Matthew Ward: Toward Eternity

Matthew Ward is best known for his part of the 1970’s trio known as The 2nd Chapter of Acts. The group often toured with Keith Green, Phil Keaggy and Barry McGuire. During his time with 2nd Chapter, Ward released his first solo album, Toward Eternity. Toward Eternity was one of the best Christian rock albums of the period. I have many fond memories of hanging out at the campus radio station play cuts off this LP on Friday nights.

I have been checking periodically for many years to see if Toward Eternity would ever be released on CD. I’m still waiting. On the Matthew Ward website, there is no mention of Toward Eternity on the Store page on his site. However, on the Music page you will find a list of all the solo projects that Matthew Ward has done. On this page is a box that looks like an ad. It lists many songs in alphabetical order. If you play around with this box you will find that it is in fact a way to play and download mp3 files of songs by Matthew Ward.

Songs that have been purchased previously appear in italics. Note that songs are not listed by original LP or CD. By scrolling up and down on the music page you can figure-out which songs belong to which recording. Setting-up an account on Snocap is easy and doesn’t require selecting the songs over again. Be warned that there is no confirmation screen prior to purchasing the songs. Once purchased you need to either install a download manager from Snocap or right-click each song title and select save to download.

Matthew has a great duel on the Donna Summer album She Works Hard for the Money. Look for the track called Love has a Mind of It’s Own. He also has a great duet with Leslie (Sam) Phillips on her Dancing with Danger CD called By My Spirit.

Matthew Ward’s music is a real treasure. I’m glad he has found his way into the digital age.

Halting Hillary & Huckabee

I was browsing the Internet last night and happened to be at the main page of the Drudge Report when my three year old jumped into my lap. He asked me who was that lady in the photo. I answered that she wants to be President of our country. He then responded, “I don’t like her.” Wow! No wonder his middle name is Reagan.

As we enter the final stretch to Iowa, Mrs. Clinton is blasting Barack Obama on the wedge issue of how long Obama has wanted to be president. Why a kindergarten class in Indonesia counts I really don’t know. I bet there was a time when he wanted to be an astronaut too.

In the last several weeks, Hilary has repeatedly stated that she wants to be President again.

Meanwhile Obama is campaigning with all the enthusiasm of a child that is overmedicated with Ritalin. He doesn’t seem to want the nomination very badly.

On the Republican side, Mike “I need a miracle” Huckabee is being touted by the media as the new maverick of the party. I think the media really views him as a spoiler that is undercutting serious candidates that might have a chance of beating their favorite Democrat.

I have heard comparisons of Huckabee to candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976. Many evangelicals voted for this southern governor because he was a “born again” Christian. As we later found out with Carter, Baptists are notoriously antinomian and their faith rarely influences their views of government and public policy.

If elected, Huckabee would drift aimlessly from issue to issue buffeted by the trials and tribulations of a Democrat controller legislative branch until he was swamped by the maelstrom and had his administration smashed on the rocks. In other words, without core values and conservative principles Huckabee can never be an effective President because the Democrats will roll him at every opportunity and render him ineffective.

Obama and Huckabee Iowa Surge Dubious

In the latest polling for the Iowa caucus, both Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee are moving ahead of the pack and challenging the long-standing front-runners in their respective parties. This sounds really interesting but is it hype or reality?

I think that polling is not the “science” that it used to be. Consider the obstacles to the modern day pollster.

First, most polling is done by telephone. It is the cheapest way to have two-way conversations with potential voters. From voter data such as that available from your county clerk, a pollster can know how often that you have voted in past elections and want your party affiliation is. This information coupled with the demographics of your neighborhood can give them a good idea of who you voted for in the past. There are many questions that they ask in the course of a poll to verify their guesses by comparing actual answers with their predictions.

Part of the challenge to pollsters is to get a statistical cross-section of the electorate. Their model assumptions about voters are important to the accuracy of the result that they get. Have you ever wondered how 1,200 people are polled and in a headline the next day we are told with certainty what 300 million Americans think about presidential popularity or Hillary’s latest healthcare idea?

