I started out wanting to make a low-carb sugar-free version of an accidential oatmeal coconut bar concoction I came up with earlier in the day at a church cookie bake-off for soldiers in Iraq. Those oatmeal coconut bars were supposed to be cookies, but melted down into a gooey mess that got scraped into a pan, and turned out to be a rather tasty, gooey, bar cookie.

But these ain't those.

My original intention was to use barley flour, but instead could only get oat flour. So, this recipie is one of those 'wheat free' things that should be pretty good for folks who are sensitive to wheat. Of course, I can't assure anybody that there isn't a bit of wheat in the processed ingredients, so if you have food sensitivities, look at the ingredients first.

• 2 sticks (equals 1 cup) butter, softened to room temp.
  
• 1 cup granulated Splenda
• 1 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
• 1/4 cup black strap molasses (or 1/3 cup if you want more)
• 2 cups rolled oats
• 1 cup oat flour

The granulated Splenda is the stuff that is meant to be cup-for-cup measurable to sugar. It is not the "baking Splenda" stuff that is half sugar, half Splenda. You could use either, but I went with the "sugar free" version.

The coconut flakes I had were pretty huge flakes, I cut them down to be as fine as I wanted them to be. You do the same, chop that cup of coconut flakes down to be the consistency you want. I supppose if you want to do the same with the oatmeal, go for it, but that's a bit too uptight for me.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees f.

Cream the butter and Splenda in a mixing bowl. Don't do like I did and toss in all the Splenda at once, it'll just make a dusty cloud on you. Pour it in slowly as the butter is being whipped.

You can pretty much just start adding stuff in to the mixer. Be careful with the molasses, you don't wan't that stuff flying all over the room.

Get a typical 9x13 baking pan out. Something near that size will do. Grease the pan, use cooking spray, or whatever you do to lube a pan so the stuff doesn't stick. If you wat to believe your "no stick" pan won't stick, well, you go for it. Put the mixed up ingredients into the pan.

Bake for 25 minutes, or when it smell real good and you want to take it out.

Take the pan out of the oven and let it cool. But then, that's pretty obvious, ain't it?

I thought the stuff would cut apart like any other bar recipe, but it's going to have the consistency of, oh I don't know, damp sawdust. Bits of it will be clumped together, and the overall appearance will be like a granola.

I've eaten the stuff dry, and with milk as a cereal. It's great. It would also make a really great pie crust, or a bottom for some other pie or bar cookie recipe. I would like to figure out how to make this stuff into a bar cookie; I suspect taking that 1/4 cup of molassess and going up to a full cup would do the trick.

Oh, here is the nutritional low-down:

	carbs (g)	fiber (g)	calories	fat (g)
1 cup butter	0	0	1628	184
1 cup granular Splenda	0	0	0	0
1 cup unsweetened coconut	56	40	1488	128
1/4 cup black strap molasses	50	0	193	0
2 cups oats	206	17	1214	11
1 cup oat flour	152	16	912	0
TOTAL	464	73	5435	323

As you can see, this recipe is neither low-fat nor low-carb. You can subtract the fiber from the carbs to get your 'true' carbs, if you wish, but then that's a disputed item. There are enough calories in here so that you could probably burn the stuff as fuel in your fireplace. Maybe the recipe could be modded a bit more to make it even more low-carb, I'll try with the barley flour later on.

I'm finding browsing the www.usps.com site quite entertaining! Specficially, the international mail restrictions are quite a hoot.

• Israel - No used beehives.
• Italy - No clocks or clock supplies. No live bees. (Did they talk to the Israelis about the bee thing?)
• Kenya - Articles bearing Boy Scout or Girl Scout insignia must have authorization of the Kenya Boy Scout or Girl Guide Commissioner.
• North Korea - All merchandise is prohibited. Mail should be addressed to Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
• South Korea - No salt. (Why not? Korean food seems salty enough to me)
• Libya - No tea, salt, or tobacco.
• Madagascar - No Saccharine (I agree, that stuff is nasty tasting anyhow). Tobacco sauce (Praiss). (time to google 'praiss' up!)
• Mali - Weights and measures not of the metric system.
• New Caledonia - Weights and measures not of the decimal system. (you think they got a feud with Mali?)
• Nicaragua - No Communist material or literature. (insert joke about Democrats or Michael Moore here)
• Nigeria - No coins; banknotes; currency notes, except from a bank; and addressed to a bank in Nigeria. (well, that's good. I was worried about not getting my 10% of that $30M sent to me from the Imperial Ministry of Petroleum Nigerian Directorate as promised via e-mail. Looks like I just have to send my bank account info to a Nigerian bank and all is well)
• St. Lucia - No shaving brushes made in Japan. (pfff. Japan? Howsabout China! I doubt the Chinese have long since dominated the world shaving brush market anyway.)

