I was lucky enough to get my Wii from gamestop. The Holiday season is just around the corner and if you do not have your Will already, here is your chance. Oct 31st Amazon will release some Wiis at 1 P.M. EST. Get one while you can.

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Wait… what? Why do we need an alternative to Halloween? When did it become the Devil’s holiday? Why aren’t Satan’s follower’s up in arms about defamation of character?

USA Today has an interesting article about a play called Hell Houses. Apparently Evangelical churches are now performing lobotomies along with their services. Who in their right mind would want to be saved out of fear? Did we forget that fear and guilt are NOT from God? Where do churches get off trying to scare people into turning to God?

1 John 4:18

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

I do not see the point of a church using fear to evangelize. If evangelists differentiate themselves from the Catholic faith and concentration on spreading the message, which last time I checked was about love and not fear or guilt, then why are they trying to scare people straight?

2 Timothy 1:7

God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

Some people that claim to follow not just the bible but most importantly the new testament forget a fundamental thing, it is all about love. Accepting and embracing other is the real message that Jesus tried to spread. When did that change in to demonizing everything under the sun?

Halloween is actually a holiday that was originated by the Celts and it was just about the end of summer. Sure it has become commercialized just as much as Christmas has but that does not make it evil. If spreading the message involves injecting fear on people to convert them to the right path I feel that religion will fail.

Just like the shock created by a horror movie, it might get the adrenaline pumping, it might actually not let you sleep for a week, but eventually you are going to go back to normal and act on your own set of rules. True faith, true change and true belief come from our own personal relationship with whatever God we worship. Doing things are of fear works only as long as we are afraid.

Bill Henry is an ex big league baseball player, he lives in Texas with his wife and it is not dead. The A.P. ran a story about his death because someone in Florida with the same name had been impersonating the real guy for years. Everyone around him believed him to be the real player because he even looked like the guy on the baseball cards. The guy that passed was married to his third wife and had kept the lie up for years. It is a pretty interesting hoax to ride for that long but we cannot ask the guy anymore why he did it.

Growing up one of my friends came from what I considered a big family. There were 5 kids ranging from 25 to 15. I was friends with the 19 year old and eventually became friends with the younger kid in the family that was a girl. They seemed to have a pretty close family and had a pretty upper middle class life. I noticed that they withdrew from everyone for a while and another friend told me the story.

They had recently found out that the father had two families. The other family was also composed of 5 kids of similar ages to the one I knew. The father had been spending some days with one family and some other days with the other for basically their whole lives and they had no clue… or at least the kids I was friends with.

To this day my brain cannot fully process what this family had to go through. I am at times even feeling like the father actually did an amazing thing. He supported two families and for the most part appeared to make them both pretty happy.

I am not against polygamy, but I think keeping one family secret from the best thing to do. Was a half time parent better than an absent parent? It is hard for me to really judge this situation because I have no point of reference and my friend never talked about it openly. It was never something that I would bring up in conversation. I have no way of knowing why the guy did it, but a pretty good idea of why he kept it secret. What about the woman involved, what do they say to him after 5 kids?

I also know of another couple that is not married but the guy has gone outside of the relationship and had two kids with the same woman. Both woman are aware of his infidelity but continue to be with him. I am not sure what motivates a woman to forgive that behaviour, but I do know that if you let it happen once it will most likely happen again.

This past weekend my uncle had computer problems again, yes the one that was ripped off by the geek squad before. He knew I was in town just for a party and going back. He did not want to tell me that his computer was messed up again but I knew it after looking at his face. I said I would stop by and fix it. I only had a couple of hours to spare and was expecting the usual virus or spy ware to be slowing it down but when I got there it was a lot worse than that. His wife who is the primary user of the computer loves to download (caunta porqueria se encuentra). I had to say it in Spanish because it has more meaning, but it loosely translates to every little dirty thing that she can find on the net. From every disc cleaner to the almighty registry sweeper she had downloaded things I had never even seen before.

