News and Views

A couple of days ago, Bill O’Reilly (Fox) talked about the Palin daughter’s pregnancy, saying: “It is a personal matter… It is true some Americans will judge Sarah Palin’s family… We hope things calm down,”

A reasonable position.

But back in December, talking about Brittany Spears’ 16-year old sister’s pregnancy, he said, “…the blame falls primarily on the girl’s parents.” And he has a picture of the parents with the word “Pinheads” underneath. Wasn’t this a “personal matter” too?

See it here.

Imagine that, a guy gets a law degree, his total political experience is to serve 8 years on the Illinois State Legislature, then one term in the US Congress, and then he has the audacity to think he’s ready to be president. How ridiculous! Sure, he delivers a good speech, but he really should get a few years more experience before he takes on such an important position. Imagine the audacity of that Abraham Lincoln guy!

Almost every speaker at the Democratic and Republican conventions says, at some point in their speech, “God Bless America”. What does this mean?

I’ll set aside the issue of the existence of this supernatural being for this blog, but I want to hear from people who accept it. What do they mean?

Do they believe that God interferes in the daily happenings in the world?

Are they asking God to do something differently from what he already planned to do? Do they believe that God listens to people, as if running an election, and if enough people ask him to “bless” the country, then he might interfere with the “natural” course of events?

Will he steer a hurricane if enough people pray for that, but not if they don’t? Let someone survive an illness or not, based on prayers received? Influence a basketball game?

What if nobody asks God to bless America? Will he “withdraw his blessing”, thereby causing something bad to happen?

Or is it just empty agreement between believers, saying “I believe in God, just like you.”

I remember a song by the Doors (not an ideal spiritual leader, of course, but anyway…) where Morrison said, “When I was back there in Seminary school there was a man who put forth the proposition that you can petition the Lord with Prayer. YOU CAN NOT PETITION THE LORD WITH PRAYER!!!”

Can you?

This is a very interesting investigation into a very sophisticated computer scam. Clicking on the wrong link can get you into a lot of trouble if you’re not careful!

It was about 10 years ago I sent out an email describing the strange chill that had come over the house in the night. It turned out that we had acquired a teenager as Devon turned 13.

Our last teenager, Derek, just turned 20 on Wednesday. We celebrated by taking him out to his choice of restaurant (Claim Jumper) and having cake at home, though not both on the same day.

Happy birthday Derek!

The interviews of McCain and Obama at Saddleback Church by Rick Warren were very interesting. I liked that the candidates were not confronting or reacting to each other. It gave a chance to focus on each candidate separately. I’d like to see more such interviews.

The contrast between the candidates was also interesting, less for their positions on issues, which are already pretty clear, than for their style.

McCain’s answers were refreshingly clear and crisp. His supporters would say that he knows what he thinks and isn’t afraid to say it. His detractors would say that he has a simplistic black and white view of a gray world.

Obama’s responses were much more nuanced and complex. His supporters would say that he sees more than one side to issues and understands that there aren’t simple answers to complicated problems. His detractors would say that he skirted around the questions and talked more like a politician than a leader.

Overall I would think that people already solidly in one camp or the other were probably not swayed by the interviews. But my feeling was that McCain might have gained a few supporters from those who didn’t know him well. He came across as friendly, frank and clear on his positions. I think he said “My friends” a little too often, but overall gave a good impression.

On the other hand, Obama is probably better known already because of the fascination with him as an unconventional candidate, so there was less room for people to learn about him.

Of course people with strong feelings one way or the other about abortion, Iraq, socialized medicine, etc. care less about presentation than substance, but I suspect that these people are in the minority. Charisma often beats content.

Personally I think the questions about faith are irrelevant and improper. The Constitution says there can be no religious tests for candidates. On the other hand, I understand that this is an important issue for many citizens. I can imagine if Thomas Jefferson were a candidate today he might have some real problems confessing that he was not a Christian and that he denied the divinity of Christ.

