My Perfect Life

Virtual Barber Shop

2009-03-05T20:53:00.000-08:00

Seriously, this is crazy awesome!! Put on headphones, close your eyes, and prepare to be amazed.

Fantastic iced tea recipe.

2009-02-23T19:51:00.000-08:00

I strongly urge you to go to my sister's blog (Keweenaw Living) and make the tea recipe she has posted. It is also printed in Hindi for all of you Indian folks.

Taxes

2009-02-23T19:21:00.000-08:00

I just got out of my Monday night Finance class, and the instructer brought up some great points about taxing the rich, and why people complain that the tax cuts benefit the rich.

It is basicly because the rich are the ones who pay most of the taxes, so obviously if there are tax cuts, they would benefit. This seems very intuitive in hindsight, and when you look at the numbers it is pretty annoying.

To put this in better perspective, or to define who the "rich" are, he showed us a breakdown, and I have looked on the internet and found the same one on www.ntu.org

For Tax Year 2006 (AGI)
Top 1% make over $388,806 and pay 39.89% of the taxes

Top 5% make over $153,542 and pay 60.14% of the taxes

Top 10% make over $108,904 and pay 70.79% of the taxes

Top 25% make over $64,702 and pay 86.27% of the taxes

Top 50% make over $31,987 and pay 97.01% of the taxes

Bottom 50% make <$31,987 and pay 2.99% of the taxes

Source: Internal Revenue Service

So, if you and your spouse combined make more than $31,987, you are in the top 50%, and you are one of the "evil rich" that would benefit from the extension of the Bush tax cuts.

Rush Limbaugh

2009-01-23T21:45:00.000-08:00

Although I am not a very big fan of Rush Limbaugh, I was listening to him on Wednesday. He was talking about how the liberal media will now target him because Bush is no longer the "head conservative." I thought that was pretty usual of Rush to be that arrogant. I was scanning the news today and it looked like Rush predicted that one. Obama is warning republicans not to listen to Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with him.

I wonder how far he will take this one. All of those conservative talk show guys have been talking about how the liberals want the fair radio act (or whatever it is called) I wonder how long before that happens and their conservative voices will be stopped.

It'll be fun to see how this turns out.

Tower Defense

2009-01-19T15:42:00.001-08:00

I have not posted a blog in a while, and I blame my blogs downfall on the discovery of the "Tower Defense" games.

When I started this blog I pasted an HTML with Castle Defense on the bottom, and have had several people really interested in it.

I will now burden you with a new Tower Defense game I have found. It is called Protector Tower Defense and at the website http://www.kongregate.com/

Click on Games in the top tab and then the subtab of strategy/defense. Scroll down to "Protector" and prepare to stay up late tonight.

If you are feeling like you have even more time to waste, scroll to Bloons Tower Defense 3.

So, before you go to this website, be forewarned and don't blame me when you waste many many hours.

Inventions

2008-11-15T23:18:00.000-08:00

I think everybody thinks of inventions at one point or another in their life. Or maybe everyday. I guess it is a matter of pursuing the creation and marketting of them that matters. I always think of inventing things, and I decided to draw pictures of one idea I had.

I thought I would share my inventions with you. In hindsight, they never had a chance. There never really were patents pending, I just put that on the top for viewing pleasure.

I was sitting at my desk, listening to my headphones. I work in a cubicle, so I can't have speakers that other people would hear, and sometimes headphones get annoying after a while. So, I thought of some brilliant ideas.

The first one I thought of is the overhead music cannon. It could be secured to your desk and go over the top of your head and "shoot" the music down to you. Sounded like a great idea, but then after some research, I found out that someone already invented it, and they were about a few thousand dollars each... so that idea fizzled. They use some kind of ultrasound instead of regular sound.

My next idea was a little cheaper. It involved an actual cannon shaped speaker that you point at your ear. Well, it turns out sound waves don't work like that. They don't go in a straight line, and as soon as they come out of the end, they would just go in every direction. (I made one out of a couple of pop bottles.)

