New Minority

AKO on Android no more?

2011-11-30T16:11:00.001-08:00

Today is probably the last day that you will be able to check your AKO email on your Android phone without getting a very expensive Bluetooth CAC card reader. According to this, imap will stop working, and only CAC cards will be supported after 01DEC2011. For more info, you can log into AKO, and click on the CAC resource center button on the left of the screen. On the new page that opens, on the bottom left there is a link for email on your mobile phone. I'd provide the link, but it's behind the log in page and I'm not sure how they feel about links to internal resources. If you are an AKO user, you shouldn't have any problem finding it. If you aren't an AKO user, then you don't need to know about it.

Amazingly, the bluetooth CAC card readers only work on TWO Android devices, the Dell Streak 5 and 7 and an Iphone with a stupid bluetooth adapter (Iphone already has bluetooth correct?). They cost well over $200, some sources saying that there is also a yearly fee of about $50 for the software. It's amazing to me how ridiculous the army can be about security. There is supposed be a balance between security and accessibility. Make it too secure, and no one will use it effectively. Make it too accessible, and everyone, even people not supposed to use it, will be using it. The Army always errs on the side of caution, making it utterly unusable. As someone that travels often, and hardly ever has easy access to a desk, you just made my job much harder. That translates into you paying me the same amount, but not getting as much work out of me. Good job!

Currently, I'm able to log into AKO in a browser, and from my phone without any issues, but I'm sure I'll be less effective at my job soon enough.

Edit: Thought I should update this with a link to a guide I wrote to setup AKO, since this is still working for the time being. Here is a link for some news on the bluetooth CAC card as well. Still looks like it's only available on Dell phones.

Letter from a christian friend - Belief, faith, and Santa Claus

2011-03-28T09:03:00.001-07:00

This post is actually written as a response to a friend of mine. I thought that I would post it here as it's a topic that relates well with this blog and it's been awhile since I've talked religion. I will try to write it in a way that you don't need to have a back story. I'm going to reference things that have already been said, but only in ways so that it's not necessary to know specifically what was said. I'm not attacking my friend's position, just giving my opinion of it (at his request actually), and I'm sending him an email with a link to this post, so if he feels that he needs to defend himself, he can. Friend, you know who you are, and if you wish to identify yourself, please feel free to comment as yourself, or if you would prefer, you can do so anonymously. It's been a few months since I've written this, and it's rather disjointed, and doesn't flow smoothly. I've been trying to rewrite it, but my heart just isn't in it. As many ideas as I have on religion, I just can't put much effort into discussing it, especially in the written word. I feel like I've seen behind the curtain at the magic show. I know the magician is just an illusionist, but no matter how I tell people about it, they still believe it's actual magic. I wouldn't mind people having the illusion if it was just a harmless magic show, but I think we all know that religion is much more dangerous than that. I could probably extend this post out to a book, but I don't think that it would be worth writing. There are already so many books on the subject written by brilliant people. So here is what has been written, sorry for the sloppiness of the writing. Maybe a comment would spark the creative part of my mind and get it back in the mood to write on the subject again.

It is common for believers to talk about atheists and use the words faith and belief. It is either a misunderstanding of an atheists position, or a semantic game with the words. While I do have faith in order to reach many of my conclusions, it is not the blind faith that religion requires (more on that later). The faith I have, is that this life and all my experiences are not all a part of some contrived joke, or experiment. There really is no way to know if we are in some kind of matrix, or in a dream world like in inception. Everything that we see, feel, smell, hear, etc could all be artificial and pushed into our brain from some self concealing source. Hell, our brain could be fake as well, and we could all be some kind of computer program that is being lied to. So how do I know that's not the case? I don't. I have faith that the things I experience are real based on their consistency, and the fact that I know nothing outside of those experiences. If it is all a lie, its a rather convincing lie, and there doesn't seem to be anything that I can do about it. Apparently I am not "the one" that can see the code. So I have faith that the this is all real, or at least that if it isn't, then anything I do in relation to this reality, is also apart of this reality and so therefore at least relevant to this reality. I may wake up and realize that I have been dreaming, but until I wake up, I will refrain from jumping off cliffs. I think you'll agree that we all have this type of faith because we exit buildings through the ground floor as long as we have the will to live. This faith is not the same type of faith that religious people have towards their religion.

There is also a common misconception that people that think evolution is true have faith. I do not have faith that evolution is true. I believe that with the mountains of evidence that it is the most likely explanation for how we got here. The theory of evolution is constantly being fine tuned to more accurately reflect what the evidence is telling us. Sometimes mistakes are made, or evidence pops up that contradicts an idea, and wait for it, this is big....scientific ideas change! Things that we erroneously thought are figured out to be wrong, and whatever was wrong gets replaced with a more accurate idea. There might be some people unwilling to change, stuck in there ways, but overwhelmingly the scientific community accepts those changes. Biologists don't argue about whether or not evolution happened, anyone with knowledge of it can't dispute it, there is too much evidence. Instead they discuss the finer points of how it specifically happened, in what order, and when. It is also completely false that evolution replaces a belief in god. There are plenty of people that are religious and also believe in evolution.

That is the major difference between faith, and science. Science is based on evidence, and faith is based on a decision. Once you have decided to believe in something, you believe in it without any evidence, even in spite of evidence. You can't prove that there is a god, or which one is real, you just have to believe. Otherwise we wouldn't have these discussions because it wouldn't be a faith based religion, it would be knowledge based. In fact, the more that you encounter contrary evidence to your belief, the more faith that you have to have to keep that belief. So the most faithful, doubt religion more than anyone else, but are stubbornly holding steadfast to their beliefs!

Pick any faith you don't believe in. What is different about their faith, compared to yours? They can't all be right, unless they are all partially wrong. There are millions of believers that have real true faith. If they can get comfort, be happy, be moral, do everything that you do, but in the wrong religion, then what difference does it make which religion you choose? The only thing that matters, is which one gets you into heaven or hell when you die. But there is no way for you to know who was right, since all of the dead people don't come back and tell you. What if believing in Jesus is blasphemy to the "true" religion and every christian has gone to hell and is burning to this day and into forever? There is no way to know. If it doesn't matter which religion, then why bother with religion at all?

Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby. Seriously, think about that. How can not believing in something be a religion.

The majority of religions challenge people to be a better, moral person. It's just an extra step though, you can challenge yourself to be a better more moral person without religion. You also won't blindly do what an ancient text says, and actually be immoral.

Finally, we get to Santa Claus! I believe that you specifically referenced the easter bunny, or maybe the tooth fairy, but it's all the same. We both agree that they are fabrications of the imagination, and if they are based on reality in anyway, it is so exaggerated and distorted that it's not worth mentioning. The magical claims are universally known to be false to anyone over the age of 10. If I believed them to be true, no amount of talking to you would convince you of it's veracity. Every bit of contradicting logic or evidence that you bring into the conversation could easily be explained away with some form of magic or another. As a child gets a little closer to the age at which they will stop believing in Santa, they start asking tougher and tougher questions, the truth gets harder and harder to evade. The ones that really want to believe, come up with fantastical answers to cover up any incongruities. The solutions become more and more fantastical, requiring more and more magic to believe, until at some point, for whatever reason, the magic stops and it all comes crashing down like a house of cards. It's a great idea that you can get rewards for doing good. That the world is fair, and some jerk kid out there will get just reward for being an ass by receiving coal instead of a shiny new bike. Just because it's a great idea doesn't make it true, no matter how much you wish it were so.

I can't get to Blogger!

2011-03-14T16:34:00.001-07:00

Not that I have been posting very regularly, but the network I'm on over here in Afghanistan won't let me get on to blogger. I can send posts via email (if this posted, that's how this posted), but I can't even check to see if they work! I can see comments because they come to me as an email, but I'm not sure how I can respond to them. I'm searching for an alternate source to the internet, so maybe that will allow me to respond better. Thanks for everyone that comes this way and reads my opinions!

Chrome OS Laptop CR-48 developer channel update 0.10.146.1 (Official Build 2a517638) dev x86-mario

2011-01-22T13:40:00.000-08:00

I've been using the CR-48 Chrome OS beta laptop that Google sent me quite a bit. It's got a great battery life, and it's really easy to use. It's very responsive, especially when coming out of sleep or when booting. I also like how I can let anyone use it without having to worry about my data or settings being messed with, and that they can also use it without worrying about me getting passwords, history, etc. It really has been a useful little computer.

As useful as it is, it's very limited when it comes to things not web related. It doesn't have a media player, it doesn't have a file browser, and most of the apps that you would expect on a laptop can't be used if you don't have an internet connection. The good news though, is that it's beta, and it's actively being developed, so of course it's going to change. Today I noticed that the settings wrench in the upper right corner had a little icon on it trying to get my attention. I had set the laptop to the development channel, but there hadn't been an update available yet. Turned out that there was already one available and downloaded for me today. All it took was a restart.

Best things about it so far-

You can now sync passwords along with your other synced settings. I have been slightly impatiently waiting for this one!
There is now a file browser. It recognizes thumb drives and SD cards. I took a picture with my camera and put the SD card into the SD card slot on the side of my CR-48. When I went to upload photos the above picture was there. That's how I loaded it. It is rather limited. There doesn't seem to be a way to cut/copy/paste files, or to move them around. You can delete, but that seems to be it for now. For some reason, some drives show up and others don't. I haven't figured out what the difference is yet, as I had two small micro sd cards, both formatted FAT32, one worked one didn't.
There is a media player now as well! I only tested an mp4 video that I ripped from a DVD and a few mp3 files. It seems to work pretty well, but it's very limited in nature. When you open a media file it opens in a little popup window. You can make it full screen, well mostly, it keeps the buttons and bars across the bottom and a small black bar on each side of the screen. There is a playlist, but you have to individually click each file and add it.

Not bad for the first big update. That at least touched on all three of my main complaints. There is a file browser and a media player, albeit simple ones, and they both can be used without an internet connection. Now you don't have to be completely dead in the water if you aren't connected. If Google documents was capable of working offline then I think you could have a viable alternative computer with only minimal problems/quirks. The CR-48 is not a production model, so although it has a small internal hard drive with very minimal space, that is not how a purchased laptop would be.

Note: If you are having a hard time finding out where advanced file system and the media player are, they have to be enabled first. Type about:flag in the omni bar and hit enter. It will bring up a window with various flags that can be enabled. They are not exactly stable, but I have had but a single lockup so far.

ASStrology is fake? OH no, what will we do?

2011-01-13T17:47:00.000-08:00

So, amazingly, people are just now figuring out that there are actually 13 signs (Ophiuchus) and that astrology has been out of alignment for hundreds of years and is now almost a month off of what it "should be". This means that almost everyone's sign is not what they think it is. That means that every time that you thought a horoscope was right, it wasn't actually talking about you. Here is a mostly good article on it.

http://www.nbc-2.com/Global/story.asp?S=13828331

Only part that they got wrong is this quote.

But, don't expect your horoscope reading to change. Scientists say this rotation has been known about since 500 B.C. and the horoscope calendar hasn't moved.

The horoscope may not change, but what your sign is has changed. That means your horoscope is different! Oh man, got caught up correcting people on Twitter. Must let ignorance continue, there are too many of them.

Google gave me a Krismas present!

2010-12-15T18:58:00.000-08:00

Google sent me a Cr-48 Chromium laptop for FREE! You can't imagine how awesome it was to find that on my door step. I just went to their beta sign up, and a little more than a week later I had one! If you haven't already signed up for it, give it a shot, and maybe you will see one on your front porch. Here is the link for more info, with sign up at bottom of that page. I'll go into better detail some other time, gotta give it a good test run first.

http://www.google.com/chromeos/pilot-program-cr48.html

Thanksgiving in under 2 mins

2010-11-26T15:48:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving world! Here is our turkey day feast time-lapsed to under 2 mins. Was a great time!

Android Pumpkin!

2010-10-28T18:40:00.000-07:00

So my buddy Dan came over to help carve pumpkins, and gave me the idea to carve an Android one. So I downloaded the pumpkin carving app, and it carved the pumpkin for me. Android phones are so awesome.

Where are all the billionaires at?

2010-10-27T20:31:00.000-07:00

This is a pretty interesting map showing where all of the billionaires are in the world. The bigger the circle, the more money. I suppose it's probably their main home, as they probably all have many of them. If there is a billionaire in the same place, they stack them up. The US is crowded with them. If any of those billionaires want to give me a few million, just send me an email and we'll figure out how to transfer it over. I will be eternally grateful, or at least for another 70 some odd years. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, do you have a PayPal account? Love what you guys are doing with the company. I'm probably not your number one fan, but I'm at least in the top ten. They didn't have a good way to import to a blog, so it's just a trimmed screen shot. Go to the site and check it out for an interactive map.

http://www.forbes.com/static_html/bill/2005/bill05distmap.shtml

Three big changes coming

2010-10-10T06:59:00.000-07:00

There are three big changes coming that I think will affect our population more than any other.

Vertical farming in skyscrapers, growing our food where we live in a closed system allowing maximum growth from minimal resources all while being organic.
Clean power, or maybe a better way to store/transport already existing clean power. This could be significantly better batteries, fusion power, neutrino based wireless power, who knows I'm just making stuff up know.
Cars that drive themselves.

I should have known that Google would be the one to save the day. Apparently they've already driven 140,000 miles in an automatically driven car in the San Francisco Bay area. I'm excited about this, and can't wait for it to be mainstream. Hopefully it won't take long.

Modest and proud of it

2010-09-28T11:49:00.000-07:00

So it's been an interesting time for me lately. The contract that I work for didn't get picked up by my company. Another company was probably going to get it, and we were all going to have to switch companies. Then because of some kind of legalese stuff, maybe we weren't. Then maybe we were going to have to go on furlough, then blah, blah, blah, they don't know. So while all of this stress inducing stuff was going on, I'm also refinancing my home for a lower rate, registering for college at Columbia Southern University to finish my bachelors, and still trying not to be a pig and have some sort of a healthy-ish diet. Then, on top of that, I was trying to find reasons to justify a raise because I felt like I was being under paid for the skill sets and experience I bring to the table. While searching to find other jobs that I would qualify for and what salary they would pay, I came across a job that I would much rather have, and I qualify for it. So I decided to test the limits of my stomach lining and my sanity by trying to get a new job on top of all the other things going on.

So trying to get more money for myself is very difficult for me. I'm basically modest. I can sometimes be cocky, but it's more of a joke than anything else. I am pretty confident in my skills as an electronic technician, but I'd rather prove myself by fixing something than I would by talking about how awesome I am. I'm also more of a jack of all trades than I am an expert in any one particular piece of hardware or software. I have some basic knowledge of a whole bunch of things, and then I've got really good fiddling skills, and I'm not afraid to click buttons or flip switches to figure out what something does. I'm also not afraid of technical manuals, in fact if there is a well written one for whatever new system I'm about to try and fix, then I'd rather dive in to it and learn. I can't say how many times I've "fixed" a system just by following the instructions that no one else wanted to read.

One caveat about the level of confidence that I have, it's based on the Dunning-Kruger effect. Here's the most important parts of it grabbed from Wiki

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

I remember a time when I thought I was a lot better at fixing electronics than I actually was. I thought I was the shit, and that I could fix anything just by being near it. I didn't know any better techs than myself. I was in over my head pretty quickly. That pretty much matches a description of someone that doesn't know what they are doing so much so that they can't even identify that they don't know it well. It's been a long road since then, with many lessons learned, and I can see now how naive I was. I also see how much I still don't know, and that most of it will probably remain that way. I've also met some real geniuses that are astounding in the things that they know.

Cupcakes...

