I had a dream last night that I had scanned through and read all the items in my Google RSS reader so that there were no numbers by each of the categories…oh man that would be a monkey off my back!

I took my first crack at light painting this evening setting up a jugg in our living-room on a coffee table as the subject. I was pretty happy with the results. Here’s the simple set up:

And the results:

The jugg was on end table agains the wall for the one above, or against the chair for a different texture. 15 or 20 second exposure, I played with a weak LED flashlight, blue key chain penlight, and a flashlight with a Lightsphere over the end of it. I was pleasantly surprised with how nice the colours were with the three flashlights giving a blue, white, and orange/red cast naturally and looked really nice before any colour adjustments in photoshop.

I’ve looked for different methods and tried a few different programs and webapps for tracking my time. If you do any freelance work knowing where your time is going becomes very valuable and being able to do it easily without overhead is a bonus. Well I’ve used SlimTimer for about a month or so now and it’s the best tool I’ve found so far for this. You can very painlessly add tasks to a little window and give them tags, start, stop, and complete tasks with a click which is what makes this app one that you may actually use. The bonus is the reporting features that you have access to. At the point you’re putting an invoice together or filling out a timesheet you can filter you work in various ways including time period and tags. Getting into the habit of turning a task on or off or adding a new task will always be an issue until they figure out how to plug into your brain and read when you’ve changed tasks, but at least some of the barriers to doing that have been reduced. …oh and it’s free…for now.

I just found a discussion that Derek points to between atheist Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan, ‘Christian moderate’. Half way through. Interesting read for me. They start out by denouncing with solidarity something called fundamentalism, which, as it turns out at least as far as I can tell is when someone holds a belief that-hold your breath- they actually believe. Andrew Sullivan presses for ‘Christianity as it can be’ which is faith that integrates doubt, on the face of it sounding very sound but actually to me seems more akin the standard evangelical fundamentalism where faith is blind and blindness is good. He talks about Truth and reason (albeit imprecisely) all the while eroding the definitions of the terms by associating them with illogic and unreasonableness. Sam seems to understand what Andrew should; namely that “…while he may be m any things, the God of the Bible … is not a moderate. Read scripture more closely and you do not find reasons for religious moderation;…” and while I don’t at all agree with the conclusions he feels this understanding of the Bible necessarily leads you to (namely to “live like a religious maniac-to fear the fires of hell, to despise nonbelievers, to persecute homosexuals, etc.”) I completely agree with his former assessment. I think he summed it up perfectly when he said “In attempting to find a middle ground between religious dogmatism and intellectual honesty, it seems to me that religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.” Andrews response the next post was basically an appeal to motivations but he did make some good points about a kinder gentler ‘fundamentalism’
Sam goes on to say though that “…there’s more to life that being reasonable-which is to say there is much more to life than merely understand the world and getting one’s beliefs about it to cohere”. Evidently we are able to have “ethical and spiritual lives without…pretending to be certain about things we are clearly not certain about.”
Postmodernism is super.
It seems like the only religious constitutions (‘beliefs’) either of these men will endure are ones that aren’t concerned with coherence. They can be irrational and illogical. They must be beliefs that to a large extent we don’t hold to be necessarily true. And why? For one the reason is because beliefs should be something quite apart from ordinary thought (more like fairytales) that don’t affect other people in any way besides bemusement and entertainment. They don’t challenge or change. And for another beliefs that are nebulous can fit any mold, be fastened to any ideas or philosophies desired and can live happily side by side with any other beliefs. Change and challenge may fit in there but not in any ways that make anyone else uncomfortable of course.
I appreciated Andrew’s points about different kind of knowing and how Science isn’t an adequate resource for all of them and Sam makes good points about the inadequacy of the personal testimony to ‘prove’ Christian truth claims.
Thus far there’s lots of really good food for thought in the email back and forth and good and bad points on both sides. Derek mentions that they continue to disagree at the end which has dulled my motivation to finish the debate …has there ever been a debate end differently?! As mom always used to say; “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still” …convinced…against your will? Wait a sec, how does that work mom?!

During the course of my morning commute I occasionally find myself walking behind the same lady who likes to walk fast and smoke. She also wears a lot of perfume, I presume to cover the smell of the smoke billowing out behind her. Combined the ‘fragrance’ can be detected some 50 or 100 feet behind her and actually I enjoy the smell because it brings back memories of some old car that to this point I can’t recall…. You know the ones where years of exposure to the smell of the car fresheners and cigarette smoke give it a very distinct and pungent odour. For the life of me I’ve no idea why I’d enjoy that smell on woman or car but I just do.