My third attempt was awesome, I was so excited about this one. It would be easy, a neck pillow with speakers right next to your ear. This way, you can turn it quiet and still hear the music without bothering others.

Too bad, somebody already invented it.

Darn Printer

2008-11-13T10:07:00.000-08:00

This is a stupid video. Do not waste your time watching it.

Barack Obama

2008-11-05T20:30:00.001-08:00

Barack Obama is going to be our president. I have mixed feelings about this. I watched his acceptance speech, and I watched McCains exit speech. I came to the conclusion that they were both right. We need to stand behind our next president and give them a chance.

Barack is known for his speaking skills. That is one reason he won this popularity contest.

If you don't care to read about my political views or morals, please stop reading now. If you disagree with me, feel free to post anonymously in order to preserve honesty.

First of all, I disagree with his abortion views. It seems obvious to me that (in my opinion) killing a fetus is killing an innocent person. If someone doesn't think that, they have something wrong with the moral section of their brain. I know the common argument is that the pro-choice people will say that they should be able to choose to terminate their pregnancy if they were raped, incest or the baby has some sort of birth defect. This has two things with it that I don't like. 1.) Is the number of abortions mostly because of those 3 reasons? No., and 2.) If you are going to give birth, it is because God is giving you the precious gift of a baby. If you had a traumatic event that led up to it, it is truly a bad thing, but why make the innocent child suffer by not allowing him/her to enter this world? Why not give someone who is not "normal" a chance at this life too? I know it is easy for me to say all of this because I have not been in the situation before. If you have been in this situation and made the wrong decision, I would not think of you as less of a person. We all make the wrong decision sometimes.

Another thing that I do not like about Barack Obama is that he thinks that we should redistribute the wealth. This is totally wrong in the free-market that has made us such a prosperous country. The argument is that when somebody has a lot of money, one dollar doesn't mean as much to them as someone who doesn't make a lot of money. It is the "law of diminishing marginal utility." So, with that said, we should take a higher percentage of money from the rich, right? I don't agree. Why should it be up to the gov't to decide that you make to much money? Sometimes it takes me a while to decide what I want on things, why would the gov't know right away what should be taken from everyone in the country to improve the overall happiness? That is the goal, right? If you take money from someone who makes a lot, that is less incentive for people to make that much money, and in turn, that will lower the gov't revenue from taxes causing less money to the gov't which will have them increase taxes in order to make more. This is going to be a vicious cycle. Also, if you give money to people at no cost to them, (work for it) they will be more likely to continue to not work and take advantage of the system. Although, I do agree that hard times fall upon people and they will be in need of assistance. But, the gov't needs to take more measures to ensure people aren't freeloading, and I don't think Obama is the man that will do this.

Obama said that he will increase capital gains taxes in order to increase revenue. This will work to a certain point, but after you hit that point and increase more, revenue from those taxes starts to go down because people decide not to invest as much. I think we already hit the point of maximum revenue from capital gains tax. This theory of the correlation between taxes and gov't revenue is graphed out as the Laffer Curve. I'm sure you can wikipedia it if you want more info.

Jeremiah Wright. If you go to church for 20 years to see the same pastor, get married and baptize your children there, chances are that you share his views, or you are living a lie. Either way, it seems immoral to me.

Exports/Imports. It is kind of a hard concept to explain, but they will equal each other in the long-run. When it comes down to it, we pay for our imports with our exports. Milton Friedman explains it in his book, "Free to Choose." During one of his debates, Obama said about South Korea, we buy (I can't remember the exact number he said) somewhere around hundreds of thousands of cars from them, but they only buy 4-5 thousand from us per year. A quick analysis of this sentence is all we need. My first point is that imports must equal exports. If we give them all of that money for the cars they gave us, they must directly or indirectly get the money back to us. This will increase production in the U.S. and make the exports equal the previous imports. My second argument with this statement is easy. Why would South Korea want the same amount of cars back that they just gave us? They don't need that many. In South Korea there are about 48.38 Million people. The United States has approximately 301.14 Million people. That is one reason they don't need as many cars we have 6 times as many people and a lot more open roads. We have a lot more space to be driving than they do, they are very populated and ride a lot of bikes. If they needed cars that bad, they would have kept more of them than instead of sending them to us.

