tales of an ordinary girl

Astronomy
Ring of Fire



The Milky Way Over Mauna Kea



A Partial Eclipse Over Manila Bay



Games
Popular WoW automation tool infringes Blizzard's copyright
Blizzard's claims for copyright infringement were worrisome to many of us following the case. The company's argument was that Donnelly's program made a copy of the game in a computer's RAM in order to circumvent WoW's anti-cheat protection; because Glider violates the End User Legal Agreement, players are no longer allowed to copy the game into RAM, thus leading to copyright-infringement. This idea seemed majorly flawed, as it could severely hamstring the rights of any computer user, since any program being used will copy portions of itself into RAM. Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that fights to scale back copyright law, even got involved in the case by filing an amicus brief that argued this copyright theory was far too broad and potentially dangerous, an argument that Judge Campbell rejected.

Music
Tim Minchin's Storm



Recipe
Perfect Sushi Rice
Sushi has an interesting beginning: people in China (funny, since sushi is a Japanese dish) used to cure large pieces of fish in between two flat layers of vinegar-soaked rice. They’d create a flat layer of rice, pour a vinegar solution over it, then lay a single layer of fish all over the rice. Then they’d top it with another vinegar-soaked layer of rice and let it cure for a length of time as a means of preserving it. When the fish was ready, they’d discard the rice and keep the fish. I guess somewhere along the way, someone got the munchies early, grabbed a big mouthful of the fish and rice, and decided it was a treat in itself.

Religion
Haggard Revisited
The church wanted to squelch the fact that Haggard was a practicing homosexual for several years, while he was one of the primary leaders of the evangelical movement in America. Instead, they tried to spin Haggard’s scandal as a single “wild streak” of aberration during a short span of time. Why? Because these facts cast an even greater uncertainty upon the basic principles of Christianity. If the greatest, most faithful among them could not for years cast off his evil nature—how could anyone? Or, could the top leaders of Christianity be mere charlatans? These are questions they don’t want people to ask. They are not profitable.

This ugly fact splays wide the festering wound they continue to inflict upon homosexuals with their obviously flawed doctrine. Even while one of their very elect is a hard-coded homosexual, they lie and wiggle to preserve the message that no, he is a heterosexual who was merely attacked by Satan with unnatural desires. This causes homosexual Christians to hate themselves, and heaps more shame upon “the guilty,” who will, in turn, require the church’s exhonoration services.

Was High School Girl Possessed In Class?
Students at a Mississippi high school said a fellow student spoke in tongues and made grave predictions for her classmates for three days.

Some of those predictions included when students would die.

Pelahatchie High School students called reporters from TV station WAPT, convinced that an evil spirit had taken over Lashundra Clanton.