One of the most painful experiences in life is losing a close friend or relative. I have lost many relatives, friends, and co-workers through the years. It’s hard to think about them soon after they pass, but you always cherish your memories of those precious times you had together. And the memories of all the dumb, selfish things you wish you could take back stay with you, too.…
I never thought I could love a Chihuahua. As a child I grew up in a family that always had pets: birds, fish, turtles, dogs, cats, snakes, and maybe a few species I don’t quite recall. My favorite animals were the cats but I was always fond of the dogs. And yet whenever I met Chihuahuas we had no rapport whatsoever. …
I often point out to people that “absence of denial proves nothing” when dealing with some of the more ridiculous arguments people make about what they want to find in J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings. For example, you might believe that Tom Bombadil is one of the Maiar (the angelic companions and servants of the Valar, the great angels who were given the responsibility of watching over the world).…
Modern computing languages annoy me. They are poorly designed, inefficient, full of holes, and require you to go too far out of your way to do simple things with no real certainty that you can accomplish them. Many of these languages are influenced by the inherently flawed design of Linux. Linux came out of the world of UNIX. UNIX, developed at the original AT & T’s famous Bell Laboratories in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was once heralded as the supreme operating system.…
Check into any argument between extremist groups divided over any given set of topics and it won’t take you long to find examples of one side “debunking” the other side’s arguments with plausible explanations. Plausible explanations are tools employed in pseudoscientific debatery to discredit ideas and/or distract attention away from inconvenient statements. Plausible explanations fall into that category of pseudoscientific tricks where you can find Occam’s Razor, demands for citations, and creating reasonable doubt.…
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies reportedly invest a lot of man-hours in pouring over shredded documents, piecing them together. If I were shredding documents I didn’t want anyone to read I would take a few extra steps to make it harder for them to match up the pieces but you can’t assume that you would be able to prevent full capture of all the pieces.…
As a lifelong Christian I reject Creationism in all its evil pseudo-scientific forms. I recognize that there was no Bible when the Book of Genesis was composed, probably sometime after 1000 BCE, and that the Bible itself did not exist in Jesus’ day. Creationists go out of their ways to distort truth and fact, and that is surely not the fruit that Jesus wanted his tree to bear. …
My mother passed away yesterday. My brother and sister are both in shock and though we have been close through the years I am always the one who stands back, emotionally reserved. It’s hard for me to share my feelings openly, although I seem to have no problem writing about them (in part) on this blog. I feel numb and a deep loss, although my mother did not have a healthy life the past few years. …
All year long people have been asking me if I would publish a book this year. They obviously had their eyes on the last “Hobbit” movie by Peter Jackson. Every time a PJ movie about Middle-earth is released traffic to whatever Website I use to write about Tolkien and Middle-earth explodes. And so this month the last, the very last Peter Jackson movie based on the books of J.R.R.…
A ruling earlier this year by the US 11th Circuit Court is causing a minor uproar among attorneys who represent debt collectors. At the heart of the kerfluffle is the question of whether the relatively new 1996 Fair Debt Collection Practices Act supersedes bankruptcy law (the basis for which goes back hundreds of years). Now, there is no reason why a legislative act cannot turn upside down 300 years of case law; it happens from time to time. …
One of the things for which I am grateful is that I survived my tumultuous childhood and teenage years. I grew up in a good family in safe neighborhoods but somehow I occasionally managed to find myself in or near violence. I was a free-roaming kid, and often snuck out at night to “go exploring” simply because I was curious about what the world was like out there. …
How often can the majority of people in a single industry be completely wrong? You may think there is no such industry but when I look back at the disastrous track record of the online marketing, or search engine optimization, industry over the past ten years I can honestly say I believe it has become a perennial situation. The people who were wrong about how search marketing works last year were also the people who were wrong about it the year before. …
