The Yankee Clock Peddler and his travelling companion start out on a sales tip in a rural area, and they stop for the night at a farmer’s house. In the morning before leaving to make sales call in neighbouring communities, the clock peddler asks the farmer if he’d store a clock for him for a couple of weeks, and that he’ll pick the clock up on his way back home. The farmer agreed to this, so the Peddler wound up the clock and placed it on the farmer’s wall before leaving (the farmer does not yet own a clock).  When out of ear shot, the traveling companion asks the clock peddler why he left the clock at the house. Didn’t he want to sell the clock on the trip?  To this the Yankee Clock Peddler replied, “don’t worry, by the time I come back in a couple of weeks, the clock will be sold… the farmer will happily buy it from me.”

The moral of the story is:  “We can do without any article of luxury we have never had, but when once obtained, it is not in human nature to surrender it voluntarily.”

Here are some of the ways my iPhone is an article of luxury that I could not easily do without anymore:

• I consume almost all my news on my iPhone and to a lesser extend on my iPad. I start my day reading the news in bed on my iPhone. This way I can be up to speed on the news before heading out for the day, and I don’t wake my wife before she needs to get up at the same time.  For reading new I use the built-in Safari web browser, Zite and Flipboard. Sports with ESPN sports.
• The other thing I do before getting out of bed (and at other times during the day) is skim through my email in the Gmail app, as well as my to-do list in GoTasks (GoTasks hooks into my Google Task list).
• As I get ready to leave for work in the morning I check out the built-in Weather app so see what I’m facing weather wise before getting on my bike.
• Before leaving campus around 5pm, I download the 6pm CBC news (from an earlier East coast broadcast) and then listen to it on the way home in the Downcast app at double speed.  Why at double speed to you ask?  Because my bike ride home only takes 15 minutes, so at double speed I can listen to the whole 30 minute news cast on my commute home.  I also listen to a lot of technology podcasts for news and continuing education.

My iPhone also comes in handy for:

• Settling bets.  If there is disagreement over any obscure facts over dinner or in a conversation, it’s nice to know that it can settle the argument in 30 seconds with my iPhone and Siri or Google.
• I frequently read books in bed, over lunch, or if I have some idle time. Kindle, iBooks are my favourite readers (Kindle ebooks tend to be less expensive in my experience). The place in the book you’re reading syncs nicely between iPads and iPhones, so you don’t have to keep track of where you are if you read on both devices. I love being able to easily change the font size to match how tired my eyes are at any given time. I think the changeable font size will be a big selling feature for older readers.
• Lastly, I love to be able to share photos with family and friends when I’m out and about, rather than take time to upload them to Facebook from my computer when I get home.

I’d argue that one modern-day incarnation of the Yankee Clock Pedder’s windup wall clock is the iPhone. Once you’ve had a chance to use used an iPhone for a while, you’ll probably end up wondering how you did without it. I’m confident that would be the case for the intrepid retired women I talked to 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. While not full proof (no solution is), it quite works well. After you’ve setup an 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 install on one computer in your home to let OpenDNS know if your IP address changes, so that it can continue to filter based on the criteria you’ve set in their control panel.

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 computers, iPods or iPads.

The easiest way to protect  all the computers and internet devices in hour home is to manually change the DNS servers that your internet router uses to the two OpenDNS servers. If you want to change your DNS settings now just use the following:

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220

If you need help figuring out where to change the DNS settings for your router, OpenDNS has a great tutorial that shows you how on their website.

OpenDNS along with Dropbox and two services that every home should seriously consider using. OpenDNS is completely free, and Dropbox is free up to 2GB of data backed up. Enjoy!

Will becoming more attractive make you happier?  Nope… plastic surgery or weight loss will give you an initial boost, but you get used to your new looks pretty quickly, and in the long run you won’t be any happier.

Will better health make you happier?  Counter intuitively, no. Unless you’re at death’s door, you get used to your state of health, and being less or more healthy doen’t change your happiness level in the long run.

Will moving to a sunny warm city make you happer? Again, no. After the new car smell wears off, your level of happiness will move back to where it was when you were living in a cold northern city.

So, what are some things that make us happier?

1. Connect… with family, friend and neighbours is the most important thing you can do to contribute to your overall happiness. The good news is that this will cost you little or no money to do!
2. Be Active. Walk, run, bike, play games, play sports, dance yoga… these are all things that will improve your mood, especially if you’re in a bad one.
3. Take Notice of the beauty in nature and in life.
4. Keep Learning. Whether it’s new hobbies or a new skill at work. Be challenged and remember that most happiness comes in striving for goals, not in reaching them.
5. Give. Do something nice. Join a community. Be selfless.

If you’d like to read more on this topic, I highly recommend reading Jonathan Haidt book, The Happiness Hypothesis, or if you’d like to read great eight page summary, you can read my brother Bob McCue’s book review.

Finally, here is Dan Gilbert’s entertaining TED Talk with his take on happiness. Enjoy!

This is one use for my iPad that I definitely did not for see when I purchased it last year: Navigating my sailboat with it!  Compared to using a paper map, navigating with my iPad is a joy. I still take a paper map with me of course, just in case, but my iPad is my navigation tool of choice.  Last week I participated in the Swiftsure Race, which typically take about 16 hours to complete. This year because of light winds and adverse currents we crossed the finish line almost 30 hours after we started.

I had my iPad running the Navionics charting software the whole time, and I was able to keep track of where we were for the whole race on a single charge.  I turned the screen on and off as needed, but was still amazed at the battery life I saw during the race. The only problems I had with Navionics is that the program rebooted spontaneously three times during the voyage. I was able to quickly restart the program, but it typically “lost” some of the route that it had been tracking for me.

The water off Victoria where I sail as part of the Oak Bay Sailing Club, is very interesting and challenging (here is a day sail route from May 2011). Sometimes it can be difficult figuring out where you are given all the little islands and navigation buoys, but Navionics makes it much less stressful to navigate. There is also an iPhone version that I purchased. It works well, but the iPad’s larger screen is much nicer to view, and the battery life on the iPad is much better. I also purchased a water proof case to keep my iPad nice and dry.

If you want to use mapping software for sailing or driving, make sure you get the “3G” version of the iPad, as the wi-fi iPad does not come with a built in GPS. The price difference is about $100 between the two devices, but it is well worth the extra money if you end up using your iPad for navigation. The US & Canada version of Navionics for the iPad costs $50.

Pros: Easy to use. Relatively inexpensive. Excellent battery life. Great for day sails or longer cruises.

Cons: Software sometimes reboots after several hours of use. This is not a saftey concern, but did cause me to loose parts of the track from the 30 hour race I was in.
Tagged: iPad, iPhone, Smart Phones, software, sports, travel ]]> http://richmccue.com/2011/06/03/sailing-with-my-ipad-navionics/feed/ 1 48.483174 -123.319451 48.483174 -123.319451 richmccue Navionics for the iPad http://richmccue.com/2011/01/12/youtube-facebook-educational-distractions-or-learning-tools/ http://richmccue.com/2011/01/12/youtube-facebook-educational-distractions-or-learning-tools/#comments Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:28:32 +0000 Rich McCue http://richmccue.com/?p=671 ]]>

Do YouTube and Facebook distract students?  Of course they do!  On the other hand, can YouTube and Facebook help students with their school work?  Until recently I wasn’t sure, but after my partner’s experience with a professor who wasn’t a good teacher, and seeing how YouTube and Facebook saved her and her classmates from poor grades, I’m convinced that these “digital distractions” can be, if used intelligently, excellent Learning Tools.

Being the father of two teenagers, the husband of a partner that has recently gone back to college, and Systems Administrator at a University Law Library, I have a front row seat  on how technology is used and abused in the service of homework, research and education in general.  When my partner found herself in a college class teaching challenged professor, I was amazed at how she, along with her classmates, used technology to compensate for the poor classroom instruction. Her learning process for each class was as follows:

• She would read the chapter(s) in preparation for class, and usually understand some, but not all of the concepts that she read.
• She and her classmates would go to class and listen to the professor read his power point slides, leaving the chapter’s concepts no clearer than the text book reading.
• Later that evening, my partner would check the facebook group for her class to see if anyone had figured out the main points of the lecture yet.  If no one had yet, she would start doing YouTube searches for the key topics in her readings, and would usually find one or more videos that visually explained the topics much more clearly than either the text book or her professor could.  For example, check out this explanation of Mitosis on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlN7K1-9QB0
• After finding a clear explanation, she would post a link to the video on her classes Facebook group.  At the same time she would typically find links to other topics from the reading and lecture that classmates had posted.
• She would watch all the videos and make notes from them for later review before exams.

