Tired of paying outrageous rents and not having anywhere to store all our car parts and equipment, my friend Jason and I decided to rent a house together. We found a fairly nice house in a good neighbourhood next to the San Jose Municipal Golf Course. I for one can’t wait to move in, as I’ll be saving almost six hundred a month in rent, won’t have to deal with noisy upstairs neighbors, will have a place to work on my car, and a nicer place to live in general (where the air conditioning works in a larger area than a 10′ radius in one corner of the living room). I got the keys this weekend and have started moving a few items, though I have a full month of overlap in my leases so I’ll have plenty of time to move in the upcoming weeks.

Amazon.com has a new feature on their front page that they’re calling a “plog” (for “personalized blog” or something like that). Basically it’s a blog-like journal of canned Amazon.com reviews of new products, customized according to what products you’ve bought/browsed from Amazon in the past.

The latest entry is about My Life, former president Clinton’s autobiography… in which I’ve incidentally had very little interest. What’s most fascinating and/or puzzling is how Amazon prefaced the “plog” entry:

My Life was released today; we thought you’d be interested because you bought Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball Calendar: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide.

Hmm? What’s the connection?

My friend Sarah and I were wandering around Japantown San Jose last night and the place was really depressing. At 8pm the place looked deserted, with almost all the businesses closed except for a few restaurants. Quite a few storefronts were empty, businesses that had simply shut down for lack of, well, business. In fact the whole place looked even worse than when I’d last visited it a couple years ago.

The busiest place around there was the Buddhist temple nearby, where there was some kind of ceremony—a funeral we guessed from all the people dressed in black.

I found myself low on cash and when we went looking for an ATM I finally realized why Japantown is so dead: there are no banks or ATMs closer than about five blocks, and almost none of the restaurants there accept credit cards. A reflection of modern Japan, Japantown SJ is not; post-war Japan maybe…

My friends and I use the Bush-ism “strategery” (or “strategerie”) to refer to an ill-conceived and/or poorly-executed plan of action (which would be considered “strategy” if it were not so ill-conceived and/or poorly-executed).

Saw Spider-Man 2 today, and went to a friend’s birthday dinner at Benihana… all of which had nothing to do with my home country, but happy Canada Day anyway!