2010-09-24T09:26:00.000-07:00

PROBLEM!

There are two things about cupcakes that I don't like. The first being that the icing and the cake are not evenly distributed causing an imbalance of tastiness depending on what part of the cupcake eating event you are at. One viable solution is to take very large bites, therefore giving yourself the correct ratios of cupcake to frosting in your food intake receptacle. That's were my second dislike of cupcakes comes in. Taking large bites can lead to your mouth being to full to accept the necessary amount of milk, it can lead to long awkward pauses in conversation and most dangerously, frosting on the nose.

SOLVED!!!

Not being one to bring up a problem without at least offering a feasible solution, I give you the cupcake sandwich. It's really quite simple, and I'm not sure how I've gone so long without figuring it out. I quite accidentally came across the solution. I was in the midst of a conversation, and was playing with my cupcake, delaying the awkward pause that I was inevitably going to create by taking a bite out of it. When I removed it from the cupcake wrapper, the bottom half cracked a little and almost came off. I haphazardly removed it, and placed it on top (also haphazardly). So I can't really take credit for discovering it, haven't even searched the internets to see if it already exists, but I can at least recognize a good situation and capitalize on it. Enjoy!

Perspective

2010-08-12T18:39:00.000-07:00

It's difficult to imagine a world without myself in it. I've never seen the world through anyone else's eyes. Maybe I've seen a movie shot from someone else's point of view, but I still watched it as something external to me, and through my perspective. I've never known what someone was truly thinking.

It's also hard to imagine a day after I've died. Everything that has ever happened with out me there, is irrelevant to me, only the things that I've seen, experienced, felt for myself are real. Every book, every movie, every song, whether fiction or fact, the characters don't actually exist. The tragedies, the comedies, the romances, are only ideas that enter my mind. Some of the ideas stay, set up house, rearrange the person I am, into something new, and other ideas they leave without another thought given to them. There is no external world to me. It is only raw data streaming into my mind. When I die, my world disappears, ceases to exist. Life ends in my world, the sun stops shining, the stars fade, the earth dissolves into nothing. Everything dissolves into nothing, and then even the concept of nothing is gone.

Were any of the things I saw real? Are there other people experiencing their own world too? Does their world exist when mine stops? I don't know. Every bit of the world I've ever known has always existed within some form of myself. How could it possibly exist without me?

When is the HTC EVO going to get Android 2.2? TODAY!

2010-08-03T04:58:00.001-07:00

I haven't even started thinking about when I'm getting the Android 2.2 (Froyo) on my HTC Evo, because the 2.1 upgrade for the HTC Hero took close to 6 months. I wasn't going to even start looking for info on it until Halloween. To my surprise, this morning I woke up to an update notice on my phone that said, 2.2! Wow! That was fast. It's way to early to see if it broke any apps, added any bugs, or if it's super awesome like all the hype is saying. I'll have to do another post about it later, just wanted to say that I was pretty jazzed to get the update so soon. The HTC version is 3.26.651.6 if anyone is interested.

Daily Machinations

2010-08-02T18:57:00.000-07:00

Pandora introduced me to Regina Spektor. I'm not a huge fan of some of her songs, they're just alright, but this one is superb. It elicits a vision of a half machine, half human hybrid that is immobilized by all of it's connections to the apartment. Random human like interactions with the apartment are life like in there mannerisms, but completely pointless to the survival of the "machine". Outside, machines are fighting and destroying each other, while a constant supply train is feeding the machine with tea sets, and cute new outfits in exchange for "her" unique perspective and organics. Anyways, here is the music. No video though, sorry, I only give what the internet has to offer.

Flying Spaghetti Monster Sighting at Fremont Summer Solstice Parade!

2010-06-19T20:25:00.000-07:00

I went to the Fremont Summer Solstice parade today. It was a truly unique parade. There were naked painted cyclists at the beginning, which was very fun to watch. Hundreds of painted people, most of them nude and the rest mostly nude riding bikes, and other human powered wheeled vehicles. I was smiling and laughing the whole time along with everyone else in the seriously crowded sidewalks. Then the actual parade started, which had some very simple rules...

No written or printed words or logos
No animals (except guide dogs and service animals)
No motorized vehicles (except wheelchairs)
No real weapons or fire

It made for a very different atmosphere than any other parade I've ever been too, and of course it also helped that there are some very free spirits in Fremont/Seattle. I loved it, and hope that I happen to be in town for another one some day. I really liked how it didn't turn into a platform for one cause or another. It was really about the art, and the art was great.

My favorite part? No, not the cyclists, although that was pretty cool. My favorite was the FSM. He came to bless us with his noodley appendages!

For more info about the parade

http://fremontartscouncil.org/summer-solstice-parade/

For more info about the cyclists

http://solsticecyclist.org/

For more info about the FSM

http://www.venganza.org/

And if you want to see the naked painted cyclists, here are some pics I took. NSFW I say again, Not safe for work, although the pictures aren't very high res either. You can also see a few short videos if you follow the above youtube videos to my account.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/boonxeven/sets/72157624188973355/

HTC EVO 4G

2010-06-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

I got one! W00T

All the Android apps I have installed on my HTC Hero

2010-06-03T12:53:00.001-07:00

I wanted to write all these down in case I forget one when I migrate to the HTC Evo tomorrow, and I thought that since I'm writing it down, I may as well share it with other people. Maybe you'll find an app that you didn't know about. If you see one that's not listed here that you really like, please tell me about it in the comments. I'm going to do some reviews every once in awhile on Android apps, and when I do I'll edit this post to link to the review. Until then, you'll have to guess what the apps do! Ha! All of these are free except for some of the games. I purchased the full version of Buka, Gem Miner, Abduction, and Robo Defense. They were each only a couple of bucks, and I don't regret spending the money at all.

Mint.com personal finance
Speedtest.net speed test
Key ring reward cards
Buka
Ringdroid
Google Goggles
Google Translate
Google Sky Map
Movies (Flixster)
Google Maps
Gem Miner: Dig Deeper
Totemo Lite
Shazam
Pandora Radio
Bubble
Amazon.com
Robo Defense
Mario Soundboard
Abduction! World Attack

Doing that list, I just realized that I didn't reinstall Pdanet after upgrading to Android 2.1. Need to do that and make sure it works before I travel again!

Can't wait for the HTC Evo 4G tomorrow!

2010-06-03T12:51:00.000-07:00

So tomorrow I'm getting up extra early to go get a new android phone. I already have the HTC Hero, but my wife will inherit that and I will be getting the HTC Evo 4G! So excited. I've been (im)patiently waiting since they started talking about it back in march. I really like the Hero and unless they really mess it up, I'll love the Evo. I'm lucky enough to be in Texas where 4g coverage is actually pretty good, so I'll be able to take full advantage of it. If you haven't seen or heard of the phone, it's well worth a Google.

The only bad things I've heard are that it's too big, doesn't have good battery life, and won't get the newest version of Android anytime soon. I don't think it will be too big for me, but it's a personal preference, so that one is up to you. I've only heard battery life sucked from a few places, and those were not all that reliable, or had unrealistic expectations. All phones are using basically the same battery technology. There hasn't been a huge technological breakthrough that will suddenly give new phones super batteries. Super smart phones are doing so much more than just being a phone, and battery technology isn't keeping pace. I don't expect a hand held computer to do everything and also last for days on end, in fact, I don't even expect all day. If I was only using it as a phone, and had everything turned off, in a place that had good wireless coverage, then I would expect it to last all day, and I think the Evo will. I plan on using it for directions, surfing the web, streaming audio from pandora, and watching videos, and when I'm doing that on top of it still being a phone, then I plan on plugging it in while in the car and at my desk. I also have an extra battery pack that takes double A batteries and plugs into usb phones. If that's too much to ask from you, then the phone probably isn't for you. I suggest a plain old flip phone, its battery will last you nicely.

Lastly, Android 2.2 is already being released, and because HTC packages their phones with an additional user interface called Sense, it takes longer for them to release updates. It will come from the store with 2.1, and probably won't get an update until the later half of the year. There will be a ton of rumors saying it's getting the update on such and such date, but I'm not even going to pay attention and I'll get it when I get it. Would I rather have 2.2 sooner than later? Of course, but it's not a big deal. I like 2.1 on the hero, and it doesn't even have all of 2.1 unlocked. Stay tuned for a review coming soon.

How to configure AKO email on your Android phone

2010-05-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

*Edited SEP 08, 2010 to incorporate changes and compatibility notes for different types of android phones. Should work for most Android phones now, please let me know if it didn't work for you, or if there was something different. Details of what was changed at bottom of post. Thanks for everyones input.

AKO is the army's internet site/mail server for soldiers and some DOD/contractors. These steps are written so that anyone should be able to configure this on their Android phone, but you can possibly also use the info to configure it on other phones as well. A lot of the information automatically prefills after you've entered it once, so if it's already entered, then just ignore and move on. In order for this to work you have to allow non-CAC logins from AKO. In the AKO main page select My Account dropdown menu, then select Account settings and then Change Password. There is a check mark labeled "Set CAC Only Login" that must not be selected for this to work. You may have to login to AKO with your CAC and enter a new password to do this.

Incoming Mail Settings

IMAP
SSL required (for the Samsung Vibrant and probably for other Galaxy S phones select SSL required - accept all certificates)
The IMAP Server is imap.us.army.mil
Port 993

Outgoing Mail Settings

SSL required (for the Samsung Vibrant and probably for other Galaxy S phones select SSL required - accept all certificates)
The SMTP server is mailrouter.us.army.mil
The port is 465

NOTE The following steps are specifically for the HTC Hero, and the HTC EVO running 2.1 (and 2.2), but may also be helpful to anyone running HTC Sense or other Android phones.

The first time you open the mail client (cleverly named "Mail" under all programs) it asks you to choose a mail provider, or if you already have other email accounts setup open the mail client. Select Menu, then more, then new account, or you can select the circle with a little triangle in it at the top left of the screen and then select new account.

Select "Other (POP3/IMAP)"
Enter your full email address
Enter your password, this is case sensitive. I click show password so I can see if I typed it wrong. Don't do this if there are spies around.
Click next or manual setup, it doesn't matter because there isn't a profile built into Android for AKO, so clicking next just brings you to the manual setup screen anyways.
You should now be in the incoming settings page. In the drop down menu for protocol select IMAP
Enter your full email address.
Enter your user name. It will probably autofill with your email address, but that isn't your username. Your username is what you use to log into AKO. As far as I know, that is your email address minus the @us.army.mil part. That's what worked for me anyways, if yours is different, please let me know in the comments.
Enter your password.
Enter imap.us.army.mil for the IMAP server.
In the security type dropdown select SSL.
The server port needs to be 993.
Select "next". If it asks you about certificates (it asks the first time), accept them. It will verify account information and if you entered everything right it will bring you to the outgoing server settings.
Select "Login required"
Enter your username
Enter your password
Enter mailrouter.us.army.mil for the SMTP Server.
In the security type dropdown select SSL.
The server port needs to be 465.
Select next. It will verify account information again, and if you entered everything right it will bring you to the Edit account page.
Enter an account name. You can leave it with the default that it auto fills, or you can name it whatever you like. This name is for when you select different mail accounts. I named mine AKO, because I like coming up with unique exotic names.
Enter your name.
Select Finish setup.

You should now be able to send and recieve emails from your AKO email. If you aren't getting updates frequently enough (or to frequently) or if you aren't seeing certain emails in your inbox, change the Send & Receive settings by selecting Menu, then more, then settings. It also by default adds a signature to all out going emails which can be changed or stopped from General settings. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

*I edited this post to reflect the differences that my army buddy Dan pointed out. Depending if you are running straight Android, or HTC Sense, or some other user interface for Android, then the steps are going to be slightly different, so I've just added a list of the settings and then below that is the detailed steps needed specifically for the HTC Hero, the HTC EVO 4G, and in all likelyhood any HTC Android Phone with the Sense UI. Also edited to show the slight change that the Samsung Vibrant (and likely other Galaxy S phones) have to do in order to accept certificates. On my HTC Evo if someone sends a message with a digital signature from Outlook, it says mail is on the server. Tested this with a Nexus One and a Samsung Vibrant (what my friends happen to have) and neither one of those had the same problem. Seems to be an HTC thing. If you are having the same problem you can configure your email as POP, or try using K-9 mail like Pat says below. Thanks Evan for pointing out how to change the settings to POP and thanks to Pat for explaining the difference and why it's (probably) best not to use POP.

Everyone draw Mohammed

2010-05-21T19:43:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'm a day late, don't kill me...

So the reason you aren't supposed to depict Mohamed is so that you don't idolatrize him. I promise I won't idolatrize him, if you promise not to try and kill me. I thought Islam is the religion of peace? Why is it that I"m afraid to post a silly picture?

Slurry of posts and a new blog banner?

2010-05-14T14:17:00.000-07:00

So months of inactivity, and then three posts in short rapid fire succession and then on top of that, a new blog banner? Oh wait, there isn't a new blog banner? Hmmm, okay, that's because I can't decide on what to take a panoramic picture of to show the essence of this blog. Any ideas? Has to be something to do with a minority, technology, and atheism.

Where are my vertical farms?

2010-05-14T13:57:00.000-07:00

So I came across this article on Discovery news talking about whether organic farming was better or worse than regular farming. Organic farming produces about half the yield, but increases the biodiversity of nature by %12 (including weeds if that's good?). If you are interested, go ahead and follow the link over and read about it, but for me, I was just disapointed. I saw the discussion as pointless because there is another alternative to both organic and normal farming, that has numerous benefits over both and shouldn't be difficult to do. Apparently I grossly underestimated how hard it was to grow plants inside, or how many of the benefits there would be when I blogged about vertical farms and then right afterwards about circular farming almost two years ago! I expected it to take awhile for vertical farms to really take off and be the main staple of our food source, but I didn't think nothing would happen at all. Yeah there are some better drawings available, and maybe a restaurant in Dubai to have an indoor garden/vertical farm, but that's it. I really expected a city like Austin or Seattle to pioneer the first organic vertical farm with lush delicious fruits and vegetables available year round, locally grown, with no pesticides and maybe even growing sustainable fish. So which multi-millionaire (or billionaire) out there is going to grab this idea and make a change that will forever affect humanity? You will make money and save little starving kids, or cut down pollution, or whatever you want to make it about. Anyone? Come on Oprah, I know you follow this blog and want to change the world. You've got the money right? Ah, oh well. Guess I'll start a garden in my garage.

Diaspora

2010-05-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

This is something I'm keeping my eyes on. It seems like it could be a much better alternative for social networking. Check it out.
http://www.joindiaspora.com/

P90X week um, I'm not sure

2010-04-18T17:20:00.000-07:00

So it's been three weeks since I started P90X. I have only kind of been following it, missing more days than I do. Excuses? Yeah, I have them, but mostly it just comes down to time. It's hard to add an hour of working out to an already busy schedule. I'm working on it, and hopefully it will become habit. More when there is more.

P90X Week one Day one!

2010-03-29T19:35:00.001-07:00

Wow am I tired. I am going to be hurting tomorrow (and for the next 90+ days presumably), and I couldn't even keep up with them at all! I'd post my before pictures, but those are only motivational if you look better than they do. I'll report back in once a week at minimum, and maybe more for some of the really brutal ones. Right now I'm 5' 10' and 240.8 lbs. Do your best and forget the rest.

St. Patty's Day parade and storm troopers!

