Quasi-Religious Things

Bun Length Hotdogs

2009-07-19T08:53:00.000-07:00

I was talking with some of my family, and we came up with a great idea. We were discussing a single-slice Toaster that I saw at a courtesy room at a meeting being held at a resort. The length of the single slot was too long for a single piece of bread or bagel, even the fancy style bread, but not long enough to hold two slices side-by-side. We theorized that it was maybe designed to be able to toast a hot-dog bun. Then, we came up with this idea...

You know how they make Bun-Length hot dogs, that extend just beyond the edge of a hotdog bun so that you don't run out of meat when you get to the end of eating the dog? Well, what if you like the extra size of the Bun-Length Hot Dog, but you prefer to have enough bun to hold more toppings on either end? So, they should make a new item...

The Bun-Length Bun. This would be longer than a normal bun, so that when used with a Bun-Length Hotdog it would give you the same ratio of hotdog to bun that a normal Bun gives you with a normal Hot Dog.

Ok, so that defeates the original purpose of the bun-length dog. Now we came up with another idea that holds to the original purpose. This time, it is for those interested in saving money. Why did they lengthen the dog to fit the bun, instead of shortening the bun to fit the dog? So there should instead be Hot-Dog Length Hot-Dog Buns. These buns would be shorter, so that when a regular hotdog is put in them, it fills it the same way that a bun-length hotdog fills a normal bun. It would have less meat, and be more economic particularly for serving large groups.

Ok, so next we came up with the greatest of all the ideas. What if someone likes the size of the Hot-Dog Length Bun, but wants a Hotdog that fits it the same was a regular hotdog fits a regular bun? So we invented the Hot-Dog Length Hot-Dog, which is the right size to fit on a Hot-Dog Length Bun in the standard ratio. The Hot-Dog Length Hot-Dog is thus actually shorter than a regular Hot-Dog. And, as a bonus, you could get a Bun-Length-Bun and put two Hot-Dog-Length Hot-Dogs in it end to end, to get a Super Double-Mini Hotdog.

My new RPG Blog

2009-07-07T15:58:00.001-07:00

I've started a new blog to document the development of a tabletop card/board-game RPG that I've been working on. Check it out, at 8-bit Dice.

Dragon Quest 8 Statistics Strength vs. Attack, Resilience vs. Defence

2009-06-08T11:29:00.000-07:00

I've looked all around the web and couldn't find an explanation of this simple thing, so I will explain it here.

In Dragon Quest VIII, your character statistics include the following items:

Sex, Strength, Agility, Resilience, Wisdom, Attack, Defence, Exp

Sex is self-explanatory, although it may have an impact on how some of the charisma-based skills of Angelo and Jessica work against opponents. Your base attributes are Strength, Agility, Resilience, and Wisdom. Exp keeps track of the experience points you've earned in battles. These go up as you increase in level. Attack and Defence (Defense) are calculated, as follows.

Attack = Strength + WeaponAttackBonus + WeaponSkillBonus + Misc

If you don't have a Weapon, your fists are considered to be your weapon, and your skill bonus in Fisticuffs (if any) will be your WeaponSkillBonus.

Defence = Resilience + ArmorDefenceBonus + ShieldDefenceBonus + HelmetDefenceBonus + Misc

It is the final Attack and Defence values that actually go into the battle equations which can be found elsewhere on the web.

Why are TV stations only set up for old people?

2008-06-02T00:28:00.001-07:00

I don't know about you, but I don't subscribe to a newspaper or own a television set. I do have computers, including a laptop, and a desktop with a huge widescreen LCD panel. I've posted about the TV stations before and their web accessibility, but its been a while... and I am here again to make some observations.

While ABC's player still sucks compared to their old one which used to support Linux, it is feasible to use as long as I keep my old Windows XP running. I can't wait to get rid of Windows, so I hope they get their Linux support working again soon.

But my real gripe today is over The CW. They are supposed to be this new hip channel. Their website looks nice. The person on the home page talks to me, and it works fine. In Linux AND Windows. But I can't get their episodes to play. In ANYTHING. What's the deal? I'm a computer expert, and I can't get it to work. I even checked to make sure I have the latest Java VM installed (God knows why I'd need that!) and Flash Player. Everything is in order but when I go to their site I just get a message telling me "Your video will begin after this brief message" (or something like that) and it sits there, spinning. Forever. Firefox, IE, same thing. On Linux at least I get an error message that tells me my OS won't work.

CW - What DO you support? You are alienating the younger generation, and we aren't going to come back once we get hooked on other shows. I guess I'll never get to know what Reaper is about. Too bad, it sounded like it had potential.

Hebrew Aleph-Bet and Gematria Tool

2007-07-29T10:18:00.001-07:00

Try this out!

It is a Hebrew Aleph-Bet and Gematria Tool that I've been working on for a few days. It can do four basic things, selected in the "Transcode" option:

Convert from "Compact Form" code to a Hebrew Font. There is a cheat-sheet for compact code provided at the top of the page.
Convert from "Expanded Form" code to a Hebrew Font. There is a cheat sheet for expanded code provided at the top of the page.
Convert from the currently selected Hebrew Fonts (one of the supported fonts) into the "Compact" code. In addition to the supported fonts, any modern Unicode font can be translated from by choosing any other Unicode font.
Convert from the currently selected Hebrew Fonts (one of the supported fonts) into the "Expanded" code. In addition to the supported fonts, any modern Unicode font can be translated from by choosing any other Unicode font.

The tool can also calculate Gematria values for the phrase entered and its individual words. Gematria is calculated using four different methods of addition:

Ragil. This is the standard method where each character from Aleph to Tav is given a value from 1 to 10, 20 to 100 (by tens), and then 200 to 400 (by hundreds), respectively.
Mispar Gadol. This method is identical to Ragil except that it uses the final forms of Kaf, Mem, Nun, Peh and Tsadi to represent 500 through 900. The Gematria calculation considers the letter to be final if it is in the word-final position, whether or not the selected font has a distinct character for the final letters.
Mispar Katan. This method uses repeating series of 1 through 9 across the aleph-bet, which is the same as dropping all the zeros in the numbers used for the Mispar Gadol calculation.
Ordinal. This method simply numbers the aleph-bet consecutively from 1 (aleph) to 27 (final tsadi).

In addition to calculating the "total" values, sums are given for each of those, until a single digit number is reached. So if the total is 666, the sum is 6+6+6 or 18, and the sum of that is 1+8 or 9.

I would like to continue to improve this tool so that it can be useful for many things, so please let me know what you've used it for and what you think could be added or improved.

P.S. I think Narkisim is a beautiful font, and I wish it came with the US edition of Windows XP, at least, (I think it gets installed if you add Hebrew Language Pack, though) or that there was a similar font available for free. If anyone knows of a similar free font, point me in the right direction.

2007-07-23T15:53:00.000-07:00

$5525.00

Mingle² - Free Online Dating

Major Plot Flaw in Prison Break

2007-03-11T00:45:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I should have posted about this when I noticed it, which was way back in November, but I figured everyone else would catch it too. I tried Googling, however, and did not find any posts about it, so here it is:

When Bellick got arrested for suspected murder of his friend Geary it was because the body had arrived at the hospital where Bellick was already at, and he was with the police officer at that time who ended up eventually charging him with the murder.

He had been in the hospital for quite some time, with the police outside his room. He calls Geary on his cell phone and leaves the message while he is still at the hospital. After leaving this message, he was never out of sight of the police and his whereabouts are always known up until the time he is charged with the crime. All they needed to do, was verify the time on the "incriminating" voicemail to see that he could not have committed the murder because why would he send the message to Geary after he had already killed him? It makes no sense.

Oops!

(The episode this was in is entitled "Bolshoi Booze", and is Episode 11 of Season 2.)

WYSIWYG

2006-11-09T18:06:00.000-08:00

Merriam-Webster: WYSIWYG

I've never heard the "word" WYSIWYG pronounced until today. And, I am now of the opinion that it should not be pronounced at all. According to Wikipedia and M-W "wizzy-wig" and "wiz-i-wig" are the standards.

How to Stop Terrorism - Fool Proof!

2006-09-19T19:07:00.000-07:00

I can't take credit for this idea, it came to me from a good friend, but it is brilliant! Ok, here's how it works: Many terrorists are operating under the principle that if they die as a martyr they will be rewarded in the afterlife. Most of these terrorists also have a law forbidding them to take pork into their body, as it is an unclean animal. So, the solution is to dip all of the United States (and allies) bullets in pork grease. They would not dare approach a situation where they might be shot with a pork bullet, because this would certainly prevent them from reaching paradise after this life. Problem solved. I have come up with my own addendum to this plan: Fill the walls of all passenger aircraft with pork grease so that in the event of an explosion the shrapnel would embed pork into the bodies of all on the plane.

Perhaps this is a suitable use for packaged weight watchers pork rines.

Google Notebook

2006-09-03T20:15:00.000-07:00

I just ran into a new (for me) Google service. Google Notebook

I've made one already, and it's an awesome concept. To get started you just need to install a small extension to your internet browser which gives you a new option in your right-click menu. Then when you find something on the web that you want to remember, or "jot down" in your notebook, you select whatever it is, right click and select 'Note This'. Whatever you selected is then added as an entry in your notebook with a link back to the site you grabbed it from - perfect for lazy researchers.

It's still in Beta, so there are still some quirks and problems.

It's really hard to move, add or delete images. I would like to host images off my own server, but this is impossible right now. If I add a note from scratch, there is no way to add a picture that I've found
In general, the text is hard to edit, it should be as easy as blogger!
Actually, it would be cool if it let you edit the html as well.
One of my pet peeves is a page with various font types and font sizes. I would LOVE it if GoogleNotebook had an option to set all the font faces and sizes to the same thing when you add a new note. That way they would look consistent.
It would be profitable, but perhaps unethical, to have optional google ads on the public view page. I say unethical, because you are farming other people's work and earning money off of it... but, someone researching a topic would much rather stumble across your notebook full of the information they need, than spend the time scouring the web for the same pages.
I wish I could change the look *just a little* .. maybe integrate the Google web page Template idea into it... *shrug*
One more heading type would be really good. Something to split the sections up a little.
Oh! Unicode support! pretty please?
A list of notebooks by topic or something would be cool, and a place for notebook authors to list a topic (or three), obviously.
Move the items in the 'Actions' drop down box into a toolbar type deal.

Despite that long list, Google Notebook is actually very usable right now, as is ... it just needs a little polishing.

Ketchup Nazis

2006-09-03T19:31:00.001-07:00

Every time I order one of those delicious cherry pies at McDonalds, I think about why the Cherry comes in a brown box, and the Apple in a red box. Everyone knows that when you slice open a hot Apple pie it is brown, and a Cherry pie is red. They may have some strange logic involving certain apple's skins being colored red, and Brown being designated as "special" for some reason. It is whack. This makes no sense. It is like a bad decision that has stuck with the company for decades now, and is being upheld by the current regime of Ketchup Nazis. Why must it persist?

Fruit Loops

2006-09-03T19:24:00.000-07:00

Have you ever thought about taking fruit loops, and separating them into separate bowls based on color. Purple, Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange. Then eat them blindfolded and see if you can really tell the flavors apart? (Raspberry, Cherry, Blueberry, Lime, Lemon, and Orange)

Are they distinctly flavored? Or are they all flavored with the same mix, and the colors only indicitive of the contents in general?

Working on what will most benefit...

2006-09-01T23:17:00.000-07:00

We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google. This empowers them to be more creative and innovative. Many of our significant advances have happened in this manner. For example, AdSense for content and Google News were both prototyped in “20% time.” Most risky projects fizzle, often teaching us something. Others succeed and become attractive businesses.
--Larry Page

Larry Page was co-founder of Google with Sergey Brin. I like this little 20% time idea. I think more companies could make use of such philosophies. How often does the worker know exactly what would improve efficiency, but is never given the opportunity to implement it? I've seen this happen everywhere, and I think it's pretty much ethically wrong to not act in such a case to improve the company.

Have you heard of anyone with similar policies? What benefits have these companies gained from this attitude?

Replace Ampersands

2006-09-01T18:18:00.000-07:00

This Regex attempts to replace all ampersands that are not part of a character entity with the & character entity.

&((([^;]|\z){6})|.{0,5} )

$result = ereg_replace('&((([^;]|\\z){6})|.{0,5} )', '&\\1', $subject);
$result = preg_replace('/&((([^;]|\\z){6})|.{0,5} )/', '&\\1', $subject);

And a disclaimer - If you don't know what this means, then you don't need to know this. ;-)

Something I did not know about Eggs...

2006-08-25T21:26:00.000-07:00

a bomb regardless

Read my comment at "A Bomb Regardless" (ironically named)

Adjusting Courier IMAP to support Thunderbird Defaults

2006-08-25T15:46:00.000-07:00

The Courier IMAP mail server has a default limit of 4 connections per IP address. Mozilla Thunderbird defaults to using up to 5 simultaneous connections per server. This is a problem. :) Many pages document how to fix it from Thunderbird, but here's how to fix it in Courier IMAP on the server:

I'm running FreeBSD Unix. I find my courier imap configuration files in /usr/local/etc/courier-imap/

You'll find a file called imapd - edit it. There's a line that says MAXPERIP=4. Change the 4 to a 5 or a bit higher, to be on the safe side. But don't make it too high -- this restriction is there for a reason.

Now, restart courier imapd. I did this on my system by going to /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ and running:

./courier-imap-imapd.sh stop

./courier-imap-imapd.sh start

And there you have it. Your Courier will now behave gracefully with the default settings for a modern version of Mozilla Thunderbird.

