the tindog coffeehouse

According to a new survey, a majority of Americans, including evangelical Christians, believe that other religions besides their own can lead to eternal life:

The findings, released Monday in a survey of 35,000 adults, can either be taken as a positive sign of growing religious tolerance, or disturbing evidence that Americans dismiss or don’t know fundamental teachings of their own faiths.

Among the more startling numbers in the survey, conducted last year by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life: 57 percent of evangelical church attendees said they believe many religions can lead to eternal life, in conflict with traditional evangelical teaching.

In all, 70 percent of Americans with a religious affiliation shared that view….

Certainly, it’s one thing to be tolerant of other faiths, just as you can be tolerant of other political opinions or lifestyle choices.  But just because I tolerate other faiths doesn’t mean I believe they’re right.

As the article points out, the Bible is very explicit when it comes to the subject of salvation.  In John 14:6, Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”  That seems pretty definitive to me.

Further, Paul writes in Romans 5:19: “For just as through the disobedience of the one man [Adam] the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man [Jesus] the many will be made righteous.”  He doesn’t say, through the obedience of “some guys” you’ll be free of sin or by praying to Allah five times a day.  No, only through Jesus comes righteousness and eternal life.

I don’t expect that non-Christians would agree.  But it is frustrating when people who are supposedly Christians don’t even understand the most basic foundations of the Bible.

So where is the problem?  Are many of those in the survey who call themselves Christians not really Christians?  Or are we not doing a very good job of teaching God’s word to those we minister to?  I suspect it’s a little of both.  Unfortunately, though, it’s not enough to simply call yourself a Christian.

Well, unless you read it in a survey.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is asking Congress to give the Fed more powers to regulate the financial system, in light of the collapse (and bailout) of Bear Stearns.

Paulson said the country had come to rely on the Federal Reserve in times of crisis, citing the Fed’s actions to broker a rescue of giant hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998 during the Asian currency crisis and the Bear Stearns episode this year.

“Our nation has come to expect the Federal Reserve to step in to avert events that pose unacceptable systemic risk,” Paulson said. “But, as we noted in our blueprint, the Fed has neither the clear statutory authority nor the mandate to anticipate and deal with risk across our entire financial system.”

Yeah, I guess we have come to expect them to protect us, but who are they really protecting: the consumers or the banks? By continuing to bailout companies like Bear Stearns for making bad (and possibly illegal) investments, aren’t we just reinforcing the same bad behavior that led to the company’s collapse in the first place?

Using a parent/child analogy, isn’t that like buying your teenage son a brand-new Mustang after he totaled his last one?

The Fed’s primary responsibility is to control the nation’s monetary policy and regulate commercial banks. Since when does that also include coming to the rescue of investment banks like Bear?

As financial analyst Keith Fitz-Gerald puts it:

The bottom line is that there’s nothing “Federal” about this crisis today any more than there was a year ago when we began sounding the alarm bells and taking a more defensive posture.

Even though it’s being spun as a good thing, by stepping into the fray yet again, the Fed is involuntarily forcing you and me and every other taxpayer to act as guarantors. …

My concern, however, is that the cost of trying to prevent a recession will ultimately cost us more than simply enduring one.

Of course, none of this should come as a surprise to the conspiracy theorists out there, since both Paulson and Fed Chairmen Ben Bernanke recently attended this year’s Bilderberg conference, the annual secret meeting of Europe and North America’s power elite who preach a one-world government and who supposedly gave birth to such things as the EU, NAFTA, and the Kyoto Protocol.

Conspiracy theories aside, though, let me be clear. I’m not saying we should take a completely hands-off approach to dealing with companies like Bear Stearns. Quite the opposite. While I favor laissez-faire capitalism as much as the next guy, there is a role that the government (and to an extent the Federal Reserve) should play in regulating the nation’s financial system. I just think we should be wary any time a federal entity seeks more power. At some point, enough is enough.

Apparently people are so used to texting that they’re now doing it in their sleep. Yes, “sleep-texting.”

Dr Ron Kramer, a spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, claimed that sleep-texting is entirely possible because “texting for some of the younger generation is probably as ingrained as driving is for some”.

