I understand that this is, for many, a large and complex issue that deserves real thought and consideration. I welcome the debate in the Senate, and trust that this august body will realize that a "marriage amendment" is not in keeping with the spirit and text of the Constitution of the United States—the most powerful secular document ever conceived. I acknowledge that there are instances where the federal government must act to protect the public safety and in doing so, moral questions do at times come up. Nevertheless, I cannot see that the banning of "gay marriages" is a matter for federal jurisdiction or concern; I cannot see that it is a matter of such overwhelming importance to the continued functioning of our society that it should be enshrined in our Constitution.

It has been several months since an InterfaithNews.Net update has been sent out, for which we apologize; your intrepid editor is preparing to move to St. Paul, Minnesota (USA) next month.

As many in the audience already know, Barcelona, Spain will play host to the 2004 Parliament of the World's Religions beginning today (June 7). Please send in your comments afterwards—essays, reviews, critiques, and praise—and we will work to compile them for the benefit of those of us who cannot attend this year's festivities.

As the last update was written in April, the site now contains news from My, June, and this first week of July, as well as three new polls about the site's functioning. So please stop by, enjoy, and vote.

The Cure is the name of The Cure's latest international mega-release. Debuting today and breaking all records (surely some record, maybe best opening day for a 25+ year old alternative college band from southern England?). Well, I suppose that all remains to be seen. Anyway, I am now happily in possession of this newest album from my favorite band in the whole wide world.

And it is good.

So why the blog all the sudden? After hinting at it for years, I've finally decided to take the plunge. Rather than bore you with drawn out prose extolling the virtues of blogging and all that...

Perhaps tomorrow or another day soon I shall extol with melodrama on the virtues of blogging and my sudden embrace of the medium. But not this day. This day I shall speak of loss and of hope.

I am by nature a Stoic. Thus it is not often that I shed a few tears twice in 24 hours.

I've been enjoying the use of OpenSSH in Windows lately but ran into a small problem today: "fork: Permission denied".

I find that Red Hat Linux (dead link removed; SF 2025) is fairly secure by default, but could use a bit of tweaking. This is the first of a series of notes on optimizing and improving security in Linux. Some items may be specific to Red Hat, but most of these notes will be applicable to all systems. In part 1, we look at runlevel services.

Okay, so this is a slight tangent from my intentions with this site, but I must share the following quote from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, neatly summarizing (with only slight exaggeration to reality) my experience as a graduate student in physics.

I finally got DSL again a few months ago, after 2 years of dial-up. Worked like a charm on my iBook, but not so on the Linux box. Actually, it wasn't so bad at first, but the DNS lookups were taking forever. Then it started dropping carrier. Often. To the point where, after a few minutes of using the computer, it was dropping every few seconds. Here's how I fixed it.