Of the mountain and the vale, and the path that I went

2006-08-10T18:34:00.000-07:00

Not necessarily *good*, just bizarre, and worth listening to at least once.

Heilige Saeure (Ding Im Ding) by Paniq

Lyrics:

guten tag meine damen und herrn
äähm...wir sind.... ich bin.....nun....also.....ich mach mal die musik an

seht, ich experimentierte mit heiligen saft,
hörte, das gibt Kraft,
dass man alles rafft
fraß meine portion
und merkte schon
ich war kein mensch sondern ein elektron

zufällige fluktuation
gedankenlegion
ein bewusstseinsstrom
mit zweiundvierzig ohm

was früher ich gekannt, wurde seltsam verzerrt
ich begriff dieses land ist unerhört gestört

mein kopf war entbrannt
er hat auf dem boden ein' topf aus gedanken
welche sich auf einem hohen niveau befanden
und ich merkte wie sie mich langsam überrannten
fühlte mich zudem bedroht von äähh tischkanten

und so beschloss ich in panik was zu tun
ich war mir sicher, ich dürfte nicht nicht nicht ruhn
denn ich dachte, dass wenn ich dächte,
dass das nichts brächte
dass ich wusste das sich das früher oder später noch rächte

(Chorus 2x)
seht ich probierte die heilige säurEE
hört wie ich für euch meine schaltkreise steure
ich erzähl euch vom fraqtal, dem ding im ding
von berg und tal und dem weg den ich ging

und immer wieder ertappte
ich mich wie ich innerlich an dem gedanken bappte, ich dächte nur an mich
und sicherlich
war das auch richtich,
nur nich wie ich mir das ausmalte, oh jetzt bezahl ich fürchterlich

und als ich dachte, dass ich dachte, dachte ich dass dachte, dass ich an denken dachte
HÄÄÄ?? sachte

ich dachte dass ich beim denken an das denken etwas machte
und so verschachtelte ich mich und lachte
die sache war verrückt und ergab trotzdem sinn, denn in jeder schachtel ist natürlich noch so eine drin
und wenn du diese aufmachst, siehst du dann,
dass man in dieser wieder eine schachtel finden kann

und jede schachtel, jeder karton, jede box, jede kiste,
die du danach findest stand schon immer auf deiner wunschliste,
denn das auspacken dieser dinge ist allein das erlebnis,
alles gleich und anders, so lautet das ergebnis

(2x)
seht ich probierte die heilige säurEE
hört wie ich für euch meine schaltkreise steure
ich erzähl euch vom fraqtal, dem ding im ding
von berg und tal und dem weg den ich ging

meine zimmer, warn gefüllt mit prächtigen schätzen
angesichts der herrlichkeit musste ich mich erstmal setzen
wer hätte das gedacht - sehr her auf meine wände
bei der struktur meiner tapete klatsch ich freudich in die hände
und in der küche fand ich ein sonnenblumenkernbrot
kein kern mit gleicher farbe, ich fand blau grün und rot
und jeder schmeckte anders, das konnte ich schon sehn
allein durch den geschmack konnte ich alles verstehn

und später hörte ich musik, die klang wies himmelreich
ein gebilde aus logik und kein ton klang gleich
oh diese geistesnahrung war wie die offenbarung
dieser tag war eine unglaubliche erfahrung

ich rat euch, gebt euch den heiligen saft
ich sag euch das gibt kraft weil man alles rafft
fresst eure portion
und ihr merkt schon
wer keine angst vorm denken hat, gewinnt ein telefon

(3x)
seht ich probierte die heilige säurEE
hört wie ich für euch meine schaltkreise steure
ich erzähl euch vom fraqtal, dem ding im ding
von berg und tal und dem weg den ich ging

I hate charities that beg!

2006-08-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

14:56:48 <ziviks> I hate the special olympics people who call and beg for money
14:56:57 <ziviks> they make me feel like a monster
14:57:01 <ziviks> I think i'll blog about it!

And so I am.

Charities shouldn't call and beg people for money. It is annoying, and they are disrespectful in how they present the information and try to pressure you into helping. There are SO many different charities out there, that if I donated to all of them, I myself would be in need to call and beg as well. One shouldn't feel bad to have to reject some of these callers. Your money should go where you decide to put it, not where people are pressuring you to put it. There are many great charities out there that can be considered. But there are many more things that can be done besides just giving money, and those things are often more important, and have a bigger impact.

Veronica Returns!

2006-08-08T16:16:00.000-07:00

If this isn't an important Quasi-Religious event, I don't know what is...

Veronica Mars is returning for a third season, on the new CW network (taking over the reigns from The WB and UPN).

Tech Support Experience

2006-08-08T10:39:00.000-07:00

I got onto a certain ISP's "Live Help" for my grandfather, who chose (perhaps unwisely) to have his main email go through them. It took 3 hours and 10 minutes!!! waiting in a queue which started with 26 people in it before anyone even began dealing with me. Some Names and Usernames have been changed to protect the innocent. This is hilarious:

2:12:48 PM System MHI Sansan has joined this session!

2:12:50 PM System Connected with MHI Sansan

2:13:09 PM You Hello

2:13:30 PM MHI Sansan I am pleased to meet you, Bill.

2:13:53 PM MHI Sansan Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention.

2:13:55 PM You This is actually Jeff, Bill is my grandpa. He had to leave. WE are having password issues on the account

2:14:20 PM MHI Sansan What was the error message you received when you tried to access your AOL account?

2:14:41 PM You well.. We haven't had to put the password in in so long, we reinstall software and when we tried to enter it it says it is wrong

2:15:20 PM You we had it written on a paper, and maybe the O's and Zeros were mixed up or something

2:15:40 PM You So we would like to do a password reset

2:16:50 PM MHI Sansan Let me see if I have this right. I understand that you need assistance with resetting your AOL screen name password. Do I have that correct?

2:17:06 PM You That is correct. I tried to reset it, and it said unable to verify and sent me to live help

2:17:39 PM You Our user name is aolsucks

2:18:10 PM MHI Sansan Thanks for clarifying that.

2:18:30 PM MHI Sansan I will be happy to assist you in resetting the password here online. However, I need to complete account verification before processing your password reset request.

2:18:52 PM You ok

2:20:20 PM You what do you need to verify?

2:22:02 PM You I am ready to complete account verification.

2:23:16 PM You I have waited 4 minutes since you said something?

2:23:23 PM MHI Sansan What is the master screen name of your account?

2:23:31 PM You aolsucks

2:25:14 PM You The screen name is aolsucks

2:25:49 PM You I already told you that 8 minutes ago?

2:26:11 PM MHI Sansan May I have your first and last name please?

2:26:22 PM You William Day (or Bill Day -- nickname)

2:27:21 PM MHI Sansan To protect your privacy and security, I need to verify your account information. Can you please provide me the answer to the Account Security Question of the Primary Master Screen Name? Here is the question:

2:27:21 PM MHI Sansan What is your pet's name?

2:27:42 PM You fuzzball ...... or fido ... i have two pets

2:28:01 PM MHI Sansan I am pleased to meet you, Maggie.

[ May I stop to point out here: WHAT!?!?! ]

2:28:11 PM MHI Sansan Please disregard the last response. I apologize for the confusion it may have caused. The message you received was intended for another member I am currently assisting as well.

2:28:31 PM MHI Sansan I appreciate the added information.

2:28:33 PM You Understood.

2:28:51 PM MHI Sansan What Screen Name would you like to have the password reset on?

2:29:00 PM You aolsucks

2:29:41 PM You As I said 12 minutes ago.

2:30:17 PM You Please help me reset the password for screen name aolsucks

2:32:11 PM MHI Sansan Thank you for waiting. I have reset your password to WD9747 under the screen name aolsucks. For security, please update this password the next time you log in to the service.

2:32:48 PM You Please wait while I try this before you leave.

2:33:17 PM MHI Sansan To change your password, please go to https://names.[the isp].com. Type in your screen name and password, then click the SIGN ON button. In the PASSWORD section, under your screen name, click the CHANGE link.

2:34:27 PM You I have succesfully logged in. It took [YOUR ISP] and you combined 215 minutes to assist me. Do you have faster support options for the future?

2:35:01 PM You After waiting in a queue I was told I was now the first in line, but you do not have enough employees to help people individually?

2:35:53 PM MHI Sansan I do apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. For further assistance, you may contact our Password Department at 1-888-265-8004 toll free number.

2:36:01 PM You People would be happier if you help them one at a time. I am a computer consultant and software professional in my area, and I will be recommending my customers stay away from [YOUR ISP] because of this poor service.

2:36:34 PM You Most companies have a password reset web page that does this instantly.

2:37:18 PM You You can hire a teenager for $50 to make that service work for your company and eliminate the need for this live help.

2:37:51 PM You Bye

2:38:32 PM You p.s. Dell is hiring for tech support. They are a nicer company, you might consider moving.

2:39:16 PM You I will be sharing this transcript (With the names changed) on my blogs as well.

2:40:02 PM MHI Sansan Here is what I have done for you today: The password for your Screen Name AOLSucks has now been reset . The change will go into an immediate effect on your next login. Please do not forget to update this password once you have successfully logged back in.

2:40:11 PM MHI Sansan Thank you for visiting Member Account Services Live Help. Have a wonderful day.

2:40:11 PM System MHI Sansan has left this session!

2:40:11 PM System The session has ended!

Focal Curve :: Archive » The Evil Entity

2006-08-04T23:58:00.000-07:00

Focal Curve :: Archive » The Evil Entity

A blogger after my own heart. Character entities are pain enough as it is, they should at least render according to the language they declare themselves.

Crossing Over Business and Blogging

2006-08-02T16:54:00.000-07:00

I met with a business owner today and learned that she is into esoteric studies as well. So, I decided to tell her about my blogs. I've never crossed over my blogging and business associates before, so it shall be interesting if she decides to read much of what I write. Unfortunately, since I told her about my blogs, that disqualifies her as a subject to blog about, lest she realize I'm writing about her. I imagine this type of crossover will become more common as time progresses. I know this is a common thing for bloggers to consider, and I wonder how it will influeunce the perceptions of potential clients. I tend to think it is generally good to be open and forward about who you are, and provides a comfortable experience in comparison with the typical dry, impersonal, corporate American business.

It's DVDs! it's a book! no ... it's Superman?

2006-08-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

I was wakened this morning by the doorbell ringing, and after a frantic search for some clothing, opened the door to a package! We had ordered some Buffy DVDs and a set of books last week, so I thought maybe ...

But, when I opened the box, all it contained was a Superman action figure and a note: "Congratulations! You are a fifth prize winner in the QTG Superman Online Instant Win Game, sponsored by The Quaker Oats Company."

A month ago, I had bought a box of Pasta Roni (Alfredo, yum), and it had this superman contest on it. I usually don't go in for stuff like that, but this time it paid off, sort of.

I'll add a picture of the toy later today.

Disowning Conservative Politics, Evangelical Pastor Rattles Flock - New York Times

2006-07-31T09:59:00.000-07:00

Disowning Conservative Politics, Evangelical Pastor Rattles Flock - New York Times

I recently read this article which was heralded by Carla Golden on her blog and I felt impressed to share it with everyone who reads my blog.

The Genie

2006-07-18T16:42:00.000-07:00

I put this up a long time ago... but it hasn't ever caught on. Maybe someone wants to give it a whirl? Impress the Genie

Note: The genie is not granting wishes. He has a specific agenda in mind, and has his own take on the whole Djinn tradition.

Life Principles, I

2006-07-17T21:52:00.000-07:00

I. Selection of Masters.

A master must possess higher knowledge in particular areas of study than her disciples in order for the disciple to benefit from study under the master.

In any relationship, when considering a particular subject, one is a master and the other is a disciple. It is not always apparent which person is occupying which of these roles. If two people are on an identical level, they are peers. Because the possibility of being genuinely on the same level could be debated, peers may be better understood as those who dance back and forth between the roles of master and disciple during their interactions, both imparting knowledge, and acquiring knowledge.

A master must possess the ability to "descend" near to the level of the disciple, in order to effectively give instruction. Similarly, a disciple who is proficient in that which has already been acquired, has an "unknown tolerance", or put otherwise, can handle a certain amount of unknown information for the purpose of processing it until it can be considered acquired knowledge.

If a master has the ability to descend fully to the disciple's level of proficiency, the student may learn without stressing the limits of his "unknown tolerance."

If a master can descend close to the disciple's level of proficiency, but not all of the way, the student may stress his unknown tolerance, and have a difficult time learning, but learning will still be possible.

If a master cannot descend near to the disciple's level of proficiency, then learning, if it occurs at all, will not be achieved with any degree of reliability.

There is a certain threshold at which even the greatest master is unable to descend to the level of a student. When enough students encounter such a master, the master is commonly deemed incomprehensible, an insane madman, or a lunatic.

The eager disciple will seek out masters who are situated just a little higher than their own proficiency level, saving the teachings of the higher masters for a later time, when a higher level of enlightenment has been attained.

It is essentially important to remember that each subject has its own proficiency. If a disciple is extremely proficient in even a very large number of fields, this does not indicate that he can successfully comprehend the highest teachings of another field, unless he works his way up to those teachings by grades, or degrees.

When a disciple attains the summit of teachings available from any chosen master he must be prepared to select a new master, or a new field of research, by which to continue his education. If he does not do this, he may become lost in the "false mystery", thinking he is making progress when he is only going in circles.

