Original ExistDifferently.com Weblog of David, a Christian Network and Systems Manager, with topics ranging from Apologetics to Worldview, and some crypto, open source, programming, opinion, and daily life thrown in between.

Fri, 2005-04-01 (Apr 01)

And to think there’s worse…

Filed under: Blog,Christianity,General,In The News,Personal,Worldviews — David @ 03:12

A “blog entry here”:http://coffeetalking.blogspot.com/2005/03/little-bit-of-everything.html links to quite a story: “False Imprisonment”:http://www.dmregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050331/SPORTS13/503310395/1003&lead=1

It’s worth reading all the way through. The sad part? I can tell you from personal (not my individual, but I was one of three people second-most affected) experience that what happened in this case is NOTHING compared to the true injustice in the, um, “justice” system in this country right now (try taking that story, drag it out to about seven years, and make it two separate false charges and two false or forced convictions…and that’s just for starters). Even sadder? That we have the “best” system of it’s sort on the planet. And some people are optimistic! And by that I mean utopian…they thing everything’s going to get better as we “evolve.” I don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t be optimistic about some things, such as God’s plan for your life and such, but don’t be optimistic about the world as-is getting better any time soon. It’s pretty much headed down the toilet, for the time being at least. Either Jesus is coming back first, or it will get worse until the next turn in the cycle mentioned by the book “The Fourth Turning”:http://www.fourthturning.com/ (which notes that it’s gotten bad like this (well, not exactly like this, but worse than we might usually imagine, also “see the book on Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/055306682X/davidsworldva-20/002-2086300-3510456?%5Fencoding=UTF8&camp=1789&link%5Fcode=xm2 and also note that I haven’t read the entire book, nor is it written from a Christian perspective)) in the past, but that history always seems to repeat itself, particularly in a four-part cycle identified in said book). Original sin brings us all this, and crushes utpianism, at least until God returns, and at that point “utopia” is just one of the two!

But I digress slightly :-)

Also, this is worth considering: “Iniquity Abounds”:http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Basics/iniquity_abounds.htm

Time for some sleep, even though there’s no work tomorrow (yay!). I wish well those of you who may perhaps have to go to either work or school and stayed up a bit late ;-)

Tue, 2005-03-29 (Mar 29)

Words, Words, and Few for You!

Talking is cool. Both online and in person. For me, when I get enough talking one-on-one, apparently I can’t come up with anything worthwhile to post to the general public here (and by “general public” I mean, the two or three people that read this regularly and anyone else that stumbles through from Google or something :-)

Not that that’s a bad thing. Unless you want to read more stuff here. But hey, it’s my blog, so you’ll just have to live. I do respond to comments occasionally, especially from commenters that aren’t, um, regulars :-) Or I would, if there were more than three such comments on the whole site. And one of those is from someone I know in person.

Of course, if I posted more interesting stuff here that was actually worth commenting on, I suppose I might then expect more comments. Catch-22 really. Or maybe the most important things I have to say right now aren’t meant for you to hear. Or you. Or you. Safe bet: if you don’t know if it’s you or not, it’s not you :-) On the other hand, if you do know what I’m talking about, feel free to ignore what I’m talking about, it doesn’t apply to you :-)

Do I get a prize? You know, for least content in three paragraphs? I should at least get runner-up for this one :-) What do you know, I did want to talk. Just not about anything you’re probably interested in, here at least :-) If you’re feeling left out, give it time (sure for this post to sink in or something (like it ever will…ha! Like the blonde that died in the shower when the shampoo bottle said “lather, rinse, repeat” ;-), but what I mean is come back later and perhaps eventually I’ll be able to post something more interesting in such a public forum :-)

Um…”Mozilla Firefox 1.0.2″:http://www.getfirefox.com/ is out. It’s cool. Get it. Um…[looks at multitude of tabs open for something interesting to post]…I found a site called “LinkedIn”:https://www.linkedin.com/ the other day that I hadn’t seen before. Interesting stuff, but I haven’t signed up yet. Still, the tab remains open since I’m curious about it :-)

Also, “Magix music products”:http://site.magix.net/index.php?id=471&no_cache=1 are good stuff…try the demos sometime. Music Studio 2005 is really good and at less than $100 is very powerful, the main limitation I run into is not being able to edit the audio while recording at the same time, which you can do in their premiere “Samplitude”:http://site.magix.net/index.php?id=15648&type=2 product (although it’s $1,000 more expensive :-)

If you have an extra $79 laying around (and who doesn’t?), “Amazon Prime”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/subs/primeclub/signup/main.html/002-2086300-3510456 is a nice program to get into if you like Amazon.com and want to get fast, free shipping (or faster, cheaper shipping). Details are right there on the site, I think you can read it without me :-) Free two-day shipping on over 1 million items, overnight for $3.99, for a year. Yep, I told you anyway! Get over it!

