The technical problems Blogger was having when I first tried it seem to have been fixed.  I've put some new blogs on my site http://nehemiahspencer.blogspot.com/

Advantages of free blogging at Blogger.com include *free image hosting if you use Picasa (free) with Hello (also free), *the fact that you can leave me comments even if you are not signed up with Blogger, *an extensive ability to adjust blog settings in Blogger as compared to Xanga, and also *Blogger seems to lack the intrusive Flash-based ads as in the free Xanga blogs. In fact, I am not entirely sure how Blogger can provide such a great free service, but it seems to be pretty well established.

This said, from now on, my blogs will most likely be posted on my new blog at http://nehemiahspencer.blogspot.com/ 
unless I note otherwise. Talk to you there.

Having difficulty falling asleep tonight?  Well, just start reading this article on health insurance costs (from a medical economics website).  Aaagh.  I got a few words into the article...

Depending on your personality, though, it might jolt you awake as you learn of the horrific difficulties we are facing in health insurance nowadays.

Just a few days until I'm scheduled to fly out to Honduras!  I wish I could suddenly be fluent in Spanish.  But at least I am trying to learn it.

Well, after working hard on this computer at my grandmother's house, and trying to remove the spyware using freeware anti-spyware programs, I gave in and we bought the for-cost anti-spyware.  It did remove about 140 'infections' or so, but... well, the pop-ups continue.

And, now this new anti-spyware program is warning me that xanga.com may be a dangerous site for my computer, and in fact initially directed me away from the site.  aaaagh.  So I temporarily changed one of the major settings in that program so I could come here and blog.  I will have to change it back, though.  I hope it doesn't give me that problem with Blogger.com.

Hmm. Maybe Xanga is a potentially dangerous site?  Probably not intrinsically, though some malicious bloggers might post harmful codes to their blogs. Well, I am hoping www.blogger.com will get improved so I can begin blogging there instead.

I read an interesting Newsweek article about Jesus Christ a few minutes ago.  To me it is particularly cool that such an article made it onto such a major website. Although it had quite a few misleading statements and blurring of the truth, I was overall quite impressed with the amount of honesty in the article.  The redeeming feature of the article was that the author did not only share his own opinion -- but quoted numerous major people in Christian history including Paul, John, Jesus Himself, and others, and generally did not take their statements out of context. 

I say 'generally' because actually the Newsweek author did not always use quotes appropriately.  For example, he misrepresented Paul's meaning in Romans 11:33.  In nearing his conclusion for the Newsweek article, the author quoted the words of Jesus from John, "I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh." However, he then opined on the sum of his quotes from Jesus and the disciples, twisting Paul's words in the Romans 11:33 to suggest that the literal truth of the salvation Jesus offers cannot be believed with certainty.  I would beg to differ, and I know that Paul himself would entirely concur with me.

The article also inspired me to learn a little more about church history.  In first quoting eyewitness authorities the author of the Newsweek article gave strong support for the fact of Jesus' resurrection.  However, the article's author also provided some disgusting quotes, including one from Athanasius -- that Christ "was made man that we might be made gods."  Such a statement is clearly in disregard of direct Biblical reading, which rather teaches that Jesus was made man so we might be made right with God. This prompted me to read more about Athanasius, and a quick Google search returned some worthwhile pages.  Apparently he stands out as a fairly major figure in early church history, even being considered by some as 'conservative.' This page, from a reformed theology source, comments on Athanasius' quote above, saying it is "dangerous to speak of a deification of man."  Another site, from a charismatic source, had some good comments on the topic, pointing out that Jesus in John 10:35 did not mean that humans would become divine.

While that article might not lead an non-believer in Jesus to become a believer, it might at least provoke thought.  I hope it will be used of God to draw people towards Himself.

This computer is still giving lots of pop-up ads... most annoying.  I am seriously considering just buying the anti-scumware program instead of relying solely on the five free programs I've installed.  There went another popup. !

I am generally feeling chipper, though I am in some pain.  That cut I got on my right leg a few days ago hasn't exactly healed.  Instead, there is some pretibial edema below the wound (and believe me, I cannot remember a time in my life when I had pretibial edema) with some mild dark discoloration of that area.  I.e., I have a bruise, as my brother put it.  But still, I was concerned, because the wound itself has a kind-of achey pain.  Like, am I developing osteomyelitis of my tibia?  Aagh.  Osteo is not a thing to be desired, to say the least.  It is a horrible infection that slowly develops and is hard to cure.  Maybe I am a little hypochondriac.  But I think I had better give my cut a little bit more attention.

I feel sort of like the dude who said 'my kingdom for a horse'  though I guess I'd say, 'no cut on my leg for a horse...'  

"Wait, exactly what do you mean, Nehi???" "Er, that doesn't exactly make sense...."  (ok, ok. 'My kingdom for no cut on my leg.') 

Today we went and got some more firewood. It was good fun exhausting work as usual.  Then we came back and I played basketball with three of my younger brothers. It was fun also... and they are sure good at it. 

