Monthly Archives: March 2006

Scott Aniol, be our Mildred J. Hill

Happy birthday to Scott, who at age 19 is almost out of the teen years! Here’s the present I’ll be sending him.

A Truly Hale-bodied Little Piece

Well, maybe that’s just a bad pun. But remember that series of diamond commercials a few years back, which featured people in silhouette wearing diamonds? The accompanying soundtrack was reminiscent of chugga-chugga baroque concertos, and (such as it is) it is probably the greatest claim to fame of composer and jazz musician Karl [...]

Boston’s Quiet Revival?

Writing in Christianity Today, Rob Moll believes there’s a revival afoot here in Boston. In fact, evangelical Christianity is thriving in Boston. During the past 30 years, church growth, fueled by evangelical university groups and immigrant communities, has dramatically outpaced population growth. At the same time, mainline denominations have dwindled and the abuse scandal in the [...]

Liberty, Ethology, Pathology?

The New York Times Magazine recently ran an article about Liberty University’s debate team (HT: Dappled Things). It has an impressively large budget of $500,000, and its five full-time judges are aggressive about recruiting and training, making Liberty the highest-ranked school overall in several national debate associations. The article alludes to a difference between [...]

Flash for 64-bit Fedora Core 4

I complained last week that there’s no Flash for Linux 64-bit. Ziobudda asked why I didn’t just install the 32-bit Firefox. Why not? I couldn’t think of any good reason. So here’s how I did it. First of all, I wanted to use yum so I could avoid all dependency issues [...]

Those Devilish Details

This past weekend I rented a car for one day from Budget. The advertised daily rate of $35.99 for unlimited mileage seems like a great deal, right? Of course it’s a little different from what you actually pay. First, add on $3.75 for the “customer facility charge,” (”let’s recover our overhead in an additional [...]