North Western Winds

I might as well make it official... North Western Winds is moving to Wordpress fulltime . You're all invited to visit me at: http://northwesternwinds.wordpress.com/ Let's get things rolling!

Read my latest here .

I am beginning to think seriously about making Wordpress my new home . If you are looking for new NWW material that will be the place to look - for now. I still have a few questions to have answered before I commit, but I am leaning that way. In the meantime I'm learning by doing, and that means "doing" over there .

My move to Mac has been very happy except for two issues - gaming and blogging. For websurfing and multimedia, a Mac is of course a terrific machine. Games on the Mac platform are often ports of games made for the larger PC market and that means a Mac gamer will have to wait for the port. I'm not a heavy gamer by any means but I am very happy that the Mac port of Civilization 4 is finally here. Well, my copy isn't here quite yet - but it has been ordered and ought to be here soon. The blogging issue is more complicated. I'm not fond of writing my posts in a browser window. This goes back to when I was first blogging and I lost one or two large posts into the ether. After that I moved to w.bloggar - a great little app that let me compose on my desktop and then click send when all was said and done. I have not been able to recreate that experience on my Mac, and not for a lack of trying! I looked at Marsedit , but that forces you to compse while staring at a bunch of HMT...

Here is another reason to stay away from Windows software - as if you needed another. This came out after Warren Buffett anounced he would give Bill Gates' charity a mountain of money : Fr. Thomas J. Euteneuer, president of Human Life International , issued a statement pointing out Buffett's track record of supporting pro-abortion organizations and related projects in the developing world. He reported that Buffett's foundation also gave a grant to the U.S.- based Center for Reproductive Rights , which fought bans on partial- birth abortion, and Catholics for a Free Choice . "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have also given millions of dollars to organizations pushing abortion around the world," Fr. Euteneuer reported. I have no idea why Gates and Buffett support the organizations they do, but I suspect it might be something along these lines : Nature is astonishingly cruel. Science, by contrast, has the power of mercy. One can only be dazzled by the inven...

I've been vocal here about how much I like iTunes. It lead me to my first Mac, after all. And that's all good - I love my Mac, and I'm very fond of the entire iLife suite. I do have a growing gripe with the iTunes country music selection here in Canada, however. I know that Americans have a much better selection that we do here because somehow or other I once found myself logged in as a Yank. That allowed me to view a cornucopia of songs and videos that I had not seen available before (and which I could not download). Example... Little Big Town has been on the airwaves around here for months and for months I've been waiting to downlowd a copy of their second recording. What's worse is that I check for what's new fairly often and too often there's nothing at all, or something old. I love a lot of the oldies ( Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys rocks the house) but not everything that's old is golden. A wider selection is a must go...

Here, Nicholas Carr explains why Google and Yahoo have an active interest in subsidizing the creation of free internet content : The enforcers of the new model are the search-based ad-placement services, mainly, at the moment, Google and Yahoo . Their business comes down to scale - in particular, the overall scale of internet use. To expand the scale of use, they want to ensure that there's as much content as possible available on the internet for free . Think about it. Every piece of content - indeed, every service - on the internet is simply a complement to these companies' ad placement business (and the underlying search business). It's thus in their interest to drive the price of those complements down as far as possible, preferably to zero. Subscription pricing, and any other barrier to the free availability of online content and services, is anathema to them because it necessarily constrains the use of the internet. I am not criticizing these companies. I am simply p...

This is a test post to see how Mozzilla.org's new blogging extention for Firefox performs. It's called Performancing and it allows for posting from within Firefox. It works on the Mac just fine, even if it has an interface that is reminiscent of MS Word for Windows. My first impression is that this is a very good idea. It seems to be integrated with Technorati , allowing you to quickly pull up information about the current website - likely the one you're blogging about. There is also a tab for del icio us (which I don't use). If I could change one thing about this program, it would be to make the editor appear as a tab. As it stands now, it's awkward to get the composer window out of the way so that you can refer back to the web page at hand. powered by performancing firefox