In other news, Patrick Kennedy just upped his texting plan.

There was a lengthy debate a few days ago on USA Today’s PopCandy blog about the all-time worst sitcoms. Most of the shows mentioned (Mr. Belvedere, Small Wonder, My Two Dads, etc.) were shows from the ’80s and early ’90s. Very few readers mentioned shows from the ’60s or ’70s, likely because those were before their time.

As a child of the ’80s, I grew up on shows like Happy Days, Scooby-Doo, The Dukes of Hazzard, and WKRP in Cincinnati, as well as classics such as The Brady Bunch, Gilligan’s Island, and The Munsters. (Yes, I watched entirely too much TV growing up.) I played with GI Joe and Star Wars toys but never made it very far in Pac-Man or Donkey Kong. I rode my Big Wheel up and down the block without adult supervision and caught horny toads in the vacant lot next door.

Now that I’m a father, I’ve come to the realization that my daughters won’t share many of these same memories. They have no idea who the Fonz is or what New Coke tastes like. They’ve never ridden in the wayback of a station wagon, recorded anything to a cassette tape, or changed channels with a pair of pliers because the knob broke off, and they don’t care.

So what things will they be nostalgic for when they’re parents? Hanna Montana? High School Musical? Shrek? Will they talk about the first time they broke 200 on Wii Bowling or laugh about how slow the Internet was? Will they tell their kids about growing up when people still used gas in their cars and it was only $4 a gallon?

And I wonder: Did my dad ever feel this way because I don’t know the words to the Davy Crockett theme, can’t recite any of the Smothers Brothers routines, and don’t have any interest in baseball trading cards?

TXU is rolling out a new thermostat that can be programmed by the owner over the Internet. Sounds good, right? I mean, say you’re traveling and forgot to raise the AC before you left. Click-click-click, you’re done. Oh, but wait, there’s a catch!  TXU can adjust the thermostat, too, meaning they can arbitrarily decide to turn off your AC to save themselves money.  Um, what?

As if that wasn’t bad enough, your new $3000 Jura F90 coffeemaker, which comes with a handy Internet Connection Kit, can be apparently be hacked to unleash what BoingBoing refers to as a “denial-of-coffee attack”.

As one BoingBoing commenter put it, “For that price you can fly to Paris and sit in an actual cafe and drink 500 cups of coffee served to you by a variety of cute waiters while people-watching and reading a good book.”

Or you could just stay home and soak in the air conditioning.

Like many loyal Firefox users, I couldn’t wait for the launch of Firefox 3, which was released yesterday. After trying several times to get to the site, I was finally able to download it last night and install it on my home computer.

I haven’t had time yet to really play with it, but I would say it does feel a little faster than the previous version. I’m not quite sold on the look of it yet, though. (FF3 is themed a little different for each platform. On Vista it has more of the Vista look and feel, on OS X it has more of the Mac’s look and feel, etc.) But the one thing that seemed to be an issue initially was the compatibility issues with a few of my add-ons.

The All-in-One Sidebar, New Tab Button, and 1-Click Weather add-ons haven’t (yet) been updated to run on the new version. I found a suitable replacement for the weather add-on and can easily work around the loss of the others. It’s just going to take a little getting used to on my part. I also had some issues with the NewTabURL add-on, which may require rolling back to a previous version.

Overall, it’s not bad. There are some really great things with this release (memory and performance improvements, a resizable search bar, and a more robust address bar), but it definitely feels more evolutionary than revolutionary.

One thing I’m really anxious about, however, is Flock 2.0, which just went into beta. Flock is another browser, which is built on the Firefox engine but also integrates a lot of social networking and media sites into it. So if you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, Flickr, etc., you can integrate all your accounts into Flock and have everything right at your fingertips.

I played with version 1.2 and really loved it. Honestly, the only thing that was a show-stopper for me was the incompatibility with Foxmarks, which I use to sync my bookmarks across multiple computers. Version 2.0 of Flock is supposed to have the same performance improvements as Firefox 3. I just have to cross my fingers and hope the Foxmarks developers release a version that works on it.

