Life 2 the Full

Intelligent people were sleeping at midnight last night. I was not one of them.

Instead, I went to the Crystal Method gig at the Family, in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley.

Although it's fine for a couple of DJ's to start their gig a quarter of an hour late, which a large numbers of their fans have paid $30 a head and given up a night's sleep to see, it's not fine at all when they drown their audience in an ocean of endlessly looped, uninteresting, badly produced, two dimensional DJ froth.

It was all gravy and no Roast and Vegies...

Be nice to your skin and bones, because they might just save your heart or grey matter. Adult stem cells are showing impressive results in helping heart attack, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's patients recover.

Dr Helmut Drexler, of the Medical University of Hannover in Germany, used adult stem cells from bone marrow of heart-attack patients to see if they could improve heart function . They Did!

"Our results lend support to the concept that bone-marrow cells can be used to enhance functional recovery in patients," he said in a report in The Lancet medical journal.

It's official - Internet Explorer is evil.

Many were surprised when in the MSN Slate eZine Paul Boutin recommended that windows users ditch IE and use Firefox. You just don't expect to hear that from a Microsoft company.

Firefox is a web browser based on Mozilla, that is developed under an Open Source License.

At the same time Microsoft has released an "emergency configuration update" for IE as it's vulnerabilities are the cause of some serious exploits that have recently happened.

Last night on the telly, while the commercial channels were beating up a live feed of Saddam Hussein's appearance in court with feeble ad-libbing, the ABC was doing current affairs properly, as usual.

Lateline handled the important bits of the day's news and then provided it's main story; a live interview via satellite with Michael Ware from TIME magazine, in Fallujah (Iraq).

Michael appeared agitated and was stunningly frank. He obviously knows all to well, what many of us at home want to ignore; that Al Qaeda is like a franchise, one that's fueled as much by resentment towards western actions as by extremist Islamic teachings, and the war to prevent the supposed link between Iraq Al Qaeda has now created it.

As Michael put it; "... Now we have the jihad that we say we came here to prevent..."

"They call this a world war until judgment day, maintaining a state of perpetual jihad."

Gmail is a new free web based email service provided by Google. It's caused a lot of commotion because while the likes of Hotmail was offering 4Mb of email storage, Gmail was offering a mammoth 1Gb of storage - that's 250 times more storage, for free.

Since the Beta trials of Gmail have started both Yahoo Mail and Hotmail have increased their storage quota's in an attempt to prevent the mass exodus to Gmail once it becomes publicly available.

However, Gmail has a very different approach to web based email. You don't need to make email folders, because there are labels instead, messages are bunched together via thread into "conversations", and at all times you have the stunning search power of Google to find any shred of info in any of your messages. They encourage you not to delete messages, and doing so takes quite some effort.

The Felspar Process is a colloquial term for a rather energetic electronica duo called the Crystal Method.

Their music is like an intravenous injection of adrenaline, at least most of the time. It's cool and funky, sharp mixing with great rhythm and such a sweet use of LFO.

And now they are visiting Brisvegas - Lucky us!

I'm not so sure about the venue, but if you love great electronic music, you should probably make an effort to be there.

Pax.

Life is like a kitchen. You can walk in hungry, and look for something tasty that's ready to eat in the fridge, and complain if you don't find any - or you can carefully asses the ingredients you do have, apply some skill, and prepare a tasty morsel based on what's at hand.

I suspect that an active loving relationship with the omnipotent author of everything is somewhat like that analogy also. At least it is for me.

You may search for a previously prepared proof of God's active participation in your life (and they do exist, but just may not be in your fridge), or you can take the care to notice the litany of signs that flood one's day like notes in a symphony. When you mix these ingredients together, with a little care, flair and passion, you'll end up with a very pleasant meal, that is pleasant in appearance and good to eat.

As one may expect, Slashdot has a story on the lastest stable release of the finest web browser available - Mozilla.

It just so happens to be free also, thanks to it's Open Source License.

I've been testing Mozilla 1.7 since it's beta, and it's much faster than previous versions, even under Mac OSX, where it did tend to run slower.

Torture, burning at the stake and other punishment for the faithful condemned as witches or heretics by church tribunals during the centuries-long Inquisition was not as widespread as commonly believed, the Vatican said yesterday.

John Paul II had asked the Historical-Theological Commission of the Committee of the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 to hold a congress on the Inquisition to prepare for the Day of Forgiveness of the Holy Year, on March 12, 2000. On that day, the Pontiff asked for forgiveness for the errors committed in the service of truth.

"The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it wins over the mind with both gentleness and power," the Holy Father said in his new letter, quoting from the Second Vatican Council declaration on religious freedom, "Dignitatis Humanae."

Results from a recent study seems to show that being fluent in two languages may protect against mental decline in old age.

This latest study appears to back up the theory that language skills also have a protective effect.

"The bilinguals were more efficient at all ages tested and showed a slower rate of decline for some processes with aging," said Dr Ellen Bialystok of York University.

"It appears...that bilingualism helps to offset age-related losses."

So learn another language, use it, and keep your brain functional longer. It's also interesting to note that in the process you'll probably become wiser too.