What sort of criteria do you use in forming a personal library of DVDs? Do you think a library like that is a waste of time, since you only need to see a movie once? Or do you think a personal copy of your favourites might be a fun thing on a rainy night? If you have children a library for them might make good sense as a way to reduce rental costs and keep them away from less savoury fare. DVDs might also be useful to you as training materials, for excersize of language training, perhaps. I don't fall into any of those categories, but I do think a few good choices are fun to have around the house. Here are some of the things I think about before making a purchase. First, since I think this is a very frivolous purchase, it has to be cheap. Usually that will mean previously viewed copies that sell for well under $20 Canadian. Around $10 is the sweet spot, if I can get it. Then, it has to be a movie that I think has a much better than average chance that I will sit down and watch it...

As you can see, I am trying to pull this blog together after some down time. I'm trying to post more regularly and made some changes to the template, to make it more reflective of what I'm reading currently. I am still having some technical problems, however, so your patience (and advice!) is appreciated. I'm still trying to settle on what to use for post composition. Using Pages was Ok, but somehow or other my links seemed to get lost on the way to the blogger servers. I'm now using Apple's Mail client, which is pretty good, but it seems to be struggling with formating. It seems to generate a lot of HTML code when text is posted, especially when I quote text from outside sources. To try and get around that, I've switched to forcing Mail to use "plain text" in the composer. That ought to help a lot. If you are seeing things like gigantic text or other really weird bits of formatting, do let me know. As far as I can see, republishing the post via bl...

Here's romp through three articles that take on the subject of human happiness - and why Liberal notions of what that is will make you miserable. First, this WAPO review looks at a new book on Benedict Spinoza . The book claims Spinoza as an important forerunner of the kind of Liberty that would be made famous by books like JS Mills' famous tome. Spinoza recognizes that he needs what he himself calls his "cumbersome, geometric order." People, he shows, are constantly being led astray by the randomness of their sensual experience, by their imaginations and passions. Only mathematics provides a model for conclusions that cannot be refuted, that are either right or wrong: "I will write about human beings as though I were concerned with lines and planes and solids." Surprisingly, the Ethics opens by establishing basic truths about God and nature. Everything that exists is part of the single substance of the deity, who, in fact, is identical with Nature, or ...

This Guardian article , by an English stand up comic on his work experiences in Germany, was unusual in that it managed to be funny and fascinating at the same time . Here is a snippet that begins with a joke: An English couple have a child. After the birth, medical tests reveal that the child is normal, apart from the fact that it is German. This, however, should not be a problem. There is nothing to worry about. As the child grows older, it dresses in lederhosen and has a pudding bowl haircut, but all its basic functions develop normally. It can walk, eat, sleep, read and so on, but for some reason the German child never speaks. The concerned parents take it to the doctor, who reassures them that as the German child is perfectly developed in all other areas, there is nothing to worry about and that he is sure the speech faculty will eventually blossom. Years pass. The German child enters its teens, and still it is not speaking, though in all other respects it is fully functional. ...

The always erudite Wretchard quotes Andrew Sullivan and then goes on to note something interesting . First, Sullivan: a follower of Opus Dei, Ruth Kelly, is now the Equality Minister in the Blair cabinet, bringing calls for removal from some gay groups. I think those groups are mistaken. Kelly has every right to her religious faith; and she has also publicly insisted that as a public servant, her first loyalty is to uphold the laws as they stand. That's exactly the right position; and exactly the right distinction between faith and politics. Writes Wretchard: One indicator of how much the early 21st century has come to resemble the era of religious wars is the revival in various guises of the concept of cuius regio, eius religio "a phrase in Latin that means 'whose rule, his religion'." The Free Dictionary notes that cuius regio eius religio forms the basis for state sponsored religions, and once granted that Political Correctness constitutes a religion in a...