2010-03-18T11:40:00.000-07:00

I'm on a business trip to Linthicum, MD. Last Sunday a co worker and I decided to go to Baltimore and check out the inner harbor. By luck we just happened to pick a great day. Baltimore was celebrating St. Patty's day with a 5K marathon and a parade. We showed up just in time to catch a bite to eat. We asked a local where to eat and he said that J. Paul's Dining Saloon was his summer hang out and we should try that. So we did, and it was good. I had the JP's 89 Burger which was worth the impending heart attack that it will probably cause. It was a huge burger piled with BBQ pulled pork, cole slaw and onion rings. While it was hard to handle and ended up falling apart, it was delicious. We finished eating and walked over to watch the runners finish up the 5K. I've never seen so much spandex, red faces, and green shirts. Shortly thereafter the parade started. I've seen better parades on tv, but never in person. I was pretty impressed and we stayed for the whole thing.

My favorite part was an irish dance group that stopped right in front of us and did a little jig. Unfortunately the video on my phone sucks and I forgot my camera. You can get the gist, but you can't tell how really cute it is. The girls in the video look a lot older than they really were because the video quality sucks, and the crowd that they are in front of is actually little kids sitting down, not adults. The girls in the front are probably 5/6 years old and then they got older as they went back to probably no older than 15. It was one of the cutest things I've seen in awhile.

Last, but far from least, after the parade there was a green storm trooper walking around. He had a very high quality costume, and the green made it even better. When he talked it even sounded like it was a "real" storm trooper. A chick walked by and asked him what he was supposed to be. Really? I thought it was pretty obvious, but I suppose there are still people out there that haven't seen Star Wars. Anyways, thought I would share. We had a great time.

Where have you been?

2010-02-23T13:10:00.000-08:00

I don't think that I have to many followers, but if you are still out there and wondering where I have been then this post is for you. I got back from Afghanistan safely, I'm out of the army now (mostly), I'm back in my old military contracting job, and I'm taking a little bit of college. I should finish up my associates degree this semester, although I had to switch out of computer electronics and into a general studies because I couldn't make my schedule work with the last two classes I needed and it's been over two years since I was in school (holy run on sentence Batman!) Time to finish that up and move on to not completing my bachelor's degree for a couple of years.

Biggest thing going on in my life right now? I'm always tired. So tired in fact, that I'm going to get a sleep study tonight to hopefully figure out what's wrong with me. After all the blood work they've narrowed it down to either sleep apnea, narcolepsy or idiopathic hypersomnia (big words for being tired, but they don't know why). They can only figure out which one of those it is by a sleep study, hence the, uh, sleep study tonight. I'm a little nervous about what they'll find, and don't really know what to think about it. Hopefully they find something small and easy to fix so I can put this behind me and not be so tired. More to follow when I actually know what's up.

What to expect from me in the future? More blog posts! Yay! I love blog posts! I've been watching my blog hits and where they come from. Seems that by far my tech reviews get the most hits, especially my green vs black hard drive comparison, which is about five minutes away from an update. I would expect more tech reviews, since that's what the masses apparently want from a godless geek, but not to worry, I'll still rant about religion, politics, and of course the upcoming Jelly Belly jelly bean scandal.

Improv Everywhere

2009-12-09T13:19:00.000-08:00

I just found out about Improv Everywhere, and I love them! They are really original and fun. I wish that this would happen around me! Check them out on youtube, or at their website.

Jesus has a brother named God.

2009-12-09T11:19:00.000-08:00

My daughter (4) goes three times a week to a christian preschool/daycare. There really isn't good childcare around here unless it's affiliated with religion or really expensive. I don't know why that is, it could be for a number of reasons, maybe the church (and by extension it's members) help offset the cost of the childcare, maybe it falls under a non-profit organization and saves money that way, or maybe it's just that it's more comforting to drop your kids off at a religious daycare and so you have to be affiliated with religion to be successful. Maybe it's a little of all three. I like to think that it's the church offsetting the cost. It really gives a sense of community, even if it's not quite my community. Anyways, christmas is coming up soon, and according to the school calendar on the curriculum for today was Jesus Christ part 1. I was actually looking forward to it because my daughter and I always have such interesting conversations after some one talks religion with her. I think she really enjoys that not everyone agrees on religion. Everything else I either don't know, or (I think) I do, but god and Jesus are a maybe. So, here is as close as I can remember the conversation that we had after I picked her up today.

Me - How was school today?

Lily - Good. (long pause) Papa, what do you pray for?

Me - I don't pray for anything. I don't believe that Jesus and God are real and so I don't pray. What do you pray for?

Lily - I pray for Jesus. It's good for him. He wants everything to be safe. He wants the trees, and all the leaves that are falling, and the fence and my hair and my hands... (Lily lists off everything that she sees for about a minute)...to be safe.

Me - Oh, that' really nice of him.

Lily - Yeah. Did you know that Jesus has a brother? (really excited)

Me - (smiling big) No? Who is his brother?

Lily - God, but he's better than him.

Me - He is?

Lily - (the following was said very excitedly and quickly)Yes. He's a king and Jesus is a king too. He's a really good king. He wants everyone to pray for him and everything to be safe, but he died. (spoken in a hushed voice) but don't tell Grandma cause I don't think she knows. But you don't believe in his family and Mama doesn't either, but Grandma believes in his family. And Brother and me we're to0 little to know, so we'll decide later (YES! That's my girl!).

Me- That's right, papa (for some reason I talk in third person with my kids sometimes) doesn't think there is any reason to believe in Jesus' family, but Grandma does. Grandma believes that Jesus died, and after three days he came back to life.

Lily - yeah, and when he came back he was different. He changed his name or something.

Me - What did he change his name to?

Lily - Jesus

Me - What was it before he died?

Lily - Jesus too, but it was different.

We pull up in the drive way and I start getting them out. She is telling me again all of the things that she sees and that Jesus wants them to be safe. When I get her out she has a postcard sized piece of paper that I now see has a picture of a girl praying on it, as well as a bunch of food, a happy looking family, a church, and a bible.

Me - What's this girl doing?

Lily - Praying for Jesus.

Me - What's this right here? (pointing at the Bible)

Lily - Um, I know! It's the bible!

Me - Like Grandma reads?

Lily - Yeah! but this ones not a making bible.

Me - A making bible?

Lily - Yeah, this one's not for making stuff, but some bibles are. Grandma's shows you how to make like food and stuff, but this one doesn't.

Me - Oh, I think you are talking about Grandma's cook book, but she also has a bible like this one.

Lily - No, this one is different. Some bibles show you how to make things and some don't.

Me - Oh, I see.

We get inside and her brother throws a tantrum because it's nap time and he is super tired and by the time he stops fussing Lily is all tucked into her bed to take a nap, so we didn't get to talk about Jesus and his brother anymore. I'm sure that more will come soon. She is so impressionable at this age. It's not surprising that so many people can't question their faith. If you were raised that Jesus is an absolute fact, for all of your childhood, then it would be just as much of a fact to you as anything else. I wouldn't be bothered if my kids grew up to believe in Jesus and god, or any of the other countless gods out there, but I would be bothered if they only believed it because someone (including me) told them to.

Edit : I couldn't remember how Lily worded the bible for making stuff. After she woke up and explained to me, she said it the same way and so I changed it. Apparently there are two types of bibles, making-bibles and regular ones. Not sure what she is confused about, but she knows the difference between cook books and bibles, and insists that her teachers said that grandma's was a making-bible.

Not used to being in this state of mind.....version 2.0

2009-11-30T14:09:00.000-08:00

This post is an exact 180 of the last state of mind post. I was so annoyed/bored/angry for the last year in Afghanistan, that now I'm not used to being so happy! My cheeks hurt from smiling and it's really great to be back home. I'm really appreciative of my beautiful wife, Jess. She is such a sweet person, so understanding and so caring. If she could, she would hold everyone in the world in her arms and tell them that everything is going to be okay, truly the epitome of what a mother should be. I'm having such a blast with my darling daughter Lily. She has grown up so much while I was gone. She now has the patience and attention to sit and play board games, which is one of my most favorite things to do. She is so intelligent, beautiful, and engaging, and of course she takes after her mother, as a total sweetheart. Last, and certainly not least, I'm amazed by the courage of my handsome son Jack. There isn't a playground (or anything really) that he can't conquer. He climbs, slides, bangs, smashes, and everything else boys are known for, but still has his sensitive side as he carries his pet kitty everywhere he goes. It reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes. The absolute best part? They all love giving hugs! My truly favorite. Goodbye army!

Not used to being in this state of mind...

2009-09-02T08:58:00.000-07:00

I'm generally such a happy person. I'm pretty easy going. I usually make the best of things. I've been making the best of things for so long now. I'm just tired of it. I wish Afghanistan was a person, I would punch him/her (that's right, even if Afghanistan was a girl) right in the face. So, to help cheer me up, I'm going to list all the good things about being here. Ha, there I go trying to make the best of things again. Sneaky optimism, very sneaky.

I've met a lot of really cool people. Some of them have become good friends that I imagine will be that way for a long time to come.

I've been a help to a many people; Lots of people a little bit of help, and a few people lots of help. I enjoy being useful, so that's good.

I've realized that my life in the states is pretty close to heaven on earth. I will cherish everything so much more than I did before. I'll also worry a lot less about all the shit that doesn't matter.

I have also managed to save a lot more money than usual. Actually, my darling wife has been doing the saving. It was probably a lot easier for her to do without me constantly buying gadgets and gizmos.

I'm in better shape than I was before I came here. I haven't lost all the weight that I wanted to, but I've still got more time. I've already lost about 25lbs. I want to lose another 10 more or so. Even though I haven't lost as much weight as I want, part of that is because I've bulked up a little bit. So while I've been losing bad weight, I've been gaining good weight, and I feel much more healthy. I go on leave in less than a month, and I think that my wife will like what I've been doing in the gym.

That's about as positive as I can be. It already helped a little bit just to think about it.

Cup of Joe for a Joe

2009-08-26T02:28:00.000-07:00

Do you have one of those yellow ribbons on your car that says "I support our troops?" If you have one (or even if you don't), and you wanted to do a little bit more than pay your taxes and sport a car magnet there is a cool program offered through Green Beans Coffee that you may be interested in. You go on to the website at the bottom and give a few dollars and a few words of encouragement or thanks and then Green Bean will give a soldier credit to buy a coffee. If you aren't familiar with Green Beans, it's a lot like a Starbucks, but for deployed soldiers. So instead of waiting in Starbucks for hours on end hoping that a soldier will randomly walk in so you can buy him/her a coffee, just buy them one from the comfort of your computer. Who knows, you might even buy me one!

http://www.greenbeanscoffee.com/coj/index.php

I'm still here...

2009-07-09T08:42:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in a little while. I really hate being away from my family. It's such a drain being here that I have a hard time being motivated to post anything. It's hard to feel proud about being here when I don't want to be here. If I could leave right now I would. It feels like a prison sentence, like I'm being punished. None of this is worth it for me, but there is nothing I can do except wait for my time to be up. Sorry for being negative, but I thought that maybe it would feel better to put it down in words. On a positive note, when I am finished here, I'm finished for good. My obligation to the military is entirely complete. I'll never have to be away from everyone I love for so long ever again.

There are no atheists in foxholes B-huts...

2009-06-21T04:59:00.000-07:00

I come across the saying that there are no atheists in foxholes rather often. It's a pretty common cliche, and I'm sure most people have seen it. It's a rather ridiculous claim saying that Atheists are all hypocrites. Although I am an atheist and I have been in foxholes, I've never been in one besides during training. I think the whole point of the quote is that when an atheist is in trouble that they turn towards god for help, especially in the case of mortal danger.

During my recent deployment to Afghanistan I was relatively safe, especially compared to some of my fellow soldiers. I believe the death rate at our base was actually safer than most cities, and highways, but I still think there were some cases where I can personally attest to whether or not there are atheists in ~~foxholes~~ B-huts. The best example would probably be in the early morning of Father's Day 2009 when we were awakened to a large explosion. We were close enough to the blast from an incoming rocket that debris rained down on our B-hut. There could have been more incoming rockets, and I was standing in my room trying to decide what to do. B-huts in case you aren't aware, are little buildings made of plywood and tin that soldiers in Afghanistan regularly sleep in if they are "lucky". An incoming rocket would have no problem destroying the building and seriously injuring or killing any inhabitants. So as an atheist in a life threatening situation did I suddenly fall to my knees and start praying? No. In fact, it wasn't even an idea that crossed my mind. You see, the key point to atheism is that I don't think there is a god. Why would I pray to something that I don't think exists? It's silly and I wouldn't. If there is a god, which I'm not saying there is or isn't, just that I seriously doubt there is, why would he value my wishes(prayers) over the wishes of all the other millions of starving and/or dying people in the world every day? All I wondered about was whether or not anyone was hurt, if more attacks were coming, and whether we should gear up and get in the bunkers or not.

If you are one of those people that like to use the fox hole cliche, maybe you should reconsider. It's silly, and untrue. Here is a link on the attack http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/21/terror/main5101364.shtml. Unfortunately we lost two American soldiers that morning. My heart goes out to their friends and family members.

Should I buy a kindle?

2009-06-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

I've been seriously debating whether to get a Kindle 2 or not. I thought it might help to list the pros and cons. I also thought that I would throw it on the blog to get some outside input. So, here is my pros/cons list and please put forth any thoughts you may have on the subject.

Pros

Have you seen electronic ink screens? They are freakin' awesome!
Lots of books, low weight. I travel a lot (when I'm back in the real world) and often a significant portion of my travel weight is books. I also don't take as many books as I want with me when I travel to limit weight.
Built in dictionary. I love new words. I look up lots of words. Carrying a dictionary is another book that I don't want to carry, and you don't always have access to the internet.
Being able to take notes without messing up the book is nifty. I'm not sure if I don't take lots of notes because I don't like writing in books, or if I'm just not the note taking type. I do usually have a small notepad with me, but that's mostly just to write down words I want to look up. I wouldn't have to write down words to look up anymore, but I might be more inclined to take notes if it were built in to the book.
Not having to deal with bookmarks and losing your place. Enough said.
I'm a gadget whore and a Kindle 2 would really give me geek cred, whatever that means.
Free Wikipedia just about anywhere. I find Wiki to be almost as useful as Google. In terms of time, I actually spend more time on Wiki than I do on Google, but that's not a fair comparison because Google is a gateway and Wiki is a destination. Wikipedia is a truly valuable tool and it would be a real boon to have it in your pocket (Hey, I have big pockets!).
Music. In some situations it would fill a dual role as mp3 player and book reader. Although with how small mp3 players are and how long the batteries last, I wouldn't use this all to often. Could be nice to listen to music and read while on an elliptical or exercise bike though.

Cons

The price.
THE PRICE! Seriously, even with the fact that you would be saving money on the cheaper electronic books, it would still take awhile to recoup the initial $360 investment. If you saved $10 a book (which you won't), it would still take you 36 books to break even. That would probably take me more than a year and maybe as long as two. Saving money on books can't be my motivation if the warranty is already expired before I recoup my money.
Graphic novels probably don't transfer well to Kindle. Not that I read all that many, but who wants to be excluded?
Black and white screen. Tied in with the above, but also with a lot of science magazines and blogs that I follow there are a lot of really cool color pictures that wouldn't transfer over.
You have to subscribe(read pay) to blogs. I'm all for bloggers making money, hell, I wish I made money blogging, but I don't know if I would pay for them directly.
No videos/movies.
When I'm at work, we have some down time that can be (and has been) spent on reading. This is in the cons because I'm typically in facilities that don't allow electronic devices inside. This is only a little con because only a small amount of my time is spent reading at work.
No expansion/memory card slot. If I'm going to use this for music and books, it would be nice to stick an 8gb micro SD card in there for extra storage
After reading a book I enjoy, I can't just hand it to my friend to read, unless I want to give up my Kindle until he/she is done.

