Book Recommendation: Seven Days That Divide the World

I was too late in formulating my question to be able to ask it at John Lennox's recent lecture at UPC in Seattle.  I was going to ask him whether and to what extent he believed the generally accepted scientific narratives of the history of the universe, the earth, and man were consistent with the Bible. 

I thought it a meaningful and relevant question to ask him because he regularly engages in dialogue and debates with atheist philosophers and scientists, and therefore he is likely to have a well-informed opinion, and one he has put a great deal of thought and criticism into.

Fortunately I was able to speak with him afterwards, and his response was to direct me to his latest book, which I ordered  as soon as I got home (they had sold out of copies there before the lecture ended).

It was a very quick read, and densely packed with information and analysis.  I highly recommend it to anyone who desires to engage in a grown-up discussion of the Genesis creation account and the controversy between creation and evolution.

My First Con

I think I will consider my birthday this year to have officially started on the morning of Friday, March 4th, when my sister-in-law Kim (who lives in China, where at the time it was indeed March 5th--12:18 AM to be precise) wished me a happy birthday on my Facebook wall. 

Earlier in the week, Dave Kellett, the comic artist behind Sheldon and Drive, had posted to his feeds that he was going to be at Emerald City ComiCon this weekend.  I had half-seriously thought about going on Saturday, but then Elizabeth scheduled my birthday party Saturday afternoon and evening, and I had already made morning plans, so I had decided not to go.

Until, that is, free lunch Friday.  Every other Friday, which is the day after payday at work, my team goes out for a free lunch.  Free, that is, to everyone but the person whose turn it is to pick the restaurant.  On this particular Friday, it was Josh's turn, and we went to Jimmy Mac's in Renton.  Jimmy Mac's has amazing bread, among other things.

Somehow or other it came out that one of my co-workers, Andrew, was planning on leaving for ComiCon in the afternoon, whereat he would attend "The Hour of Awesomeness with Wil Wheaton" and get a photo with him as well.  Wouldn't it be great, he suggested, if I (who look uncannily like Wil Wheaton) would come along and get a photo with my slightly shorter doppelganger?  Josh, who is ever the instigator, and also a fan of Dave Kellett, decided to throw his support behind the plan.

Entirely aside from our visigial similarities, I have come to appreciate Wil Wheaton.  His championship of the gamer geek ethos, his antics, his blog, and his contributions to The Guild and The Big Bang Theory have made me a fan.

I was therefore easily persuaded, but there were some logistical details to work out.  In the car on the way back to work, I gave Elizabeth a call.  Yes of course she totally wanted to come, and she would check with her mom about taking Shoshana while we were there.  She would bring the camera and the shirt I had made last Halloween [reference].  Thankfully my work schedule is flexible enough that I can usually leave 5 hours earlier than planned on a whim.

At 2:00 PM we left for the convention.  I had never been to a "con" as they say, and so I had a few preconceived ideas, but in general didn't know what to expect.  The first thing we did after meeting up with Andrew's girlfriend, buying tickets, and entering the convention hall, was head for Dave Kellett's booth.

Dave had kindly provided his fans with a map showing his "impossible to miss" location on the show floor.  It was indeed easy to find, and Mr. Kellett was perfectly personable and helpful.  Liz and I bought the first Sheldon book, and Josh bought the fourth (since, I believe, he has the first three).  He drew Flaco (the lizard) in our book, and Arthur (the duck) in Josh's book.

After that, we wondered the floor for a bit.  We each entered a drawing entitling us to a free superhero pin--I picked Wolverine.  There were a couple other artists I recognized, but none I was interested in interacting with at that point, so after making a lazy circuit, we headed back out and found the place where Wil Wheaton's Awesome Hour was to take place.

We were about half an hour early, but still the center section was occupied pretty far back.  We settled into a row of seats in a side section near one of the microphones they had set up for questions.  In short, the Hour was indeed awesome.  Wil Wheaton, in his entertaining style, told stories about video games, growing up, his family, and life.  The last fifteen minutes or so were dedicated to questions.  A few people asked him to answer "as Evil Wil Wheaton", which, he did (though usually in brief, as he was on the spot, and I imagine it's difficult for him to get into an "evil" mindset amidst thousands of adoring fans.


One kid (about 10 years old) asked what "he" would do if Sheldon Cooper showed up.  He said he would get right in his face, just to make sure he had made his bed in "his house" (referring to a comment that Evil Wil Wheaton had made on BBT, that he was living rent free in Sheldon's head.)  I was sitting at the end of the isle about three feet away from the kid, wearing my replica of Wil Wheaton's recursive shirt.  I was quite tempted to surprise the kid by getting in his face on my knees as Evil Wil Wheaton, but he had already started to walk away.

