I’ve decided to replace the battery in it, but I’m not going with Apple. They have a battery replacement service, but 1) their service seems a bit steep in price to me (it’s Apple, what else should I expect?), and 2) I’m not crazy about the idea of getting a refurbished iPod, which is what I’ve heard actually happens. While I’m sure Apple thoroughly tests their refurbished stuff, the fact is, I’ve had my iPod for a long time now, and well, it’s mine. I don’t want to trade my old, well-loved iPod for someone else’s.

I ended up ordering a replacement kit from iPod Juice, which seems to have gotten plenty of favorable reviews. The price isn’t that much lower than Apple’s, but the battery included with the kit I purchased lasts (supposedly) twice as long as the stock battery. That’s certainly not something I’d argue with.

They also have a ton of videos on YouTube showing the process of replacing the batteries of various Apple devices, and it looks pretty easy. I figure if I can put together my own computer, I can pop open my iPod and stick a battery in. Follow-up post forthcoming, after I’ve destroyed my iPod in attempting to replace the battery…

The Fresh Air Fund is now accepting applications for counselors for this coming summer of ’09. We hire staff members with a wide range in some pretty amazing fields. We are looking for college-aged men and women who love to work with children.

You can check out this news release for much more information, as well as the main Fresh Air Fund site. In short, however, the Fresh Air Fund has helped provide free summer vacations to inner-city kids since 1877, via donations, host families, and volunteers for the Fresh Air camps. If doing any of the above sounds like something you’d like to do, check it out; it seems like a pretty cool program to me.

Enough about Bush, though. He’s gone, and at this point, I couldn’t care less what he does. I guess I already have some pride back, due to the fact that America really did vote a black man into office. Considering that people fought for blacks to use “white” water fountains in the ’50s and ’60s, go to “white” schools, sit in the “white” seats of buses, it’s still pretty amazing to me that we voted him in a mere 50 years later. Much more time has been taken in history for much smaller advances.

While I know that the naysayers could still be right – that he’s a rock star and that he will end up being all talk – he at least has the ability in his speeches to make me feel like he’s going to pull through. Unlike most political speeches, I actually want to listen to his, to hear what he has to say and, perhaps more importantly, how he says it. The guy has an air to him that, at least for me (and apparently millions of others), inspires confidence. I hope that that air can be seen by people around the world, and that America regains its position of respect which it once had, before rampaging off into Iraq, before setting up Gitmo, and before, basically, we made ourselves look like fools.

Finally, I don’t think a post regarding yesterday’s event would be complete without a link to the inaugural address. So, if you’ve not yet watched it, here you are; it’s worth your time.

Well done, America.

Update: This picture sums up my feelings quite well.

And, if you need a Battlestar Galactica fix before then, I may be able to hook you up. Apparently, SciFi did another set of webisodes, entitled The Face of the Enemy. It’s 10 short episodes (around 4 minutes each), starring Grace Park and Alessandro Juliani (er, that is, Felix Gaeta). You can watch them here. I’ve watched half of them so far, and they’re not too bad. Then again, it’s been months since a BSG fix, so I’m not sure how useful my opinion is. SciFi could probably dangle a model of the Galactica via fishing line in front of a black sheet with holes poked out for stars, and I’d cheer.

I’ve long thought that indoctrinating small children with religion is not without its problems, as religion seems to me something that one should decide on for themselves. For something that can alter one’s life so much, it seems wrong to me to teach kids this way or that way from an early age. If we can get them to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, we can get them to believe in anything; to use the innocence, and frankly, gullibility of children to put them on whatever path the parent (or whoever) has chosen seems rather unfair to me.

