I downloaded and installed Firefox on my Wintel machine at work. It is pretty fast at rendering but it still has some “issues”.

When I installed it in Win98 on my VirtualPC it choked like Chicago traffic at 5PM, like Martha Stewart when she found no window treatments in her cell. In other words, it was very slow.

Is it better than IE? It renders faster than IE but it still has some bugs to work out. It has tabbed browsing which is a real winner and the reason I was an early Safari adopter. It also inherently blocks pop ups which is always a big plus.

So the verdict is: eh.

My worst fears are realized. What’s next? Open Theism?

You Are a Conservative Democrat

Frankly, the way most other Democrats behave embarasses you greatly. You pride yourself on a high level of morals, and you have a good grasp on right and wrong. It’s likely you think America needs to get back to its conservative, Juedo-Christian values. Why aren’t you a Republican then? Because you believe the goverment helps more than hurts.

The line went extremely fast. I was impressed. Heard on NPR about some people waiting hours in other places. What stinks is that we vote for judges here. Like I have a CLUE how these judges are doing!

The graphic looks just like the sticker I’m wearing.

Whoever wins has a tough road ahead of them. The vote will be very close and so no one can claim a mandate from the people. The hard part will be pulling this polarized country together and move us ahead.

He changes times and seasons;
he removes kings and sets up kings;
he gives wisdom to the wise
and knowledge to those who have understanding; – Dan. 2:21

No, we didn’t go out Trick or Treating nor did we pass out tracts instead of candy. My kids and I went and saw Sky Captain (which is an excellent movie made on Macs). The night before, we carved pumpkins. The digital camera-ette’s batteries died so I don’t have a picture of what we did.

Likewise, our church didn’t have a Reformation Day celebration or a Harvest Festival or anything like it. I had hoped that the church was going to do something to recognize the Reformation until I read this from The Dane. The Reformation was wonderful in that it moved the doctrine of salvation by grace alone through faith alone to the forefront (where it belongs) and for that we should be grateful. What we forget in the celebration of this is the sad division that it brought. Wouldn’t it have been better for a) Rome to agree with Luther or b) Luther and Rome to not anathamatize each other and continue as a united body to discuss and debate? Rome was too drunk on power and authority and Luther recognized the importance of the doctrine and wouldn’t back down. In the end Rome did the wrong thing for the wrong reasons and it kicked Luther out. They brought the division, not the Protestants.

So while we may rejoice that the gospel was made central again, we should be saddened that it divided the church. Oddly enough, the typical Protestant answer is the same as the Roman one: we’re the true church, they departed. And neither side seems to be too upset that the body of Christ has been divided.

Here in Chicago there is an ongoing stink over Sinclair Media‘s plan to air “Stolen Honor“, a documentary on Kerry’s anti-war efforts after he left Vietnam. They’ve scaled it back and will air clips in a different format. The problem is that Kerry is not given equal time. Sinclair Media owns or manages 62 TV stations in 39 markets, some of those markets are in swing states so you can see where the concern comes from.

But wait. Why was there such a warm reception of Fahrenheit 9/11 by the Democrats? Moore’s point in making that film was to defeat Bush. Where is the equal time for Bush during the screening of 9/11? Where is the Democratic cry of “unfair” in the airing of that film?

My point is that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. If it is okay for Moore to do his slanted “documentary” why is it not okay for Carlton Sherwood to “document” Kerry’s protest record?

In the end I think they are both inappropriate uses of the media of film for political purposes. Sinclair capitulated to the pressure not to air Stolen Honor but Moore reveled in the opposition. It bothers me that both the Left and Right are resorting to this kind of tactic.

I know that people get sick with the flu. I know that some people die from it. I know that the flu shots are supposed to prevent it. But I’m glad that now that I’m out of the military I don’t have to get the flu shots and so the present shortage doesn’t bother me personally.

Here’s how I think about it. Normally you would get the flu via dirty hands or a sneeze in the face or contact with someone who has it or whatever. So why is that we bypass all those natural defenses and jam the disease under the skin to trick the body into fighting it? It seems to me that this only weakens the body’s defensive systems and makes us more susceptible to the dreaded thing.

Second, once we get it our bodies try to get rid of it by developing itchy eyes and runny noses. We sneeze, our body temperature goes up and we need more rest. This is the natural course of action our body takes once it has lost the first round to the dreaded bug. But what we do once we get to this state is take antihistamines to shut down the sneezing and the runny nose. We take Tylenol to bring down the fever and we take Nyquil to put us to sleep.

In the end we’ve bypassed our natural defenses with the shot and then we take medications to inhibit our body’s method of fighting the infection. Drug companies are making money on this entire enterprise. Sure, we’ve greatly diminished many life threatening illnesses, but I wonder about the general health when it comes to non-life threatening illnesses. I wonder if we are really any better.

I prefer not to get the shot and let me natural defenses do what they can. If they fail me, which they have in the past, I chose to use natural methods to fight it. I have found Oscillococcinum to be excellent against the flu if you take it at the first sign of symptoms. If you miss it, you need to take remedies that follow the symptoms. They don’t shut down the symptoms, they try to help your body do what it is trying to do better.

Drug companies hate homeopathy because they can’t patent the ingredients. Scientific studies have found homeopathy to be no more effective than a placebo, but I’m not persuaded. I think they may have treated them as they would a drug; you have this symptom you take this pill, the symptom either goes away or it doesn’t. With homeopathy, the symptom may actually get worse before it goes away. Also, different types of people respond better to different remedies, there isn’t that one-to-one correspondence there is with other medicines. It has done wonders for me.

