Records

The news is that former Democratic Georgia governor and US Senator Zell Miller has joined governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina and governor Rick Perry of Texas to endorse Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell for governor.

Sat in the briefing this morning at the Tower Club, hosted by Dallas city councilman Bill Blayes and the Dallas Protocol. It was about the trade corridor, NAFTA, and the I-69 project creating a highway going from the Mexico border to the Canadian border.

Stopped by Browning Trophies to put in the order for a trophy and a whole bunch of medals for our church's family camp.

The new Yahoo! Messenger with Voice is pretty decent. I called and talked to my highschool buddy in Saigon yesterday and the quality was quite satisfactory.

I enjoy listening to Conversations with Rabbi Small by Harry Kemelman.

If you are like me new to airplane-for-sale listings:

TTAF stands for Total Time Air Frame, the same as AFTT, which stands for Airframe Total Time.
TSTOH stands for Time Since Top Overhaul.
TSMOH stands for Time Since Major Overhaul.
TBO stands for To Be Overhauled.

A great website I Will Worship I saw on one of the song sheets the band had this past Sunday.

The luncheon honoring State Representative Linda Harper-Brown at the Las Colinas Country Club was originally scheduled at 11:30 but it was moved to 12:30. When they began serving the food at 12:50, I was starving so the fajitas tasted really good. I had an appointment with my orthodontist, Dr. Joseph Ainsworth, at 13:30 so I didn't get to stay and listen to the keynote speaker, senator Kay Bailey Hutchison.

Finally I finished rebuilding my Windows XP box, now with 1.5Gb of memory installed and a good PVR/Video Capture Card installed as well.

Went to West Village for dinner and then a movie but we found out that the Internal Affairs is sold out at The Magnolia so we went to the Starbuck after dinner instead.

We all know that Microsoft Internet Explorer will hang and cause your system to become unstable if you set the cache too big. In the exhilaration of having my brand new 160Gb drive, I forgot and made the mistake. I am happy to report that it's been corrected.

It appears that the Christian Democratic Union (CDU - Christlich-Demokratische Union) party chair Angela Merkel, born Angela Dorothea Kasner, July 17th, 1954 in East Germany, is poised to seriously challenge incumbent chancellor Gerhard Fritz Kurt Schröder in the upcoming September 18th, 2005 German federal election.

If you are having trouble with Partition Magic 8.0, error #27 cannot lock drive, first shutdown all applications, including those in the task tray. Then get a command window, run chkdsk /f, answer yes to unmount volume and if applicable, no to running chkdsk upon reboot. Wait like about 3 minutes for all the file handles to be released, then run chkdsk /f one more time. The second time, chkdsk should run without the question about running upon reboot. Now, you are reading to run Partition Magic again.

Finally I found time to take a stroll through the new IKEA store opened a few weeks ago in Frisco.

Benigno Aquino Jr. said it's better to die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life. However, my associate pastor said it's impossible to die a meaningful death unless you have lived a meaningful life; and for Christians, it's living life according to the purpose for which God created you as he preached from II Timothy 4:6-8 this morning.

I really enjoyed lead singer Denver Bierman and the Mile High Orchestra tonight at the free concert hosted by the First Baptist Church of Dallas. I got all 9 of their CDs. We went out to La Madeleine for dinner after we have gotten all of our CDs autographed.

Went to the free concert featuring the Shane and Shane band, hosted by Park Cities Baptist Church at the Majestic Theater downtown.

I have always thought of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or the new name Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) as those with very limited capabilities but it appears that it's no longer the case, page 39 of the 2005 UAV Roadmap, emphasis added by me: "The sale of U.S.-manufactured UAS to foreign militaries offers the triple advantages of 1) supporting the U.S. industrial base for UAS, 2) potentially lowering the unit costs of UAS to the Services, and 3) ensuring interoperability by equipping allied forces with mutually compatible systems. Balanced against these advantages, however, are two areas of concern. The first concern is the potential for transfer of critical technology. This is mitigated by export license reviews and establishment of UAS disclosure/reliability policy guidance. The second concern is that an UA capable of carrying a given weight of reconnaissance sensors and data links on a round trip could be modified to carry an equal weight of advanced weapons twice that distance on a one-way mission. As the range, accuracy, and payload capacity of UA have overtaken those of cruise missiles and some ballistic missiles, controlling their proliferation has become a concern."

Now on the side of frustration, I had such a hard time getting my Windows 2000 SP4 box to recognize my new Western Digital WD1600JB 160Gb hard drive. Dell GX204 A05 BIOS recognized the drive as 160Gb. I have already enabled 48-bit LBA support by setting the parameter HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters\EnableBigLba to 1 according to this article. Western Digital Data Lifeguard reported the drive capacity as 160Gb but when I tried to create a partition, all it allowed me are 137445Mb, roughly 137Gb. I was ready to give up since I have read everything I found on both Western Digital and Microsoft websites, and did everything that could have been done. I decided that I am going to bring the drive home and try to install it on my Windows XP box at home and switch it with the 120Gb I have at home. One last search and I stumbled across someone's mentioning of something called the Intel Application Accelerator. I went and downloaded it for my chipset, 845, installed and prayed. Then opened up the case again, put the drive back in, boot it up. Whoa la, My Computer, Manage, Disk Management reported a 149Gb drive, certainly something better than the 137Gb figure. I then pulled up Western Digital Data Lifeguard and saw what I have wanted to see all day long, 160049Mb maximum size partition. Praise God! I should have prayed early this morning. Something I thought I had learned but apparently not.