Looking at the situation I weighted my options. I could take the computer and clean it and have it back to them on my next trip. I could also talk my uncle into just buying one of the very well priced computers they have at all retailers now. For about 350 bucks he got himself double the performance and Windows Vista. My experiences with the OS have been less than satisfactory so I knew that setting it up would be a pain… but it would be about a couple of hours which I was willing to spend. Even though the original set up of it did not take too long, getting it functional was very painful with the constant “are you sure you want to do this, are you sure you want to do that?” However I had an overall good experience this time (last time I was troubleshooting a laptop for a friend that just would not do what it was supposed to, and it was partly vista’s fault).

Before I left my uncle said, go ahead and take the old box I have no use for it. We had dinner, talked and I totally forgot about the computer. We were about to take off, already in the car when my uncle came calling and said don’t forget to take the box. I went back in and got machine full of viruses and God knows what else.

I have always loved Linux since back in College. Even though my experience with it on my actual hands is limited and even though the web server my site runs on is also Unix based running Apache I have really never used the OS itself, I have always done things either via applications like Cpanel, PHPAdmin and a command prompt here and there but nothing really on the actual OS level. I’ve had a red hat 9 disc for years and a couple of machines that I had ready to put it on but I never pulled the trigger out of lack of time (read lazy).

Fabian Rodriguez is a Colombian Tech Blogger that lives in Montreal. Coincidently he and my wife are good friends but have not spoken in some years. Fabian and I know each other just via our blogs and I really did not know much about my wife’s friendship with him until her and I met IRL and she told me she had actually been to Fabian and his wife’s house and actually had a friendship outside of the internet world. She mentioned in passing that Fabian had installed ubuntu on her machine but she forgot the password and never used it.

My first thought when I got a hold of that box that is only about 3 years old and could use a whole new set of system files was to put a linux distro on it. Then after Fabian and my wife connected again via facebook ubuntu came back to mind and I downloaded the ISO.

You have to remember that I am a corporate programmer that works on client server applications and have always worked with windows based software except for a couple of minor projects. I can move around Linux and can actually compile an application from the command prompt but I have gotten windows fat and lazy. I can click around like no one else remembering where settings are even without having labels… (I had to troubleshoot both of my wife’s machines at one time or another and everything is in French… my French is like grammar school level and windows settings go right over my head… demarrer, demarrer).

I was mentally prepared to have to read up a manual bigger than the bible to learn how to do beautiful things with ubuntu, I seriously thought that to get it to display level I would have to install a million pluggins… but then I gave ubuntu a try…

OMG I’m L337!!! yes just like a noob getting the first head shot from skill and not luck my face lit up. The Live CD did its thing in minutes and I was on the net faster than plugging the network cable to the PC. Zero setup headache, Zero trouble… the computer that minutes ago was almost a windows brick was not running an OS that IMHO (and that of others) can rival vista in many ways. I cannot believe I waited this long to switch specially since I have not been hardcore gaming in the PC in a while (and I am sure I probably will be able to game in ubuntu too).

The beauty of it is that you do not have to install it if you don’t want to, or it can coexist with your current O.S. if you chose to. There is no reason not to give it a try. Download the ISO, put it on your disk tray and restart that windows machine… chances are you are going to just LOVE what you see and experience.

This article got some digg notice

Appetizer
Name a great website you would recommend to others.
Ubuntu story! Make the switch.

Soup
On a scale of 1-10 (with 10 as highest), how often do you dream at night?
I would give myself an 8, I think I dream every night and remember about 60% of the time even though lately I seem to remember more.

Salad
Did you have a pet as a child? If so, what kind and what was its name?
I had tons of pets, Mitsiu the spastic coker spaniel and Bengaly a little white finch.

Main Course
If you had the chance to star in a commercial, what would you choose to advertise?
I think the war in Africa, not enough people care.

Dessert
What is your favorite kind of hard candy?
Coffee Delight without a doubt

I’ve had enough with the immigration debate. The people of this country have started to forget details about how this country was built. I am sick of people thinking that Mexican people are the enemy when Bin Laden is still running around out there and we are about to go to war with Iran. Seriously, some people are more worried about supporting the minuteman to protect our borders than actually look at the truths right in front of them.