But of course, I can certainly understand why this happens, particularly now that I’m in the position of the parent. You have to tell your kid(s) something, because rest assured, if you don’t, someone else will. But the big question is, what do we tell him? I consider myself Buddhist, but due to my feelings on the issue, I don’t really want to just say “this is it, kid; this is the way to be.” Buddhism is the choice I’ve made for myself, but I’m really not sure it’s my place to make that choice for him, nutty as that may sound coming from a parent. I’d introduce him to a variety of religions and let him decide, but at his age, I think all that would accomplish would be to confuse him – not to mention, I’d say most people I know would disown me for doing such a thing. While I may not agree with all of them, I can’t completely ignore social norms. I’m not sure how well it would go over in first grade if he went in and said that he’d decided to be Muslim or Hindu; we do, after all, live along the Bible Belt.

Then again, perhaps I’m agonizing over this for nothing. Perhaps, regardless of what we tell him, he’ll find his own way in his own time. I was raised in a Christian family, and I’m certainly not a Christian now. On the other hand, I’ve known people who were raised following one religious path or another, and it caused them endless trouble as an adult as they struggled to figure out their own beliefs and thoughts.

So, here I am. I’m in the position of needing to give guidance on this issue, but unsure as to what guidance I should give. Any ideas on this one?

Not My Knee

I’m tremendously happy that it’s feeling better. For a while, I was quite worried that I’d really messed something up, and that I’d be moaning about my aching knee for the rest of my life. I’m sure I’ll reach that point at some point in my life, when everything is creaking and popping, but I certainly didn’t want to start at 24. Give me at least until 30, yeah?

Relatedly, it’s great to be back to shovelgloving. I started doing it at the beginning of August, and had more or less not missed any days at all. At this point, it feels quite weird for it to be a weekday and for me to not shovelglove. I guess that’s a pretty indicator that it’s been ingrained as a habit… I’m still doing No S as well, and it is becoming increasingly difficult – there are so many temptations sitting around, what with my mom cooking up a storm around the holidays. Chocolate, cookies, pies, cakes… It’s easy to not eat sweets when all that’s in the house is a crappy factory made treat, but homemade stuff? Much more difficult to resist.

And, speaking of holidays – I hope they’re happy for all of you!

(One last aside – “on the mend.” What’s up with that? We don’t say “my knee is on the pain,” it’s just “my knee is hurting.” Idioms; gotta’ love ‘em.)

What it reminded me of is something on eBay which is a little more troublesome. Namely, people who post that if you have zero feedback, they don’t want your bids – period. It luckily isn’t the case, but do these people realize what would happen if every seller set such a hard line? New users would essentially be locked out of eBay. Personally, I don’t really see the big deal about accepting bids from users with 0 feedback. If they don’t pay up, eBay has methods to deal with them. I suppose they could gain feedback by selling rather than buying, but again, they would run into a similar issue: most buyers I’ve ever spoken to tend to avoid sellers with 0 feedback, as they’re afraid they’ll pay up and never get the item. The solution to that problem would be to just use PayPal for payment, and you’re covered.

Sadly, though, I must say that, at least for the things I go after, eBay has become less and less useful over the years. It’s jam-packed with items listed at retail price, which is a bit baffling. The whole idea behind shopping at eBay is to get a decent deal, or at least, I thought it was.  If I want to buy something at retail price, I’ll go to amazon.com. I’ve also grown increasingly tired of people listening items at $.99 with a shipping price of $15 or $20. If you feel that your item is worth $20, that’s cool with me. But list it as such, don’t try and trick people into bidding for a buck, only then to discover that they’ve just bid, in reality, $21. That’s just dirty.

I am, however, off of shovelglove for a few days. I’ve done something stupid, and gone and hurt myself. You would think that doing an exercise program that involves swinging a sledgehammer around, I would have injured myself with the hammer; but that’s not the case. I actually injured myself by doing the one exercise in my program that doesn’t really use the hammer at all: squats. I think I did them a bit… over zealously.

I don’t remember any sharp pains or anything while exercising last week, but by the weekend, I was in quite a bit of pain. I stubbornly put off going to the urgent care center until Thursday, thinking that it would just get better on its own (it wasn’t). The urgent care center did an x-ray to make sure I hadn’t broken anything, gave me crutches, and some wonderful pain medicine – the documentation on it says it’s akin to morphine.