Do not be afraid to consider yourself and Deity as masters from which to learn. They may be the most capable of making the necessary descent.

Jeff's Political Alignment

2006-07-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

I decided to share my results from the political test on OkCupid to amuse my beloved blog readers (that's you!) ...

Jeff is a
Social Liberal
(80% permissive)

and an...
Economic Conservative
(68% permissive)

Jeff is best described as a:
Libertarian

Political Survey

2006-07-10T12:42:00.000-07:00

I took this political test a few minutes ago, and thought I'd share the results.

There were a few questions on there that were really tricky, because, although I believe in Economic freedom, I don't think it should deny people or the earth their rights as living beings. I don't think money is really the most important thing in the world, so if the loggers have to go to school and learn a different trade because they ran out of logs to log... that's fine by me. It's not like any of the other trades are protected in that way - if people stopped wanting web pages, I wouldn't expect the government to step in and force businesses to buy them from me!

Susie is a
Social Liberal
(66% permissive)

and an...
Economic Liberal
(36% permissive)

Susie is best described as a:
Democrat

Unconditional Love

2006-06-22T17:42:00.000-07:00

I love my wife even though she spells disc (as in Compact Disc, or DVD) with a k (disk).

Life Energy Harness?

2006-06-22T16:29:00.000-07:00

Nicholas, a friend of mine, recommended a concept to me called "Life Energy Harness Technology", which can be read about on the web at LifeHarness.net I'm somewhat of a skeptic, but I'm giving it a whirl... I created my own "harness" and I am wearing it currently. It is supposed to light up the heart center and the crown chakra... or in other words, stimulate the thymus and pituitary glands. I'm not usually into meditation and yoga and so forth. The symbols I posted on June 2nd were experiments regarding what symbols work best with this technique, and which parts of the body they influence. The symbol I've ended up using is none of those, however, and instead is a Morning Star (pentagram, with one elongated point down, a symbol of Venus, or Christ coming from the East, each point representing one of the nails which wounded him.) The particular star I'm using is made of tightly twisted wire, about 20 guage, one strand of brass, and two strands of copper.

We'll see if it does anything. :-)

Symbols

2006-06-02T23:11:00.000-07:00

Oh, pretty. I made these out of brass wire today as part of an experiment being conducted by my friend Nicholas. I'm not sure exactly what the procedure will be, but we're going to be finding out something about the energy contained in these symbols in the next couple weeks.

Print-On-Demand Self Publishing

2006-05-29T23:24:00.000-07:00

I just found out about lulu.com, and it looks amazing. What is it? Basically, it is self publishing from a company with ethics that seem comparable to Google. They give you full control over the process, and they let you set your own royalty fee (they take a small comission). There are no set up fees, and they offer a variety of formats, including other products like CD's and Calendars.

I plan on using this service for some projects that I have been dreaming about but considered impractical until now. If you're interested in expressing yourself, check out Lulu!

Prints and Photographs Reading Room (Library of Congress)

2006-05-28T18:32:00.000-07:00

I just found this amazing resource on the web:

Prints and Photographs Reading Room (Library of Congress)

It has a historical picture for just about anything. Plus, it seems to be growing daily :-)

I actually ran into this site when looking for a picture of someone preforming "Grecian Bends" (A fashion in the late 1800's).

Technology and Magic

2006-05-28T11:28:00.000-07:00

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic -- A. C. Clark

gop.com vs democrats.org

2006-05-26T12:09:00.000-07:00

I think this says it all...

On democrats.org, I see things like this:

<ul><li><a href="/a/party/chairman/index.php">Our Chairman</a></li></ul>

But on gop.com, I see this instead:

<td width="157" rowspan="3"><a href="http://www.gop.com/default.aspx"><img src="/images/RNC_indx_logo.gif" alt="GOP.com" border="0" height="51" width="157" /></a></td>

I began by pondering about the choice of .com or .org for these sites. Making a quick review of the above we see that the democrats use .php and good html structure. The republicans are using table based layouts, gif images, and aspx.

Using the w3c validator to check their home pages, democrats.org currently gets 27 errors, all simple things that I can easily see how to resolve, however gop.com gets 144 errors, almost all of which are grave sins in my eyes as a web developer, including the use of the long deprecated FONT tag, missing ALT attributes for accessibility on many images, and other critical syntax errors.

Judging from the navigation style, the republicans have horizontal dropdowns - very hard to use, normally... but they've opted to let them lag open for several seconds after moving the mouse off, which alleviates the problem somewhat. However, this causes the top portion of their page to become obscured and makes it difficult to click certain links in the page body. The democrats also use drop downs, not always the best choice, but they used the vertical style which is much more forgiving for people who have difficulty using the mouse.

Just look at the two pages.

My conclusion: The democrats hired a much better web designer.

Who eats oats?

2006-05-26T00:06:00.000-07:00

Does eat oats and goats eat oats but little lambs eat ivy.
A kid'll eat ivy too, wouldn't you?

My wife contests that it should be:

Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.

Yet another variation found on the web is:

Mares eat oats and goats eat oats but little lambs eat ivy.

I saw someone else faced with this quandry had proposed dropping the other animals entirely in lieu of giraffe.

Help? From whence should the absolute authority derive for this little rhyme?

P. S. I'm not necessarily looking for which one is older or more original, but which one is fundamentally better.

Americans United

2006-05-25T13:46:00.000-07:00

Americans United: Home Page

Check this out. Many worthy articles of information are expressed on this site which strive to preserve people's Liberty.

Being "Left" on this issue (even if you take this side on no other) is beneficial to Religion, all religions. People who take the Right-wing side on this are a danger and are attempting to set precedents that essentially shoot themselves in the foot.

All Religious people should support separation of Church and State so that they may continue to act and worship as they please.

Horror and a Blind Eye

2006-05-23T14:09:00.000-07:00

I recently read a news article from the Washington Post about Saudi Arabian school text books. I am sure that most people who read this article responded with horror or disdain. From a couple random blogs:

One can see how this sort of teaching is a recipe for terrorist violence.

As long as such hate-filled rhetoric is posed as religious truth, extremist and takfiri ideologies will have a fertile field in which to take root and grow.

Certainly, in light of the terrorism coming from the countries in the Middle East, this type of thought is understandable. But, I question the haughty righteousness of those people criticizing these teachings.

Consider these words from otherwise well meaning Christians (only one was taken from a fundamentalist group):

Most people are unsaved. This is confirmed in the Scriptures. Only a few inherit eternal life. When an unsaved person dies, they perish to a place called hell. In hell, they are tormented day and night in the flame. Their tongue, in some manner, is set on fire. ... Finally, they are cast into the eternal lake of fire, which was prepared for Satan and his angels. This is called "the second death." There they will be tormented day and night, for ever and ever. There will never be any hope of escape. There will never be any hope of release. This is the eternal destiny of most people.

Hell is the reason why we are so eager to share the Gospel. The only antidote for hell is the Lord Jesus Christ. We cannot be happier than when someone becomes saved.
The only people who have done good in God's sight are those who have received the righteousness of Christ; while they were still living on earth, they became saved.
It is an awful thing to contemplate, but if we die unsaved, there is no hope and no possibility of salvation.

If you believe in Hell, not just abstractly, but practically, if you believe the lost die and go to hell, if you believe your neighbors, your children, your parents and those you work with will die and go to Hell, let me ask you this? When was the last time you gave out a tract? When was the last time you preached on the street corner? I mean, if you really believe those people down at the bus stop, waiting for the bus, are going to die and go to Hell, when was the last time you stood there and spoke to them?
If you do believe in Hell, you need to find a street corner and preach on the subject of Hell. Build the church. Get people saved. Get them baptized. Get them serving God, so that they can win others. Do you really believe in Hell? Then it is time to get busy.

Hell is literally the second death, for the sinner will be forever separated from God, and, inasmuch as Gehenna is a place of darkness, this separation will doubtless isolate him from the companionship of unsaved friends as well.

150,000 People Will Die Today
The counter to the side is ticking off the number of people who have died since you opened this webpage. [a javascript weblet counting off a death a second] The vast majority of those people are entering Hell. Christ commanded his followers to share the Gospel with those who are perishing... who have you shared with today?

I think that this is enough! Before you make sweeping judgments about how evil another group of people are, take a good look at what you yourself believe. Let me juxtapose some words into the first grade version of Islamic hate doctrine (changes in italic):

" Every religion other than Christianity is false."

"Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words (Christianity, hellfire):

Every religion other than ______________ is false. Whoever dies outside of Christ enters ____________."

Would your first grade students get the answer right? And believe it?

There are people who are "fed up" with the way modern journalism tends to be saying "we're just as bad as they are". Well, in this case, we are.

Next time you are tempted to rail against another religion for intolerance, don't turn a blind eye to your own beliefs, and perhaps feel a little horror for what you profess to believe as well.

On a related subject, Adnan Siddiqi speaks about friendship between Muslims and non Muslims, including verses from the Quran and the Bible.

What religion did Jesus profess?

2006-05-22T16:55:00.000-07:00

If Jesus Christ walked the earth this day, I am convinced that the so-called Christian churches would consider him to be a Pagan, and they would do him no better than the Jews did. Perhaps they would not bestow upon him again the status of Martyr.

What is accepted as a depiction of him today is largely a product of hundreds of years of corruption by the early Church fathers. Evil has been made to appear Good, and Good to Evil.

Could it be that the Neo-Pagans or Occultists are closer to following in Jesus' footsteps than those who claim his name?

Quasi-Religious by Email

2006-05-13T16:32:00.000-07:00

We're experimenting with a new feature - Just let us know if you want to receive our latest blog posts by email, and we'll mail them out to you. To let us know, just email quasireligious@kingsolomonslodge.org

The da Vinci Code

2006-05-13T15:58:00.000-07:00

I don't really see what the big fuss is about. Dan Brown's book is entertaining, speculative, and thought provoking. I believe it is clearly possible that Jesus Christ had a wife (or wives), and several children. If he did, this in no way damages my faith, and in fact may increase it. What more fundamental, instinctual type of love is there than love of family, and shouldn't our great exemplar be allowed to exhibit this? One reason this book does not "shake up" my beliefs, is that my faith rests squarely in the Father of all, The Great Progenitor of the Human Race, and I believe that He provided a plan whereby mankind can transcend beyond the physical death, and by whatever means he went about enacting this plan, it does not, to me, matter so much as to be offended if more light should alter the relatively minor details about Christ's life, or whether or not he died and resurrected in the precise way we have been told by the traditions of our fathers.

Google What?

2006-05-13T10:54:00.000-07:00

After reading this article, I have decided that many people have an improperly founded faith in Google.

To take a small quote the article:

Users of the new Google-Talk-enabled Nokia device will be able to make calls -- either by talking directly into the device like a wireless handset or by attaching a headset -- to other users with the Google Talk software on their personal computers or handheld devices. Users won't, however, be able to make calls to regular phones.

Basically, Nokia is making this new tablet PC device, which holds some alluring cell-phone-like features, but they opted not to use a cell network, but instead to use the obscure Google Talk service. Google Talk, to anyone who is familiar (which, I think, is very few people), is an Instant Messenger service competing with Windows Messenger (Formerly MSN Messenger), AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, and Yahoo! Messenger. My wife and I tried it one day, but were disappointed in the client software's lack of innovative features, and the total depravity of the userbase. Simply put, no one else we knew would have Google Talk, and everyone already has one or more of the other four. Why do we need yet another instant messenger? By embedding this into a tablet computing device, Nokia has chosen the smallest possible market. If I, as a computer geek type, cannot even find a person I know with Google Talk, how could any normal human being do so? Admittedly, there must be a few people onboard.

This seems to be a blind faith which has been put in Google, as if it will push its Google Talk service to be the mainstream IM protocol sometime within the next year. I have not seen any move to indicate that, and even if they tried, I am not sure if it would catch on, especially with their current feature set.

This, combined with Google's recent bumbling--oops, I meant bundling of the inadequate and agressive Symantec Norton Antivirus and Real Player with the supposedly 100% free software "Google Pack" which is likely to offend and put off many users who trusted Google implicitly in the past, makes the growth of their software products seem unclear.

Many things that Google does are EXCELLENT, however. They just need to be more attentive to their self-proclaimed mission to "Do No Evil", and other people need to choose things intelligently, rather than be willing to follow Google right off the edge of a cliff.

The Four Elements of Man and God

2006-05-09T01:31:00.000-07:00

I have spoken before on the blog about the Elements or "The Gifts." It is a topic favored by me. I feel inclined to share a few more things tonight.

In studying the elements, a progression exists which circles from South to East to West to North and possibly repeats. The elements are, in the same order: Fire, Air, Water, Earth, and the gifts are Seventy rods of Gold, Twelve pounds of Frankincense, Three pounds of Myrrh, and One Body (Adam or Christ, depending on which time through the cycle you are referring, the Alpha or the Omega)

The four words are: Light, Life, Love, and Law.

North. The Garden of Eden. Adam's Body. It is said in some old texts that the Law, or the study of the Torah was said to be man's sole original focus. Adam and Eve kept the Commandments of Jehovah until Eve partook of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.

South. Light. The golden rods shone forth light, which provided a way to see in the Cave of Treasures (see Apocalypse of Adam), and was the only gift taken from outside of the Garden.

East. Life, (or plural: Lives). The mortal existence, temporal needs, and life were represented by the prayers offered daily to God from the burning of sweet smelling incense upon the altar.

West. Love. The gift of Myrrh. Death. Sacrifice. Giving life to save another.

North (again). Law. Through the law, Christ becomes as Adam was in the Garden. The return to the exalted estate of paradise. The resurrection.

