do.

Secondly, they want to nab up about 50% of the smartphone market. That’s incredibly insane; the fact that they have 20% is already pushing it. Their company just got record numbers and they’re saying that they won’t be able to match anything near that in the next quarter.

So a decline in sales.

Instead of a surge of sales.

And they’re expecting to meet quota.

Does anyone else see how that logic fails?

I mentioned this days before Macworld happened to my friends as we were talking about various different things. (Including some D&D content I’ll be releasing later.)

The thing is, part of this can be blamed on the economy. But only part. Most of this needs to be shouldered by the people who put so much into Macworld.

They made unreasonable expectations, and then Apple said, “Oh, yeah, we’re going mediocre this year.” and they did just that.

The iPhone was cool. The Macbook wasn’t s’much. (Still sleek lookin’, though.)

To be honest, I’m glad, but that’s just me.

Not necessarily. Being the sofware giant that is Microsoft comes with a few pitfalls. One of those is that everyone wants to haxxorz your software and fuck with the people who use it.

When you get good news, though sometimes you just have to hype it, and this is a pretty good example of that. Fewer security risks than any other OS around in the first year.

And people were all saying how much safer they were with OSX. Tee Hee.

I could have told you that. But this guy decided to break it down into ten points for you.

Really, I can sum it up in a number of much finer points:

Overpriced and underpowered. You get very little, and you pay out the ass for it. Sure, it’s sleek, it looks nice, but that’s not saying it’s a good piece of machinery. Paying $2,000 for this thing would be silly. An extra two pounds won’t matter to anyone when you’re looking at a regular sized laptop.

Which is what you’re looking at It’s only marginally smaller than other laptops of roughly the same specs, and for ultra portables, it’s much, much larger.

Not to mention you won’t get any work done if you have to lug around a bunch of accessories. I know for a fact that if someone with an Air came up to me and asked me if they could use my CD Drive on my laptop I’d laugh in their faces and tell them to get their own.

Honestly. Using someone else’s CD Drive? What kind of crap is that?

Actually, I’m not very condescending to most women. I’m all for the women’s rights movement and such. I grew up in a house full of women and I don’t think there’s “Women’s work” and “Men’s work” around a house.

But sometimes women piss me off.

I mean, seriously. Come on. How stupid do you have to be to come up with this kind of garbage?

This woman likes sex. Just not with her husband, who she’s remaining married to because they have kids. Okay. I can handle that. It’s not so uncommon that women (and men) become dissatisfied in relationships.

So that’s cleared up and out of the way. Next?

She almost cheated on her husband. She would have, too, if the guy she’d planned on cheating with hadn’t hooked up with some other chick first. He found out and didn’t kick her to the curb.

I think that was kinda silly of him, but understandable. She told him she couldn’t stand to have sex with him, cried, and then apparently they had sex for several months.

Then she stopped and hadn’t given him any for four years.

That’s all fine and good, but then she went off and wrote a book about it. She not only basically blamed her husband for a problem that they were both to blame for, but she publicized it for the world to see.

She went a step further and said that every woman who was married feels that way. She also makes it out like females are the only ones who can experience this.

I’m sorry, but she’s fucking retarded.

There’s more to a relationship than sex. Some people have crazy, delirious mind-numbing sex. Others don’t. There are a number of factors, including the skill of bot yourself and your partner. Part of it is you. Part of it is them.

She touts herself as a martyr because she’s doing the right thing and not being selfish. Fuck selfishness, you don’t just ‘quit’ something because it got ‘tough’. Find out why you’re not enjoying sex and fix it.

And if it’s because, as the article suggests, you can’t have multiple lovers at once, then maybe the problem is with you rushing into something before you knew what you wanted.

The real thing here, though, is that she’s shown herself to be below even culturally accepted norms by wanting to go out and fuck an old boyfriend. She’s further pushed herself back by saying, “Hey, guys, it’s not us that have problems in a marriage, it’s you!”

Oh, and let us not forget about the kids! She said directly that being a mother meant you couldn’t have a good sex life.

So, kids, there you go. It’s your fault. It’s everyone else’s fault but her own, because she’s perfect.