There are several things that I'd been meaning to post about recently. I'll try to do all of them now.

I got my power bill for the month of August last Thursday. It was $370. I find this irritating. The worst part is that the power company uses a tiered system to determine how much your power bill is. For the first 350 kWh (or so), the cost per kWh is only $0.022. The price then goes up in tiers based on what percentage of that 350 kWh value (the so-called 'baseline') you exceed it by. I exceeded it by over 200%, which means that the last 350 kWh or so were $0.25 / kWh. I've turned down my air-conditioner somewhat, but the real power usage is the 8 computers (9 if you count the xbox) that never turn off.

Command and Conquer 3 has a notable cast. It has Lando, Sharon from Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Cameron from House, and the teacher from Starship Troopers. Command and Conquer 2 had James Earl Jones in it, so I guess I shouldn't be too suprised.

LEGO Star Wars II isn't as good as LEGO Star Wars. They followed the standard "3D platformer sequel plan" which consists of two steps. First, keep the gameplay almost identical. Second, add arbitrary collectables of dubious value. If you were thinking about collection all 99 gold bricks in LSW II, I'll go ahead and tell you what it does: it gives you a LEGO stud (i.e., money) fountain. This is handy if you have a lot left to unlock in the store. I only had the higher-value money multipliers left to unlock, which made this reward something of a let-down.

If you haven't played Halo 2 yet and you want to play it on a PC instead of a machine not designed for FPS games, you should wait until Halo 3 PC is released. The game pulls a XIII, though at least we know that there is a Halo 3 in the works.

Also, Halo 2 for the PC is a bitch to play. You have to sign up for an XBox Live account to be able to play it--even in single player. I find that to be an idiotic design decision. The most annoying part is that Microsoft Passports are the basis of XBox Live, but you can't simply use a Passport account--you must first go through a registration process before being able to use the account you already have.

Speaking of passports, I got my US Passport today. Now, if I have to go to France in January, I'll be able to do so. Also, it will be significantly easier to prove my identity (yet again) during the rebadging process at JPL. I had to prove my identity to them twice since I started working there. I had to prove it again at the California BMV. I am growing tired of having to prove who I am. Apparently a passport is a one-stop item for doing so.

I've recently begun converting my DVD collection into a more useful form. I'll post more about this at a later date.

I haven't heard anyone complaining about being unable to access the link or blade.io. I wonder if people other than me can access them...

Today is my birthday; I turned 23. Earlier today, I had difficulty writing the date down on a piece of paper because I am used to writing today's date followed by my birth year instead of 2007. I then had to think really hard for a few seconds to determine what year it was that I should be writing next to my birthdate instead of the one that I was mechanically programmed to write.

The unifying theme of this post is the lack of unifying theme. This sentence contains 54 characters including period. This sentence does not refer to any sentence in this post, including itself.

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