Scott Adams in his Dilbert Blog talks about there being thieves everywhere:

Today my wallet was stolen for the 400th time, and frankly I’m sick of it. I don’t know what bothers me more – the crime or the fact that the thief always sneaks back into my home an hour later and puts the wallet back in a hard-to-find place such as the top of my dresser.

There’s never anything missing from the wallet, so I know the thief isn’t especially good at his job. It might be the same idiot who keeps stealing my car every time I park it at the airport. He always refills the gas tank and parks it somewhere in the general vicinity of where I know I left it, but still it’s rude and unsettling.

This is truly hilarious! Probably more so because I have a certain child of driving age who has a similar problem with her car keys.

John W. Fountain is a a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has a great testimony in the NPR Series This I Believe :

Here are some excerpts:

I believe in God. Not that cosmic, intangible spirit-in-the-sky that Mama told me as a little boy “always was and always will be.” But the God who embraced me when Daddy disappeared from our lives — from my life at age four — the night police led him away from our front door, down the stairs in handcuffs.

I believe in God, God the Father, embodied in his Son Jesus Christ. The God who allowed me to feel His presence — whether by the warmth that filled my belly like hot chocolate on a cold afternoon, or that voice, whenever I found myself in the tempest of life’s storms, telling me (even when I was told I was “nothing”) that I was something, that I was His, and that even amid the desertion of the man who gave me his name and DNA and little else, I might find in Him sustenance.

I believe in God, the God who I have come to know as father, as Abba — Daddy.

It wasn’t until many years later, standing over my father’s grave for a long overdue conversation, that my tears flowed. I told him about the man I had become. I told him about how much I wished he had been in my life. And I realized fully that in his absence, I had found another. Or that He — God, the Father, God, my Father — had found me.

This latest image of the Crab Nebula from the Hubble Telescope is fantastic. I have set it as my desktop background. The HubbleSite has a bunch of different sizes of the image available for viewing and printing.

This is a mosaic image, one of the largest ever taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope of the Crab Nebula, a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star’s supernova explosion. Japanese and Chinese astronomers recorded this violent event nearly 1,000 years ago in 1054, as did, almost certainly, Native Americans.

The orange filaments are the tattered remains of the star and consist mostly of hydrogen. The rapidly spinning neutron star embedded in the center of the nebula is the dynamo powering the nebula’s eerie interior bluish glow. The blue light comes from electrons whirling at nearly the speed of light around magnetic field lines from the neutron star. The neutron star, like a lighthouse, ejects twin beams of radiation that appear to pulse 30 times a second due to the neutron star’s rotation. A neutron star is the crushed ultra-dense core of the exploded star.

The Crab Nebula derived its name from its appearance in a drawing made by Irish astronomer Lord Rosse in 1844, using a 36-inch telescope. When viewed by Hubble, as well as by large ground-based telescopes such as the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, the Crab Nebula takes on a more detailed appearance that yields clues into the spectacular demise of a star, 6,500 light-years away.

The newly composed image was assembled from 24 individual Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 exposures taken in October 1999, January 2000, and December 2000. The colors in the image indicate the different elements that were expelled during the explosion. Blue in the filaments in the outer part of the nebula represents neutral oxygen, green is singly-ionized sulfur, and red indicates doubly-ionized oxygen.

A neighbor is moving and lent me his Craftsman Yard Vacuum to try to entice me into buying it. I used it for about two hours and filled the 2 bushel bag 5 times. I estimate that the mulched leaves would have been the equivalent of about 20 garbage bags full. It did a pretty good job, especially since the leaves had gotten wet and embedded in the grass. I had one of the boys go behind me and rake loose the leaves it did not pick up and they were easily sucked up the second time around. I then used the hose attachment to clean out my window wells and the landscaped areas around the house.

It did a pretty good job. We have a couple of mature trees and the next door neighbor has a couple of sycamore trees that drop leaves for a couple of months. With a rake it is a never ending job and the many many bags of leaves that have to be disposed of one way or another. This yard vacuum mulches them pretty well so that there are much fewer bags to deal with.

Today’s cartoon from the Calvin & Hobbes archive shows a dad after my own heart.

