New Zealand, plus fantasy football wrapup

I'm back in Taipei, after having spent 10 days in New Zealand. What amazingly gorgeous scenery! There are no words...

It was pretty cool taking great pictures based on no photographic skill whatsoever; everything is so lovely that any random snapshot comes out looking good. I'll post a couple when I get a chance.

Having seen the first two Lord of the Rings movies, I guess I'd had an inkling of what we would see, but I'd figured everything was CG enhanced. I'm still pretty impressed with Peter Jackson and the LOTR crew, but it certainly didn't look like they would've had to do much to get those beautiful panoramic landscape shots. Speaking of LOTR, I got to see Return of the King on our last full day in Auckland. How cool is that?

Sitting on the plane today, I was trying to decide what the trip highlights were. My conclusions:
- the drive to Glenorchy (and the hike we did there), definitely the most scenic day of the whole trip
- the entire sheep farm trip: the ride over on the TSS Earnslaw, getting to feed all the animals, and the very yummy afternoon tea (especially the cheese and onion scones) in the lovely garden
- jet boating on the Shotover River
- whale watching at Kaikoura (5 whales!)
- getting to drive from Christchurch to Picton, and again from Taupo to Auckland
I bet I'll look at my pictures and come up with more, but those were the ones that were foremost in my mind.

On a completely different note, I'm the champion of our fantasy football league! Woo-hoo! I'm counting that as a birthday present, and a most excellent one. My team MVPs were Holmes, Lewis, Holt, McNair, and my free agent pickup of the year, Domanick Davis. I'm tempted to retire from fantasy football altogether, on this high note.

military powers

Someone asked me the other day if I thought the United States' armed forces could take on the rest of the world, if necessary. For some reason, I was pretty convinced we could, except then the nations with nuclear weapons would probably use them, and we would all be screwed.

Today I went looking for numbers to justify my belief. I found this site which has numbers on military spending and scores for military power, quality, etc. The only countries that come even close to the US are, in order: China, Israel, India, and maybe Russia. China has 1/3 the power score of the US, 1/3 the quality score, and 1/10 the budget, but they have more active units and a bigger population.

forced relaxation

I've decided that the best way to relax is to go to a place where you are literally unable to do any work.

Over Thanksgiving weekend I was at my parents' house. They do have high-speed Internet there, but all three of the computers of decent speed and stability were monopolized by people playing FF XI. I couldn't pay any bills, I couldn't compulsively check e-mail, and I couldn't write holiday cards or wash dishes or do laundry, so my cousins and I basically sat around all weekend. We watched some DVDs, chatted about random topics, reread old books, lounged around being backseat gamers ("What do you mean, it's not your job to heal your party??"), ate lots of yummy food...pretty much the standard definition of doing nothing. It was great fun.