When he had left the stage, I decided it would be fun to get some pictures of me behind the podium, so I did.  As I stepped down, a rather gruff looking heavyset man addressed me, asking whether I still keep in touch with the actors from Stand By Me.  I had never actually heard of Stand By Me, so I was at first a bit dumbfounded.  "No," I said, "but then, I'm not Wil Wheaton."  It took him a few seconds to register what I had said, and afterwards, I'm not entirely sure he believed me.  I had, after all, just alighted from the very stage he had occupied for the last hour, and he had quite possibly just made his way to this spot upon the conclusion of Wil's remarks.

After the Awesome Hour, we all headed to Wil Wheaton's "line".  On the way, I learned about Stand By Me.  Upon arriving, I was told that they had been chanting my name.  Indeed.  We got in line, and learned that, unlike most of the other celebrities, Wil did not charge for autographs and photos.  Nice.  The program had led us to believe that it would be something like $70.  While in line, there were a trio of guys behind us who were wondering who "that redhead over there" was.  Seriously:  they didn't know who Felicia Day was!  Apparently, they hadn't seen anything of Wil Wheaton since his role in Stand By Me, the DVD case of which they had brought for him to sign.  "What else has he been in?" they asked.  We blinked.

We then patiently explained to them about The Guild, and also threw in a little bit about his appearances in The Big Bang Theory.  Oh, yeah, and Star Trek:  The Next Generation.

A couple of groups in front of us were a trio of female superheroes.  One of whom, dressed as Wonder Woman, held a crocheted doll that reminded me of a Little Big Planet character.  I asked her what it was, and she showed it to me.  She had made Wil Wheaton a doll of his character Fawkes from The Guild, complete with kilt and Axis of Anarchy shirt.  It was adorable; it was incredible.  She was a bit self-conscious about the hair.  I told her it was awesome, and he would love it.  He totally did. I'm pretty sure it made his day.

When we got to the front, Andrew went first, and told him all about how he became an engineer, in part, because of Star Trek.  "Hello," I said, approaching. "I'm Evil Wil Wheaton, and I'm here to sign your breast."  (Perhaps that comment warrants some context.)

"Where did you get my shirt?" he exclaimed.  I replied that I had made it, and that it was superior to his because it glowed in the dark.  He retorted that HIS was superior in that he had worn it.  I conceded, but pointed out that that could be fixed.  I asked him, however, if there was a pen appropriate to sign the shirt, which there was.  I took it off (I was wearing a shirt underneath), and he autographed it, signing each of the shirts in the recursion.

Wil Wheaton demonstrates the signed shirt.

We asked Wil what he thought I should do when people confused me for him.  He said I ought to play along with it, and keep making things up that were so wild and crazy that eventually they would figure out I wasn't the real him.  Everyone was all for it, except of course, that I'm a terrible liar. 

After that, Liz and I got a quick picture with him (which was on Andrew's camera, so I don't have access to it yet), and we were off.  Andrew wanted to catch the end of Jonathan Frakes' panel, so we headed back to the hall.  While he met up with his girlfriend, Elizabeth, Josh and I sat in the back to watch.

When it was over, we were mulling around what to do next, and how long to stay, when a short and petite woman asked me whether I remembered a charity race from a few years back.  "Not really," I said, "I'm not Wil Wheaton."  She was taken aback for a moment, but then exclaimed at how much I look like him.  The shirt doesn't help matters, I conceded.  She wanted to take a picture with me, so I obliged.  I offered to kneel down to be closer to her height, but she said that she hated when people did that.

As the photo was being taken, another girl walked up and started taking my picture when she had left.  I asked her if she wanted a picture with me instead of just of me, to which she eagerly assented.  After that picture, a little kid wanted a photo with me.  I didn't have the heart to mislead him, so I told him who I wasn't, but did he still want a picture.  He did, and I obliged.

As we were finishing, the girl from before came back.  She shyly said she was sorry to bother me again, but she had forgotten to ask for my autograph.  Flabbergasted, I realized what I had done.  Taking pictures was one thing, but I didn't think I could forge his autograph in good conscience (or very well, without practice, and my only reference on my own chest upside-down in dim lighting).

"I'm not Wil Wheaton, I just look like him.  No really.  If you want me to sign your book," I offered, " I can still do it as Evil Wil Wheaton."  Confused, sad puppy eyes.  I felt like I had tainted her world.  She recovered quickly, though, and I scrawled my doppelganger identity, and asked if I could take a picture of her with my very first autograph.  She obliged:

My very first autograph.

What is Worship?

Over Christmas break I was down in California, and attended a bible conference.  I was asked to speak at that conference the previous week, and I chose the topic of worship.  Worship is something I've been thinking about for a while, and have mentioned before.