Update 04/26/06: It appears the ESV files have been taken down temporarily but are supposed to be back up shortly.

I was checking for upgrades on Bible+ that I use on my Palm and found out that the English Standard Version (ESV) has been made available. This amazes me! But then again the ESV site has more ways to use and access it than any other version that I am familiar with. Here is the link to the Palm Bible+ ESV files.

Bible+ for the PalmOS has to be one of the best software packages available on the Palm and it is free. Its integration with the Plucker Plugin Interface allows it to go directly to dictionaries (including bible dictionaries). Besides the NKJV and now ESV versions I have a Spanish version and the New Testament in Greek. Couple those with Matthew Henry’s Complete Commentary, Jamieson Fausset Brown and I am set!

Two of the new features in version 3.2 that look interesting:

• Added support to parse clipboard text at start up. If there is something starting with the ~ char it expects something like ~[version,] book chapter[:verse], i.e. ~ESV, Jhn 3:16 will go to John 3:16 in the ESV version.
  So you can copy a reference into the clipboard from something you are reading or working on and then when you open Bible+ it will go right to the verse.
• Boolean search - so you can use AND, OR, and NOT operators. Plus two wild card operators; “?” and “..”. The “?” matches zero or more characters at the beginning or end of a search term and the “..” operator can be placed between search terms.

While working on the links for the previous post on the ESV for Bible+ on the Palm I ran across the ESV Blog interview of Mark Altrogge who has set Bible verses to music to aid Scripture memorization. He currently has 6 CDs available each with about 20 different sets of scriptures and costing just under $10 each.

The six CDs at his website, forevergrateful.com, have lots of samples from each CD that you can listen to. The ESV interview also hosted 2 full songs:

• Psalm 46:1-3 (mp3)
• Jude 24-25 (mp3)

I am impressed with what I have listened to so far. I may purchase the CDs for home use and also for kid’s Sunday School class I help teach. Will have to wait for Mystie’s opinion :)

Counterfeit money is making a big hit in the Tri-Cities. At our office we are using a Counterfeit Detector Pen to check all bills. Besides using the pens there are a number of ways to tell if a bill is ‘good’:

• Know Your Money - From US Secret Service
• Counterfeit Protection - How to tell a good bill

What to do if you have counterfeit currency
Since the consequences for passing counterfeit currency include fines up to $5,000 or imprisonment up to 15 years, you need to be careful. If you have a suspicious bill:

• Write your initials on the back so you can identify it later.
• On a separate sheet of paper write in detail how you got it:
  • Who gave it to you.
  • Where you got it.
  • When you got it.
• Handle it as little as possible to preserve any fingerprints.

• Contact the local police.

I just was reading Lifehack Your Books: Dogear, Writing In Books, and Apologizing to Librarians and thought about how I treat my books.

I agree with the author’s first point:

The first taboo I think everyone should just plain get over is the taboo of writing in books. I write in most of my books. Notes about the content, things the content reminds me of, etc. When you just plain write in the margins, inside the cover, etc. there’s no way the notes for that content will get lost. They’ll forever be attached to the text they refer to.

I have no problems writing in my books. I will write notes in the margin - my ‘conversation’ with the author; agreeing, disagreeing, or asking questions. I will mark any ‘important’ notes with an ‘NB’, an abbreviation for the Latin for Nota Bene, or Note Well.

I do not like to underline in books. First, I cannot draw a strait line, so the long squiggly line I would put in the book would distract too much. Second, even a straight underline would distract too much. I mark the beginning of the area to be ‘marked’ with an ‘L’ like bracket and then end of the area with a backwards ‘L’. I then mark in the margin a vertical line that draws the eye’s attention. A double vertical line is used for those areas I really want to ‘highlight’. I guess you could say I ’sideline’ instead of ‘underline’.

The next point I cannot bring myself to do:

This Christmas light display from WFTV.com in the Hunter’s Creek subdivision in Orlando, Florida, is getting some negative attention. It would appear that someone bagged Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and has him field dressed and hanging from a tree.

You can see the one red light in the photo that represents Rudolph’s nose and the rest that show the blood draining from the body. According to the news story many of the neighbors say it disgusts them. There is a video on the site with interviews.