The crutches seem to be helping tremendously, as I can already note less pain. I’ve also been icing it regularly, as ordered. I’ve got a follow-up appointment with my doctor on Monday, to see if she thinks I need to get an MRI to check for any soft tissue damage, or if I should just continue babying the knee. Let us all hope and pray and do knee dances (just do the rain dance moves and think about my knee) for the latter course of action. You all do the dancing, please; I’m not in any shape to jump around, even with crutches.

As an aside – crutches! I’m not sure if they’re supposed to help me or torture me. I’ve never had to use crutches before, and I must say – they’re a lot harder to use than I ever would have imagined. I’ve had some very close calls, thinking that not only would I need to get my knee checked out again, but also my head. In mid-swing, your balance has a tendency to get a little screwy.

In public restrooms, why do so many people not flush? It takes a mere second to do; it doesn’t cause you any pain to do it. And, it’s polite – no one wants to come in to a restroom to see someone else’s.. well, whatever. Furthermore, I would hope such an act would be deeply ingrained in most people – use the restroom, flush when done. But it would seem that’s not the case. In all my visits to the university restrooms over the past few years, I think I’ve seen two or three “all flushed” restrooms.

I initially thought it might just be an American thing, but Nils confirmed that it goes on in his region of Europe, too. Maybe it’s just a guy thing, then. Would any of the ladies reading like to chime in? Are your restrooms typically nice and clean, or do some women routinely refuse to flush, too?

Hmm… nope. Didn’t work. I kept it short, and that was still pretty peculiar.

I am, however, a big Indiana Jones fan. I grew up on the movies, and for a time in my younger years (say, 9 to 11), I yearned to be him; I had a brown aviator’s jacket that looked vaguely like Indiana’s jacket, and I consistently asked for an Indiana Jones hat. Thankfully my parents never got me one; I’m sure I would have been pummeled the first time I wore it to school, and my fighting skills would surely have not been up to Indy’s standards. But I digress…

So, being an Indiana Jones fan, when I learned that it had came out on DVD, it was high time for me to watch it. We rented it a few nights ago, and… well, I was rather disappointed. If you’ve not seen the film yet, it is now time for you to bail out, as spoilers will be running rampant in roughly four sentences. Anyone left? Excellent. Moving along:

The beginning of the film had me captivated. They touched on all of the right things from the old movies, tying it all together. The warehouse was wonderful, and they had the right music to go with it, too. Ford, while obviously bit (okay, a lot) older, fell into the Jones role admirably, I thought. He crashed into the Soviet truck so well, I could have easily been tricked into thinking I was watching one of the original movies. However… as the movie went on, it lost me completely. Come on – Indiana Jones and aliens?

I suppose it’s fair to argue that all of the other movies were way over the top, too. Let’s see – we had the Ark of the Covenant that melted Nazis; a religious cult that ritually ripped out folks’ hearts, only for them to continue living so they could be burnt up in a massive lava pit; and the Holy Grail, which could heal a grievous gunshot wound, and which was, incidentally, guarded by a knight who had been alive since the Crusades. Way over the top, I know.

But there weren’t aliens. I can’t really put my finger on it, but at least for me, Indiana Jones and aliens don’t mix well. I think part of the reason is that they pull the Jones films away from the era I know them to be in – the World War 2 years. Moving forward in time to deal with Ford’s age is fine; replace the Nazis with Soviets, and move along. But throwing aliens into the bargain was too much for me. That’s not to imply you couldn’t have aliens show up in the World War 2 era; I suppose they could. But as the original films were, being set in the era they were in, they had a certain feel to them. The aliens messed that feel up for me. I had fun watching the movie, as it was nice to get in touch with some childhood memories, but I think it could have been a lot better.