Celtic Odyssey

'Religion is a human effort toward transformation that will make us acceptable to God, make us godlike ourselves, or negate our personhood so we can become one with cosmic forces. Dr March asks, "Why should there not be a diversity of religions?" The reason is that religion is about human striving to achieve and create purpose apart from the grace of God through Jesus Christ. The distinctive nature of Christianity is that grace comes through Christ alone, even despite our best efforts to make it otherwise. God doesn't want any religions! God wants a wide, wide diversity of people with varieties of languages and cultures all accepting grace, to be free from striving, and living in relationship with God. How will they know saving grace if they are not told of Jesus? Grace isn't just meant for the afterlife. It is meant for the here and now so that we may see the presence of God's justice and mercy "on earth, just as it is in heaven." ' -- M...

At my office, we have several 'new' systems that have been donated to us recently -- four laptops and six desktops. These systems were given to us 'as is' and without OS or applications. So, this was a great time to install PCLOS. After the initial install, I showed them to my supervisor. 'Wow', was her response. She was blown away at how smooth everything looked and how smooth everything worked. I took one of the laptops (a Compaq Evo N800c) into another room and attached an LCD projector to it. I booted up the laptop and the image appeared on the wall. PCLOS mirrored the image without any changes from me (This is very much like it works with Mac, btw.). Also, these laptops come with an Ati Radeon M video card with a native resolution of 1400 x 1050. PCLOS not only identified this card correctly, it even used the native resolution -- even while running from the LiveCD! Amazing. In Windows, I have to download the latest drivers from Ati; install them;...

I recently saw the keynote speech Steve Jobs gave (you can see it here ). All I can say is '...wow...' There are some very cool features coming out in Leopard but the one that blew me away (and from the sound of the crowd, a lot of other people as well) is something called 'Time Machine'. Time Machine is a backup utility built right into the OS. It backs up everything on your Mac -- photos, music, docs, and the entire OS -- automatically. Then, the cool part, is that if you need something that you 'know was in my Documents folder yesterday' (my family is notorious for saying things like this), you click on the Time Machine icon from the Dock and you are transported into outer-space with a series of Finder windows cascading back to 'the beginning'. There is a time line on the right-hand side of the screen where you can just select the day you want to go to, or you can just click on one of the arrows to go back to when the contents changed -- this co...