Spengler comes through with a colunmn on the anniversary of Freud's birthday that's definitely worth mulling over: Having cured society of repression by making sexual pleasure a commodity, enlightened opinion is shocked, shocked to discover an epidemic of depression. In consequence some 70 million Americans have taken anti-depressants. Psychotropic drugs, I hasten to add, work miracles for many who suffer from imbalances of brain chemistry, and I mean no criticism of psychopharmacology in general. But the vast numbers involved suggest that a spiritual ailment is epidemic for which anti-depressants cannot be the solution. ... Human beings are not beasts content with daily fodder and rutting in season. To be sentient is to be sentient of one's mortality. The status of wife and mother in a family within a community offers women an honored position and a link to the eternal. Sexual objectification leaves women with a foretaste of death, and it should be no surprise that Fre...

The trouble with The DaVinci code is certainly this : the fundamentals of the Christian creed can be summarized in a few sentences easily learned by schoolchildren and recited aloud from memory by the whole congregation on Sunday. They are great mysteries to be sure - Trinity, incarnation, redemption, salvation, crucifixion, resurrection - but they are simple enough to explain. Contrast that with the account Mr. Brown offers of a centuries-long fraud, sustained by shadowy groups, imperial politics, ruthless brutality and latterly revealed by a secret code "hidden" in one of the world's most famous paintings. The Christian Gospel offers a coherent, comprehensible account of reality that invites the assent of faith. It requires a choice with consequences. Mr. Brown's dissent from Christianity offers a bewildering and incredible amalgam of falsehoods and implausibilities, painting a picture of a world in which the unenlightened are subject to the manipulations of the fe...

And Survivor stuff too! I'm sorry that posting to this site has become such a rare event. As I've written here before, the time available for blogging is not what it was. The primary culprit remains that I'm missing about two hours plus out of my day, every workday. What free time I've had has gone into playing with the Mac. David Pogue's Missing Manual is my primary reading material again. It makes more sense now that I'm more familiar with the Mac interface, and it contains a lot more information that Leo LaPorte's book . LaPorte was great for an introduction but left too many side-roads unexplored. I wanna see everything! I'm that kind of guy. I don't want to bore you with it , but... Today I realized that OS X's "services" include the ability to send e-mails composed in programs other than Mail. Programs like Pages , for example. Pages is Apple's word processor and it's very pleasant to use. It's better than Blogger...

These new ads are great. I especially like the one about iLife, since iTunes was what lead me to take a long, hard look at what the Mac has to offer these days. For the record, while I have had apps crash on me in the week plus that I've been working on this thing, OS X hasn't gone down once. It hasn't even slowed down, indicating that it's time for a re-boot.

It's been a busy week for me! Between longer work days and toying with the new Mac, the blog seems to have fallen out a bit. As mentioned, another problem has been losing the composition tool that I used to use (w.bloggar) on the PC. I realized some time in the middle of the week that I could use blogger's "publish by e-mail" feature, and, what's more, that I could send post in via G-mail. That means all my work could be done in one application. It also offers spell check and online backup of my posts. Very nice. Also, it was probably an obvious solution to many people long before I figured it out. Because I've been so busy, I've just now gotten around to trying it out. And since my wife is making diner and not DVDs at the moment, it's carpe diem time. But what to write? I spent yesterday afternoon going over the documentation related to my new work chores with the goal of finding variances between what I really do , and what I'm scheduled to d...

Making the move I've been going through some issues at work that I won't go into here - what's relevant is that my time is less than it was. I'm happy to be back blogging again, but it's a fact posting is going to be spotty going forward. That is, unless my muse doinks me about the head and sets my pants on fire. That's the less happy part of this post. The happy part is the buried lede that starts here. Rebecca and I caved into iCulture in a big way this weekend and bought an iMac. I'll confess to wanting one in the worst way since before Christmas. Heck, my curiosity goes back to the OS X rollout. Anyway, it's here, I'm sharing it with Rebecca, and it's beautiful as all get out. The screen is fabulous and the built in speakers are surprisingly good. It's amazingly less cluttered than a PC, and that's with a wired keyboard and mouse. We are only just beginning to understand what Bluetooth and Airport could do. I'm more than a l...