We have four interesting words here. Light, Lives, Love, Law.

I am not normally one to prescribe to Bible-code or linguistic coincidences, but this was very striking to me, and so I thought I would share. I do believe it is possible for God to create beautiful things through a long passage of time, and if Hebrew and English intermingle somehow here to achieve a more beautiful thing, then so be it. This could, however, be nonsense:

The "L" is the same shape as the Hebrew letter Gimel, which sounds like the word "Camel" and actually represents the "foot", to walk, to travel, and in modern calligraphic Hebrew it is drawn to look like the foot of a Camel. It is the contact point of Man and Earth, to tread upon the Ground. In Masonic symbology, it is the Architect's Square, representing the four corners of the earth.

In English, the letter "L" which has retained the shape of the Hebrew Gimel, differs in that it has transformed to now sound like the Hebrew letter "El". The Hebrew letter/word "El" means "God," from whence is derived Elohim, The Gods, or The Judges. The Hebrew letter/word "Vav" was used to represent the hooks of silver which fastened the curtain (yeriah) to the posts, thus enclosing the Old Testament Tabernacle. The sound Vav matches in English the letter "V" which is the Masonic Compasses, used to circumscribe around a point, to create circles. It can be said to represent the Heavens being opened to man, God reaching down to man.

If the Garden of Eden (or the Temple) is presumed to be the contact point between Heaven and Earth, the place where El and Vav meet, it is amazing to find that LIVES, LOVE, and LAW are all the same hebrew letters El and Vav (for W is equivalent to V in Hebrew, they could both have been pronunciations of Vav) LiVE LoVE LaW. LV LV LV. Whereas LIGHT is either El Tet or El Tav (someone with more Hebrew knowledge may be able to help me discern which). Tet is a letter that represents both Good and Evil. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is what separated Adam from returning to the Garden. In primitive Hebrew alef-bet, the Tet is actually formed by blending the Vav and Zayin characters together and appears as either a snake coiled in a basket, or a man bowing to a crowned man wielding a sword. Tav is a stamp or a seal. Tav makes an impression on the Ancient of Days. The secret of the power that links worlds and generations together.

So we have LT, the one outside the garden.

Followed by LV, LV, LV. Life, Love, and Law. El Vav. Square and Compass. Urim and Thummim. Lux et Veritas. Light and Truth. Light and Knowledge.

These four words describe God, or the perfected Man. Light, being innate within us, is quite possibly what we are composed of, and is cultivated to become stronger. It is the first step, (remember, the Foot, the Camel) on our Journey into Enlightenment. Adding to this innate, eternal light, we receive the Breath of Life. It is a gift, and we must respect it. The power to Give Life is one of the attributes that makes a God, or a Man, special. These first two attributes are given to us freely. The next two must be developed within us by our own choice. They are Love and Law, perfectly equivalent to the holy principles of Mercy and Justice.

We start here with Light. Casual, every day, out in the world, walking upon the ground. Everybody has it. We become clothed with the other three as we begin to journey through the courtyard of the Temple, having Incense offered (prayer and supplications to Deity) and approaching the Holy Place and the Sanctom Sanctorum or Holy of Holies to worship God through emulation.

And once we attain all this, we will have returned to Paradise, which all men must pass through before they reach their final abode, and there we will start with Law, the highest of all, and after receiving it finally, we will be required of necessity to set it aside in order to progress further.

In the Spirit of Light and Revelation, it is my hope that this information has been of some benefit to you.

Theology - Achieving Balance

2006-05-07T11:43:00.000-07:00

I want to comment a little, regarding the nature and character of deity...

I think anyone would be lying to themself to deny that a "higher power" exists. I believe in at least two such powers. One of them is impersonal, it is a spiritual force, and although it has a mind, and a body in the sense that it is comprised of everything residing within it, and those thingscontain intelligence and substance. This is what I personally call "The Universe". Some people take this same force and call it God. I believe that The Universe is both spiritual and physical, in fact, I believe there is no difference between these two things, except that the physical is more crude, and able to be discerned by our human intellect with the greatest ease. Spiritual is one of our words for anything so miniscule, or so complex that we cannot perceive the way in which it works. Prayer, for example, works by way of physical means, although it is such an amazingly miniscule process that we cannot (as yet) build machines to manipulate it, although I think science has admitted now that it does cause bodily changes and is healthful to engage in (although they would often prefer to attribute this process to other ideas, to a non-religious terminology.) I also believe in a God who is a personal being, with whom it is possible for us to communicate, who watches over us, guides and blesses us by manipulating The Universe in ways that we OFTEN cannot do (but that Jesus could do, and which he suggested we all could do if we had Faith enough). The reason we pray to this personal God, (for I think anyone praying, even if they acknowledge The Universe as God, are probably leaning towards the concept of a personal God any time they speak a prayer.) is because we relate to this personal God in a way that we cannot totally relate to The Universe. Quite simply, we are persons, we are not universes, although some of our parts resemble them, and so dwelling on The Universe although mind opening, can also become a way to lose our mind, if we fall too deeply into, to the point that we are excluding the personal God.

This is actually a relatively small part of the theology which I accept, but I think it is a profound part, and wanted to share it, but -- more importantly, I wanted to share this idea:

There is a Truth (with a capital T). Often we (the left side of religion or whatever "we" are) may use words which seem to deny it, and some of us may in actuality deny it, but to do so is an error - an overcompensation. It is a tendency which comes from rejecting what the orthodox, dogmatic religionists have propogated for years. I think we need to acknowledge this Truth, however, or else we are being less than honest. Let me defend my case here: If The Universe is "real", which I assert, and if all other "real" things reside in it, including physical and spiritual things, which I also assert (possibly expanding the meaning of the word Universe to be a little larger than the popular definition, to do so), those real things exist as an undisputable fact, whether or not we as imperfect humans, have a capability to perceive or document them. They are simply there. For the sake of simplicity (and this is oversimplicity -- not implying that this metaphor is part of my theology) let me call them pixels. If two people are examining the same pixel, The Universe is well aware of the color of that particular pixel, a human may perceive the pixel, or they may not. We perceive only a few that are around us. But, say two humans do perceive the same pixel. One may call it Aqua, and another may call it Light Blue, Sky Blue, or Teal. All of these humans may be seeing the same pixel. One trained in color may give it a more precise name. The Universe alone holds the numerical Red/Green/Blue value to it -- not because it is all knowing, but because it actually Contains that Pixel, it is part of it. Thus it
belongs to The Universe in that way. The Universe cannot "think" about it, beyond the thinking all other rational beings do to try to identify that Pixel's color. Ok, but all who see the pixel may disagree, and a colorblind person may even call it red. But, nonetheless, it is there, and it is a discrete, particular color. That is the Truth (capital). There is only one way things actually are. That way might not be a narrow pathway of a particular creed in the style of the old Catholic tradition, but there simply is a way that it really is. We can't throw that out the window just because we embrace the idea of Freedom of Religion, Free Thought, and Free Speech. It should be our constant hope to come closer to that Truth so that we have a real understanding and not something skewed by our own tunnel vision.

By acknowledging this, we are faced with some difficulties:

First, we must admit that it is possible for us to be outright wrong. I have been wrong on several things in the past, and I've tried to adapt as new information reaches me from any source (sometimes divine revelation). To admit this and to be willing to accept correction is Humility.

Second, we must recognize that each Truth-seeker has a different piece or pieces of the puzzle figured out, and that they deserve deep respect for the portion of it which they do have, the offering that they bring to the table. Sometimes it is hard for us to acknowledge what they have, because we become blinded by the error that they carry along with it. To see them for what they are, and to overcome our prejudice is to Love.

Third, (and it is really just the logical result of the other two ideas) we must not be afraid when others do point out our errors, (or what they imagine to be our errors.) These are actually opportunities for both parties to grow, to enable them to come closer to the truth.

Fourth, for the sake of others on the same road, we should never be afraid to boldly proclaim those things that we do have. Being afraid to share because of fear that we might offend others (who are really just like ourselves) only slows everyone down. Trying to share a piece of the Truth, isn't creating Dogma (of the bad variety), unless you let weaker recipients of your teachings believe it without somehow "earning it" along the way, and they begin to cling to it as though it is the Truth itself instead of a mere description of the Truth.

Divine revelation always has a little baggage attached, because it filters and expands as it passes through a human being (be it ourself, or someone else) before it is written down or otherwise communicated. Filtering, meaning that the person was not able to fully express it, and thus part of it was lost on the way. Expanding, meaning that the person embellished it with additions due to their own cultural and philosophical ideas in order to best express things in the words that make sense to them.

Every piece of revelation that ever has been recorded passes through this scenario with, I believe, the sole possible exception of real and actual voices heard and written down (because it *is* within fairly common human capacity to simply scribe what has been heard.)

Permanent Fix for ActiveX Internet Explorer Patch relating to Eolas Patent

2006-04-19T16:34:00.000-07:00

Over the last week or so the new security patch for Microsoft Internet Explorer has been rolling out to millions of PC's around the world. Included in this security patch is the court mandated changes to the ActiveX browser plugin technology due to a patent held by Eolas. This isn't "news" exactly, as it has been known to be pending since 2003.

Microsoft has released a temporary patch to undo the security patch changes for 60 days, which is intended to give corporations and developers a chance to update their intranet and internet sites and software to comply with newer techniques. Sixty days isn't a long time, however, and it is obvious that only a handful of the most trafficked sites will incorporate changes to accomodate this issue. So a more permanent solution is desirable for the common web user.

The permanent fix for this problem is freely available from Mozilla, and should ensure smooth surfing unencumbered by proprietary/patent issues for years to come.

Information about the Fix from Mozilla

Search Engine Ads

2006-04-19T01:26:00.000-07:00

This thought came to me today while we were fiddling with a Google ad campaign: If everyone has their bid amounts set to "auto", what's to stop the price of ad-space from going up indefinitely? At a certain budget, you will get impressions and clicks for however many keywords you can afford. This number goes down as you run out of money for the month. But, the number of key words you can afford also goes down as other advertisers raise their bid to stay on top. If you leave your budget the same, in time all the keywords would be unavailable because the price is too high for you to afford. This could technically go on forever - especially for popular search keywords.

My advice is to keep strict track of how much you spend on web advertising, and how much you get back. If you are spending more than you are earning, try cutting out your search engine ads altogether. On our server, the site that gets the most traffic, and earns the biggest profits (as of now) does not use any search engine advertising. It is not impossible!

As so often happens, as I was thinking about this in the back of my head, I ran across a page on the same topic: Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: Search Engines as Leeches on the Web

The Alertbox is a great site on usability, by the way. If you are in the web design field, you should read through some of his other articles.

Qaballah Tree of Life

2006-04-15T00:40:00.000-07:00

To the right, you'll see a "Tree of Life" that I designed out of pipe cleaners. The fascinating thing about this particular depiction of the Tree of Life, is that it is three dimensional. Furthermore, I will show that it actually meets the description of the Golden Lampstand, or Golden Candlestick of the ancient Israelite Tabernacle, in a way that many common depictions of the Candlestick ultimately fail to do. The biblical description indicates seven lamps. A central shaft, with four sets of the "ornamentation" (which we will get into a bit later), with six branches coming out of it, three on one side, and three on the other side, each of those containing three sets of ornamentation as well. In total the number of sets of ornaments comes out to: 22, the number of letters in the Hebrew Alphabet. Anyone familiar with the Cabalistic Tree of Life will note that there are also twenty two paths connecting the Sephirot on the Tree.

Additionally, we learn some particulars as to the arrangement. Namely, that one set of ornamentation (bowl, bud, and blossom) is found below where the first set of two branches split off from the main shaft, working our way up, we find another set below where the next two begin, and a third set is found below the final two branches.
Depicted at the left, you see a typical representation of the candlestick. I say typical, but in reality you will hardly find two pictures that agree on the specifics, and that is precisely what I mean by "typical" ;)

However, there is one point which MANY depictions do agree on, and that is in relation to the placement of ornaments on the central shaft. One located below each set of branches, and by necessity, an elongated, unadorned top portion, capped by the final set of ornamentation where the central oil lamp is to be found.

The Tree of Life exhibits this same pattern in its central shaft. Three, equidistant orbs, a void, and then the crowning orb, "Kether", at the very top.

But, you may say, how can the Tree of Life be the Candlestick, since the Tree of Life only displays a central shaft with one branch on the left, one branch on the right? To answer this, we must enter the third dimension, and along our journey we will find out more about all the intricate intersecting pathways in the Tree of Life, and why some of them have Sephirot and some do not.

For simplicity, I have color coded my tree. The central shaft is red. The lowest set of branches is Blue, the next highest is Green, and the final set is Orange.

The Blue Branches

Here is a picture from the bottom of the tree looking up. I have not depicted the ornaments themselves, so I will describe where they are. [Maybe a reader can render this in 3D for me sometime, to help complement my crude pipe-cleaner model.] The first ornament rests just below the joint of the two blue branches and the red stick. The two blue and red branches "sprout" out of the blossom, and extend upward. You'll notice the blue goes to what I will call the South and North sides of the Tree, for it is placed chickenstance to the compass directions as explained by the first century Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus: "These lamps looked to the east and to the south, the candlestick being situated obliquely."

