• Greed destroys people, cultures.
• There are more powerful things around us than just physical things.
• Being more simple can lead to a better life for some.
• Being spiritual has its benefits.
• Satan wants to own your soul.

OK, so no where did I get that last one. But when you watch the video of Mark Driscoll, he wants you to believe it.

In the video, Mark claims that doing anything remotely ’spiritual’ invites the Devil. This could include anything from alternative medicine, to yoga. (Seriously, that’s what he says… yoga is an invention of Satan.) So, based on that bullshit information, he comes to the conclusion that since Avatar is a very spiritual move and it’s one of the biggest themes, it’s the most Satanic movie of all time.

*rolls eyes*

After watching the video, I had to ask myself, “If this guy was in charge, I wonder just how much of the existing culture would be burned to ashes?” There seems to be more and more Christian nutbags preachers who seem to rid the world of not only anything not Christian, but anything that’s not ‘their’ Christian. To me, that’s just damn-scary.

On the other hand, it’s kind of scary, to think that such blatantly homophobic-proposed laws are being thrown out there to the public left and right. These people don’t seem to care about hiding anymore. Instead, they’re putting all their cards on the table for anyone to see. What’s even scarier, is that there are people who are so unintelligent, they’ll agree that I’m so awful that such legislation is necessary.

As it would happen, I ended up working at Dell for a while, as a quality tech. I was a part of the group who made sure the computers being built met Dell’s standards. It was a lot of fun, but it wasn’t meant to be permanently. As a temp, I worked so many hours and they had to let me go. My next job after that was also a quality tech. Unfortunately though, that job wasn’t meant to be for long either.

My very first call center job was with T-Mobile. Ever since then, I’ve enjoyed helping people over the phone. Yes, the field has its own issues that can make it frustrating for reps, but overall, I’ve found it rather rewarding. (Especially the technical portion of it.)

What I’d Like To Do
I’d love to get into technical support of some kind. I don’t have any special training or classwork under my belt, so I’d have to start with some kind of basic help desk job. The problem is, those jobs are few and far between. (At least up here in Columbus.) I’d love to work in a 911 call center, but again, I imagine those job openings are rather rare.

At any rate, the past few days have made me realize that if I want to get into anything a bit more complicated, I’m going to have to go back to school at some point. In the mean time, whatever will happen, will happen.

It’ll be interesting when Chrome OS is launched. Slowly but surely, an operating system is becoming nothing more but a place to store your local files. Linux, and Chrome OS, may not be perfect, but considering it does just about everything I need it to do, they’ll suit my needs just fine.

A judge awarded custody of a one-year-old boy to his own foster parents. The judge had determined the boy was ‘happy and thriving,’ so why not? Had they been any typical parents, it probably wouldn’t have been any deal at all. But the parents are lesbians, so you know bat-shit-crazy obsessed right-wing people had a fit over it. How they did it though, was shady and under-handed. (And, also kind of funny to those of us on the intertubes.)They wanted to shock people about the ruling. Now-a-days, just telling people a child was adopted by a gay couple won’t stir-up much controversy. So, in order to really get the people terrified, the nut-bags decided to show a picture of the couple. Of course, the couple actually look quite normal. So… they decided to find the most hideous lesbian couple they could find on the internet…

I’m fairly certain you can tell which couple is the real one, and which one was the picture the had-hatters decided to use…

The extreme-right groups use these kinds of tactics all the time to drum-up support for their goals of stamping out homosexual rights of any kind. Don’t be fooled. Even though this one was fairly obvious to a lot of people, there are others that aren’t so blatant.

I was introduced to VBS.TV a few days ago via CNN, who recommended the Vice Guide to North Korea. (Which was an awesome short series by itself.) I spent some time looking through the various series when I stumbled across Toxic Garbage Island. You might have read about it before, that it was literally an island made up of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean. The truth though, is that it’s not an island, but maybe an island’s worth of mass floating across a vast amount of water.

