Wayne D's Blog

I know it won't make any difference but I must rant about gas prices.  When I was driving home a week ago Thursday I needed some gas.  Unfortunately the price of gas was about 82 cents a litre and the cars were lined up at every gas station I drove by.  The next morning the price was $1.02. 20 cents a litre in one night, give me a break.

Having written recently about my travails with getting sound working on Linux I thought I should give equal time to a recent Windows XP problem I encountered.  We decided to convert one of out Linux machines to a dual boot system so I went out and bought a Windows XP CD, made the proper incantations and installed it.  The machine was a plain vanilla Dell computer that had worked flawlessly with Linux for over year.  Everything went fine until I tried to get the onboard networking going.  Windows XP didn't have a driver so I dug up a CD of Dell drivers from the proper vintage of machine. No luck, XP couldn't find a driver it liked.  I rebooted in Linux so I could find out what type of card Linux thought it was. Linux thought it was a card that was listed on the Dell CD I had tried.  The most irritating thing throughout the process is that every time XP rejected the drivers I offered it asked me if it should connect to the Internet to find them.  Would it be too much to ask Microsoft to add a snippet of code to the Windows setup that would check to see if the machine had Internet connectivity before offereing to connect to the Internet to find a driver that I needed to connect to the Internet? Talk about rubbing salt into the wound.

I gave up, the next morning I bought a generic $20 network card at the local computer store and booted the PC.  Windows XP found the card, loaded a driver that it had already and happily connected to the network.  Sigh.

The picture at the top of this entry was taken as I was driving up to the cottage last weekend to open it up for the year.  It's a picture of some of the turbines of the Melancthon Grey Wind Project located near Shelburne, Ontario.

It was my first visit to the cottage this year, not counting the time my brother and I went up to clear off the roof after a particularly large snow storm.  Two solid days of work, two leaks found, one repaired.  Want to buy a cottage?  It's for sale, the MLS listing is here .  If you are looking for a nice 4 bedroom cottage in Sauble Beach this is the cottage for you.  It's a 50 yard walk from the front door to the beach access, I'd love to keep it myself but I don't get enough time off to make having a cottage worthwhile.

P.S.  As I was driving to a picnic today I saw a sign on a vacant corner announcing the construction of a new Home Depot.  This location will be about 3 km. from my house.  Double sigh.

I have noticed that a number of words have entered common usage recently that I had never heard before.  These words obscure the grittier reality of what people are talking about and I am intensely displeased that the media has fallen into using these words instead of calling a spade a spade. Most of these words have come into usage when governments have used them to refer to particularly unsavory practices.


Redact means to edit or prepare for publication. When someone on TV or radio talks about a redacted document what they really mean is censored. Someone has went through the document and blacked out the bits that they don't want us to see. I don't mean to suggest that this is a nefarious practice, some things need to be kept secret but lets say censored so everyone really understands what we are talking about.


Renditon means to hand over. When someone on TV or radio uses the term extraordinary rendition what they mean is kidnapped and turned over to a foreign power for interrogation.


When does a "stress position" become a "torture technique"?  Doesn't the American government realize that it's usage of these techniques only reinforce the perception that they are an evil empire? Slate calls a spade a spade in their article The Torture Feature which details approved U.S. government interrogation techniques.


Why say ethnic cleansing when what you really mean is forced population transfer? Ethnic cleansing is not nice, lets not make it sound that way.


The reason an undocumented worker is undocumented is because they are in the country illegally and can't get documents. Why does the media not call them illegal immigrants when that's what they really are?  In Canada we treat illegal immigrants terribly. When they are apprehended the judical process is so slow that there cases may drag on for up to 8 years leaving them with a sense of false hope. Spending 8 years in judicial limbo is unconscionable, either the status determination process needs to be streamlined or they should be allowed to stay.


There is nothing happy about "Happy Slapping".   Filming someone getting assaulted with your cell phone camera is stupid and pathetic.  This is another case of where the behavior of a few makes everyone feel less secure.  Is that group of kids in hooded swearshirts hanging around outside the mall going to attack you as your walk in?

Must blog now, otherwise will never do it.