The first reason people bring up why immigration is a problem is assimilation. I am sorry to burst your bubble, but no immigrant group was assimilated in one generation. Go to an old German town in any state on this country and you will see that there is still a lot of Germany in them even today. Go to an Irish neighborhood in Pittsburgh or a true Italian neighborhood in Chicago… as any of the people from this generation if their grandparents speak fluent English. Second and third generation Hispanics are fluent not only in English but also in Spanish… why? because now it is not as shameful as it was back when the Irish and Italians immigrated to speak another language. Most of the people that I have talk to are ashamed that they lost so much of their culture, why do you want to squash the Hispanic culture then?

The economic problem outlined by “they are taking our jobs” is not the Mexicans’ fault, is American’s addiction to cheap products and services.

The drag on social services is not a nation wide issue and if there was a method to legalize people in a more organized fashion this would be about low income people and not just poor Mexican immigrants.

Should they come here legally? of course, but the current policy towards Mexicans entering this country is flawed at best and honestly just absurd. Start considering how many Mexican people help your life be more comfortable every day before you spew your venom and are actually glad that even KCK has a Mayor that stands behind a racist appointee. Oh and also… not all people of brown skin are Mexicans! and a Cuban restaurant does not serve chips and salsa… just thought I would educate some people on those two.

I would like to first clarify that I believe that men and women have equal right and opportunity. Mentally I find them both at the same level when it comes to capability for comprehension and learning. I however believe in certain differences that make one superior to the other in some situations. However, that is something many people are afraid to think and even more to say so.

I am so glad that I married a woman that knows a lot more than me in many subjects, she is way more talented than I am in science, and can even give me a run for my money in many others. Intelligence is defined in Webster’s dictionary as “the ability to learn or understand, or to deal with new or trying situations.” She is also a very intelligent woman, and does not feel like she is less than me when she takes care of me by cooking a meal or having my clothes ready. She has a way higher earning potential than I do with her Biology degree, and could be telling me that she does not need to do any of these housewife duties. But instead she is proud of being able to do them for me. She enjoys it and does not feel less; in fact she is very against the idea that a career woman is more successful in life than a housewife.

Having her by my side has enabled me to not be scared of being a man. I take charge in many situations and she does not mind. She lets me wear the pants in the house because she knows that every step I take is to make our lives better. In turn I value her opinion and will many times take her word on some subjects even over my own. We come to agreements using true compromise and deal with most things with laughter. She has no problem making me feel like a man, and I in return give her the respect every lady deserves.

Since women started joining the workforce the dynamics in a household began to change. Now man is expected to share chores that they were not only not trained to do but even made to look as demeaning or “women” jobs. While I think those tasks should never be looked at that way, like the whole “boys don’t cry” mantra many people grew up with those ideas. I believe that chores in a household where both people work, should be separated by a list where both people get to pick. like picking kids at school… and that last chore gets to be a compromise. I do not believe that all responsibilities should be divided along gender lines but more about what the couple like. I personally don’t mind laundry, vacuuming or cooking but hate picking up after myself and dusting. I don’t think performing tasks around the house makes me less of a man but it was something that society and the way I grew up told me differently.

Sexually it is also very frowned upon to be masculine. Man end up becoming pigs when they have to limit their talks about sex to a group of guys talking about the opposite sex like a piece of meat. Men do not discuss any issues besides politics with any seriousness because we are thought that you just don’t bring that kind of stuff up. Sex is as taboo of a subject as how long you take in the bathroom. I am not saying that I want to discuss details with my friends, but it would be nice if society allowed for open conversation. The couple of times that I had a friend bring up the subject of sex in his relationship was almost like we were doing something illegal even though he needed to vent. Many men deal with sexual rejection from their partners and vice-versa; the difference is that women can talk to their girlfriends about the issue but men are left to deal with the situation by turning to the wrong outlet for their sexual frustration. When masturbation becomes something you hide in shame but do to relieve tension it can truly affect your overall sexual life.

Something awful compiled a list of the 13 most awful fears and guess what number one was… men. While it is just funny satire it does come from some truth. When I was in an abusive relationship my biggest fear was that I was going to be the one accused of abuse. Society paints men as the enemy even if most of us are doing nothing more than trying to provide for our families. I personally feel OK being considered an alpha male even if an extreme feminist might look at me as macho and misogynist. I know it only comes from her own misandry.