Update: After much fussing around, I finally gave up on Firefox 3 (for now).  The NewTabURL add-on just doesn’t work properly, and doing without the other incompatible add-ons isn’t much fun.  I went back to version 2 and will give it some time until the add-ons are updated.  Oh, well…

A new study shows that daily coffee consumption could reduce a person’s chances of dying from heart disease.

The study found that women who reported drinking two to three cups of caffeinated coffee per day had a 25 percent lower risk of death from heart disease than women who did not drink coffee. The researchers saw a smaller decreased risk for men but it was not statistically significant.

According to financial disclosure statements filed by the two presumed presidential candidates, Barack Obama earned about $4 million dollars last year (mostly book royalties) while carrying no credit card debt. John McCain, meanwhile, earned about $340,000 but has a joint American Express account with a balance of $10,000-$15,000 with an interest rate of 25.99%.

Of course, you’re asking the obvious question: What would Andrew Jackson think about that?

I’m currently reading An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power by John Steele Gordon. He points out Jackson’s quest to eliminate the national debt, which had “soared” to $125 million after the War of 1812.

Jackson had two purposes in ridding the country of debt. The first, of course, was that he thought debt was bad in and of itself. He had called it a “national curse” in his first run for the presidency in 1824. But he thought that the institutions and the people who benefitted from it were a national curse as well. “My vow,” he pledged, “shall be to pay the national debt, to prevent a monied aristocracy from growing up around our administration that must bend to its views, and ultimately destroy the liberty of our country.”

And in fact, Jackson lived up to his pledge, reporting in his 1834 State of the Union address that “the country would be debt-free on January 1, 1835, and have a balance on hand of $440,000.” (Emphasis mine.)

Well, now I know who I’m voting for in November! (Even if he has been dead for 163 years.)

If you’ve been to this blog before, you may have noticed a little redecoratin’ going on ’round here. Yes, I redesigned the blog, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Hope you like it, too.

I actually rolled out the new design a couple of days ago (briefly) but yanked it when I realized the sidebar wasn’t showing up at all in Internet Explorer. (Stupid non-compliant browser!) Luckily I found the problem, although as is typical in web design, it created a few other minor issues which I’m hoping to work through (or learn to live with).

Being on Wordpress.com, as you may know, means being able to choose from only a limited number of templates. And although you can customize the CSS, the amount of customization varies widely from template to template, depending on how it was built. When I initially setup the blog last year, I picked a template I mostly liked and tweaked the CSS a little, and that was it. But I was never fully happy with it.

I like this design much better. It’s cleaner and the text is easier to read (kind of important in a blog, being able to read it). Hopefully, I can get the last little bugs ironed out without calling Steve Ballmer too many nasty names. (Maybe I’ll just throw some eggs at him.)

In the meantime, feel free to leave your feedback. And thanks for the visit.

About 400 of our employees were randomly selected to complete a survey about our jobs for Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For. I was one of those “lucky” few.

I hate surveys like this. It just seems pointless. I mean, who’s really going to give their company all A’s? Nobody loves their job that much. Right? OK, maybe some people do, I guess. But then you have the permanently disgruntled employees who constantly think the world is out to get them, and they see a survey like this as a way to stick it to management. Yeah, go on, fight the power!

I don’t hate my job, I really don’t. But I’m not in love with it either. Would I say this is one of the best companies to work for? Honestly, I would say it’s about average. Most of the stuff that I tend to complain about is stuff that exists anywhere you go in the corporate world.

Coincidentally, I took a day off yesterday, and we headed to Six Flags. While standing in line for the Roaring Rapids, the guy in front of us was wearing a shirt for a, well, post-mortem cleaning company. “Accidental death, murder, suicide, call 817…” Advertising a company like that on the same ride where someone drowned in 1999? Now there’s a guy who likes his job!

In recognition of the 50th anniversary of the creation of ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Department of Defense agency that would give birth to what is now the Internet, Vanity Fair has attempted to compile an “oral history” of the Internet, from ARPA to today.

So how’d they do?

Al Gore aside, they did pretty well, at least at a high level, interviewing pioneers such as Paul Baran (the inventor of packet-switching), Vint Cerf (the inventor of the TCP and IP protocols), Bob Metcalfe (the inventor of Ethernet), Marc Andreessen (Netscape), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Larry Page (Google), and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia).

