Ted Tschopp

What do you think about the following statements.  Are they true?  Do you believe them?  What would you add or subtract?  How would you change them?

1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

 

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” – General Eric Shinseki, Chieff of Staff, U.S. Army.

One of my coworkers daughters is going to college to be an animator.  One day she needed to take her mother to work and she stayed.  To pass the time she started to draw each of us as anime characters.

Anyway, I thought it turned out rather nice and was worthy of sharing.  I wonder if that’s my black Geek t-shirt or my Steve-Jobs-Black turtle neck I’m wearing.

Enjoy!

I started moving into my new place today. The electricity and gas is on, I have purchased a table, chair and book shelf. I am going to get the rest of my crap moved into my new place over the weekend. It will probably take a couple weeks to get everything moved into the new place, and it will then take a month or so to get everything unpacked and into the correct corners.

But the most exciting thing about all this is that I now have no room mate, and I have a nice 2 bedroom condo with a ton of space. What this also means is that my computer habits and posting habits are going to change as well. I look forward to spending more time keeping this blog up to date, as well as starting a couple projects I have in mind.

Here are a couple pictures, now time for dinner.

I downloaded IE8 today and noticed it had a new way to post to Microsoft’s blog by highlighting some text and sending it off to their blogging service.

Here is the code that will make it work in Typepad:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
 <homepageUrl>http://www.typepad.com/t/app</homepageUrl>
 <display>
  <name>Blog in Typepad</name>
  <icon>http://www.tschopp.net/favicon.ico</icon>
        <description>Post this in my Blog</description>
 </display>
 <activity category="Blog">
  <activityAction context="selection">
   <execute method="get" action="http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post">
    <parameter name="title" value="{documentTitle}" />
    <parameter name="SourceURL" value="{documentUrl}" />
    <parameter name="blog_id" value="16627" />
    <parameter name="text" value="{selection}" />
    <parameter name="keywords" value="{keywords}" />
   </execute>
  </activityAction>
  <activityAction context="document">
   <execute method="get" action="http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post">
    <parameter name="title" value="{documentTitle}" />
    <parameter name="blog_id" value="16627" />
    <parameter name="SourceURL" value="{documentUrl}" />
   </execute>
  </activityAction>
  <activityAction context="link">
   <execute method="get" action="http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post">
    <parameter name="title" value="{linkTitle}" />
    <parameter name="blog_id" value="16627" />
    <parameter name="SourceURL" value="{link}" />
   </execute>
  </activityAction>
 </activity>
</openServiceDescription>

1. Copy and paste this into a Text file.
2. Name it typepad.xml
3. Replace blog_Id with your blog ID
1. Browse to http://www.typepad.com/t/app 
2. Click on the blog you want to post to
3. Observe the URL http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/manage?blog_id=16627
4. Replace the <icon> with your favicon
5. Save the document
6. Upload file to your Typepad account
7. Create a new HTML file
8. Name it typepad.html
9. Put the following code in the html file:<A href="javascript:window.external.addService('http://www.tschopp.net/typepad.xml');">Click Here</a>
10. Replace my URL with the URL to the XML file you created above
11. Save file
12. Upload File to Typepad
13. Browse to HTML file
14. Click on link

My files are located at http://www.tschopp.net/Typepad.html

Let me know how it goes.  I will post updates later this week to get more than just selections working.  I also want to expand this to other services.  Let me know how this is working for you.

And therefore I observe, that the Will (without any metaphysical refining) is, That by which the mind chooses any thing. The faculty of the will, is that power, or principle of mind, by which it is capable of choosing: an act of the will is the same as an act of choosing or choice. – Jonathan Edwards in Freedom of the Will

Did you eat breakfast this morning?  How about Lunch?  What did you do this weekend?  What choices did you make over the long weekend?  Did you make any choices or did you just go along with what you have always done? 

