Long time, no post!

OK. I know what you're all thinking: "He still exists?" Yes, and I promise all of my eager readers(hey, that sort of rhymes!) that one of these days I'll get back to fairly regular posting. In the meantime, however, this is just a quick update, upon which I'll expand in(hopefully) the very near future.

First, I'd like to welcome any Facebook readers, who are probably wondering what I'm talking about by this point. Let me explain: this is my blog, and I've told Facebook to import any new entries as they are made. Older entries, for anyone who's interested in reading some facile political thoughts and a few other bits of randomness, can be found at lifeuniverseanddaniel.blogspot.com.

For the rest of this post, I will refrain from discussing the current political situation, as I'm sure pretty much everyone is already about as saturated with it as they can take. I'll save my thoughts for after the election, which is only 2 days from now!

But anyway, I'd like to talk for a while about food. Specifically, the uniquely American habit of eating as much of it as we can possibly hold without becoming seriously ill, and perhaps a bit more. I must confess that I am not entirely immune to this myself. Yesterday, my family and I went, as we do every year, to Red Lobster's endless shrimp promotional event. Sounds harmless enough, shrimp's a light food, you don't have to eat any more than you want, etc., right? WRONG.

There is some deeply rooted American psychological imperative which makes us feel that when we pay for an essentially unlimited amount of food, we absolutely have to eat every bite we can possibly hold, whether or not we really want it. Even your humble blogger is not immune to this effect. I ate far more than was necessary, and ended up feeling miserable for most of the visit to Barnes and Noble afterward. But I digress...

Another exciting bit of news is the release of Nintendo's new portable, the Nintendo DSi. As of about 11 hours ago(thanks to the difference in time zones), it is available in Japan. A U.S. release is expected to be delayed until after April of next year due to the continued popularity of Nintendo's current DS portable. I must admit I'm drooling over this new incarnation, which is a major upgrade from my current DS Lite system. The DSi features a pair of cameras, one facing toward the user and one facing out. It also has built-in web browsing and music playing capabilities, both of which I already have, thanks to the marvels of homebrew software, but the official versions will of course be more polished and functional. The DSi also has a Shop function similar to that of the Wii, where shoppers buy points and use them to purchase and download items directly to the DSi.

There are a lot more major upgrades, but I won't waste any more of your(or my) time detailing them. For anyone interested, there is a good feature overview video here. It's in Japanese, and thus is a bit uninformative on the actual hard data, but the video is enough to make any portable gaming people drool;-)

Did I say this would be a short post? Oh, well. I'll stop while I'm ahead. Oh, wait, I should have stopped about a paragraph and a half ago. It's a good thing I didn't get into politics as well...

OK, well, bye for now!

Daniel G.