Several years ago I saw a book at Barnes & Noble, "Who Wrote the Bible?" and I was compelled to buy it. Sadly, in the years hence I didn't have the same compellation to actually read the book, and it's sat on my bookcase all that time.

I was still intrigued enough by the subject though, that when I stumbled onto a concise analysis of Bible authorship theories in The Straight Dope, I read it.

Ever the king of the short attention span, I found this to be an excellent synopsis of a highly controvertial topic. If you're at all interested in the subject, this will let you learn in an hour what would otherwise take a semester, or at least many nights with a big fat book, to which you can turn if the article sparks more curiosity than it sates.

Note: The link goes to just the first segment of five, dealing with the authorship of the Five Books of Moses. The others address the Histories in the Old Testament, the Prophetic Books in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and a chapter on who decided which books should be included and excluded from the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish Bibles.

Interesting reading. Oh, and in case anyone's terribly offended, the articles present both the religious and the academic viewpoints, without drawing conclusions.

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A pair of tidbits: First is the first electronic bulletin board created in the '70s in (of all places) Leopold's Records in Berkeley (later bought by the Wherehouse, and even later closed and replaced by the neighboring Tower Records).

Next is Google's expansion of their Usenet search to posts from over 20 years ago. At over 700 million messages, it's the most comprehensive usenet library ever compiled.

Some notable posts in the new library are the first known use and explanation of emoticons (1982) (raise your hand in pride shame if you remember using 'J/K' to let people know you were 'just kidding' before the emoticon was invented), the first post to alt.religion.kibology (1991), the first thread about AIDS (1982), and a bunch of other pieces of collective net history that I'm so glad were saved after all.

My librarian/teacher friends (of which I recently realized are a staggering percentage) would be (are?) so proud.

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So I finally got rid of the source of one of my Windows frustrations. A while ago, I don't know how, a malicious program hacked into my computer, so that whenever I type in an incomplete URL, instead of going to MSN search, I get redirected to 'spacesea.net', a broken search frameset. When I close that window, an invisible window is spawned that throws up popup ads as much as an hour later.

The bitch is that it took a while to figure out that's where the ads were coming from. I never noticed the invisible window, discernable only by the box in the taskbar that says "Internet Explorer" but I could close all the windows on my screen, and 20 minutes later a stupid popup would come up.

Okay, long and short (and I'm posting this as much so people searching for 'popups' 'popunder ads' 'search takeover' or any of a number of other keywords will find this) is that the program adds a line to your 'hosts' file in Windows. This tricks your computer into thinking that the MSN search domain actually points to the spacesea.net IP address. to fix it, search for 'hosts' on your computer. Open the file in Notepad. Erase the entire line that has an IP # and says msn.search.microsoft.com or somesuch (*don't erase any other lines*). Save the file.

That oughta do it. you might have to restart to have it take effect.

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Live in the Bay Area? Have to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles? Check this out. It may be that you'll save time driving to a more distant branch.

Living near the El Cerrito and Oakland DMV offices, I still often drive out to Walnut Creek, just because it ends up being faster. It's nice to see some validation in print.

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So, in the theme of "If you want to do something right, do it yourself" or, in this case, with the help of a few friends.

So, without further ado, I present the 'Show Table Borders' bookmarklet v0.1.

It's only been tested in IE on the Mac, but you're more than welcome to tinker to get it to work wtih other platforms/browsers, but if you do, please let me know, so I can update the reference code here.

How to use:

1. Drag this link: Turn Tables to your favorites bar.
2. Navigate to a page that has tables.
3. Click the 'Turn Tables' link in the favorites bar

If it's working as it should, it will then iterate over the page you're looking at and set all the table borders to '1' so you can see them.

If you compose web pages with tables, especially if you do it by hand, you're thanking me right now... :-)

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I found a nifty site, Six Degrees of Kevin Fox, which has nothing to do with me, but I like it nonetheless. There really are a lot of us, I suppose.

On a more relevant note, I'm currently working on getting myself into the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) for the bit parts I had in "Carpool (TV)" "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear (TV)" "The Bad Seed (TV)" "Explorers" "Lost in America" "Mask" and "Domestic Life (TV). I'm already only two degrees from Kevin Bacon...

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Here are a couple links to tell you more about words than you ever thought to ask:

• Lexical FreeNet is a sort of ultra-thesaurus.
• RhymeZone is pretty much what it says, but also goes a little farther.

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A friend told me today about a study someone (with too much time) did on the 20,000 most common words in the English language. Turns out all of them have been registered in the .com TLD. Out of curiosity, I decided to check what grand purposes the low number domains are being used for:

• www.one.com - Minor telecom marcom site
• www.two.com - No DNS Entry
• www.three.com - 'Dave's place on the Internet'
• www.four.com - "How to configure Outlook Express for Internet Mail"
• www.five.com - Deadend Splash Page
• www.six.com - No DNS Entry
• www.seven.com - WorldNews.com
• www.eight.com - Layer Eight Systems (Financial Derivative Trader site(!?) )
• www.nine.com - Number Nine Visual Technology
• www.ten.com - Porn
• www.eleven.com - "Not for sale. Go away."
• www.twelve.com - Deadend Splash (Go-go Poster Bodoni)
• www.thirteen.com - Buy Me
• www.fourteen.com - No DNS Entry
• www.fifteen.com - 403 Forbidden
• www.sixteen.com - Porn
• www.seventeen.com - Seventeen Online Magazine
• www.eighteen.com - No DNS Entry
• www.nineteen.com - Porn
• www.twenty.com - 20/20 Software (Symmantec)
• www.twentyone.com - 403 Forbidden
• www.twentytwo.com - No DNS Entry

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I'm going into the city this afternoon, and I couldn't help but notice how many Starbucks there are in the financial district:

Soon they'll just be another utility: Garbage, gas, water, coffee...

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Can't remember the difference between Socratism and Platonism? Confused about the difference between Rationalism and Experientialism? If so, it's time to brush up on your Isms.

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