Right now it’s getting close to 5:00pm and I am hungry.  I have a cup of tea that I’m sipping, and I have not had solid food in almost 20 hours.  Sitting a couple desks down from me is a full spread of sandwiches from Togo's.  Down the other direction is a table with a large jar of smoky roasted almonds, one of my favorite snacks.  I know where there is a cache of Milky Ways, a candy jar full of Kisses.  I’m sure if I looked into any of the conference rooms they would have food from Baja Fresh, Trendy Thai, Pickup Sticks, or Panera. 

But I’m not eating.  My stomach is grumbling a bit.  But I am choosing not to eat.  Every time I walk past a large spread of food here at work I am reminded of my choice.  I choose not to eat. 

During this Lenten season, I have chosen to fast.  At first I only told an individual or two at work regarding this fast.  It soon got out to the whole group that I was fasting for 40 day (and not 40 nights).  One of the questions that has been asked boils down to:  “Isn’t it hard to fast.”  Of course this question takes many forms, but it has been asked so many times that I think I will formulate a response that reduces my experiences to some general advice about what I have learned.

From the quote above we can see that Jonathan Edwards, in Freedom of the Will, defines the will as the mind choosing.  This fast has made me start to question what it means to choose.  What is free will.  I am now of the opinion that man has a lot of freedom, but many times he choose not to exercise that freedom. 

I am free to eat.  I gain nothing in heaven or here on earth for not eating.  Perhaps I’ll be healthier.  Perhaps I’ll learn some lesson about my life.  But in the end there is no value in my fast.  It is a choice I have made freely.  The value for me is that I chose it.  I chose to act differently.

How many times do we run through life and we don’t choose.  We have freedom to do whatever we want, but we choose to let the smells of cooking McDonald’s fries choose our meal.  How many times do we let advertising of a product make a choice for us.  Each time I walk past a spread of food here at work, I smell the aroma of those foods.  They call to me.  They beckon to me.  Their voice reminds me of other voices I hear; the voices that to me and tempt me. But every time I choose not to eat the food. I make a choice. This leads me again to ask how many times do I truly have my mind choose for me. How many times do I truly use my free will?

I can ask these questions about many areas in my life, but we are adults. Let’s make these questions count.  How many times do we actively choose to do good instead of evil.  How many times do we choose to be kind, instead of cruel?  How many times are we just going with the flow of the culture or the social group around us? How many times do we do just those things which we have always done? How many times do we actually think about each of our actions? Many of us at this point some will probably say the following:

“Well, I’m not so good at this.  I need to work at this.  I need to get better at this.  I’m glad you brought this up.  Now lets see; I’m going to choose to do a better job at choosing things in my lfe.  I’m going to be different than all those other people.  I need work, but I’m not as bad as those other people.  I am no longer going to be a sheep, I’m not going to be like all those other sheep out there.  They just follow each other into stupidity and ignorance.  They do all sorts of evil and wrong.”

Can you hear that voice in your head? No? Wait until you drive to work tomorrow and you go the same way you have always gone. Wait until you eat the same thing you ate last week for dinner. Wait until you don’t make a choice and you just go along with the world. You will then be a failure. That is when you will hear the voice. It will say, it’s not so bad, you are not as bad as other people. You choose to do two good things this week. And you have gotten on nagging habit under control. Well to that voice I have the following to say.

"Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.' But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!' I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted."  Jesus as recorded in Luke 18:10–14

What is that voice in your head saying now?

This parable was recorded as occuring when Jesus was heading down to Jeruselem for the last time.  Every step along the way, Jesus chose.  He chose as no man before him or since him chose.  He chose becuase he knew what was going to happen.  He chose, even though he knew the outcome.  Here is the point of all this writing.  Many times we don’t use our free will.  When we do, many times, we choose things we later regret.  But someone else has already chosen.  He chose to die.  In his death he took on all the wrong choices we made and gave us all the right choices. 

In this lenten time remeber that you have a choice.