The audio recording of my talk is here (31 minutes MP3).  If you want links to the other speakers' messages, they can be found here.

Enjoy.  Think.  Discuss.

LastPass vs. Xmarks: Password Synchronization

Since Xmarks announced that they were being bought by LastPass, I decided to give LastPass another try.  In the past week I have done so.  Here are my thoughts.

LastPass Vault

Last time I tried the LastPass Firefox extension, I was put off by the requirement to log in every time I started the browser.  Subsequently, I've taken a different posture with regard to the security of my sensitive data on computers, and in particular on laptops.  I have now taken the tack that sensitive data needs to remain secure, even if a data thief has access to the hard drive.  As such, I started using KeePass to store my non-web passwords (whereas before I kept them in a plain text file), I created a TrueCrypt vault in my Dropbox folder in which I keep tax records and other sensitive documents, and I have started encrypting the passwords stored in the browser.

Initially, this meant that I had to swallow the enter-a-password-whenever-you-start-the-browser pill.  I didn't like this, but I adjusted my behavior to minimize instead of close the browser, and I used suspend or hibernate whenever possible instead of shutting down.

Well, with LastPass, you don't need to keep your browser running in order to stay logged in.  They have a desktop app which stores your logged-in state at the OS level, and communicates with all of your browsers.  That means you sign in once in Firefox, and you're automatically signed in in Chrome.  If (for some unknown reason) you are compelled to use MSIE for something and you're logged in there too.  (LastPass also supports Safari and Opera, but I don't currently use those.)

This scores major points with me in the trade-off between security and convenience!

LastPass Menu

Since I'm comparing LastPass to Xmarks, I should mention the basics.  Both services are ways of synchronizing your passwords between all of your web browsers on each of your computers.  Both services encrypt your data on your computer before transmitting it to their servers.  Xmarks uses your browser's built-in bookmarks database (which can be encrypted with a password or not), while LastPass uses its own encrypted vault to store the passwords.

The premise behind LastPass is that the password that encrypts your data could be "The Last Password You'll Have to Remember!"  If you only need to remember one password, then it can be a strong password, with different character types and such.

They certainly do go a long way towards making it possible to not type in (or even know) your passwords for any website.  LastPass can (optionally) create strong passwords for you that it will auto-fill and auto-login when you visit the appropriate site.  They have excellent browser support across all the major platforms, including smartphones, which brings us to their business model: LastPass is a freemium service.  They give you basic functionality for free, and when you're ready to be a power user, you can pay for the next level of service.  In the case of LastPass, this next level comes in the form of their smartphone apps, which, as I am not a premium member, and do not have a smartphone, are beyond the scope of this review.  I did, as promised, pay for Xmarks Premium, however.

Bookmarklets

So what happens when you can't install the LastPass extension?  As it happens, I'm not allowed to install the LastPass extension on my work computer.  That's OK though, because LastPass has some very excellent bookmarklets that allow you to fill in login information, form data, or simply log you in (as in automatically fill login information and submit).
A bookmarklet is a piece of Javascript that is stored in a bookmark.  You drag a link to your bookmarks bar or right-click to add it.  LastPass creates bookmarklets especially for your account (probably because it's more secure that way), so you'll need to log in to get them.  Instructions are here.

Anyway, at work, I stuck the "LastPass Login!" bookmarklet in my bookmarks toolbar, logged in to LastPass, and viola!  Instant access to my passwords.  (Okay, I had to add lastpass.com to my third party cookies whitelist, but that isn't necessary unless you block third party cookies.)  You can't add login information or form data to the LastPass vault with the bookmarklets, but you can do that with the website.

LastPass behaves much like your browser's normal password saving feature.  When it detects something it can do, a bar will pop down from the top of the browser until you take an action or dismiss it.  LastPass puts its logo inside form and password fields that it wants to interact with.  You can also access the LastPass menu from a button installed in your toolbar.

If you choose to save some information, you are presented with more options:

Saving a site's login information with LastPass

More things that LastPass can do:

Stored Mint.com password

•  Store and fill shipping and contact information, credit card data, or any other specific form on the web.  After installing the plugin, LastPass had collected much of this information from saved form fields (not credit card numbers though, obviously).
• Store passwords and other form data for sites that normally prevent your browser from storing the information.  One such site that blocks normal password saving is Mint.com.
• Import passwords from browsers and just about anywhere they're stored (including KeePass).  It will export to Firefox if you decide to stop using it.
• Store, retrieve, and print secure notes - something that might come in handy should the need arise.
• Share selected passwords with another user - this is useful if I want to be able to log in to Google and Facebook on my wife's computer and we each have separate accounts (or if we share access to a credit card account and the credentials change).  If I update the password in my LastPass account, the correct password shows up in hers as well.