What a terrible 24th of May weekend weatherwise. ( I originally said crappy but someone called me out tonight for saying crappy three times in less than five minutes, he accused me of being a character from the King of Queens)  Rainy, cold, windy, what I really want to know is what braniac in our government decided to give $400K to Regis and Kelly to come to Niagara Falls yesterday.  Millions of Americans saw Regis wearing gloves and a coat with Kelly huddled under a blanket. I'm sure that's really going to help tourism. Anyone who has lived here more than a year knows that the weather on the 24th of May weekend is a crapshoot.  Last year I spent the May long weekend at a scout jamboree in Montreal. It rained all weekend.


Even though the weather was terrible no one decided to head home early so we managed to get stuck in a 7 km. long traffic jam that resulted from the closing of one lane of the westbound 401 for bridge repair. The section of bridge that was closed was no more than 20 metres long.  It took us about 45 minutes to cover the 7 km.  I wonder how much greenhouse gases that traffic jam contributed to the environment.


I finally got around to watching two movies I have been meaning to see for a long time, Ararat and Scooby Doo. Ararat is a very serious movie about the Armenian genocide but I still enjoyed it alot. Christopher Plummer take on the customs agent was very good and I've been a fan of Arsinée Khanjian ever since she hosted something or other on CBC Newsworld a number of years ago. Scooby Doo is a  movie about a talking dog.  The one major flaw is Scooby Doo is that the monsters were real. As any Scooby Doo afficianado knows, the monsters in Scooby Doo are never real. It wasn't until I got home and had a chance to look it up on IMDB that I realized Velma was played by Linda Cardellini, who is a regular on ER. She brings a whole new dimension to the character of Velma.  I found that Daphne, as portrayed by Sarah Michelle Gellar, was just a tad too cynical for my tastes. Ain't I profound? I also managed to catch Enemy at the Gate, a war movie about the siege of Leningrad. It wasn't too bad but the love story they shoehorned in was unnecessary.


I thought I should add some pictures in case you got boreddo you know which one is Velma and which one is  Arsinée? (Hey Yahoo, when is this thing getting a spell checker?)
 

My favorite Goggle video for this week.

I don't know about you but I think the hype over the upcoming DaVinci code movie is just a tad bit over the top.  I read the book last year and found it was an entertaining potboiler only slightly grounded in reality.

As I was driving home last night I heard a report on CBC radio about how some Christian groups are using the DaVinci Code as an opportunity to engage others in faith discussions instead of just griping about how Dan Brown was making money off of Christianity. You can here the report here. It seemed like a great idea. Being a died in the wool Lutheran I wondered if there were some Lutheran  friendly resources,  so I spent a few minutes browsing for Lutheran friendly resources. Unfortunately neither the ELCIC  (the national body for Lutherans in Canada) or ELCA (the national body for Lutherans in the United States) have any specific collected resources.  I offer here what I have found along with my comments.

Most of these resources are not specifically Lutheran and should be read with as critical an eye as one should use when reading the DaVinci Code. Please feel free to add your own comments and websites, I'm sure there is some great stuff out there I missed.

• DaVinci Code: Beyond fact vs. fiction Very short, read this one.
  

• Truth Is Stranger than Fiction: The Da Vinci Code and Early
  
  Christianity  A longer, more scholarly work from the Journal of Lutheran ethics.
  

• 5 Big Questions from The Da Vinci Code  Bullet points for discussion. Christianity Today's statement of faith includes a statement on the inerrancy of scripture which is not ELCIC doctrine (My branch of Lutheranism).  I mention this in the interest of full disclosure. The ELCIC position is that  "This church confesses the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the inspired Word of God, through which God still speaks, and as the only source of the Church's doctrine and the authoritative standard for the faith and life of the Church."  (from Article 2, Section 3 of the ELCIC constitution) You may think I am splitting hairs but their is an important distinction between the two positions. 
  

• The Truth about the DaVinci Code An article in the magazine of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (the other major branch of Lutheranism in North America), which also professes the inerrancy of scripture. This link takes you to a PDF of the complete magazine, the article starts on page 5.
  

• DaVinci Code - the errors
  
  This great article is reproduces in it's entirety below, It is written by Bart Ehrman,  a well known theologian, historian and writer, a longer interview with him can be
  found at http://www.beliefnet.com/story/167/story_16783_1.html. Buy his books and read them. He has helpful included an excerpt from his book Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code  on his website. Chapter 7 covers Jesus, Mary Magdaline and Marriage, it's worth the time to read these paperback size 22 pages.
  
  
  With the world-wide release of The DaVinci Code movie fast approaching, as a service to our readers, we post Bart Ehrman's list of the 10 historical errors contained in the book.
  
