Mc-Kenna.com

Left my laptop at a friend’s house … doh!

One of the net’s best sites for technical analysis on topics they cover, ArsTechnica, has chimed in on the hijinx in Florida’s schools over evolution (as mentioned here previously), specifically their lack of evolution from creatures incapable of abstract thought ;-) The Ars author mentions, as I did, the apparent lack of education in those making the decisions as they don’t seem to comprehend the concept of a “theory” and instead consider the several-thousand-year-old guesses from the christian bible to be more scientifically accurate than what has been thoroughly researched over the past few hundred years. Then again, the bible’s stories may have been based on hundred’s of years of research, but as the Library of Alexandria was destroyed/disappeared we’ll most likely never know.

Asthma attacks suck.

The best new TV show of the 2007/8 season, Chuck, will be back for two more episodes in late January. While the show was given the go-ahead to make the remaining episodes to fill out the full 22-episode season, due to the writers strike its actual future is unknown. Interestingly the last aired episode, “Chuck vs The Crown Vic”, felt like it could have been left as the end of the series due to how it returned the show to the status-quo from earlier in the series, but I’m definitely glad to see more coming. Yay!

After a week of chaos from our recent flooding, and sleeping at either a hotel or in-laws (thank you!!) we’re finally home again. And now that we’re home there’s a mountain of work ahead of us to get our house back to normal. Everything from our kitchen is in boxes, shortly to be joined by everything from our bookcases, which all got damaged. We’re also going to be going through everything with an eye to getting rid of a good chunk of our possessions that we just don’t either need or use anymore, which should greatly lighten our load. We’ve submitted some initial details to our insurance company and hope to hear in a few days when we’ll get funded to replace our beds as it kinda sucks sleeping on a mattress pad on cold, hard terrazzo. Anyway, hope your year is going better than ours.

Twelve counties in Florida, covering probably hundreds of schools, have decreed that they will no longer allow the theory of evolution to be taught in their schools. Idiots. Yet another example of why our children will never step foot in a public school here, or probably any other outside of college level. So just because a few people are too stupid to recognize patterns in biological taxonomy, hundreds of thousands of children will be denied access to current theories. Sheer idiocy.

When you awaken out of bed at 12:30am to discover that your feet are wet when hitting the ground - panic. That’s what I discovered last night, after having only gone to bed at 11:30pm. The water leaked from the kitchen through the entire house and onto the back porch / Florida room leaving around half an inch of water everywhere. Thankfully two inlaws came over to help so by 4:30am it was almost all dried up. Many things have been damaged, including all of our beds, some furniture and electronics, but our two main computers were luckily off the ground, including my laptop which I’d left sitting on a couch. Luckily we’d just taken out the Christmas tree, otherwise the problem could have been very much worse as it had cables and connectors dangling on the ground. I’ve got a claim in with the insurance company, now I just need to get a list made up of everything that was damaged. Argh.

@rdempsey: congrats to you all! And welcome Palamee :)