Comments

• January 12, 2010, Chris M wrote: Sounds to me like you want Rob Bell's book: Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections between Sexuality and Spirituality http://www.amazon.com/dp/0310280672
• January 12, 2010, Robert Fischer wrote: It's on the reading list, but the half-assed scholarship and pop theology in Velvet Elvis has left me pretty cynical about Rob Bell: I'm not sure I'd trust anything he has to say.
• January 12, 2010, Chris M wrote: Eh... well, you don't have to trust any of it-- but it might give you some ideas to think about anyway. I haven't actually read it myself, but your request immediately reminded me of it. It's a fairly blatant title.
• January 12, 2010, Robert Fischer wrote: Yeah, no kidding: that title's pretty much exactly what I asked for. :)
• January 12, 2010, Chris M wrote: And I won't even mention the horrible Focus on the Family audio cassette tapes my mom made me listen to when I was going through puberty.
• January 16, 2010, Mike wrote: http://www.reuniting.info
• January 19, 2010, Mike K wrote: Here is a book from an evangelical Christian perspective: "Sex and the Supremacy of Christ". I haven't read the book myself but I have a good deal of familiarity with the author's works and it should be worthwhile - http://www.desiringgod.org/Store/Books/603_Sex_and_the_Supremacy_of_Christ/
• January 20, 2010, David Dickinson wrote: I'm just catching up on my RSS feeds, so I apologize if this is too late. My proposal for a Ph.D. thesis in 1999 was "A Theology of the Erotic," which was received favorably, but unfortunately my job forced me to move before I could start. I had mainly done exegetical work around the image of God (Gen 1:26-27) and the sexual aspects related to that so I didn't get too far down the theology book path, but a few I recommend are: Roger Scruton, "Sexual Desire"--A philosophy book rather than theology, but very insightful, especially his use of Wittgenstein's "Private Language" argument. Helmut Thielicke, "The Ethics of Sex"--More than just ethics, an insightful examination of sex from a Christian spiritual aspect Phyllis Trible, "God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality."--I didn't always agree with her exegesis or conclusions, but interesting, thoughtful and provocative Shmuley Boteach, "Kosher Sex"--An interesting presentation of intimacy from a Jewish perspective using the Talmud and OT
• January 21, 2010, Robert Fischer wrote: It's never too late.
• February 9, 2010, David wrote: Taboo: Sex, Religion & Magick By Christopher S. Hyatt and Lon Milo DuQuette http://tinyurl.com/y2phl6 Sexuality, Magic, and Perversion By Francis King http://tinyurl.com/yzqf2sv Sex, The Secret Gate to Eden - Alchemy, Tantra, and Kabbalah Video from Thelema Press [Sketchy at times, and makes a fundamental error (from a tantric-variant's bias) about the relationship of the orgasm to the specialized definition of "chastity", but extraordinary in illuminating core symbolism.] http://tinyurl.com/yhavkdt Consider: Masonic symbolism...as you are probably discovering. The mapping of modern masonic myths (clothed in the mythology of esoteric Judaism) to their Egyptian origins (Memphis-Misraim). The "lost word" in relation to the (in your words) "basic nature of all religions" as the unity form of the ubiquitous glyphs of primary duality involving a "cross" and a "circle" (ankh, celtic cross, rose cross, sacred heart, etc.), and their procreative aspects depicted in the three-fold expressions as the various glyphs of trinity, and finally the self-reflexivity in the four-fold expansion as the tetragrammaton...the Logos as Ouroboros. Solve et Coagula. The procedure for the Philosopher's Stone as given in the Emerald Tablet: solutio, putrefactio, albedo, citrinitatio, destillatio, coagulatio, tinctura. The Kybalion. Unrelated (perhaps), here are some inter-woven almost-quotes from the New Testament and Liber AL vel Legis: "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God." "God is Agape." "Because of your Thelema they existed." "Your kingdom come. Your Thelema be done." "On these two commandments [of Agape] depend the whole Nomos." "Agape is the Nomos, Agape under Thelema." "The Logos of the Nomos is Thelema." "The Book of the Nomos is Written and Concealed." "Nor let the fools mistake love; for there are love and love. There is the dove, and there is the serpent. Choose ye well! He, my prophet, hath chosen, knowing the Nomos of the fortress, and the great mystery of the House of God." "Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." "For I am divided for Agape's sake, for the chance of union." Moab-Ammon, Ben-Ammon, Ben-Moab, Moab-On "rise up and walk" Son of the Father, Seed of the Sun IAO Aum Ha

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The problem is that I also picked up a Toshiba external HDD to plug into this beast. The Toshiba drive exposes not *one* but *two* volumes. These two volumes are not two partitions: they are two distinct volumes. One is a “Virtual CD” riddled with Windows software, and there’s no way to get rid of it. A few hours of searching the Internet and hacking on the thing later, I finally gave up and ran it back to Best Buy.