Well, this is starting the second week of my fast for Lent.  This year I have decided not to eat any solid food (liquids only) when the sun is up.  What this basically means is that I have a nice normal dinner, and everything else is liquid.  I have also decided that I will not be drinking any soda, so all fluids are going to be juices and tea.  Most of the time I will drink several types of tea.  Occasionally I will have an orange juice or a vitiamen water.  For lunch I will drink a Jamba juice with a shot of wheat grass.

I have done this fast once before and combined it with a one and a half mile walk becuase Jamba Juice was that far from work.  This year Jamba juice is much further from work, so I will have to go out of my way to do the walking.

So far everything seems to be working great.  I will post more later this week about how the process is going.

Everyone who is in a state that is holding a primary today needs to vote.  There is no excuse I’m willing to entertain.   I don’t care who you are voting for, but you need to vote.  If you don’t and I find out I’m going to consider you to be a Commie Pinko who needs to leave these United States and live elsewhere where they don’t give citizens rights.  In the United States citizens vote, slaves don’t.  We outlawed that practice.  So would you kindly head down to your polling place and vote, or pack your bags and be a slave elsewhere. 

</a>It has been a while sense I have updated any of my blogs or websites.  I have been really busy at work, and I have a couple rather long blog posts in the works that are partially done.  One is on my experiences with social websites like Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, or LiveJournal.  The other was going to be a Christmas message/card.  I guess the time for that has passed.  Anyway, I thought I'd show people what I have been working on.

There are a couple images I have attached that are to the companies new Portal.  This portal is now available externally at http://portal.edisonintl.com/.  Now I don't have a username or password you can use to log in and check out all my hard work, but I will post one screen shot of what it looks like from the inside.

Enjoy the screen shots and I'll hopefully have more updates on this blog this year.

I think I need a pizza, this is from the LA Times.

Salvatore A. "Sam" Martorana, the son of Italian immigrants who felt he had hit "the big time" when the pizza at his Eagle Rock restaurant was named the Southland's best, has died. He was 83.

Martorana, who founded Casa Bianca Pizza Pie in the mid-1950s, died Sunday at his Pasadena home of complications related to a brain tumor, said his daughter, Andrea Martorana.

"Of all the neighborhood pizza parlors out there, each of them touted as the best in the Southland, one of them actually has to be the best. And after chomping my way through half the pies in Los Angeles County, I'm pretty sure Casa Bianca is the one," food critic Jonathan Gold said in The Times in 1991.

After the article ran, "things really changed," Andrea Martorana said. "We were doing well as a little family place, but at one point we had more business than we could handle."

"When you step into the foyer, you're whomped with the smell of garlic and the roar of many, many people being happy," Gold wrote in the review. "And the pizza -- well, the pizza is just the best, especially the sausage pizza."

There is no secret recipe, his daughter said, just a dedication to using quality ingredients and making everything from scratch. Until recently, the vaunted sausage was handmade by Martorana, the son of a butcher.

In 1991, Gold also named Casa Bianca's sausage pizza one of the top 10 dishes that he had tasted that year.

But Martorana's favorite pizza was his signature "deluxe," made with sausage, mushrooms and bell peppers.

Salvatore Anthony Martorana was born Feb. 8, 1924, in Milwaukee and raised in Chicago. He was known as Sam, a name spelled by his initials.

At 17, Martorana joined the Navy and served for four years in the Pacific during World War II.

After the war, he returned to Chicago and honed his pizza-making skills at a restaurant called Tony's Pizza. In 1954, he migrated west to be near family members who had already moved to Pasadena.

With his brother Joseph, Martorana opened Casa Bianca in 1955 in a corner storefront on Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock. Running a restaurant "was in their blood" since their father had owned a grocery-deli, his daughter said.

In the early 1960s, the brothers split amicably and Martorana's wife, Jennie, started working at Casa Bianca. Joseph had wanted to open his own restaurant, and for years he presided over a Pizza King at North Lake Avenue and East Walnut Street in Pasadena. He died in 1984.

Martorana's daughter and his son, Ned -- along with their mother -- now run Casa Bianca, a pizza place with the requisite red-checkered tablecloths and a line out the door most nights.