The Green Branches

The green, or second set of branches extend to the East and West, and just below the joint of their starting point is the second ornament. At this point, let us stop and take a collection of what remains. We now have a central shaft, with two sets of branches coming off of it, one in each of the four cardinal directions. If we were to view it from above as described so far, we would see nothing more than an X or + shape. Each of the extremities of this X shape extend directly upward and contain three sets of ornamentation, one at the base, one in the midst, and one at the top. The central shaft contains four sets of ornamentation: One below each set of branches, and another one, located at the top, higher than any of the others. At this point, we have five lamps burning. Looking from directly above, compare it to the number five represented as the pips on a standard die. Each pip is where an oil lamp burnt, with the central one being higher than the other four.

The top ornament on each branch, the place where the lamps burn, corresponds with the place beyond "Daath", the void between the upper three Sephirot and the seven found below it. So in the Lampstand, we could say that the upper three Sephirot are "on fire." With the left or right hand side, Chohman and Binah each containing two flames, one near to our point of view, and one back behind.

The Orange Branches and the Snake

The Tree is sometimes associated with the Snake, a zigzag or a spiral concept. The final two branches, the "Orange" branches (as our pipe cleaners happened to be colored), are found coming forth from Tipereth, the Sun, the sixth Sephirot. The first ornament on each of these branches is found in a location half way between the second ornaments on the green and blue branches, and the second ornament is found half way between the third ornament of the green and blue branches, but the orange branches "spiral" around the top, so that they form the pathways reaching to the Crown, and cause the pinnacle of the left and right orange branch to be in perfect alignment with the flame at the top of the red central shaft. These three together are seen as a single point from the traiditional viewpoint, but it is actually a spiral similar to the old NCSA Mosaic logo, where the three "flames" are aligned in a straight row.

To help clarify the shape for any who haven't been able to discern it from my description and bad pictures, I'll provide a couple additional bad pictures:

The area above Daath from the "Normal" point of view.

The area above Daath viewed from the side.
The striped "bar" is not actually a path, but represents the union of these three energies which are combined to form the Kether. Notice how well illuminated all of the branches are from this perspective. Two blue, two green, and two orange, all shining down through the vail.

Here I have depicted the tops of the seven lamp stands as seen from above.

The following photo is the closest I was able to achieve to the look of a traditional Menorah by photographing my creation from an angle to create the illusion of two sets of branches (green and orange) coming out of each side. The remaining set of branches is coming out the front and back, in line of vision with the central shaft. Ignore the striped bar across the top, and if it only weren't for 3D perspective, the orange branches would not have even look crooked.

Considering it again from the traditional viewpoint, I found it interesting to observe the "thickness" or prominence of each Sephirot with this arrangement. The "F" indicates "Flame" and the number is how many sets of ornaments:

3F
2F,1 ... 2F,1
3 ... 3
1
2 ... 2
1
1

Well, I hope I haven't bored you. I think this is enough Kabbalah for the moment. Looking forward to hearing comments and interpretations on this one.

An "Expansion" of Faith

2006-04-09T20:01:00.000-07:00

I recently heard of a concept called the Expansion Theory, in relation to inspired works of scripture, and it immediately helped my faith to, well, expand, so I felt it worthy to mention here:

In a previous article, I talked about Honesty in Religion. Mainly, I was concerned with the intentional covering-up of "darker" spots to make a religion appear more palatable on the outside. This concept seems to be related, but not the same, because this one does not involve intentional deviation from truth on the part of any person. Well, here it is:

Every person who receives revelation, inspiration, visions or impressions, when trying to communicate them to other people, has to translate them from "brain language" into their own native language, and into concrete symbols and words. In so doing, they by necessity of human nature, taint the material by their own thoughts, life experiences, religious and social background. The only time such a record can be 100% faithful to the event, without embellishing, is when actual words were heard and afterward recorded, and even then, it could take an incredibly strong mind to remember with the necessary exactness to put forward these things without error.

How much "expansion" actually occurs? It probably depends a great deal on many factors. In some cases, God has given specific approval of the end product in some way, to indicate that it is "good enough" to serve the intended purposes.

What does this really meant? It means that the language and trappings of scripture and religious practice can be influenced heavily by those who are receiving them, and yet the status of the revealed word is not threatened by this fact.

As a word of caution, do not take this to the extreme! We cannot use this concept as a cover-all to write off serious doctrinal errors. We could use it, however, to explain why Solomon's Temple so closely resembled the Phoenician Temple of Melqart in Tyre. Of course, the employment of builders from Tyre provides a more direct connection. Scriptures indicate that God did approve of this structure, so the Phoenician influence was acceptable in the sight of God.

Acquiring the Mind of the Father

2006-04-09T19:19:00.000-07:00

I once read that the Holy Spirit is the Mind of The Father and of The Son. The same teacher later revealed the Holy Ghost to be a personage of Spirit distinct from The Father and The Son. These ideas seemed at first to contradict, but I think I have found a deeper meaning behind them - or perhaps a concept entirely apart from the intended meanings:

To "acquire" the Mind of the Father (and of The Son) is to reach a point during or after our life when our own decisions are made with the ultimate wisdom and goodness. When God can fully and completely trust us to decide with our own freedom of choice and intellect what must be done in any scenario. These decisions must be made in complete love.

In no way is this a forceful thing, or becoming a predictable "robot," but rather, it is attaining an absolute thorough understanding of the question 'why?' Why does Father make the laws He does? Why does Father allow things to be the way they are? Why doesn't Father make it easier? These are just a few good questions to demonstrate the point. Once we understand why, once we have "grown up", we may find ourselves worthy of becoming Holy Spirits, as mentioned in one of my most recent blog posts. We will share the same mind of The Father and of The Son, and will be entrusted with more privileges and responsibilities than we can now imagine.

The Holy Spirit, meaning the legions of Holy Spirits, are all those disembodied Spirits who share the Mind of Father, in the sense of being a trusted representative of Him, whose presence is always as though He had been there Himself.

This is something we should seek after ourselves. The more we can understand why God does the things he does, the better equipped we will be to handle the challenges of life, and to love our fellow man with the kind love of Deity, boundless and without reservation.

Spiritually Speaking

2006-04-09T17:47:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to put in a quick plug for this blog. It is worth a read.

The Necessity of Opposition

2006-04-09T17:23:00.000-07:00

I recently had someone tell me that the perfected (but foiled) plan of God was for Adam and Eve not to have fallen, so that all of humanity would live together with love and tranquility inside the Garden of Eden. On the surface, this seems to be a wonderful thing - Peace, Prosperity, Kindness . . . all the things that are lacking in our World at large. But, would it really have been all that we imagine? I think not.

The World is not a resort for us to vacation in for a while. We are here for a specific reason; namely, to prepare ourselves for what lies ahead. Below is a quote by C.S. Lewis, regarding the reasons we have Virtues, and why we follow them:

We might think that the 'virtues' were necessary only for this present life - that in the other world we could stop being just because there is nothing to quarrel about and stop being brave because there is no danger. Now it is quite true that there will probably no occasion for just or courageous acts in the next world, but there will be every occasion for being the sort of people that we become only as the result of doing such acts here. The point is not that God will refuse you admission to His eternal world if you have not got certain qualities of character: the point is that if people have not got at least the beginnings of those qualities inside them, no possible external conditions could make a 'Heaven' for them - that is, could make them happy with the deep, strong, unshakable kind of happiness God intends for us.

While I don't agree that there will likely not be any use for bravery, and just acts and so on in the next life, he brings up a good point - that we are not here to be good, but to become good. In a world with no troubles, there would never be an opportunity sacrifice of yourself for other people, or casting your pride away to let others help you.

Think of the child growing up in luxury, who does he become when he is older? A great man, with experience and wisdom, or a selfish one who cannot fend for himself? I think we can look to history, and experience to find the answer. Like the chick who is broken out of the egg by another, instead of struggling through it himself, the one who is given freedom looses it, and the one who struggles and fights for freedom, truly gains it.

Help stop the heresy of Jesus Worship

2006-04-09T01:53:00.000-07:00

Matthew 19:16-17:
And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?
And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.

Christ did not desire to be the object of worship, nor even to be called "good." He taught the doctrine of the Father. Christ worshipped the Father, and prayed to the Father.

If you have been worshipping or praying to Christ, you are not listening to his own teachings.

Let me clarify. There are two senses of "worship." One of them is appropriate to give only to the True God. To give it to any other being is to violate the first of the Ten Commandments, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." (Exodus 20:3) This first type of worship is the type where we make sacrifices (whether they are flesh and blood, or personal, spiritual sacrifices), and set the being as the object of our prayers and thanksgivings. The other type of worship would be better fit into a different word, like to revere, respect, and honor. It is a limited sense, and this type of "worship" can apply to a number of worthy exemplars or even principles in our lives. Don't get me wrong: Christ was our great sacrifice. He is the only way to the Father. We are to seal our prayers to the Father in his name, because he is our redeemer. However, you must make effort to listen to and perform the things he actually taught.

If you HAVE been worshipping or addressing prayers to Christ, do not be fearful. There are several possible outcomes:

1. You were praying with real intent, and because of this, God was the actual object of your worship. You were being true in heart, and were unaware of the mistake. God heard your prayers, and dismissed your mistake as though you were a child using bad grammar.

2. You were actually trying to pray to Jesus Christ. This opens you up for the possibility of being deceived. It is not exactly necromancy, being that Christ is alive, but it seems to be in a similar vein. God condemns this behavior and forbids attempting to conjure spirits for these purposes:

Deuteronomy 18:10-12
There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch,
Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.
For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.

By doing this, you could have received many false impressions or lies from Satan or his minions, pretending to be the Spirit of Jesus Christ. It is up to you to decipher what has happened. There is likely a mixture of this and the previously explained outcome. You should pray correctly for help and guidance to know what is right and wrong. Once you taste of the Spirit as the response to true prayer, you will know it and it will be harder to fall into this trap again. Satan is a great counterfeit, and he wants to have all glory and power given to him. He is an Angel of Light, now fallen, who desires to have his throne higher than the throne of God. He will use any means to achieve his goals, even professing Christianity to prey on the weakness of man.

3. You were actually trying to pray to Jesus Christ, but this doesn't work. Your prayers were deliberately addressed to a being other than God, and therefore, they could have gone unanswered. No harm, no foul. Get it right next time.

It is my hope, that category #1 is where most people who have made this grave error have landed.

In conclusion, help spread the truth, and give the Glory to God by following the great example of Jesus Christ. Believe his words, and act accordingly. Be Christians, true followers of Christ, not Christ-Worshippers. Amen.

Holy Spirits

2006-04-08T03:50:00.000-07:00

Those familiar with Christian Theology may have some ideas about the concept of the Holy Ghost, or the Holy Spirit. Dismissing the perverse doctrine of the trinity which pervades many sects, let us evaluate the being of the Holy Ghost further. The Holy Ghost is a being of Spirit, not of flesh and bones. Furthermore, it can help guide us and even become our constant companion if we are worthy of it. At this point, I would like to make a departure from popular traditional thought. May I suggest the possibility that there is more than one being serving as Holy Ghost. That there are literally Holy Ghosts, or Holy Spirits, rather than a single being. This would seem to solve the question of how it can be the constant companion of more than one person. I have strong experiential evidence to suggest that this is true. The Holy Ghost might be like your "Guardian Angel" to use a familiar phrase. It could be the Spirit of someone who has already passed on, or who is not yet born.

I would encourage anyone reading this to at least try this idea on for a fit. I think it may be a doctrine that is partially expressed in the Catholic notion of "patron saints." This Guardian Angel, or Holy Ghost, is a conduit between The Father and his children. It is the still small voice that whispers in your ear.

In addition, I believe it to be possible to identify your Holy Ghost, by personal revelation, even by name. I challenge you, my dear reader, to attempt to determine whether this concept is true and to identify your Holy Ghost by name, if possible. This should be done through prayer and study. Reading the words of those passed on before may allow you insight or a reading between the lines where you will find out this answer. There is a chance your search will end in a question mark, because perhaps your Holy Ghost has not yet been born, and/or perhaps there is no body of text written where you can read the words of this being.

The being you locate will by necessity be a faithful Saint of God. You will know when you find it. When you do, if you feel inclined to share, please do so, but if you know the name, I would ask that you only share that via email with me, instead of posting it in the comments, so that you do not sway other readers one way or the other. However, do post the steps or experiences in general as comments if you feel inclined.

I know who my Holy Ghost is, and it fills my soul with warmth and makes me feel as though I could cry tears of joy.

Is your religion Living?

2006-04-07T19:24:00.000-07:00

You should never be afraid to adopt new beliefs and understandings if you come across further light and knowledge. The weakest people in religion and spirituality are tossed to and fro with every wind of doctrine. The stronger people hold fast in their faith, they are strongly rooted in their doctrines. But the truly wise ones remain teachable, as little children, and allow their faith to be alive, to develop towards higher truth. At some point in your journey, you should reach a place where you doubt everything you ever believed. If you do not reach this place, you still have quite a distance to travel. Don't be surprised if you reach higher truth, and find it to be a relatively lonely place, at least for the present time. Narrow is the way and there are few that shall find it.

Ubuntu on a PowerBook

2006-04-07T18:44:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read my previous two posts, please go back and do so. This is a continuation of them.