This is how the whole semester went.  In the end, in spite of her ineffective teacher, she received an A- grade in the course.  Then again, maybe it is because of her teacher’s poor instruction that she and her classmates were forced to spend extra time to find quality materials on-line to explain and learn the concepts they needed to master. To sum up, there seem to be two important tools and trends that were very helpful to my partner and her class:

1. The availability of high quality learning resources on YouTube and other websites for college and high school students.
2. Facebook’s collaboration capabilities make it very easy for groups to share information (links to YouTube), and then discuss the quality and merits of each of the videos among themselves. All the students are Facebook users, so it is a natural virtual space for them to collaborate in while they work on homework from home or library.

As David Pogue points out, this might be just what the doctor ordered for your tween, who wants a cell phone, but you’re not interested in signing a 2 or 3 year contract.

Another option in Canada is Koodo Mobility. Two of our teenage kids have no contract cell phones through Koodo, and the $20 monthly fee they each pay gives them unlimited texting and 50 talk minutes per month (we had to build our own plan to get the monthly fee down to $20).  Given that they almost exclusively text, this works just fine for them.

If I did not have a year left on my cell phone contract what I would personally do is buy an unlocked iPhone from the Apple Store for $660 (yes we can buy unlocked iPhone in Canada). Get the smallest Data and Voice Plan I can find from a local carrier (about $25 per month with Koodo including 100MB of data), and then use a service like Line2 for $15 per month.  My Monthly phone bill would drop to $40.  For 500MB of data the cost would rise to about $55 per month.  Lower cost, and unlimited voice in North America.

My first preference would be to use Google Voice, but as I mentioned it is not yet available in Canada yet. In any case this sort of competition should benefit all cell phone users as it will put pressure on them to lower their costs or risk loosing customers as their contracts expire.

I think we all “fake it” on a fairly regular basis.  Not only that, but we’re taught do so from an early age.  Just think of when a parent “encourages” their child to apologize to their sibling or play mate.  Do we really think that the apologizing child feels sorry for what they’ve done?  Most of the time they don’t, but they are being taught how to get along, and perform socially acceptable acts that help make up the civilized portion of our society.  Most people would agree that this sort of “faking it” is a good thing in that it reduces tension in groups, and helps them function more smoothly.

There are other kinds of faking it of course.  John Edwards (the american politician) faked it at the end of the US presidencial campaign, pretending that things were going well in his life and marriage, until it came out that the woman he was having an affair with was close to giving birth to their child. I think that is the kind of faking it that most people cringe at.

Faking it goes on in religion as well.  One example of this is in the Mormon religion I was raised in. As a teenager I was taught that if I told others that I “knew” certain religious “truths” were true, even when I didn’t actually know they were true or false, that I would come to know for myself that they were true. This could be described as the “fake it until you make it” method of learning.  While this may be a useful tool for learning to do certain tasks, I don’t believe that it is effective in determining truth.

So the next time my wife asks me how I like the new dress she bought, should I “fake it” or be completely honest no matter what the consequences?

Island Energy is doing the install of an Enerworks system.  Photos and more information to follow!

Very, very interesting!  Here are some good foods to start with:

Here is the 20 Minute TED Talk where Dr. Li talks about his findings:

Not rocket science, but a much less expensive way to save electricity or natural gas than buying expensive new appliances.

For example, in looking at how societies portray the model of womanhood, there are probably a number of morally positive ways to do this in between the extremes of the Islamic Burka, and the overt sexuality on the covers of many western mens magazines.

Harris also addresses the issue of giving the same weight to all moral arguments, irregardless of their source.  He argues that some people are better at moral thinking that others, just like some people are better a physics than others, so why should we put the Dali Lama and Ted Bundy on the same footing when it comes to looking at moral arguments?

A thought provoking video even if you don’t agree with everything he says.

At the time of my diagnosis I was inundated with suggestions from friends about different supplements that I should try that would hopefully help my condition.  I’m happy to say that I’m still here to write this blog post!  I’m also here to tell you that I didn’t follow any of the suggestions.  It would have taken me a year or more to throughly research the dozens of “suggestions” I received (some of them plausible, and some outright crazy sounding – “wheat grass cures most cancers”?).  A visualization of supplements with an indication of the quality of the science backing up their claims, would have been an invaluable tool in helping to quickly sort out quackery from the truly helpful.

I am even more skeptical now than I was back then, so I would not accept this as the final word on any of the supplements they list, but would use it as a good starting point for doing some research if a particular supplement looked helpful.  One thing I really like is that they included a link to the underlying data was used to generate the visualization, including links to the studies they relied on, so you can do your own analysis if you wish.

Have fun researching!

Being the father of five children under the age of 15 years old, and having 4 computers in our home along with a couple of iPod Touches, I’ve been experimenting with software & services over the past few years to try make my childrens’ experience on the internet as porn free as possible. After trying some commercial software for content filtering that ended up slowing down our 4 year old computer, and didn’t do anything to help on our iPod Touches, I have found something that works quite well on all the internet devices in our house (remember that no solution is 100% perfect not matter what the software vendor claims).  It not only works well, but once you set it up on your home router, you don’t need to install anything on the desktop computers or iPod Touches!

OpenDNS is the solution. OpenDNS allows you to filter web content and block adult websites on the internet by simply changing the DNS servers that your computers uses, or even better by change the DNS servers on your internet router. The service not only works well, but is free to use. After you’ve setup an account you can specify the kinds of web sites you want to block.  Types of sites you can filter range from, Pronography, to simply Tasteless site.  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

You should also install the OpenDNS client on your computers, just in case the IP address on your router changes.  If your IP address changes (which happens from time to time), the OpenDNS client will let their servers know, so that your network will continue to filter content as you requested.  Here is download page for the Mac and Windows clients.

While this is a great technological solution, don’t forget that you should talk to your kids about their use of the internet, and what they should do if they accidentally get on a site that they aren’t comfortable viewing (i.e. tell mom or dad so that they can take care of it).  Like I said earlier, no solution is 100% effective, so chances are that they will occasionally see sites that aren’t appropriate.  Making sure that they know that it isn’t their fault and that you’ll help them is probably the best way to resolve the immediate problem, and open up a dialog between you and your child on their use of the internet.

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

What digital assests are we talking about?  Things like:

• Online Account Information: Facebook, Blog’s, websites, Email, and Shopping sites.
• Hardware: including computers, thumb drives, backup drives and DVD’s… Any hardware that you have personal data stored on.

What got me thinking about this?  I saw a thought provoking article on the American Bar Association’s web site, called Estate Planning for your Digital Assets, by Dennis Kennedy.  Here are 3 important steps taken out of his somewhat lengthy article:

Step 1. Inventory Your Digital Assets: After the inventory is complete, put the list (including user names and passwords) in a secure place, possibly in a safety deposit box along with your will.

Step 2. Identify Appropriate Help: Let one or more people know about your inventory, so they know it exists and where to look for it when it will be needed.

Step 3. Provide Instructions:  You may want friends on social networks like Facebook or Twitter to be notified of your passing.  Make sure you’ve provided a message to post (along with the passwords you’ve already written down). You may want to close up your blog with a parting message, or pass along specific information to individuals (like photos or journals).

My imperfect solution: decriminalize polygamy and then institute a mandatory religious social study class in the Province of BC, similar to what Quebec and England have instituted. The religious social study class would definitely not be a forum for religious indoctrination, but simply a class for learning about the beliefs and practices of world religions.  How would this help?

1. Decriminalization would hopefully lessen the siege mentality that the polygamist leaders encourage in their community, and allow community members to be more open to ideas from the outside.
2. A religious social studies class would hopefully open the school children’s eyes to the world of faith and belief outside of their own community.  This might help them, as they mature, to look more critically at their own faith, and make a more informed decision as to whether or not they want to stay in a polygamist community.

