There is, however, some bad that comes with the good. It is quite easy to get a measure on the ballot here, so it's actually a good thing that we can vote at our leisure, giving us time to research all these competing measures. Now, you California folks are gonna say "hey, wait, we have ballot measures too!" Sure. Did you have 18 of them? This is actually quite normal here. Every time I've voted since we moved here there has been a whole raft of measures, and some of them are pretty heavy duty. Gotta pay attention to that shit.

Anyhow, back to music. This whole thing with the next Micronaut release is getting quite ridiculous. I completely changed the focus of the album last weekend to go with a much more organic, downbeat sound. While this doesn't really mean anything in the grand scheme of things, it means that I have a bunch of songs in various stages of completion, from laid out but not completed to entirely completed and mastered. Not sure what to do with these at this juncture. Ideas are appreciated.

The new Bounte EP, Maximal, is now available for purchase in shopPOSI, as well as most all the on-line services. 'Tis here, and is available at Depression 2.0 pricing.

If you think about that for a second, 11/02/98 was right when the "dot com bubble" was starting. In a month, that'll be 10 years ago that AOL bought Netscape, setting the whole thing off. Bill Clinton was about to get impeached. (The Starr Report had just got sent off in September, you'll recall.) Google was founded that year, too.

The difference between 14,000 (what the Dow was at this time last year) and 8600 represents roughly 3 trillion dollars disappeared in a poof of smoke. This is just about 25% of EVERYTHING that the United States produces in a given year, or essentially the same as turning off the entire nation for three months. It is, in fact, about 3% of everything the whole world produced in the last 12 months.

Most people can't really fathom that amount of money, so look at it this way: if you see a pallet of toilet paper at Costco, imagine that pallet is actually $100 bills. That pallet would be about 1/5th of a billion dollars. Multiply that times 15 thousand. If three trillion dollars existed in $100 bills (which it doesn't) it would fill about 2 normal-sized Costcos, floor to ceiling, wall to wall. That's food for thought.

Only here would that happen.

I met up with a friend of mind from England who is also attending this convention (the Audio Engineering Society, if you find that information interesting) and we managed to find the one single restaurant in San Francisco that serves shitty food. It's expensive, the portions are large, and it all sucks. The milkshakes were pretty good, though, so there's a bright side.

After I dropped him off at the flat he's staying at, I came back to the hotel, and decided I'd go for a quick walk around the 'hood, and see what's what. While it's true that I have achieved a certain measure of success, the area around this hotel is above my pay grade, to be sure. Hermes. Bulgari. Prada. Gucci. Etc. Etc. One thing I noticed on my walk is there is obviously a club around here that is entirely populated with really, really wealthy Chinese people, as they were all on the way to it. I didn't actually see the club itself, but I have a mental image that looks roughly like the closing scenes in "Big Trouble In Little China," minus Kurt Russell. I will note for the record that Chinese people can wear Prada with a certain carelessness that actually makes Prada look pretty cool. When white people wear Prada, they generally look (and act) like fucking douches.

Anyhow, I'm wiped out. Convention tomorrow, home on Sunday in time for Entourage.

Seeing how the Senate managed to git 'r dun, I'm intrigued to see exactly how much lipstick the House will put on this pig to accomplish the same thing. Once again, my Senator (Ron Wyden) voted "nay," and for that he's the business. My other senator, the soon-to-be-voted-in-to-oblivion shyster Gordon Smith, voted "aye" and he used the fact that he was able to attach a $3.3B earmark to subsidize cutting down trees in Oregon as a justification.

This fucking stupidity is just rampant.

In other news, you might recall that I mentioned a couple months ago that Bank Of America had cancelled our credit cards with that company; they used some bizarre "you have a history of late payments" as justification, which our credit report from any of the three agencies will prove is simply not true. The simple fact of the matter is that we hadn't used them in months (years?) and BOA was tightening their credit, and they sent us the same bullshit form letter they sent to everyone else they did this to. Well, today I get a letter from BOA that I pre-qualify for a $30K line of credit. Huh. Fancy that.

I also got two pre-approved credit card offers from Washington Mutual in my mailbox today.

These people are fucking insane.