So what new year resolutions have I set for myself? Well, I don’t really believe in setting resolutions. Setting resolutions is ultimately a commitment to change something about ourselves whether for better or worse and from my own past experiences they usually end up as a complete failure. For myself, it’s less of a factor of getting started on the resolution but more so not having the drive to succeed. I’ve found that the initial enthusiasm of setting a resolution may provide the motivation to get started however that enthusiasm alone is never enough before habit takes over – unless of course your a well trained Jedi Master (maybe I should look into Jedi training this year?). Don’t get me wrong as there are a few things that I’m aiming to accomplish this year, I just don’t feel that I have to commit to those in order to succeed. I have commitments at work, I don’t need these same failures in my personal life.

Anyways, I will say that I’m definitely looking to accomplish is to stop sucking at blogging. I can’t believe it’s been seven months since my last blog entry!

This was also the first time I had flown British Airways. From the time I had arrived at the airport in London until the time we on the ground in Rome, every BA employee was extremely nice and helpful. The pilots even made every effort to keep us aprised of the flight status (we were initially delayed by almost a half an hour but made up the time in the air). I would definitely consider flying them again in the future.

Anyways, that’s all for now… I gotta make it off to the Termini in order to catch the night train to Munich.

To the friend (you know who you are) that e-mailed me stating that I don’t blog enough… all I have to say is is the link to your site has been updated.

I must be living an exciting life if this is the only thing that I have to blog about. Perhaps there will be more to come if we get more serious about pub night!

That aside, I’ve recently been looking at getting a Plush Bag though I’ve been debating the last couple of weeks on whether or not it’s worth the cost as the model I’ve been looking at would be ~$400. Anyway, yesterday I finally convinced myself the cost was justified and as I head in to make the purchase one of the employees informs me that they’re having a two day sale and that everything is 50% off. Talk about a pleasant surprise, getting something I had already intended on purchasing at full price but saving a couple hundred dollars in the process. A very similar thing happened several weeks ago when I went to Macys to buy a watch — I already had an idea of the model I wanted and when I finally went in to make the purchase they had it on sale for 25% off, saving me ~$125.

Now only if I could plan all my purchases around these unforeseeable events.

• The owner AND manager of the restaurant that served him the drinks that made him intoxicated. They’re apparently negligent by handing drinks to Josh for the 3 ½ hours he was there. Did he not order, purchase, or ask for these drinks?
• The towing company who is apparently negligent by having their truck in the way of Josh’s SUV.
• The tow truck driver who was assisting the stalled vehicle driver apparently is negligent by failing to put out flares and call the police after only being on the scene for ~5 minutes.
• The owner of the disabled vehicle for negligence by allowing his vehicle to become stalled on the highway and failing to move out of the way of oncoming traffic. BTW, that vehicle that became stalled when it spun out after being cut off by another vehicle – who’s the victim here???

This whole lawsuit infuriates me. I don’t mean to be insensitive but Josh made some bad decisions and his fate was decided – my deepest respects are with him. I do however have an issue with his father; I’m surprised he’s not suing the cell phone company by providing the means for Josh to talk on the phone while driving.

I find it absolutely absurd that frivolous lawsuits such as this are allowed though I guess that’s one of the “benefits” of being a free country – we’re able to place blame on anyone and everyone except ourselves.

I had no real point to this post, I just wanted to vent…

Anyways, they came over with the prize (tickets) and I *immediately* plopped them down in front of the couple sitting next to me (of whom I didn’t know). Wow, to see someone else’s eyes *light up* so quickly and wonderfully was just simply amazing. Prior to this we had never spoken which seemed to shock them even more so. Think of it from their shoes, here’s a complete stranger of which we don’t know and have never spoken to and he just gave us premium tickets to the ball game.

I mention that though I’m not going to the game that I’m also in no need of the tickets and that it’s my pleasure to provide them with the opportunity. Another gentleman approaches and states “Working on filling up the karma jar, eh?” a remark that I ended up just smiling to.

Ironically the couple who I had given the tickets to ended up picking up my entire tab (it wasn’t much but a wonderful gesture nonetheless) and ended up bringing meaning to the saying “what comes around goes around; apparently the karma guy wasn’t too far off base.

Walking home I find myself smiling thinking about what I had done, something that I felt was a reward within itself.

Now I know I won’t always be this lucky but it definitely grounds me more in my comfort zone of not needing a car. Iin fact, I paid off the balance on the car loan this week in anticipation of selling it… more to come on this soon.

Anyways, I was setting up an online account last night with one of my banks and I was shocked at the fact that it wouldn’t allow me to use special characters in my password (i.e. !, @, #, $, %, ^, &, *). I knew some didn’t allow this but after stepping back and looking at the situation I realized 38% of my financial institutions do not allow me to have a *real* strong password – they limit you to using [a-z], [A-Z], or [0-9]. I guess to them Carl1979 is considered strong enough and they don’t believe there’s any justification for me to have a password such as 6OE92k21$.

The offending banks:
• Washington Mutual – 6th largest bank in the United States!
• HSBC – 4th largest bank in the world!
• Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) – 7th largest bank in the world!

Now I don’t know about you, but I find it concerning that I can have a more secure password on my MySpace profile than I can with the top banks in the world.

I can see that they don’t want to be responsible if my cash “walks off” but at the same time who’s going to take it? The only folks that would have the opportunity would be the TSA folks themselves and personally I would like to think that if we’re entrusting them to keep air travel safe and free of terrorism then surely I should be able to trust them with $70 in cash going through an enclosed x-ray machine… if not, there’s a bigger problem.

I also suppose there is the possibility of me being selected for further screening and becoming separated from my belongings though I would argue should not occur as anyone who is selected for additional screening should have their belongings accompany them. But even if this scenario was to occur, how stupid would someone have to be to lift a wallet in front of security while on camera? Also, if this really did happen the least of my worries would be the cash and more on my identification and credit cards.

I guess I’ll just have to continue to be perplexed and assume the TSA is just protecting me from my own money…