I guess these aren't all the reasons that I disagree with Barack Obama, but I am getting a little long winded.

My point is that even though I disagree with his views, I am willing to accept that Barack Obama is our next president, he is the first Black President, and this truly is a great time for our country. This will show a lot of black youths that they can accomplish anything and their past isn't what defines them. What made me breath a sigh of relief was at the end of Obama's speech when he said, "God bless you, and God bless America."

Sorry for rambling on about my views, but after all, this is my blog.

Limo

2008-11-04T13:18:00.000-08:00

So, this was a while ago, but that doesn't make it any less funny.

I was at Limo's house changing the oil on the Jeep. Limo was in the garage and the jeep was halfway in the garage and halfway outside. I decided that I would return something to the back of the jeep. I did. When I came back to the side of the Jeep, Limo was crouching down while jacking the car up, I thought it was hilarious. Not because of the way he did it, but for the reason that he wasn't wearing any clothes at all.

Lucky for him I didn't have my phone camera at the ready.

My Job

2008-11-04T12:44:00.000-08:00

So, I haven't posted a blog in a while. It is always work to try to think about something to write. Instead of something funny, I can just write about me I suppose.

I go to school full-time and get supplemented by the government via G.I. Bill. I think that I make enough money without having to have a job. One of the reasons I started going to school was because I extremely dislike my current job and I want to be able to qualify for a higher-paying job so my wife will not have to work and we can live a normal (per societal rules) life.

I have contemplated quitting my job in the past and only go to school full-time (I have been going full-time)but the incentive to stay working at my job was to great. I get paid well for a college student, flexible hours to contrast my school schedule, tuition reimbursement, and, best of all, I get to work with my wife. These are all great benefits, but what if you don't like your job? Obviously I liked the money/benefits more than I didn't like the job or else I wouldn't have stayed.

I was recently advised that my company can no longer support my position and they will eliminate it come January 1st. Usually people who are told that their job is going away are not to happy about it. Not me. I am strangely excited. The easiest way to explain how I feel about it is to compare it to a gift. Suppose you get a vacation trip on Christmas to the Bahama's, but the trip is not until March 1st. My wife and I talked it out and I will be able to do the stay-at-home mom thing when she goes back to work. I will be getting paid enough money with her working and my college money that we will be able to afford this.

Although there is one disincentive, and this is where you come in. I would like to hear what you have to say about it. Please feel free to not put your real name if you want. I probably won't really care if you disagree with me, but I would like to hear a good argument if you do.

Usually when the wife works and the husband doesn't, wives talk to each other about it(not necessarily the "victim" wife). I know this is a stereotype, but I think it is true because I hear about the husbands that don't work. If the stereotype wasn't true, I wouldn't hear about them. Also, I really don't want people calling me and telling me what job openings there are when I don't want a job due to our current situation.

So, your job as my blog reader is to post a comment stating what you think I should do, and why, and to talk about a situation where the wife has a lazy husband and doesn't work and how that relates to me.

My Professor's Curves

2008-10-21T19:27:00.000-07:00

So, I go to school. I am in a business law class that I really like because I enjoy arguing sometimes. Even though some of the things in the class are objective and the answer is either right or wrong and that is it, there are some that can be argued into being correct. This was the case with the following situation.