The biggest challenge to this model is technology. A large percentage of people under age thirty have only cellular phones and not a landline. These folks are not listed in Ma Bell’s directory. People also have IP telephony and other means of communicating that are not listed. This coupled with traditional unlisted phone numbers on landlines makes contacting a cross-section of voters even more difficult. The only thing that is saving their models of the electorate is that many in this age group are not high propensity voters. Older, high propensity voters tend to have traditional phones.

Another challenge is who is actually answering the phone? Most times that a telemarketer calls my phone, we hang-up on them. Due to the number of polls done in modern political campaigns and the small population of a state like Iowa, I think many folks are burned-out answering their phones too. Are the results showing shifts in the candidate preferences of Iowa voters accurate or are the number on non-responding folks causing results to be weighted differently to keep the pollsters in business?

Most people made up their minds months ago and it would take a big event to change their preference. Neither Obama nor Huckabee can point to such an event. (Yes, some might argue that Hillary and driver licenses for illegals qualify but we will have to see.)

If given my assumption about the lack of a big event, the logical place to go to explain any shift in voter preferences is that the “undecided” are finally settling on their choice. My problem with this is two-fold. First we must ask is this “undecided” voter who up ‘til now has not been paying attention really firm in their commitment to a candidate and second, will they actually go to the polls and vote?

Lastly, going into the holidays will detract from campaigning. This is a season for family and the sacred not secular. This will result in committed people voting and those with little interested getting distracted and not making the extra effort to vote. I doubt anyone knows how to model this because it has never happened before. The timing of Iowa is an unquantifiable variable that should not be minimized.

I could go on but I think I have made my point. The polls are entertaining but should not be trusted. There are too many variables that make Iowa difficult to call prior to January third.

MPEG2 Error C00D11B1 in Windows Media Player

My three-year-old abuses to heck out of our family’s DVD collection. After he handles them a few times, they won’t play. The disks are covered in yogurt, fingerprints, apple juice and who knows what else. Anyway, the poor lasers in the players don’t stand a chance against him. I frequently have to wash the DVDs with soap and water to clean them before he can watch them. Many are also accumulating scratches and it is only a matter of time before they will be unusable.

As a result, I have decided to download as many of his favorites as I can into my computer for him to watch. This will allow us to watch a copy of the disk and reduce the abuse to which they are subjected. I also am doing this because the wife and I are considering purchasing an XBOX 360 for the kids’ big Christmas gift. With the XBOX, they can watch the movies on my computer—via the Windows Media Center—on their television. (I wired the house for computers and the eventual purchase of the XBOX last year.)

As an experiment, I ripped a few DVDs using the Roxio Easy Media software. I selected the MPEG2 format. I tried to play the resulting files with Windows Media Player and got an error.

The same file plays fine using Media Center and several other software applications in my computer. I was determined to find a solution. Media Player has never been able to play an MPEG file from any source on my Vista computer.

I started at the beginning. Did I have the proper codec to play this file format? I thought so but my research found that support for MPEG files is only partially supported natively by Microsoft. They support MPEG1 but not MPEG2. MPEG2 is the format used on DVDs and requires a third party solution. I downloaded and installed the software at a cost of about $15. As I found out later, I already had the codec and this was a waste of money.

I searched on the Roxio support forum and found a thread that seemed to hold some promise.

There were all sorts of great sounding ideas. These included codec diagnostic programs, quotes allegedly from Microsoft TechNet and purchasing new codec packages. None of these worked.
I tried the Microsoft website and found a thread on error C00D11B1.

This tread starts out poorly with a bunch of BS about Samsung software for cell phones causing this problem and then goes on to suggest changes to settings in Media Player and even registry hacks. My experience with this is that it is nonsense, not troubleshooting. However, on the fourth page of this thread you get to the payoff. Buried in the bottom one post you will find the following nugget:

Anyway, while i was typing that essay, i found a solution!

http://www.codecguide.com I simply download that codec pack, and everything worked perfectly. It installs another media player called Windows Media Player Classic, but i checked, and the files work using the regular media player too.

The codecs on this page are free. I tried the full package and took most of the default settings. However, I kept the MPEG2 codecs that I already purchased and told the install program to replace my DIVX codecs, and on the bottom of the second screen, I checked to box to create a setpoint before installing.