A memorial service for Martorana will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday at Eagle Rock Baptist Church, 1499 Colorado Blvd., Los Angeles.

In addition to Jennie, his wife of 58 years, and his son and daughter, Martorana is survived by four grandchildren and two sisters, Antoinette Impala and Pauline Ward. Another son, Leandro, died in 1978.

I recently heard Alex Wright speak at the Long Now Foundation via their podcast.  It made me think of a couple things.

The talk is worth listening to, as many of their seminars are.  Alex left me with a couple ideas I want to look into further.

As a child we all use to play the 20 questions game, and we are all very familiar with the first 3 questions.  Is it an Animal?  It is an Mineral?  Is it a Plant?  Then we would proceed to ask 20 questions, each time trying to further narrow down the selection until we were able to say what the person was thinking of.  This categorization if formalized is a taxonomy. 

The first idea surrounds taxonomy.  It turns out that when sociologists and anthropologists look at different societies around the world they break their world into different taxonomies.  This isn’t all that weird.  The weird part is that universally these taxonomies are only 5 or sometimes 6 levels deep.  There really is no good answer as to why this is the case. 

There are several guesses.  One has to do with the depth of families; you, your children, Your parents, and your grandparents.  If you count up the generations, you get 5.   If you add you children’s children, then get 6.  The idea then goes that this is culturally conditioned into us and the way that we see the world.  Eventually those individuals who are predisposed genetically to accept this fact become more successful in reproducing and the “idea” is carried forward via genetics and culture.

That’s an interesting idea, but also controversial even among evolutionary biologists.  I think the idea above is interesting, but it is just as scientifically mythological as other anthropological mythologies.  As a religious person I would love to have seen Adam apply the first Taxonomy. 

Next Ideas to Think About:  The House of Memories

 

This has nothing to do with New Jersey or emo Jewish twenty somehtings trying to deal with life.  This is a blog post that I am making to capture a couple ideas I have bouncing around in my head that need further refinement:

“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

“Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.”

When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground— then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 

Ok, the first idea.  Adam (The Man) was put into the garden of Eden (not in Eden specifically) to work it and keep it.  What is the limit of the garden?  We notice that Eden has a limit.  There is definitely an inside and an outside.  Now looking at the garden.  We that God planted the garden in Eden, and that he placed the tree of live in the midst of the garden, as well as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.   But we also notice that the river flowed out of Eden to water the garden.  This river divided into four rivers.  The important point I’m looking at is the idea of the garden, along with the rivers, flowing out of Eden.  Also we see the man was told to work and keep the Garden. 

Ok, So what is a garden?  It’s a collection of plants.  It’s ordered.  But as they are plants they fall under the command from God to be fruitful and multiply.  So, how far does the garden extend?  Lets say it extends 10 miles in every direction from the tree of Life.  It seems that’s a reasonable thing to say, as the tree of life was in the midst of the garden.

What happens when, after several years of working (and avoiding the serpent), the Garden grows to ten miles in each direction, is mans job done?  No, for a garden to be a garden it has to grow.  So what is the limit of the Garden?  What if there was never a fall, to what limit should the garden have been extended?  What if there was never a curse, and the garden didn’t start to die?; how far had it been extended?  How far could it have been extended; to the size of a city?  A state?  A country?  A continent? The whole world?  Could the Garden be extended to the Moon?  How about to Mars?  To the Stars?  Where do we want to put up a fence and say this is inside the garden, and that is outside?

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed…

Our final look at the Garden is here.  We see a city has sprung up around the tree of life, on either side of the river, and that the fruit from the tree is bearing fruit, and that this fruit is healing and removing the curse. 

So, the effects of the fall and it’s curse are only temporary.  But my question still stands?  What is the limit of the Garden?  How far will it extend?  Just to the edge of the city which has grown up around the banks?  How about to the edge of the state?  Will it be only to those of a given country, or just to those individuals of a given race?  Will you be the one who plants the first tree on the moon?  Are the stars really that far away when you have forever?  Perhaps they are in need of a couple gardeners.