Gee, can you tell I work at Whole Foods Market?

I was working on a database in Access yesterday and wound up fishing through the help file looking for a clue. I never did find what I was looking for but I did come across this:

For additional information, select the item in question and press F1 (in Windows) or HELP (on the Macintosh).

Okay, first off, Microsoft never made Access for the Mac. Apparently there is something about the engine that is built in to Windows and isn’t present in Mac OS X. Fair enough and I have not heard a big outcry from the Mac users out there. Secondly, there isn’t and as far as I know never was a HELP key on the Mac keyboard. Wonder how this got in there.

Engage Geek Mode.

What I was trying to do was dynamically address controls on a form in VisualBasic. The name of the controls is in a table and I needed to get to each one to make some changes.

If ControlName is a variable with the name of the control in it, ThisForm is the name of the form, and you want to change the caption, the syntax looks like this:

(“Forms”)(“ThisForm”)(ControlName)(“Caption”) = “Caption Changed”

Place that in a While loop and walk through that table one record at a time and you’re dynamically addressing controls! Unfortunately, if you search the help file for this you won’t find it. I had to pull out a database I’d written in the Air Force to figure out how to do this. Not that the help file is a waste, I used it to teach my self how to program Access. It is just that sometimes this kind of advanced programming is hard to locate in the help file.

I’d forgotten how much I missed doing heavy duty programming like this. <:-) (that is a cone head simley)

Disengage Geek Mode.

One of my last jobs in the Air Force before I retired was in logistics. One of the last test concept meetings I attended was
one on this project. The tanker fleet is stretched pretty thin. Scheduling a tanker for a test mission is a really hard thing to do. Therefore, most test missions have to be under an hour and a half. When we came to the table and were briefed on the effort to lease 767s from Boeing and convert them to tankers, two things came to my mind. First, we really need tankers, this is a great idea. Second, Boeing really needs a contract after losing out on the F-22, what a great idea.

Unfortunately, there were some shenanigans going on to make the deal happen and so now it is dead. The Air Force would have benefited by gaining badly needed tankers without having to go through the cumbersome acquisition process and waiting for Congress to approve the money. Boeing had lost the badly needed F-23 contract to Lockheed’s F-22 (I thought the F-23 should have won because it looked so much cooler.) and was in danger of going out of the military aircraft business. We need more competition in weapons acquisition for large scale projects. (Come to think of it, we also need major reform in that area too. It is extremely complicated and unnecessarily slow. I know, $500 hammer. But wrapping the process in bureaucracy is no cheaper.) Lockheed has the B-2 and F-22 contracts, Boeing needs something. Finally, the next big contender in the tanker arena could be Airbus which is (unfairly) propped up by European government. Other aircraft builders cannot compete with a supplemented program.

I’m glad that Druyun is going to jail, she should. But I think it is really unfortunate that she’s taking a worthy and needed project with her. Dummy. Now we all suffer.

I pop in on Memri, a service that translates news from the Middle East into English, every once in a while. Often it is a difficult read because of the hatred of the West. But here is one that gives me hope. The author, a Qatari intellectual, calls for non-radical Muslims to admit that the 9/11 terrorists were Muslim and “they carried out the operation because of their belief that it was Jihad and martyrdom. They were our young people and our sons, and they were our responsibility.” He rails against conspiracy theories (they are common amongst Muslims) and calls for some realism.

This is the kind of thing that is necessary to bring terrorism under control. I think we need to really focus on Israel and make some concrete changes that help the Palestinians’ quality of life improve. We need to provide humanitarian aid to hurting Muslim regions that doesn’t come from the US government, it needs to come from American volunteer organizations. We need to hear from moderate Muslims calling for sanity. In short, to end terrorism we don’t need regime change exclusively (it was necessary in Afghanistan), we also need to work to cut off the supply of volunteers. Hate and fear drives a young person to engage in suicide bombing. Conspiracy theories feed that regardless of the facts and there isn’t much we can do externally about that but we could make them more difficult to believe by actually being the good guys once again.

My wife and I are off to the Desiring God national conference Sex and the Supremacy of Christ for the weekend. Seemed like an appropriate one to take my wife to. :)

It is interesting to note that it is not “the Supremacy of God”. This is related to 9/11. I heard Piper a few months ago explain that after 9/11 there was this mad rush to embrace Islam and so Christians (our current President included) were saying that we worship the same God. This is flatly not true as the Christian God is triune and Jesus Christ is God. This is not the case with any other religion. John wisely decided at that point to purposely use the name “Jesus Christ” as often as he could to delineate the True and Living God from all others.

I haven’t been to the conference yet and it has already shaped my thinking. I caught myself the other day looking at a beautiful woman while I was driving so it was a brief glance. The thought that replaced the image of her was “and loving and obeying Jesus Christ is better than looking at that.” Sexual attraction, as strong as it is, is not meant to last. In the resurrection we will not be married, we’ll be like the angels that way. Furthermore, and here is more Piper, sex is not necessary to be a fulfilled person. Jesus never married (contra the DaVinci Code rubbish) and he was without sin and so he never had sex. Yet, he was perfected humanity. Sex is great, man and women were created for each other and sexual union is blessed in marriage. But it isn’t everything. Some things are better.