I took down the Image Verification (Captcha) in response to accumulated frustration expressed by users. I can’t get the Captcha and Preview functions to play nicely together. We’ll try this out and hopefully I won’t get spammed to death (a bad way to go).

Update: I installed a patched version of the Captcha module. It’s annoying that you have to verify twice (if you choose to preview your comment), but with the Math verification it shouldn’t be too painful.

Please let me know how commenting goes, via email (my gmail account name is “fierymind”) if your comments can’t go through.

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013: At Harvard., originally uploaded by mind on fire.

My first visit to Harvard was the low point of my vacation. Jana suggested that we go there towards the end of our last day together in Boston (before she left for her retreat in New Hampshire). When we got there, I found myself depressed and cranky. Jana went into troubleshooting mode.

“I thought you’d be really excited to be in Harvard,” she said.

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As previously discussed (although I can’t find it or I’d link to it, or just simply comment in it), I’m in mid-switch to Ubuntu Linux. Lady Murasaki is up and running. I decided it was an appropriate name given what (little) I know about her & since it means purple. Lady Murasaki is small & dainty…and purple. So thank you for the suggestions.

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I enjoyed a bona fide Friday afternoon tea in Boston today. It wasn’t my top choice, but I ducked into one of Tealuxe’s three shops about a block away from that most sacred of edifices, the Boston Public Library. There I gulped down a small pot of Taiwanese Oolong:

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This week’s challenge is to dream. Technically, every time a human sleeps (at night, I don’t think naps count for this), that human dreams. Dreaming is one of our brain’s mechanisms to relax and rejuvenate. So while you’re asleep, your brain is still firing. These firings are what we call “dreams”. Whether or not you remember your dreams when you wake is another matter, but everyone has dreams.

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Jana and I arrived in Boston a few hours ago. I have a week off, and in addition to discovering Boston and our online friends here, I plan to get some writing and reading and contemplating done. If you’re a fan of MoF and are in the area, drop me a line!

For now, I’m exhausted from a day of travel, and am going to leave you with a few photos (they don’t do the locale any justice, but they’ll have to do for now):

We’re celebrating 15 years of wedded bliss, and half of our lives as partners:

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a Brief Overview

Any real tea that you will encounter, though it may seem different from all its siblings, is from the same tree: Camillia sinensis. The most common kind of tea in the US is black tea, although that may be changing, so I’ll start with that.

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My answer is no. Absolutely not. Religions are not equal.

This question is often implicit when we talk about religion, and we encounter a variety of responses, depending the situation. Proselytizing missionaries, by definition, answer this with a great big “NO.” Advocates for religious tolerance often affirm the equality of all religions. When they are their most polemical selves, dogmatic anti-religionists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens would say that all such superstitious systems are equally bad. On a personal note, when we left Mormonism for Quakerism, several of our friends implied equivalence when they suggested that we were merely swapping one system for another.

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Site Update, Technical Details (and Recommendations to Readers):

September 5th, 2007 · by John · No Comments

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