That's enough for now. You can go dig around for more oddball mail restrictions on your own.

With the new postal rate change (for time travelers, this is January 2005 and First Class mail is now, what, 39 cents an ounce), I had to calculate the price of sending a 3-ounce envelope to California. On the www.usps.gov website, there is a mail rate calculator, and they include one of those "pick a nation" lists. For laughs, I picked Iran.

Now I don't know if it's the U.S. Postal Servace, or maybe the good ol' Iranian Postal Service, but you tell me if this price makes any sense:

Rate charts and complete information for Iran
	Mailing Services   (Show Dimensions) Estimated  Delivery Time*  Price     Airmail Letter Post     4 - 7 Days $2.40      Economy (Surface) Letter Post               (Rate for pieces 16 ounces or less) 4 - 6 Weeks $6.00    *Designed to be delivered in the number of business days specified for each service depending on origin and destination.

Hmm, let me see... Airmail takes a week and is $2.40. Economy mail takes up to 6 weeks and is $6.00. I'm trying to save some money here, and after all it does say "Economy"...

How did I do it? I followed the excellent directions I found in this Ars Technica article. I had two rather old PS2 units, both would throw irritating "Disk Not Found" errors with certain games or DVDs. One of the decks was chronically gagging on this problem, rendering it nearly unusable. The other would cough up on specific titles; making loud clunking sounds while trying in vain to read the disc.

Anyhow, if you do read the article above, the article mentions the PS2 having 10 screws on the bottom. My early model PS2s only have eight screws to remove.

With both of my PS2s, it was not enough to simply clean the deck out, I had to manually adjust the lens height.  This proved a simple procedure, and yielded me two PS2s that now play as they did in days gone by.

Mind you, I'm not telling you to follow the instructions, I'm just stating what worked for me.

I'm watching "The 750 lb man" on TV. I saw it before, along with another show about a similarly large woman. Now and then you hear a story about some massively obese person who hasn't left their bed in years. Without any intent of being cruel, I cannot help but think that these folks are not able to gt out of bed, so how do they stay so huge? Clearly, somebody is enabling their road to ruin.

• big person: "Bring me a dozen Krispy Kremes!"
• loved one: "Don't you think that's a bit much?"
• big person: "Hey, don't you be judging me! I don't need you tellin' me how to live! Just you go on out and get me those Krispy Kremes! And bring back some Diet Coke, too!"
• loved one: "Hey, I'm only trying to help you, I love you."
• big person: "Well, just get me those Kremes, will ya?"

I'm certain there must be exchanges like this all the time. It just sounds so hard to believe, but obviously it happens regularly. After all, if the big person is bedbound, the other person is doing a lot more than bringing food. Enabling person needs some counseling, too; I'd suspect. Come to think of it, I suspect the symbiotic relationship between the big person and the loved one is similar to that of an alcoholic and an enabling loved one.

A million wrong decisions, made in sequence. "Should I stop now, or have one more?"

I'm certainly not mocking these unfortunate folks, I've made a boatload of wrong choices in life.

1 Timothy 5:24 "Some men's sins are clearly evident, preceding them to judgment, but those of some men follow later."

If you have read my previous rant about attempting to buy a laptop from CompUSA, you know I don't like CompUSA. The last time I tried to buy a laptop from those folks, I walked out in disgust, vowing not to return for a loooong time. And that time finally arrived. My loving wife said I could get a laptop for Christmas, so I watched the el-cheapo laptop deals go by. Of course, I did drive out and try to get them, but it seemed like everybody sold out of those dirt-cheap laptops the moment the stores opened, or at least it felt that way.

Starting 2006 with a bang, CompUSA advertised a $499 Compaq Presario M2000; well, it was $699 plus a $200 instant discount, yielding an honest $499 cha-ching at the register. Amazingly enough, the deal had nothing to do with a forced AOL subscription, either!

If anybody at CompUSA reads this, mark my words: The lack of the forced AOL subscription clinched the deal. That motivated me to pursue the purchase.

Anyhow, their new year deal was one of those "Doors open at 11 AM! Suplies are limited to stock on hand!" things. I rolled in at about 4:30 pm, totally expecting that the store had two of the laptops, and they both sold out by 11:01 am. Imagine my surprise when they still had them in stock! Maybe everybody else gorged themselves on previous Christmas deals. Anyhow, I heard the obligatory speech on why I should buy the extended warranty, and replied with why I would not buy it; the laptop is, imho, disposable. In two years, I'll buy a better one for half the price. Of course, they looked at me like somebody jumping out of a plane without a parachute, but hey, at least they didn't irritate me right out of the store like last time. They did tell me that this particular promotion leaves me with no warranty to speak of, but I didn't sweat that, due to what is known as the implied warranty of merchantability. They have to sell me a working laptop. After that, I'll take my chances.