As I was researching this problem, I had seen many comments that blamed newer DIVX codecs as the likely cause of the problem. Strictly speaking I know that trying two different repairs at once is not proper troubleshooting technique but by the time I got to this point in the process I wanted results and a good night’s sleep. The bottom line is that it worked.

I hope my experience will save others some heartache. Happy computing.

iTunes Bug Kills CDs in Vista

Recently I upgraded my Windows Vista computer to iTunes 7.5. After starting the program I was greeted with a message that my DVD/CD burner was unable to be used by iTunes. Why? It works for everything else I want to burn!

Upon further investigation, I found that iTunes is not compatible with my 64-bit operating system and I needed to download a third-party driver so that this piece of Apple software could work as advertised with my burner.

I found this on the Apple website in one of their support threads:

I don’t understand why Apple support doesn’t react on this, as the solution is ridiculously easy.

You need a 64bit version of the driver, install the one you find here:
http://www.gearsoftware.com/support/drivers.cfm

Use “Driver installer for AMD64 and Intel EM64T processors”.
Works like a charm.

This is my third bug this year with Apple software in the PC world and the second I’ve encountered with iTunes.

On my windows XP Pro system, I had to physically remove the CD-ROM from my computer because iTunes can’t tell the difference between a CD ROM and a CD Writer. I had both in the computer peacefully coexisting until I wanted to burn a CD using iTunes. Theirs is the only burning software I have ever encountered that can’t make this fundamental distinction.

The error message from the iTunes program basically said PCs were crap and we can’t function in your box because it is built different that a Mac (only they used engineering sounding words to more politely insult the 90 percent of the world that doesn’t do things their way).

My third Apple bug this year is in QuickTime Player. I can only play movies from external hard drives. Any movie I play on my local hard drive will crash due to buffer error within seconds of activating “play”. I found a website claiming to fix this error if I will install four downloads and then re-start my computer.

DirecTV On Demand Service

Yeah! In addition to rolling out more HD stations this fall, DirecTV is Beta Testing an on demand service. Apparently, you select the program and it gets downloaded to your DVR and then you watch it like any other program. There is no press release about this on their website yet.

Dobson Should Embrace Rudy

Conservatives are once again poised to assemble their famous “circular firing squad” and should Rudy Giuliani emerge as the Republican presidential candidate, they plan on pulling the trigger.

James Dobson and a group of other evangelicals are threatening to throw their support to a third party candidate—to be named later—if Rudy is the nominee. This is the result of Rudy’s longtime support of legalized abortion. This smacks of the Ross Perot effort in 1992, which resulted in the election of Bill Clinton. Clinton won with 43 percent of the vote.

This presidential cycle will likely see a credible third party challenger from the Left due to the dissatisfaction of the anti-war fanatics. Dobson’s gambit will likely be a pale imitation of their efforts. If Dobson and company put up a third party challenger, it will be to the detriment of evangelicals and when it fails, it will justify the marginalization of social conservatives in future public policy debates.

Rudy is better on the war than any of the Democrats. If we are dead or in economic ruins, then all the social policies that we spend so much time fighting about won’t matter because we won’t be here to have the debate. Our national existence is on the line in 2008. Once the Sword of Islam is dealt with then we will have to time to look at these other issues.

Furthermore, should Rudy appoint the kind of judges that he says, we might end-up with Roe v Wade being gutted regardless of what Rudy said on the campaign trail. Why? Simple really. The kind of judges that support the War on Terror and law & order issues will tend to be the strict constructionist judges that would favor curtailing the overreaching intrusion of the courts beyond the limits of the Constitution.

Rudy certainly couldn’t pick any worse than did Reagan and Bush senior. Republicans have a terrible track record of picking justices for the Court. Picking judges reminds me of the old joke about marriage. It has been said that marriage is like fishing, you don’t really know what you caught until you get it in the boat. Ditto for Supreme Court judges.

The irony of Dobson’s position is that to get the result he wants, his best chance is to join with Rudy.

