... and it looks like we left just in time.

So it looks like John Stewart (the 'with' of The Daily Show) had a spot on the O'Reilly Factor back on the 17th, and someone posted the full transcript of the interview.

It's an interview I would love to have seen a snipet of, but the transcript showed a few things:

- Bill O'Reilly is still an arrogant ass.
- O'Reilly believes everyone who watches The Daily Show is drunk and/or stoned slackers.
- John Stewart is awesome.

Through my wanderings online and on Google, I came accross a very disturbing story surrounding a 1995 terrorist plot known as Project Bojinka.

The whole story is an investigative exposee about how Al Qaeda-linked terrorists tried to kill the Pope, the US President, and bomb eleven airplanes. Some of the names are directly associated with 9/11, and there's a very strongly backed theory that Project Bojinka's bomb plot was the precursor to 9/11.

It's a very long but well detailed read. I'm mainly posting about it because the story completely blew me away - the details, the plot, the timing, the investigation... everything seemed to come from a John Grisham novel, but in a spooky kind of way.

So today I scratched an itch I've been thinking about for quite a while - car audio. Janine's smack-talked my car stereo performance ever since she got her Matrix with the higher end stereo, and ever since I've thought of upgrading the various components in my car - from the speakers to the head unit.

Well, today I finally started the upgrade process and bought new speakers from CDT Audio. I got a new par of rear speakers and a sweet set of component speakers for the front. The components come with a normal woofer speaker and a small 1" tweeter speaker for each side, plus some special electronics to pass high or low frequencies to the respective speaker.

I'll have to do some custom installation for everything (especially the tweeters, since I currently don'y have tweeter speakers in my car), but I'm looking forward to playing with my new toys!

After 11 days, the beast known as our garage has been tamed. No longer do we have exposed drywall and ugly cracks in the concrete floor. We now have wonderfully smooth and blindingly white walls. The floor has also been coated with a nice layer of Epoxy Shield... including pretty little paint chips that sprinkle on like glitter. Best of all - I got to play with a 2700psi pressure washer. Sweet. :-)

We'll have pictures up soon. We still have some tape on the walls from when we painted the Epoxy Shield, and that stuff takes about a day to cure before you can walk on it. Total cure time until our cars can drive into their new home - one week.

Janine talked with my step-mom (Bonnie) on the phone yesterday, explaining the whole idea of us working on the garage. Bonnie didn't quite understand why we were putting so much work into a garage. Suddenly Janine came up with the idea of us having a big ol' hilbilly party in the garage! What better way to celebrate a big open space than to shove people, chairs, and a barbeque into it? Bonnie's response, after a 5 second reflective pause, was a hesitant "Okay."

I'm glad that I've started reading more of my news from Google, 'cause CNN doesn't have anything on this story, unlike 466 other news sources:

Annan: Invasion of Iraq 'illegal'

Now the US and some allies is naturally rejecting this point of view and insisting that the war was legal. It's possible that Annan's comments are his own opinion (which do carry a good amount of weight), but in the past he has kept his comments very broad and vague while still voicing displeasure. Now the voice of the United Nations has changed his verbage and come out straight and to the point.

And now there are reports saying that the whole situation in Iraq is bleak and stability is uncertain. So much for living in a safer, less terror-filled world.

... and now I'll get off my damned soap box.

It's official. The NHL owners have decided to lock the doors and put the next NHL season on hold.

This has been news for a while, but for those of you in the dark the story goes like this: NHL Players want money. Team owners want money. Neither can come up with a new contract to decide who gets how much. The old contract expires tonight.

The whole situation is much more complicated, but that's the simple story. Noone is quite sure how long it will be until they come up with a contract, but seeing that they've been negotiating for almost a year already a lot of people are doubting that there will even be a season this year.

Keep your fingers crossed...

So somehow I was surfing around eBay this afternoon looking at Cubs tickets when an idea struck - why not see if I can find an AVIC-N1. When I typed the model number and hit search, a ton of auctions from $.99 to $5.00 came up - way too good to be true for a product with an MSRP of $2000.

The description for each auction was almost identical; Bid on the auction and be sent a URL with information on how to buy an AVIC-N1 for $99.95 - yet another deal too good to be true. This was going to be a mystery no Green Machine could solve, so I downed some Scoobie Snacks and went on a quest to Google myself an answer.

A quick 10 minutes later, I had my answers:

The website: http://www.membergifts.co.uk
The bait: Cheap-ass Gameboys and car audio electronics.
The catch: A Ponzi scheme. You start as a level zero when you first sign up. To move up the ladder you must bait people into registering for the website. The more people you get, the higher you move up the ladder. Oh, and you have to buy their e-Books to move up, too. .. at $25 a pop. This may technically be a 'Straight-Line Matrix', but Ponzi sounds cooler.

I'm sure this isn't the only website doing this sort of thing, but it just goes to show that if you see a deal that's too good to be true... it probably is.

Per request from a Coffman family member, here are links to three pictures a friend of mine took of me playing goalie back in mid-July. I have cooler jerseys now, but the premise is the same.

Picture #1
Picture #2
Picture #3

Pictures (c) Arkady Spevak '04

Here's a good reason to wait to have kids.

Via Alison

To celebrate this illustrious mini-vacation that is guaranteed by some congressional bill of rights or somethingorother, the bride and I are heading to the tranquil hidden smack in the middle of BFE city of Aberdeen, South Dakota. I've told a few people at my work about this trip, and the first word out of their mouths is always the same. "Why?"

Orshi, one of my best friends from high school and a former bridesmaid in our wedding, moved to Aberdeen to be with her fiancee who got a job as a journalist with a Night Ridder newspaper in this town in the middle of nowhere. A California girl at heart, I can't wait to start making fun of her when winter hits the plain states. But for now, I'm content to fly out and show a little support for the girl who moved almost two thousand miles away from home to be with her boy. She may be koo-koo enough to be a clock, but hopefully they'll be able to move to warmer climates soon enough.