So Minnesotans talk normally, eh?

What American accent do you have? Your Result: North Central   "North Central" is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw "Fargo" you probably didn't think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot.
The West
The Midland
Boston
The Inland North
The South
Philadelphia
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Were I an American…

I may not be an American, but it's still fun taking these who-do-you-match quizzes—probably due to the whole “mouse beside the elephant” syndrome we Canadians have WRT the USA. I've never heard of Kucinich or Gravel, but I'm not surprised that Obama is the the number three match for me. Nor am I surprised at the sharp difference between how I matched to the Democrats (all above 67%) and the Republicans (all below 37%).

89% Dennis Kucinich
88% Mike Gravel
72% Barack Obama
71% Chris Dodd
70% John Edwards
68% Bill Richardson
67% Joe Biden
67% Hillary Clinton
37% Rudy Giuliani
35% Ron Paul
27% John McCain
23% Mike Huckabee
19% Mitt Romney
12% Fred Thompson
9% Tom Tancredo

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz

	I received 56 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Take the Sci-Fi Movie Quizdigital camera ratings

Props to densaer.

What is so diffiult about critical thinking?

Recently somebody left the following spam on my Facebook FunWall.

Attention all Facebook membeRs.
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you're active please send
to other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send
this message to all your friends and make sure you send
this message to show me that your active and not deleted.

Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg

How can people fall for such crap? Whatever happened to the skill of critical thinking? This particular hoax, “Overload of Malarkey” has been up on Snopes for ages — the old “Please forward this message to as many people as possible or your Hotmail account will be deleted” hoax, only this time retooled for Facebook. This basic hoax has been around since at least 1999 and he Facebook version since December 2006.

I mean, I know most people have little or no understanding as to how computers and the Internet actually work, but are people really that gullible as to think that the founder of such a booming company as Facebook would actually send out a message with such atrocious grammar? Think, people. Think!

School and Skull Fractures

Back in June I started upgrading my computer cetifications at triOS College in downtown Kitchener. A+, MCSE and the like.

One thing I wish I had done was keep track of stupid questions my classmates have asked — they would have made great blog-material. At the very least, blogging it all would have made banging my head on the desk every day worth something.

The current course is 70-298, "Designing and Implementing Security for a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network" and by now all people in my class have take at least one of the A+ courses a well as, Network+, 70-270 (Windows XP) and five other Windows Server 2003 courses. But today, as we were going over the mini-project from yesterday setting up IPSEC policies and filters (firewall stuff, deciding what gets through, what is encrypted, what is clear, etc...). Of the various settings we had to do in the filters was make sure that Windows File Sharing traffic was encrypted and FTP traffic was blocked.

As the instructor was going through creating the filters, one of my classmates asked “What is the difference between FTP and File Sharing? Aren't they the same thing?” After six months, you'd think that he'd know the difference by now.

NerdTests.com

Letter to the Editor

The Record has printed another one of my letters to the editor. First, here is the other person's letter to which mine is a response.

The teaching of atheism

October 02, 2007

Despite Premier Dalton McGuinty claiming "evolution is a science," (Record, Sept. 7) he cannot demonstrate a single repeatable fact of evolution.

If evolution is true, it does not need a god to guide it. Evolution stands on its own as the cornerstone of atheism. And so our public schools cannot be neutral on the issue. If they teach evolution, by default, they teach atheism. God is a myth.

No wonder there is an outcry. Intelligent design needs to be taught to balance the scales. We may argue over God's name, nature and plan, but to make the teaching of creation unlawful establishes atheism as the state religion, represses freedom of speech, stifles intellectual thought and oppresses all other religions.

Yet McGuinty is against faith-based schools and calls evolution a science.

Dan Kraemer

And here follows my reply.

The evidence is there

October 10, 2007

In his Oct. 2 letter, The Teaching Of Atheism, Dan Kraemer shows he does not know very much about evolution.

First off, Kraemer is utterly wrong about there being no demonstrable facts of evolution. Indeed, transitional fossils such as archaeopteryx immediately spring to mind, and the London Underground mosquito is one of many observed examples of speciation. There are many more examples for those who would but look.

Second, evolution is not a cornerstone of atheism and it is dishonest to try and portray the two as equivalent. Many Christians, including myself, accept the theory of evolution as the best explanation which draws the facts together into a coherent, operating whole.

Third, intelligent design is anything but scientific theory. Leading ID proponent Dr. Michael Behe has conceded that "there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred." He also agreed that that definition of "theory" as he applied it to ID was so loose that astrology would also qualify.

Would Kraemer say teaching how two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom make up one water molecule is atheism? Chemistry never mentions God, either.

Cory Albrecht

Unfortunately, for The Record letters to the editor need to be under 250 words to stand a decent chance of actually being chosen for publication. There were so many other pieces of evidence I wanted to give. In my initial draft, each of the three sections were about twice the size, if not more.

The first section, to counter Kraemer's claim of no repeatable facts of evolution, had multiple examples of both transitional fossil sequences and observed events of speciation. In addition to Archaeopteryx, I had listed the well proto-horse fossils from Hyracotherium through Mesohippus and Merychippus and so on that lead up to modern day Equus, as well as those fossils in our own lineage — Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Homo habilis and so on. To go along with the London Underground moiquito I had also mentioned Hugo de Vries's discovery of a polyploid variant of the evening primrose which he found in his test subjects and that would not breed back to the diploid parent stock and the multiple instances of Drosophila speciation in laboratory settings. I had hoped to give an indication of just how much supporting evidence there is for the theory of evolution without having to get into complex subjects such as molecular biology and genomics.

In the third section I had originally mentioned the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District and how in that court case Intelligent Design had utterly failed to show that it was a science and how organizations like the Discovery Institute use dishonest tactics like creating a strawman of evolution to tear down or even out and out lies about evolution. Alas, I had to settle for a few choice quotes from Dr. Michael Behe.