Ran into an interesting site while searching for something (I don’t remember what, a how-to on something) the other day. It’s a computer help site called “Bleeping Computer”:http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/. I get a kick out of the name and wish I’d gotten to that domain…like I need more than the 30+ I have :-)

If you’re looking to buy something computer related, first check out “eCost”:http://www.ecost.com/ because they have a lot of good deals. LCDs and camera memory cards are some of their best and most often discounted items. But they have lots of stuff. Also, for general, daily updated deals (lots of Dell deals that link directly to Dell, sometimes with coupon codes, but plenty of non-Dell, and some non-computer related, like “Overstock.com”:http://www.overstock.com selling down comforters and bedsheets really cheap) are awesome over at “GotApex”:http://www.gotapex.com/. I watch that site several days out of the week to spot good stuff. Not that I buy that often, or I’d be much poorer than I am (although they’re one of the reasons I’m as poor as I am already :-)

For example, GotApex is listing right now that Amazon.com has a “Canon PowerShot SD110 Digital Elph 3 megapixel 2X zoom”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0001G6U9I/ref%3Dnosim/gotapex/002-2086300-3510456 camera for just $159! If I had the spare cash I’d jump on it, the Elphs are awesome because they’re so darn tiny while still be high quality. And usually high priced. But I don’t :-)

And, my last item for this post is “my Flickr page”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/existdifferently/ which, if you’re not on my friends or family list, still has a lot of pictures that I spent all night last Friday night (until 8am Saturday morning) tagging with metadata and making public. I have over 3,200 images uploaded to Flickr, and am nowhere near getting them all sorted (probably never will be) but I like the ones I have available now :-)

Goodnight!

Update: I do find it somewhat ironic how long this post ended up being, and how much info I included, given the title. So much for intent! :-) But aren’t you glad I got around to some actually useful information after all that stuff at the top?

Fri, 2005-03-25 (Mar 25)

My Kind of Alarm!

Filed under: Blog,General,In The News,Personal — David @ 17:48

I should probably look into “this alarm clock”:http://coffeetalking.blogspot.com/2005/03/are-you-alarm-hitter.html at some point. That, or move my alarm clock across the room. But I tried that before, and got so ticked off about having to get out of bed to turn it off that I just moved it closer :-) This one actually moves so it is next to your bed the first time, and if it moves to a random part of the room so you have to look for it, it could be helpful. Of course now I just sleep through my current clock (well, I did today, but I actually woke up to it a few times this week!), so it might not help much :-)

Update: Original article with pictures (it’s ugly at the moment!): “right here”:http://bicillin.media.mit.edu/clocky/

Tue, 2005-03-22 (Mar 22)

Microsoft’s Vacuums

Filed under: Blog,Funny,General,In The News — David @ 14:25

While browsing, I stumbled upon (geez, will that cliche ever go away? :-) a funny quote I haven’t seen before, at this “article on usenet posting”:http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html. Specifically:

“The day Microsoft makes something that doesn’t suck is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners.” — Ernst Jan Plugge

Not to say I buy that hook, line and sinker about Microsoft, but they certain do have their moments :-) But, I do work with a lot of their products and, when configured and used properly, they do actually work sometimes, and sometimes (gasp) better than the alternatives! But, that doesn’t make the quote above any less humourous!

Kill Your Baby?

Filed under: Blog,Funny,General,In The News — David @ 12:49

That’s right. Fox 59, your friendly local Indy news station, recommends you at least subject your kid to danger if you don’t buy a brand new crib! While searching for something else (Did you know some people have taken pictures of “every Starbucks in the city”:http://www.starbuckseverywhere.net/Indianapolis.htm and posted them online? This one “next to my bank”:http://home.flash.net/~ral1/starbucks/bigimages/DSCN8511.htm (they’re connected inside! You can smell the coffee while you make a deposit, I suppose so you can then use your debit card to spend your deposit on the spot :-) has a sign out front that I hope isn’t keeping people away!), an “archive from April 2004”:http://fox59.trb.com/news/local/morningnews/wxin-am-fyi-april.story says, in part (emphasis mine):