I saw this over at digg, and thought I’d post it as it does contain on semi-serious ideas.

Villagers in southern Peru were struck by a mysterious illness after a meteorite made a fiery crash to Earth in their area, regional authorities said Monday.

Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was an airplane crashing near their remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.

Residents complained of headaches and vomiting brought on by a "strange odor," local health department official Jorge Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP.

Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being hospitalized, Lopez said.

Rescue teams and experts were dispatched to the scene, where the meteorite left a 100-foot-wide (30-meter-wide) and 20-foot-deep (six-meter-deep) crater, said local official Marco Limache.

"Boiling water started coming out of the crater and particles of rock and cinders were found nearby. Residents are very concerned," he said.

So, now for all the fun ways we can take this story.

The first one is for all you Hal Lindsey fans out there.

Then the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared to sound them. The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down upon the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up. The second angel sounded his trumpet, and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned into blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed. The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water— the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter. – Revelation 8:6–10

The second direction you can take with this is for all you science fiction fans out there.  Go pick up your copy of Andromeda Strain and start reading.  While you are out getting your copy, pick up a couple cans of Sterno. 

I guess another direction you can head with this is for all you science based horror fans out there is to pick up your copy of World War Z and the Zombie Survival Guide.  While the beginning of each of these stories do not exactly start with the approach of a meteorite, many Zombie movies and books do indeed start with this theme.

If you wanted to take this into the Occult based Horror you can always rely on H.P. Lovecraft to provide you with a good story.  Check out his Colour out of Space.   

I think I should talk about comic books and how Meteorites falling from the sky bring about the changes from the ordinary into the super natural.  But I am not really a comic book “expert.”  I’ll leave that job to others.

 

</span>

Well I broke my iPhone. I dropped it at lunch today and the glass shattered.

I went off to the Apple Store last night to get it replaced.  Turns out that due to the fact that the screen is shattered and nothing else is wrong I will have to pay $250 to get it fixed.  If I had damaged the phone more I wouldn’t have to pay as it would be covered. 

Personally I think I should have kept the phone at the point they told me the damage was only cosmetic and then used the touch screen and cut my finger up and then asked them if they thought the damage was only cosmetic.  Also, what seems interesting to me is that each Apple Store seems to have a different policy on this broken screen issue.  I have gone online and seen that other Apple Stores have acted differently regarding this screen issue.

I think Apple is really missing the boat on this one.  Some teenage girl was in the store before me with two broken iPods.  These iPods were banged up, and on one the screen was not working.  They were each registered to different people.  Their tech guy took a look at them spent about 10 minutes on each trying to resurrect each before handing her new refurbished ones and sent her on her way.  I couldn’t get this kind of service on my iPhone. 

When they asked me if I wanted to have them ship the phone in right now, or wait and I could call Apple care, I told them I wanted them to ship the phone now and give me a loaner and ship the repaired phone to my home, they told me they couldn’t give me a loaner as they didn’t have any.  They also told me that they couldn’t ship the iPhone to my home.  The other guy a the ‘genesis bar corrected him and told me they could ship to my home. I then asked if they could swap it out with a refurbished model, and they said no.  To be honest, I’ve been treated better by Cingular reps on this one. 

Well, now I’m back on my Blackberry (which is charging slowly) and the repaired iPhone will be shipped back to me in 2 to 3 business days.

So here are the lessons learned

• There is something about cell phones that cause companies to start to suck
• Apple’s iPhone is the bastard child of Apple Support
• Apple needs to carry more loaner Phones
• Different Policies with different stores
• ‘Policies’ changing from day to day
• Going from iPhone to Blackberry is not fun
• iPhones dropped from waist height on a tile floor will cause the screen to break

I saw this on my daily rounds and thought, I got to visit there some day. 