Baby Executed

As reported over the weekend, a 21-year-old man and his son were shot and killed in an apparent home invasion robbery.
http://www.kcra.com/news/14124355/detail.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297027,00.html

The father left his son in the car and walked up to the front door of a friend’s house and was jumped by two gunmen. All three men entered the house and a fight broke-out. The father was killed from multiple gunshots. The baby was in the car and strapped into his baby seat. As the gunmen left the house, they went over to the car and purposely shot the 8-month old infant in the head.

The motive is unknown.

The father was a boxer and had been training for a return to the ring. He had not fought for several years but had aspirations. Police have supposedly ruled-out gangs and drugs. This crime seems like something from a Mickey Spillane novel. Killing a man during a robbery is one thing, but executing his son raises the crime to the level of a mob hit.

I am particularly angry about this crime. Killing a baby in this purposeful manner is a crime that most folks would agree is worthy of a quick trip to the gallows. Part of my emotional response to this is the fact that it happened very close to where my wife works. In addition, I have a son that is two years old.

I hope the police will find the people responsible for this crime and rid our society of such evil men.

Microsoft Office $59.95?

Do you want a legal copy of Microsoft Office Ultimate for $59.95?

Office Ultimate 2007 includes the entire Microsoft Office toolset that students are accustomed to working with and more, including Microsoft Office Word 2007, Microsoft Office Excel® 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 with Business Contact Manager, Microsoft Office Access™ 2007, Microsoft Office Publisher 2007, Office OneNote 2007, Office Groove 2007 and Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007.

It is available September 20, 2007 to April 30, 2008 from http://www.theultimatesteal.com/ You need e-mail address at college and active enrollment. See Microsoft press release at
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/sep07/09-12UltimateStealPR.mspx

Chain Reactor

For many years the Holy Grail of clean energy has been the search for “Cold Fusion”. The next best thing has just made the mainstream scientific community: seawater. Yeah, all that H2O that has covered the planet for eons has finally been proved to be a potential source of energy.

An Erie cancer researcher has found a way to burn salt water, a novel invention that is being touted by one chemist as the “most remarkable” water science discovery in a century.

John Kanzius happened upon the discovery accidentally when he tried to desalinate seawater with a radio-frequency generator he developed to treat cancer. He discovered that as long as the salt water was exposed to the radio frequencies, it would burn.

The discovery has scientists excited by the prospect of using salt water, the most abundant resource on earth, as a fuel.

Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist, has held demonstrations at his State College lab to confirm his own observations.

The radio frequencies act to weaken the bonds between the elements that make up salt water, releasing the hydrogen, Roy said. Once ignited, the hydrogen will burn as long as it is exposed to the frequencies, he said.

The discovery is “the most remarkable in water science in 100 years,” Roy said.

“This is the most abundant element in the world. It is everywhere,” Roy said. “Seeing it burn gives me the chills.”

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8RIRI600&show_article=1

If this sounds somewhat familiar, it should. Utilizing radio frequencies to produce energy is the plot of the movie Chain Reaction that was released in 1996. The movie starred Keanu Reeves, Morgan Freeman, Rachel Weisz and Fred Ward.

In Chain Reaction, a group of college students help a professor produce Cold Fusion using water. A radio frequency is necessary in order to sustain the reaction. After this breakthrough is achieved, the lab is sabotaged and Keanu Reeves and Rachel Weisz get chased thru the rest of the film.

Granted it is still early to find a definite power plant design to make this technology commercially viable but see if this idea piques your interest.

The reaction sustains a temperature of 3,000 degrees. So I’m thinking it could be used for a high-pressure steam turbine. If the required radio frequency could be generated naturally, much like to old crystal radios, then you might not need as much battery power to get it started.

The reaction would start in the salt-water chamber. Liquid would be heated to a high temperature and pumped thru to a heat exchanger. On the other side of the heat exchanger water would pump in where it would be converted to steam. The steam would flow into a turbine. Once condensed, the water would be pumped back to the heat exchanger. (See basic design for submarine nuclear power plant for many specifications. This would be smaller scale with different heat source.)

Once it gets going, the turbine could generate electricity to make the whole system run. All you would add is water to top-off the steam system. This would allow for electric cars, self-sufficient energy for homes and it would beat the socks off current solar technology.

Finally we could tell those folks in the Mid-East, “Bye-bye. Enjoy what’s left of the seventh century.”