Monthly Archives: May 2009

May 28, 2009 · 8:29 am

Questioning God

There’s been a lot of publicity lately for vocal opponents of God in general and Christianity in particular. With the popularity of Angels and Demons and other fictional books/movies also comes a curiosity about non-fiction anti-God or religion books, such as The God Delusion or God is Not Good. That’s normal, but for some people it’s a scary concept. Why? (excuse me as I ramble a bit about this)

The thing I find interesting (as does the media, as I keep seeing these stories everywhere) is that so many of the anti-God crowd used to call themselves Christians. Some of them seem to feel that this gives them more credibility, as they’ve now “seen through the lies” and they’re now better, happier people, free from the chains of organized religion. But almost all of them left Christianity because of a person or group of people within the Christian community who failed in some way. Continue reading →

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May 7, 2009 · 10:26 am

Quick Workaround for Yarssr in Ubuntu

Just a quick fix for anyone else having this issue right now:

When trying to start up Yarrsr yesterday it locked due to a feed it suddenly decided not to parse. (Though it had in the past – probably the feed changed on me, haven’t checked yet.)

When calling the program from the terminal I got this error:

*** unhandled exception in callback:
*** Can’t call method “get_url” without a package or object reference at /usr/share/yarssr/Yarssr/Feed.pm line 158.
*** ignoring at /usr/share/yarssr/Yarssr/GUI.pm line 115.

Here’s the quick perl hack to stop this from happening:

  • sudo gedit (or whatever program you want to use) /usr/share/yarssr/Yarssr/Feed.pm
  • insert a line before line 158 with: if ($item) {
  • insert a line after line 162 with: }
  • save the file

That let me open Yarssr and delete the feed with issues. I added a different feed with the same info. Works great now, no problems since. This doesn’t really solve the issue, it just keeps Yarssr from trying to deal with blank data from what I saw. But it let me open it, so I’m happy.

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May 1, 2009 · 5:54 am

7 Reasons to Write Fan Fiction (and one reason not to)

There are some people who believe that there are two kinds of writers in this world – real and fan fiction. While, granted, there is a lot of bad fan fiction out there, there’s also a far bit of horrible “real” fiction, so it seems to me that the stigma of writing fan fiction must have more to do with the idea itself than the products that come out of it. This is something that strikes me as unwarranted.

I write fan fiction. There, I said it. I’m also a published author, and yes, I do think there’s a connection. So let me share my top few reasons why I think writing fan fiction can be worthwhile and even really helpful for any budding fiction writer. Continue reading →

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