Here are some of the free programs I’ve been using.

Firefox
Firefox has had the 3.0 version (now 3.01) out for a few weeks. It looks pretty stable, with a couple of new features. For one thing, it’s supposed to use less memory, and release memory better when it is done using it. This seems to be true from my experience. Another enhancement is in page zoom. With Firefox you could always hold the Control key and roll the mouse scroll button to zoom in or out of a page. Before it would only zoom the text, but now it also zooms the pictures too. Handy for taking a closer look at a picture. The picture zoom option can be turned off if you want, so it can behave like it did before.

AVG
AVG has also had version 8.0 out for several weeks. I recommended the upgrade several blogs ago, but I have some reservations now. It seems that if any of your hard drives are formatted with FAT32 the new AVG doesn’t seem to work so well. I have one FAT32 drive on my computer, and a full daily scan takes about 8 hours. Anyway, the protection seems to be better than before, but this is a little inconvenient.

Encryption
TrueCrypt is a very nice free data encryption program. You can create an encrypted file that once “mounted” looks just like another hard drive. Once you unmount it, it is almost completely unreadable. I guess the FBI or NSA could probably eventually crack it, but it’s pretty secure. What’s more, you can have it set up with two passwords. If you use one password it will display one set of data, while the other password will display another set. This way you could hide all your banking information under one password, but put fake data under the other. If a bad guy holds a gun to your head and makes you give him the password, he will only get the fake data. Or for another example, US Immigration has claimed the right to examine your laptop computer when you bring it in the country. This could also be a way to keep what’s private, private and only reveal to them the fake stuff.

Photo Copier
If you have a scanner and printer, but lost or never got a photocopy program with it, PhotoCopier is a nice free alternative. It’s pretty basic with only a few adjustments, but works quite well.

CD/DVD Burner
Similarly, if you have a CD or DVD burner, but lost the burning software that came with it, CDBurnerXP is a good free alternative. It’s not quite Nero, but it’s pretty good.

Calendar
If you want a calendar, I know of three free options. Outlook is probably the best, most full-featured calendar available, but it’s definitely not free. However, Lightning is. Lightning is made to integrate into the Thunderbird email client, while Sunbird is an identical stand-alone version. Another free option is to download the Palm Desktop program. This is actually designed to synchronize with your Palm handheld, but it works fine as a stand-alone calendar, event manager, and contact manager. It’s a little more mature than Lightning, too. And the final option is Google Calendar. This has the advantage of being online, so you can access if from anywhere. Plus, if you collaborate with other people you can see all the calendars side by side and determine when you are all free for a meeting. I have not used Google Calendar, so I am only telling what I have heard.

DVD Copier
If you want to make a backup copy of your DVD (just in case the dog chews up the original — I’m not advocating piracy here!), I have used DVDShrink for a years. It will remove region restrictions and most copy-protection schemes. Plus, it can compress a two-layer DVD onto a cheap single layer DVD, so you don’t have to buy a dual layer burner and expensive dual-layer disks. The compression works very well; I’ve never noticed any image degradation. I don’t think they have a Blu-Ray version yet. If you have Nero installed, it will integrate with it and burn directly. If not, it will create the files that you can burn with CDBurnerXP or another program.

Backup
Cobian Backup program is an excellent free data backup program. It can be set to run automatically every day, or whenever you like. The only problem I have seen is that even though I have set it to only keep a limited number of backup copies, they seem to keep accumulating, so periodically I have to go in and delete old ones. Otherwise it’s an excellent program. I back up critical data on my C drive to my D drive, and vice-versa. So if either drive fails I should have a backup on the other. Of course if the computer gets stolen I would be out of luck… You can also back up to an FTP location.

PDF Reader
I’ve mentioned Foxit PDF reader before. If you tried it and had problems, try the latest version. It is much faster than Adobe Reader, and uses much less system resources.

