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Comiqs.com is a free web site that allows you to upload your photos and create comic-style stories. You can see in the photo the right that some proud parent took a picture of their cute baby and then added some comic strip style text boxes. It is a lot of fun to play around with.

I’ve been using ComicLife (made by the same company that has created comiqs.com), on my Mac for a couple of years now, and have loved it. If you want to do more comic-style stores I highly recommend paying the $24.95 to buy comic life (there is a Windows version now as well).

Here are a few of “cartoons” that I created with Comic Life… It was a great was to remember a fun trip to Moab I had with my boys and Mitch Massey and his boys:

• Adventures in Moab - Part 1
• Klondike Bluffs! - Part 2
• Gemini Bridges - Part 3
• Unsettled Weather - Part 4

Enjoy!

Sometimes it can be tiring being a parent… This reminds me so much of our little 4 year old Jillian. She just loves to be chased around, and be tickled… screaming with joy the whole time.

Being the father of five children under the age of 13 years old, and having 4 computers in our home, I’ve been experimenting with software over the past few years to try make my children’s’ experience on the internet wholesome… or at the very least porn free. After trying some commercial software for content filtering, that ended up slowing down our 4 year old computer, I have finally found something that doesn’t kill our computer, and as an added bonus is FREE. The software is called, K9 Web Protection. As I mentioned, it works well on the old windows computer in our kitchen, but K9 will not run on Mac OSX or Linux (both of which we have in our house).

I had given up hope of finding something that would run on all our computers until I heard about OpenDNS last week. OpenDNS allows you to filter web content and block adult websites on the internet by simply changing the DNS servers that your computer or router uses. It works very well. The service is free, and after you’ve setup and account you can specify the kinds of web sites you want to block or allow. You can also specifically allow web sites that may be grouped in a category you have blocked. You have all the control that you could ask for.

If you want, you can also enable logging so that you can keep track of the websites computers in your house are visiting. This all happens transparently, without having to install any software on your computer. If you have an internet router, you can manually change the DNS servers that your router uses to the two OpenDNS servers, and all the comptuers in hour home will automatically be protected from the kinds of web sites you specify, log the sites they visit (you have to turn the logging on, it is off by default). If you want to change your DNS settings now just use the following:

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220

OpenDNS along with Mozy Backup and two services that every home should seriously consider using. OpenDNS is completely free, and Mozy Backup is free up to 2GB of data backed up, and $5 per month for unlimited backups. Enjoy!

I decided to write this summary of Michael Shermer’s book, Why People Believe Weird Things partly for myself to review what I’d read (it took me a month of off and on reading to get through it), and to hit some of the highlights for my wife who told me that she didn’t think she’d be able to get all the way through the book based on my description of it. This is by no means a complete summary. Shermer talks about a wide range of weird beliefs, ranging from Holocaust deniers to UFO abductees, and a lot in between.As I began reading the book, I was anxious to get to the final chapter where Shermer addresses the question of “why smart people believe weird things”. So I’ll cut to the chase and give you the answer: “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” (page 282) After reading the whole book that made a lot of sense to me. Everyone typically arrives at weired beliefs in the same ways, it’s just that smart people are better at finding ways, and especially obscure patterns, to support and defend their weird beliefs.

Shermer says that “myths are not about truth. Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life - birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age.” (page 130) In discussing the tension between evolution and religion in some people’s minds, he says that “evolution theory cannot replace faith and religion, and science has no interest in pretending that it can. The theory of evolution is a scientific theory, not a religious doctrine. It stands or falls on evidence alone. Religious faith, by definition, depends on belief when evidence is absent or unimportant. They fill different niches in the human psyche.” (page 135)

So what are some of the reasons that people believe weird things? Here’s Michael’s list:

• It feels good: “More than any other, the reason people believe weird things is because they want to. It feels good. It is comforting. It is consoling. Skeptics, atheists, and militant anti-religionists, in their attempts to undermine belief in a higher power, life after death, and divine providence, are butting up against ten thousand years of history and possibly one hundred thousand years of evolution (if religion and belief in God have a biological basis, which some anthropologists believe they do).” (page 275)
• Immediate Gratification: “Many weird things offer immediate gratification. The 900 number psychic hot-line is a classic example. Deep insight and improvement may take months or years. Delay of gratification is the norm, instant satisfaction the exception. By contrast, the psychic is only a telephone call away.” (page 276)
• Simplicity: “Immediate gratification of one’s beliefs is made all the easier by simple explanations for an often complex and contingent world. God and bad things happen to both good and bad people, seemingly at random. Scientific explanations are often complicated and require training and effort to work through. Superstition and belief in fate and the supernatural provide a simpler path through life’s complex maze.” (page 277)
• Morality and Meaning: “At present, scientific and secular systems of morality and meaning have proved relatively unsatisfying to most people. Without belief in some higher power, people ask, why be moral? What is the basis for ethics? What is the ultimate meaning of life? What’s the point of it all? Scientists and secular humanists have good answers to these good questions, but for many reasons these answers have not reached the population at large. To most people, science seems to offer only cold and brutal logic in its presentation of an infinite, uncaring and purposeless universe. Pseudoscience, superstition, myth, magic, and religion offer simple, immediate, and consoling canons of morality and meaning.” (page 277)
• Hope Springs Eternal: “It is my conviction that humans are, by nature, a forward looking species always seeking greater levels of happiness and satisfaction. Unfortunately, the corollary is that humans are all too often willing to grasp at unrealistic promises of a better life or to believe that a better life can only be attained by clinging to intolerance and ignorance, by lessening the lives of others. And sometimes, by focusing on a life to come, we miss what we have in this life. It is a different source of hope, but it is hope nonetheless: hope that human intelligence, combines with compassion, can solve our myriad problems and enhance the quality of each life; hope that historical progress continues on its march toward greater freedoms and acceptance for all humans; and hope that reason and science as well as love and empathy can help us understand our universe, our world, and ourselves.” (page 278)

Because of questions that a number of people have asked me, I’ve decided to set the record strait as to why I now consider myself a non-believing Mormon. This is not going to be an easy read for my believing Mormon friends, but it will be worth while and thought provoking. Let me start by saying that most of what the LDS church does is wonderful. I especially love its emphasis on family and service. My local congregation is a group of wonderful, supportive, loving people. That said there are a few doctrines that the institutional church teaches that are discriminatory and hurtful. As well there are elements of the church’s history that are glossed over or misrepresented by the church.

That most in the church have never heard of Joseph Smith’s marriages to other men’s wives is scandalous. Polygamy makes members of the LDS church uncomfortable enough, but if they knew that he married 9 other men’s wives that would give them pause to think (some married with and some without the other husband’s consent). I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Zina and Henry Jacobs when Joseph Smith asked Zina to marry him.

I don’t know how church leaders and other members of the church who know about these marriages justify them in their minds. True, Joseph Smith did many good things during his life, but not all the fruits he produced were sweet. Most of the Book of Mormon is inspiring, but the doctrine and Joseph Smith’s practice of plural marriage was as abhorrent when he was practicing it as it is to us today. To get a feel for what it must have been like for people in his day we need look no further than Warren Jeffs the FLDS prophet (from the summer of 2007) and how he and his church currently practice polygamy. I’m sure we feel at least as uncomfortable at the accounts of him pressuring young girls to marry older men as people in Joseph Smith’s day did about his match making.

Here are the LDS doctrines and practices that I find most objectionable:

