Movies in bad taste

While my wife and I were at the movies yesterday, we saw a preview of a movie about September 11th. Playing on this major tragedy in recent US history is in extremely poor taste, in my opinion. I'm sure every adult remembers where he or she was on that fateful day and doesn't want to relive the emotions. For me, I had gotten married 2 days prior and my wife and I were in a hotel room in San Luis Obispo; I was showering and she was watching TV. We couldn't believe it and cut our mini-honeymoon (we took a few extra days off from work to drive back from our wedding down the California coast) short to head back home. It was a very eerie trip home as we heading down I-5 and passed LAX where it was completely empty and the exit was blocked, not to mention the light traffic for a Tuesday.

I don't think movies about this tragedy are necessary and having people capitalize on it is shameful.

Lego pricing

In my quest to find Legos, I've come across a number of sites and eBay that have Lego sets. Some sets/pieces are available on Lego's website and people selling the ones that are available are pricing them at more than the price Lego has them. However, the market for used and new older Lego sets seems quite large. I wish I had gotten interested in Legos 10 years ago as I would have been able to get sets at list price and would have had a large selection. Over the last few years (at least from what I can tell), the emphasis in Legos has been licensed sets such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, Batman, Spiderman, etc. as well as Bionicles. I'm not interested in any of them, so the selection is quite limited for me and I'm afraid that Lego won't be producing much variety in the town/city and train lines.

Speaking of trains, just as I start getting interested in trains, Lego is moving away from the 9V trains where the tracks are powered to plastic tracks where the engine is powered and has a remote control. The 9V trains interest me more as they are more like model trains and less toy like. In order to cater to the Lego target audience (young kids), Lego decided that the remote controlled trains are better. I can understand this, but it's too bad for folks like me. I can still buy some parts from Lego, but soon the price will go up and the secondary markets selling Legos will make everything much more expensive.

BTW, if anyone wants to sell me Legos, let me know. I'm looking for town/city related sets, train cars (9V), as well as bulk lots of random bricks to build stuff.

More waste of taxpayer money and complete injustice

Well, today, Justice Anthony Kennedy granted a stay allowing the cross on Mt. Soledad to stay in place at least temporarily. Both sides of the issue are interpreting it in different ways. If the supreme court accepts the case, I think it will be a bad precedent as the law (in my eyes) is quite clear that the cross doesn't belong there and courts for the last 15 years or so seem to agree with me. It will be even worse if the supreme court sides with the city of San Diego and allows the cross to remain in place. In any case, this is a complete waste of taxpayer money, both city and federal government.

What's up with baseline energy usage?

I received my gas and electric bill today and have always been curious what baseline energy usage means because I always exceed it by at least 2 times and usually more than that. For energy usage > 100% of baseline, the rate increases and then increases more as the usage goes up. Turns out, the baseline is based on a) location (there are 4 zones, coastal, inland, mountain, and desert), season (summer or winter), if all electric or gas and electric applications, and number of days in the month. For the summer, where I live (inland), the baseline is 11.8 kilowatt hours per day. The big problem with this is that the size of the house nor the number of family members is taken into account. So a person with a 1000 square foot house has the same baseline as someone with a 2500 square foot house or a house with 2 people and a house with 4 people have the same baseline. Unless I'm missing something, this is completely ridiculous. I do what I can to conserve energy (I still haven't turned on the A/C despite the 90+ degree weather outside), but my bill doesn't reflect it. Granted, I do have to run computers all the time for my business.

I guess if you can afford additional family members or a bigger house, you deserve to pay more for electricity.