Then in the evening the whole family watched a nice movie together.  I didn't catch the name of it, but basically it was set in the pioneer days of America, and it followed the experiences of a boy who (years prior to the story in the movie) had gotten captured by Indians. In the movie, there was a peace treaty formed between the Indians and the whites that the whites would not harm the Indians if the Indians would return the whites they had captured. But the white boy who'd been captured and brought up as an Indian had a hard time accepting the idea of being a white person.  In his mindset all whites were evil and enemies.  Through his experiences he learned that there are evil people among the whites but also trustworthy people, and that the same was true among the Indians.  Of course there was the de rigeur love story (times 2 couples, no less!) integrated.  Not to be weird, but actually I personally thought that aspect was quite nice, if slightly unrealistic in the way it was portrayed. The white girl that the boy ended up loving was the indentured servant of a real creep who hated and killed Indians. The boy of course hated him and wanted to kill him.  But the girl (the indentured servant) was gracious and kind, and made some extremely insightful and wise comments to the boy about how anger and hatred affects people (when the boy was struggling through his emotions). 

It was a good movie in that it exalted good morals, some sense of justice - at least in the sense of the rough and unbridled pioneer-days - and clear thinking about appropriate personal responses to evil.  But there were quite a few points in the plot where it was a little weak / awkward / unrealistic.  But who am I to comment... I guess the way the story was portrayed really could have happened if that storyline took place in real life. And I suspect there were somewhat-similar real-life stories.  One of the best players, in my opinion, was a guy who played Davy Crockett in a movie we watched as a family yesterday evening.  He sure is a sharp shooter.

Well, Blogger is having problems, so for now I will continue to blog on this xanga site.  At least the blogger.com people admit they are having problems and they are actively working to fix those problems.

I myself am working on this computer at my grandmother's house. Whew, there is a lot more to computers than I previously understood. (Hmmm... how to explain this... it is complicated. Ok, Nehi, start basic.)

There are bad people in the world.
Bad people do bad things.
Bad things make problems.
(ok, maybe I had better speed up the logic a bit...)
Basically, there are these sneaky programs, referred to by terms such as 'adware,' 'scumware,' and 'spyware' and 'malware' that can get onto your computer without you realizing it. Ok, so these sneaky programs are on your computer. No big deal, right? Wrong. Since they were made by bad people, you can expect problems. (Remember the logic above?) Spyware-type programs collect your personal information off of your computer and send it back to the bad people.  Adware programs pop up nuisance ads to try to get you to spend money (and when you spend money, the company that made the adware program gets a little share in that money).

So, there are also programs designed specifically to help you find and get rid of bad programs.  Well, some of these good programs are free, and some cost money. 

I went online and read quite a bit about these various good (i.e. anti-spyware) programs.  I decided to install a couple of the free types, which allowed me to delete a lot of the spyware off of the computer. 

Well, I also had freely downloaded a locked-functionality version of an anti-spyware program that costs money if you want to use it as the fully-functional version (but as noted, I didn't want to have to spend the money).  This particular not-free program only identifies and lists the location of the spyware on the computer -- unless you pay for the program -- and then it will let you delete the spyware.

So, follow along  : the free programs got rid of a lot of the spyware on the computer.  Then I ran the locked-functionality not-free program... and disappointingly, the free anti-spyware programs had missed several 'infections.'  "Well," I thought, "I guess I could try to delete the remaining infections manually."

This is where things get tough, and I'm not sure I'm going to take the time to follow through with this.  It turns out that a bunch of the bad programs had done stuff to the computer's Registry.  Ok. And, it turns out that this Registry thingy is something an ordinary computer user shouldn't mess with, or else will risk wrecking the computer.  (Quite literally... that is practically a quote off of Microsoft's support website.)  So, while it would not be entirely impossible for me to fix the Registry if I were extremely careful and had lots of time, I only have the former resource (carefulness) and not the latter to expend.

Below, I've put some links to the Microsoft support webpages. I was reading these when I began to get the suspicion that "hmm... maybe it was good that my father wanted me to go into medicine rather than into computer science."  Whew... this is deep computer stuff... aaaggh.  Then again, to be fair, medical knowledge is just as overwhelming (if not more so). But take a glance at these pages, and you might understand why I was a little overwhelmed...   

Description of the Microsoft Windows registry

How To Backup, Edit, and Restore the Registry in...

How to Install Windows 98 on a Computer with No Operating System

If you wonder why that last link is part of all this stuff about the Registry... well, basically I learned that if you mess up the Registry the computer might not start, and you might have to totally re-install Windows itself. In otherwords, you lose absolutely everything you have in the computer, and you have to start from the beginning.

So, I decided, hmm, maybe I will tolerate having a few bad adware programs on my computer. At least I have four free and relatively good anti-adware programs on my computer (in addition to the antivirus program I already had installed some time ago). In fact, I just downloaded another free anti-adware program, and I guess I will install it also. That makes five total. 

Whew, this is probably tiring just to read. And wow, I need to be spending my time studying Spanish.