ABIT "NF7-S2" NForce2 Ultra 400 Motherboard with onboard 6-channel audio and 10/100M network cards

AMD Athlon XP 2500+ "Barton" 1.83 GHz Processor

Gainward nVIDIA GeForce 6800 Video Card with 128 MB DDR RAM

512 MB Corsair XMS DDR RAM

DVD-ROM and CD-RW Drives

120 GB Hard Drive

RAIDMAX 10-Bay Case with 420 W power supply

...coming to a dorm room near you. Well, at least to a dorm room near me.

And a HUGE thank you to Josh West and Ernie West, for building it for me. And Jonah, too.

First of all, I hope you all had a good Independence Day.

You have to love a nation that celebrates its endependence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.     -Erma Bombeck

Just don't forget the men and women who died so that you could be free to have that picnic, cookout, or small-town fireworks display. God Bless America.

I saw something on FOXNews.com that I can hardly believe: a 5' 7", 132 pound Japanese man. Wait, that's not the amazing part, there's more. This man, twenty-five year old Takeru Kobayashi, won this year's annual Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, which began in 1916 and is held every July fourth at Coney Island. He won last year's contest as well. He ate 53½ hot dogs (without buns), beating his previous record of 50½. I want to know how a 132 pound man can eat that many hot dogs, and in 12 minutes, no less. I think I'd be sick of hotdogs after the second one, and have to stop after the tenth. But I guess we all just have different talents. Anyway, here's a picture of Kobayashi posing with 53½ hot dogs (with buns, lest they look unappetizing), after having successfully defended the coveted Mustard Yellow Belt against the 19 other contestants. The second place finisher only managed to eat 38 hot dogs.

Hey there everyone! Congrats to my good friends Jacob and Lindsay. They got married last Saturday. It was cool. Lindsay was absolutely gorgeous, and Jacob looked like his usual self... except in a tux. Jonah and I went, and stopped at Kohl's on the way for some wedding gifts. He got a meat tenderizer (a fitting gift from him I thought) and I got them a wok. They were things on the list and we thought they were cool. I wrapped the wok in the car, and did my best to wrap it in the same shape as the wok, and it was completely obvious what it was. I thought it was funny. Anyway, best wishes, you two, if you ever read this.

I found the coolest website ever. Okay, well not the coolest. But I'd say top 20. My sister agrees. It's basically 20 questions. But the AI "learns" by what people answer. It freaked Lizzy and me out when it correctly guessed "sea cucumber." Anyway, go here to try it out. Let me know if you think it's as cool as I do.

Friday (still "today" for me), as all of your are aware, Ronald Reagan, our nation's 40th president, was laid to rest in California. Earlier in the day, President Bush gave a really great eulogy, which you can read here. Reagan was the President of the United States for the first six years of my life. I really wish that I had been old enough to appreciate him at the time. Reagan's speech in Berlin still gives me goosebumps when he says "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Maybe I'm just weird. Anyway, here are some cool pictures and awesome quotes from Ronald Reagan:

"Without God, there is no virtue, because there's no prompting of the conscience. Without God, we're mired in the material, that flat world that tells us only what the senses perceive. Without God, there is a coarsening of the society. And without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure."

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."

"When people tell me I became president on January 20, 1981, I feel I have to correct them. You don't become president of the United States. You are given temporary custody of an institution called the presidency, which belongs to our people."

"Whatever else history may say about me when I'm gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears... May all of you as Americans never forget your heroic origins, never fail to seek divine guidance and never lose your natural, God-given optimism."