When we last left off, I ran out of hard disk space. The solution I came up with was this... While the installer was running a second time (I allowed it to reformat the ext3 Linux partition to start over), I did these things: I flipped over to the second console (ctrl+option+F1), pressed enter to start it, and navigated to the folder where packages were being copied to. There are two locations I found that were useful. One of them was /target/var/cache/apt/archives, and when the installer reaches the Copying remaining packages to hard disk phase, you can go in after it and delete things. Upon completion, I realize that I could probably have deleted almost everything, because Ubuntu was really resiliant with downloading or retrieving from CD things it did not have at the time it needed them later. But, I was careful, and I picked and chose things I knew about that I considered unessential to begin with, like gimp, openoffice.org, and a few others. Quite a few others, too many to list. At this step, don't worry so much about what you want to run, we just need to get the base system up and going, so be generous in how much you delete. Be sure to delete most of the truetype font packages, especially the foreign ones, they're really hefty on space requirements. (I would remove xorg and gnome for the time being for reasons described further down. We will add them back in later.) My partition was 1.7G, and at the end of this step I think I had whittled it down to 36% usage (use "df" to check your free space on /target) But, the previous attempt when I ran out of space, it was around 51% usage at the end of this step. The "end" of this step is when the installer talks about a bootloader and instructs you to remove the media and reboot.

After this, unplug your network connection, because if you don't, you'll be waiting on a big download to retrieve the files you swiped out from under it. Remove the CD when you reboot as well, or else it will probably copy from there.

In BootX, select the new kernel from the install, but leave the ramdisk image the same as it was (I think), and boot again. In this phase, Ubuntu will set up and configure all the packages that were copied.

If you boot up to a text login prompt, you can skip down until the section titled "GETTING GNOME TO WORK":

So, after I got Ubuntu installed, my first main problem was the video was scrambled. There were stripes through it, and the mouse cursor tweaked the colors as I moved it. Also, even though I could see well enough to log in, doing so gave me nothing but a blank "brown" screen, along with the gnome login sound. To make matters worse, trying to flip over to another console with option+ctrl+F1 produced a flickering screen instead of readable text, and logging into the failsafe terminal mode gave me scrambled letters that were unreadable.

To make a long story short, I used BootX to boot up from the CD again. There is some confusion in my mind about which initrd file to use. I am pretty sure I have only had real success with the initrd.gz from the Ubuntu CD. The one I copied over wasn't proceeding to boot. However, I flipped the kernel back over to the vmlinux taken from the CD, and started up. I proceeded forward until the networking was set up, but did NOT partition again, then flipped over to another console. option+ctrl+F2, and press enter to start it. At this point, you are accessing the Ram Disk (initrd) file system, not the one you installed previously. So, I made a directory in the root called t (for target, I'm lazy), with mkdir /t, then I mounted my target volume there. mount -t ext3 /dev/hda10 /t, and you can get in and update your XF86Config file, use cd /t and chroot to set your root to your target drive so that you can use pico or vi to edit your files.

GETTING GNOME TO WORK

The XF86Config file I "copied from" to achieve a working result with the PowerBook LCD display was this one, although I only used portions of it. Specifically, I tried to keep my keyboard and mouse devices "as is" because they were working fine. Your mileage may vary:

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Powerbook 3400c Configured"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/ttf"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/artwiz-fonts:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/misc"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled"
# FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled"
# FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
# FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo"
# FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"
# FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi"
EndSection

Section "Module"
# Load "GLcore"
# Load "dbe"
# Load "dri"
Load "extmod"
# Load "glx"
# Load "pex5"
# Load "record"
# Load "xie"
# Load "ddc"
Load "bitmap"
Load "freetype"
# Load "speedo"
Load "type1"
# Load "vbe"
# Load "int10"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "keyboard"
Option "Protocol" "Standard"
Option "AutoRepeat" "250 30"
Option "LeftAlt" "Meta"
Option "RightAlt" "Meta"
Option "ScrollLock" "Compose"
Option "RightCtl" "Control"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
# Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Protocol" "PS/2"
# Kernel 2.4 with devfs:
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
# Kernel 2.2 :
# Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Unknown"
ModelName "Unknown"
# DisplaySize 256 184
HorizSync 119
VertRefresh 196
Option "DPMS"
Option "blank time""5"
Option "standby time""10"
Option "suspend time""30"
Option "off time""60"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "fbdev"
# BusID "PCI:0:17:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 15
SubSection "Display"
Depth 1
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 4
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 8
Modes "800x600"
ViewPort 0 0
Virtual 800 600
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 15
fbbpp 16
Modes "800x600"
# ViewPort 0 0
# Virtual 800 600
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 16
fbbpp 16
Modes "800x600"
# ViewPort 0 0
# Virtual 800 600
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "800x600"
ViewPort 0 0
Virtual 800 600
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 32
Modes "800x600"
ViewPort 0 0
Virtual 800 600
EndSubSection
EndSection

After these changes, I unmounted the drive, umount /t, then I rebooted again (type "sudo shutdown now"), set BootX back to the installed kernel, and it booted up to a fine looking screen.

If you've made it this far, the rest is relatively easy. Flip over to a text console with ctrl+option+F1 and log in. run sudo aptitude to go into the text mode package manager, and watching the space requirements, use its interface to disable anything remaining that you don't think you'll need, and enable gnome. You will want to remove ubuntu-desktop and a couple other similar packages, because they are "umbrellas" for the entire system, and will be considered broken if you don't. Don't worry, removing ubuntu-desktop will still let you install everything you need, it just won't enforce it anymore.

After you've applied your changes here, and waited a long time. :-) You will find that gnome still doesn't work. Darn. To fix your gdm and gnome, you need to run

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a

After answering the numerous questions to the best of your ability, and trying NOT to change the video settings at all, so as not to destroy our custom PowerBook video selection we made above.

Affter this was all finished, I rebooted ("sudo shutdown now") and logged in, and everything came up fine!

Watch your free disk space! Installing even a couple packages can wipe it away to nothing. This is not for the faint of heart, but does render a usable Macintosh as a result.

Best of luck!

Ubuntu / PowerBook 3400 Update

2006-04-04T22:48:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this blog post from Firefox in Ubuntu Linux on a PowerBook 3400c.

Not any PowerBook 3400c, but the one I was working on in my previous blog post! I have done the impossible!

There were many other adventures on the way to getting this operational. I will relate those in a post in the near-future, from my PC. :-)

For being in Gnome for a couple minutes, my only concern so far is that I don't seem to have any way to "right-click", it being a Mac. That is disturbing, but I bet there is some switch somewhere I can throw to turn on a modifier key for right-click, or a press-and-hold right click.

On the plus side, Linux no longer mangles my keypresses being stored in the keyboard buffer, whereas the Mac OS would frequently flip them around backwards, if I typed "the" too fast, it would come out "eht". On the other hand, the blogger editor control is so slow that I can easily type a couple phrases in advance of where it has caught up with me, however, it seems to keep up eventually (so it is a good thing the buffer doesn't flip). Bear in mind, that I am an unusually fast typist, so for an average user, this might not be much of a concern. Also, editing in GEdit seemed to be up to speed.

As an experiment, clicking the "Edit Html" link in Blogger seems to make the speed quite a bit faster, although it is still a little bit sluggish.

I'll post the gory details of how I pulled off this technilogical feat on a system with only 2G of disk space and substandard everything, very soon.

Ubuntu on a PowerBook 3400c

2006-04-04T01:49:00.000-07:00

I'd just like to report that I've been casually (meaning: it has been distracting me for over 24 hours) trying to install Ubuntu Linux on a Macintosh PowerBook 3400c. I'm not a Mac user, so I've been learning a lot of new things. This Mac was recently given to me, and was lacking a System CD (that would be the Operating System, or Mac OS). It falls in the family of "Old World" macs, running a PPC (PowerPC) processor but not so old as to use the antiquated 68k processor. It isn't new enough to run OS X.

I have had numerous challenges in this process. First of all, I had no way to boot off of a CD, since I was lacking any bootable Mac CD. So I boldly decided to force edit the partition table to create enough free space for my Linux install. I had made the wild guess that since I was using a forceful hackerish type of program to do it "hot" (while the partition was mounted), that it would not actually erase the data on the drive, and I might still have a bootable System, since I theorized that the System was the first thing installed and would therefore be earlier on the disk.

Boy, was I wrong. It looked fine at first, but upon a reboot I got a blinking question mark on a disk.

After numerous hours of attempting all sorts of things, I managed to find a Macintosh "Disk Tools" for Mac OS 8.5 bootable floppy image. I used a raw image writer to write it to a floppy. I probably had to decode it from hqx or macbinary first, but I forget (I've had to do this so many times to so many files, that it is all a jumble in my head).

As a side note, I should mention that Macintosh files use two forks, a "data" fork and a "resource" fork. MacBinary is a way to stream these two forks together into a single file with a wrapper to tell it what is what. BinHex (hqx) is the same thing, but seems to create a file suitable for emailing (low ASCII only). The end result: You must turn a file into a MacBinary .bin file or an .hqx before it can be stored on a PC or Linux partition, or else you lose an entire fork of the file and end up with nothing useful, and you must undo this whenever you've put a file back onto the Mac in order to reconstitute it to a usable format. This of course does not apply to common interchange formats like .jpg, .zip, or .txt where all the content resides in only one fork anyway.

So I booted my PowerBook 3400c from the Disk Tools. I was able to use Disk First Aid to do ... something. Then I used Disk Setup to Initialize the hard drive, which finally took on the partitioned size I had selected before. So my partitioning job was actually fine, I probably should have just done it after I booted off the Disk Tools disk, instead of before. :-)

I dragged the System Folder and Friends (the entire Disk Tools, actually) onto the hard disk, and now I had a bootable system using System 8.5DT (DT = Disk Tools), which is sort of a hackerish solution because every time I boot it tells me that the version of System I'm running was intended for boot from a floppy and I have to click OK. I can work around this later, I believe. If you own a PowerBook with the proper System installer, using that should alleviate this problem.

At any rate, we've partitioned the drive, and installed Mac OS onto a small partition, I used 250MB because I wasn't sure how much I was going to need to do on the Mac side. Don't touch the other 7 or 8 partitions, they are important Mac things that I have no clue about, you are only interested in lowering the size of the Apple HFS volume. So, I had 1.7G remaining for my Linux, and I left it unpartitioned for the moment.

Next, I found that I could not access any CD-ROM discs. Bother. So, I had people help me, and found out that I needed to install the Apple CD/DVD driver extension. At the time of this writing, it was living at this location, as an .img.bin file. I used hfvexplorer131 from my PC to create a Mac floppy containing it. This automatically translated it from MacBinary for me, so I'm left with just an .img file. Next, I discovered that I needed Apple's Disk Copy program in ordere to read an .img file. Disk Copy lives here, and has the advantage of being a self mounting image after you translate it from MacBinary.

So I click on the .smi file, open that up and install Disk Copy. Then I unmount the image, by dragging it to the Trash, because it won't actually finish the whole install while an image is mounted (since it is the thing that mounts images, circular logic!) After this, I was able to mount the .img file, and retrieve the small Apple CD/DVD extension which I then dropped onto my System Folder who magically migrated it into the Extensions folder.

I rebooted, and inserted a Macintosh CD. It mounted.

Next, I needed to install BootX, a bootstrap loader that would allow Linux to boot on an Old World mac. BootX lives here, and suffered from the problem that it was too new of a .sit file for the only version of StuffIt I could find for a Mac that old to work with. So I installed Aladdin StuffIt Expander for Windows, and unpacked it "with options" telling it on the Cross-Platform page to use MacBinary for all of the files. I ended up with a BootX 1.2.2 folder, which I then burnt onto a CD to load into the PowerBook.

No luck. Apparently, Mac can't read Joliet CD's, and I'm not sure what they do read natively, so I found an extension that lets Mac read Joliet CD's. It was located here, and I ran into the same problem with too new of a .sit file, so I did the same deal, but it fit onto a floppy with hfvexplorer so I didn't have to burn another CD.

I installed the extension, rebooted, and voila! My BootX CD was now available. I grabbed the BootX folder and copied it to the hard disk, and used StuffIt Expander for the Mac to reconstitute the forked files. Unfortunately, StuffIt was very difficult for me to find, and I didn't retain the link. Maybe someone reading this can comment on where to get the old version of it if they know. I had to reconstitute the BootX files one at a time to get the ones I needed. I was mostly interested in the BootX App and the BootX Extension. I dropped the App into System Control Panels (although I'm not sure I needed to), and the Extension in the Extensions folder. Also, move the Linux Kernels folder into your System Folder, you'll need it later.

Next, I put the Ubuntu Linux Mac disc into my CD-ROM drive, and went into the Install folder. I found a powerpc folder with the vmlinux and initrd.gz files in it.

I copied the vmlinux into the Linux Kernels folder on my hard disk, as well as the initrd, and then I ran the BootX App. Select the ram disk (initrd) in the options screen and check the box to use the ram disk, pick the kernel from the drop down, leave options blank and click Linux.

A window frame should shrink, the screen should go black, and after a while, text should appear scrolling on the screen and the Ubuntu installer will open to a blue screen with a language selection.

Unfortunately, I had BootX fail to go to the black screen a couple times. I was persistent, and it has worked ever since then. I'm not sure what it was.

The Ubuntu install went pretty well. When it got to the partitioning screen, I selected Manual Partitioning and made a swap disk of 150MB from the unpartitioned space (usage: swap), and also made an ext3 Linux partition with the remainder of the space (mount point "/").

I continued with the install. It detected my network and Internet connection, and everything installed smooth. When you get to the screen that talks about a bootloader, you'll need to manually intervene with Option+2 and press Enter, then do the following to copy the new kernel over to your Mac partition. Replace hda9 with wherever your Mac HFS partition is. You'll know you got it right when the mount command doesn't complain, and you can see your Mac files by doing ls /m :-)

mkdir /m
mount -t hfs /dev/hda9
ls /m
mkdir /m/boot
cp /boot/* /m/boot
umount /m

This should get everything we will need for later booting over to the Mac side.
Option+1 flips back over to the installer interface, where we will continue by pressing enter. Eventually you are asked to remove your install media from the CD Drive. Do so, and reboot.