LastPass confused by a Facebook form

LastPass isn't perfect, but it's pretty good, and I've decided to use it going forward.  One drawback of Xmarks' password syncing was that if you had more than one saved password with the same user ID (or no user ID) for a site, Xmarks would refuse to sync your passwords until you had either deleted one of the passwords or created separate profiles for each of the passwords.  One reason you might have two passwords with no username is on sites such as live.com, which save your username, but don't create an auto-filled form field for it and ask you to just re-enter your password.  LastPass handles this situation by giving you the option to select which credentials you want to use from a drop-down menu, or using keyboard shortcuts.

No More Xmarks: Now What?

Update: Xmarks is not dead after all.  Crisis averted.  Yay!  I'm keeping the post as-is below both for historical reasons and because it's still good information.

Xmarks just announced that they are closing up shop because they can't find a sustainable way to make money.  Earlier, I did a post on this blog comparing Xmarks and Firefox Sync.  It appears that now the option has been taken away from us.

What I ended up doing between the two services was using Firefox Sync for keeping everything in sync between my Firefox installations (bookmarks, passwords, etc.), but using Xmarks to keep bookmarks non-Firefox browsers synced, and also to share a few bookmarks folders.

As noted on the Xmarks shutdown page, there isn't a good replacement for inter-browser sync out there.  The closest I can think of is Delicious, but that site is built around sharing, not synchronization.

On the other hand, Delicious does an excellent job sharing bookmarks.  Since I was only really sharing one folder on the web with Xmarks, I installed the Delicious add-on for Firefox and imported that folder's bookmarks.  I made them public and gave them a unique tag, so that they could be shared as a collection. 

I've used Delicious for a while, mostly to collect links that I consider share-worthy.  I did this using the bookmarklet.  For a while, I was importing them into Facebook.  This appears not to be working anymore.

The Delicious add-on didn't work in Firefox 4 beta (which is what I'm running on my laptop).  I installed it, and (after banishing the toolbar and other annoying features) attempted to "import" the folder in question according to this guide.  It simply didn't work.  Literally nothing happened.  The "Import to Delicious" button was in black text on a mostly black toolbar at the top of the window, so they clearly haven't started integrating with Firefox 4.

I still have Firefox 3.6 installed, so I loaded it up, selected the folder, and clicked the button.  Nothing appeared to happen, but this time the bookmarks were uploaded.  Annoyingly, the "imported" column still shows nothing for those bookmarks, but at least it worked.  Well, sort of.  It didn't upload any of the tags I have assigned to the bookmarks locally to the cloud.  It just tagged them "imported".  Maybe this is expected behavior.  If so, there should be an option to upload the tags as well. 

Clearly, I'm not going to be using the Delicious extension for a while, but I don't know that I'll ever use it to keep all of my bookmarks in sync.  Delicious wants you to adopt their system of organization and interaction, and I'm not ready to do that.

At this point without Xmarks, I'm without a good solution to the following problems:

• Cross-browser syncing - Google will sync Chrome; Firefox Sync will sync Firefox; Windows Live Mesh will sync MSIE; but only Xmarks syncs between all three.Bookmarks profiles - Some bookmarks only need to be on certain computers.  Profiles allow you to selectively unsync the ones you don't need on computer A and B, while still keeping them on computers C and D.
• Bookmarks history - Xmarks allowed you to restore bookmarks from any point in your account history.  This came in very handy when I deleted more than I thought I had while cleaning up and only found out about it months later.
• Bookmarks sharing - Yeah, Delicious will let me share collections of bookmarks, but, at least currently, it's a pain to do so.  I've disabled the Delicious add-on.  I intend to keep the list up-to-date, but I will have to do so on the Delicious website, not from my bookmarks collection in the browser, and the two versions of the list will become out of sync.  The Delicious bookmarks also aren't sorted, and there's no way to store an introduction to them: the tag is just a tag, and contains no meta-data.
• Bookmarks favicons - It seems nit-picky, but it's a huge inconvenience if you re-install operating systems a lot.  Hopefully, the Firefox Sync developers will solve this one.  It's most annoying for toolbar bookmarks, because for me those are icon-only.  With Xmarks, all favicons are synced along with the bookmarks.  When you first sync with Firefox Sync, the toolbar icons all look the same.  In order to get the favicons to load, you have to visit each link.
• Bookmarks browsing from non-synced machines - I don't sync my bookmarks at work.  I can't access my bookmarks from other people's browser installations with Firefox Sync.  Xmarks gives me access to all of my bookmarks on the web, and I can even make changes and re-organize using the web interface.