• The church’s separate but equal policy with regards to woman and the priesthood. That women cannot hold leadership positions such as Bishop is patently unfair no matter what faithful LDS women say. Ask any 8 year old child, who is more important in the church, men or woman, and you’ll get a more objective and accurate answer. I put this doctrine in the same category as women’s suffrage and blacks and the priesthood. It will change, it is just a question of when.
• The church’s discrimination against gay people and opposition to gay marriage. Most scientists today agree that gay people have not made a choice to be gay, but sexual orientation is most likely the result of a complex interaction of environmental, cognitive and biological factors. In other words this is the way god made them. Active members of the church who are gay are regularly exposed to a virtual hell on earth at church meetings when marriage and the law of chastity are discussed. Their god given sexual drive is described as evil, and they are told that to be exalted they must enter into a marriage with someone of the opposite sex. In many cases this leads to severe depression. In some cases substance abuse is turned to as a way to escape the depression and unfortunately others turn to suicide as a way out. Just think of what a gay person must think when their bishop tells them that it is better off to be dead than to commit sexual sin. For an insightful look at this topic see this Sunstone article.
• The church’s longstanding discrimination against black men (that ended in 1978). Withholding the priesthood from black men was just wrong, and an excellent example of how the Old Testament can be used to support doctrines that make no sense in our modern world.
• I don’t feel good about polygamy in general and particularly with Joseph Smith marrying nine other men’s wives (in addition to the twenty other single women he married). I am inclined to agree with William Law (editor of the Nauvoo Expositor), that if Joseph was a prophet, by the time he started practicing polygamy he was a fallen prophet. This is another example of how the Old Testament can be used to support doctrines that make no sense today.
• The teaching that the prophet of the church can never lead us astray (see above for polygamy as one example of this). I suspect this is where the “cult” accusation against the church comes from. I’d like to think that the prophet would not lead anyone astray, but to say never is unwise given the history of the church. To have an organization tell you that they cannot lead you astray, yet not let you question its teachings is a bad sign. In the short run it does however make it easier to lead an organization when no one challenges or questions your decisions. I believe that the leaders of the church are for the most part well meaning men who act based on their consciences and the needs of the organization.
• The church’s aggressive proselytizing and focus on baptismal goals. This practice antagonizes other churches and can lead to depression in missionaries, when mission goals are not met. I think I personally would have had a much more fulfilling mission, and done much more good if the focus of my mission had been on service to the needy. I will encourage all my kids to take time off school to go do meaningful service in other parts of the world, but will actively discourage them from LDS missions for the above reasons.
• The general focus on the needs of the institutional church, rather than on local needs. What has happened over the past few years with scouting in Victoria, BC, Canada is a very small example of this. Some local church leaders felt that it was in the best interests of the local church not to continue with the Boy Scout program. Then a few years later a church leader from Salt Lake arrived and told them that scouting was not an optional program. It is also interesting the the primary benchmark to determine whether or not members in a region are ready for the building of a temple is tithing. This is clearly and example of the institution looking after it own material needs.
• The church not being accountable to members for how tithing monies are spent. As a matter of principle, the church should report its receipts and expenditures to the tithe paying members of the church. It should also report all salaries and stipends given to general authorities of the church. I would be surprised if there was anything greatly amiss, but we currently have no way of knowing.
• The teaching that one can know that the LDS church is Gods’ one true church by saying that it is true (the get a testimony by bearing it method). Studies show that the more often you say something you don’t believe, the more you begin to believe that thing. Not a good foundation for a spiritual practice as I’ve found out. Having a testimony of the institutional church or “the church” places faith in a man made institution rather than with god and in higher spiritual things. Whether this has been encouraged maliciously or unintentionally I do not now. I do know that it does not feel right.
• The church’s only true church doctrine. I think it is more important to god that I be a good, charitable person rather than to simply be a person who has been baptised and participated in priesthood ordinances.

One LDS church leader quoted me the scripture “by their fruits shall ye know them” to me, hoping that I would think of all the good things the church does and want to come back into full fellowship. As I said there are a lot of good fruits produced by the church (service and its community for example), but there are also some rotten fruit on the vine, that no one in authority seems to doing anything about. If God is a just god and if He was truly leading the LDS church, then these things would not be. To me this is one of the strongest evidences that the LDS church is a man made organization that is led by well meaning, but not divinely led men. Most religions in the world teach many good things… That the LDS church teaches many good things is not remarkable in that context. Joseph Smith took a more enlightened position many of the things that were being debated by the Christian denominations of his day. For that we can be thankful.

I believe that if current members were more mindful of the effects of the church’s hurtful doctrines, and became fully aware of the history of the church that they have not been taught in Sunday School, that they would demand changes. They would also begin to call the current church leadership to account for the way they have handled their steward-ships. As Joesph Smith reformed the religion of his day, the same needs to be done today in the LDS church. The church as become rigid, hierarchical and bound to tradition, the very opposite of the radically inclusive, and open church that Joseph Smith founded.