My 2 cents worth…

[In the interest of full disclosure you should know that one of my great grand mothers was a polygamist in the early 1900's]

Once the “attack deer” had left the scene, Ryan tried to get Maggie to leave the porch so that they could finish the paper route together.  She would not move!  Ryan spent a couple of minutes trying to get her to leave the porch, but she wouldn’t budge, for fear of encountering the deer again. Fortunatly the owner of the house saw what happened and came out and told Ryan that he would stay with Maggie until he finished delivering his papers.  By the time Ryan was finished, Maggie had calmed down enough that she walked home with Ryan under her own power… We love Maggie, but she really is a Labr-Chicken!

The first of the three stops we made was to a quiet coved beach, for lunch. The water was warm and greeny-blue. There are often dolphins there, but the party must have scared them off… The next stop was at a historic island where there were forts and old buildings. It was beautiful, though Rich had to translate all the information the tour guide was sharing and that meant we both missed out on much of the information… Our final stop was not an actual ‘stop’, but we anchored down in a beautiful area nearby an island, and were told we had about 15 minutes to jump off the boat and swim around. Rich managed to get thrown off the boat by the head pirate, while I took a more cautious entry point from the rear of the boat, off a ladder. We swam around the bath-tub temperature waters, admiring the nearby island and hoping for a glimpse of a monkey. As we headed back to dock, they stepped up the party even more with louder music and bigger dances. By this time, everyone was 100% wrapped up in the mood and even those who had been reluctant to previously, were dancing around the deck. All in all, it was an unforgettable anniversary date and we loved our day together. The kids all survived at home with no major injuries, so that was nice to come home to.

Saturday, to end off our anniversary, Rich had me booked in at a salon for hair highlights, a manicure and a pedicure. I was pampered and poked for a good long time. Sadly, I got really warm at one point, and while she was cutting some cuticles on my fingers, I began to feel unwell. I started to get pale and I knew if something didn’t change soon, I was either going to pass out or puke, neither of which were attractive options. Rich had thankfully stuck around to help translate, so I told him in earnest that I needed some help. They got the fan on me and took a break from the pampering, and before long I was as good as new. I was a bit embarrassed as I felt they must have thought I was some Canadian wimp who can’t even stomach a manicure. But thankfully, they were very understanding and the rest of the morning went without a hitch.

Saturday evening, we had the opportunity to go to a Capeiora show of sorts. A bunch of more advanced students arrived at the local studio we’ve been taking classes at, grab some musical instruments, formed a circle, and created a beat for the two Capeiora dancers/martial arts in the middle to do their ‘thang’. It was amazing to watch their body control and movements as they smoothly pushed, kicked and swung themselves around the small circle. We will not even begin to get that good while we’re here, but it was nice to see how it’s supposed to look, after watching our own choppy moves for a few weeks. The event was later in the evening, and we eventually left when both Emily and Jillian fell asleep on the floor beside me. Luckily we only had to carry them one street over.

On Sunday, it was a hot, beautiful day, so we headed off to the Ingleses in the late afternoon for a swim and some night life. The kids loved the calmer waters and even Jillian learned how to tread water a bit, as well as jump up with the slower waves to avoid the waves rolling right over her head. There was a parade of party boats out in the deeper water, complete with fireworks, dancing and music. As the sun began to set, we packed up off the beach and headed a street over to grab some dinner. Carnival is coming up next weekend, so there is a party mood all over the Island. We caught up with a band practising for carnival and followed along with the beat that was pounding through the pavement. We grabbed some ice cream, watched people for a bit, and then headed home on the 7:30pm bus. It was an awesome night. We can’t wait until Carnival!

We now know how to extract be bicho de pe from feet. Emily learned her big toe was a bit sore and came to me to have a look. It looked like a callous/blister with a dark centre… something I wasn’t familiar with. We called our wonderful neighbour, Kevin, who was both familiar with how bicho de pe’s look like, as well as how to get them out. He came over shortly and confirmed that Emily did, in fact, have this little flea burrowed into her big toe, near her toe nail. He graciously set about extracting it, complete with the several dozen eggs that had been laid inside the skin. Emily was as brave as she could be. There were a few tears, but all in all, she did a good job of allowing Kevin to get the problem looked after. I would go into the details of how to get a bicho de pe out, but I’m afraid I’ll make the weaker readers feel ill. Let it be known, though, that it involves cutting, squeezing and digging… ‘nough said. We know this is very common here, and we are prepared to have it happen again, but we’re REALLY hoping it’s something we can avoid if possible. Everyone will be wearing flip-flops routinely outside from now on.

Today is going to be a quieter day. We’re needing some quiet time after a busy weekend, plus I’m getting over a head cold. Rich took four of the five kids to our Capeoira class this morning (I bowed out due to a sinus headache), and we’re looking forward to bathing a stray dog today, in hopes of pretty-ing her up so she can find a good forever home.

- Heather

We have also met another family two doors to our left. While the boys were in the backyard playing soccer, Michael was wearing a Manchester soccer jersey. Someone from the deck of the neighbours house yelled out something about, “Where’s that jersey from?!”. The first thing that caught the boys attention was that someone had just spoken to them in English. Secondly, someone recognized a soccer jersey that wasn’t from Brazil. Since then, we’ve learned that the mother is from Uruguay, the Dad is from England, and the two adult sons living there right now have lived in both Brazil and England. Their English is WONDERFUL! We have friends that we can all speak to, now! The sons, Kevin and Chris, both came to dinner and helped out with the BBQ, played some soccer with the kid, and shared wild surfing stories. We have enjoyed getting to know them better as we’ve gone to the beach together, had Chris come over to help Ryan learn some Photoshop tricks, and just chatted away with them both. They are very kind people who have found a special place in our hearts.

Last week, Chris was kind enough to drive Rich and the older boys around to look for bikes at second hand stores. They found two that would do the job, plus Chris and Kevin lent us one, so we now have three bikes to use. It has been very helpful when we have needed to get last minute things from the grocery store, pick up a garden hose from a hardware store up the street, etc.

Part of our purpose for coming to Brazil, other than to have fun, try to learn a new language, and have the kids see and appreciate another culture other than their own, was to find some kind of service project we could be a part of. It hasn’t been easy finding one that would work with both our family dynamics, as well as our location. However, one may have fallen into our laps. There a many, MANY stray dogs in Brazil. Some have been pushed out of their homes when the owners have rented out their home, while some are products of unspayed or unneutred strays coupling up. In any event, there are many strays. We are dog lovers and it’s been sad seeing so many dogs hungry, injured, or just plain lonely. We’ve combined both the need and the love, and turned it into a service project idea. On a small scale, we’ve taken three dogs under our wing and have been feeding and providing fresh water to them. Because of the potential for fleas and a few other undesirable conditions, we can’t have the dogs come into the yard or home, but we feed them out on our road, love them up, and enjoy the trust they seem to be able put in us. There’s Spotty (a black and white dog), Lucy/Blondie (a yellow dog whose name creates division in our family… some prefer ‘Lucy’ because she looks a bit like my sister, Jen’s dog Lucy, while some prefer a more descriptive name to make distinction easier), and Limpy (who has since lost his limp, but the name remains). On a larger scale, we are going to try to get involved with a local established dog rescue organization. Chris is getting us more information on that in the near future. The kids are excited to be helping and making life better for some of the thrown away dogs in the community.

The beach has claimed yet another victim in our family. Thankfully, not in a sucking out current, but in a powerful wave that slammed Rich off his body-board. As the wave sent him twirling head over feet, it turned him on his side, pushed a wave right into his ear, and the other side of his head into the sand floor. He popped out of the water with a very sore ear and stumbled up to shore, walking like he’d had several too many. His balance was gone for a bit, and he feared he’d ruptured his ear drum, but a follow up visit to a doctor the next day seemed to indicate not a rupture, but a highly inflamed ear drum. He has since been taking it easy and staying dry. It seems to be feeling better with no signs on infection.