I then picked up an HP SimpleSave, which has better reviews (especially from Linux users). Of course, the one I grabbed has a bent USB connection, so it was utterly worthless. Exchanged it for a new one at Best Buy, plugged it in, and life is good.

Comments

• January 11, 2010, Stefan A. wrote: Just took a look at the specs of the SimpleNET Nas. Do you know if it is possible to do RAID 1 with the two connected harddrives?
• January 11, 2010, Chris Conway wrote: I've got a similar issue with an IOCELL flash drive (a fixed, read-only volume called CASTELLA). Very annoying. I think you might be able to remove the volume in Windows.
• January 11, 2010, Robert Fischer wrote: @Chris Yeah, I got that recommendation from some online forum. Tried to remove it via my wife's Vista, and that failed. Also tried to use software from the Toshiba website, and that failed (claimed to not find a VirtualCD volume). As far as I'm concerned, it's not worth my effort, and I want to punish Toshiba by returning their product to Best Buy and picking something up from their competitor. The HP SimpleSave drive I picked up worked right out of the box: just plugged it in and went. @Stefan A No obvious way to set up RAID 1 via the web interface.

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One of the things I’ve done is adopted a kind of “Downloads Zero” approach (akin to “Inbox Zero“): I had built up a lot of crap in the Downloads folder, and I had become afraid of what to throw away and what was important. This ate up a bunch of hard drive and was generally a source of low-grade anxiety that I didn’t need. So I’ve implemented a new plan: each I log into my computer, I wipe the Downloads folder completely. This means that if something’s important in Downloads, I have to consciously move it out of that folder and into someplace else. So far, it’s going great: there’s a surprisingly refreshing feeling when I see an empty Downloads folder!

To implement this on OS-X, create a folder named ~/logs and a file named ~/bin/cleanup_downloads.command with the following content:

name=cleanup_downloads
rm -PRf ~/Downloads/* 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null

Then, in System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items, click the little + and select ~/bin/cleanup_downloads.command.

Comments

• November 24, 2009, Antony Jones wrote: Good ideas, personally I make all operations on temporary files on my desktop, meaning I'm constantly reminded if things are not clean and tidy! I find the ~/Downloads folder is a bit hidden away for my liking.
• November 24, 2009, Michael E wrote: Interesting idea. I too suffer from a large quantity of cruft in my downloads folder (it was worse in my Windows days, when i would carry around gigabytes of frequently outdated freeware installers). I'm not sure if I'm quite ready to get this extreme about it, but it might be beneficial.
• November 24, 2009, Robert Fischer wrote: @Michael It's not that extreme: after all, if it's in the downloads folder, you got it from the internet, which means you can always get it from the internet again if you need to!
• November 24, 2009, Barry Kelly wrote: I just file away everything I download to my file server, into directories created according to date, in an automated fashion. My file server is over 7TB in size, and it'll grow exponentially over time as HDs get larger, so I generally don't worry about it.
• November 24, 2009, Barry Kelly wrote: Oh, and it's a mistake to think you can download everything again. It's can be hard enough to find many e.g. game mods and the like three or four years after the fact, never mind 10 or 12.
• November 25, 2009, Robert Fischer wrote: @Barry If I had effectively unlimited disk space on my network, I'd probably do the same: instead of deleting, I'd just move it over to a mounted network directory based on date. I'm not in that position, though, so I just wipe it. I considered burning everything to DVDs every once in a while, but that seems like a pain and more hassle than it's worth. If there's something valuable which I may want later, I'll just have to be pro-active about saving it or accept life without it. So far, I've been able to survive just fine that way.
• November 29, 2009, Ingo Richter wrote: Great Idea! After reading your blog post I had a look into one of my Downloads folder. On my Desktop machine there were 12G of data and files. Much more than I thought. And lot's of really old stuff. Huge amount of wasted diskspace. Now I will do the same with my Downloads folder. Remove everthing that wasn't filed accordingly (if neccessary at all) and gain more space for the important stuff. Thanks.

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• Tor — This system provides anonymity online. Even if you don’t use it yourself, running a server in the Tor network provides opportunities to the vast array of people who use Tor to protect themselves and evade oppressive governments: see the description of various users here. At least run as a non-exit node in the Tor network (reject *:* in torrc, or unchecking all the boxes in Vidalia), although allowing exits to port 80 (“Websites” in Vidalia) and 422 (“Secure Websites (SSL)” in Vidalia) make lots of people happy with relatively minimal abuse possibilities.
• BOINC — Although this started as SETI@Home¹, there are all kinds of projects you can subscribe to now from across a variety of fields. The big ones are here.

