Archives for April, 2006

No technolust this week

I have been taking some photos of product packaging that butchers the English language. I have no idea that with all of the friends of mine teaching English as a second language that companies don’t hire some Saskatchewan ex-patriates with $20 and a pizza to proof read some packaging.

Well, actually there was going to be a technolust this week but everything that I thought was cool this week was mocked by co-workers. Being such a sensitive guy and all, I bowed to peer-pressure.

04/30/2006 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Contextless Links

04/29/2006 | Contextless Links | No Comments

Bush vs. Iran

I am going to make my millionth case I think against political partisanship so if you aren’t interested, just move on. 
 
I read a wide variety of news sources and all of them are covering the Iranian nuclear story with interest, including many that were very critical of the invasion of Iraq.  Most if not all of them are saying something similar to what the BBC is writing here.
Mr Ahmadinejad said the pursuit of peaceful nuclear technology was Iran’s “absolute right… our red line”.
He was speaking after the UN’s atomic watchdog said Iran had failed to meet a Security Council deadline to suspend its uranium enrichment programme.
A senior Iranian official meanwhile has said Iran will allow snap checks to resume if the council drops the case.
Mohammad Saeedi, deputy head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, said UN experts could conduct snap inspections of its nuclear facilities if the issue was returned to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
However the BBC’s Frances Harrison in Tehran says this is unlikely to happen , so the offer seems rather academic.
Iran halted such inspections in February after the IAEA decided to report Iran to the Security Council.
When talking to friends on the left wing of the political spectrum I hear a lot of wag the dog talk as in that this is all another fantasy of Bush which strikes me as odd as while the EU and the world press was outspoken in it’s skepticism of the Iraq WMD claims, it seems in agreement with Iranian nuclear plans.  By doubting Bush because he is George W Bush makes for great lines by Jon Stewart but it is also is what many on the left accused the right of doing leading up to the Iraqi war and that is believing in Bush when the facts did not support the case.  Now, when the facts do support what the White House is saying, then isn’t it hypocritical to dismiss it just because Bush is President?  I am on of the many that think that he is a horrible leader but I think on this issue, he is taking the right approach.  Personally if we want to have a real debate on the issues, I think that we need to deal with the facts and not as much partisanship.
 
If you want to read more, as with most current events, Wikipedia has some excellent resources.

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04/29/2006 | Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Net Gains by Jeffrey Sachs

Sachs in today’s New York Times

Americans [and the rest of the west] have a perfect retort to Osama Bin Laden’s call for expanding the terrorism war to Sudan. We should respond by showing our abiding concern for the plight of Africans by helping to save millions of children who are at risk of death from disease. In honoring the sanctity of the lives of the least among us we have the best chance to defeat the ideologies of hate.

Exactly

04/29/2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Bush falls to #2

It’s weird, last night I was sure I heard a report saying Bush had signed with the Texans but apparently it was Williams. The funny thing is that I thought it was weird for as soon as I heard the reports of the Bush family living arrangements, I figured Reggie would fall out of the top spot. For a team to invest that much money in a player and then have the allegations made, didn’t make sense. For me the shock was Vince Young being picked ahead of Matt Leinart and Jay Cutler.

New Orleans will have an offence next year. Deuce McAllister, Reggie Bush and eventually a healthy Drew Brees.

04/29/2006 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Wahoo!

According to Wendy, we have phone and cable service restored to the Cooper homestead. The carrier pigeons can be put back into the retirement home where they belong.

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04/28/2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Broken bones in my foot

I forgot to mention yesterday that I broke three toes in my left foot.  It only hurts when I walk or stand up which is great for work.  The cool thing is that I think the gabapentin that I take for the neuropathy minimizes the pain a bit… but just a bit.

04/28/2006 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

The Reggie Bush Saga

Dan Wetzel is imploring USC tailback Reggie Bush to end the drama surrounding the house that his parents live in last year.  Good article but there are some good arguments that say that there is no ethics in professional sports (and I call the NCAA Division I professional sports) as it was ruled by money.  Look at the San Francisco Giants, MLB, Barry Bonds (or Mark McGwire if you want as well) and tell me that they didn’t know that something was wrong.  Men’s head sizes don’t grow a couple of sizes over a summer normally.  It isn’t that what Reggie Bush’s family did was right (from what we know), it is just normal.
 
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04/28/2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments

The tide has gone out on the word "evangelical"

From Christianity Magazine

to the unchurched and people of other faiths – evangelical is increasingly shorthand for: right-wing US politics, an arrogant loud mouth who refuses to listen to other people’s opinions, men in grey suits who attempt to crowbar authorised version scripture verses into every situation, or ‘happy-clappy’ simpletons who gullibly swallow whatever their tub thumping minister tells them to believe. Large parts of the British media seem happy to paint evangelicals into that stereotype. Today in the UK evangelical’ is often linked with the ultimate 21st century swearword fundamentalist’. The result is the name ‘evangelical’ which years ago, may have smelt of roses – now has the aroma of the manure that fertilises the bush.

It totally agree, when people ask me if I am evangelical, I generally say that I am Methodist and side step the word all together.  Popular culture has replaced fundementalist with the word evangelical and the term carries too much baggage to be redeemed.  via

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04/27/2006 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Contextless Links

04/27/2006 | Contextless Links | No Comments

No phone, no cable, and Wendy has my cell phone

SaskTel is working on it.  Well, actually they made it worse.  Before we had problems with the telephone and now I come home to no SaskTel Max.  According to the SaskTel repair guy, they wrecked the phone line when we got high speed internet.  While I generally like SaskTel, lately the constant technological problems are starting to wear a little thin.
 