Speaking of infection… I had an exciting bus ride with Jillian the other day. I took all the kids to the Ingleses beach, as we needed something to do and we hadn’t been to that beach in a long time. While we were there, dark clouds started to close in. It wasn’t a big deal, as we were already wet, but after a while the rain pelting down on us began to hurt. Plus, there seemed to be some dark, smelly fall-out coming from a drain pipe into the beach water. That was our cue to head home. While we were en route, Jillian began to cry and tell me she felt like she was going to barf. With nothing around to help contain the anticipated explosion, I grabbed one of our beach towels. Sure enough, Jillian followed through on her threat and I quickly learned that towel positioning is critical when trying to contain vomit, but not until it was too late. Foul, lumpy ‘stuff’ was slipping through the folds of the towel and landing on my lap, the floor, my bag….. Ugh… And the bus ride had only just begun. Oddly, the young man sitting beside me stayed put, which meant I had limited space to try to organize chaos. It was futile, so I sat there with vomit all over both Jillian and myself until either he got off the bus, or we landed at our bus stop. Eventually he did get off, but not for an agonizingly long long time. Jillian stood up and we began mopping her off. Then I started on me, and then the seat. Ryan was good enough to collect all the towels we had brought, which I ended up needing all of. By the time we got to our bus stop, the very last stop on the line, we had cleaned up enough to be a little less offensive, and with a quick apology to the bus staff, we left to walk the last bit of road to home. An exciting day for all
of us… And thankfully it didn’t appear to be flu bug or any other kind of contagious thing. Perhaps some bad cheese we bought at the beach?

Today, it’s a lazy Sunday. The sun is shining, the air is damp from a massive downpour during the night, and we’re taking it easy in the cool of the house. Emily, Matthew and Jillian have gone on a mission to the local grocery store to get some cereal and some ice cream… interesting combination. Ryan and Michael tried to purchase a hachet at our local hardware store, but the store was not open quite yet. And I’ll try to get out of my pajamas in time for some adventure to begin.

-Heather

Emily ran the RVM 1K kids run (along with Jillian and Matthew), and did very well. It was great to watch the younger kids zoom along almost effortlessly over the 1k distance.  1K is almost exactly two laps around our block, so it is a distance that the kids know well   Emily is also maintaining her “money bar” callouses by working out on the monkey bars at school every chance she gets.  We haven’t done a family arm wresting tournament lately, but I think that I would put my money on Emily in the left handed matches.  Emily is continuing to get 100% on her spelling tests at school… she must take after her father

It is with sadness that announce that Katie passed away peacefully in her sleep several weeks ago.  No, this is not Grandma Katie McCue, but Katie the gerbil, daughter of Mary (aka Fred), who was one of the three “miracle gerbils” born of Christmas day about three years ago. At Matthew’s request, she was buried underneath our plum tree near her mother Mary.  This was quite an ordeal for our sensitive little Matthew.  I suggested that he do some journaling about some of the things that he would miss about Katie, and it was quite moving to read the simple little things that he would miss now that she has passed on.   It was a good learning experience for most on the household.

One of the big events in Michael’s life recently is that he tied for 3rd place (in the 12 and under age group) in the 8k run at the Royal Victoria Marathon with a time of 37 minutes.  Much to his satisfaction he beat his cross country teacher from Gordon Head Middle School by 8 or 9 seconds.  He also participated in the  Bear Mountain 10K run with a time of 53 minutes. He also came in 3rd place in 15 & under category in that race (Michael is 11 years old).  It should be noted that the Bear Mountain 10K is touted as the most difficult 10K race in Canada because of all the hills on the course, including a steep 1.4K hill right a the beginning of the race (I guess they want to put any novices out of their misery early in the race). One odd thing happened to Michale recently is that he came down with the shingles.  We don’t know what the source was, but fortunately they were not as painful for him at his age as for an adult.

Ryan also did very well in his Royal Victoria Marathon 8k run with a time of 38 minutes, 14th place in the 13 – 15 category (he’s 13).  He did this in spite of feeling under the weather.  He came back with a vengeance in the Bear Mountain 10K and finished with a time of 48 minutes, and beat me (his Dad) by almost 2 minutes.   This was good enough for 2nd place in 15 and under category, and a very respectable showing in the men’s division overall.  Both Ryan and Michael are turning into very good distance runners.  Ryan is also becoming a Photoshop wizard, and is doing some amazing mashups and original work for colleagues of his on the internet.

Heather also participated in the 8K Royal Victoria Marathon, and was kind enough to let both of her boys beat her so that they wouldn’t have their delicate egos challenged by being beat by their mom.  I believe this is the first time that Heather has lost a race to any of her kids. It was a day or so after the race that she started having some odd asthmatic problems that demanded her attention. She went to the doctor and got some Ventolin. Since then, she has felt like a weight has been taken off her chest when she exercises.

In mid September I entered in, and finished the Sooke Triathlon Sprint (500m swim, 28k ride, 5k run).  I was last out of the lake, but finished respectably by the end of the race.  I enjoyed it enough, that I may enter in it again next fall.  In October after Heather, Ryan and Michael ran in the RVM 8K race together, I decided that I’d try to run a 1/2 marathon later that afternoon on my own (with out any training before hand -  I play lots of soccer, so what could go wrong?).  As Heather predicted, this turned out to be an unwise decision.  I was able to finish the 21K, but not without injuring my ham string and my IT bands.  I rested and did physio for a month, and then ran in the Bear Mountain 10K (another unwise decision), and re-injured myself in finishing the race.  It was very humbling to have Ryan beat me in the race… Both Ryan and Michael had great races.

I think that’s it for now!

Rich, Heather, Ryan, Michael, Matthew & Jillian

The present festivities of Santa Claus are very difficult to explain, because our Santa Clause is really a funny sort of bastard. No don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean a bastard in the present day context, but a bastard of the Middle Ages. He’s the offspring of old German practices going back two thousand years, and a Roman Catholic saint who lived after the reign of Constantine the Great, (4th Century A.D.) at a time when the Roman Empire was concentrated more in Constantinople than in Rome itself. Let us first look at his father, that is the old Germanic practices.

When I say Germanic I’m not quite correct because they really come from the Celtics, the ancient people who lived in present-day Britain, Ireland, and the Atlantic Coast form Holland to the Pyrennees. Now their practice was to celebrate the ‘sonnewende’ or yuletide, and this originated in the fear that the sun which stood still on that day (December 23rd) would disappear and never come back again. So to appease the sun god, they often brought human sacrifices. When the sun returned (and they knew very well it would because they’d seen it before after all), they would greet it by lighting candles, yule logs, etc., and by feting up trees. These customs remained in this form until the coming of the Irish Priest St. Boniface in 740 A.D.

He came to the Germanic tribes which had replaced the Celts and tried to stop the pagan rituals. He found, however, that the only way he could do it was to assimilate them into Christian practices which he achieved by having the Church year begin on December 15th, and celebrating the sonnewende at the same time. Thus instead of having lights burning for the sun-god they would now be lit for the Christ child. It should be remembered that the coming of a child, especially a boy-child was a special event anyway. (Girls were not so honoured because they represented the expense of a dowry sooner or later).

By the Middle Ages we see that more stress is laid on Christ’s mother, and this reflects the feeling of the time. (Nowadays we hear about women’s liberation, but in fact women were more venerated in the so-called Dark Ages then ever before. It is from this period that we get all our polite habits concerning the treatment of women). The idea of the Virgin Mary begins then as well.

All right, so now we have the yule log, the candles, the tree and the holly, but the focal point is still the crib or manger. The whole thing was designed as a joyful celebration with a serious moral intent…and that was the Middle Ages; they made everything holy, but also gave it a very human aspect as well. Now where does Saint Nicholas fit in?

Well, here we get another person who is connected with goodness and giving like the Christ-figure, and that is the Bishop of Myra whose name was Nicholas. Don’t bother looking for Myra because it doesn’t exist any more. It was once an important seaport on the Aegaan, just north of present-day Smirna; but various factors combined to reduce its place in history. However, it was once the see of a bishop and it was here that Nicholas performed the work which made him famous.

Nicholas brought some consolation to an age which was still far from completely civilized; he was sort of a welfare officer, he helped children, did missionary work amongst sailors, and helped girls to obtain dowries; (don’t forget that this was a time when a girl without a dowry had only two other choices; prostitution or the nunnery, and the latter were not nearly so prevalent after the 3rd century). In short then, he did charity work, and since, in this period at least, it wasn’t too hard to become a saint in the Catholic church, the Pope had him canonized while he was still alive. One reason was undoubtedly because several ‘miracles’ had become ascribed to him, including the anonymous giving of money to the needy. (this was a miracle because he wasn’t likely to have had any himself let alone enough to give away). Nicholas therefore became very well known during his lifetime; but his story might not have created any lasting impression if something hadn’t happened in the 7th century.

