Posts from — February 2007

This time with FedEx. I got email notification of shipment on Monday, so I added the tracking number to my bloglines to keep up with it (I love that feature).

Within bloglines, I get the following tracking information:

Date/Time Location Activity
2007-02-23 07:41:00 ROANOKE – HD, VA Scanned at Fedex sort facility
2007-02-23 07:23:00 ROANOKE – HD, VA Scanned at Fedex destination location
2007-02-22 15:54:00 CHARLOTTE, NC Scanned at Fedex sort facility
2007-02-22 12:17:00 CHARLOTTE, NC Arrived at Fedex sort facility
2007-02-20 10:07:00 RIALTO, CA Departed Fedex sort facility
2007-02-19 20:48:00 RIALTO, CA Scanned at Fedex sort facility
2007-02-19 16:59:00 RIALTO, CA Customer-loaded Trailer Picked Up
2007-02-19 00:00:00 RIALTO, CA Package information transmitted to Fedex

If I click on the link, and view the tracking information on FedEx’s actual webpage, I get the following

Date/Time Location/Activity
Feb 23, 2007 7:31 AM SALEM, VA/On FedEx vehicle for delivery
7:23 AM SALEM, VA/At local FedEx facility
Feb 22, 2007 3:54 PM CHARLOTTE, NC/Arrived at FedEx location
Feb 20, 2007 9:04 AM BLOOMINGTON, CA/Departed FedEx location
Feb 19, 2007 8:48 PM BLOOMINGTON, CA/Arrived at FedEx location
4:59 PM BLOOMINGTON, CA/Picked up
2:31 PM /Package data transmitted to FedEx

As long as they get it to me, I don’t care if they can’t keep it straight.

Sorry to be so remiss…Let’s see.

We tried Roasted Vegetable and Beef Stew

I only deviated from this recipe in that I used a leftover roast from the day before, and therefore skipped all the business about roasting the beef. However, I think it would have been even tastier with individually roasted bits of beef. We liked this a lot.

One day I made French Onion Soup. It was a time-consuming disaster. We could not ask the children to eat it, and it didn’t go far, which turned out to be a blessing, though it didn’t feel like one when I was pouring my heart into the preparation. Not yummy. The recipe called for over a cup of wine. I used about a cup (what we had leftover from Sunday)….blech. Richard said that was all he could taste. It was definitely too sweet. I do like the idea of putting bread on top and baking it with cheese. That part was great. Unfortunately it had nothing to do with onions. I think my Frenchy card is going to be revoked.

One more soup. I cheated and made a soup that we’ve had before….but it had been several months, and I’ve only made it once. I got it from someone on the Rumor Forum. (Thank you, Andrea!) So delicious.

Roasted chicken-noodle soup

2 t. olive oil
1 c. chopped onion
1 c. diced carrots
1 c. sliced celery
1 clove garlic, minced
¼ c. all-purpose flour
½ t. dried oregano
¼ t. dried thyme
¼ t. poultry seasoning
6 c. chicken broth
4 c. diced peeled baking potato
1 t. salt
2 c. shredded cooked chicken (about 12 ounces)
1 c. evaporated milk
4 ounces (2 cups) uncooked egg noodles

Heat olive oil in Dutch oven over medium heat. Add onion, carrots, celery and garlic, sauté 5 minutes.

Mix flour, oregano, thyme and poultry seasoning in cup, add to veggies, cook for 1 minute.

Stir in broth, potato, and salt, bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer, partially covered, 25 minute or until potato is tender (but not too).

Add chicken, milk and egg noodles; cook for 10 minutes or until noodles are tender.

I was going to write a post about the controversy surrounding Dr. Marcus Ross and his degree.

In summary, he is a Young Earth Creationist that recently received his PhD in geosciences from a secular university. His work for the degree was all under typical scientific assumptions, i.e. his research followed an evolutionary/old earth paradigm.

Now evolutionists like Eugenie Scott have come out and accused him of lying, stating that he should not have received his degree, and are calling for standards that will disallow this horrible crime from happening in the future.

But, I see that everything I wanted to say about this has already been said over at Telic Thoughts:

Marcus Ross and Methodological Naturalism

I would have only added some quotations of Eugenie Scott from an interview with St. Anne’s Pub a number of years ago, and from Michael Shermer in his book Why Darwin Matters, which reinforce what is argued in the TT article.

Athanasius Press is having a Valentine’s Day sale. Some of the email I got…

For two days save 30 – 50% on books from Athanasius Press!

February 13th and 14th is the time to place your order at www.athanasiuspress.org and receive big discounts on every book title in our inventory.