¹ Please read all the way through Brian’s The Fermi Paradox post before committing your clock cycles to the SETI@Home project in lieu of more immediately and directly beneficent project.

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I haven’t heard a single explanation for the rejection of the Google Voice app that makes a shred of sense at all.

What’s funny is that if you read the previous two paragraphs, the answer jumps right out at you:

Fact: Apple continues to sell iPhone apps that permit you to send free SMS messages. No problems there either.

Fact: You can still do everything that the Google Voice app would have done by accessing the web interface through Safari, albeit slightly less conveniently.

Exactly!

Imagine Google Voice was allowed on. Imagine that its “in the cloud” nature or its ease-of-use makes it a common go-to application for SMS, and people share their Google Voice number for incoming phone calls and use the Google Voice app to place their outgoing calls. In short: most of the iPhone’s core functionality is replaced by Google Voice.

Now imagine Apple pisses you off, and you decide to switch. No problem: switch to a Pre. Same carrier, same Google Voice functionality: didn’t even have to move over your contacts. That’s no biggie to you, but a big biggie to Apple: they just lost a gizmo junkie.

In my interview with “This Ain’t Your Dad’s Java”, it came up that Apple’s approach to developers is rather domineering: they are letting you play on their playground, and while you may make some cash or have some sense of ownership, the real person in control is always Apple. And this is the way it is on OS-X, too, which (despite its BSD roots) is still de facto dependent upon Apple’s good graces for up-to-date Java releases and other software support.

While this attitude may seem initially at odds with Apple’s extensive effort at developer evangelism, the fact of the matter is that tight control over the software is what drives a lot of Apple’s hardware sales. OS-X is effectively an Apple-hardware-only piece of software¹, and that software has attracted a whole lot of people who were otherwise turned off by the spendiness of Apple hardware (your humble author included). Now that I’ve got a MacBook Pro with OS-X, it comes shipped with iTunes, which I use because nothing else integrates as well with the other applications I’m running. iTunes doesn’t integrate well with my cell phone or MP3 player (both of which I end up treating like a dumb USB drive), which makes me tempted to get an iPod.

OS-X (software) sold MacBook Pro (hardware) which shipped with iTunes (software) which is tempting me towards an iPod (hardware): Apple may be more of a gizmo company than a software company, but it’s a mistake to think of them as a hardware company. They want any piece of their puzzle to get you hooked and jonesing for the rest of it. And letting someone act as a bridge to a non-Apple universe is simply not helpful to that plan.

¹ You can try your luck at the OSX86 Project, but it’s commensurate with rolling your own Linux distro.

[EDIT: There is a bunch of people all excited over the FCC's inquiry about Apple canceling Google Voice. Relax: it's for a more general investigation into vendor lock-in in the handset market (cite), and there's no sign they are going to force Apple to allow an app into their app store. ]
[EDIT 2: More good stuff on the FCC's inquiry over at a Washington Post reprint of TechCrunch info, although the title is a bit misleading ("Why The FCC Wants To Smash Open The iPhone" — Really? It does? Got any evidence whatsoever?).]

Comments

• August 2, 2009, Marc Stock wrote: There's a big difference between rejecting an app in the first place, and approving an app and then deciding to boot it. GoogleVoice app isn't the only app that provided this functionality btw (http://www.riverturn.com/blog/?p=455). Voice Central does the same thing and they had approval prior to submitting it in the first place. To add insult to injury, Apple is expecting the developers of these apps to pay for all the customer refunds and refuses to even explain why they booted Voice Central. So there's plenty of reason to be pissed off. Say hello to my little friend: Redsn0w.
• August 2, 2009, Robert Fischer wrote: I have no doubt that there is other apps with similar functionality: it's just that Google has a stronger established user base, which makes it a stronger argument to bounce around: why use Apple's contact book system when you can use one that integrates with your GMail/GTalk contacts? And if you're not using Apple's stuff, Apple can't use vendor lock-in to leverage you into buying their other gizmos. As for releasing it and then pulling it: Apple probably underestimated how much stronger until it released the app, and then discovered (probably through some kind of built-in "QoS" spyware) how dangerous it was. Or maybe it was approved by one group of people and then the executives noticed it and decided it had to die. At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter. You have no right to be "pissed off": you're playing Apple's game, and Apple never pretended otherwise. If Apple decides to screw you, you're screwed. Welcome to the Apple World: wouldn't you like to pay $100/year to play? The fact that most of the time people go around pretending like that's not true is why this wake-up call suddenly shocked and annoyed people. But Apple's not doing anything that should be the least bit surprising.

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