It was then that the Muslim Arabs overran the Eastern part of the old Roman Empire and forced the Christians to retreat westward. The result was that Nicholas’ body was removed and taken to the southern Italian seaport of Bari for safekeeping. Here a large cathedral was built in his honor, and his connection with sailors grew until he was finally made their patron saint, which result that his name was spread all over western Europe.

Coincidentally, the conversion of the Slavs occurred at this time, and his name was taken by the missionaries into Eastern Europe, including Russia, where he became the patron saint of the country. (Which explains why so many Russian czars had the name Nicholas). So you can see that Nicholas was pretty well universal by this time, and all that was needed was the veneration of the practice of secret gift-giving to complete the legend.

This occurred in the 9th century, and by the 12th century celebrating St. Nicholas Day on December the sixth was widespread all over Europe. Now actually the celebration happened on the eve of the day, December 5th, as was common for all saints festivities.

With the rise of the Spanish Empire in the 15th century, St. Nicholas became associated with Spain, mainly because that was where all the ‘goodies’ came from; by ‘goodies’ I mean spices and special sugar items which came from the East with the Moors. Thus the good bishop picked up a servant, a black moor who came to be called Black Peter and whose bag contained all the treasures of the Orient. Now we have all the elements of the legend together; a charitable bishop, no longer in Constantinople or Italy but in Spain, who appears on his day with his Moorish companion, all over Europe giving out delicious treats to the children. Don’t forget that sugar was a luxury, and oranges were so rare that in 1386 the city of Coventry made a special gift of twelve of them to Richard the Second. Well, to make it short, by 1300 the practice was well established all over Europe.

Now we get something else popping up and that is this: the Dutch became the main carriers of the St. Nicholas tradition simply because they became the main merchants of Europe, and most especially the Eastern spice trade. This one of the other customs which they transport is the custom of good eating.

So now we have the two holidays of Christmas and Saint Nicholas’ Day, one with the old symbols of sonnewende, and the other with the tradition of gift-giving incorporated. What happens to them when the Dutch take them to the New World? Well, they kept them pretty much as they were, but the trouble was that the tradition of St. Nicholas had almost died out in the non Roman Catholic countries of Europe after the Reformation , simply because Protestants did not recognize holy bishops, and when ten thousand of these Puritan settlers came over to America, it swamped the small Dutch colony in New Amsterdam. Because of neglect on the part of the Mother Country, however, these settlers were very dependent on the Dutch community for the first little while, and especially on Dutch trading ships. (Don’t forget that Holland was still in control of the luxury trade, including all those items connected with the Saint Nicholas celebration).

During this period, the Puritans were gradually taking over the Dutch colony, including their customs; but they had done exactly the same thing as their counterparts in Europe had done; that is to say, cut off all ties with bishops, and so taken all religious sense out of the December 5th festivity. On the other hand, the hard, sparse existence in the wilderness gave the custom of special, luxury item gift-giving a particular appeal to the immigrants, and they dearly wanted to take over the holiday, if only they could find a way of removing the association with the Catholic Church. They did it finally by removing the garment of a bishop from the Nicholas figure, (replacing the mitre with a sleeping cap for instance) and by shifting the date of the celebration to Christmas Day.

Now a curious thing happens’ the holiday, virtually forgotten in the Old World returns to Europe in its revised form and becomes popular again, and the Germans (who formed the bulk of the early settlers to New England) translate the name Saint Nicholas to the equivalent: Santa Claus. Thus it is in New England, after sixteen hundred years, that the marriage of the two great holidays takes place, and it is the Dutch, who had already married the holy idea with the profit motive, that promote the commercial aspect of the result.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see that if you commercialize one part of it, soon the whole thing gets out of hand, especially when, like the Puritans, you have deleted the religious connotation from the patron saint. Santa Clause, no longer a bishop, could hardly be allowed to retain his origins in Catholic Spain either, so his home became the North Pole. And as for Black Peter, well! the slave trade was in full swing by this time, so the veneration of any black man had long since disappeared, and since the Eskimos weren’t known, and the Indians despised, Santa became a pretty solitary figure, with only reindeer, (substituted for the white horse he’d had in Spain), to accompany him, Mrs. Clause and the elves were the additions of a kindlier age.

The story highlights the potential for conflict between scientific discovery and dogmatic faith, and does so in an interesting and compelling fashion.  For anyone with kids or teenagers, I highly recommend watching this episode with them.

The basic plot line is this:  The StarGate team travels to a new planet, where a star gate has been recently uncovered by local archaeologists in their country of Bedrosia.  The archaeologists are very surprised to find a star gate, because they were actually searching for evidence that star gates did not exist. Bedrosia is at war with a rival country, the Optricians, over their beliefs regarding the origin of human life on their world. The Optricians believe that aliens brought humans to their world thousands of years ago through a portal, while the Bedrosians believe that their god, Nefertum, created life on their planet.

One of the archaeologists is convinced that the functioning star gate is dramatic proof that his own beliefs, and the beliefs of all Bedrosia, are wrong, and that the Optricians have been right all along. The Bedrosian military is not convinced by the evidence and believe that the StarGate and SG Team are all part of an elaborate hoax setup by the Optricians to undermine Bedrosian institutions and their faith (i.e. their religion). From the Bedrosian General (I’m paraphrasing): “I will not allow this hoax to undermine the institutions and faith of our people.  I have read the book of Nefertum from cover to cover and know that it is true no matter what lies the Optricians try to make us believe.  Our solders have not died in vain.”

“The primary theme of the episode is the ideological war between religion and science. The archaeologist is a true scientist, who has no unfounded allegiance to abstract belief, but is eager to change what he believes when presented with new evidence. The Bedrosians are dedicated to their faith, and are presented as arrogant and stubborn — unwilling to consider that their beliefs might be wrong, even when presented with hard evidence. This dichotomy is manifested in the characters of the archaeologist and the military general.” – http://www.gateworld.net/sg1/s3/319.shtml

You can read a full summary of the episode here: http://www.gateworld.net/sg1/s3/319.shtml. If you’d like to watch the episode, you can purchase it at the iTunes store here.

Two thumbs up from Rich & Heather!

Hairy Cell Leukemia (HCL) is very treatable, but because so few people contract it, individual doctors and oncologists don’t see it often or at all during the course of their careers. I have a wonderful medical team behind me, but I suspect that I am only one of two people that they have treated with this disease. They are busy people with limited time during the day for research into my disease of interest.

The internet allows me to connect with communities of people who are also fighting the disease, and with other medical professionals who specialize in it’s treatment. For HCL in particular I’ve found a great online bulletin board, called Rob’s User Friendly HCL Site and Chat Room. The support there is wonderful. When my blood test numbers recently starting trending downwards, I of course consulted with my doctor, but I also shared with the HCL board. I received support from the board, and also some advice from a Doctor who is a regular on the board (a GP who is himself is a HCL survivor). I also received private messaged pointing me to journal articles that related to what I’m going through at this point in time. I now have two or three thing to consult with my doctor about, including an article from the Journal of Clinical Oncology that talks about different chemotherapy strategies that have been tried over the years with HCL.

Without the internet, and the communities that it enables, I would know much less about the disease I’m battling, and would be not nearly as well equipped to discuss different treatment options with my doctor. So after not visiting Rob’s User Friendly HCL board for a couple of years now (since my last round of chemotherapy), it looks like I’ll become more of a regular now that my old friend is back with me. By the end of next week when my bone marrow biopsy results are back I’ll have a better idea of what treatments, if any, I have to look forward to.

For now I’m feeling great. This past week, I’ve played soccer twice, gone mountain biking with my sons, and played a little touch rugby. Life is good. I have much to be grateful for. I better get going though, my ride to the hospital for my bone marrow biopsy at 10:30am is about to leave.

First let me say that I believe that what the Texas authorities did in taking all the children in the community away from their parents was wrong. If there was a complaint about abuse by an individual, then something should have been done to protect that person’s family until things could be sorted out. This is not the first time the US government has put polygamist families through their legal justice system. I am a happy monogamist, and will encourage my children to be monogamists, but in this day and age, if consenting, informed adults want to enter into polygamist relationships, then the government should not interfere. If teenagers are being encourage or coerced to enter into polygamist marriages, then the adults involved should be prosecuted to the fullest extent under applicable laws (as Warren Jeffs the leader of the FLDS was for example).

