All Along the Watchtower

Time again to collect my thoughts for posterity since this blog was started to be a journal.

With the stock markets diving, it appears reality has finally caught up to investors. The new jobs report shows unemployment down slightly to 9.1% but is due to Americans leaving the employment game. Only 58.1% (or 63.9%, I’m running into varying figures) of the employable population are holding a job right now.

The attempt to decouple employment from economic health baffles me. It demonstrates just how out of touch the elites are. Apparently, they have no knowledge of history – if they did they’d be terrified right about now. The first warning sign is usually a populist political movements being born. If those fail to change things or are suppressed, structural failures in a society begin to be evident. That isn’t saying they weren’t already there, but that the masses begin to perceive them. Consider it noticing that the emperor is walking around stark naked.

I think we have entered that stage with “government” replacing “emperor.”

Should be an interesting day watching the stock markets again. 3% a day declines in US and Asian stock indexes have been the pattern the last few days. We’ll see if that changes.

At home, we now have much higher DSL speeds thanks to a change in modems and the new package from Ace. Speed tops out at 6.7M down, which is amazing after being used to 1M. Streaming is a new world, but tests of HD streams have been mixed. Since I don’t have many to compare, my conclusions are limited but it appears to be dependent on the technology used by the streaming services.

720P works just fine off of youTube, but an anime site I tried still stutters. Come to think of it, they don’t label as 720P, maybe they are trying to push 1080P. I should try out Hulu Plus for the free week and see how that works.

Will this skeptic of streaming movie services ever be fully converted? Time will tell.

Best thing about the increased speed is how software updates seem instantaneous now. There is also enough bandwidth to have two people browsing videos and music without stepping on each other’s virtual toes. VOIP is working better so far as well.

A Mormon Defense League? For all the talk of Latter-day Saints being so media savvy, the fact this only just launched demonstrates how questionable that assumption is. This organization is needed given the rampant bigotry and ignorance on display across the country.

I was checking the stats on the blog and noticed a lot of hits were on my Citizen Kane review. What is surprising is how many people have been looking for the No Trespassing sign still shot. Is there a meme out there I’m unaware of?

And by a lot of hits, I mean in double digits.

One of the nice things about having a small blog is seeing the strange intersections of what I post and what people are looking for. Part of it is nostalgia for when the Web was new and I’d surf to find whatever was out there. That feeling of finding the unexpected and different is no longer there for me. Maybe others aren’t as jaded and find something here to entertain or ponder. If so, I hope that feeling of discovery is aided a little by my meanderings.

Watched the new Clash of the Titans the other night. What a hollow experience that was. None of the charm or respect of the old myths in the original was present. The effects were decent and that is the only area in which it was superior. It simply isn’t a good movie.

Finally purchased and downloaded Planescape: Torment to play. It is a game I’d read about for years and had meant to get last year when it showed up at GOG.com. There are some issues of crashing, but I made sure to add the mod to allow quick saves. Sigil is one interesting place and the Planes always make for a good setting.

Hopefully, I can finish this game eventually. I haven’t gamed that much lately since writing has taken up more of my health induced down time. This is a good thing.