At the Metrocrest Republican Club monthly meeting last night, we had Matthew S. Murphy of the Right To Fly citizen group and Brian Murnahan of the DFW Airport Media Relations Department, speaking for and against lifting restrictions at Dallas Love Field airport, respectively. I learned a few things I didn't know:

1. American Airlines has at least 2 gates of the 32 gates at Love Field.
2. Beside Southwest Airlines who operates 14 gates, Continental Express is another airlines flies out of Love Field utilizing 4 gates and Atlanta Southeast Airlines (ASA), wholly owned subsidiary of Delta Air Lines, also has at least 1 gate.
3. The Wright amendment only put the destination restrictions on flights that have more than 56 seats.
4. Without the Wright Amendment, flights out of Love Field can only be to destinations within the state of Texas. The amendment by then House Majority Leader Democrat Jim Wright of Texas in 1979 added the four surrounding states: New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The 1997 amendment by Republican senator Richard Shelby of Alabama added Missisippi and Alabama. So to lift the restrictions, what we actually want is not the repeal but another amendment to expand further than the Wright and Shelby amendments, adding an additional 42 continental US states to the list of destinations that can be served by Love Field.

I have not bought anything from Hewlett-Packard for at least the last five years because they provide the money to develop and produce those, for lack of better words, "suction machines" use in abortion for population control in China. I replaced the HP inkjet I owned with a Lexmark inkjet and then a Samsung laser printer. My PDA is from Palm and Blackberry, not Compaq or HP. Along that line, Target has not gotten a cent of my business since last Chrismas when they decided that Salvation Army bellringer is no longer welcome at their stores. Now this list compiled by Life Decision International pointed out JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and a whole bunch of other big name businesses is supporting Planned Parenthood. It's going to be tough find the time to switch all my credit cards and bank accounts to other companies but it's on my to do list.

Saw Jeanine F. Pirro being interviewed on FoxNews just now and I think she's the kind of girl that can challenge socialist Hillary Rodham Clinton.

It's interesting to note that the practice of posting bond were there as early as 1st century according to Acts 17:9.

We had a long deacon board meeting at church today and so I was like 3 hours late coming to the babyshower for Anthony and Chi at Teresa's place.

We lost power and I called OnCor at around 9:30 pm. The customer rep. told me that the main feed was down and that the power would be back on by 11:30 pm but it's already back on by 10:00 pm as I am typing this.

Peter Jennings has gone on to see his Maker. Hope that despite his liberal view, he had received Christ as his Lord and Savior.

A whole bunch of us VPSers went to several Vietnamese businesses around the Garland area to solicit funding for our VPS Film Festival today.

On the way home, I stopped by Farmers Branch Manske Public Library to return the audio book Miracles by C.S. Lewis. Currently enjoy listening to The secret on Ararat, book 2 of the Babylon Rising series by Tim LaHaye. I also decided to pick up all four books currently available on the shelf by Francine Rivers about the women in the Bible: Unveiled: the story of Tamar; Unashamed: the story of Rahab; Unshaken: the story of Ruth; and Unspoken: the story of Bathsheba.

Went to Dr. Goldreich's bowling party with Nancy afterwork. They had free softdrinks, pizza and ice cream for everyone.

Because it rained, our church weekly community night was cancelled tonight so I went shopping at Sport Authority, taking advantage of the 7th annual sales tax holiday weekend we have here in the Lone Star state.

Everyone knows that Muslims do not eat pork but did you know that observant Muslims do not have dogs as pets; both swine and canines are considered unclean; they are
proscribed from drinking alcoholic beverages and they do not collect or pay
interest, according to this Congressional Research Service (CRS) report Islam Primer.

Congressman Pete Sessions spoke last night at the Dallas County Young Republican monthly meeting last night. Meredith Lindsey is now doing the Dallas scheduling for him, taking over Taylor Bledsoe's job basically. I was pretty disappointed to learn that drilling of ANWR has been pulled out of the enery bill as Amy pointed out during the Q&A with Pete. During Q&A, I know there's bound to be a question regarding Love Field, and Pete's got a pretty convincing case for gradually lifting the Wright amendment, or living in Switzeland as he put it, instead of the status quo, the Joe Barton camp or the immediate repeal, the Jeb Hensarling camp.

The Supreme Court nominee John Roberts said it best regarding judges, that they "do not have a commission to solve society's problems, as they see them, but simply to decide cases before them according to the rule of law.”

You think Microsoft would be better but the reality showed by this article contended that this line javascript:void(window.g_sDisableWGACheck='all') paste into the browser address bar would override the new anti-pirating Window Genuine Advantage Software.

Came in to Carter Bloodcare location in Plano and did a double red donation today before heading over to Hoang's place for our VPS Film Festival.