My great grandmother Katherine Love Paxman was the fourth wife of William Paxman. At the time she married, Katherine was 24 years old and her husband was almost 50 years old (interestingly, William’s eldest son by his first wife, was 29 at the time he married Katherine). William was a leader in the Mormon church, and in accordance with church doctrine at the time, was encouraged to marry more than one wife. Unfortunately at the time he married my great grand mother, the United States government was beginning to actively prosecute and jail polygamist husbands.

At least partly as a result of the pressure by the US legal system, the church sent William on a mission to New Zealand in order to move him out of the reach of the US government. Only one wife could go with him on his mission, and my grandmother turned out to be the lucky wife, and made the trip to New Zealand with him (I’m not sure why, but it may have been an economic issue, as great grandma didn’t have any children to take with her at the time, unlike her sister wives).

Nine years, and five children later (1897), William died suddenly while eating dinner, just two days after falling off one of his other wife’s roof while fixing it. At the time Katherine was living at her mother’s home, and after his death, to make ends meet, she took a job as secretary at the town hall in Nephi, Utah.

In a sense I am grateful for polygamy. I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for my Great Grandfather William Paxman, and his fourth wife, Great Grandma Katherine Paxman. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else, but quite selfishly I’m glad to be here.

P.S. In Sacred Loneliness is lengthy book that provides quite detailed biographical sketches of the lives of Joseph Smiths 30+ wives, right from their births and family back grounds, to their death’s. Todd Compton is an academic, and his prose isn’t captivating for the most part, but some of the stories of the women in his book are truly incredible. Many of the stories taken directly from their personal histories. A great example of one of those incredible stories is of Zina Huntington Jacobs. Joseph Smith approached her about a polygamist marriage in Nauvoo, and she rebuffed him, and within weeks married Zina, who had been courting her at the time. Six months after her marriage to Henry Jacobs, Joseph approached her again and told her that an angel had appeared to him with a drawn sword and told him that if he did not marry her, that he would be killed and that her family would not go to Heaven. She acquiesced, and was married to Joseph as his fifth wife. The marriage was done in secret. So secret in fact that Joseph’s first wife Emma was not told of the marriage.

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!

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!

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)

That most in the church have never heard of Joseph Smith’s marriages to other men’s wives while they were still married to their first husbands 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 less than a year after they themselves were married.

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 a number of 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 can no longer support or justify:

• 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 archaic doctrines.
• 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 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.

Recently 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.  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 harmful 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.  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 wrong side of a number of important moral issues, and to occupy a leadership position in the church with that knowledge, was hypocritical. If I felt that there was any chance to reform from within, that might have changed the course I’ve taken, 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. The church needs 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 harmful and uncharitable doctrines are taught. If there is a just god, then living a good, moral, service oriented life should be all that is required of us. That is what I am trying to do, and it is what I teach my children.

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.

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.

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 …

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Dear Stuart,

The Vinyl Cafe has been on my mind a lot these past few days. My wife has finally convinced me to write this letter.

I was in the hospital every afternoon this past week for my latest round of treatments. I shared a room during my stay on the Oncology Ward with a three older gentlemen. During the course of the week different patients came an went, but Cliff, one of the fellow patients, was there the whole week with me. While I was around each afternoon, Cliff was never alone. His wife, Pearl, stayed with him during the day and was kind enough to go get some of those little plastic ice cream cups for us all from the fridge down the hall. It must have been at least 25 years since I last ate an ice cream out of one those little cups with the cardboard peel-off lids. The only change those cups have undergone in the past 25 years is that they do not ship them with those little wooden spoons anymore. The good news is that the taste is exactly like I remembered… cool, creamy goodness, laced with enough sugar that they cannot help but taste wonderful. Cliff, Pearl and I sat around enjoying, or eating one of life’s simple pleasures while our other roommates enjoyed an afternoon nap.

While I was lucky enough to be an outpatient, Cliff was in the hospital 24/7 while he was recovering from the radiation treatments he had received for a brain tumour. I wish I could tell you that this was his only health problem, but he also has inoperable cancer in one of his lungs. In spite of these problems, he is hoping to go home in the next few days, once his hospice nurse arranges appropriate home care for him. He misses sleeping in his own bed. Pearl would like to take care of him on her own at home, but both she and Cliff are around 85 years old and she just isn’t as strong as she used to be.

Friday was my last treatment and when I arrived, Cliff and Pearl were quietly sitting together. I greeted them and they asked how I was doing. From the look on their faces, they seemed a bit low, so I offered to go to the fridge down the hall to get some ice cream for everyone. Pearl thanked me for my offer, but told me that she had already been to get some but it appeared that they were out of ice cream today. Sometimes life just isn’t fair.

We chatted for a bit, and soon my nurse arrived to hook me up to my IV for my treatment. While I had a few moments to myself, I wracked my brain to try to think of something that might cheer Cliff and Pearl up. Then an idea came to me. My routine had been to talk with my fellow patients upon arrival, then read a chapter of my favourite book (“Marley & Me – Love and Life with the World’s Worst Dog”… I highly recommend this book), then do a bit of work on my laptop computer. I also had an iPod with me that I hadn’t been using. Along with all my music on it, I also have virtually all of the Vinyl Cafe stories that have been released onto CD, on it. I could think of at least on thing that would put a smile of both Cliff and Pearl’s faces – “The Blood Pressure Chair” story. I found the story on the iPod and asked if they wanted to hear a really funny story by a great story teller. They said they would, so they each took one of the ear pieces and sat their soaking up the experience. It was amazing and wonderful to see their faces light up as the story unfolded for them. Eventually I could hear Cliff chuckling softly to himself with a wide grin on his face.

Near the end of the “Blood Pressure Chair” story, some visitors arrived for him, but he was too engrossed to leave the story, so Pearl and I chatted with his visitors while he continued to snicker to himself. I’m not sure which story he moved onto next, bit it was about a half hour later when he asked me how to pause the thing so he could say good-bye to his visitors. By the end of my treatment, I’d decided to leave my iPod with Cliff so he could listen to and enjoy the rest of the Vinyl Cafe stories stored on it. I figure that if someone can survive radiation therapy, I’m sure he could survive or even thrive with a few more hours of “Vinyl Cafe” therapy. I’ll go back in a couple of days and ask him which were his favourite stories. Thank you for sharing Dave, Morley and the rest of the gang with us.

Sincerely,
Rich McCue

Victoria, BC

I did learn something interesting yesterday from my nurse.  She was just getting ready to hook me up to My IV drip when I ask her if she knew how much my treatment cost.  She said she didn’t know but that she would go and find out.  I didn’t expect that she would know off the top of her head, and half suspected that she wouldn’t be able to easily find out the cost either. To my surprise she came back about two minutes later with a small booklet with, among other things, the cost of cancer treatment drugs. After thumbing through he booklet she found my drug, and showed me that the cost was $485 per mg, and that my half liter bag clear fluid contained 10 mg of the drug. So the total cost of the drugs for my daily treatment is about $4,850, and the total for my week long treatment will total over $24,000.  Needless to say I think I’m getting my money’s worth out of my federal and provincial taxes this year.  UPDATE: My nurse told me that she had mis-read the booklet.  The cost was about $500 per day, not $5000 per day.  So the treatment was not quite as expensive as I first throught it was.

As I mentioned, I’m sharing a room with three other men who are also going through cancer treatment.  Yesterday I had a chance to chat with Cliff, one of my room mates, and his wife Pearl.  As we talked Pearl told me about an experience she had on the bus that day.  The couple, both in their late 80′s, live in James Bay, and typically take a taxi when they occasionally need to travel further than walking distance from their home. Now that Cliff is in the hospital, and Pearl is visiting every day, the daily taxi rides were starting to strain their tight budget.  So she decided to try taking the bus to the hospital. She caught the bus with out any problem, but when she arrived at the hospital bus stop she realized that she was going to have to go down some stairs to get off the bus. She had the misfortune to catch one of the older buses with steep stairs at the front and back of the bus. Going up the stairs when she boarded the bus wasn’t too bad, but Pearl has problems going down stairs now that she is almost 90 years old.  As she stood at the top of the stairs wondering what she was going to do, she looked around the bus with a distressed look on her face.  Fortunately a couple of fellow passengers noticed the distressed look and asked if she needed any help.  She told them that she has a problem going down stairs.  At that point two passengers jumped up, each held her under her arms and gently assisted her off the bus.  The two young people made sure she was ok and then re-boarded the bus.  The bus pulled away.