That's all the pros and cons I can think of right now. If I think of more later I'll throw them on at the bottom as an edit. As it stands, all the pros are either things that make my life a little easier, or things that make me look cool. I obviously don't concern myself all that much with looking cool, so the only thing I gain is convenience. You know what's not convenient? Work, and work is what I would be doing to pay for the $360 price tag. That basically sums up the cons. It's really a lot of money just for a little bit of convenience. I think it's the future of books, and that eventually all books will be predominantly electronic, if not exclusively, but being a part of the future right now is always expensive. Even if I was a millionaire (which I'm definitely not) I would still think this was a silly way to spend money. Of course the whole point of being a millionaire is being able to spend your money in silly ways.

The ants go marching...

2009-06-04T10:26:00.000-07:00

Bunch of ants all marching from one hole to another hole about 10 feet away. I've never seen such a mass migration of ants before. They were almost all going in the same direction. They weren't carrying anything. They all looked like the same kind of ants, and didn't seem to be fighting. I've walked this way dozens of times and never seen it before or since. My buddy and I watched this go on for more than five minutes, a steady stream of ants. Anyone know what they were doing? Maybe running from the Egyptians and about to wander the desert for 40 years?

Afghanistan ornithology - The Common Myna AKA the Indian Myna

2009-06-02T02:00:00.000-07:00

I'm stuck on base all the time, which is good because it's safe, but sucks because it's boring. I've taken to following birds around to pass the time. There is one interesting bird that I've never seen before that I've been documenting. A quick Google search of Afghan birds and I found out it's probably an Indian Myna, aka a Common Myna. It's a pretty cool bird. Looks like a mix between a crow and a puffin. The very first thing I noticed about Afghanistan was the Mynas. I didn't know what it was at the time, but right after getting off the plane we walked under a tree that had about a thousand of these birds all chirping at each other. It was late at night and at first I thought it was bats. After being here a few nights I realized it was actually these birds. Every evening and morning they are in the pine trees fighting/mating/partying? They would also hang out on top of a few buildings and an antenna tower.

Here is a video of the birds going crazy in a tree.Here is a picture of the tower covered with birds.

I've actually been following these birds around for quite some time. I've got hundreds of pictures that are just too far away to be any good. They are very skittish. They seem to know when you are looking at them, and take it as an act of aggression. They really don't like you to get closer than about twenty feet, and with my camera it isn't close enough for a good picture. Lately they haven't been chirping in the trees, I assume because they are nesting. For how many hundreds (thousands?) of birds there are around I've only been able to find one of their nests. There is a couple that is ever vigilant about watching you when around this one stack of shipping containers, so I spent some time looking and finally managed to find the nest. It's in a hole made by the joining of two shipping containers stacked on top of each other. I can just barely see a bunch of grass that is probably the nest. I didn't take any pictures of it because I would have to stick my camera in the hole to get a good shot and I don't want to disturb the nest. I have since sat and watched from a picnic table just in sight of the nest and have watched them visit the nest confirming that it's theirs.

I finally got an up close picture of one. This myna was harassing a group of sparrows (I think they are sparrows anyhow) that nest here. Probably the only reason he (she? I assumed since it was aggressive that it was a male.) let me get close enough to him. I haven't been able to tell the difference, if any, from males and females.

I also had to avoid making eye contact with him. I intentionally wouldn't look at him except through my camera so as not to spook him. After I'd snapped a few photos, I looked right at him, and sure enough he took off.

One of the shipping containers near this ones nest. By wearing my hat tilted down over my eyes and looking through my camera, this one let me get kind of close to it. They seem to be slightly more tolerant of me being around since I've been hanging around them a little. The tree in the background is a mulberry tree with a ton of fruit on it right now. I haven't actually seen them eating the berries, but they come to this tree a lot, so I assume they are.

Although they are indigenous to Afghanistan, apparently they are quite a nuisance as an introduced pest species through out the world. Anyways, I thought that I would share what I've been doing with everyone. If you want to know more about them here is a link to their Wikipedia page.

Maytag repairman and the Chaplain's letter.

2009-05-20T06:40:00.000-07:00

So I've been the exact opposite of busy lately. I've fixed just about everything that I can fix, and not just the electronics I'm responsible for but literally anything I can get my hands on. After running out of things to fix, I got a little bored and thought I would stir things up a little. Every weekday our chaplain sends out an email entitled "The Hope Channel". It's what you would imagine a typical religious daily email to be. It's full of random excerpts from the bible, words of encouragement, usually some kind of prayer and "thoughts of the day". I don't particularly mind getting them, sometimes they are actually funny. Sometimes they are funny because they have a joke that is supposed to be funny, other times they are funny just because how silly they are. So, like a kid with a stick, I poked it into the ant hill to see what would happen. Here is the email that I sent the chaplain just to see what he would say.

Thought maybe you would like my "thought of the day"

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?"
-Epicurus

This line of thinking is the premise for why I don't believe in a
personal god.

His response was rather cliche, and really kind of disheartening. I've made the chaplain's writing blue, and I've put some of my thoughts mixed in. Any typos on the blue writing, are all the chaplains as I've only cut and paste. I have not responded to this letter from the chaplain. I thought I would see what everyone else thought, whether they think I should reply, and what I should say if I do.

SPC Jones, Thank you for your honesty and your comments.I believe everyone has choices and looks like You have made yours. It’s less of a choice, and more of just who I am. I’ve tried to believe, and I can’t. In my life, I had a real Living encounter with Jesus Christ. I’d be interested to hear of your encounter, but I would be surprised if it was a real living encounter with Christ, but instead an encounter with his followers.

To quote a Greek philosopher as Epicurus, Who believes that what is good is what is pleasurable, and what is bad is what is painful...you'll find that all you will seek in life is what this world offers. After that you die, and there is nothing else. Epicurus believes that pleasure and pain are the basis for the moral distinction between good and bad.

Epicurus actually gets it pretty right. All of our morals can be (and probably were) derived from the simple rule of pain is bad pleasure is good. The only thing that I would add into the mix is empathy. Empathy allows us to realize that other people have feelings as well. If you count emotional and physical pain and factor in empathy then you can easily justify all morals. You can even look at the so called morals in the bible and show that they are actually immoral.

I find that if I am wrong about Jesus Christ, at least I lived a life that is moral and honest and true. Unfortunately believing in Jesus doesn’t mean that you are moral, honest, and true. There are many aspects of the bible that are immoral. If you look at any major human rights argument you will find someone on each side of the argument claiming to be the religious right. The easiest moral arguments to think of are slavery, and women’s rights. Do you support slavery? Do you think that women are not the equals of men? I can easily find passages in the bible claiming both, and I’m not even a man of the bible like you are.

Currently there is a huge controversy about the morality of homosexuals. If it isn’t immoral (which I don't think it is), then the good book could actually be leading you away from morality by calling it an abomination. I see no reason to think it’s immoral, for just the same reason that I don’t think it’s immoral to like blonds over brunets. I also don’t think it’s immoral for the main reason I’m not a homosexual. It just doesn’t do it for me. It wasn’t a choice I made; I just don’t find men sexually appealing. If I did find men sexually appealing, I would be no more to blame than I am now for finding chocolate tasty. I never chose to like chocolate; I just tried it and liked it. I also didn’t choose to be heterosexual; I just looked at men, and didn’t find it appealing, then looked at women, and did find it appealing (some of them at least). If I was gay, and I suppressed it and hid from it my whole life because of the bible, it would have been detrimental to living a good life here in this world. If there is no god, then I would have suffered for no reason. Gay marriage is illegal (mostly), and many happy loving couples aren’t allowed to be married because of the bible. Does anyone really have the right to deny people, whom aren’t hurting anyone, happiness?

If I die and there is nothing - well, I lived a happy life. If I am right about Jesus Christ, and there is an after Life with those who believe in Him...well, then I will be With Him for all eternity. This argument is known as Pascal’s wager. The biggest flaw of the argument is that it assumes which god is real, and also that we know what that god wants. If you are wrong about Jesus Christ, and Mohammed was the true last prophet, then you will burn in hell for “betting” on the wrong religion.

If you don't believe there is eternal life after this one, you will live this one up in parties, alcohol, women, and all kinds of other entertainments that this world offers. That is kind of a crazy assumption to make, that just because I don’t follow your religious dogma, that I will be a drunken man-slut. I currently only enjoy entertainment that this world offers, as what other world is there to enjoy from? Even if there is a heaven, you can’t enjoy it now. Even if there is a loving god that cares for what you do, he may still make/allow you to suffer to make you stronger while here in this world. Currently the thing I enjoy in this world the most is the company of my friends and family. I love to play with my children. I love loving my wife. I love talking and laughing with my friends (of which I also consider my wife). I drink only occasionally, and in moderation. Even with the “simple” pain based morality you can reach the conclusion that if you drink too much it is painful and detrimental to your life. After you die, nothing, no judgement, no accountability with The One who created you. If there is a god to judge me, and he is the one who made me the way I am in spite of being omniscient and knowing that I was going to do everything I’m going to do, then the judgment isn’t really on me, but on the creator who is ultimately responsible for everything I’ve done.

But what if you are wrong. What if there is a God who is trying to get your attention and trying to have a living encounter with you...and you continue to not pay attention to His Calling you. Are you saying that an all knowing, all powerful, loving god is having problems communicating with me?
What if there is eternal life where God has prepared a future for you. This life offers 100 years but eternal life, How long is that? Is condemning me for eternity based on 100 years of ignorance moral?

Do you lie? Everyone has or does lie, although I can’t remember the last time that I did. There is hardly ever a time when it’s necessary, but sometimes lying is actually the moral thing to do. Do you steal? Not since I was a child, and even then it was rare and minor. Are you in a sexual relationship prior to marriage? I was in a sexual relationship prior to marriage, but now I’m married and faithful to my wife. Do you drink till you blackout? Not in a long time, and probably never again. I have done it before though. All pleasures that this world offers to keep you away From the Truth. Funny, but I don’t see lying, stealing, and blacking out as pleasurable. They are character flaws that some people have. I enjoyed sex before marriage, as I enjoy sex while married, but how is that keeping me away from the truth? If I knew your “truth”, wouldn’t that make me more justified in doing those things? Isn’t the whole reason that Jesus was a human sacrifice was to forgive us of our sins? If I didn’t sin, then that would be slapping Jesus in the face saying he died for no reason.
Jesus said: "I Am the Way." Did Jesus really say that, or did a book say that he did?

You'll never know what He offers you until you recognize that He is the One who: *gives us air to breathe *gives us food to eat *allowed us to see another day...
If he is the one who gives us all those things, then when we are without them, is he not also to blame?

All good things come from above. Above what?
We are created by God for God. Evolution?

I hope you find the Truth...before it is too late. I hope you find the truth before it is too late, Allah is a jealous god. I prefer to not live by such absolutes, especially when so many “truths” are contradictory and can’t all be right. Sounds to me like God wants to have an encounter with you. He is welcome to talk to me at any time, what is he waiting for? I just want you to know one thing...you can't hide for [sic] Him. I am challenged this day to pray for you. Is it so challenging to pray for someone that doesn’t agree with you? I wish everyone well, regardless of their beliefs, I just don’t believe that my wishing alone can make it happen.
Let me know how things turn out.

Blessings on your Journey.
Blessings until I die, and then curses for all eternity.

Blog theme changed.

2009-05-18T06:13:00.000-07:00

I changed the blog a little bit. Not much, but a little bit. It's a different color theme and the picture at the top is different. It's a panoramic from outside the window of the shower building here in Bagram. The rows and rows of buildings that you can see are the B-huts that we live in. For most ranks, there are 8 people per building.

I added a poll!

2009-05-03T07:30:00.000-07:00

I added a poll to the side of my blog. Mostly because I think it's really funny that PZ Meyers sends the horde of highly evolved monkeys poll crashing. I really enjoy when they get upset that their poll was crashed. That's like getting mad that someone shook your magic 8 ball too many times and you got an answer you didn't like. So, feel free to vote as many times as you want. You can pick yes, you can pick no, you can even pick both at the same time! Either way it's just a silly poll that means nothing. Have Fun!

Don't pick the flowers!!!

2009-04-27T05:21:00.001-07:00

I thought this view was a little ironic; beautiful flowers, deadly mines. I guess spring is here in Afghanistan.

WD Caviar Green VS. Caviar Black (updated)

2009-04-22T05:23:00.000-07:00

Today is Earth day. In honor of today I’d like to use my virtual soapbox coupled with my electronics expertise (sort of) to talk about my new hard drive. It’s the perfect hard drive for a discussion today because it’s green. That’s not just a fashion statement either; it’s actually eco-friendly.

Over two years ago I built a desktop computer for basic household needs that was also a decent gaming computer. I didn’t want to spend an exorbitant amount on it, but I also didn’t want it to be out-dated before it had even been shipped to my house. The best way to do that is to buy the absolute top of the line motherboard with plenty of expansion slots and all the other parts just get what you need staying middle of the road.So now that two years have passed, it’s time for a little bit of an upgrade. I’m going to be doubling the ram, replacing the video card, striping the two hard drives I’ve already got for improved speed, and then on to the point of this post, expanding the storage capacity by adding another hard drive. Since most of the parts I’m buying are the very best of slightly older technology, and the economic slide has lowered prices even further, it will cost me almost nothing to upgrade. Shopping at Newegg it will all only cost me about $200 and I should see a significant improvement that should make the computer last for at least a few more years.

Whenever I purchase hard drives, I tend to stick with Western Digital unless there is just a phenomenal deal on something else. Western Digital may not always be the fastest (although always very close), is definitely not always the cheapest, and doesn’t even always have the longest warranty, but I’ve never had one fail. Part of that is luck, and part of it is just good craftsmanship, but that’s the brand I stick to. So first thing on Newegg (another brand that time and time again hasn’t failed me) I did was narrow the search down to internal hard drives, 3.5 inch form factor (desktop size), SATA 3.0 Gb/s (the connection for my motherboard) , and Western Digital. I was looking to have a lot more storage space, and trying not to spend more than $150. If you narrow the search down further to 10,000 rpm drives only, you get a faster drive, but not much storage space and it’s a little pricey. If you narrow it down to 7,200 rpm, you get a much better compromise of speed, storage and price. Looking at all the different drives I decided that a 1Tb drive would be plenty of storage space for a long time to come, and on sale at $109 it was well within my price range. Now some of you may remember that I’m not in the States right now, and some of you also know that my wife isn’t very technical, so you may be wondering why and how I’m upgrading the desktop computer that’s on the other side of the earth. Well, I also need an external hard drive right now, but probably won’t need one when I get back, so I’m going to use a USB to any type of hard drive adaptor that I’ve already got to use the internal hard drive as an external while I’m here. All of the other upgrades will wait until I’m back at home, probably at an even better price.

