Winter holiday cards

Normally I only get one or two cards but this year the two cards I received had a summary of what happened the previous year. If I were to (for some reason) send out a card with one of those, I wouldn't have enough very much to say, but it would probably sound something like this:

You may or may not know me, but I couldn't buy a small number of cards (the smallest box had 50 cards in it), so I decided to send the 43 cards that I didn't need out to random people. It would mean a lot to me if you feign interest in my life as it makes me feel like I have friends.

It's been a pretty hectic year. Actually in hindsight, it's been pretty much the same as every year. I'm still alone (over six years now. Is that a record?), but I just spent $6,000 at Great Expectations, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that spending an insane amount of money as a final sign of desperation is all it takes to find a good woman. A live-in hooker might have been cheaper, but I think that's still technically illegal

I bought a new car (a Scion XD), even though the car that I traded in on it was paid for, so maybe it wasn't the smartest thing to do. I guess I was just bored (see previous paragraph.)

I'm still working, but I can't really tell you much about it because it's a Dept. of Defense project.

I'm still running. I'm up to about 40 miles a week. I don't really have any reason to run or a particular goal other than not getting insanely fat like most people I see. Maybe I'm just bored (see three paragraphs ago).

That's about it. Whether you know me or not, I wouldn't be offended if you tried to hook me up with any single women you know (no children and no fat chicks).

Happy Winter Solstice!!

Dying young

The only thing worse than dying young is growing old.

Secure the Gmail notifier on OS X

This was found on macosxhints.com via digg.com:

I was shocked to discover that the Gmail Notifier, as distributed by Google, defaults to sending your Gmail password over the network in clear text every time it checks your inbox for new mail. This is incredibly insecure, especially since Google has plenty of smart people who now how to secure internet communication. They have the capability to enable secure communication as proven by the ability to access Gmail entirely over HTTPS (by using https://mail.google.com as the entry point). As it turns out, there is an easy "hack" for Mac users to switch Gmail notifier to HTTPS as well:

Pull down the Notifier menu (either Calendar or Gmail), hold down Command and Option, and click Preferences on the menu. You’ll see a hidden settings editor. Enter SecureAlways in the Key field (upper and lower case must be entered as shown) and 1 in the Value field, then click Set. Quit Notifier and start it up again. From now on, all connections with both Gmail & Gcal will be https. Thanks to this comment on the O'Reilly blogs for this trick!

Sansa MP3 players

I currently own an 8 GB (e280) version of the Sansa portable music players. I bought my first 4 GB unit about 18 months ago. Overall, I really like the device (small, light, decent GUI, priced right), but I have to say that if I hadn't bought the $29 extended warranty from Best Buy, I wouldn't be a happy person.

About two months after I bought the first 4 GB unit, the screen had a series of diagonal lines across it and the device was locked up. I took it back to Best Buy and they happily replaced it under the extended warranty. This happened four more times over the following 8 months (sometimes the device just wouldn't power up anymore).

When I returned it the last time, the 4 GB model had been discontinued so they gave me a full refund of the original purchase price. I didn't feel like driving around town shopping for another player so I checked out what they had for the same price (about $249). The 8 GB model was there, and they had some iPod Nanos for a few bucks more. I decided to stick with the Sansa if I could buy another extended warranty, but I couldn't help but think "Surely they've fixed the quality problems by now." Six weeks later, it died. That was in January 2007 and I've had two more e280s die since then.

You may be asking "what the heck are you doing to these things?" I'm not rough with it, I keep it in a neoprene case, it doesn't get wet, etc. I take pretty good care of the players, so it must come down to poor manufacturing quality.

All in all, I would recommend buying one, but only if you buy a "no questions asked" extended warranty and you don't mind driving back to Best Buy/Circuit City every 6 weeks or so to exchange it

Final Second Life entry

I forgot to make an entry after I abandoned SL, so here are my final comments on the application (for now at least).

I did meet a few cool people there, but everything was so oriented towards the sex industry (there are an inordinate number of transsexual prostitutes there). Once you meet a friend or two, then what. You hang out at someone's house, go to an overcrowded night club (the more people there, the slower everything runs), or just fly around exploring stuff.

If you are a little creative, you can try to build stuff, but land is pretty expensive so you might want to reconsider spending a lot of time building a house.

So, I transferred all of my transferable stuff to people I knew, gave my money to a club I would sometimes hang out in, and canceled my account. If SL goes more mainstream, maybe I'll go back, but I just think that with the current trend, it will not be sustainable.