Pearl said that she stood there on the side walk overwhelmed with emotion. She had just been standing on the bus, afraid to go down the stairs, and with in a few seconds two young UVic students had carefully helped her off the bus. She felt so grateful that tears started to well up in her eyes. Pearl’s comment to me as we sat chatting in the hospital was that while our society may have some problems, there are still a lot of good people around, who are willing to help a total stranger in need.

I had an enjoyable afternoon.  Take Care.

At about 5:30am Sunday morning I decided that I better go to the Royal Jubilee hospital to get checked out as my temperature was at about 103 Degrees (39.7) (I’m on doctors orders to get medical attention right away if I develop a high temperature because of my currently depressed immune system). So I arrived at the hospital at 6am, and there were two people (yes only two) in front of me. I was quite pleased as I thought this would mean that I would be seen by a doctor fairly quickly. At about 7am I was still in the waiting room with the same two other people, when someone from the lab arrived to take some blood samples from me. I thought that it was a little odd that they would do this in the waiting room, but was happy as I expected that this would speed things up. I continued to wait, and at about 10am I went to the Tim Horton’s in the hospital to get something to eat as the Nursing staff continued to tell everyone that arrived at the triage desk that the emergency ward was full and that they would have a long wait. Between 6am and 10am only five or six more people arrived to the triage desk, one of whom was immediately admitted because of the seriousness of his aliment, and the rest sat in the waiting room with me.

Not long after 10am, I was taken back into the emergency ward and couldn’t believe what I saw. I trusted the hospital staff when they said that the emergency ward was full, but not only were all the regular beds full, but the hallway leading from the outside of the hospital to the main area of the emergency ward was bumper to bumper with elderly people on gurneys waiting for a proper bed. While I had been sitting in the waiting room, I was not able to see all the elderly people being brought in by the ambulance staff from nursing homes in the down town area. Now that I was in the ward I could see and hear what was going on. Ambulances and vans from nursing homes arrived on a regular basis with elderly patients suffering from everything from broken hips to dehydration from the flu. The few life threatening cases were given beds right away, and the less pressing cases backed up in the entrance hallway. By my unofficial count (as I walked to and from the bathroom) all but two people in the ward were under 60 years old. Admittedly the Royal Jubilee hospital is in an older part of town, but over 95% of the admitted patients were over 60 years old.

As I lay resting in my bed for most of the day I could overhear some of the conversations between the intake nurses and the elderly people in the hallway who had not yet been properly admitted. Many of these people were clearly suffering from some degree of dementia, and the staff had a difficult time getting information from them to help them make a good diagnosis. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to try to help someone who cannot communicate very well. Actually I do know what that is like, because I have a one year old daughter. And that is how the staff kindly treated the patients with dementia; like small children.

This is completely anecdotal, no statistics or science used in forming this option, but given the demographics of our population I would guess that this problem is not going to improve on its own any time soon. I’m not sure what would be the best way to try to alleviate the problem. You can always throw more money at the problem and try to fix it the same way you’ve been doing it, but on a larger scale (i.e. add more beds to the hospital). However in the zero sum game of budget politics, the extra hospital beds may come from fewer seats available in Universities, or higher taxes. Not very fun choices to make. I hope we have a better solution for the problem before I’m ready for retirement.

http://desktops.linux.com/desktops/04/07/01/1833212.shtml?tid=49&tid=99&tid=13

Title A parent’s guide to Linux Web filtering
Date 2004.07.01 13:20
Author warthawg
Topic

http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=04/07/01/1833212

Having converted quite a few people to the world of GNU/Linux, I am often asked by parents, “Can I set up parental Web filters for my children using Linux?” The answer is yes, and here’s how.

A Web filter is a software that can filter the type of content a Web browser displays. The filter checks the content of a Web page against a set of rules and replaces any unwanted content with an alternative Web page, usually an “Access Denied” page. The type of content to be filtered is usually controlled by a systems administrator or a parent. Web filters are used in schools, libraries, and homes to safeguard children from obscene content on the Internet.

Before you begin, you should be familiar with some basic networking concepts:

* A server, as in “Web server,” is nothing more than an application that runs on a computer and listens for incoming requests. It sends back, or serves, information to the source that requested the information. This information can be anything from Web pages to databases. Each server communicates through the use of an IP address and a port number.
* Ports are logical addresses that applications on a computer use in a way similar to how we use phone numbers. Each server program must have a unique port that it uses for communications.
* Every computer connected to the Internet has both an external IP (Internet Protocol) address, usually assigned by an Internet service provider, and an internal address of 127.0.0.1. The internal address allows the computer to “listen” and “talk” to itself and is referred to as the loopback address. Normally a server is set up to accept requests from other computers on the Internet by listening on its external address. Since this can present a security risk for our single computer, we will use the loopback address instead. This will cause our server to only listen for requests from the computer that the server resides on.
* A firewall is an application that controls the types of communication your computer can send and receive. GNU/Linux has an excellent firewall called netfilter/iptables, or simply iptables, built right into the kernel, which we will make use of to redirect users’ Web surfing through our Web filter.

Getting the software

The only software you need to set up parental filters under GNU/Linux is iptables, DansGuardian, and Squid.

DansGuardian is the actual filtering software. It supports phrase matching, which allow you to block out Web sites that contain certain phrases or words; PICS filtering, which blocks content that’s been labeled as possibly objectionable material by the creator of the Web site; URL filtering, to block content from specific sites that are known to contain offensive material; and blacklists, or lists of sites that contain content you want to block. Blacklists usually come from third parties, though you can create and maintain your own.

Squid is a Web proxy server that acts as a middleman between your computer and the Internet. You need a proxy server because DansGuardian isn’t able to fetch Web pages by itself. We’ll configure Squid as a transparent proxy, meaning we’ll hijack network traffic and redirect it to a new destination — our filter program, in this case — without the need for the user to know that it is happening.

Most modern distribution have packaged versions of Squid and DansGuardian available. If yours doesn’t then you will need to install them from source code. Both the Squid and DansGuardian Web sites have complete instructions for how to compile and install the programs from source.

Iptables is the firewall management tool used with the 2.4.x and higher kernels. Most modern distributions provide iptables. If yours doesn’t, you will need to compile a new kernel and enable iptables, which is beyond the scope of this article (and probably beyond the abilities of most parents). You’d probably be better off upgrading to a newer Linux distribution.

Configuring Squid

The default location for the Squid configuration file on most systems is /etc/squid/squid.conf. While most of the default settings for Squid are all right for our usage, you will need to edit the configuration file just a bit.

You will need to become the root user in order to make the changes and issue the commands shown in this article. You can do this by either logging in as root or with the su command.

Add or edit the following line to have Squid listen only on the loopback device on port 3128. This will cause Squid to act only as a proxy server for this computer and assigns it a specific port number to listen on:

http_port 127.0.0.1:3128

To configure Squid as a transparent proxy, add the following lines to squid.conf:

httpd_accel_host virtual
httpd_accel_port 80
httpd_accel_with_proxy on
httpd_accel_uses_host_header on

Your system should have created a user and a group named squid when you installed Squid. If it didn’t, you should create them yourself by using the following two commands from the command line:

groupadd -r squid
useradd -g squid -d /var/spool/squid -s /bin/false -r squid

Since Squid is normally started by the system and run as root, you need to add the next two lines to /etc/squid/squid.conf in order to make Squid run with squid’s user and group IDs:

cache_effective_user squid
cache_effective_group squid

We will later use this to identify Squid to our firewall. Then we will allow the user squid to access the Internet while we redirect all other Web traffic through our filter.

Configuring DansGuardian

Our next step is to configure DansGuardian. The default location, on most systems, for the configuration files is /etc/dansguardian/dansguardian.conf. Once again, most of the default values are fine, but we need to make a few changes.