I am at peace with the direction I am currently taking. I also have no regrets about the time and energy I’ve put into the church over the years. I still attend church meetings and activities periodically, and make sure that my children know where the pitfalls are in the church’s doctrine and practice for when they attend. To be honest to myself and to those closest to me, I feel I had no other choice. In my view the church is on the morally wrong side of a number of important issues, and to know that those things are wrong, and to be in a leadership position with that knowledge, was something I felt was hypocritical for me to do. If I felt that there was any chance to reform from within, that might have changed how I’ve acted, but the church’s organizational and disciplinary structure is such that unless you are at a very high level in the leadership of the church, the opportunities to influence church policy are almost nil.

There is much good in the LDS church. It is a loving service oriented organization. We need to build on the good and reject the discriminatory, hurtful and unjust doctrines that are rotting on the vine. Members of the church need to be vocal about what they believe in their hearts and not just object in silence when hurtful and uncharitable doctrines are taught. If there is a just God, then living a good, moral, service oriented life is all that is required of us. That is what I am trying to do, and it is what I will teach my children.

Do you think online prenatal classes are a good idea? If you or your spouse were expecting, would you consider an online class as an alternative or supplement to a face to face class?

My wife Heather is a Prenatal Class Teacher and a Doula. She has put an enormous amount of time (at least it seems like it to me), putting together materials and activities for her prenatal classes. Recently she has started to allow her clients to customize their classes to meet their specific needs (or as I think, address their specific fears) through a form on her website. This seems to be a hit, combined with the one on one teaching she does.

Recently I suggested that she might want to put her lessons online, and let people access her lessons for free, and pay for the web site and her time by using Google Adsense. We currently have Google Ads on the birth stories she has written for each of our children. We typically get about 700 page views per day, and average $1.40 in ad revenue per day. While not a lot of money, it is amazing that over the past year she has earned over $500 from the birth stories. This has more than paid for her time in writing them (although as she would be quick to point out, money was the furthest thing from her mind when she wrote them up).

So… Online birth classes with text, pictures, video and some interactive elements like quizzes. There would also be a question / comment feature so you could ask questions on the lesson pages so that Heather and/or others could respond to the question. Again, what do you think? Would you or your spouse go to a site like this to check it out? Just post your comments at the bottom of the blog post. Thanks!

As the systems administrator at the UVic Faculty of Law every semester I see one or two students who have lost everything… documents, pictures, music… Everything on their laptop computers. The look on their faces is unmistakable. They come to me looking for help. Unfortunately more often than not I have to deliver the news to them that they have lost all their data. Typically the the data is lost because of a hard drive failure (a recent Google report seems to indicate that newer high density hard drives are becoming less reliable not more reliable). Recovery is sometimes possible (just ask my good friend Mike Binstead), but it can often be quite expensive ($1,000 or more) if the problem is severe enough that a hard drive recovery company needs to be involved.

The most recent student who came in to my office with a troubled look on her face, just had her laptop stolen, and did not have any of her data backed up. She lost everything except for things she had e-mailed other people (she uses a webmail program, so her e-mail was not lost).

Last week I heard another sad story from publishing company that I’ve been working with. One of their branch offices had a fire which destroyed all six of their computers. The person in the office I’ve been working with most closely didn’t have any of her data backed up and lost everything. Two others in the office had backups, but stored them at the office, so their computers and their backups were both destroyed (just because you back things up doesn’t make your backup system full proof).

I know a number of data loss stories from Hurricane Katrina… I won’t tell them here, but I’m sure you can imagine what happened to many people and companies who were not backing up their data, and keeping some of the backups stored off site.

The biggest complaint I hear about backups is that people feel they are a pain to do. I agree! Most backup systems are a pain. If a backup system requires human intervention on a regular basis, it is probably not going to work well. Up until recently I backed up my home computer by burning the Data to DVDs. I have enough pictures and videos on our computer now that it took 3 DVDs to back everything up. It was a pain to do, and as a consequence, I ended up backing things up once every two or three months … not very impressive for a systems administrator.

At the Faculty of Law we backup everything on our servers nightly using a little piece of software on the servers that backs all the changed data to a central server on campus. The next day, a copy of the backed up data is shipped to a storage location on the other side of the country. I sleep better knowing that if the Law School Burns down, all our data is recoverable.