Whenever I buy something, I like to think about it awhile before I actually make the purchase. It helps get rid of the impulse buy if I wait a few days, and it also gives me a chance to think about it a little more. There’s nothing like ordering a new “whatever” and not getting the right one, or forgetting to get “X” accessory with it that makes it work. So, I waited a few days and good thing! I forgot to order the SATA cable which I will eventually need once it goes into my desktop. I also narrowed down my search in a different order, and discovered a drive that will actually do better for my uses, and thus the point of this whole post. The original drive I was going to order was a WD Caviar Black, but when I didn’t narrow down my search results by speed, but instead by size, I discovered another WD drive, the Caviar Green. I compared the two drives, and they are virtually identical except for the Green drive being ten bucks cheaper and not saying what the drive speed was. I did a quick Google search of the two drives and found a nice review on Tech Report of the Caviar Green that went into great depth on the drive and compared it with dozens of different tests with the Caviar Black, and a bunch of other similar drives. Basically, the Green is an eco-friendly drive because of its lower power consumption. It’s not made from recycled parts or anything like that, it’s just designed to be more energy efficient and also happens to be quieter too. It is a slower drive than you can get, but in most cases the difference was negligible, and for the applications I need it for, storage and redundancy, it’s the perfect drive. It’s huge at 1Tb, and significantly more energy efficient. I’m not going to bore you with the details, but if you are interested Google or the Tech Report review aren’t far. If you are looking for a new hard drive, especially for storage, then check out Western Digital’s Caviar Green 1Tb hard drive, and help save the world at the same time (or at least save a little energy and change).

Update : 23 Feb, 2010 - I bought this hard drive and received it a few days after this post. I used it as an external for a few months, and then when I came back to the states on mid tour I installed it in my home desktop. Other than not connecting the power plug all the way in (my fault), this drive has given me no issues at all. The actual usable space on the drive is 931Gb. I have a bunch of movies on it right now and I don't get any lag on it when playing them across a G router to my PS3 in the living room. I don't however have any HD videos, they are all standard DVD quality, so I can't say if it is fast enough for HD, but wouldn't be surprised if it is. All in all, I'm extremely satisfied with this drive. Hope that helps!

Religulous

2009-04-08T08:22:00.000-07:00

I finally got a copy of Religulous. I was a little worried that I had hyped it up in my head to be better than it could be, but I wasn't disappointed. I should have known better. I already like Bill Maher, and my favorite topic is religion, so how could I not like it? It was a very well done movie. It was funny and it had a good message. I recommend everyone with an open mind to watch it. It's probably not what you think. I would say that if you are a non-believer, then it is kind of preaching to the choir, but might encourage more timid non-believers to be a little more open. It is rather funny even if you aren't changed in any way by it. If you are a staunch believer, you probably won't watch it, and if you do, you probably won't have a change of heart. The people that are on the fence, might actually be influenced to think about it a little more. Captain Phantasmic, after watching it, said, "wow, I think I believe in god much less than before".

Captain Phantasmic you see, is only recently an atheist. I guess you could consider him my first convert, but I wasn't trying to convert him and he was basically an atheist already, he just didn't call himself one. Just listening to me BS with fellow friends, watching religulous, and thinking about all the things he's seen in the world he realized that he was basically an atheist, or maybe at most a deist. He definitely things that if there is a god, he doesn't give a shit about us, or is an asshole. I don't want to speak for him and his beliefs, so if I got it wrong, or if he wants to clarify, I sent him a link to this post and maybe he'll post a response.

So to sum it up, a really funny movie, with a serious undertone, that just may make you think.

My favorite place on the internet!

2009-03-29T20:12:00.000-07:00

Here is my favorite place on the internet right now.
http://texasjones.blogspot.com/
I know I'm a bit partial, as it's my family, and I can't be with them right now, but I thought that maybe some of you would get a kick out of seeing the people that matter the most to me. It's our family blog. I started it shortly after this blog, but my wife does a much better job of keeping it going. She's very good at getting pictures up and a short story right after any kind of trip or outing.

The subtitle of the blog says "An atheist's family's adventure in the bible belt." If you read the blog, you'll realize that the blog has nothing to do with atheism beyond that. It's just a blog about a normal everyday family. That's really the point actually. There isn't anything different from any other family. We love being around each other. We love playing and running around and tickling. We love splashing in water and learning how everything works. If I put my apostrophes in the right spots then what that sentence actually means is that I'm an atheist, and I have a family, and they/we have adventures. It doesn't mean my children are atheists (as that would be silly), just that I am. Hope you enjoy it.

How sad

2009-03-20T03:43:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago our unit (Texas National Guard) celebrated Texas' independence day with a BBQ her in Afghanistan. All of the functions held in our unit always have a prayer by the chaplain (more on the chaplain later) at one point or another. I just stand there and try not to laugh. I look around at everybody, and see their serious "I'm talking to god" face, and occasionally I see other non-religious people looking around. After the prayer and a few words said and a toast, we all got food and sat down. I was sitting at a picnic table with some friends, and a few other acquaintances, when one of my buddies started talking about trying to find me during the prayer. He said that he was looking for me to see what I was doing. He knows I'm an atheist and was curious how I was handling the prayer. One of our supply sergeants asked why he was looking for me. I told her that I was an atheist and the first thing that came out of her mouth was, "oh how sad!".

It really is sad how ignorant people are. I'm a very happy person. I really enjoy life, because it's probably the only one I'll have. I was really quite shocked and didn't even say anything in response. I doubt that anything I could have said would have mattered, but I still wish I had said something at least.

Captain Phantasmic AKA the BEARD!

2009-03-19T10:59:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture of my buddy Eric standing at my door being a goon. We try not to take things too seriously here, as sanity is always lurking around the corner. Although, by looking at him, you may think that sanity is much closer than just around the corner. And yes, that is a bubble pipe, quite sophisticated.

Storm!

2009-03-13T20:51:00.000-07:00

This beat poem is my favorite right now. It really feels as if the poem is talking about me. The only thing that doesn't fit is that I'd rather have a 7&7 or a jack and coke than wine. This is my favorite part...
"Twice as long to live this live of mine, twice as long to love this wife of mine" and I would have to add in twice as long to love these kids of mine. I hope that you like it.

Two big milestones in one week

2009-03-10T05:33:00.000-07:00

So I can no longer be nominated for best new blog. Last week was my first year anniversary of my first blog post. It doesn't seem like it's been a year, but it has. I also passed a thousand hits sometime last week as well. It's not entirely accurate because I did have a different hit counter for a couple of months that stopped working, and I also didn't even put one on my page for awhile, but I have now definitely had at least a thousand. I didn't really know how to celebrate such a monumental occasion, but I think I've figured it out.

Here are two pictures that should hopefully get a laugh out of a few. The first one is a shot of the toilets we use here. Notice anything strange about the toilet? First, the toilet is backwards compared to most toilets, and second there is only water right in the hole, and no where else. It's the perfect reason why you should challenge your ideas every once in awhile. The guy who designed this toilet thought that he had a grand idea. He thought his toilet was better than every other toilet out there. He thought his toilet was so good that he convinced enough people to actually make them, and they convinced enough people to actually sell a ton of them (at least all the toilets on base, whether they were the only ones we could buy, or the cheapest I don't know). All it would have taken, somewhere in the process, was for someone to take a shit on one. Had they done that it would have been very evident that this was not a good idea. Without being too graphic, lets just say two things. There isn't much distance between the top of the bowl and the bottom of your arse. There is also a problem when it comes to flushing and friction. Let's just say that I only got a clean picture of the toilet because they had just cleaned it. One of my fellow soldiers described it as "taking a shit on a plate". Oops, so much for the graphic part. Sorry ladies.

The second one is of the stalls that we get to use for our bathroom business. They went to all the trouble of making these stalls out of sheet metal. They don't look prefabricated, so it actually took a little bit of extra effort to do. The walls are just barely too close, which would make sense to maximize space, but what you can't see is that on the end of the stalls there is plenty of extra space to spread these out a little. Then the toilet paper is awkwardly behind you. See the white thing in the front on the left? That's the shower curtain door. There is one great thing about these though. They do flush (mostly) and they are cleaned daily by a very diligent cleaning crew. I've also never seen one out of toilet paper, which is a real plus when you consider that we are a couple hundred yards away from our B huts.

Vegetarian for (almost) a week

2009-03-09T10:50:00.000-07:00

This post is one that I started writing, and for whatever reason never got around to posting it. It's rather old, but since I haven't been posting lately I figured I should post it.

One of the great things about being an atheist and not believing in absolutes, is that I can explore other peoples morals, as long as they don't hurt anyone. This past summer I was TDY to Austin for a few weeks. I decided that I would try to be a vegetarian. I eat meat on a daily basis and think nothing of it. To some people in the world, it's considered evil to kill animals to eat. It's also evil because it takes a lot of grain to make a steak. You could feed many more people if you ate the grain instead of feeding it to cows.

I figured that if I was going to make this work, that Austin would have the easy access to vegetarian foods that would make it possible for a vegetarian ignoramus like myself. On the first day there I went to Whole Foods Market to fill my fridge with wholesome healthy vegetarian food. There was a very helpful lady at a small bar/restaurant inside the store. She explained to me that there are all kinds of vegetarians. Ones that eat eggs and milk, ones that eat shellfish, and vegans that eat only things that grow from plants. There are even people that don't believe in cooking food! I had no idea. I decided that since I wasn't really doing this because of my morals, but instead only to gain some perspective that I would try out different types of vegetarianism at some meals, and that I wouldn't eat meat (chicken, beef, cow, goat, fish, crustaceans, etc) for the entire week. Products from animals that didn't involve any killing would be okay, like dairy products and eggs.

It was about lunch time, so I asked the lady if she could recommend a good vegetarian meal for lunch. I got a taco salad that was entirely vegan. Nothing was cooked, not even the shell, which was made of pressed flax seed. There were a ton of fresh vegetables, salsa, avocados, rice, beans, and some kind of substitute sour cream that tasted just like the real thing. I was very impressed and really enjoyed it. The only thing I wasn't crazy about was the flax seed shell, and only because some parts of it were a little too hard. So, first meal down, and I actually enjoyed it. I stuffed myself and didn't feel bad at all because I still ate significantly less calories than a Big Mac and I was much more full.

The lady at the counter (I wish I could remember her name) suggested that I get lots of fruit, try out the meat substitutes, and to get healthy dips to make eating vegetables more enjoyable. She also pointed out that a lot of carbs that I usually eat only have eggs in them, so if I was a lacto-ovo vegetarian then many of the foods I love would still be on the menu. Unfortunately it also meant that most of the unhealthy desserts I love, as well as sodas, would be on the menu. Looks like being a vegetarian isn't healthy by default. So I got a little bit of everything, and decided that sodas and ice cream could be my rewards for eating better, but only sometimes.

For my first night we all went out to eat at The Armadillo and guess what? The special for the night was vegetarian lasagna! How appropriate, I could eat veg, and I could save money. Again, it was delicious. I wasn't even aware that I was eating vegetarian except for my coworkers giving me shit about it. Apparently it's unmanly and un-Texas like for me to not eat meat. I was nice and full, and didn't feel bad about it.

Breakfasts were no different then normal, just cereal. Snacks were much healthier, I was eating fruit or these really good Cascadian Farm granola bars. I really like them a lot, and still eat them now that I'm back to being an omnivore. Lunch was were I started to have problems. We were too far away form our hotel to come back at lunch, and we didn't have a fridge to keep things cool at work. We ended up eating out almost every lunch while we were there. I quickly found out that most restaurants don't cater to vegetarians, even in Austin. The most they would do is have a veggie burger. Also, if they happened to have a veggie meal, they would only have one veggie meal. If you were in the mood for it great, but otherwise you had no other choices. Fast food was essentially off the list. I made it four days eating many veggie burgers, many salads, and many PB&J's. A personal favorite, but not something I want to eat all the time.

On the fourth night, I was taste testing a whole bunch of easy to make meals that were vegetarian. There were some boxed meals that you just add water kind of like hamburger helper without the hamburger. I also had a few random meat substitutes, and a few frozen meals. I'm not sure if I just don't know how to pick vegetarian meals, or if maybe vegetarian food doesn't fit the microwave/pre-made meals category well. I could tolerate some of the things if I had to, but wouldn't want to eat any of them. After maybe my fifth or sixth thing I tried and didn't like I figured I had tried being a vegetarian long enough, and went across the street for a nice big Whataburger.

The most important thing I learned is that unless you are used to it, you will definitely miss eating meat. There just isn't anything like it. If I were going to be a vegetarian full time I would just have to forget about eating meat, the substitutes were horrible. I also learned that not nearly as much of my meals that I eat consist of meat, and that many of the meals that do have meat don't necessarily have too. I also realized that I like good fruit, especially strawberries, significantly more than a candy bar. The reason I don't eat as much fruit as I should is mostly because I hate for it to spoil if I'm not in the mood for it, and that I dislike mediocre fruit significantly more than a candy bar.

So, how's the weather?

2009-03-09T04:14:00.000-07:00

I got an email from my cousin Lew asking me how the weather was here. I realized that I hadn't been posting, and that other people would probably be interested too. I was intending to post, but before I got a chance to I messed up my partition table on my laptop and ended up having to reinstall windows. Note to self: if I decide to install linux, don't overwrite the EISA protected file. It took me awhile to get everything configured and installed the way I like since I have been real busy with work, and also trying to get a little bit of sleep.

When we first got here, it was a lot colder than it is now, but it was still bearable. We got a lot of snow two different times. Generally during the day it would get warmer than freezing, and then at night it would get below freezing. I don't really now how cold, but I was okay outside for wearing a jacket and gloves. Right now it's actually pretty nice. During the day it's maybe 70 degrees, getting a little colder at night, but not that bad. During the summer it's supposed to get pretty hot, but hasn't gotten hot yet.These are the little buildings we live in. They are called "B" huts, not sure why. There are 8 rooms in each building. That was one days worth of snow. It got a little thicker than that.

Someones bike covered in snow.

Someone made a snow couple. I think they painted it, but it might be some kind of powdered drink poured on the snow. They were around for about a week, looking more pitiful every day.

Fallen soldier ceremony

2009-02-11T23:33:00.000-08:00

Today I woke up to a cold rain and a cold dose of reality. Where I'm stationed, and what I'm doing keeps me out of harms way, but it doesn't mean I'm not in a war zone. Anytime a soldier dies here in Afghanistan, their body comes to Bagram to be taken where ever it is going. When it gets to Bagram all the soldiers here line the main street on both sides. This morning a french soldier arrived, and I went out for my first fallen soldier ceremony.

We lined both sides of the main street, two or three rows deep in some parts. We stood silent and somber for roughly twenty minutes at parade rest. An escorted Humvee drove by with a casket that was draped with an American flag. There were six soldiers, that looked like they were french (I haven't gotten used to all the foreign uniforms yet) riding in the back with the casket. As it passed we all came to attention and then saluted. I've never seen so many soldiers make so little sound.

For some reason all I could think about was unchecked emails. All the jokes that wouldn't be laughed at, all the spam mail that wouldn't be bothering anyone, the caring letters unanswered, and the photos that would never be seen. I wondered if there were any emails in his inbox that someone regretted sending, and if there were any that weren't there that someone regretted not sending.

I hope that his life wasn't given in vain.

Afghanistan

2009-02-07T22:06:00.000-08:00

So I'm here in Afghanistan. I've been counting down days from one place to another over and over again. Sometimes it was better that the days went slowly, then others I would prefer it to be much faster. Now that I'm here I'm counting the days for the last time until I'm able to go back home. I hope these days go the fastest because there are so many more than any of the other countdowns. For anyone that is worrying about me, I'm extremely safe. I'm an electronic technician and I'm on the largest base in Afghanistan. I won't leave the base the whole time I'm here, and rocket/mortar/artillery doesn't hit our base very often. I've heard that it's only been attempted two times in the last year, and neither attempts even reached the base. I've also heard about a military system called C-RAM (Counter - rocket artillery mortar). I'm not sure that Bagram has one of those systems, and even if I could confirm it, I wouldn't be allowed to say so, but I know if I was in charge of the army every major base would have one. Realistically I'm probably safer here than back in the states. Statistically the biggest killer of soldiers is automobile accidents, and every where I go is within walking distance. There are cars, but the max speed limit on base is 25 mph, and there are sidewalks or walking paths everywhere. I only cross one road to go eat, and don't cross any roads to get to where I work. So please don't worry, the worst part of being here is being away from my family.

