On a more serious note

On a more serious note National Prayer Day is more of a reminder of how different I am than a time for national unity. I do not adhere to a traditional religious faith. I am not churched. I went to church and sunday school growing up, but when my father died it stopped. I never really got it when I did go. As I grew older I realized that I felt as though deity centered religions meant people didn’t have to be responsible for their behavior. In fact, having a deity at the center of your world seems to give one license to do some pretty heinous things. That left me with the idea that a human centered belief must be the answer. The only entity that will ever hold me responsible in this life is my fellow man, that’s what government is all about. This serves me pretty well most of the time. Unlike some humanists I have a lot of appreciation of the mystical and the unknown.

Today is National Prayer Day.

Today is National Prayer Day. I was wondering just what one prays when I found one recommended prayer for national prayer day from the Presidential Prayer Team. While I have some problems with mentioning “the battle against terrorism” in a prayer I cracked up when I read this:

Bless our President, Congress, and all our leaders with supernatural power.

Can they pick which supernatural powers they get? Can they get more than one? Is this any different than ordering magickal spells over the Internet?

Karen posted a comment in

Karen posted a comment in reply to my gall bladder surgery bill wondering what it’s like to have an organ removed. For me it breaks down into two areas of thought. How it affects me while I’m alive and after I’m dead.

As I thought about it I was reminded of an old anime series, the episode is A.D. Police: The Ripper. It’s set in the near-future and a female corporate executive in Japan has her uterus replaced by a cybernetic equivalent. The reason is that in the hyper-competitive executive environment her menstrual cycle was viewed as a weakness that kept her from being as productive as her male counterparts. While the new parts don’t physically affect her (other than no period anymore) mentally she has problems. After the surgery she starts to break down. The absence of her human uterus challenges her understanding of what makes her human and female. Due to the insignificance of the gall bladder I’m relatively free of any nagging thoughts.

This is Gracie. She's

One of the many cute things she does is play with her food. She’ll grab a morsel of food from her bowl and bring it into the living room. Once she drops it on the ground she circles it, pounces on it and then rolls on her back on top of the food. Even though I’ve seen it a hundred times it’s still funny every time I see it.

Got the bill for having

Got the bill for having my gall-bladder removed. The most expensive line item is 1 unit of “OR Services” for $6,536.50. The cheapest is 2 units of “Laboratory” at $19.50. The total cost to remove an organ from my chest: $18,176.95.

Being able to sleep at night and not worry about intense pain: priceless

Discussion on plastic has turned

Discussion on plastic has turned towards the end of free content. One ramification I’d never thought of is all the personal weblogs or sites like slashdot, plastic, or metafilter that just link to news sites will lose the free links. Would this kill the public discussions? Would weblogs react by creating more original content or doing their own reporting? Or would news or magazine sites respond by creating special free versions to service this audience?

I'm impressed with Apache's mod_rewrite.

I’m impressed with Apache’s mod_rewrite. I was able to vastly simplify how I redirect people from one web server to another by modifying the Mass Virtual Hosting recipe in the mod_rewrite guide. Now I can redirect something like dallasmoviegeek.com to a new url by just adding one line to a text file.

Just a little thing, but it sure did cheer me up.

If you are curious how I do it then here you go. I made a file called rhost.map that has lines like

A few weeks back I

A few weeks back I broke the “,<” key on my iBook keyboard. It still works. It just requires some massaging at times. Today I broke down and decided to see what it would take to fix it. Considering that I purchased it back in September and Apple has a 1 year warranty, heck it might even be covered.

I decide to call the Apple Store I bought it from. Little did a I realize this meant a walk through the corporate Apple voicemail system till I ended up in their support area.

I thought that if I

I thought that if I complete something it might pull me out of my funk. Yesterday afternoon I went and bought Spider by Patrick McGrath. The book is being made into a movie by one of my favorite directors, David Cronenberg, and the back of the book compared the author to personal favorites like Poe and Paul Bowles. They had but to add Lovecraft and I would have fallen prostrate in the book store at such a holy trinity. I thought here it is. If I read this book I’ll be rejuvenated. I’ll actually finish something.

Added a new "upcoming movies"

Added a new “upcoming movies” sidebar so I can keep track of what movies I’m waiting to see make it to Dallas.