So today I learned how to change your prompt on the Mac OS terminal. At first, I was confused, however, as to why if I ran the bash shell from the Terminal my changes would show up, but if I just clicked on New Shell from Terminal's File menu, they didn't. Unsurprisingly for Unix, there was a complicated answer, having to do with the difference between two user profile files (which are actually shell scripts). One, .bash_profile, is executed on login (which is why it controls the Terminal settings); the other, .bashrc, is executed when the shell is invoked from inside another shell (or from inside X Windows, apparently, although that doesn't seem to hold true on the Mac). If you really want to learn more about the difference between .bash_profile and .bashrc, you could read this article. Or you could just type diff .bashrc .bash_profile. </end stupid Unix joke>...

What other "religion" combines all the thrills of science fiction with all the cloak-and-daggers drama of a spy novel?...

"Social networking is sooo last year: Come on, people. Social networking? Everyone should just get a blog or a personal webpage." I can see where "Student PR Blogger" is coming from (especially with regard to Facebook being a walled garden in the midst of an open Web). However, I think membership in a few social networks is actually worthwhile. The market's saturated now, so there's really no point for new groups to enter, unless they have some serious differentiators. But Facebook is useful - it just depends on who you know. I don't see the "Web 2.0" landscape as blogging vs. social networking, but rather as a feedback loop in which the two borrow the best features of each other. For example, MyBlogLog gives blogs an associated social network, and Facebook "Notes" are like a minimalist version of blogging. The core functions of blogs and social networks are different. Blogs...

Instead of doing the usual questions tonight, we broke out the Trinity Hymnal (the red one) and had a good old-fashioned hymnsing. No Indelible Grace, no CCM reworkings, just the originals. Who needs questions when the hymns have all the answers?...

Apparently Facebook just added a People You May Know block to their sidebar. Just when I thought I had found all the people I wanted to friend request... The network knows me better than I know myself....