This Pilgrim's Progress

"Hobbit" Species found!!!???

Australian scientists have found bones of a previous unknown hominin species that they call "Homo floresiensis". They found a partial skeleton about 3 foot tall along with some tools and implements. It's quite an interesting find. I don't know if they were actually a human species or just another extinct species of great ape. They have found remains of about 7 individuals. I've always thought that a lot of the old legends and tales about giants and "little people", and dragons was somehow factually based but transformed into folklore over time. Apparently the island where they were found also had dwarf forms of other species like the elephant, so it's apparently an example of micro-evolution in response to a restricted environment??? Or maybe God made small critters to live in small places??? Get's one to thinking about the possibilities, doesn't it??

My daughter will be delighted by this being a big LOTR fan!!!

PC revived--sort of

Hi, well a buddy at work helped me to get our family PC revived and somewhat functional again. There are still some wierd problems with it like the IE6 browser takes forever to come up, and I couldn't download McAfee from their web site for some reason. The IE6 wouldn't run the activex control, no matter what I did. The McAfee folks sent me back a very nice note with some trouble-shooting steps that I followed religiously, but to no avail. The Windows Explorer is taking a long time to build its directory tree too. This happened when we first had XP installed and I remember doing some sort of tweak to get it to run faster, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was I did.

I've switched over to Firefox for a browser, and it seems to be a pretty good browser. In the meantime we have an external drive coming today that I ordered and that we'll use for our backups.

I really hate computers, especially when they don't work. I work as a data warehouse designer and I'm very patient when trying to solve a problem at work. But at home I don't want to have any problems, I just want the dumb thing to work like it should!!

I think we'll probably get another computer in the near future just to prevent our being so dependant on one machine. I'm thinking a laptop and using a wireless network and have Cox Communications set it up for us. But, that's a couple of months down the line.

The PC is sick!!

This if my first post in a long time. I've been pretty busy with life in general. Work has gotten a little more busy, and I've been teaching middle-school boys how to splice, and I'm finishing up on my daughters curriculum outline for the next 2 years. I'm in charge of the history/literature curriculum for our children, and time got away from me and I hadn't finished my daughter's outline for grade 11, and she's 2 month's into the school year already!! Luckily she had some stuff to finish from last year's outline, so she wasn't without something to study.

Politics has receeded a little in importance to me as these other tasks came up. It has been a crazy campaign, and I'm sure the next few weeks will have some surprises in store for us.

I've lost about 20 lbs. since our vacation in August. I haven't seen 180 in quite a while. I'm going to keep it up and see if I can get down to my "fighting weight" of 160-165 which I haven't been since high-school some 30 years ago!! But it will improve my health, and maybe I can catch up with my daughter and do some hiking and even backpacking with her!!

Our PC came down with a "corrupted Registry heap" this week, and it refuses to boot up, even with threats and cajoling. It seems pretty immune to my imprecations. I brought it to work to see if one of our PC experts could help me revive the poor thing. But it's putting a pretty big crimp in our life-style, its a major tool for our family, especially my daughter who uses it for school and communicating with her buddies.

I attended a Ligonier Ministries conference last weekend with R.C.Sproul and R.Godfrey. The topic was God's Providence. It was a very good conference and the teaching was excellent. I've always had a pretty solid faith in God's Providence and this helped to firm that up a little. It's hard for most non-believer's to understand the concept of God's sovereignty and how nothing happens that he isn't an agent of. Even though God is not the author of sin or evil, he sometimes restrains his hand to allow it to work towards his own perfect plan. A hard teaching, but its a comfort if you also have faith in God's essential Goodness and his goodwill and good plans for His Church.

My 13 year old son and I went to the Chrysler Classic Speed Festival at North Island a few weeks ago. It was great to see those old cars racing. We had a great time and came home exhausted!! I've got some good pictures, but I won't be able to do anything with them until our PC is up again.

Well, I've got to get back to the "salt mine", so I'll end this rather rambling post.

"Political Jihad"?? Puhleeze!!!

Tom Brokaw accused the blogosphere of a "Political Jihad" over the Rather "MemoGate" scandal. This was at a round-table discussion of sorts back east. The participants were Brokaw, Rather, and Jennings. These guys don't get it!!! If they didn't portray themselves as the Brahmans of journalistic objectivity, then we wouldn't be so hard on them. But their pomposity and extreme left bias makes them fair game when they mess up, especially in regards to journalistic ethics!!!

Like the typical post-modern, Rather is more sorry he got caught than he is for his professional screw-up.

I've been reading Dante's Inferno lately, and it's quite interesting how Dante places the well-known figures of his time in the different levels of hell to suffer the appropriate torments for their particular sin. If we could add another level of Hell for "Journalists Who Lie", the appropriate torment would be to immobilize them a la "Clockwork Orange" and make them watch a continuous tape of their broadcasts. Dante would always add a creative twist, so we could make the torment worse by having a demon (who remarkably resembles Michael Moore) dancing around and shouting out news-blog site names. I get a strange comfort from that mental image!!