Scale of universe

Some recent comments I made on another blog concerning same-sex marriage.

http://trinitariandon.blogspot.com/2007/04/california-mischief.html

Trojan.Packed.13

University of Bangor, Wales

As of today, the last major written chapter of my PhD dissertation, prior to the empirical work, is almost done and I therefore can soon fully concentrate on gathering questionnaires and working on tabulating my results.

I have just received my third email within 24 hours with an attachment with the following message.

This message has been processed by Symantec's AntiVirus Technology.

postcard.exe was infected with the malicious virus Trojan.Packed.13 and has been deleted because the file cannot be cleaned.

The latest email had the subject Your Friend and Lover. Hmm, I knew that one was phony right away! I am glad Norton caught these viruses as some Trojan have managed to end up in my registry previously. Over time I have added more security programs. My opinion is that Microsoft and their operating systems should prevent viruses and spyware to a greater degree. There should be less necessity for secondary security software. The three email messages came to an email address associated with this blog, and so the email address could have been found through this blog, although I am not stating that this is likely. I shall continue posting articles and comments on some of the interesting material that is emailed to me. I do this is for both educational and satirical purposes. Below is a link from Symantec with information about Trojan.Packed.13.

http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/security_response/weblog/2007/04/middle_east_war_or_just_more_j.html

Middle East War, or just more junk email?Over the weekend Security Response received samples of the latest variants of Trojan.Peacomm and W32.Mixor doing the rounds. The social engineering trick employed this time is in appealing to people's sense of fear as well as natural curiosity of a possible Middle East war involving the United States, Iran and Israel.

Subjects include "USA Just Have Started World War III" / "Missle Strike: The USA kills more then 20000 Iranian citizens" / "Israel Just Have Started World War III" / "USA Missile Strike: Iran War just have started". From the sample emails that we have seen to date, the actual email body is blank, and the attached files have various names such as "video.exe", "movie.exe", "click here.exe", "clickme.exe", "readme.exe" and "read more.exe".

Proactively detected by Symantec antivirus software as Trojan.Packed.13, the underlying threats are actually nothing new. They are simply minor variants of Trojan.Peacomm and W32.Mixor (named W32.Mixor.AR@mm in this instance) which have been repacked in an attempt to avoid existing detection, and appear to have been largely successful at that attempt. The only differences between W32.Mixor.AR@mm and previous versions apart from the obvious email subjects are the filenames and registry values. A writeup has been posted containing this information. Continuing along the lines of the previous variant, Trojan.Peacomm employs rootkit technology, as described in a blog entry posted back in January.

Even though Symantec customers were protected from this without the need to update definitions, there is never a good time to let your guard down, even during a festive season when goodwill to others should surely be the overriding theme. The more shocking or unbelievable the subject of emails such as these, the more the contents should be treated with the suspicion they usually deserve. Hopefully the Easter bunny delivered something a little more pleasant to the majority than this tedious offering.

Posted by John McDonald on April 9, 2007 12:10 AM

This arrived by email and is not from my ISP.

Manchester United 4 Europe 3

Some fairly quick highlights from the March 13, 2007 match. A wide open friendly with some goals worth viewing.

I went through several negative experiences while living in Manchester, England from September 1999 to July 2001. These included being bottled, burgled twice, and losing my appointment at a University due to my temporary advisor's insistence that I write from a secular and not Christian world-view. I quit the department. I also had serious untreated allergies and serious undiagnosed sleep apnea. On the positive side, I gained some Christian friends, experienced the English lifestyle, ate very good food and had home membership to Manchester United and away membership to Arsenal. I saw matches at Manchester for both United and City, and viewed matches in London, Liverpool, Leeds, and Birmingham. I truly miss attending matches with a friend from church. Manchester is not the tourist centre that London is and so if you have never visited the United Kingdom I would of course suggest visiting London for the sites and perhaps visiting Manchester. Manchester is worth seeing even if just to view Old Trafford and Manchester United. There are also a lot of University students and clubs in Manchester, but I have never been interested in clubbing much. All in all I am glad I lived in England and pleased I have my British citizenship through my Dad which makes living there again quite possible. It is difficult to completely understand life lessons from experiences but although I do not consider myself overly proud of overly egotistical, I reason the Lord reaffirmed in my mind that success or failure is largely due to his guidance. Some things are somewhat under my control, but all things are under his control. I was fortunate to become involved with the University of Wales and look forward to completing my PhD dissertation with them.

Russ

Good Friday Thoughts

Victoria, BC

1. http://www.waltermartin.org/realaudio.html

For the month of April there is a taped debate featured on the resurrection, between the late Dr. Walter Martin and Dr. Dale Miller. I bought the debate on tape about 15 years ago and have since converted in to mini-disc. Martin takes a traditional, orthodox perspective and Miller attempts to explain that resurrection has a variety of Biblical meanings.

The gospels discuss a resurrected Christ who has a body of both physical and spiritual nature, and the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15: 44 explains that the resurrection body shall be spiritual. Let me be clear from Paul's perspective if Christ was not raised, there is no resurrection of the dead and preaching and the faith is in vain, as he states in 1 Corinthians 15: 13-14. Biblical Christianity cannot survive without a literal physical resurrection of Christ after completing his atoning work. This resurrection leads to the eventual resurrection of believers. Religion, or a form of cultural Christianity can exist with the primary belief in a metaphorical, figurative resurrection or resurrections, but it is not supported by Scripture. Dr. Gary Habermas has done years of academic research on the resurrection of Christ.

http://www.garyhabermas.com/

2. http://www.technorati.com/

I think that this blog ranking and linking service is helpful, although I had to email technorati several times and eventually fax them until they finally updated my thekingpin68 philosophical theology blog after almost half a year. To me the ranking is not primary in importance as a blog's level of quality cannot be completely evaluated through a process of counting links and hits etc. However, I like knowing through technorati who is linking to my blogs and to read comments being made on other blogs. For a small blog which is less than a year old, satire and theology has done fairly well and I appreciate those who read the articles, comment and link me. Originally thekingpin68 was my only blog but I wanted to separate my philosophical theology from my satirical material and so I created kingpinned and eventually satire and theology. Kingpinned now contains photos of my comic art!:) I figure that I own the site and so I might as well use it. Thekingpin68 originally contained more articles in the beginning years of 2004-2005 and some are now on this blog in the archives. I wish that thekingpin68 was ranked higher than this blog by technorati as I put more time into the articles on that site, but I aim for the highest quality with both sites and realize that both blogs are ranked pretty well for small blogs. Satire and theology is a bit easier to read with shorter articles and has satire, sports etc. that thekingpin68 does not. Some persons are just not into reading long academic type articles and I can understand that fact. I am so busy that I do not often take the time to fully read academic blog articles, I often just skim. I recommend for those of you who may try reading thekingpin68 to try skimming. From 16 years of academic work I can tell you that skimming can be beneficial. Now of course when writing my dissertations I go over some written material again and again. Satire and theology also often offers more personal theological reflection than thekingpin68. I suppose that some who read thekingpin68 find my theology interesting but may not be interested in some of the shenanigans that go on here, and so I have two theology related blogs! I have looked at most of the rankings for bloggers that comment and link my blogs by the way. Some of you should check to see if technorati updates your rankings and links, if you care.

Russ:)