I was cleaning up my overstuffed email inbox and found the below picture...thought it would be a shame to just throw it away, so instead I've posted it here for everyone's enjoyment. They won't bind your legs!

Just an FYI, I've uploaded a dozen or so new pictures from the past couple of weeks while I've been over here in Europe. Not enough variety just yet, but if you click over to the Europe Media Gallery I've picked out some of the ones that turned out a little better than the others. Next week: Stockholm and Copenhagen!

My attempt earlier today to express some of the frustrations I've been feeling of late regarding this modern life of ours didn't really resonate with me, so I went on a search for other authors that have perhaps expressed some of these issues more eloquently than I am currently able. (Writing takes focus and an absence of distraction, both of which have been in short supply of late.) I found the following paragraph which is an excellent start:

...the economic superstate generates a superhologram that offers only one channel, the shopping channel, and one sanctioned collective national experience in which every aspect is monetized and reduced to a consumer transaction. The economy becomes our life, our religion, and we are transfigured in its observance. [ link to story on AlterNet ]

Sorry all for the radio silence for the past month or so, as I've been learning "walkabout" doesn't exactly leave to a steady rhythm in your life calendar. These days, I find myself thankful for the days when I have a stable Internet connection and a bed to sleep in that doesn't totally suck. I have many, many thoughts swimming around in my head right now about the state of economic affairs in America, but to be honest most of it leaves me feeling rather depressed when I think about it too much or take it seriously. Not exactly finding a reservoir of energy to tackle the issues at hand.

One more link for the few of you out there watching the web-reality PC Pimp Doctor show...Episode 3 is now online. This particular machine rebuild was the most difficult of the set, as there were some hardware failures along the way and time wasted readjusting furniture instead of building the PC.

[link]

For anyone living in one of our coastal cities, saying "houses are expensive here" is like saying "oxygen is nice." The cost of rent or a mortgage in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Diego, and many of the surrounding 'burbs spiked over the past several years to levels that are only defensible by banks and the National Association of Realtors. For example: The median sale price for residential real estate in California is currently about 12x that of Kansas. If you buy a home in San Francisco with a 20% down payment and a traditional 30-year fixed mortgage, your monthly payment is about 47% of median monthly income for the area. That's half of your pay going to the bank. At the other end of the spectrum, towns like Indianapolis, Topeka (Kansas), Springfield (Illinois) or Omaha are going to cost you less than 12% of your monthly take-home pay for an equivalent house.

Just a quick link: PC Pimp Doctor, Part 2 is now online. Looks like I may need to cut back my reality TV star plans a bit, though, it hasn't exactly taken over the airwaves just yet. But there are still 3 more PCs to build, perhaps the page views will pick up!

[Previous link: Episode 1]

I'm embarrassed to admit that it's been almost a full month since I last journaled about my Walkabout experiment. To an outside observer trying to deduce what the radio silence on this site means, it probably resembles the thousands of other blogs out there that simply died on the vine due to author neglect. Either that, or my car got stuck in a ditch somewhere and I've been trying to hitchhike back to an Internet connection.

Just a heads up: the first episode of GamePro's Pimp My PC reality show is now online. You can check out the video over here, where yours truly gives a few lucky people brand new high-end custom computing gear.

In the first episode, we meet a father/son duo who want to do some high-end PC gaming but only have a machine from circa 1999. They would also like to be able to connect it to their Xbox 360 and to their HDTV in the living room (hey, why not?). Oh, and I've got six hours while the son is away at school...and a machine that's overheating at 190 degrees...no problem!

I believe the show is being structured into eight episodes, two per build. Before you ask, no, I don't know if there are going to be future episodes so don't ask how you can get a free PC. But if you like the show, leave comments on the videos and over here so we can show the feedback to the sponsors!

EDIT: That picture was a lot bigger than I realized. Buh-bye, picture!

While catching up on some reading of reliably depressing Life After The Oil Crash, I came across a very thorough article in the Asia Times about how currency devaluation destroys wealth. Anyone not in the financial sector (including myself) can easily get confused about the relationship between currency exchange rates and inflation and whether all of these bumps up and down are good or bad things. I then hit one sentence that, if I can remember it, will always keep things straight in my mind:

Money itself is not wealth, only a generally accepted measuring unit of wealth.