Shop Safe
This is an option that my Credit Union offers. I’m pretty sure other banks have similar options. When I want to buy something online, the ShopSafe program will generate a one-time credit card number, limited to the amount I tell it. The charges are applied to my regular credit card, but the number is useless for future purchases. This takes most of the worry out of giving out your credit card number on the internet.

Image Viewer/Manipulator
The FastStone image viewer is an excellent image browser, viewer, slideshow program. What’s more, it has edit capabilities, both single and batch. Do you have a lot of photos you want to upload to your gallery, but they are all high resolution straight from your camera? Select the pictures you want to resize and FastStone will do them all in one shot. I used to use ACDSee, but FastStone is better and free.

Disk Usage
TreeSize will go through your whole hard drive and tell you how much space each folder is using. I find this useful when I start to run out of space. I can find out what the space is being used for and decide what to delete.

Well, that’s enough for now. What did I miss?

Poor Apollo!

About a week ago we noticed that he was licking his paw a lot. We looked at it but did not see anything unusual.

Then today he was licking it again, and saw that it was quite red under the fur on the top of his paw. We took him to the vet, who said he has an infection. It’s not hard to treat with antibiotics and topical spray, but it won’t heal if he keeps licking it. Hence, the lampshade. You can just see the red area on the top of his right front paw in the picture.

Poor puppy takes it very well. He keeps bumping into things, but doesn’t complain about it. We can only take it off when we are watching him intently and stop him whenever he starts to lick. He has to wear it for a week.

We closed escrow on the house this morning. We were over there most of the day, installing smoke detectors, curtain rods, etc. The other two boys started moving in while we were there, though I don’t think anybody will sleep there tonight. We will have to go back over tomorrow and finish up a few projects, but pretty soon we have to start behaving like Landlords (advance notice before we can visit, etc., etc.) Wait a minute — my son lives there. Can’t I just go visit him whenever I want? We’ll have to figure out the balance between being parents and landlords!

Apollo hasn’t seen his new home yet. It will be interesting to see how he adapts to living with a smaller yard, but with three kids who might play with him more (hopefully!). Derek’s probably got one more night in our house, maybe two.

You can see the house in Google Street View. Go to maps.google.com, and enter “del rio & college, 85282” for a search. Then click on the Street View link. The house is on the north-west corner.

I posted a comment in Donna’s blog about the leaks in my house from the very heavy rain last week. Two spots were especially bad — 3 buckets worth in the garage, and damaged drywall in the kitchen.

I spent the last two days on the roof over the garage. I started there because there is a big shade tree and I can work out of the sun most of the day. In fact, the shade tree was part of the problem — leaves had filled the gutter that runs along the wall and water had been diverted up out of the gutter onto the roof under the tiles. I cut out and replaced rotten wood, covered much of it with galvanized steel sheets and then tar paper before replacing the tiles. Oh yes, and I cut the tiles back a little so they don’t obstruct the gutter. Hopefully the leaves won’t accumulate so badly.

I was exhausted after two days on the roof (and the obligatory basketball game this morning), but with threats of rain tonight I dragged myself up on the roof over the kitchen. Hmm. Simple problem. Several tiles had slid down out of position. They should be nailed in place, but apparently the roofer had been in a hurry on this part of my roof. So for now, just putting them back in position should work, and I can worry about nailing them down when I have more energy.

But then I noticed a small, black, rat-sized piece of excrement (not “as big as a rat” but rather “the size a rat would produce”). Roof rats! They have been a problem in parts of the East Vally the past few years, but I hadn’t noticed any signs until now. And then it occurred to me that they are probably living under the tiles. And what’s better than a tile pushed out of position, leaving a nice access point. So now I need to keep watching to make sure they weren’t the ones pushing the tiles out of place. Maybe I blocked their front door, and they will just open it again. Sounds like it’s time to call an exterminator.