Here is a video of C-RAM if you've never seen one. Pretty cool. I haven't heard one firing, but that could be because no rounds are coming in, or we don't have one. Not sure.

40+ hours on a plane

2009-02-03T06:11:00.000-08:00

I'm in Afghanistan now, more on that later, but first I have a story about the flight over. We flew from McChord Air force base in Washington (the state) to some small air base in Germany. I'd tell the name, but I don't remember and it's not important to the story in any way. I was lucky enough that I got to sit in first class on a 747. It was very impressive, with a video screen for each seat. You could play whatever movie you wanted. The chair turned into a bed. There was ample space for my feet, and all the random junk I was carrying. It was a really enjoyable flight. We left in the late evening, so I just watched a movie and then slept. When I woke up we were in Germany to refuel and change crews. We were only supposed to be on the ground for about an hour and a half, but of course everything up till that point had gone right, so it was inevitable that the plan would have to change.

As we were taxiing to the runway to take off the pilot came over the intercom to announce that our flight was going to be delayed at least 18 hours due to weather. Our next stop on our journey to Afghanistan was Manas, Kyrkistan, and Manas was at zero visibility and not expecting a change. In a more developed country zero visibility isn't as much of a hindrance, but in a third world country it most definitely is. Eighteen hours on a plane is a little long, especially after a ten hour flight from the states, so our chain of command did the sensible thing and got us rooms at a hotel. Here is were the catch came in. The only hotel that could take nearly 300 people on short notice was roughly 2 hours away in Frankfurt. We had a plane full of soldiers, and each soldier was carrying weapons. Customs frowns on taking weapons into the country, even if it is soldiers. We can't just leave the weapons on the plane, there are going to be crews coming on the plane to change out the food that will be expired 18 hours from now, etc. Germany won't let us through customs with our weapons, and staying on the plane with that many people is out of the question, so we had to send everyone to the hotel, leave the weapons on the plane, and leave guards. Since I was in first class, I volunteered to stay on the plane with three other soldiers from first class.

Everyone left, including all of the crew. The only people that stayed on board with us were a few of the maintenance guys. One of the Germans from the airport brought us over a case of beer and the maintenance guys gave us full privileges on the plane. I basically did everything on the plane that you always want to do, but never actually do when on a plane. Every switch, every button, every little cabinet, I flipped it, pushed it, or opened it. I also got an in depth tour of the cockpit. All the food on the plane was going to be thrown away, so we could eat whatever we wanted. I ate the crew meals because their food was much better than the first class meals even. I actually had a blast. When we finally got cleared for take off I had spent over 25 extra hours on the plane. When we landed in Manas it was about 41 hours after taking off in the states. It was quite the adventure.

Here is the beer. Bitburger is what it was called. I'm not much of a beer drinker, I prefer mixed drinks, but this beer was pretty good. I figured that since I was in Germany, and alcohol won't be accessible for awhile that I may as well have a few. Thanks to whom ever it was from the airport that "accidently" left them on the plane.

Heres two of the other guys enjoying the food and movies.

Radio silence...

2009-01-13T21:43:00.000-08:00

Well we're almost ready to go to Afghanistan. We'll be in the field with out internet for about a week, and then shortly afterward I'll be catching a long airplane ride. I may post before then, but I don't expect too. Don't worry though, I'll be plenty bored once I'm over with lots of crazy people talks to write about. Until then, enjoy yourself with a video from CDK007.

Raised that way...

2009-01-10T06:00:00.000-08:00

People tend do a lot of things because thats how they were raised. They never specifically made a decision to do it a particular way, that's just how their parents did it. I speak English, eat Americanized food, and I use the American Standard for all of my measuring. I think its a confusing system, I still have problems with it, and yet I still use it. At one point I had no choice, but now that I do it's so ingrained that I drag my feet. I was looking for a good way to fully use the metric system exclusively when XKCD posted the above comic, Converting to Metric. It seems like a good way to start converting, and it's got Firefly references. I wonder if I can find metric measuring spoons to make my yummy cookies with my daughter.

Cuttlefish VS AIG

2009-01-07T21:56:00.001-08:00

Apparently Digital Cuttlefish and AIG are having a battle of epic proportions. Err, well, not really a battle, DC is just negotiating a realignment of the celestial Google ratings, but with the way creationists blow things out of proportion, (like the "war on christmas"), this will probably be seen as an act of war. So, if you like Digital Cuttlefish, then maybe throw up a link to him(?) on your blog to help spread the word. If you've never heard of the Digital Cuttlefish, then go over and check it out. You'll enjoy it. There are lots of cuttlefish over there.

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-25T14:17:00.001-08:00

Here is a cool wintery picture I took out the window of the plane. I'm pretty sure it's Mt. Rainier that is sticking through the clouds, but there are so many mountains in the area, and I don't really know how long we had been flying when I snapped it. The clouds look like white waves lapping against an island. I got to come home for 10 days for the holidays. It is so good to be at home with the family. I hope everyone is having as good of a time as I am.

It's uncomfortably cold here.

2008-12-14T20:33:00.000-08:00

I don't like the cold. I've always heard that at least in the cold you can always add more layers to get warm, while in the heat you can only take off so many layers. That sounds like a great idea, but when it comes to putting it in practice I find it less than effective. The main problem has more to do with the army though. The army doesn't pay any of the soldiers by the hour. We get a salary whether we work 23 hours a day, or not at all. As a result of this, it's much easier to have everyone hurry up and get in line, and then wait as long as it takes. In the civilian world it would be more efficient to set up schedules or appointments and manage employee's time. In the army, time is free, so we do a lot of "hurry up and wait". So my main problem with the cold, is balancing between to much cold weather gear, and not enough. If I have to much gear on, I'm comfortable while we are waiting around, but then I'm overheated and sweaty when we start running around playing army games. The exact opposite problem happens if I wear too little cold gear; I end up freezing while we stand around and I'm just right while we are busy. I chose the wrong day to go light on layers. The training that we did ended up being less physical than I had anticipated, and the weather was much colder than I expected. The picture was taken today right after we got back to the barracks. I was standing on the stairs leading up to said barracks when I took both of those pictures.

Meaning of christmas?

2008-12-12T23:23:00.000-08:00

Here is a quote from an anonymous poster the other day.

I'm curious what you tell your children the meaning of Christmas is.

I'm curious if you even know what the meaning of christmas is? It really doesn't have the same meaning for everyone. For me it is a time to love and cherish my family. Although, it's hard to love and cherish them more than I already do. Maybe it is just about the toys. There definitely isn't a standard meaning of christmas. It doesn't even have the same general concept from one country to another, and from one time period to another. The history of christmas has far less to do with Christ than most people think. If you'd like a brief overview of the history of christmas, check out this bit on the history channel website. Did you know that christmas used to be illegal in the United States? I had no idea.

God is great, god is good

2008-12-10T12:09:00.001-08:00

You may have heard the prayer god is great, god is good, let us thank him for our food, by his hand we are fed, give us lord our daily bread. I was thinking about saying grace and ended up writing a little poem. It's not as great as anything over at Digital Cuttlefish or anything, but maybe someone will like it. I guess that's what happens when you don't have anything to do riding in the back of a humvee all the time.

God is fable, god is fake
myths, wife's tales, a big mistake
Blindly following and misled
don't they know that god is dead?

Thank you god for choosing me...

2008-12-07T20:38:00.001-08:00

Fuck everyone else. That's all I can think of anytime I see someone saying grace. Every meal at the chow hall there is at least one person bowed in prayer thanking god for the wonderful meal they are about to eat. It makes me sick really. Are they completely unaware of how many people are starving in this world? If you are thanking god for your food, then you must think he had something to do with it being in front of you. If he is the one giving people food, then how come there are people in the world without food? Is that because of the devil? God can fight off the devil for you, but not for the millions of little children all over the world? If ever a prayer would be answered, it would be in the case of a starving child. Regardless of what god or religion the child has heard of, that internal voice asking for help would be answered if there truly was a god. If you can't see that, then you must really think you are special.

If you think that evil is in this world in order to give us the power of choice, then you must never have been to Baskin Robbins. They've got more than 31 flavors to choose from, some of those choices are pretty tough to make, and not one of them involves, starving, raping, murder, war, genocide, or nazis. Next time you are thanking god for the delicious meal in front of you, think about who/what you are really thanking, and why.

Hello from Yakima Training Center

2008-12-04T11:46:00.000-08:00

Here is a picture of the barracks I'm in right now. They are actually pretty nice, as long as you don't like chairs or desks or dressers or wall lockers that lock. The one chair you can see in the picture is the only one in the barracks. It's so weird the things that you take for granted. I would love to sit down on a couch and watch a little bit of tv. Oh well, what are you going to do. It's really not to bad here. The chow is pretty good, and even though the it's really cold (at least compared to Texas), they gave us very nice cold weather gear. Brand name Polartec cold weather gear with 7 different layers that will keep us warm down to minus 40 degrees (supposedly).

I'm also not the only atheist around, so that is nice. There are 3 other full blown atheists. There is also one spiritual but not religious, and one that is basically a diest that enjoys the community that a church provides. There are also some young earth creationists, and a few very devout catholics. One of the catholics was passing out rosemary beads that were blessed by the pope. I touched one of them and it cured the cancer that I didn't have. It's really quite amazing. I have already sat through two prayers, one praying to a general god, and one to (baby) Jesus. They weren't mandatory per say, but they were both following official military classes that were mandatory. I could have made a stink and gotten released I'm sure, but I don't really mind and I'd rather not have the whole battalion (minus 5 others) against me.

Happy Thanksgiving, etc

2008-11-27T06:40:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone has a happy turkey day or whatever kind of day you want it to be. Here is a picture of my family; me, my wife Jess, my daughter Lily, and my son Jack. Actually since I'm wishing you one happy holiday let's just go ahead and knock out all the rest. So, happy christmas, hanukkah, ramadan (a little late on that one), bodhi day, yule, kwanzaa, boxing day, winter solstice, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day. What the heck, let's go all the way out to Groundhog Day.

Praise Jesus! Proposition 8 has passed!

2008-11-15T17:00:00.000-08:00

Good news to all you christians out there, proposition 8 has passed, preserving the sanctity of marriage! Now god will reward your noble efforts by stopping all the fires in California. The whole reason the state had all those fires was because of god's wrath right? Oh wait, what? The state is on fire again? But, what about god's wrath? Shouldn't he be happy now?

How about people stop using religion to support their prejudices? If there is a god he/she/it definitely doesn't care about fires in California and same sex marriages.

Life in the army...

2008-11-12T17:34:00.000-08:00

Somnambulist happens to be one of my favorite words. I think I like it because I so often find myself in a state of somnambulism. So often do I find myself in such a state that I might even call myself a somnambulist. And no, I'm not a sesquipedalian, I'm just tired and feel like sending some people to the dictionary. Twice.

I've borrowed a wireless internet fob from a fellow soldier. I'm actually surprised by the speed that I get from it out in the sticks. I've got a few posts in my head that I want to share with everyone (all three or four of you), but they will have to wait until I get a little bit more sleep. Expect them soon.

Great post over at Digital Cuttlefish

2008-10-31T11:56:00.001-07:00

Check it out.

Obama

2008-10-29T13:37:00.000-07:00

I voted the other day. I voted Obama for president, and a mix of libertarian, democratic and republican candidates for all the other offices. Mostly I tried voting out wackaloons. I was disappointed that I couldn't vote out Gail Lowe from the Texas board of education. It turns out that the part of Bell county that I am in, is in a different district than hers. My district here didn't have a board member up for election. Voting for Obama is kind of a throw away vote in Texas since it's so republican (Big Oil + Bible Belt = Republican), but maybe McCain and Palin will do something really stupid to piss off Texas and my vote will actually help...we'll see.

In polite company... Healthcare

2008-10-05T18:08:00.000-07:00

I think it's a grand idea to have health care for all. I'm not sure how exactly it should be funded. I would hate for taxes to be higher so that I can pay for other peoples health care and get rid of the great health care I get through my job. I know that sounds selfish, but honestly I don't see why I should pay for someones survival when I have a long list of things that I need to spend the money on for my family's welfare.

I've also had "free" health care before. I spent four years on active duty military, and an additional two years after that my wife was active duty. If the government's health care is anything like the army health care than it's not worth it. People went to the doctor way to often simply because it was free. Every little cough or sniffle sent people into the waiting room. The doctors had no incentive to give good care. They didn't give a rat's ass in most cases (There were a few good doctors). Everyone was over worked, under appreciated and bitter. I also don't like being forced to do something. If I'm getting taxed an extra 500 dollars a month for health care that sucks, I'd much rather take my money and buy my own. I guess it comes down to how well it was managed. If it's run like medicare and social security have been run then I'd rather keep my money. So I guess I'm for it if they do it right, but I'm mostly against it because I don't think they can. I also don't have the slightest idea how running it the right way would even work. I don't think I would recognize a good plan for universal health care if I saw one. If they could fix all the other disastrous government programs then I would be a lot less hesitant to support government health care.

Go Betty Go

2008-10-01T19:39:00.000-07:00

The last post made me think of Go Betty Go, so I thought I'd give you a taste and share a short story.

I went to see Flogging Molly in concert, but had never heard of the two bands that were opening for them. One was called Boston Harbor I think, and the other one was Go Betty Go. While listening to Boston Harbor, I went out into the lobby where you can hear just as well to get some drinks and check out the few vendors that were out there. There were a few tables set up with Go Betty Go merchandise all over it; Shirts, demo cds, stickers, etc. There were four girls behind the tables that were really cool. I was bs'ing with them, finding out about the band, trying to get some free stuff. They were a lot of fun, laughing and joking, it was almost like hanging out with old buddies. I wasn't really interested in the band that was playing, so I sat down and hung out with them. All of a sudden, they were like "Hey, we gotta go! We'll be back in a bit. You should watch us inside." I went into the theatre, and they all got on stage and started playing! I was pretty shocked, I just thought they were sales clerks. They were so cool and laid back, and they were the band. They weren't very big at the time, and they aren't huge now, although they are bigger than they were then. They were on the Fantastic Four soundtrack, and a national deodorant(?) commercial. After the show we talked a little more. I bought their cd, and they took a picture with me. It was pretty fun because they were just regular chicks.

Quite awhile later, maybe a year or so, they opened for some latino band at the same theatre. The band they opened up for had a following of an older conservative hispanic demographic. Basically everyone was there for the other band, and except for their kids, I don't think anyone was under 35 years old. They were all dressed up and ready to salsa. It was a weird booking putting a punk band as there opener. I guess the only reason was to find a larger audience and because some of their songs had a latin twist to them even though they are very punk rock. So me and my friends were there kind of out of place, and only to see Go Betty Go. Before the show they recognized me from the previous show. We talked a little, and then they went on stage. The whole show they basically played just for my friends and I. We knew the lyrics to all their songs, and no one else even knew who they were or even liked their genre. It was a blast.

Since then they have lost the lead singer and the bassist, and now have a new singer. Except for some songs on myspace I haven't really heard the new singer, but they still sound fun. I don't really keep up with music like I used to. It's still fun to reminisce though.

If I ever leave this world alive...

