Yesterday I saw a status message set to:

*WARNING**Go to the top right of your screen, click Account & then click Edit Friends. Go to the left side of your screen and click Phonebook. Everyone’s phone # is being published. Please repost (sic) to let your friends know of this change in security, so that they can remove their phone numbers or change their privacy settings…

I went and checked out my Phonebook and noticed that all the phone numbers in there were from Facebook friends that had them listed in their profiles. I think it’s not so bad for Facebook to organize the information that people have made available to me already. Apparently this is a pretty old feature I had just never seen. False alarm. Nothing to see here.

Then I saw this message at the top of the screen.

To learn more about Phonebook or to delete any contacts imported from your phone, click here.

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1. Primal Fear
2. American History X
3. American Gangster
4. The Professional
5. Terminator 2
6. Silence of the Lambs
7. Empire Records
8. The Shawshank Redemption
9. Armageddon
10. Braveheart
11. Tombstone
12. Super Troopers
13. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
14. The Italian Job
15. Real Genius
16. Memento
17. Fight Club
18. Speed 1
19. Matrix 1
20. Princess Bride

What the hell? Such a great season with so much promise ends with a complete disaster. Seemingly random abilities are somehow developed as a result of major evolutionary steps, although the children of the evolved do not carry on the ability of the parents, meaning they somehow evolved in a different way??? In line with the fantasy element of the show, I am willing to accept that seemingly random person x has seemingly random power y and they can wield it at will. However, blatant contradictions are just stupid. How can a script writer not remember the rules of his own universe?

1) Hiro just runs up to Sylar and stabs him. If we remember, Hiro tried this before while time was frozen and still failed. And Hiro would have had his head in the game much more than Sylar, because Sylar had just killed his own mother. What a ridiculous decision not to have Hiro freeze time to stab him, or do like DL and teleport the sword directly into Sylar. It might as well have been Ando with the sword after all.

2) Nathan has to carry off Peter to save NY? That makes no sense at all. The first power Peter found was his ability to fly. He could have flown himself anywhere, anytime. Alternatively he could have frozen time and run away, teleported to a desert or the sky where Nathan carried him, or just learned to control the power like Ted and Sylar did. Are they suggesting that Peter, with the most powers of anyone, and was trained in how to control them, was inferior at controlling them compared to Sylar and/or Ted? Nathan did not have to die. Not to mention, Claire could have just shot him in the head/chest and he would have regenerated. Niki could have knocked him out. There were literally hundreds of solutions, even suggested ones in the plot, that did not involve Nathan dying needlessly. They completely failed to justify why Nathan carrying him off was the best solution.

3) Peter met Ted in the middle of New York. Peter knew he was going to be the exploding man. He was going to leave for Nevada. He never followed through on this and no reason was given why. On top of this he met Ted in downtown NY. Talk about stupid. Not only that but he met Sylar there too.

4) Planning this series of events would not only have been improbable, but completely impossible. Even the notion that Linderman, Angela Petrelli and Charles could have known about what was going to happen before Isaac painted it is unexplained. To somehow conclude that they planned for this to occur and there was “nothing that could be done about it” starting as far back as Claire’s birth and Niki and DL getting together is absolutely ridiculous. There were so many ways to stop NY from exploding that almost happened or could have happened that the line “there is nothing you can do to stop it” became the biggest farce in the entire show.

I really really liked the show as a whole, but the last episode was inexcusably bad.

Hello Family,

Hello Family,

The newest Gadberry household has been busy this year and has many updates to share. Both of us had the most exciting, albeit busy, year of our lives.

At the end of last year I moved to College Station to be closer to Lauren. As a perk, I was able to room with Travis from August until June. Lauren was busy with the spring semester and wedding planning, looking forward to taking the summer off.

Looking ahead to supporting a wife, I left my independent contract work behind in early May and got a “real job” at a medical research software company named Datatrak. I could not be more content in my position at the company. I have an over-affirming boss with superb upper-management directly above him. I am truly blessed in finding this amazing position.

Of course the highlight of the year was June 3rd when Lauren became my wife. Our honeymoon on the Riveria Maya was phenomenal, aside from having to sleep on two double beds for the first two nights! We snorkeled, wind surfed, toured Chichen Itza, rode a banana boat, touched giant sea turtles, and much more. Over a week in Mexico was grand, but it sure made me appreciate the good old USA. There are things we have here that are simply not available in Mexico, even in a luxury resort, such as 800 numbers, the FDA, customer service departments, and good water.

Lauren took the summer off so that we could begin to build our home together. It was a great time of relaxing and getting used to a new life with each other. In the fall she was in school again taking the most time consuming semester I have ever seen. Aside from the reading intensive Political Science and History classes, she also had to take Statistics and Fortran Programming. Who ever heard of a Political Science major needing a computer programming class?!? I can comfortably say that we both know Fortran pretty well now.

We have been attending a Newly-Weds Sunday school class at Grace Bible Church here in College Station. It’s been a great class for us and has allowed us to learn from other people’s hard knocks instead of our own. It has also been very affirming to see how much of the subject matter we had already covered. About 3 months ago in the Newly Weds class, my boss invited me to attend an FPU group. FPU stands for Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. Since my wallet didn’t look as fat as I wanted it to, I decided to give it a shot. It has been a huge blessing in our lives. I highly recommend it to everyone, to both the young and to the not-so young.

Looking ahead, Lauren is now registered for next semester and plans to graduate in August after the second summer session. For those of you who are counting, that’s 3 years and 3 months from when she took her first class! After that, our plan is for her to get a job so that we can get closer to our first house. Hopefully that’s somewhere in the next Christmas letter.

Merry Christmas,

Aaron and Lauren