I recently started using a similar system for my laptop and home computer to backup all the data. It is Wonderful easy to use service, and for up to 2GB of data it is Free! The company is called Mozy Online Backup. If you have more than 2GB of data, you can pay $5 per month to store Unlimited Data. I am happily paying $5 per month for my unlimited account. Mozy works on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX (the Mac client is currently in beta testing, but I am happy with it’s performance on my laptop). Here are the features I love about the Mozy backup service:

1. It requires no intervention to backup. Just setup an account, install the software, select what you want to backup, and then just let it run!
2. It backs up your changed files every 3 hours, and keeps different versions of the same document for 30 days.
3. It stores your data off site at a different location, so in the case of a natural disaster or fire, your backup will be safe.
4. It is cost effective. Free for up to 2GB (which will work perfectly for UVic Law students) and $5 per month for unlimited backups.
5. The data is encrypted before it is sent to the server so that it is secure while it is being transfered over the internet, and while it is being stored on the Mozy server.
6. Mozy just signed up General Electric as a customer, to backup their systems world wide. A nice vote of confidence in Mozy.

I encourage everyone who does not have a good, reliable backup system in place to take a hard look at Mozy for your personal backup solution. I’ll be installing it on the two computers are my parents house the next time I visit.

An interesting thing has happened to me over this past year. Almost every time there has been a big family dinner on my wife’s side of the family, I have been press ganged into making the gravy. Up until this year, my gravy making has been hit and miss. I would more often than not have large lumps in the gravy … I’m sure this had had my gravy making grandma McCue turning in her grave. My mother on the other hand (just like my grandma did in her day) consistently makes excellent tasting, wonderfully smooth gravy. Her ability to make great gravy, along with my wife’s ability to tell people that I "make gravy" (without commenting on the quality of the gravy I make), has made it so that my sister-in-laws have consistently asked me to make the gravy at our family dinners for about a year now. No one every asks me to make gravy on my side of the family (I will occasionally be asked to cut the meat). They all look to the experts that my mother has personally trained over the years (my sisters). I have watched the process of gravy making since I was a child, but did not have any practical experience until after I was married. The experience I did get after marrying Heather, didn’t come that frequently, and occasionally produced disaster (like the time I put the pyrex pan on the element to warm the gravy… until the pan exploded, delaying Thanksgiving dinner by an hour or so.)

A few years ago Heather’s mother and father passed away. Her dad was the "gravy guy" in the family until his passing, and it appears that I have inherited his role in family dinners. For now, I am the go to guy for gravy. I have consistently made good tasting, non lumpy gravy all year now! I’m confident that my grandmother McCue smiles down on me every time I make her wonderful tasting, non lumpy, southern Albertan gravy. I’ve also noticed that when my wife tells people that I can make gravy, she doesn’t just stop by saying that I can "make gravy", but qualifies it by saying that I make "good" or "excellent" gravy. Kind of weird that circumstances have made me the "Gravy Guy" in at least half of my world.

I read an interesting article a few weeks ago. The title caught my attention. It was called, "Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer?" I know that sometimes I think I’d be happier if I had a bit more money in my pocket. So what did the researchers find out? The article said that people who are struggling to put a roof over their head and food on their table typically saw an increase in happiness as their income increased. Their happiness continued to increase until the per-capita house hold income reached $12,000 (This is for the United States, in US dollars). After that point there was virtually no increase in reported happiness as income rose above that level. On a graph, happiness increased steadily with income, until the $12,000 per person mark, and then it went almost completely flat.

A different research group also took a look at lottery winners in Great Britain. Interestingly he found that in the case of people who won large lotteries (over $200,000); they reported a significant increase in happiness immediately after winning, but within a year, most were back to the same level of happiness that they were at before winning.

Both of these studies confirm what I saw a number of years ago while I was living in Brazil. Most of the people I worked with would be considered "poor" if they lived in Canada, but most were quite happy in spite of their relative lack of material possessions.

What this tells me is that if someone is unhappy with a little bit of money (once their basic needs are met), then there is a very good chance that they will be unhappy with a lot of money. It turns out that money doesn’t buy happiness in the long run. I better get back to work so I can afford my gym membership …

If you regularly check two, separate Gmail accounts and you’re a Firefox user, you don’t have to switch between them manually all the time. This is an issue that I have with my home and work account. Simply put you use the IE Tab Firefox extension , open up one IE Tab and one regular Firefox tab, and log into your two Gmail accounts, one in each. No more logging in and out! No perfect, but it works… If you have more than two accounts, this won’t work for you.

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