In an unrelated matter, this is to point out that Lileks is a funny guy : ... then I remembered he's more of a control freak (and there's another term I can't stand, mostly because of the "freak" part. I'd prefer situation administrator or perhaps orderliness enthusiast. "Freak" has sixties / seventies vibe. [As does "vibe," for that matter. Half the slang used by aging boomers was tired when it was used by some guy in a white jump suit and aviator-framed sunglasses, nodding his head to the Love Unlimited Orchestra as he made his way across the fern bar with a White Russian in one hand, fingering the coke spoon around his next with the other. I do not belong to that era. I do not belong to any era, except perhaps the era when all your friends' dads looked like Bill Cullen.] It was a term of approval: let your freak flag fly! Shock the man! Make Anita Bryant wet herself in fear and disgust! Why don't we do it in the road? Oh, I don...

David Warren adds his two fine bits to the topic of tradition and apocrypha here .

I'm continuing where I left off Saturday by placing questions and "new angles" about the Christian story along side Orthodoxy as I know it. These Davinci Code sort of questions are all the rage at the moment, and the fire is helped along by scholars like Bart Ehrman feeding the flames by pointing to supposed problems in the Bible itself. My favourite Gnostic is on it, and so is Scott Adams over at The Dilbert Blog : Just to give you a flavor of the magnitude of the problems, according to Ehrman, there are more changes (both intentional and unintentional) in the Bible than there are words in the New Testament. The estimates range from 200,000 to 400,000. Yesterday I read that half of the people who voted for President Bush believe that the popular King James version of the Bible is the literal word of God. How does one reconcile that belief with the fact that experts know the Bible is riddled with human additions and errors? Here are the only arguments I can think of:...

Wondering what Screwtape makes of The DaVinci Code? Wonder no more! My dear Wormwood, ... another extremely admirable facet of this book is the author's intimate knowledge of his audience's skyscraping ignorance, which he exploits to devastating effect. One must ever endeavor to capitalize upon ignorance, Wormwood. This is one of the chiefest weapons in our arsenal, and let me observe—and not without some glee—that the ignorance of contemporary Western Society in matters of history and theology both, is of an absolutely unprecedented greatness. Never before have so many known so little about so much of great importance. Ask your average fellow in the street the slightest detail of a daft sitcom of forty years ago and he will move heaven and earth to supply you with the answer, and then will likely prate on with other similarly inane details—as if knowing who lived at 1313 Mockingbird Lane was his very passport to the Elysian Fields. Ha! But ask him to tell you abou...

An Easter reflection for you: The Person which assumed human nature was not created, as is the case of all other persons. His Person was the pre-existent Word or Logos . His human nature on the other hand, was derived from the miraculous conception by Mary, in which the Divine forshadowing of the human spirit and the human Fiat or the consent of a woman, were most beautifully blended. This is the beginning of a new humanity out of the material of the fallen race. When the Word became flesh, it did not mean that any change took place in the Divine Word. The Word of God proceeding forth did not leave the Father's side. What happened was not so much the conversion of the Godhead into flesh, as the taking of manhood into God . There was continuity with the fallen race of man through the manhood taken from Mary; there is discontinuity through the fact that the Person of Christ is the pre-existent Logos . Christ thus literally becomes the second Adam, the man through whom the human rac...

Regular readers know (and irregular readers have probably guessed) that I am of central european extraction. I can claim physical ancestors from Austria and Germany, and spiritual ancestors from Italy and probably Hungary as well. The culture in this house is undeniably Germanic once you scratch the maple syrup. Deutsche Welle is carrying a nifty photo essay on Germany that I enjoyed a lot. Here's to us!

During this quiet time there has been no blog that I have enjoyed more than Gagdad Bob's One Cosmos. He has simply been on fire for the past month. Here is my collection of hits from his post today (with the addition of a cartoon link from the comments thread): Science, of course, proceeds on the basis that the cosmos is ultimately a closed system. While there may be local entities that temporarily escape that fact and become open systems--such as biological organisms--in the end, it is all nothing more than a brief and futile reprieve from the iron hand of entropy. From death you arose and to death you shall return. It's funny how science starts out with such admirably modest aims and methods, but soon makes such grandiose pronouncements. I yield to no one in my respect for science as science, but at the same time, when philosophically unschooled scientists start leaping to unwarranted metaphysical pronouncements, we should all be concerned. Through a sleight of language, s...