  
  1. Jesus' life was decidedly not "recorded by thousands of followers across the land." He didn't even have thousands of followers, let alone literate ones.
  
  
  2. It's not true that eighty Gospels "were considered for the New Testament." This makes it sound like there was a contest, entered by mail. . .
  
  
  3. It's absolutely not true that Jesus was not considered divine until the Council of Nicea, that before that he was considered merely as "a mortal prophet." The vast majority of Christians by the early fourth century acknowledged him as divine. (Some thought he was so divine he wasn't even human!)
  
  
  4. Constantine did not commission a "new Bible" that omitted references to Jesus' human traits. For one thing, he didn't commission a new Bible at all. For another thing, the books that did get included are chock-full of references to his human traits (he gets hungry, tired, angry; he gets upset; he bleeds, he dies...).
  
  
  5. The Dead Sea Scrolls were not "found in the 1950s." It was 1947. And the Nag Hammadi documents do not tell the Grail story at all, nor do they emphasize Jesus' human traits. Quite the contrary.
  
  
  6. "Jewish decorum" in no way forbade "a Jewish man to be unmarried." In fact, most of the community behind the Dead Sea Scrolls were male unmarried celibates.
  
  
  7. The Dead Sea Scrolls were not among "the earliest Christian records." They are Jewish, with nothing Christian in them.
  
  
  8. We have no idea about the lineage of Mary Magdalene; nothing connects her with the "house of Benjamin." And even if she were, this wouldn't make her a descendent of David.
  
  
  9. Mary Magdalene was pregnant at the crucifixion? That's a good one.
  
  
  10. The Q document is not a surviving source being hid by the Vatican, nor is it a book allegedly written by Jesus himself. It's a hypothetical document that scholars have posited as having been available to Matthew and Luke, principally a collection of the sayings of Jesus. Roman Catholic scholars think the same of it as non-Catholics; there's nothing secretive about it.
  

Perhaps hate is too strong a word.  What I dislike intensely is the wait in line. My local Home Depot replaced two or three checkout desks with four self service checkouts.  I would have used them except that the item I had was too big to fit on the scanner desk and the self service checkouts don't have hand scanners. Even if I would have had a smaller item the lines for the self service checkouts was as long as the lineups for the regular checkout.  I saw one guy who had a 10 foot high tree on a cart who had pulled it up to one of the self service checkouts and then couldn't figure out how to scan it.  This effectively blocked that checkout while the staff member who was monitoring the self serve checkouts came over to help him figure out what to do.  This was a Saturday afternoon and there were 4 staffed checkout desks including the lumber one which had a lineup that stretched half way down the lumber aisle. When I first saw the length of the lineups I actually took my item back and was going to leave the store before I left the store I realized that I really did need my item so I went back, retrieved it and joined the line.

As I waited in line I discussed with other people in the line how we disliked coming to Home Depot because they always have such a long wait to checkout. One of the women in my line had joined the line when she entered the store while her husband went to retrieve the item they were going to purchase just so they could avoid the long wait in the checkout line.  Home Depot, how about setting up a cash only, express line with a $1 surcharge?  I'd gladly pay for the convenience.

I used to avoid Home Depot and instead shop at the Home Hardware building store in town but it closed soon after Home Depot opened, I really miss it.  It had an old fashioned lumber yard, one time the two guys in the yard helped me to tie a 4 by 8 sheet of plywood to the top of my old mustang when it wouldn't fit in the hatchback. It's also the same place that we bought the three sheets of drywall from when we wanted to close up an archway in our house.  Home Depot has a fixed delivery charge of $50 which is a bit excessive for 1o bucks worth of drywall. Their other alternative was rent a van for 24.95 for 4 hours. The only problem with that was that you couldn't reserve the vans in advance and they were all taken. Home Hardware delivered the drywall for $15.

Next time it's the Home Hardware in Oak Ridges for me.  I wonder if Rona has any plans for a store in Richmond Hill?

 While I'm ranting, hey Yahoo, why doesn't Yahoo 360 have a spell checker built in? I'm getting tired of copying my entries to Microsoft Word so I can spell check them.  That’s one backwards step the Yahoo mail beta has taken. The spell checker doesn't work on Firefox, the spell checker in the previous version worked fine in Firefox.  In the Yahoo Mail beta when you click on the spell check button all you get is a pop up that says the spell check function is under development for Mozilla. Do you think I should believe them?