I usually tell my wife about my day in school, and any kind of "fun" that happens. This time it involved a test. Afterwards, the professor goes over the questions and asks if we wanted to dispute any. On one of the questions, that I got correct, 13 people got the question wrong. As the professor was going over it, I brought up how the main sentence in the question could be interpreted as meaning something else and therefore make the answer that a lot of people got wrong, correct. He looked over it and acknowledged my point, I didn't bring it up to strong because I got the question right anyway. He was asking the class if anyone else wants to argue about that question, because it could lead to an extra point or half a point or whatever. Nobody wanted to argue it, so I kept going with it. (I didn't tell anyone that I got it correct.) I was pumped, I sounded great arguing with this experienced lawyer. He told me he "thinks" that a reasonable person would interpret that sentence the way that he meant it when he wrote it. I came back with, "Well, I 'think' that a reasonable person would disagree with you." This put him off and he checked the question for review and he would give the people who got it wrong credit for it.
I was all pumped telling my wife about this until she caught me on one little word... she said, "Doesn't he have a curve on his tests?" umm... so... I guess it isn't always worth it to argue.

Limo

2008-10-20T21:44:00.000-07:00

I was looking at some old pictures I have on a flash drive and somebody, that I am married to and who chooses to remain nameless, suggested that Limo resembled Lyle Lovett. Does he?

(LIMO)

(Lyle Lovett)

I didn't see it, but I guess I just see Limo when I see Limo.

Carpool

2008-10-14T08:38:00.000-07:00

So, I carpool to work in order to stop global warming, (because I am arrogant enough to believe that man has enough power to bring destruction to the earth, and that man has enough power to stop the world from it's destruction when that time comes.) Actually, I do it for the monetary incentive, but I am getting away from the point that I am trying to make.

Last night I had to bring my car in to get worked on because I have no knowledge on how to fix things when it gets more complicated than changing the oil. I give Kingston Auto kudo's because they give a loaner car everytime you need to get your car fixed, so it will not inconvenient you. So I thought it would not inconvenient me.I knew it wasn't my day to drive today, and even confirmed it by calling who was carpooling the next day. In order to protect her identity, we will call her Amy Kilpanen.

So, I drove up in my junky loaner car and sat quietly in the dark outside her house. (Which feels weird in itself and could have led to another story if a neighbor would have looked out the window and seen me there.) I was a little nervous because it was 5 minutes before we usually leave and no lights were on in the house. I was wondering what I should do. Is she still sleeping? Is she home? Did she leave already? Despite all my worries, I figured that I would give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she would be driving out of the garage at the exact time and I wouldn't have to worry about anything.

It was now 6:30... no garage door opening. My fears were confirmed by a phone call. I was now driving my loaner instead of riding in a nice heated car. Yes, I didn't mention this car was not heated, this was not the only negative thing I didn't mention about the car. It turns out that when you advertise a car for sale, it creates a new blind spot on the window for your viewing pleasure(if you are an extreme optimist) I guess while I am optimizing, I will also mention that the car brang back memories of when I was younger, when i was 17 was the last time I felt a car shake like that when approaching the speed limit. The car also may be posessed... It seems that the spirit in there really wanted me to go in the opposing traffic lane every time I didn't have a death grip on the steering wheel. I guess that is a good thing. No chance of falling asleep if you are physically fighting to stay in your lane. I can't hear to good out of my driver side ear now either. I don't know why a window would refuse to roll up all the way.

Good thing I used a fake name for the person who was responsible for this.

Do you think it is worth it to carpool?

Oil tycoons are stealing my 401K!!

2008-10-11T11:44:00.000-07:00

I seen an article on this on FoxNews and since this is a big issue, and I am interested in economics. I thought I would bring it up.

If you are watching your 401k go down like everyone else in the U.S., you may think that because it is your money leaving, somebody must be taking it. And that somebody must be the same guys who are making oil cost a lot. These fat, rich, arabs, maybe?