2008-10-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

I'd like to dedicate this next song to my beautiful wife. The video is nothing special, but the song is one of my favorites, and that's really the only reason I'm posting it. The best concert I've been to was Go Betty Go opening for Flogging Molly in the Realto Theatre in Tucson Arizona. The theatre is small and old, and almost cozey even though the walls are halfway stripped of their plaster and spray painted with various colors and graffiti. It was the Day before St. Patty's Day, and Flogging Molly was extra energetic. The lead singer said "It's already St. Patty's Day in Ireland" and then took a big gulp from his bottle of whiskey. He then said, "But since I'm Irish, every day is St. Patty's day!", followed by another large gulp. It was a great show. Go Betty Go was pretty fun as well.

AHH, I'm really going to Afghanistan.

2008-09-19T17:48:00.000-07:00

So I've been in training with the Texas National Guard lately. It's starting to dawn on me that I'm actually going to be going over to Afghanistan. I've known for awhile now, but it was always kind of a distant reality that might never materialize into existence. Yesterday while in combat life savers class (CLS) it really became tangible. I'm not sure what did it, whether the various grotesque casualty pictures, or learning how to give an IV and actually giving one to a fellow soldier, or maybe the entirety of the experience, but I now know it as truth. I'm going to Afghanistan as a US soldier. I guess it will be a good way to test if there are any atheists in foxholes, even though this isn't a very traditional war and there might not actually be any foxholes.

The worst part about about everything is going to be the seperation from my family for about a year. I'm going to miss them so much.

In polite company... Welfare

2008-09-19T17:32:00.000-07:00

As with most topics, especially politics, you end up having to make decisions based on generalities. I understand that in certain cases welfare has significantly helped deserving people that used welfare as a stepping stone to get their life back on track. Unfortunately, I don't think that it represents the majority of people on welfare.

Speaking only from people that I have known on welfare, and not on statistics or any other scientific like study, I'm against welfare. I think it enables laziness, and quite often helps people with drug or alcohol problems continue their lifestyle. If you can't make ends meet, and you need help, then I think the government should be there for help, but not just for free. You want money? There are a lot of jobs in the government that you can do. They may not be "good" jobs, but if you don't want to pick up trash, clean sewers, etc, then go get a job on your own. Did I mention that if you work for the government that you have to submit to random drug tests at least once every 6 months? Oh, and one more thing. If you can't even support the family that you have now, how can you possibly support another child? Guess you'll be thanking the government for your mandatory depo-provera shot? (mandatory only for welfare recepients before everyone jumps on me)

In polite company... Iraq

2008-09-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

From cdk007

This war is a tough topic for me. In a lot of ways I support it, and in many other ways I don't. The above video shows significantly better ways to spend the money we didn't have. On the other hand, Iraq was a horrible place to live. Maybe a lot of people were happy, but only because they made do with what they had. The country was run by a sadist dicktator (sorry Jeff) and his family. The country only had the strength it had because of it's oil, much like many of the other archaic Islamic countries. I personally think that even with the cost of the war being so high, that eventually the war in Iraq will be a good thing once (if) Iraq is stabilized.

I also feel that there are many other countries that deserve to be invaded and toppled. Countries like Iran and North Korea specifically, and many other middle eastern, asian, african, and south american countries. Many countries in this world support/promote/use children soldiers, starve their own people, support drugs (growing, producing, and trafficking), suppress and abuse women and and many other atrocities. If those countries don't want to reform, then I think it's the worlds duty to make them conform. I like to think of it as a mugger attacking an old lady in the street for her purse. If you stood by and watched, you would be immoral, especially if you were Batman. It's a shame that there aren't real super heroes, and that the lady getting mugged is instead humanity in despair.

The unfortunate thing about Iraq, and any other country that you would invade, is that they think we want to rule them. We just want them to be free to do what ever they want (besides what they are already doing ), to end the oppression of humanity. So even though we are there to free Iraqis, the very Iraqis we want to free are fighting us. A huge part is because of their religion, but it's also because national pride. If we were freeing them from an outside oppressor they would be fighting with us.

The same thing happens with religion. As an atheist I don't want to tell other people what to do, but I do want to free them from the oppression of their mind. If you have a conversation with someone deeply entrenched in religion, they think you are attacking them, when in fact you are attacking their religion. The enlightenment must come from inside. The war on Iraq is not a war against anybody, but against ideas.

So in a way, the war in Iraq is one that can't be won. The citizens of Iraq, at least the ones fighting us, are a lost cause. We will never convert them, the only way to stop them is by killing them. Is that such a horrible thing though? We are saying to them, be a decent person. If you don't want to be a decent person then you will die. Are you killing a human or a disease? How do you stop a malevolent meme? The children of Iraq are the reason we are there. We are trying to show them that there is a different way to think and live than the primitive ways of their fathers. When the children see that it is the US that is building the schools, hospitals, and power plants, and their fathers, cousins and brothers are blowing them up, that is where the war is won. When the mothers crying for their lost children realize that it was their fellow countrymen that viciously attacked them, that is when the war is won. When the Iraqi's realize that they are sitting by, as foreigners come into their country to blow up ambulances and soccer games, that is when the war is won. It is won, one person, one family at a time.

In the long run, I think it's the best thing for humanity. Could I be wrong? Of course, these are only my opinions, and please, feel free to disagree.

Gone till October

2008-09-09T20:06:00.000-07:00

I'll be gone until October. My national guard unit is training me for the Afghanistan deployment. I don't expect to have internet considering that cell phones barely even work where I'm going to be. I will have my laptop and my brand new copy of Spore though. I had meant to write a lot of posts for while I was gone, but time was short and the to-do list was long. You all will just have to wait.

In polite company... Abortion

2008-09-08T06:00:00.000-07:00

I'm pro-choice. I don't think it's an easy choice to make, but I believe it should be a choice. Aside from all the what if stories like, mentally/physically handicapped, rape, incest, etc, the main reason is - who am I to tell someone else what to do with their body? Having a child is a huge commitment, and sometimes mistakes can force you into that commitment. There isn't a shortage of people on this planet, but there is a shortage of food, space and love. Raising a child is difficult even in the most perfect situation.

Another big part of accepting abortion, is my lack of belief in miracles. A pregnant women isn't miraculous. It's beautiful, it's amazing, but it's nothing special. Everyone got here that way. It's just the way things work. There isn't even anything special about a fertilized egg. Eventually it becomes a baby, but until then it's nothing special. A good percentage of fertilized eggs are broken in some way and eventually become a miscarriage. A significant amount of fertilized eggs never even attach to the uterus. An even more significant amount of eggs don't even get fertilized and get discarded in one way or the other. Thousands of eggs lie dormant in the ovaries and never even leave the body, left to die when the woman dies. Don't even get me started on how much sperm is wasted. The point is, there are millions of times a day where all the living parts of the beginning of a child fail to live up to their possibility, and actually become a child. If I'm not bothered by the nearly infinite number of people that fail to become people all the time, why would I be concerned if there are any more? One thing I never understand. If someone is pro-life, how come they aren't screwing every person they meet? Every moment that a pro-lifer isn't reproducing, they are potentially murdering their offspring.

On the other hand, I think there should be limits. If you are 9 months pregnant and you decide to have an abortion, I don't think you should be allowed to. If you've waited past the first trimester to make a decision, then you've already made a decision. Once it has really started to become a baby, with arms and legs, and a heart and brain, then you should have the baby. Basically, if you are showing, you're birthing. Also, if you decide to have the child, then you should do it responsibly. Quit doing drugs, drinking and smoking, and start eating right, it's not just your body anymore. That's all I have to say. It's just my opinion, please feel free to disagree.

In polite company...

2008-09-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

Supposedly you aren't supposed to discuss politics or religion in polite company. Since I already talk about religion and it's follies, and I've even already talked a little bit about politics, I figured what the hay, I'll jump right in and let loose. Besides, how do I even know if it's polite company reading this?

I'm neither a republican nor a democrat. There are so many issues, and I've yet to see a candidate that I fully agree with, much less a party. Some issues I'm middle of the road, others I'm left, and yet others I'm right. So I figured I'd make a short series out of it. I'll be training with the National Guard starting Wednesday for 21 days with no internet. I didn't want to leave everyone without a post for that long, so I wrote some posts all at once and set them to post at a metered rate. I won't be able to respond to comments until I get back, but please don't let that stop you from letting me know what you think.

Stupid post in the future thing.

2008-09-05T20:21:00.001-07:00

So I set up some posts for when I'm gone. All you have to do is change the post date. Apparently it doesn't always work, as the last post was supposed to post on the 11th. Oh well, here it is now, and it will make more sense once the other posts ...er...post.

Obama on evolution and global warming

2008-09-05T17:31:00.000-07:00

I was over at Jeff's lunchbreak, and I asked him a question I should have answered myself. What does Obama think about evolution and global warming. Here are my answers.

Global Warming -

And from Obama's website

Evolution - This one is not as clear as a video, but apparently the York Daily Record interviewed Obama on ID. I went to the source, but the article isn't available anymore. It's referenced on many blogs, this one in particular. Here is the quote...

Q: York County was recently in the news for a lawsuit involving the teaching of intelligent design. What’s your attitude regarding the teaching of evolution in public schools?
A: “I’m a Christian, and I believe in parents being able to provide children with religious instruction without interference from the state. But I also believe our schools are there to teach worldly knowledge and science. I believe in evolution, and I believe there’s a difference between science and faith. That doesn’t make faith any less important than science. It just means they’re two different things. And I think it’s a mistake to try to cloud the teaching of science with theories that frankly don’t hold up to scientific inquiry.”

Google Alert - Eric Jones

2008-09-05T15:27:00.000-07:00

I have a Google alert for Eric Jones in blogs. I mostly do it as a way to see the trail I leave through the internet. Usually it just alerts me to useless stuff that isn't related to me in anyway, but I have found a few interesting websites from it though.

There is my doppelganger over at Transformed Daily. Of Course when I say doppelganger I don't mean all that mythical mumbo jumbo, just that he is quite opposite of me when it comes to religion and he shares my name.

Another interesting site I've come across is My Life In Pictures, by another Eric Jones. I've added it to my blog roll. I usually don't mention when I've added a new blog to the blog roll, but I didn't want anyone to get confused by the blog, thinking it was me. It's an entirely different Eric, that apparently is traveling around in China right now.

Damn you creationists, get out of my science!

2008-08-31T08:45:00.000-07:00

I'm in Washington on a business trip. I'm away from my beloved dvr with all my shows pre-recorded on it, and a fast forward button to skip all the commercials. On top of that, I don't even know what all the channels are without looking at a little card with a bunch of network symbols on it. Now I remember why I stopped watching tv before the advent of dvrs, and how great dvrs are. Okay, enough of the dvr plug.

I got all excited because I found a science show. There was an official looking guy talking about global warming. I wasn't paying full attention because I was eating my continental breakfast. The guy was saying blah, blah, blah, global warming, blah, blah, blah, people will die, blah, blah, blah, water level rising, etc. I finished my huge meal, and started actually watching the show with my full attention. Then I get my first sign something wasn't right. Why does this guy have an o-scope behind him, with the intensity turned all the way up and a few sin waves scrolling all over the place. No self respecting scientist or technician would do that to his oscope for any reason. It might be that way when you turn it on if your noob lab assistant was messing with it, but you would quickly adjust it to get something useful out of it. Wait, what did he just say? Genesis? Damn, this is a creationist show. What a bunch of bullshit? Man's dominion over the earth. Global warming is "only" 1.5 degrees. People will die because they don't have access to cheap energy.

Wow, how did this get on tv? Hmmm, what channel is this. Get out the card with all the station icons on there. TBN? Google, what is TBN? Trinity Broadcasting Newtwork. Ah, thanks Google, that explains a lot. I watched a little bit more to see if they had any good points. Closest thing that may actually be science had to do with cosmic rays. They claim that all the warming has to do with a change in the amount of UV rays that come from the sun. While the sun is definitely a variable that determines the earths temperature, it's niave to say that it's the only variable. The commercials in between the show, were for the show. Coral Ridge Ministries is the producer of the film. It looks like the show is on their website. I can't tell if you can watch the film, or if it's just a trailer, but I doubt anyone really wants to torture themselves.. It just says it's buffering for awhile and then fails. I think it's the hotel internet, not the site, but no way to tell from here.

So, to get to the point. Damn you creationists, get out of my science!

I'll sell my soul for a handshake...

2008-08-18T18:13:00.000-07:00

So, I tried to sell my soul. It didn't work. I said, Hey, devil. All you have to do to get my soul is come up here and shake my hand. I'll swear away Jesus' salvation if only you'll just come up here and dance a fiery dance with me. We'll do the tortured soul tango into eternity. If you don't come up here and show yourself I'll take Jesus in my heart right before I die, but if you come up here then I'll say the blasphemy challenge right now. Come on Beelzebub, my dinner is cold and I could use some heat. Let's make a deal. The price is right. That's my final answer. Ah, screw you Satan. You're as lame as that god fellow. If you are real then you are a sad pitiful excuse for a demon.

Praise Jeebus

2008-08-10T18:27:00.001-07:00

I just wanted to take the opportunity to thank the lord, hallelujah, for blessing me with good vision last Thursday. I've been wearing glasses for years now, cursed by the devil with near-sighted vision and astigmatism, but no more! Jeebus and the Ornery Ghost came down and manipulated photons into magical mysterious laser beams performing a miraculous feat called LASIK! It happened just a few weeks after I saw this sign up in front of a local church offering freemods! It may look like a typo, but a typo wouldn't have been left up for over a week would it? Heck no, it was an offer from the almighty for free modifications to your intelligently designed body. I only had to pay just over 2 grand! Gaymen!

Thank you for lunch!

2008-08-03T18:28:00.000-07:00

This weekend I had to do my National Guard drill in Austin. I ate lunch at the Austin Diner today, and a nice family bought my lunch without me knowing it. They finished and left while I was eating. One of them said thank you for serving in the Army as they left, but I had no idea that they paid for my meal as well. When I asked for my check the server was a little confused because it was already closed out and paid for. After talking to the lady at the register she figured it out and happily let me know. So, to the family at the Austin diner, thanks for supporting our troops, and thanks for lunch! Your kids were really cute as well.

Another Mom quote...

2008-08-03T18:25:00.000-07:00

Apparently...

"Jesus has a perfect [astrological] chart"

I find that a pretty interesting claim for two reasons. First, what is the "perfect chart", and second, when was Jesus born? I thought that nobody even knew the specific day, much less the time.

asceint

2008-08-03T03:51:00.000-07:00

I was looking for a word to describe people that are without science, or don't believe in science, similar to the word atheist for religion. I couldn't find anything, so I thought I would make one up. I thought it should sound similar to atheist, maybe the same amount of syllables. The root is scient which shows up in the etymology of science (on webster) as 'having knowledge', and the "a" part would be as in greek or latin, 'without or not'. So the definition and word would look something like this.

ascient - A person that lacks scientific knowledge or doesn't believe in scientific facts because of a conflicting belief system.

I'm pronouncing it ay-sea-ent. When googled it comes up with about 3700 hits, most I'm guessing as misspellings of ancient. There does seem to be an IT company named ascient though. It may therefore be necessary to spell it differently, maybe asceint which only gets 16 google hits.

Please feel free to use my word if you like it. If you happen to know a word already in existence that would fit the definition, please educate me. Let me know of any ideas you have that may be similar. Maybe I'll use your word instead.

Danger!

2008-08-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

I snapped a pic of this warning sign awhile ago and forgot to post it. There are actually a few in the area. I'm not sure the exact meaning of this sign, whether warning about church pedestrians or letting you know traffic might be piling up or some other reason, but I doubt it was the meaning that I got out of it. It's a shame that you don't see more of these around, and that they probably don't warn people away.

Quotes from my Mom...

