Tales of Ordinary Madness

Religious identification in the U.S.:
How American adults view themselves

This is generally good news. Religion (Christianity) in the U.S. in my lifetime has constantly interfered with science, education, and general progress. I’m glad to hear that perhaps the country is finally moving away from the boogeyman of the past.

“There does not seem to be revival taking place in America. Whether that is measured by church attendance, born again status, or theological purity, the statistics simply do not reflect a surge of any noticeable proportions.” George Barna. 2

“The proportion of the [American] population that can be classified as Christian has declined from 86% in 1990 to 77% in 2001.” ARIS Study. 4

For those of you who don’t know, Jono is the community manager for Ubuntu and also one of the hosts of the former LugRadio. He gave a great Keynote at Ohio Linuxfest and is a heck of a nice guy.

RadioShack somehow has became even less relevant to me today.

So I’m helping my buddy Scott (the guy behind www.linuxalt.com) run a few Cat 5 cables through his 100 year old house. The one thing we need that we can’t find is an RJ45 tester. We want to make sure we got all our wires in the right order before we hook it all up. Who else would have an RJ45 tester but RadioShack. Well guess what…..

No RJ45 tester. Oh sure, they have eight different multimeters and giant drawers of transistors and stupid piezo buzzers, but not one RJ45 tester. They had a WHOLE corner dedicated to that new technology known as the Citizens Band radio (perhaps you’ve heard of it), but not one RJ45 tester.

Stupid, stupid RadioShack.

Oh ya, all that goodness under a single roof. This little gem of Americana can be located in downtown Southern Pines, North Carolina. When I found out this place was located just a few short miles from Jess’ Mom’s house, how could I resist. I dragged Jess out there (someone had to take the pics) this afternoon

Here’s a pic of me standing next to the bear that announces the presence of this great museum:

Oh and the best part of this museum is their collection of ALL of the credible evidence for evolution:

In case it’s not obvious, the only thing in the case is a plastic snake wrapped around an apple.

If the sign isn’t clear, here is a better shot:

Ridiculous is the nicest word I can think to describe this place. If you’re in the neighborhood make sure you stop by.

I totally want to hang out with Satan.

I could watch it over and over and over again

So, I’m not sure that I totally understand the usefulness of “micro-blogging”, but given the immense amount of interest around it, I’ve decided to give it a try. I know twitter is the most popular site right now, but I refuse to use it for several reasons. Mainly because the service seems to be down more than it is up, but also because once your content is put into twitter, it’s theirs. They have been given a ton of venture capital money and the only way they can make money is with YOUR content.

Identi.ca is different. Identi.ca is based upon an Open Source application called laconica licensed under the GNU AGPL. You control and own all your content. Don’t like Identi.ca? Fine, grab your data and set-up your own Laconica server.

We’ll see how my micro-blogging experience goes. Right now Identi.ca is still rough around the edges and they are still in the process of adding some features that Twitter has had for a while.

If you’d like to see my Identi.ca feed, you can see it here: http://identi.ca/cteodorski/all

Bloggers stink.

People need to relearn when it is appropriate to use the exclamation point. Below is the explanation of when to use an exclamation mark:

A sentence ending in an exclamation mark is either an actual exclamation (“Wow!”, “Boo!”), a command (“Stop!”), or is intended to be astonishing in some way (“They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”).

“I had a great sandwich!” or “What a nice house!” or even “That was very funny!” doesn’t qualify. I don’t understand why the exclamation mark has become the most abused punctuation symbol (for my purposes, I prefer to abuse the comma).

Please, next time your blogging, read your sentence that ends with an exclamation point aloud like you are yelling “Stop!” to a friend who is about to cartwheel off a cliff and see if it still makes sense. My guess is that 99.999% of the time it will sound down right ridiculous.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

This video moved me in a way I can’t explain. It’s so easy to be us versus them, but so easy to forget it when you see people together sharing the same silly experience.