Here’s what we’ll be offering -

“Paedofaith”, Rich Lusk, normally $15.95, will be $7.98
“The Case for Covenant Communion”, Gregg Strawbridge, ed., normally $14.95, will be $7.48
“The Second Adam and the New Birth”, M.F. Sadler, normally $10.00, will be $5.00
“The Federal Vision”, Steve Wilkins, ed., normally $10.00, will be $7.00
“Ecclesiastes Through New Eyes”, Jeff Meyers, normally $14.95, will be $10.47

Sale begins Tuesday, February 13th.

I’d really like to get the Sadler book, but I am sticking to my vow of not buying any new books until I’ve read more of what I already own.

It snowed Tuesday night. We got around three inches or so of good snow. Of course, by Wednesday afternoon it was in the 40s, and the snow is next to gone. Only where it was packed together, like in the snowman that the girls made, does it remain. He’s still struggling to stand up. Geneva is looking out the back window at the snowman when she turns to Megan and says, “Mom, can I go outside, real quick, and kick down the snowman?”.

Her request was granted and she and her sisters had a demolition session. Such sweet little girls!

Just an update on the Sony Connect music store DRM that I was dealing with. I was able to login to the store, and deauthorized my old computer, authorized this one. And then imported the songs, and all was well. So it worked pretty much the same way iTunes works.

At my work, I’ve been offered to have business cards made several times, but I’ve always declined. I never say the need. But here at my “new” workplace (I’ve been here nine months… when does it cease being new?), they didn’t ask me. They just made them.

So a month or so ago I got a box of business cards. I’ve never had business cards before, so it was a kind of fun feeling to get them. But, other than playing around handing them out to friends, I never used them.

Until today. Yep, I used one in an official capacity today. I gave it to a temporary faculty member, in case she has to reach me for anything. I’m just so professional!

So my hard drive was dying, and I bought a new one. Installing a new hard drive gave me opportunity to do a fresh install of Windows. I installed a full version of XP Pro that I have rather than the OEM XP Home that came with the lappy.

iTunes gave me some trouble when I tried to play protected content. I had to authorize the computer, and everything plays just fine. The only problem with iTunes is that one of my five slots for authorized computers is filled with a nonexistent computer. I don’t expect I’ll ever have five computers at once, so the trouble will come if I fail to deauthorize a few more times when my hard drive crashes.

Windows Media Player is the worst. It just doesn’t play the songs. Who cares that I have the licenses backed up? WMP 11 doesn’t allow you to backup and restore licenses, so those files are now worthless.

Sony Connect is nearly as bad as WMP, but I haven’t reached the conclusion of the story, so it’s still possible that things will work out. Some time ago, I used the SonicStage Backup Utility to backup all the purchases from the Connect store. Safe, I considered myself. Ah, but when I tried to run the restore, I am told that I have to deauthorize the old computer. You’ll recall that the old computer is nonexistent. I thought it would be worth it to log in to the store anyhow, and see if I could do anything. Well, I can’t get to the store. When I click on that tab, I get an error that crashes the program. So who knows if I’ll ever be able to log into the store to deauthorize/authorize my computer.

Thankfully none of this is a real loss to me. I burned all these songs to audio cd, and then reripped them as plain vanilla mp3 files. So I have the music I bought (and, for the record, most of it wasn’t actually bought. I spent no money at the Sony store… it was all free gift cards I got with Sony products or other rewards programs. Most of the WMP songs were also obtained in some free prize fashion, but I know I bought at least a few tracks from WalMart’s music store. Three or four, maybe. I have bought several albums worth of songs from iTunes, but still most of the DRMed content I have with it is free downloads or gift certificate downloads. And I also used QTFairUse to rip off the DRM of most of what I bought).

But the fact that backing up my songs/licenses did absolutely nothing for me should be alarming. And bring attention to the failure of DRM. It’s supposed to keep people from stealing, but all it really does is give honest users a headache and probably make their purchases unplayable.

Everything I’ve downloaded from emusic plays just fine, by the way. They don’t DRM their stuff. And, if I had happened to have lost the data… I can still download every track that I’ve bought from them (unless their distribution deal with the label has changed, in which case they remove the songs from their store).

Saturday, 21st July 2007, 0001.

They passed up a once in the lifetime genius marketing plan of releasing the book (Book 7) on 07.07.07. It’s only a couple weeks later, so it isn’t that big a deal as far as getting the book in our hands. But… if I were in charge, legions of Harry Potter fans the world over would be rejoicing. As it is, there is widespread disappointment.

Mark made a great point about The Blasphemy Challenge.

This guy makes another one.