It’s mind-blowing to think that something so basic as a computer network wasn’t always so obvious, and how technology that we use every day and take for granted could very easily have never existed but for a few brilliant minds.

However, while quite lengthy, the article certainly isn’t a comprehensive history. There are a lot of things not covered in the article, some of which seem to be rather glaring omissions (for example, no mention of Cisco at all).

Some other missing pieces:

• Xerox PARC
• CompuServe and Prodigy
• Other protocols: Gopher, Telnet, FTP, Wi-Fi, Wimax, Bluetooth, IPv6, AppleTalk, Frame Relay
• IIS and Apache
• HTML, XML, Perl, PHP, Java, ASP, Ajax, Flash, Photoshop
• The breakup of AT&T in 1984
• The reshaping of the Baby Bells into the major telecoms of today (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Qwest)
• The role pornography played in driving consumer Internet usage early on (whitehouse.com)
• Canter & Siegal (a law firm which posted the first commercial mass advertising online [on Usenet] in April 1994)
• Intel and AMD
• HP, Compaq, DEC, IBM, Dell, Gateway, Sony
• ICANN
• Instant Messaging and SMS
• P2P (Napster) and Bittorrent (The Pirate Bay)
• RSS and Podcasting
• Other browsers: Firefox, Safari, Opera, Flock
• “Irrational exuberance” (Alan Greenspan, explaining the dot-com bubble)
• “It’s a series of tubes” (Senator Ted Stevens, describing the Internet)
• Peapod and Webvan
• Mark Cuban (Broadcast.com)
• Wardriving
• Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, Newsvine, Last.fm, Pandora
• Tech blogs and reporting: TechCrunch (Mike Arrington), Ars Technica, The Register, Slashdot, BoingBoing (Cory Doctorow), Rocketboom (Andrew Baron), Robert Scoble
• TechTV, CNET, and ZDNet (Leo Laporte, John C. Dvorak, Patrick Norton, Tom Merritt, Chris Pirillo)

And what about the dark side of the Internet?

• Privacy and security risks (phishing, identity theft, government wiretapping, adware/spyware)
• ISP packet-shaping and bandwidth-throttling
• Copyright infringement paranoia (DMCA, DRM, RIAA lawsuits, Allofmp3.com)

What else is missing?

I need a vacation. Desperately.

But it’s not happening, at least not more than taking a day off from work here or there.

At my job, we get 10 paid vacation days and 10 paid sick days a year plus 2 personal days. The personal days are issued upfront at the beginning of the calendar year, while vacation and sick days are accrued. Unused sick days carry over to the next calendar year, but unused vacation days and personal days do not. So on January 1st, you have 2 personal days and any leftover sick days available, but zero vacation days.

The personal days get used up pretty quickly, and you can use a sick day here or there if you need to take just one day off. But if you want to take several days or a week off, it’s next to impossible. Here I am, halfway through the year. I’ve used both my personal days and a couple of vacation days plus one sick day. I have almost no vacation time left but almost two weeks worth of sick time accrued. And of course, the beancounters won’t let you use sick time as vacation time, even though I’m salary and get paid the same no matter what.

I’m hoping for an illness that’s bad enough for a doctor to keep me home for a week but not so bad that I can’t enjoy the time off. (Maybe I could volunteer for some kind of surgery. I don’t need my appendix, right?)

Here’s a thought: If you’re not going to let people carry over unused vacation time, then give them all the days upfront at the beginning of the year so they can use it when they need it instead of having to wait until the end of the year if they want a week off. Of course, I know they won’t do that since they have to pay people for any unused vacation days when they leave the company. (They don’t have to pay for unused sick days.)

Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s not like we were going to go anywhere this year anyway. Instead of going out of town, we opted to buy season tickets to Six Flags. Yes, it was expensive, but it was half the cost of what a weekend getaway would cost by the time you factor in gas, lodging, and food. And we can use the tickets all year long.

But that’s not really the point. The point is, I need a break from this place before I go crazy. Hmm… insanity could be classified as an illness, right?