my examined life

Yesterday, I read an op-ed piece on the Washington Post by Kathleen Parker. In it, she talked about Jessica Corry “of Colorado, a married, pro-life Republican mom, soon to be “freedom fighter of the month” in High Times magazine,” and while Jessica doesn’t smoke pot, one of the main reasons why she’s fighting for its legalization is “protecting her children should they decide to try marijuana someday.”

That last line struck me as funny since it conjures up images of parents running around trying to repeal drunk driving laws, or texting while driving laws, etc. I mean after all, those parents are just trying to protect their children should their sweet little angels to do something illegal just like Mrs. Corry of Colorado.

While most people would argue that she is well within her rights to fight a blatantly unjust law because driving drunk actually kills people and smoking a little pot never hurt anyone, the point I’m trying to make is that teaching your children the difference between inalienable rights and self-perceived rights is a much better place to start for lasting change in our society.

I don’t know about you, but in the past few years I have read a number of articles in which scientific studies are showing that more and more of how we behave is based upon our genes. This interesting article talks about how genes may play a roll in the age at which we loose our virginity.

Personally, I like to believe that I’m in control of my decisions and not my DNA, but if you wish to remove one’s responsibility from one’s actions it sure is nice to have science back you up. Being LDS, I have to say most Mormons must have slower genes as most of us are pretty old, compared to the rest of the world, when we first have sex. Though, I’m sure this has more to do with our upbringing and/or religion than our genes.

I’ve been using OpenDNS for almost two years now, and I’m a big fan of their service. Their DNS look-ups are quick which can make web surfing noticeably faster, but what really sold me was the free content filtering. I used to run my own proxy server using DansGuardian for web filtering, and while DansGuardian is a awesome web filter I decided that I didn’t want the noise, power consumption, and maintenance of an additional computer in my house, and OpenDNS fills that void nicely.

Their content filtering is top notch, and customizable with over 50 filter categories and whitelist/blacklist capabilities. They offer typo correction for the most common sites, which means that if you type www.google.cmo in your brower’s url bar you’ll end up at www.google.com which can be handy for those fat finger days. For other mistyped URLs they send you to their OpenDNS Guide which is a google-like search results page to help find the correct site, coincidentally the ads displayed on the OpenDNS Guide pages are how they pay for the service. You can also add images and custom messages to the blocked pages to personalize, and maybe have a little fun with those boring blocked pages. But, best of all the service is free which you can’t beat in today’s economic climate.

If any of this sounds remotly interesting, take a look at their use OpenDNS page to get started, you won’t be disappointed.

There are some days where I wish I could be this guy. I’m going to have to plan a little hiking trip in the near future.

Click here

If I had the money, this would be the next PC that I build:

• Motherboard: Intel D945GCLF
• Hard drive: Seagate Momentus 7200.2 120GB 7200RPM
• Case: Morex 3688s
• RAM: 2GB 667MHz DDR2 Non-ECC CL5 DIMM

I can get all of this for around $300, but having just bought a house money is kind of tight right now. That and I just spent $100 for a new motherboard a few months ago. I suppose I’ll just have to wait till Christmas.

Some will get the title. I read that site way too much.