I was a little sketchy about whether the BootX extension was actually working at Boot time, so I clicked MacOS manually and ran the BootX App after start-up to boot into the system again. But FIRST:

Copy the Kernel from your boot folder (the file starting with vmlinux- and having -powerpc in the name) into the "System Folder:Linux Kernels" folder.

Now, I don't remember exactly what I did next, but it involved picking one of the two initrd's combined with one of the two kernel's (vmlinux), and either setting or not setting the extra paramater as "root=/dev/hda10" (without the quotes, replacing hda10 with the Linux partition you used). This gives you only eight possible options to try, so figure out which one works to get you into the next step -- where you get back to the Ubuntu blue installer screen and install the packages that have been copied.

My intuition tells me I did the new kernel (with the number and powerpc) and the OLD initrd with the root option set. It didn't seem right to use the old initrd, but it seems like that was ultimately what was required. Any other combination gave me an ALERT! error and dropped me to a BusyBox shell.

After I got this going, I ran into a snag. Out of hard disk space. Ubuntu requires 1.8, and my Macintosh only had 1.7 left after my Mac partition of 250MB and my swap partition of 150MB.

I suck. I think I could trim down my Mac partition to 75MB and my swap to 50MB, but this would only be 1875 MB. Rumor has it, Ubuntu takes more than 1.8G during the install because it has to unpack some files while it is installing packages.

Also, the Ubuntu Mac disc did not give me a prompt to choose custom or server install as opposed to desktop, the way the PC version does. Otherwise, I'd be able to trim it down to ~400 MB hard drive requirement (and no graphical interface) easily. It says on the disc sleeve that that is an option, but I see no where to select it from.

I'll report back soon on progress.

Sony once again attacks Freedom

2006-04-01T00:49:00.000-08:00

I just heard that Sony Online Entertainment has started censoring (by deletion) any negative comments about the online game "Star Wars Galaxies" from their forums. Yet another move towards the dark side by the evil empire.

This started because Sony decided to revamp the game to eliminate most of the reading, wandering, and learning, and to make the game more like the movies instead of something creative.

I used to have a "boss" (the work arrangement was barely even legal, hence the quotes) who worked under the same modus operandi). He believed he could herd users like cattle and force them to do his bidding, which was usually pointless, extremely stupid bidding.

Dumbing down things is rarely ever a good way to attract a wider audience. All it does is bore people and drive them away. But again, the censorship is the point here. People were trying to post comments to suggest ways to improve the game, and they would delete any one that mentioned anything negative.

The Temple and the Kabbalah

2006-03-31T01:44:00.000-08:00

Thursday night I studied some correspondences between the Kabbalah and the floorplan of the Israelite Temple. The idea was proposed to me that there are actually two Trees, one descending down and the other rising up as usual, and I have surmised that there are perhaps four trees, as the pattern can be repeated. I have determined the following:

The Garden of Eden is the underground match to the Holy of Holies, and both are Paradise. Father Adam was placed there by way of what I will term a "Portal" (go ahead and think of the Star Trek teleporters), He transgressed the law and was cast Eastward out of Eden.

The prayer or incense altar is in the Holy Place, and the entrance back to Paradise is guarded by a vail upon which are represented Cherubim and a Flaming Sword.

When Our Father first was ushered out of the Garden, He and Eve obtained coats of skins in connection with partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (the tree on your left, if you are looking at the vail from inside the Garden or Holy of Holies), and when we (and He) enter into it again, we must partake of fruit from the Tree of Life (the tree on your left if you are OUTSIDE the vail, looking in).

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil represents coming to earth, entering into mortality. It is the act of God reaching towards man. The Tree of Life represents obtaining eternal life, departing from this mortality. It is man reaching towards God.

Our first parents ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and because of it, we were able to be born, and we have a mortal body. It is important to realize that we haven't eaten of this tree ourselves. Some day, after we have eaten from the Tree of Life, and the earth and ourselves have returned to paradisiacal glory, and after we have passed through the Portal represented by the Ark of the Covenant, so that we may dwell in the renewed Garden, where the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is, then maybe we too will be able to partake of its fruit, transgress and fall as Our Father before us has done, and bring about a new beginning, a new cycle of existence.

Honesty in Religion

2006-03-27T02:25:00.000-08:00

I've noticed a frightening trend amongst people on an individual level, a group level, and even a deliberate organized effort, to try to sweep certain things "under the rug", so to speak, that they find awkward, hard to explain, or embarassing. These "dark places" in history are a bad idea. Not only do they actually DRAW unnecessary attention to the perceived "problem" by making it seem as though the person doing the hiding is "admitting guilt" to something, but by deeming these things unacceptable to teach those coming after you, you are submitting them to a certain imposed ignorance, when it most likely was not your rightful decision to make.

Proper steps? If there is something wrong: Admit it, or apologize for it. If there is something confusing or not comprehendable, admit so. By doing this, you are aiding the young seeker of truth to gain strength. If you hide things from them, you are only setting the stage for them to acquire the sense of betrayal once they realize what has happened. The reaction to this, can sometimes be worse than the "thing itself", and could send a person "off the deep end", depending on how serious the matter is.

Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization

2006-03-27T01:36:00.000-08:00

ECHO is a charitable group that finds and implements new agricultural methods in order to help poor people in developing countries grow more/better food. They also develop new strains of plants that will grow better in bad conditions (like drought). Their mission is to help feed the hungry people in the world by giving them the education they need, seeds and plants and a network of further information and guidance.

They have free tours of their Demonstration Farm in Fort Meyers, Florida - well worth the visit, if you are ever in the area.

When I went there, I saw some pretty amazing things. Ways to use old junk to make a gas stove.Old tires or socks or a cardboard box used to make planters that you can keep in your apartment or on your roof, if you live in a city. They were working on a project to develop an apple tree that would grow in the tropics. That way local farmers could grow apples, and sell to the local market. Since apples only really grow in temperate climates, the prices are quite high in tropical areas. ECHO sends each applying farmer a package of apple trees that will grow into an orchard, along with a volunteer to teach him what to do, and how to take care of the trees etc. Once he gets started he can bring himself and his family out of poverty - away from renting land, and working for pennies a day - into working for himself and bringing his entire community up with him.

Instead of dropping food on these people, and feeding them for a day, ECHO is giving them a renewable source of food and income that will last as long as they take care of it. This is good stuff.

Make sure to look at their websites: www.echonet.org and www.echotech.org

Where Evil Dwells

2006-03-25T23:39:00.000-08:00

There sure are a lot of people, and a lot of groups of people going around trying to do good, to contribute something to society, or live the way God wants them to, etc. I think almost every person out there has this type of "good intentions". I have a friend who professes Paganism, and when I investigate his intentions they are, more or less, just as good, and just as noble as that of the Christians.

Interestingly, both groups seem to have tagged each other as evil, the enemy. This is scary. Way scary. I think that every group needs to look inward and realize that the enemy is right here, within the group, working from inside.

Christians, hear this: Satan could care less what the Pagans are doing. They are not his force of darkness. Satan's force of darkness lies wherever he can find the most Truth, wherever he can find the strongest believers, the most spirituality. He seeks to corrupt through twisting and turning the words of Truth into tyrannical, evil devices, crafted to take away the liberty of mankind and once bound up, drag them to hell.

The Devil is not a big red guy with horns and a pitchfork. He is, in every apparent, outward respect, one of the Saints of God.

If you forget this, if you proclaim the forces of "the world" or the "other guys" (be it the Christians, the Pagans, or any other group) are the instrument of Satan, you have deceived yourself, and have opened yourself up for attack from within.

Goodness

2006-03-23T22:28:00.000-08:00

There are people who are good, and then there are people who try to make other people be good.

HAL, SAL and ...

2006-03-23T13:49:00.000-08:00

I was asked by my husband to make some icons yesterday for a program. One of the icons was supposed to be a button. I interpreted that to mean a big round red one. While I was waiting for instructions about what to put on the button, I started doodling, and it ended up looking like HAL the 'evil' super computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was pretty funny, so I sent it to him along with the real buttons.

Of course, he liked that one the best, but wanted it green. So I made another by changing the color, and named it PAL.

After that, I went wild and made one for each possible color in the window's 16 color palette: HAL (red), SAL (blue), PAL (green), MAL (puke and yellow), CAL (teal) and GAL (purple). You can download them here as a zip file.

Large Curd Cottage Cheese

2006-03-22T04:23:00.000-08:00

At the grocery store a couple of nights ago, I asked one of the clerks if they could start stocking Large Curd Cottage Cheese in larger containers, because they had approximately eight varieties of small curd, but only one type of 16oz container of Large Curd, which was out of stock on that day.
I felt that the needs of the people who appreciate Large Curd were not being met. There were several other stores in town that we could have gone to in order to purchase Large Curd Cottage Cheese, but I felt that I could help them improve their store, which is known around town for their lower prices, and is a local company. Much later into our grocery experience, the clerk approached me in a different section, and told me that he had talked to someone about the problem, and he had me give my name and phone number to the manager so that they could call us when the problem was resolved. I don't know if there will be a change in their product line, and I don't know if I'll even get a phone call, but I was pretty impressed that he followed through with my request to the best of his capability.

My wife's grandma just moved into the area, and she was telling a little story about an emblem or design having something to do with boy scouts, years ago. She had been unhappy with the design, and thought that it was confusing, so she proposed a new arrangement that would make more sense. She received a letter back, telling her that they liked her design and that it was going to be adopted.

Individuals can make a difference.

Nectarine!

2006-03-21T01:27:00.000-08:00

I'm listening to 'Joy' by Zanoma right now. It's a happy song.

For all of you out there who don't know what song I'm talking about, it's from the 'demo scene' or the group of people who would crack commercial programs and games for re-distribution over BBSs and added their own 'little' signature to the beginning, called a demo. Well, the different groups started competing over who could make the most impressive demo until that became the point rather than cracking software. These same people were later hired by companies or started their own. The flavor of the 'demo scene' has influenced computer games, well, up till now.

If you want to sample some of this music, try Nectarine Radio at www.scenemusic.net where their variety is astounding!

To play the song Joy, linked to above, you need to have WinAmp, or something that will play .it files. If you are on a Windows computer, and you don't have WinAmp installed - install it now. Make sure to get the free full version or you are still out of luck.

If you have no way to install winamp, or play .it files, try this version: Joy

"I am not an atomic playboy"

Every page a Blog.

2006-03-20T03:34:00.000-08:00

I just got this crazy idea where every page on the Internet inherits much of the functionality of a blog -- well, if it wants to. The idea centers around the use of javascript to plug dynamic content into any page. I'm sure people have done this before, but I'm talking about the ability to put a few lines of HTML code that would insert a blog-like "Comments" box onto an existing static web page. Things to think about: Will this dynamic content be readable by other javascript devices such as Google Adsense. How to secure a comment box so that another page can't just hijack the code for someone who is using this system. It sounds good, if these things can be solved. My inspiration was a fellow I know who insists on using archaic tools like FrontPage to create sites. He gets quite a bit of interaction via email from visitors, but I think he would see a lot more if they could simply leave a comment directly on the site.

I'll post more if this idea reaches fruition.

Ubuntu and Digital Freedom: Part II

2006-03-19T15:39:00.000-08:00

After reading Part One, it would seem like there is very little reason to even think about using Linux. But, not so!

In the digital world, freedom abounds. There are few actual limits to what can appear. This Blogging system is an example: a place for people to publish whatever they want to say. Information can be duplicated with little trouble. Some have responded by crippling their product so that it is difficult to convert, *cough*Sony*cough* or deciding not to make a product that can be duplicated digitally (like furniture :-) ). Then there are the people who sift through every page in hopes of finding some violation of their rights and suing anyone who oversteps the bounds by a fraction, or pushing their way into people's personal files to try and catch some sort of illegal activity (ignoring their own misdeed at the same time). Then there are people who say 'Hey! I've got this really cool program/song/book/whatever - Why don't you try it out, no charge, no gimmick, no spam or ads.'

http://www.baen.com/library/ This is a library of free, high quality books. And an article about why giving away free books online makes sense financially.

http://www.modarchive.com/ This has 33,016 music files, submitted by their composers - some of whom, are professionals and well know within their genre.

Those links are just two examples off the top of my head, I know there are numerous others like them out there. You can also go to the library, or turn on your radio and get the same products that are being so well guarded - for free.

Then, what I really wanted to talk about: Computer Programs. Programs are what make your computer worth using. You wouldn't be able to do anything but, well anything (unless you know machine language (ones and zeros) and at that point you are just making your own programs). For any given task there are hundreds of programs that claim to perform it. Some are free, some are $500. Price has nothing to do with how well a program runs or what it does. For example, I have a sound editing program that cost me $30. A couple of years ago a big name brand bought it, changed the name and raised the price to $350. Is there really a $320 quality difference? uh, no.

The leader in "free" programs for the computer is the Open Source community. If you can think of it, someone is at least trying to make an open source version of it. Briefly, open source means that all the code for a program is 'open' for anyone to see, make changes to and redistribute. If you open up the Internet Explorer .exe file in a text editor, you will get a lot of gibberish - but that is all you will ever get out of Microsoft. You'll get the same type of thing if you open up the .exe for Firefox, but you can go online to http://www.mozilla.org/ and get all or part of every bit of code that makes it. But wait! Some "evil hacker" can just go in and break the whole thing *cries*. Not really. Each project is well monitored, and additions have to be approved before they are included in a program that will be distributed to the public. But, the "evil hackers" are free to do anything they want to their own version. Like change the language so their Grandma who doesn't speak English, but some obscure dialect can use that program.