It was an eye-opener, for sure. It’s not a floating island of garbage, no, it’s much scarier than that. Instead, you have billions and billions of these tiny little plastic particles floating in the ocean, being eaten by all sorts of animals and washing up on shores. It’s disgusting, revolting, and terrifying to think that there’s that much plastic out there.

But like one of the guys said in the documentary, we can’t exactly escape plastic at this point in the game. We use it for just about everything. However, it makes you wonder though, if we should start switching to biodegradable plastic? Even if we did, we still have the big mess in the oceans of the world, and it’s not going to get better any time soon.

Google has introduced Buzz today, as their own way to improve social networking. The problem is, I don’t get what all the ‘buzz’ is about.

It’s a great idea, if it takes off. The problem I have is that Facebook is the site I use currently to share/link/etc. I don’t have everyone’s email address. Why would I if we all use Facebook? There’s really no need. For now, Buzz works off the people you email the most. (Which is really just one/two for me.) Thus, you still ‘technically’ need to be apart of something to get any kind of information stream.

That being said, I can see this being much, much more useful if things were more interconnected. In the meantime, it’ll take a hell of a lot more work on Google’s part before I start making heavy use of Buzz.

It’s funny. Some of the strongest memories I have of high school, were some of the most ridiculous ideas school leaders and parents had about how things should be done. Uniforms, solving school shootings? Sure, they thought that was a great idea! It never ceased to amaze me how people freak out over the simplest of things.Now, I believe I had to read The Diary of Anne Frank in middle school. So far as I remember, it was the original text that was released, not the super-deluxe-smut version where she talks about her lobster pot. (Where was this version when I was in school???) Of course, even if I did have access to that version, I doubt you’d catch me, or anyone other normal kid, masturbating to that in a bathroom stall. (I mean… that would just be creepy, don’t you think?)

Of course though, there’s a school system that had an a few helicopter-pussy-parents parents complain and had the super-deluxe-smut version pulled and replaced with the original.

Look, parents, teachers, school board members… I’m not saying that kids shouldn’t be protected from material they’re not ready to deal with, but I have news for you: sexually-active teens isn’t a new concept. It’s fairly obvious Miss Frank had a few hormones running through her at the time she wrote her passages. If anything, it tells teens that kids back then weren’t so different from kids today. And that, to me at least, was a big important part of the book. (And made me connect that much more with someone I barely knew.)

I have a feeling though that the browser wars aren’t over, not by a long shot. But for me to go back to Firefox, Mozilla is going to have to ramp things up. They’re going to have to come up with some really strong usability features to get me to go back. And they will. Firefox hasn’t really had any serious competition until now, and I can’t wait to see what’s next. In the mean time, I’m going  to enjoy my new relationship with Chrome.

They Can’t Make A Good Choice
As an adult, you’re free to  make all sorts of choices for yourself, including medical ones. If you’re a part of a religious group who doesn’t believe in standard medical options and choose to ‘pray the sick away,’ then by all means, go for it. You’re an adult. You have the right to make whatever irrational educated choice you see fit.

Kids though, don’t really have that option, do they? I have a very hard time with stories like the above, because the kids died without being able to make and educated choice. The question then, should there be stricter laws that state that even if one’s beliefs include things like ‘faith healing,’ one should still be required to also use standard medical treatment in-tandem?

It’s A Harder Issue Than It Looks
A part of me says that goes back to a key Wiccan rule, “Do what you want, but harm none.” Of course, the parents in the story obviously hurt someone, their own kin. Yet, should people still be able to do this anyways? Should they still be allowed to be so ignorant that the end up killing themselves? We have laws against suicide already, so maybe that’s already covered?

Did the couple just get a slap on the wrist in my opinion? Yes and no. On the one hand, I think they should spend a bit more time in jail. On the other though, as unfortunate as it is, maybe losing their granddaughter and now their son will show people that, yes, you’re free to faith heal all you want to, but you may also want to be a bit more intelligent, and also go see a doctor, too.