I’m not in the market for a new computer right now and probably won’t be for at least another year, but I spent a little time pricing out components for what could be considered a mid-range system. I wasn’t particularly surprised to see that the price came out to be the same as my last build, but with a significant boost in raw power and storage. My current rig is no slouch and can still handle just about everything that I throw at it, although it is beginning to gasp a little when I go crazy with the multitasking. That was difficult to imagine a few years ago when I was amazed at just how snappily it performed.

And there’s no way I’m getting a Mac. The additional cost is considerable and I can get just as much performance for several hundred dollars less, not to mention the fact that Windows 7 is just as shiny as OS X.

A colleague informed me today that this blog is now blocked by the web filters at work. I checked for myself and, sure enough, I received a warning message stating that the site was blocked under the somewhat curious category of “Message Forums”. I’m guessing someone finally got fed up with my frequent critiques of the governor, my obsession with fishnets, or some combination of the two. While this move may slightly affect my hit counts (a few of my co-workers would check out the blog over lunch), I view as a kind of affirmation of my corrupting influence. I’m now an official malcontent whose efforts to speak truth to power are threatening enough to merit censorship. Today, it’s just the Minnesota state government, but soon it might be the whole of China. I’ll be the Salman Rushdie of the digital age.

I’d better start hiring my security team of Amazonian women whose uniforms will consist entirely of fishnets and Lycra. I’ve already done the sketches.

Andrew Sullivan points out that the Tories, the British conservative party, would be considered a hotbed of radical socialism in American politics. They fully support their single-payer health care system, marriage equality for gays, public transit, and moving away from a carbon-based economy.

Meanwhile, American conservatives are currently obsessed with reviving Confederate pride, removing all references to that humanist pansy Thomas Jefferson from history textbooks, and repealing most or all of the Affordable Care Act.

The fundamental difference between these two movements is that the Tories are looking to the future through a moderately conservative lens; American conservatives are fixated on a sanitized past as viewed through a glass darkly. If the Tories do win next month’s election, perhaps their sane counterparts here in the States will be a little bolder in confronting the babbling fringe that is currently holding a gun to the head of the Republican Party.

I’m a sucker for violent footage of the natural world and this clip of a sea lion making a meal of a squirrelly octopus is pretty spectacular. The octopus makes a few valiant attempts to get away, but the sea lion will not be denied its seafood snack. The fact that the sea lion managed to so agilely pursue its prey with a camera strapped to its back is also worth noting.

Somewhere in western Minnesota, cephalopod lover PZ Myers sheds a single tear while watching this video.

It looks like the alien-invasion movie Independence Day is not going to get just one sequel, but two. I couldn’t get to a theater fast enough to see the original, but left feeling a little disappointed. The script was all kinds of silly and I had been hoping for something a little more grandiose. Something tells me the sequels will be even sillier, but I’m still enough of a geek tool that I’ll probably see both of them.