By allowing the User to reform the actual program, it gives them (or us) the power back. For example, in a musical synthesizing program, should one of the notations be down a fraction of an inch? If it is an open source program, tell the developers about it, or if you know how to program, fix it yourself. Your new feature will be available as soon as someone fixes it - maybe a week, or the next day or a month. Compared to a commercial project, where you would call or write to the company, where if someone got the note, they would put it on the agenda and after the next release (a year? three? ever?), you might have your notation in the right place.

The most important program you run on your computer is your operating system. The vast majority of people use Windows, some use Macintosh, some use Linux and the rest use ancient or obscure programs. The Operating system determines how data is read, stored and accessed. It has the ultimate power over what you can and cannot do. In the future Microsoft is releasing a new operating system (named Vista) which is reported to be going to new lengths to keep people from violating something, I'm not quite sure what they are trying to accomplish. More restrictions will never stop pirating, or hacking - because Microsoft works alone by brute force, while those who want/need to work around the obstacles Microsoft outs in the way work together.

At the root of the problem is the idea of what belongs to whom. (See the Sony ARccOS post earlier) Right now it seems that all these large corporations and organizations have the attitude that they own every imaginable right to their product - but what then are we paying for? It seems that we are paying for limited access to a limited product. And our access can be taken away at the slightest whim or chance or bad fortune.

Moral of this story?

Use products that honor your right as a consumer to use your own possessions as you see fit.

http://www.ubuntu.com/ Linux for human beings.

The First Temple

2006-03-19T15:30:00.000-08:00

The First Temple could refer to King Solomon's Temple. Still, it could refer to the portable Temple called the Tabernacle which was set up under direction of Moses. Then again, you could take it to mean the Temple in the Heavens that was the model for these earthly structures. However, I would like to explore an idea somewhere in between.

To explore this idea, I'd like it if we could set uside preconceived notions of how things were in the early history of mankind and instead look at what those who went before us believed to be true.

It is pretty well established that our first parents, Adam and Eve, donned Aprons, and built an Altar at which to make offerings and pray to their God. This altar was made of unhewn stones.

The First Book of Adam and Eve, part of The Lost Book of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden, contains an interesting tale in which Adam, after having been cast out of the Garden, prays to his God to receive a token from the Garden. God responds by giving him three gifts, which He and Eve set up in the "Cave of Treasures" where they begin to dwell. The first gift consisted of seventy rods of Gold taken from a sea south of Eden, and was set up on the south side of the cave where it created light so that they could see in the darkness of the cave. The second gift was twelve pounds of sweet smelling incense, taken from the east end within the garden. It was set up on the east side of the cave. The third gift was three pounds of myrrh, which was taken from within the garden at the west end, and was set at the west end of the cave. This strongly appears to be a prototype for the Tabernacle of Moses. The Golden Candlestick or Menorah set at the South end of the Holy Place, had Seven lamps upon it and provided the light by which the Priests did their work. The Incense Altar was on the East side of the vail. Myrrh is a bit more symbolic. It was commonly used as an embalming agent, and if you compare the Sanctum Sanctorum or Holy of Holies with the inner chamber of the Pyramids for example, it is obviously set up in the order of a Tomb, making the Ark of the Covenant, on the West side of the vail, well represented by Myrrh, which was burnt in that place by the High Priest once each year for Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).

Gold, Incense and Myrrh are thus intimately linked with the Temple. Upon continued reading, we find that a charge was given to Seth just prior to Adam's death: to guard over these tokens, along with his Father's own body which would be buried in the cave.

They were to be passed down from generation to generation, until one day the Messiah would receive them. We are perhaps far more familiar with the story of the wise men, or Magi who visited Christ two or three years after his birth to deliver these same tokens and commune with him. Wait... Where did Adam's body go? Maybe Adam's body was symbolic of the Human Body in general, maybe Christ's Body served in its stead in this capacity.

Where did these gifts or tokens go after that point in history? And, were the Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh literal or figurative gifts?

I have a couple of strong theories that I might share at a later date. I believe many people today have received these same gifts, but they know it not.

Scottish Rite Research Society

2006-03-19T15:14:00.000-08:00

I'd just like to throw in a quick plug for the Scottish Rite Research Society. A friend suggested that I join it back in december, and I've already received three incredible hardbound books worth well over the $30 it costs to join for a year. The subject matter goes beyond the Scottish Rite of Masonry and has included many relevant items of historical Masonic interest. Membership is open to anyone, so even if you aren't a member of Scottish Rite, and even if you aren't a Mason, or even a man, it might be a way to quench some of your thirst for information of this type.

The books I received for 2005 membership were: "Esoterika: Symbolism of the Blue Degrees of Masonry" by Albert Pike, and Heredom volumes IV and XII, which is a publication put out yearly by the Research Society containing articles submitted by its members. Heredom has been fascinating in its variety, and each of the volumes so far has even contained the complete text of an historic degree that is no longer worked. They haven't announced what this year's "Bonus Book" is going to be yet, but I'm certainly going to go for the 2006 membership.

Scottish Rite Research Society

Personal Freedoms - Sony ARccOS

2006-03-19T05:11:00.000-08:00

Okay, so this post isn't even quasi-religious. Unless basic ideas of Freedom of Information can be considered such. I'm pretty irked because I spent a few hours (maybe 5) this evening in frustration over Sony ARccOS protection on a DVD. We accepted a free trial of Blockbuster's new mail-out system competing with Netflix. It was NOT impressive. Poor queue management, poor selection, and a couple of the disks wouldn't even play. Well, they gave us a couple coupons for in-store rentals too, and we wanted to use them before they expired. Since I've gotten several scratched disks from Blockbuster already, I am wary of getting deep into a movie for fear that it will suddenly stop and leave me without an ending, or a middle as the case may be. So I've taken up the habit of copying the disc first to look for error blocks. I put it onto a small hard drive on my laptop, and I don't care about encryption, just sector readability. If there were no errors I watch it. If there were errors, I can go complain that the disk doesn't play, without having to be left in suspense. As it turns out, I waited until the due date on this flic: The Grudge. It looks like a pretty new disc, but there are a couple minor scratches. To cut a long story short, I spent a good hour or two trying to find a DVD drive that would read it, and cleaning the disc to eliminate the scratches, before I decided there is nothing physically wrong with the disc at all, but that it must be some sort of weird copy protection scheme. After much research I learned about Sony ARccOS. They use decidedly evil techniques to make a 1:1 copy of the disc nearly impossible to make. Not only that, but nightfall came and I missed getting the disc in by the due date. After all this, I don't have time to watch it, and I look forward to getting scammed by the Blockbuster "no late-fees" policy which I'm sure has some strings attached.

In closing, it is a good thing that Sony did not start using ARccOS a bit earlier, when "The Ring" was released on DVD, or we'd all be dead.

Ubuntu and Digital Freedom: Part I

2006-03-18T02:20:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago, I was having trouble with my computer. Programs were crashing left and right, I was annoyed. Needless to say, I started thinking about alternatives. Being the geek that I am, I turned to Linux for an answer. I decided to try Ubuntu, a nice distribution for new linux users.

The install was a breeze, and quick! Changing settings to make the computer generally usable was pretty easy, the main snag being mp3s and DVDs. If I had never used a computer before, or if mine had been totally demolished (along with all my back-ups), it would have been a great computer. But, after using it for a day, I had to start working again. I'm a graphic artist (right now) and I mainly use Photoshop for my editing. Well, Photoshop doesn't run in linux. Neither does Flash or MIC or any of the other programs that are made for Windows.

We tried everything we could think of to get around this difficulty. We tried WINE, an application that tricks programs into thinking they are on a Windows machine by supplying them with library files. But it was glitchy and constantly crashed when certain actions occurred, like resizing the Layer palette. Next we tried a real emulator. But it ran excruciatingly slow (I could cook breakfast in the time it took to save one photoshop file). I also tried Gimp, the linux image editing tool. It was hard to work with since I didn't know my way around, and it also crashed while editing files.

Deadlines started creeping up on me, and I had no way of finishing the projects. So I gave in and installed windows on the other half of my hard drive.

Oh, and there was no way to play my .s3m files . . .

See part Two for the rest of the story - and why Linux is actually cool.

Freemasonry and Quakerism

2006-03-17T23:22:00.000-08:00

I've been a Freemason for a few years now. I'd like to take a minute to compare it to the Quaker faith. Although I am not a Quaker, I have been visiting a Quaker Worship Group on a regular basis for a little over a year. Also called The Religious Society of Friends, I have found its long name to be a pretty accurate description of the experience. The group I've been visiting is an unprogrammed worship group, which translates roughly to "liberal quaker" as opposed to "evangelic quaker." The Friends are one of those groups that I would tend to call quasi-religious. I don't mean to belittle anyone for whom the Quaker experience is their Religion or spiritual home, but what I mean is that by having no creed, established doctrine, or sacraments, liberal Quakerism appears to make a fine appendage to whatever type of religion one already accepts. It pronounces no theology and no plan of salvation, leaving you free to hold your own views. As long as this type of participation is acceptable to your existing religious conscience, you have nothing to lose. If there is one belief that all Quakers do share, it seems to be the understanding that there is "that of God in everyone" or that the Spirit may speak through any human being, or that there is a divine component to every human.

Being entirely devoid of ritual and creed, I now contrast it to my experience with Freemasonry. Someone might be tempted to say they are entirely opposite. However, I have found that not to be the case. Masonry is not a religion, and makes no claim to be one. It has been said, however, that it is the "handmaiden of religion", and that it is "so far interwoven with religion as to lay us under obligation to pay that rational homage to Deity which at once constitutes our duty and our happiness". Masonry does not admit atheists, but beyond that requires no specific theology or religious alignment. It does teach of the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Immortality of the Soul, although an individual brother's understanding of these things is up to his own interpretation. Masonry is full of elaborate tradition, ceremony and ritual.

At an administrative level, the process for governing each of these groups appears to be very much the same. Masonry exists in the form of local Lodges, each governed by a Grand Lodge, of which in the United States there exist separate Grand Lodges for each state. The Grand Lodges are each soveriegn, meaning that they maintain relations with one another, but each one has the highest authority over the Lodges in its jurisdiction and falls under jurisdiction of no other body. Representatives from local Lodges attend yearly communications of Grand Lodge, at which legislation can be proposed, worked out, and a decision can occasionally be reached. Any types of change or efforts put into play are generally worked out and discussed at the local Lodge level ahead of time, before the Grand Lodge convenes. The Quakers are divided into Weekly Meetings, Monthly Meetings, Quarterly Meetings, and Yearly Meetings. Each of these is a group which "umbrellas" all of the groups beneath it, with the smallest units being "Worship Groups" (areas too small to have their own Weekly Meeting), and Isolated Friends (people who are in an area without any type of quaker meeting). The Weekly Meetings all belong to a Monthly Meeting, and they all belong to a Quarterly Meeting. The Quarterly Meetings all belong to a Yearly Meeting. At each level, the geographical area over which the group covers is expanded. The Yearly Meetings maintain relations with one another, but are also 'sovereign' although I haven't heard a Quaker use that term. Each Yearly Meeting has its own flavor and style, and some contain Programmed Meetings ("Evangelical Quakers") while others are of the liberal variety. The business is usually dealt with on a local level, and a few people may attend the Quarterly or Yearly Meeting and participate in the business at the higher level.

Both groups share a propensity towards being very involved in the process and very slow and inefficient at reaching any conclusion or action. Although, it could be argued that perhaps this is a good thing and keeps them from swaying to and fro on whims?

Both groups accept into their fellowship people from a wide variety of backgrounds, and are defenders of freedom and set pretty good examples of tolerance.

On the other hand, Masonry is limited to men, ability to attend is restricted to members, and new members must be voted upon. Both organizations also serve very different additional purposes.

I get the impression that the Quakers consider someone into doctrine and ritual and the type of exactness that I appreciate as a Mason to be a little bit out of place in a Quaker meeting, or at least to be the minority, however, it seems they have far more in common than they probably realize.

That other blogger

2006-03-17T22:29:00.000-08:00

I'm still trying to figure out what this blog is about. The title: Quasi-Religion - hmm. Something that is like religion, but not quite. So it depends on how broad your definition of religion is.

In my favorites, under 'Religion', there is a huge variety of things. From how to knit a kippah, English Guilds, Tarot, something by Oliver Cowdery about a hollow earth?, 'The Church Utensils Explained', and so forth. If I were forced to define where I stand religiously, I would have to call myself an Esoteric Mormon. There are a lot of mainstream-mormon ideas that I disagree with, as they are at variance with earlier teachings or just plain protestantism creeping in.

I'm fond of the Greek Philosophers - especially Aristotle. They were struggling with the same questions we have now. That really tells us how far Mankind has come in the last 2500 years. They were wrong about some things, just as we are wrong about some things. Expect a lot of quoting from them in the future :-)

Welcome to Quasi-Religious Things

2006-03-17T21:14:00.000-08:00

Hey! This is my first blog post. I decided to jump on the bandwagon and see where it takes me. Unlike many people, I think I might actually have something interesting to share. I'll be posting concerning my studies into symbolism, ritual, the occult, FreeMasonry and other fraternal groups, the Ancient Israelite Temple, and modern day parallels to these traditions that can even be found in popular media. Hopefully it will be fun, informative, and a great way to learn more from other people studying the same areas.