Tuesday, April 13
CRIB SAFETY PRECAUTION
A crib can cost more than $3,000. But a hefty price tag doesn’t always mean more safety for your baby. Consumer Reports tested more than a dozen cribs to find out which ones are the best. Prices ranged from $100 to $500. Experts say simpler designs are safer. “Fancy decorations can catch a child’s clothing at the neck and that’s a potential strangulation hazard”, says Consumer Reports Sandra Gordon. The Delta Luv Jenny Lind model #4650-1 is easy to assemble and at only $110 its a Consumer Reports best buy. If you decide to use an older crib instead of buying a new one, make sure it was made before 1999. Experts say cribs made before that are not as safe.

Did they really mean that? Well, probably not as much as Wal-Mart meant that interesting price, uh, “reduction” I mentioned a while ago :-)

I never want my blog accused of sensationalizing trivia, so don’t accuse me. Whether I do it or not. Okay? ;-) (If you need to accuse me of something, you could point out my overuse of smileys :-p Or…how about my (usually (sometimes) nested) use of parentheses? I mean, you’ve got a nice example of both right here! Can! You! Spot! Another! Problem!? Not so much in this post (other than the last five sentence fragments), but overall my exclamation point useage patter tends to trend toward the upward side of the curve :-) And that’s even after I try to curb my enthusiasm! (Hey, that’s almost the name of a show on HBO! I don’t get that channel so I’ve just heard the name.)

Wed, 2005-01-19 (Jan 19)

Comment Spam-Be-Gone: Thank You Google!

“Google”:http://www.google.com/ has done it again: solved a major problem on the web. Fixed Comment Spam! It was a blindingly obvious fix, but only with the usual 20/20 hindsight :-) It will take a little while to make a difference in the number of comment attacks, until all blogs are updated to take advantage of it. The major services out there (including LiveJournal for some of my readers) have it or are implementing it right away, in cooperation with Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search. Robert “brought it to my attention”:http://robert.accettura.com/archives/2005/01/18/no-more-spam/ from his blog and I checked out (as you should) this Google post called “Preventing comment spam“:http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html on Google’s official blog. All the gory (not really) details.

Very elegant, but it does require the major search engines, the reason for the comment spam problem, to implement ignoring the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all links they index. Fortunately, that’s exactly what has happened, and why this is even news!

So, Google, thank you once times a “googol”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=googol&btnG=Google+Search!

Sat, 2004-12-25 (Dec 25)

“isn’t it time someone saved you?”

SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t seen Spider-Man 2, and don’t want to know the ending, don’t read the “more” part of this post! Merry Christmas and go watch the movie! :-)

Okay, just finished watching a couple of movies tonight. “Elf”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0002F6BRE/davidsworldva-20?dev-t=mason-wrapper%26camp=2025%26link_code=xm2 I watched because my Mom wanted to see it, so my family watched it. It was okay. Funnier than I expected in several areas, and Bob Newhart is good in it, but not worth subjecting myself to twice. Not like I usually watch movies more than once.

“Spider-Man 2”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005JMQW/davidsworldva-20?dev-t=mason-wrapper%26camp=2025%26link_code=xm2, on the other hand, was awesome. It didn’t quite have as much action as the first, much more plot development, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There was action, it just wasn’t in spurts quite as long as I rememember them being in the first movie. I could be remembering incorrectly.

My favorite part (and this is where the spoilers start) was (more…)

Thu, 2004-12-23 (Dec 23)

Christmas Lights Crazy

Filed under: Blog,Funny,General,In The News — David @ 02:22

Christmas Lights Seen while Caroling (click for larger view) I mentioned in my “last post”:http://www.existdifferently.com/archives/2004/12/23/white-christmassnow-kidding/ that while Googling to make sure I spelled “Griswold” correctly (in reference to the Christmas lights we saw when out caroling last night…click the thumbnail image to see a full-sized view–gotta love (hate) the bad low-light quality of my Treo 600’s camera!) I ran into some really interesting stuff online. Well, here it is: “Alek’s Christmas Lights Webcam”:http://www.komar.org/cgi-bin/xmas_webcam