Does Science Leave Room for Faith?

I wrote the following essay for a scholarship a few years ago. The subject was "Does Science Leave Room for Faith (or vice-versa)?" I don't think the people granting the scholarship liked it because they didn't even bother letting me know that I didn't get the money.



To begin with, "science" suggests a fact or series of facts leading to a conclusion, while "faith" is typically used when an unobservable event happens (i.e. the origin of life) that is explained by the existence of a supreme being.

The question "Does science leave room for faith" (or vice-versa) suggests that everything we, as humans, know allows for a dichotomous existence. With a lack of hard facts, many people have filled in the scientific gaps with divine influence, and over the years, a schism formed between religion and science.

A Brief History of Time provides a description, in relatively plain English, of what we currently know about the origin of the universe and life within. However it is also an example of how science requires faith in its facts. Stephen Hawking, was not at the quantum singularity that the universe was created from, but based on the evidence given, we should "believe" that he is correct in his findings.

As far as faith leaving room for science, any religion should allow for humanity's gathering of knowledge. As humans have overcome intellectual hurdles, it is natural for us to take what we have learned, expand on it, and work toward the next goal. During this process, many items originally explained by religion are reevaluated in scientific terms.

For example, Galileo professed that the Earth was not the center of the Universe. Since this went against the Catholic Church's doctrine, he was imprisoned for his beliefs despite overwhelming evidence supporting his findings.

Another example is the discovery by the ancient Greeks that the Earth is round simply by noting that the mast of an approaching ship is visible before the hull. If the Earth were flat, the entire ship would be equally visible. Despite this, the Earth was believed to be flat and surrounded by demons for another 1500 years.

In conclusion, science doesn't eliminate faith, it simply attempts to provide answers based on given evidence, and many of those answers require a certain level of faith themselves. In contrast, religious faith doesn't eliminate science, but it can be used to provide answers to questions that science hasn't been able to explain. For us to grow beyond a choice between faith or science, we must realize that what we know and what we believe are not absolutes, and as we grow, we will find that some parts of science AND religion were wrong. When that happens, we must relinquish our old beliefs and embrace the new facts.

Military memories

Every now and then I'll read, hear, or see something that reminds me of a past experience. I was reading a comment thread on Digg.com about how Bush's approval rating had dropped to 26% and the posters were arguing about how/why people in the military voted in the last presidential election. One commenter stated that most of the people in the military voted for Bush because they (at one time) legitimately believed he had some sort of plan in Iraq and that it had nothing to do with how Republicans increase military budgets.

This caused a spark or two to go off in my weak brain and I remembered one time when I was stationed at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama and we were FORCED to go to church one Sunday (I'm an Atheist, so you can imagine how upset I was), and the guest speaker was some Sergeant Major that talked about how "God says it's o.k. to kill if it's for the right reason" and "there's no such thing as a [politically] liberal soldier on the battlefield". This was right after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991 under Bush Sr. (the last successful Bush family member to be elected to office) and they were going full force with the whole brainwashing thing before a single U.S. soldier stepped foot on the sands of the middle east. They were expecting a horribly bloody ground war (much worse than we are currently experiencing in Iraq) and wanted to stretch out the time between a lot of soldiers dying and the living soldiers becoming disgruntled with the war.

/End of flashback

More Second Life observations

One of the first things I noticed about SL was that, just like in real life (RL) or 1st life, men get much less attention than really good looking women. I created a really good looking female avatar and people go out of their way to answer questions, or just say "hi". My male avatar could have exploded in a huge mushroom cloud (I'm sure it's possible to do in SL) and no one would have noticed.

The next thing I discovered is that people have virtual relationships in SL. Boyfriends, girlfriends, life partners, slave, whatever. They apparently treat it as if it were completely real by building a house and just hanging out staring at a fireplace and spooning on the sofa.

Further, the 1st life gender of the avatar doesn't seem to be important any more. The first 10-15 years of cyber sex held the stigma of "dude, that was probably a guy you were talking dirty to. What are the odds it was a hot 19 year old girl?" Apparently, SL has given people such a huge suspension of disbelief that they no longer care of who is sitting at the keyboard on the other end.

Of course, only SOME people are able to let go of their inhibitions there. Some people are just as big of a jerk in SL as they are in RL, or their avatar is a very close replica of their RL body and all of their phobias go with it.

There is apparently something for everyone in there. . .

Stay tuned.