2008-07-30T17:56:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post I mentioned that I will be going to Afghanistan. As a result of this, my mother was kind enough to come live with us while I'm gone to help out with the kids. It's a win win situation for both of us, we get a live in baby sitter (who cooks really well too!), and my mother gets to live without many bills for a year. She has been living in Hawaii, but wanted to move to the main land again because of the cheaper living expenses. Now she can move to Texas without worrying about a job or home for a bit. And of course she gets to play with her grand kids.

I'm making this blog post, and I assume many more, as a way of keeping the peace. We tend to argue because she has some pretty eccentric beliefs, and I'm pretty grounded in reality (at least I like to think so :). Instead of arguing with her when she says kind of out there things, I'll just blog about it and not take it too seriously. So, here are some Mom quotes. They aren't going to be exactly word for word, but my summary of what she said. I won't exaggerate or distort what she says one bit, I don't have to.

After I called her gullible for believing in astrology, she said :

I don't believe in Astrology. I do however believe that the sun, the planets, and the stars have an effect on us daily. They also imprinted certain characteristics on us the day we were born.

How is that not astrology?

The next one had me rolling with laughter. It hurt my sides. Don't worry, I did it in private so as not to offend. To help explain how the quote happened, you have to know a little background info. My mom has lived in Arizona and/or Hawaii for the last 25 years. Neither state has daylight saving time. Everyone else changes (well, not everyone, but you know what I mean), and they just do their own thing. My mother was talking about how she hasn't gotten used to it being light so late here in TX. She said..

I wish they didn't have daylight saving here. You would think that since it's so hot that they wouldn't want the extra hour of sunlight.

What?

Well, that's why they don't have daylight saving in HI and AZ. It's already so hot, if they added another hour it would be way to hot. A lot of people are mad that other hot states have daylight saving because it makes it hotter.

You know that daylight saving doesn't actually make the day longer right? It's just an arbitrary change that has no effect on the sun. The sun is "up" longer in the summer, and less in the winter, but not because of daylight savings time. All daylight savings time does is make the time "line up" with the rising sun. There is still as much sunlight in the day in AZ, as in TX (at the same lat of course) regardless of what time we say it is.

No, daylight saving time makes the day longer. Sunrise happens at the same time, but the sun sets later in the day. I can show you in my farmers almanac (which she uses for astrology, not farming) that the sun rises at roughly the same time, but stays up later.

Yes Mom, you're right. I didn't want to argue about it, and we can't have friendly debates. I could see why you would think what she thinks, regardless of how wrong it is.

Most of you should know this, but in case you don't, the earth is tilted at an angle to the sun. As the earth is spinning around it's axis, it is also going around the sun. One half of the year the northern part of the earth is tilted closer to the sun, while on the other half of the year the southern part is. The hemisphere that is tilted closer to the sun experiences summer, and the hemisphere farthest away from the sun experiences winter. The equator is basically season less, as it stays pointed toward the sun, just slightly higher or lower depending on the time of year. As you are pointed towards the sun, you have longer days, and away from the sun shorter days. The exaggeration of the length of days increases the farther you get away from the equator.

Our system of time is completely arbitrary. You can call 4 Oclock, 12 Oclock, or beer thirty, or 987 space-time units. It's irrelevant to the sun. If I call it one thing, and you call it another, the sun is still the same. Time is just a unit of measurement. Just as an inch is still as long whether it's called an inch, or it's called 2.54 centimeters, daylight is still the same regardless of what time you say it is. The day is longer in the summer, and daylight saving "springs forward". That just means that 7:00, is now 8:00, and the sun is "up" later, even though it rises at roughly the same time.

If I didn't explain it well or you want to know a lot more about it, check out wiki.

a bipedal primate mammal

2008-07-28T19:09:00.000-07:00

What is it that makes us human? What characteristics define us? Are we human simply because of our DNA? Are we human no matter what? It is simple to contrast a human with an inanimate object, and even with other species. We are singular and unique on this planet. There isn't anything much like us. We walk on two feet, using our opposable thumbs and our amazing brains to literally change the face of earth. As of yet, we aren't just unique to our planet, or our solar system, but we are unique in the universe. There are likely other intelligent beings in the universe, even though they are undiscovered by us, but they most likely aren't quite like us. We are humans, but what does that mean? According to Webster.com, the title of this post is all that human, the noun means.

Describing myself as an atheist doesn't say much in the way of my beliefs. It simply says that I don't believe in a god, not what I do believe in. I'm an atheist because I'm a freethinker, not because I'm ignorant of the gods. As a freethinker I've thought about many of the things I do believe in. I've also looked at a lot of beliefs that other atheists have that I don't share. I like to try on their ideals and see if they fit, and if not, why. Humanism is what has been on my mind lately. The basic gist of Humanism is kind of like the beginning part of the second paragraph of the declaration of independence, but slightly more politically correct. All humans have certain rights that should be guaranteed simply because they are human.

I agree one hundred percent that all humans deserve the chance to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Where I disagree, is the definition of human. I don't think that just having 23 pairs of the right chromosomes makes you human. There are people with down syndrome that definitely deserve the name human. On the other hand, there are people in this world with the right amount of chromosomes that don't deserve to be called humans. Basically, I think that everyone that is born has the potential to be a "human", but because of the person they become, they may lose that privilege. If someone chooses not to live by the very basic principles of the golden rule, then they forfeit their right to be treated by said rule. I don't mean minor infractions like praying or not, or some other trivial thing, but big things like physical abuse, murder, stealing, etc. If you don't want to act like a decent human being, then I don't think that you deserve the basic rights of a human being.

So essentially, I don't think I could exactly call myself a humanist. There are too many people in the world that I don't think deserve basic human rights.

I want to be a genetic engineer when I grow up...

2008-07-17T19:41:00.000-07:00

Not that fluorescent fish aren't cool, but when are we going to really crack this genetic code? I know that we have sequenced a lot genomes, made clones, and of course made lots of creatures glow in the dark. I'm not talking about that. That's the equivalent of (if not worse) than my computer coding skills. I don't know how to write code. I know how to view html. I know how to look in the code and identify what bit of code does what, and then transplant that little bit of code into another bit of coding to usually get the results I want, but that's not actual coding. I'm not a computer programmer, and no one (yet) is a genetic engineer. Maybe there are genetic code manipulators, or genetic code transcribers, but there aren't any genetic engineers yet.

I'm talking about fully understanding the genetic code and using it to it's full advantage. I'm talking true intelligent design, not that baloney that the creationists claim. We are currently in the beggining stages of understanding genetics. Our genetic knowledge today is analogous to when we were building computers the size of rooms with less computing power than the pocket calculator of today. I'm not one prone to prophesy, but here is my prediction for the future; Our understanding of DNA is going to grow exponentialy. I envision buildings being not just organic and green, but actuall living creations. Our lights will be provided by living chemical reactions, our air purified and our water provided by our house photosynthesizing. Our fecal matter will be taken into the living house as fertilizer. Instead of buying a desk made from chopped up trees, you will grow a tree in the shape of a desk. Why build a guitar or violin? It would sound much better if it were grown as one single piece of tight grained wood. Instead of growing crops at a farm, and butchering animals for meat, your house will just grow fruits, vegetables, and juicy ribeyes.

Another serious improvement to life as we know it will be concerning our health. Have a gene that causes heart disease? Not in the future you won't. Genetic disorder? Nope, not in the future. Viruses, bacterial infections or allergies? Please, those were the first to go. Think I'm crazy? Sure, maybe now I'm crazy, but here in the future, crazy doesn't really happen all that often anymore. Wow, you were in a tragic accident and lost your legs? That's okay, we'll grow you a new pair. Don't even get me started on aging and death.

This kind of sounds utopic, but let's not get hasty. There are going to be some things that aren't going to be perfect. Genetic discrimination, genetic inequalities, and loss of genetic diversity. The way that marketing is, everyone would end up being identical if things played out wrong. Another important thing to consider is reproduction. We already can't feed everyone in the world, and we definitely can't sustain the current rate of growth. If life expectancy suddenly jumped to 300 years, we would have some serious overcrowding issues. There would have to be some kind of limitation in place to slow population growth. If it wasn't enforced, people wouldn't listen, if it was enforced, it would be considered an attack on our basic human rights, and people wouldn't listen. I suppose that if we are all genetically modified to be more intelligent, and less selfish than it wouldn't be that big of a deal. We are setting the stage for the possibility of real life distopias (my favorite type of book that I still want to blog about sometime) coming into existence.

Now, these aren't all original ideas, and even the ones that are original and creative from me, I'm sure someone has already had them. It seems that nothing in this world hasn't been thought at least once. I'm sure there is probably already a web page that talks about all of this in much better detail, and I'll get a link to it after I post this. That's cool though, that's whats great about the internet, anything you are interested in can be read about with just a little googling. So if anyone knows about a distopia book with genetic engineering, please let me know. Oh, and I don't mean Brave New World because cloning, birth control, and alcohol in the babies' test tubes isn't exactly cutting edge science (anymore), and I've already read it. :)

A Fantastical Story

2008-07-15T04:59:00.000-07:00

I made this post awhile ago. I wanted to edit it, and apparently I left it half finished and never re-posted it. Oops! Well here is the video. I'll have to redo the rest of the post when I have more time.

This video has an agenda, but I don't think that the points made are any less valid. The sources check out, and the agenda is actually pro-religion (albeit a different religion). There is a huge abundance of information on this topic available, I just personally liked this video. If this video peeks your interest and you want to know more then google "DNA and Mormon".

Edward Current and youtube.

2008-07-14T05:18:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen Ed's stuff on youtube, it's worth a few minutes to check it out. Here is one of my favorites.

That's called logic atheists, suck on it!

Scarlet A

2008-07-07T16:33:00.000-07:00

I put an OUT campaign scarlet A on my blog a little while back, but neglected to explain why I did. The main reason I put it up isn't because I agree with the capaign's ideals (I do agree btw), but instead to help show sarcasm. Sarcasm is hard to show or translate in writing. I don't take religion very seriously, and like to jest. If you aren't a regular reader or you are unaware that I am indeed an atheist you may get confused when I'm being sarcastic, and not realize that I'm just being facetious. If you have to explain the joke, it's never as funny. So, that's the main reason why I have a Scarlet A on my blog. It's a reference point grounded in reality, easily visible, and generally recognizable.

Offensive vs insulting

2008-07-07T16:10:00.000-07:00

I had a falling out with a friend recently, and it was mostly because he didn't understand the difference between the words offend and insult. For anyone that isn't aware of the subtle, but important difference, I quote Webster.com. Note that they don't always mean different things, but often do.

offend - 2 a: to cause difficulty, discomfort, or injury b: to cause dislike, anger, or vexation (offend needlessly)

offend need not imply an intentional hurting but it may indicate merely a violation of the victim's sense of what is proper or fitting

insult - : to treat with insolence, indignity, or contempt

insult suggests deliberately causing humiliation, hurt pride, or shame

Basically, the difference is the intent. Someone can be insulting and yet not offend anyone, and someone can be offended by someone who isn't insulting. Calling someone an asshole is being insulting, even if the person being called an asshole doesn't take it personal and get offended. On the other hand, if someone doesn't believe something just because someone else does (without any evidence for, and in spite of evidence against) it does not make the skeptic insulting even if the believer is offended. Does this example seem like it may have a real life parallel, maybe based on a true story?

If you ever find yourself being offended, you might consider taking a step back for a little bit of self reflection. Why are you being offended? What nerve did someone hit?

As far as being insulting goes, just because I find you insulting, doesn't mean that what you said has any clout. Instead, it could mean that you are just generally unpleasant to be around.

Next subtly different synonym comparison - pride vs arrogance
Coming soon!

"I used to be an Atheist."

2008-07-07T15:06:00.001-07:00

I've heard it a lot, as I'm sure many other Atheists have, the phrase - "I used to be an Atheist." You hear it from older, "wiser" people usually when they are trying to convert you. You also hear it anytime there is a video, article, or speaker that claims they can scientifically prove the existence of god. It supposedly adds more weight to the strength of their claim, because they too used to "be an Atheist" just like you! If you have heard enough conversion stories then you know that it actually makes them less credible. It shows one of a few things. The most common possibility is that they are just lying, the second is they were atheist because it was the cool, defiant thing to do, or last that they were atheist because they were ignorant or unaware of religion, not because they recognized it for the quackery that it is. So if you haven't already noticed this phrase, look out for it, logical fallacies and general religious silliness are bound to follow. Anyone that is a true Atheist will more likely than not remain one forever. Of course part of being open minded is to be, well, open minded, so it is possible that an atheist would be converted if there really were a god. The only problem is that every time you hear someone say they used to be an Atheist they never have a good logical reason for the change of heart.

Circular farming!

2008-07-05T07:58:00.000-07:00

Edward had a comment on the last post about another urban farming idea that is even better than the two that I had posted. I think all three of them have benefits, but the Omega Garden seems to be the best. If you had the Omega Garden on every floor of a tall building you would have a considerable amount of farming space. I'm curious to see which of these ideas, or a combination of them, will turn out to be the future of farming. Here is a short video on the Omega Garden. Thanks Edward.

Vertical farming!

2008-07-04T20:28:00.000-07:00

It's not everyday that you hear an idea that could literally change the world. I vaguely heard about this a few years ago, but for what ever reason didn't look into it more. I saw it again on the Colbert Report a few weeks ago, and it renewed my interest. Here are two similar but different approaches to growing crops. Both of them are more efficient, healthier, and bound to help feed the masses. Now to educate the masses to stop reproducing like rabits! Science can only save us so much.

I think this one is the best idea, but may take awhile until it's actually in place.

This one is pretty cool too. Maybe the above one would be combined with this.

christian god’s Gay Pride

2008-06-25T06:38:00.001-07:00

PZ Myers made a post about how silly Ray Comfort is. Prompting this post was one that Ray made in which he condemns gays in California and blames CA wildfires on them. Ray Comfort is an archaic tool that still thinks the gods control the weather, punishing anyone who transgresses. Now we know why New Orleans was hit so badly; it was god's wrath for New Orleans eating all that shellfish. The best thing about Ray's post is something PZ missed, the post directly under it.

The title is "Thank god for Science". The whole post is all about light, the bible and god. Ray states that "god is light", and to help illustrate his point he uses a nice visual aid. It's the above picture which I have renamed to "god is Gay and Proud". Not only does the picture suggest that god is gay, but it also suggests that it's natural, because it's from light. I personally agree that being gay is natural and that there isn't anything wrong with it. I'm surprised that a conservative christian would think so though. Honestly, if you think about it, if god is all knowing then he must know what really great butt sex feels like. He must also know what it's like to give a bj, and to get snowballed, right? Blumpkin? Yeah, he knows how to give one helluva good one.

Thanks for the laugh and the great picture Ray, hope god doesn't punish you for calling him gay.

His name was George Carlin.

2008-06-23T05:04:00.000-07:00

His name was George Carlin.
His name was George Carlin.
His name was George Carlin.
Repeat Ad infinitum.

Two small blog things.

2008-06-22T02:55:00.000-07:00

First - Blogger added a different blogroll page element. I switched to using it because it uses RSS feeds. It now arranges them by most frequent post, and adds the title of some of their posts. It will only display the top ten most recent, so once my blogroll gets a little longer it won't take up to much space.

Second - Anyone with Blogger know how to make pages that have a "fold" to them? I tried using Blogger's help section but it wasn't too clear. The very first bit of code it says to insert, I can't figure out where to insert it. If any of my readers don't know then I will try the group help feature, but thought I would ask here first. Just trying to fold some of my really long posts to clean up my blog a little.