Basically, during certain evening hours, you can remotely turn this guy’s Christmas lights on and off via the web, and watch it on his webcam. This is just cool enough that I am interested in trying it, except I’m probably too lazy to spend the time (and money) setting it up. His site got “Slashdotted”:http://www.komar.org/faq/slashdot-effect/ at least once a year since 2002 it looks like, which resulted in his ISP popping a 40-amp circuit breaker in 2002, plus a stress-test of his analog on-off switches! The actual 2002 “Slashdot article”:http://slashdot.org/articles/02/12/25/0118201.shtml has some pretty funny comments to go along with it (be warned that Slashdot isn’t known for it’s ultra-tasteful comments but this post doesn’t seem to have much of the worst at first glance, and some are pretty darn funny). Slashdot user CableModemSniper, for example, said, “The only way to create a fire-hazard from half-way around the world…Light ON, light OFF, Light ON, Light OFF, Light ON, Light OFF, Light BOOM! –Sparks everywhere…”, and TheOnlyCoolTim said, “We just slashdotted CHRISTMAS. What next, do the editors engineer a DDoS on GOD HIMSELF?”.

“Alek Komarnitsky”:http://www.komar.org/ also has some links to “other sites”http://www.komar.org/xmas/faq/other_sites.html with similar crazyness, like “‘Drive Me Insane!'”http://www.drivemeinsane.com/ which appears to be down temporarily but has much more web-based control of stuff. He also has links to some of the more “‘interesting'”:http://www.komar.org/xmas/2004/cool_pictures/ pictures he has from his webcam (personally, I like his shots of “‘watching grass grow'”:http://www.komar.org/faq/watching_grass_grow/ even better :-)

Want to see the “world’s biggest interactive computer display”:http://blinkenlights.de/? Just more random webcam-coolness…time to go watch more TV!

Oh yeah…I found out about this thingy in the first place from a Google search that lead me to “this Netscape article”:http://channels.netscape.com/ns/atplay/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1120&idq=/ff/story/0001/20041214/1914631691.htm&sc=1120.

Sun, 2004-11-21 (Nov 21)

Porn Worse than Crack?

Filed under: Blog,Christianity,In The News,Worldviews — David @ 23:25

Wired magazine put up an article Friday called “Internet Porn: Worse than Crack?”:http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65772,00.html that talks about the addictiveness of pornography. Since it “…causes release of the naturally occurring opioids. It does what heroin can’t do, in effect.”, and because unlike a drug it doesn’t go away over time (“Pornography addicts have a more difficult time recovering from their addiction than cocaine addicts, since coke users can get the drug out of their system, but pornographic images stay in the brain forever”).

The article also talks about the dangers of the newfound purvasiveness of this era of internet accessability (note that this is in no way an argument by me for less Internet…the Internet is awesome and just like I won’t stop reading “World Magazine”:http://www.worldmag.com/ because Playboy is also a magazine, I won’t stop visiting the good websites even though bad ones exist). Here’s that part of the article:

Mary Anne Layden, co-director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Cognitive Therapy, called porn the “most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of existing today.”

“The internet is a perfect drug delivery system because you are anonymous, aroused and have role models for these behaviors,” Layden said. “To have drug pumped into your house 24/7, free, and children know how to use it better than grown-ups know how to use it — it’s a perfect delivery system if we want to have a whole generation of young addicts who will never have the drug out of their mind.”

Of course they go on to quote from a morally relativistic person who complains that porn isn’t always bad, it just has bad effects sometimes. I shouldn’t really have to answer this, if you’re a Christian and you don’t know why porn is bad for the whole culture (not to mention sinful), you might want to start “researching”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=davidsworldva-20&path=tg%2Fdetail%2F-%2F1581344589%2Fqid%3D1100916383%2Fsr%3D8-1%2Fref%3Dsr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14%3Fv%3Dglance%26s%3Dbooks%26n%3D507846 your “worldview”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=davidsworldva-20&path=ASIN%2F0842318089%2Fqid%3D1100919008%2Fsr%3D2-1%2Fref%3Dpd_ka_b_2_1 a bit more, because arguments are rather useless if they come from a worldview other than your own.

Sat, 2004-11-13 (Nov 13)

Now I’ve Got A Good Template!

Filed under: Blog,General,In The News,Mozilla — David @ 05:18

Thanks to Neil’s Weblog Templates for the awesome template I’ve switched to! No more default WordPress template for me!

He’s got a good Mozilla Category going at his site as well…pretty cool! He’s got some good comments about the 1 million downloads mark being reached for Firefox 1.0 in 24 hours after launch! Look, ma, another exclamation point!

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