Entries from June 2009 ↓

I ran into some instructions on the web on how to get excommunicated from the Catholic church. I was surprised how difficult it was. They sure seem to want to do everything they can to keep you on their rolls.

So I was curious, what would it take to get excommunicated from the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod? Would it be so difficult? Apparently not. Here’s the email exchange about my request to be excommunicated:

“Hello, I was baptised in Ashland, Wisconsin at
Zion Lutheran Church in 1963. I am an atheist and wish to be
excommunicated. This is not a joke. What must I do?”

“Dear Jesse, thank you for contacting the LCMS Church Information Center.
There is nothing to do. By not attending services, you have chosen to
voluntarily sever your connection with the church.

Blessings on your day! Joy and peace in Christ,

Diane
LCMS Church Information Center”

What do you know about that? Nothing to it! I’m out! Or, am I? I’d bet any amount I could waltz straight in to any LCMS church in the world and they’d be happy to have my “offerings”. I found nothing on the LCMS web site discussing excommunication.

I don’t think they have any system of internal checks at all.

Wait a minute. That means they could be infiltrated, doesn’t it? Who’s to say it hasn’t already happened? We could walk among them, undetected. For whatever good it would do.

I usually don’t hold much stock in psychometrics.  As an exercise in that management course I took in London a couple weeks ago, we touched on various tools.  One that I remembered taking nearly twenty years ago at the USAF NCO Academy at Keesler AFB, MS, was the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

While the instructor was talking, I took an online MBTI test.  I am still an INTJ.  My strengths of preferences were 11%, 25%, 50%, and 78%, respectively.  There are books written on interpreting those results.

It turns out I am in a group making up between 1 and 2 percent of people.  [un-referenced claim follows] Of the INTJ’s, 37% of them are measured to be in the top 2% of the population in IQ (as am I).  Now you may bow down before me.  Ow.  Hurt myself patting my own back for my cleverness.

What I ran into yesterday was the INTJ Central website.  Their Compleat Idiot’s Guide to the INTJ is absolutely brilliant!

I was reading it late at night and nearly woke up my wife so she could read it, too.  The accuracy is stunning and specific.  Anyone who knows me will agree, I don’t doubt.

When I find the same thing measured twice, and confirmed by other similar measures, it makes me take more notice of it.  There is a lot to read about on this subject, so I’ve got something new to entertain me for a while.

I had been, for a few years, hosting my blogs on my Mac G5 desktop from my home. I was using the updatedd dynamic DNS client to keep the world able to find me by host name, which was hit and miss sometimes with my DNS provider.

After waiting a month for my ISP to deliver a fixed IP address, I decided to host my blogs off-site with a professional hosting service.

Enter DreamHost.

They were second on the list of recommended hosting services at wordpress.org.  No content censorship.  Their sales staff answered my questions about multiple domains and blogs in minutes.  They got my business, no problem.

Setting up a new blog is really about as simple as a few clicks.  Moving a blog from one server to another isn’t quite so easy, but I did it.  Not without a few minor glitches, but those were caused by customizations on my Mac, not with my new hosting service.

The Skepdick is now professionally hosted, availability and speed should be far superior than what I could deliver over a residential DSL line.

Got to give a thumbs up to DreamHost.

I’m away for the week, attending a management course in London.  After the first day, I am disappointed to report I have learned nothing new.

The hotel, at GBP 150 a night, can’t even give wifi internet access.  Money grubbing bastards.

So, I’m next door at the British Library, using their free wifi.  What a great library.  I think.  I didn’t bring anything with my address on it so I can’t actually get a library card to get into the fucking library.  Crap!

A woo report:  The hotel I’m staying in, Novotel St. Pancras, has no floor 13.  Actually, they do, they just call it floor 14.  What the hell?  Does this superstition still carry such weight?

I ought to accidentally break one of their mirrors to give them some real bad luck.