It's time to start getting things in order. I am taking the next month off to prep for my departure to Australia. Which means today is my last day of work here at this, my large multinational company. I am leaving on good terms, so don't expect this to degrade into a bridge-burning post, as I may do work with these guys in the future. Anyhow, quitting is much more pleasurable than getting the boot, as can happen when you don't know when to fold 'em and move on. I learned that the hard way.

I have a month before I get on a plane headed across the Pacific. I have this feeling that I am going to be busy dealing with storage, spending quality time with my friends and minimizing myself down to two large bags. After being sedentary for five years, it's time to make some change, and it just happens to be just about long enough for me to have completely blocked out how awful it was the last time I moved.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I love my new mix tape.

In this modern tech world that we live in, one should not forget the value of the mix tape. Sure, my current tape was made without the the warm fuzzy niceness of analogue, on my nicely-alphabetized, easy-to-use iTunes but the end result is pure goodness. A universal great thing about mix tapes is that the maker is almost always bound to love it. I think that damn near every tape I've made has rocked my socks off. And as I listen to my new tape/playlist as I write this, I must say that I still find my musical taste impeccable—it's like I know exactly what my favorite songs are.

Of course, this isn't really the point of a mix tape. I never make mix tapes for myself, despite my self-congratulations. This one is headed off to Sydney, where I am to meet up with it in about a month. I'm not sure what is to be read between the lines with this album, but I'd say that it is a pretty happy and generally rocking group of songs.

I hope that this inspires you to fire up the tape player, or the iTunes and start putting songs together. It's fun, people love to get them and you'll love making it.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Colin J Allen at 3:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This last week I decided to get my mind around whatever is happening in Iraq. It's all rather confusing as to who hates who and why. As soon as we befriend one side, they go and start killing anyone who is not like them. For a while we didn't like the Sunnis as they kept blowing us up, so we helped the Shiites out till it got out of hand. Now the Sunnis still hate us and continue to blow us up, and the Shiites are armed and running about anyone who rubs them wrong, namely Sunnis and other Shiites who disagree with their federalist or anti-federalist ideas. Yes, democracy over there would be nice, but frankly, I wonder if there are just too many guns over there to sort it out.

Just saying 'I told you this shit would happen,' as I have been for months now, isn't really a forward-looking answer. I believe that you need institutions before you set up a working democracy, which is not going to happen in Iraq any time soon. We might be there awhile till things settle down and people start voting with ballots rather than militias. We need to keep engaged as every alternative I come up with scares the crap out of me, and if for nothing else, we need to keep oil flowing out of the country.

It's all very ugly, but we must make the best of a bad situation. It's going to be like this for some time, and I think that it is about time we realize that we can't just pull out all of our troops and be done with it. It's going to take years, and even after all that we may still lose in some sort of Vietnam-style way. But if we manage to keep Iraq from breaking up into three or four pieces, then I would say we did the best we could.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)