The cross-continent backup/restore routine at UniJewel failed to find the zip to download to Belgium. David emailed me a "here we go again?" and I responded with "maybe later. I have to wait for my wife to approve this... then it will be in the mail for a week or three.
IOW, UniJewel is blacklisted until I get paid for what I did in december. Sorry, friend, it's not you who is to blame - you did your best. Just pass my discontent will to match the speed upwards."
Other random thoughts for the day:
Mozilla FireFox 2.0 has a spell checker on by default - and it reports its own name as misspelled :). Though it can't catch words spelled as other words - "your done" are two correctly spelled words, and even "how is you're friend" is flawless... as far as spell checking is concerned.
An episode in a week long dispute with a religious nut from Brazil:
>Just repeat with me, with the most deep feeling in your heart: "Jesus I accept you as my Lord.. I accept you as my onw savior and I recognize that you die in my case.. To save me!!"
I really can't. It'd be a lie if I said something like that, and I don't want to do that.
>Here at UA everyone play plane charity on the exercise of our fellowship.
No. I don't. I'm here to learn and share what I know. But not as a charity - it's out of the solidarity between equals, not a handout from the haves to the have nots.
If you accuse me of charity, you better build a case to prove that I did that.
[update]
Sorry, I forgot you don't do proving.
>When Jesus was in the cross had a thief on his side that asked him... "what do I have to do to be with you" Jesus answered: "You already will be with me"..
"...but if you can't move a bit closer I'll be alone on the pictures".
>where should I find peacefull and pacific life with ethics with no religion?
Here, with me. I've refused two invitations into Miloshevich's wars. I haven't even taken part in a bar fight. Proof enough? Ah, but you don't need proof, you believe.
I can even promise some fun: I'll do my best to rebut any attempt to show me the error of my ways.
>So you mean the religious community is providing a valuable service to me, and I'm blissfully unaware of it?
>
>No, I'm saying that if everybody in society decided to set and act on their own morals individually, you'd be a lot worse off. I'm presuming that you are law-abiding, which means you are largely confirming to a set of external principles, but why would you object to an extra layer of shepherding towards behavior that benefits you?
Living with sheep, you get ticks, shepherded or not.
I can read this as religion being the tamer of the beast, and that the beast would inevitably slash everything in sight if the tamer fell asleep. It may be true here - generations which were brought up believing this can't change their minds overnight, and they'd probably lash out from simple fear that everyone else would lash out. A self-fulfilling negative prophecy.
Except that it doesn't go that way. I've lived in a country where the religions were marginalized (except that you could get into jail for "insulting religious feelings of believers"), and the people were still polite, friendly and merry. Actually, even more merry, because the old "you can't marry him, he's a [insert the other denomination here]" didn't apply anymore. The crime rate was low, there were no homeless people (each municipality owned some housing for the neediest).
>Few things I saw them do probably don't qualify (asking for money and knocking on my door trying to get me to read their stuff, taking over the whole street so I have to park two blocks away, occupying all TV channels for a whole month, occupying a lot of local FM bandwidth... that comes to mind).
>
>Are you one of those people who "hate" a radio personality but always listen to him?
No... I'm very quick to flip a channel, or to slam the button on the radio. I even listened to Michael Savage (not the guy of the same name that we have here, but the savage on the radio) for about five minutes before I changed the station - and never heard him again.
>Sheesh, nobody forces you to access *anything* you don't like on the internet, radio, TV, whatever. If there was nothing except religions programs, I'd see your point, but I'd also see that the TV station is entitled to respond to the market to make $.
In december, whatever I'd want to watch (mainly CSI and a few other of the kind) is either on reruns or outright canceled. If I try to flip a channel, my TV malfunctions, there are only two colors - a specific shade of red, and the specific shade of green.
And there's no influence on the TV channels - they have their 20000 families as a sample, and they don't know what I'm watching or not (which may be a good thing :). I'm a disrespected minority on that market, and nobody seems to care about this niche.
>As for doorknockers- just tell them you're Catholic, or say your aunt is on the commode and you don't want her to fall again so you have to go. ;-)
Ah, my standard answer is "Religion? We don't do religion. And we don't go around people's homes telling them to stop believing, so why would you do that to me? Have a nice day".
> As for parking- you mean there are popular services near you and they park on the street? I guess that could be annoying, but it's their street just as much as yours.
It was where my daughters studied. And they'd have signs that these few blocks of the street are reserved for them on a given afternoon. So the street was more theirs than mine, even though I was paying the rent (and hence, indirectly, the local taxes). And two blocks down the street there was another church, with ample parking space - with strict towing policy against non-members, even though that parking was always empty whenever I saw it.