Starting a new hobby

Took up learning to fly. I'm starting a new blog to track that adventure: http://apexncflyer.blogspot.com/

Why debate religion but not science?

After reading more I've learned the debate at Messiah is actually designed to be a series of one-on-one interviews with the media. Wired wrote an interesting article asking why the candidates are willing to discuss issues in a religious context, but not in a scientific one. Hear hear.

We spent the last eight years under a religious zealot. That didn't get us anywhere good. One of the reasons I support Obama is because he is erudite. I hope he won't bow to religious leaders on any issues which are important to me (climate change, stem cell research, peak oil, renewable energy, etc.)

Debate at Messiah

Messiah College, my alma mater, is hosting what promises to be an interesting presidential candidate debate focused on moral and ethical issues.

Facebook Discovered

So after reading article after article about Facebook in Wired, I finally decided to check it out. Well, my gosh, how cool it is. I typed in the name of my highschool and was immediately presented with a list of alumni. One of which was my best friend from those days. I linked to him and saw that my college roommate was one of his friends. So I added him... and so on and so on. I'm up to 7 "friends" now which is neat. I even reconnected with an favorite professor from college. He, in turn, commented on this long abandoned blog and made interesting observations about my interest in gardening, zazen meditation, trying to be more likeable, etc. I then reflected on this and just went back and re read many of my old posts. What I've discovered is, I've fallen off the wagon terribly. Not only have I not been maintaining this blog, I've neglected my health mentally and physically and begun falling back into patterns of negative thinking at work. Well enough of that. Today I start back up on my Rob 2.0 project. Because I'm feeling I've downgraded almost all the way back to Rob 1.0.

Re-making connections has been great. I spent over an hour IMing with an old college roomate. Very therapeutic. Hopefully I'll do better at maintaining connections with people. I think that's important to a healthy lifestyle.

Shark Attack

So here I am minding my own business, splashing in the surf with my son Evan at Atlantic Beach, NC, when we notice a fire department pick-up truck come screaming down the beach right past us. Like something out of Baywatch. A minute later another "medical" type SUV goes screaming by. I figured someone might be drowning or had a heart attack or whatever. They stopped about 500 feet from where we were in the water. I mainly ignored all this... but then frantic mothers started waving their kids in to shore. I went up and quickly heard that the hub bub was about a shark attack! No way I thought. So I, and about 1000 other nosy people trotted down to see what was what. Sure enough they're bandaging up this woman who had a goodly part of her thigh missing. Her foot and one toe was also wrapped up. Not sure how bad the damage was. Cops on the scene said it looked to be a 5-6 foot shark from the bite radius.

Amazingly, they didn't close the beaches. No one went in for about an hour, but then we all started trickling back in as it was too damn hot to sit on the sand. And I'm on vacation and I'm going to swim dammit! :)

This has hit local news in Raleigh:

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/640090.html
http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=triangle&id=5481796
http://www.nbc17.com/midatlantic/ncn/news.apx.-content-articles-NCN-2007-07-17-0014.html

The news accounts don't make it sound quite as dramatic as it was being their live!

Outlook Presence Issue

Interesting Outlook Office Communicator issue. After installing Office Communicator some users reported losing the presence indication in Outlook
In Outlook's Tools, Options, Other tab is an Enable the Person Names Smart Tag feature. Below it is Display Presence Status in the From field. The latter is greyed out. When a user clears the first option and applies the dialog settings they lose the presence indicator smart tag in Outlook. We found that if you checked the first option again the smart tag would pop up when hovering over a name in Outlook, but it wouldn't display persistently.

After googling in vain for a day I finally realized that this must be a registry setting somewhere. So I stumbled around until I found it. Since there appears to be no information about the solution to this problem (though several other's have posted in Usenet wondering what the solution was), I figured I'd post what I found here. Maybe someone will find it useful.

The registry setting that controls this behavior (HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\IM\EnablePresence=1). I still don't know why this option is greyed out in Outlook (tools, options, other, display presence in from field) for me. But at least now I have a workaround. Hoping this helps others.

See how my garden grows

Left to right we have carrots, garlic, lettuce, spinach, peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, butternut squash, peppers, and some more tomatoes.