On a deserted beach on a small island near the equator, there's a barrel and some ziploc bags. This post office has been here for more than a hundred years. It was built by whalers who needed a way to get letters home to England. The idea was that the last stop you would make on your way home was to the post office. You'd pick up whatever letters were there and bring them back to England.

I dropped two postcards in the barrel ten days ago (no stamps, of course). They arrived on Wednesday. I'm told some notes take as long as a month or two. Apparently, you can send a letter anywhere in the world and count on it showing up. There's actually a shortage of mail... more people want to carry the letters then write them.

Ideas spread in funny ways. In this case, the joy of the person who helps out by delivering the note is probably greater than that of the sender. And the story is so irresistible for both parties that it can't help but spread. By word of mouth or by blog.

Source

Everyone who has gotten to know me doesn’t really expect the above words coming from my mouth, much less an endorsement of said device.  But I was rather amused by this site which has a random idea generator.  I hit the random button and that’s what I got.  Head on over and waste some of your time let me know what’s your break through idea?

Go Here

 

 

It’s August already and it seems that yesterday was January.  Most of my plans for this year have been dashed to pieces to lay neglected on the side of the speeding highway that this last year has turned into. 

Over the last couple of weeks I have taken time to slow down and simplify my life.  I have thrown out 6 trash bags of stuff many of which was one of a kind Lord of the Rings crap I had collected over the years when I ran The One Ring.  In this process of letting go I have come across things that I needed to pick up and keep a hold of.  This story is one of the things I found laying at the side of the road neglected.  It was a story that needs to be told.

I’m not very big on gifts, getting or receiving; when I do get a gift it’s a big deal.  This last year I exchanged gifts with a couple of friends.  One gift that stood out was a book from my friend Nikki.

Nikki got me a book for Christmas, a non fiction book; a book I had seen several times in the book store, but it seemed to only be mildly interesting too me. Well seeing the book, I thanked her for it and threw it into my car with every intention of adding it to the stack of books I am reading.  Time passed and the book stayed in the car.  I would come across it in manic bouts of car cleaning.  The book soon rotated to the trunk.

One day around May, I found myself in my car, waiting on one of my other friends to show up for something.  I fired up my iPod looking to listen to another pod cast.  Curses!  I had listened to all my podcasts.  I saw my bible and thought about doing my homework for my bible study.  No, I could put that off.  Then the thought occurred to me.  I could go to the trunk of the car and get Nikki’s present out of the trunk.  I got the book and read the cover “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything”. It asked a couple questions.

• What do sumo wrestlers and teacher have in common.
• What does the KKK and real estate agents have in common?
• Why do crack cocaine dealers live with their parents?
• What effect does legalized abortion have on the crime rate.

Well, that sure seems interesting.  I cracked the book, and I couldn’t put it down.  About 30 minutes later my friend showed up and I had to put it down.  Over the next week I would race home from work and devour the book.  It was the best non fiction book I have read in a long time. 

Then it hit me.  I had totally overlooked this gift.  These hours of pleasure and enjoyment had been given to me by Nikki and I had not trusted her to know me enough to get me a good book.  I had not thanked her for it.  I had made a mess of one of the best gifts I had been given in a long time.

Over the next couple of days I finished the book.  The next time I met with Nikki I thanked her for the book and told her how bad I felt about not reading it sooner.   I also told her I would post a review of the book to my web site. 

Time has passed and it is no longer late spring, it’s now late summer and I have yet to post the review.  Let the above be my Mea maxima culpa as well as my review and recommendation for the book. 

August is a strange and unfitting time for Christmas, as it is a strange and unfitting time to thank someone for one of the top 10 gifts I have ever received from my friends and family.  But like Christmas, thanks and apologies for mistakes are never too late, they are like Christmas in August.

Looks like there is a rumor running around the net about a Jurassic Park IV featuring "a government who has trained dinosaurs to carry weapons and use them for battle purposes."

I'm ok with this as long as the Dinosaurs win and drive humanity under ground. The sequal would be called "Xenozoic Tales". I think I still have some of the gaming books from back in the day.

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I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. — Marie Curie