No, that is not what is happening. When you purchase your stocks, or 401k, you are paying someone what the equilibrium price is, that is where the demand and supply curves meet to determine the fair price of the object. When you see how much money is in your 401K, that just means how much money someone would buy your shares for if you sold it at the time. It is not a physical amount that you have sitting in a pile. Since their are external factors in play, like people not thinking the shares are worth as much now, they wouldn't pay you as much for them as they would've last year, quarter, month, week!

So, you are not losing money. You are holding a big pile of shares and they are worth less money, so if you sell them now, you will get a lot less for what you paid for them, then you will lose money.

Good Luck!

Iraq Veteran Supporting McCain

2008-10-10T22:49:00.001-07:00

This guy puts into words what many of us feel when they say the Iraq war was a mistake. Many Soldiers did love seeing the freedoms that we gave to the Iraqi people.

John McCain

2008-10-10T22:14:00.001-07:00

How about Mr.McCain, huh? I am definitely an anti-obammy guy, but maybe we could have done better for the republican side. Anyways, obviously I would support the non-democrat, but this guy makes it to funny. I thought it was kind of weird that he was wandering around like a confused senior citizen, I guess I wasn't the only one who thought that.
"...I've become vapor." That was hilarious!!! That Conan is a funny dude! If I was Irish, I would want to be just like him.

Late..

2008-10-10T19:29:00.000-07:00

So, at my work we have to use a keycard to enter the building if it is before 7:30 in the morning because the doors are locked at that time. Since we start at 7:30, we are usually going through the door prior to, and have to use the keycard to get through.
There is one person at my work who is notoriously lazy. We will call this person Pedro.
One morning Pedro was walking into the building with one of my co-workers. This was about a year and a half since we started in this building. He has been here the whole time. He went to open the door and it wouldn’t open. He went to the next door, it wouldn’t open either. He turned to my co-worker and asked, “When did they start locking the doors?”

Store Attire

2008-10-10T19:28:00.001-07:00

What do you wear when you walk to the store? I was wondering that one day when I didn’t have a car and I needed noodles. I thought about wearing joggers to make it look like I was exercising, but I didn’t want to run to the store so people would just think I was a lazy exerciser. I thought about looking like I was poor and just wearing a ripped shirt and dirty pants so people would feel sorry for me and just assume that I didn’t have a car, but I didn’t want to look poor. I just ended up wearing a polo and slacks.. I felt stupid.. luckily the store was only 2 blocks away.

My first post

2008-10-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

Today we organized our apartment. It was stupid. I hate organizing things, I can’t wait until I am rich so I can hire people to do it for me. Kind of like Kuwaiti’s.. If you see someone working in that country, they are foreigners.
Blogs are stupid. What the heck am I doing it for you may ask? I may also ask that. I think I just want to join the crowd and I think that I have a sense of humor… I am modest. Also, I would like to complain about things.

Andy to Jim...

2008-10-10T19:26:00.000-07:00

“Sorry Tuna, if you don’t know why that’s awesome then… you need awesome lessons.”

The Office Obsession

2008-10-10T19:25:00.000-07:00

I really like, “The Office” but today I think I may have hit the point of over-obsessed.

I was extremely excited to watch the office last week. They played the debate instead of it and I was irate! I honestly think the office is way more important than two politicians bickering.

After waiting two weeks to watch it last night, I was all ready to talk about it at work, I had my quotes memorized and everything.

When I did watch it last night everything was funny, I was happy to be there on my couch with my friends: Jim, Dwight, Michael (oh, Michael, he’s so funny) that everything they said was just hilarious. It wasn’t until someone here at work told me that the office wasn’t that funny last night, that I realized it. I don't know if it was funny. I have become so obsessed, that if it wasn't funny, I would just go on the defense and disagree with them.

Why am I so obsessed? It is like cigarettes for your eyes. When I first saw it, it wasn’t that good, I actually kind of disliked it. I don’t know why I tried it a second time, but after that, I was hooked. Now I can’t get it out of my system, I even watch it at work. I don’t want it out either.