So I managed to pry the laptop out of the ol' Den O' Thieves without too much grief.

Imagine my surprise when I actually lit the thing up, to find out it was a pretty good deal indeed!

First off, assume any laptop with 256mb RAM is hopeless. This is truly the case. After it booted up, a look at the Task Manager revealed that a Physical RAM vs. Commit Charge comparison left about enough RAM to launch Notepad. I placed an order for another 256mb of RAM later on in the evening, from memorysuppliers.com.

I spent the first few hours carving off all extra junk I didn't want. The Desktop was loaded up with trial AOL blah blah, along with other unwanted disk hogs. These got deleted. Windows Messenger? Gone! Internet Explorer? Adios! Firefox was my first install, and unless a better browser comes along, it will remain so. Even after trimming down the bloatware, there still wasn't much RAM available for anything useful. The laptop was paging to disk just to browse the web! I can't complain, though; I buy a minimal laptop, it's gonna have minimal RAM.

Oddly enough, it did have two things I never expected for a bargain basement laptop; built in 802.11g and a CD-ROM writer / DVD-ROM reader! Those two items were totally a surprise to me. I was expecting to have to stick in a PCMCIA card for wireless, and to have nothing but a cheapie CD-ROM reader. These two items alone make this laptop a rockin' deal, since adding in RAM is an easy upgrade. Not having to hassle with an add-in wireless card is nice.

Software-wise, the laptop comes with MS Works, and a timebomb version of MS Office. MS Money went to the bin almost immediately, as did a variety of other things I can't recall. I'll probably dump MS Office, and install OpenOffice.Org in the upcoming days. I use OpenOffice.Org on my Linux boxes and love it.

So, as I type on my newfangled $499 laptop, I wish you all a prosperous 2006, and pray this laptop lasts long past 2008. My previous laptop, a Fujitsu Lifebok 600, still runs, and it's nearly 10 years old. Let's see if this Compaq can live as long. And for now, I'll take CompUSA off of my mental blacklist. For now.

 Finally there is an apparent backlash against the popular culture's quash of Christ from Christmas. Many folks, Christian and non-Christian alike, are raising their voices to state that it is perfectly acceptable to say "Merry Christmas". Christmas is not a "winter holiday" nor "happy holidays". Christmas is not "season's greetings". Christmas is not a cultural holiday. Christmas is not a secular holiday. Christmas is the day where we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

To all the enemies of Christ out there, if you want a holiday to give gifts to your loved ones, and you don't want to use the name of Christ or Jesus, get your own holiday. I suggest you use Halloween.

While visiting my mom in SLC, we drove out of town to spy out Cabelas, a store by the same company famous for their mail order catalog. The store is an outdoor fantasy come true. There simply is nothing they lack. I saw some fascinaning stuff such as a 20-inch cast iron skillet, it took two hands to lift. They have a cafeteria featuring elk, bison, wild boar. They had home furnishings with that woodsy hunting lodge look. And guns! Whoo, they had loads! Two stories of testosterone, the store is a must-see for anybody visiting SLC.

Okay, right to the point: Download kjv.zip

Now for the explanation. If you work with CFML running on either ColdFusion or Blue Dragon, this application, named kjv, will generate a random verse from the King James Bible. Specifically designed to work for folks who use hosted accounts, kjv contains an init script that will create a database, and populate it with the King James Bible, all using basic SQL.

kjv supports both mySQL and Microsoft SQL Server; and works with both Windows and Linux.

Even if you don't want the random verse generator, kjv will provide you with a nice complete King James Bible in database format, arranged so that you can easily use it for other applications.

As you might have noticed, you can see a sample of kjv running at the top of this page. Each time the page reloads you get another verse.

At the moment you are reading the documentation for the app. The app itself is written in the Fusebox 3 style, so Fuseboxers will feel right at home. You can call it as a standalone appliction or as a cfmodule, as I am doing here.

Installation:

•  Unzip the file, and upload the kjv folder to your webserver. You will need to edit the file fbx_Settings.cfm , which contain variables for accessing your DSN, your DSN username, and DSN password.
• After that, you need to run the script by accessing {your url}/kjv/index.cfm?fuseaction=init.home
• The instructions will be there. Have fun!

Credits:

• King James Bible - Version used here in kjv originally obtained via working over the Access DB version available at htmlbible.com
• Fusebox 3 - Courtesy of fusebox.org
• Eternal Salvation - Courtesy of Jesus Christ.