Monday, October 31, 2005

Holiday or otherwise?

OK. I've had too many people ask me why I don't do Halloween. I look at it like this. I don't celebrate Cinco da Mayo, Hanukkah, Ramadan, the Queen's birthday, or anything like that. Why celebrate Halloween?

Most people don't know the origins of Halloween, so I'll try to enlighten you. Many people think of Halloween as just a harmless time when kids go out and beg for candy from the neighbors; and to tell the truth, I used to think the same thing. I started to understand the power that was available on Halloween around when I was in high school. I was starting to look into the occult at the time, and was digging around into things I really didn't understand. I figured that since I had ancestors who were accused of being witches, and there was some sort of "second sight" in my genetic make-up that I should try to take advantage of what I had. Well, I "out-grew" that stuff (actually, I scared myself out of it, but that's another story) and about 10 years later or so, we (my family and I) were living somewhere "out west", when we heard about kids "disappearing" around this time of year. I also heard about several groups involved in Satan worship in the area. With my understanding I put the two together (accurately or not) and decided that there was some sort of connection between the kids missing (and never reported found, BTW) and the Satan worship. I do know that there are groups out there that perform human sacrifice still. I know that this can be associated with Satan worship and that Samhain (the Celtic name for Halloween) is one of the 8 high (or low, depending on your point of view) days for Wicca and other anti-Christian religions. I can't find any good sites about Samhain, but you can check out www.samhain.com and see some of the stuff out there.

You can believe it or not. I won't be wearing a "Halloween Costume" or handing out candy any time soon.

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Idiots and Incompetents

OK. I guess I've figured out what my problem is. It's not people I don't like. It's idiots and incompetents.

How can you say you're a good driver if you don't have the situational awareness (SA) to know where the cars around you are? Most of the incompetent drivers around here have their brains six feet behind them on the highway. The have the SA of someone with ADHD.

The worst place for me I guess is the Wal-Mart parking lot. I don't care which Wal-Mart it is, but I always have problems with other drivers in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Incompetent drivers with no SA just driving around in the parking lot like it's empty. I know my car is small, but it's not INVISIBLE!!! But I guess because I have SA, I haven't gotten hit in the parking lot lately.

And don't get me started about I-95 between here and DC. And then there's the drivers in DC itself. Wow. How little SA can you really have!?!

Maybe it's a military thing. Maybe it's because I'm an INTP. Any suggestions?

On another point, today was the second Sunday we used OpenSong at church to show the words to the songs during services. Nothing but good comments! Actually, some of the folks almost raved about it. Great software. Can't wait until version 1.0 comes out. :)

BTW, Erin, I didn't think it was possible for me to get any cooler. :)

Saturday, October 29, 2005

First Post!

Well, here goes. Just to let you know, this is just going to be a stream-of-consciousness / rant blog, so, you've been warned.

It's a nice, quiet Saturday morning. The perfect time to start something new, like this. Sitting in the living room, watching all the home improvement stuff on TV while using my tablet PC in laptop mode to edit this junk.

When I was thinking about this yesterday, I was thinking about all the stuff I could post, ranting about traffic, the general decline of civility in the world, and lot's of other stuff. But I guess I've calmed down since then. Maybe by Monday I'll have more on some of that.

I saw a cool show for the first time last night. A friend introduced me to "Survivorman" on the Science channel (I don't get the Science channel but Comcast could fix that for me :)). Check out the website at http://www.survivorman.ca/. Funny, informative, and cool.

I guess that's all for now, but I'll think of something soon and update this again. I want to make this a daily thing, but who knows, it may be more or less.