Happy Birthday to Me Okay, everyone gather around and congratulate me on not dying yet... or managing to live another year, depending on how you look at it. That's right, today I am the ripe old age of 22. It kind of sucks though, because there's nothing special about 22... or anything afterward except retirement. Goodie.

My parents took us all out for a nice dinner at restaurant/brewery called Hops, which was delicious. Then we all went to the mall to pick up a few things they needed, and then killed some time and bought some books at Barnes & Noble. Then home again for ice cream and yummy cake with real strawberry filling and icing. My parents gave me a gift certificate for clothes, since it's something I needed, and my grandmother gave me one of those completed "Grandmother" books, with memories and pictures. Very sweet. And my wonderful husband got me a hookah from the Middle Eastern restaurant we frequent in Nashville.

It's been a good birthday. Now I have to go finish a paper that's due Saturday. Ta.

Google I am now the number one hit for "castration pics" on Google. I am so sick of getting hits from that search. What has this world come to. Somebody make it stop...

Valentine's Day Ah, yes, yet another holiday everyone has the pagans to thank for... and the Christians to blame for ruining it. According to this page, Valentine's day was originally a celebration in honor of Juno, the Goddess of women and marriage. Girls names were put in jars and drawn by a young man and the two were "partners" for the festival. I bet that sucked for the girls that got stuck with the nerdy astrology geeks... Well, anyway, the Christians, being anti-erotic as they are, thought that it would be so much more fun for the celebrants to draw names of saints instead of names of girls... and emulate the saint's virtues for a year. Doesn't that sound like a lot more fun to you? Yeah, not to me either. And since the church had a saint that had conveniently been martyred on the same day as the festival's beginning, it became Saint Valentine's Day. So while you're all out celebrating your love for your significant other, be sure to thank the goddess Juno for the holiday, and the church for taking all the fun out of it. And if you don't have a significant other, you have the church to blame for that too, since if it wasn't for them, you could be drawing some hotties name out of a hat to "partner" with for a day.

Cassiopeia Woes I've had my Cassiopeia for over a year now and I've never had a problem, until the device crashed, wouldn't reset, and I had to do a full reset, thereby loosing all my info. This shouldn't be a problem, because you can do full backups through Microsoft ActiveSync, right? Wrong. The Cassiopeia's have a bug where they will start doing a backup and freeze somewhere in the middle of the process, so I could never do a full backup. The other day I was reading through the Cassiopeia's reviews on Amazon.com and saw that I wasn't the only person with this problem. One of the reviews mentioned a fix, so I wrote him and asked him about it. While I was waiting for a response from him, I started doing searches on the internet through Google on various search terms, checking different Pocket PC software sites, and the websites for Microsoft and Casio. I couldn't find a thing. I found several mentions of the bug, but no one seemed to have, or to know of a fix for it. The next day, the guy from Amazon wrote me back and sent me this link. It's all in German or something, but just scroll down and pick the processor that you have. The read me and install are in English. Or, you can click here and download the fix for the MIPS processor off of my site. He said you could apparently get the file by request from Casio as well. Of course, stupid me didn't figure out until after I lost all my data that under Start > Programs > Utility there is a program that comes preinstalled on the Cassiopeia's called Card Backup. It makes a complete backup to your Compact Flash memory card, if you have one, which I do. I felt like such an idiot. I could have made a complete backup the whole time. Well, since I bought my Compact Flash card anyway.

Another thing I learned from a review on Amazon, which should have been obvious to me, is to close programs that apparently have no exit button, bring up the keyboard and hit "ctrl+q". All this time I thought you had to go from Start > Settings > System > Memory > Running Programs > Stop All to close running programs that didn't have an exit. Or install that bTask program included on the Cassiopeia Software Applications disk. Oh well, you learn something new every day. Or at least once in a while.

What's I Think Is Wrong with America Today I started writing this at work as a rant to add to my essay section. Here's my rant so far.

We live in a Christianized, repressed society. It's evil and wrong to see sex on TV or let children see it in movies. It's evil and wrong and you should only share it with the one you love. But violence... Now there's another story. You know the tramp is the first to die. How dare she show her naked breasts. Here, let's rip out her intenstines. That'll teach her. We actually had a parent ask us if it was okay for our daughter to see an R rated movie because the R was "just for violence." Just for violence? I don't know about you, but I'm more offended by seeing someones internal organs that I am by external ones.

We live in a country where we are free to have our own opinions. And if your opinion is different from mine, well then you can just leave! And you can say whatever you want, but you better not hurt anyone's feelings. We have to be politically correct and non-discriminatory. So why is it that women joke about men and it's funny, but if men joke about women it's chauvanistic? Black people can joke about white people and it's humor, but if a white person jokes about a black person, it's racist. You can not like a white person and have that be a valid opinion, but if you don't like a black person, it's just because they're black. Please, crawl out from under the mask of race, and just accept the fact that I don't like you because of the way you act, not the way your skin is colored. Take responsibility for your actions and be more than your color. We live in a society where you can't stereotype by race, but you can by anything else. Gay? Wuss. Southerner? Redneck. Punk, artist, or in a band? Druggie. Under 18? Childish. Over 18? Automatically a mature adult.

You have freedom of religion, but you'd better love God, or you can just leave! Bunch of heathens. You have freedom of religion, just not freedom from it.

We have a president determined to wage a war on something that you can't even put a face to. A war on terror? Why don't we add love, rage, sorrow, and happiness in there and wage war on the full range of emotions. It's just an excuse to play a big video game with the world. Oh, look, what's this button do? All you terrorists better hide because... Oh... Wait, they already are. And we don't know where they are. Or who they are. Or how many there are. Or just about anything. But you better watch out, because we're going to get you just the same. Hey, while we're at it, why don't we pick on something else that can't fight back? How about plants. Oh, we've already done that, too.

Our attorney general wants anything with naked women or men covered up, and it doesn't matter if it's a beautiful work of art, because naked people are just wrong. He also thinks calico cats are the minions of Satan.

These are the leaders of the "free" world. Scarey, isn't it.