If you need to contact Wendy or I, e-mail us or send over a carrier pigeon.
 
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04/27/2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Moving beyond…

When I am not talking , I have time also to read a great post by David Fitch about the need for the emerging church to move beyond liberalism and fundementalism.

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04/26/2006 | theology | No Comments

I talk too much

Jason Evans wrote this about Mark Palmer’s life.  A part of it has stuck with me.
Palmer was committed to spiritual formation. He practiced spiritual disciplines. He engaged in the historic spiritual practices enhanced by the Christian calendar. He also was committed to living out the fruit of the Spirit. He was committed to the Sermon on the Mount as a way of life. He also longed for the spiritual gifts to rise up within himself and the LP communities. And I believe he did these things to clarify and enhance his mission in life, to embody the Gospel of the Kingdom.

nurture of community through nurturing personal relationships
Palmer developed community by developing people. I wish I could have the time he had throughout the day. Alas, I live in So.Cal. and I have to work full-time. But this is really only an excuse. The truth is, I envy the way Palmer valued people, saw potential and capacity in everyone and always could listen… I like to talk way too much. Mark developed a sense of community amongst those that called LP their church by helping all who participated to see their value within the community. By focusing on an individual that individual discovered their place at the table, as part of a family… I want to do that for my community.

Lately I have been really struggling with how us as culture see other people and upon further reflection how I see other people.  I want to see people like Palmer did.  Full of potential, capacity for greatness, and worth listening too.  I want to ditch the excuses as well.
 
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04/26/2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments

How I Work

Fortune Magazine is running a series called “How I Work” They interviewed a plethora of business leaders and celebrities about the tools and processes they use to manage their day. Blogger Steve Rubel thought it might be cool if some of us did the same thing.  Here’s my post on it.  If you want to join the fun, file yours under the Technorati tag .

I work on a bunch of different desktop and network computers at home and at work so I want all of my desktops and applications to run the same for efficiency sake.

Here is what I am running.

  • Google’s Gmail :: I love the fact that all of my e-mail is in one place.  I can log in from any computer in the world and my e-mail is all there.  In any given day, my e-mail is checked from 2 to 5 different computers which is important because I am back over 100 e-mails a day again.
  • Firefox :: I never use Internet Explorer anymore.  Firefox will run off a USB key but I use del.icio.us for my bookmarks so I can work from any machine.
  • Open Office :: It is installed at work and while I have been a Microsoft Office users since Word 2.0c, I made the switch a month ago.  It is installed on every PC in the house now and I think it is on every computer at work (well, the computers that I use anyways).  The only time I use Microsoft Office anymore is that they have a Fax Cover Letter template and I keep forgetting to make one.   I have a copy of WordPerfect Office 12 but I haven’t played around that much with it and so far haven’t found a compelling reason to switch.
  • Flickr for photo storage and Google’s Picasa for tweaking them.
  • Bloglines or Kinja for keeping up to date with RSS feeds.  I created a new Kinja account recently to let me quickly see what was new with work related sites.
  • Google Talk and MSN Messenger for IM.
  • Skpye for VOIP
  • Google for search and now Google Calendar to keep track of my life.
  • Upcoming.org to see what is happening in Saskatoon
  • del.icio.us for bookmarks
  • A small Moleskine is generally in my pocket for times that I am not near a computer
  • Google News, CNN, CBC News, and Bourque for news
  • Yahoo! Sports for ummm, sports coverage.  At night I will flake out in front of The Score to get hockey highlights.  While I enjoy hockey tremendously, I find I don’t have to watch the games to care what it happening.  The less I have to listen to John Davidson and Al Strachan, the better.
  • Qumana and Blogger for blogging
  • Yahoo! Music Engine’s DJ Plugin

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04/26/2006 | Saskatoon, blogging, photography | 3 Comments

Contextless Links

  • Malcolm Gladwell on the Duke rape case :: But the Duke case is an example of another, even more problematic aspect of eyewitness identifications, and that is that we aren’t particular good at making them across races.   There is a huge amount of psychological research in their area, pioneered by Roy Malpass at the University of Texas at El Paso.   A few years ago, John Brigham and Christian Meissner did a big meta-analysis of all of the cross-racial identification studies and concluded that given the task of picking someone out of a lineup, the average person is something like 1.4 times more likely to correctly identify an own-race face than a different-race face, and 1.6 times more likely to incorrectly identify a different race face.   These are not trivial error rates.
  • Winners of the I look like my dog contest :: So wrong on so many levels
  • Where Vista fails :: “Because it failed so obviously with Vista, my guess is that Microsoft is a bit gun shy about major OS releases and will be for some time. And that’s too bad. Windows Vista was Microsoft’s first chance since Windows 95 to reach for the golden ring. It may be another decade before they try again.” via
  • The vibrant legacy of Jane Jacobs :: “That vision of the urban good life had wide appeal, but the supply of old cities that offered the requisite mix of street life, architecture, and diversity was limited. The lively city districts that Jacobs championed, including her beloved Village, have become exclusive enclaves, closed to all but the extremely wealthy. She always considered the amenities of city life to be everyday and widely available goods. Little could she have imagined then that they would become luxuries instead.” via
  • Essential Latin phrases :: How many times have I need to say, “I have a catapult. Give me all the money, or I will fling an enormous rock at your head” in the last week.
  • Top 10 Windows XP tips of all time
  • How to build a Lego computer
  • 10 things that you should never purchase
  • 25 Free Grunge Fonts
  • 2004 Electoral Map interpretations
  • Who needs a 64 bit processor?
  • Caterina Fake is looking for a good argument

04/26/2006 | Contextless Links | No Comments

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