First, add or edit the following line to make the filter use HTML templates, which are static Web pages that our filter will use to display the “Access Denied” page instead of the inappropriate sites. Using HTML templates keeps us from having to set up a Web server to display the “Access Denied” information.

reportinglevel = 3

Next, add or edit the following lines to make DansGuardian listen on the loopback address and port 8080:

filterip = 127.0.0.1
filterport = 8080

Add or edit the following line to tell DansGuardian which address and port that Squid is listening on. This enables our filter to fetch the requested Web content through the proxy.

proxyip = 127.0.0.1
proxyport = 3128

Again, to keep your filter from running as root you need to change the user that it will run as. For simplicity, we will reuse the user and group that we previously set up for Squid. Add or edit the following to make DansGuardian run with UID and GID of squid:

daemonuser = ‘squid’
daemongroup = ‘squid’

While DansGuardian provides an excellent filter all by itself, you may want to exercise further control over the Web filtering by editing the other files in the /etc/dansguardian directory that contain external blacklists. Blacklists from squidGuard and URLBlacklist work perfectly with DansGuardian. Each file contains a brief explanation for its contents to make configuration easier.

Putting it in action

Once you have Squid and DansGuardian set up, the final step is to implement a transparent proxy using iptables. Use the following commands at the command line to add rules to the firewall to allow the user squid to access both the Internet and the Squid proxy we set up.

iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp –dport 80 -m owner –uid-owner squid -j ACCEPT

iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp –dport 3128 -m owner –uid-owner squid -j ACCEPT

If you want a user to be exempt from filtering — a parent, for example — issue the following command. Replace EXEMPT_USER with the username that you wish to exempt from filtering:

iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp –dport 80 -m owner –uid-owner EXEMPT_USER -j ACCEPT

The next command redirects Internet traffic from all users, other than squid and any exempt users, to the filter on port 8080:

iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp –dport 80 -j REDIRECT –to-ports 8080

Since we have a proxy server set up, a user could configure a Web browser to bypass the filter and access the proxy directly. The Squid proxy is listening for requests from the computer, and it doesn’t care which user sends the request. We could set up our firewall to deny all access to the proxy except from our filter, but let’s be a little sneakier. Let’s set it up so that direct requests to the Squid proxy server, except from our filter, get redirected through the filter. To do this, use the following command:

iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp –dport 3128 -j REDIRECT –to-ports 8080

Some systems, such as MandrakeLinux, utilize an application called Shorewall to manage firewall rules. For these systems, place the above firewall rules in /etc/shorewall/start, to use the filtering when Shorewall starts, and in /etc/shorewall/stop, to make them stick if you should stop Shorewall for some reason. To implement the new rules simply restart Shorewall using the following command:

service shorewall restart

For systems using Shorewall, your firewall rules are set. For all other systems, you’ll need to perform the next two steps in order to get the new firewall rules started at boot time. Issue the following command to save your firewall rules:

iptables-save > /etc/sysconfig/iptables

Now issue the following to make sure iptables is started at boot time and to start the iptables firewall:

chkconfig iptables on
service iptables restart

You may also need to make sure that DansGuardian and Squid get started at boot by using the following two commands:

chkconfig squid on
chkconfig dansguardian on

To get the filtering started, you can now enter the following commands:

service squid restart
service dansguardian restart

The “Access Denied” screen – click to enlarge

Now when users enter a forbidden Web address they will be presented with an “Access Denied” page instead of the offending site. You can customize the look of the “Access Denied” page by editing the template.html file in the appropriate language section located in /etc/dansguardian/languages.

Final thoughts

While the setup discussed in this article is intended for use on a single computer, this method of Web filtering can be applied to a wide range of scenarios. These tools can be easily and successfully implemented on a small home network, a large business infrastructure, or any environment that needs to comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act.

Bear in mind that Web filtering software of any kind is not 100% failsafe, nor is it a substitute for parental supervision. Along with installing filtering software, educate yourself and your children about the Internet.

• Solar Closet: It’s a small, well-insulated room with lots of thermal mass (water is best), and a large triple glazed south facing window of about 30sq ft. Hook it into your heating system, and you can do away with the furnace (There’s a guy up in Calgary with one, and so long as he gets 15 hours of sunshine every 2 weeks over winter; he can keep his house at 70F all the time, with no furnace or other heating.)

• Put in a Stonehenge feature, ie, some quirky thing where one day a year the sun hits a photocell and lights up a scale model of the Eiffel tower or something.

• Definitely need one wall setup to be used as the junk drawer.

• Appliances that are Internet enabled.

• Exercise equipment connected to generators, for selling energy back to the grid.

• Use the central computer/electronics room to warm water pipes.

• Totally stainless steel kitchen counters that all drain to a sink. When you’re done cooking (making a mess) cleanup consists of hosing it down, and then pushing all the debris to the sink-disposal with a simple squeegy-like device. Cleanup of nearly any mess takes all of 15 seconds.

• A system to get materials from the kitchen to the outside compost heap without going outside.

• Toddler dining area that’s easy to hose down.

• It’s crazy to warm your house to 70 degrees while cooling your refrigerator to the temperature outdoors, at least on cold days. Is there some way to bring the outside cooling to the rear of the fridge without making the house cold?

• Windows should be argon filled low-e filtered glass and plasticized frames color-matched to whatever Dilbert wants (low maintenance).

• The exhaust from the clothes dryer, should be filtered to clean out the lint, and the heat generated used to heat the house in winter.

• Flexible LCDs for walls.

• The yard should have ground cover (pachysandra, vinca, etc.) instead of grass to eliminate mowing. The plantings should be the most trouble-free evergreens which would be azaleas (which are beautiful but need no pruning, etc.). The trees should be only evergreens as they don’t have leaves to drop and be raked up. One exception for a shade tree….the honey locust, whose leaves are so tiny they dry up and disappear when they fall. (Much as we all loves oaks and maples their leaves would give Dilbert work).

• Bulk buying storage: In the kitchen the cabinets should be on an outside wall so they can be restocked by Costco from the outside. Items bought in bulk will include paper plates and plastic utensils, paper towels, and ketchup.

• Dilbert will need a dedicated games room, full surround sound etc All set up for LAN parties X-box type parties (it has never been used by anyone outside the house – but Bob is often found there playing dinosaur games, or prehistoric games such as the original pong and space invaders!

• He should have a rainwater collector and purifier, to conserve water and not have to get city water. And definitely solar power collectors, and maybe even wind power collectors too.

• Staging area at bottom/top of stairs, for items that are continuously on the wrong floor.

• You have to be able to see a window or a good TV from the main kitchen sink or people won’t spend any time there!

• Lots of wall sockets a desktop height for plugging in computers.

• A sound proof office where one can work while the kids destroy the rest of the house.

• It would be fantastic if Dilbert could show brilliance and forethought by including principles of Universal Design (UD) in the Dilbert House. By making his house usable by all people (with features like zero-step entrances and wider hallways), he could enlighten an entire generation, and perhaps even save them from institutionalization later in life!

• Put the laundry room upstairs. Most families store their clean clothes upstairs, along with the dirty laundry basket(s).

• A Sunroom / greenhouse. Can be used for solar gain, natural air freshening (with proper ducting) and growing fresh herbs etc.

• Walls that resist kids writing on them.

• Hidden room for danger or storing valuables

• Whole house protected power circuits

• No air ducts in the ceiling (or in the floor) for air conditioning. It creates too much dust all over the place.

• Without doubt, Dilbert’s house should Not have baseboards that protrude, however little, from the walls. Rather, they should be somewhat RECESSED, so that they never need dusting.

• Dilbert must have those light guides from 3M that pipe solar photons into his interior rooms, thus saving electricity in the daytime.

• Cluster services together, especially hot water so that the pipes don’t have far to go to deliver the water. This cuts down on heat loss, original installation costs, and repair and maintenance costs. (Put all bathrooms at core of house?)

• It should definitely have a completely enclosed cat deck so your cats can enjoy the essence of the outside world without being exposed to the dangers.

• Use the heat of the hot water line to warm your bath towel!

• Several outlets in front and back.

• Office-only doorbell in addition to whole-house doorbell.

• TV antenna on roof

• Make your garage double deep and double high so that you don’t need to build a shed as soon as you’re done building your house.

• One of those “forever hot water” things that gives hot water on demand but doesn’t waste money on heating it when not in use. Ideal for single people who don’t like replacing those leaky tanks… or who own fuel cells. http://www.foreverhotwater.com/index.shtml

• Water source near your bed for when you wake up thirsty.

• Brick exterior, no maintenance required. (fake brick facade?)

• It seems to me that he should be able to run his computer through his TV and theater system