This I Believe

So on This I Believe (an NPR national project that invites you to write about the core beliefs that guide your daily life) this week Penn Jillette did an essay on “There Is No God” (you can also listen if you don't feel like reading).

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have. - Penn Jillette

On “This I Believe” you aren't supposed to state what you don't believe, but it's interesting since he chooses to believe in a negative (“No God”). He makes it a very liberating concept and I thought it was interesting and different way to think about it.

I like being able to discuss things and not have to agree with the other party and yet be able to understand what and why they're saying it.

Please note I'm just commenting on his story. I'm not saying what I believe, disbelieve or how this impacted what I had for lunch, I'm only discussing him presenting his article so direct all your comments to Mr. Jillette or you can contribute your own essay.

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Posted by Gary on Saturday at 3:09 AM on November 26, 2005.
Related categories: general, web sites
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Gift Certificates

So I know you're thinking the winter holidays when I say gift certificates but really that's not it. I'm thinking of my birthday which was ten weeks ago and that I finally just ended up spending the last of my gift certificates. And yes, I know that was ten weeks ago, but I didn't want to waste them.

Yesterday I spend the last few at Best Buy for memory for my computers. After moving some around between a few I ended up doubling the memory in the one and increasing the other by 50%. I thought it was going to work out a little better than that (I thought the one had more memory slots) but you can still tell the difference on both of them.

I think most of the gift cards were for Technology or Books or Target (plus I had a few duplicate items that needed to be exchanged). Things I bought with the gift cards were:

Memory for the computers

Firefly on DVD

An astronomy reference card set (very cool)

iTunes (I had to return an Apple item and that worked out best)

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaimen

Smallville Season 1

The West Wing Season 1

Liz Phair's new album

And I know there was another book or two...

Except for the Firefly DVDs, I think everything I bought was on sale! I'm a good shopper. :)

Thank you everyone!

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Posted by Gary on Saturday at 1:27 PM on November 26, 2005.
Related categories: books, computers, computers, general, holidays + events, music
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No WiFi at Home..?

So I'm at Panera and there are all these college age students here with their laptops (I'm sure a few are older and a few are younger), more than I've ever seen here before. My guess is that a good portion of them are home from college for the weekend and their parent's homes don't have the high-speed internet access that they've gotten used to at college. So they're here using the free WiFi. At least that's my theory (and I'm sticking to it).

One thing I've noticed other times when at Panera is that the network always seems to work (start working) better if I launch Internet Explorer first, I'm not sure why, but whenever I'm at a hotspot and having problems that seems to get me going. I think it helps at other places but it really helps at Panera (it might be the user agreement they have you agree to before proceeding).
I noticed an extra network when I was trying to connect called “Kristy” and also noticed an iBook user who had all sorts of windows open (but none had web pages). We tried the above IE “trick” but I guess the new iBooks don't ship with it. It was her first time trying to connect to a WiFi hotspot so there might be some other problem.
We never did get it going, I think it's something in the “internet connect” options, she somehow created a 802.1x (point to point?) network and we couldn't delete it. I had something similar happen once upon a time and it seems to me it was a bit of a problem until I was able to delete it, but I don't know what I did to do that.

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Posted by Gary on Saturday at 4:49 PM on November 26, 2005.
Related categories: apple, general, portable, wifi
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