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Wow. Seriously, if you haven’t seen Michael Moore’s movie Sicko, watch it now.

And don’t worry, it’s not some sappy-crappy story about people without health care — Moore says that in the first 5 minutes. Instead, the movie is about people who have health care but had their health care dropped the minute their health care company actually had to pay something out.

He travels to England, France, and Canada and shows how their “socialized medicine” systems work (and work well) — one country I wished he would’ve visited too is Japan. Japan’s the closest a country comes to us economically (read: they’re very, very capitalist there), yet even they seem to have free health care for everyone!

As I understand, Japan has a very good mix of private and public health care, with the only government control being that you have to be offered it by your employer (or if you don’t have an employer, by the government). Why we can’t at least have this kind of system here in America, I don’t know!

The best parts in the movie for me were just the expressions on the faces of the people in other countries when Moore asks them about how much they have to pay for their health care, or how much medicine costs, or where they go to pay their bill after they get out of a hospital — they look at him like he’s from another planet. “Why would someone make you pay if they’re trying to keep you alive?” they seem to ask.

Also, listen closely when they play back the old Oval Office tapes of Nixon — that man was a goddamn monster. He basically just comes out and says, flat out, that the goal is to keep people sick and sad.

…for pseudo-pipelined JavaScript. I’ve seen it done before, and it’s always seemed really neat — I’m really curious to see if it can be done dynamically…

Apparently, the overheating with my white mustang is somehow connected to engine RPM! Yeah, doesn’t make sense to me either. If I just sit there, my car starts overheating, but if I put it into PARK and start bringing up the engine speed, it starts cooling off.

Beats me as to why, but I’m happy that I can at least cool it down if I get stuck in traffic, now!

All done putting in the new water pump on my white mustang! Only took about two hours — quickest damn job I’ve ever done. It’s a vast difference than it is trying to replace the water pump on a V6 or a V8 — those take hours, if not days.

I noticed my timing belt is starting to get kinda old in there, too, unfortunately.

Fortunately, I seriously don’t think it’s going to be that hard to do even that kinda job anymore — I’m starting to get to the point (in automotive maintenance) where the only thing holding me back is the availability of certain types of tools for the job, otherwise I’m thinking I could do damn near anything, car-wise.

About to start fixing my cars — both my white mustang and my blue (ha!) one. Don’t know what’s exactly wrong with either one, but I’ve a pretty good guess, so here’s to hoping!

Every now and then, I peruse FreeRepublic’s boards, just to take a look at what the “enemy” is thinking — what I see sometimes scares me.

Pray for President Bush - Day 2753

I got a flat tire going home on Friday of last week (well, it was more like I had a tire explode on me…), and had to put on my little wimpy space-saver spare in a parking lot. (It was a church parking lot, too!)

So, I get online and order up some tires real quick from TireRack.com, get ‘em shipped to my house, and wait until today to put them on my rims — I just take the rims off the car and bring them up to the tire shop directly, since I hate anyone else driving my car.

Well, they were real busy there, so the guy just told me to leave my rims and the new tires there, and I could come back in about an hour and pick them up. Well, I come back and they’re not done with them yet, so I wait around for about another hour or so (it’s a Saturday, so they were real busy, and I overheard the manager guy saying he had someone quit just that morning), and then the guy tells me to pull my car around so he can give me the the newly mounted tires.

Well, to make a long story short, he didn’t make me pay anything! Yay! Said he felt bad that it took so long — it’s not a tiny gesture, either, since it’s like $40 to mount two tires at this particular place (they do a good job, usually).

I won’t say what the guy’s name was, so he won’t get in trouble or anything, but it makes me feel good to know that there’s still people like that around — lets me know that I can bring my car there in the future and not feel bad about it. Repeat business, and all that.

BitTorrent, Comcast, EFF Antipathetic To FCC Regulation of P2P Traffic

If you can, try and give this a read — see if you can get the message.

It’s not bandwidth that Comcast is trying to protect, it’s the flow of information — that’s why they’ve gone after Bittorrent, now that Bittorrent is a media provider, too.

And it shall be mine eventually. Seriously, you could ping away like Annie Oakley with this thing, considering the fact that you’re firing shotgun shells.

And I’m happy.