In my entry on biblical liberalism I found myself referring to "liberals" and "conservatives" in "quotes" constantly. According to dictionary.com, being ideologically "liberal" means being receptive to new ideas and uninvested in traditional values. By contrast then, conservatism would be resistance to new ideas and adherance to traditional values. The difficulty arises when we have to ask "which values? whose traditions?" E.g., current "conservatism" in America is not interested in defending the status... (...more)

Last Sunday there was a mildly awkward incident where I posted a pair of Bible quotes to kick off my "Jesus Loves Liberals" series on my FB wall, and some right-wing sheep from my Castle Age network popped in to respond with ...what I guess he thought was a counter-sermon about doing pretty much anything else with your money besides helping the poor. I guess he thought I was making a case for welfare, which ironically wasn't even my intent, but that's where the ensuing commentary went. Actually, the passag... (...more)

session 11: (per Twitter) 3.3mi in 49m20s (avg. 4.01mph), peaking at 6.2mph for a half-lap.

Seems every time I get on the 'mill I push my limits just a little further, but one thing I'm kind of frustrated with is, not being able to jog much more than 1/4 mile at a stretch.

For lots of list-cleaning purposes, a spreadsheet is preferable to a database. Up to 2000, MS Excel was limited to around 65,500 rows, and even now OpenOffice Calc is limited to about 1 million rows; so if you need to operate on lists that exceed your spreadsheet limits, then you need to work in a true database manager application, such as MS Access. In Excel, you might sort your list by the column you were deduping, and use a formula to increment a count or simply show a flag word if the current record... (...more)

For some reason the checkbox-type input element to flag entries under editing as "hidden" is, itself, invisible in the edit page. I know it's there, I can see the selection outline if I tab to it, but I can't tell if it's toggled. I could deal with it easier if I at least had an indicator in the entry template to tell me if the entry was flagged hidden. A little twiddling and here's what I came up with: :X At first I tried an inline style spec including a "title:'hidden'" attribute. I don't know ... (...more)