While for the majority of you that are reading this, Daylight Savings Time just ended and you gained an hour of sleep, for me it just began and I got gipped of an hour. Oh well, not like I’m bitter or anything. 😉 But now instead of being 15 hours ahead of Minnesota/Wisconsin time, we’re 17 hours ahead. I had the old system of time conversions down pat, so this new conversion is gonna screw with my head for a couple days probably.
Yesterday I really didn’t do much. I slept in, started sorting through some photos that I hadn’t named or saved yet, walked down to Pinewood for some groceries and lunch, read some stuff online, and then spent a good chunk of the evening fiddling around with a program called jAlbum. It’s a free software program that makes java-based online photo albums for you, and since I have a backlog of big photo albums to compile, and since I was tired of making photo albums the way I’ve always done (very inefficiently and time-consumingly), I decided to spend a little time figuring out how to make some minor modifications to a new template that I really like. Eventually (perhaps over Christmas break or some other convenient time), I’m planning on just redoing all my photo albums with the new template. It’ll just clean things up a bit and make everything easier to deal with in the future, even though it’s a bit of extra work up front. I’ll let you all know when I get a few new photo albums up so that you can see the new design (and new pictures), but I have no idea when that’ll be. Perhaps this coming weekend, perhaps not.
Today I actually got around to a little bit of studying for my Large-Scale Weather & Climate exam coming up on Tuesday morning. I dunno, it’s probably since it’s my last final, but I’m not exactly motivated to study that much for it. I usually always get this way before the last exam of the semester, I just wanna get it over with so I can move onto more enjoyable things. Tonight it was time for Monash Bible Talks again, and it was the last official MBT of the semester, though we’ll be still having a couple of “unofficial” meetings the next couple weeks. So at least I don’t have to say goodbye just yet. 🙂 Tonight we wrapped up a really good six-week series on the greatest sermon ever given, the Sermon on the Mount. Heaps of good food for thought on how to live and act.
Well, the presidential campaign is thankfully in its final hours. And — October Surprise! — Osama bin Laden has tried to meddle with our election by putting in his two cents’ worth, and all but endorsing Kerry. Osama was clearly taunting Bush and trying to turn the voters against him, but I really can’t see how the tape could possibly be construed as hurting Bush overall; I mean, sure, he might be hurt in some voters minds by reminding them that we haven’t gotten the SOB yet, but far more people will be reminded that the man most likely to kick some terrorist ass and actually nail that bastard is George W Bush, not John Francois Kerry. So this should be a net gain for Bush on Election Day, because now virtually every single voter that walks into the voting booths on Tuesday is gonna have the issue of terrorism at the forefront of their minds — and guess who that helps? I’ve long been cautiously optimistic that Bush will rather handily win the election (with at least 52% of the national popular vote and possibly over 300 electoral votes), but now I’m even more optimistic about that, and that it could truly even be a landslide victory for Bush. But of course there are some kookball wackos out there like Walter Cronkite who are seriously suggesting that Karl Rove is behind the whole Osama tape thing. I mean, c’mon, how can anyone possibly take this guy seriously? And sort of on the topic of Osama, Charles Krauthammer has an absolutely brilliant column on how Kerry has amnesia when it comes to Afghanistan, and why it’s such a pivotal issue in this election. Also, liberal Iraqis are hugely in favour of Bush, while the terrorists in Sadr City are overwhelmingly for Kerry. That should be yet another red flag to potential Kerry voters, especially on top of all the ringing endorsements he’s received from terrorists around the world. Shouldn’t it be absolutely critical that we elect a president who will protect America first?