i am on a quest for content. i am climbing the everest of internet pages and peering into the cracks and crevices, seeking for those rare golden nuggets of well-written personal narratives, essays, and journal entries. if you know of any sites that publish quality content on a regular basis, please let me know, or [...]

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i was too brain-dead last night to mention this, but my site is now totally database-powered! the creation of every post before last night’s involved cutting and pasting, manually typing in date/time combinations in several different locations, editing of archive files, not to mention the painstaking task of authoring thought-provoking content. now my little asp [...]

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it is 2am and my brain is numb and my thoughts are murky. the best time to make foolish vows are when the mind is suffering from lack of sleep or under the influence of alcohol. i make mine now: i vow to lose 12 pounds by the end of the holiday season. i vow [...]

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i ride my bike to work along a river path. for those of you from out of state, country, or from northern california, rivers here in urban socal are usually large concrete ditches with a mossy trickle occasionally parting around a shopping cart and debris island. in my river, however, dirt has covered up a [...]

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god! will it never end? i was working on the post below and saw on yahoo this headline: suicide bomber kills at least 13 at jerusalem restaurant. a bunch of ordinary people enjoying a lunchtime meal at a sbarro’s–5 or 6 of the dead are children. some israelis wearing t-shirts that read, ‘no arabs – [...]

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i spent some time visiting some other blogs this morning. when i returned to mindonfire my first thought was, “whoa! my posts are so long! who’s going to take the time to read all these egotistical mind dumps? i thought a bit about making my posts shorter, more focused on personal events and sites that [...]

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i invited a couple of missionaries from mongolia over for dinner monday night. they are waiting for their visas to japan, and speak no english, a little japanese, and, of course, a lot of mongolian. i was a little worried, because i heard that mongolians have a hard time adjusting to non-mongolian food. i did [...]

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i wrote this piece a few months ago, after my first visit to the museum of tolerance in los angeles: i finally had the chance to go to the simon wiesenthal museum of tolerance today. i was surprised that it didnít have the impact on me that visiting the atomic bomb museum in nagasaki, watching [...]

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my winamp player is playing the louis armstrong and ella fitzgerald song, “they can’t take that from me”. satchmo’s voice is magical–he’s like a 20th century orpheus, wielding his vocal chords like a second trumpet. i drop everything to listen. i am transported away the worries and cares of this world, for a moment. contrast [...]

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woohoo! i got the job! i got the job! i have escaped the greedy clutches of corporate america! i’m back in the university environment, this time providing database support to a variety of programs, including the one that sends students to study in ghana, the one that helps all the kids struggling in their o-chem [...]

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