HatTip to Reformissionary

It has been cold here in the Tri-Cities lately and the other morning the trees all around had been ‘flocked’ by Mother Nature.

Brian Kaylor over at For God’s Sake Shut Up! talks about an article at the Associated Baptist Press asking Is the ‘war on Christmas’ worth fighting against?.

Is the “war on Christmas” one worth fighting? Despite the dutiful culture warriors lining up to defend the religious trappings of the holiday, some Christian ethicists aren’t so sure it’s a wise battle to pick.

We all know from the news that Christians are arguing that the retail stores and cities are taking Christmas out of Christmas. (I remember when it was a fight over taking Christ out of Christmas because people were using an X in Xmas). Well, some Christians are wondering why we fighting a battle to keep the commercialization of Christmas. Here are some comments from the article:

“The examples about Wal-Mart not using ‘Merry Christmas’ in its ads, Lowe’s putting up signs that say ‘holiday trees’ … they’re reacting to a kind of political correctness on the left, if you will, that has made us all more sensitive to our religious diversity,” Haynes said. “But this religious correctness from the other side is equally ridiculous, you know — somehow telling people by saying ‘happy holidays’ they’re anti-Christian.”

“Christians really need to exhibit a deeper concern for the way ‘Christ’ is used by ‘Christmas’ in order to stimulate a massive orgy of consumerism and thus stimulate the American economy,” Gushee said. “But that is a more counter-cultural message than anyone seems willing to hear.”

Haynes went further. “We’re not talking about the religious Christmas here. That’s one of the strangest things about this; we have people saying they are religious people … defending the secularization of Christmas,” he said.

“And they’re not saying they want stores to really focus on Jesus this year, [they’re] saying, ‘No, we just want stores to continue to exploit the Christian faith and use the birth of Jesus to sell things …. One of the oddities of this whole debate is that here you have these folks defending the commercialization of Christmas.

So what do Christians want to buy - well, I have written on Jesus Junk before, but if you need some more examples, see what blogs4God, LordMart, and again Google Images, suggest for your gift giving pleasure.

Ship of Fools has as Day Nine of the 12 Days of Kitschmas these ‘Cross Shaped Cards’. I think I have finally been able to find the perfect gift for a certain son-in-law who is very hard to buy for.

Now our monthly poker nights can be much more edifying:

“A pair of kings… but there can only be one king in our hearts.”

“Three of a kind… Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”

“Six of spades… umm…”

I just saw this good explanation of the myth of “Full Coverage” with auto insurance. As an insurance agent, I constantly have people coming in saying they want “full coverage”. It is usually because when they bought the car the salesman told them that they needed “full coverage”. What is really needed? I usually start off lightheartedly with my clients telling them they cannot afford “full coverage” but we can give them coverage that will make the bank happy and protect them too.

The bank (or car salesman) that that tells you that you need “full coverage” really only cares that you have comprehensive and collision coverage to fix the car if it is damaged with a maximum of $500 deductible. They don’t care if you even carry liability coverage - but the state does, so I usually begin with showing a client the minimum coverage that will make the state and the bank happy. From there I will explain why they should have more than the minimum and why they should carry other coverage such as Personal Injury Protection (PIP) and Uninsured Motorist. (The article referenced above has a good explanation of these coverages.)

There is a popular myth if you have purchased “full coverage” from your automobile insurance company, you will be covered for anything and everything when an automobile accident occurs. It is only after a collision that the myth of “full coverage” is soon replaced by the reality of “insufficient coverage.”

Today I had a bunch of slack time so was able to catch up on some RSS feeds that had been piling up. Here are the ones that I bookmarked over at del.icio.us.

My shared del.icio.us bookmarks from 12-24-2005

• Enhanced Daily Del.icio.us plugin
  incorporating links added during the current day to a Wordpress blog
  (tags: del.icio.us, plugin, wordpress)
• Yet Another DailyDelicious hack for WordPress
  a nice simple way to mirror my daily bookmarks that I’ve added to del.icio.us into WordPress
  (tags: 2Do, del.icio.us, plugin, wordpress)
• Steve Jobs SNL Sketch
  Too Funny! Jobs introduces the next of the iPod family
  (tags: humor, video)