impleri

Hi, just letting you know that i’m alive.  X-Men 3 was decent, although it did violence to the comics.  Will i go see X-Men 4 if there is one?  Probably so….just without my Nightcrawler t-shirt.
i’ve been working on my computer…here’s a cool comparison:

• Windows XP Pro with some software (OpenOffice, Macromedia Web Suite, a test server [XAMPP], and a handful of games like Myst and Starcraft): 15 Gb.
• Debian Linux with the 2.6.16 kernel and mucho software (KDE 3.5, OpenOffice, KOffice, theGimp, a fully functioning server, Gnome 2.1, a bunch of neato widgets on the desktop including a news ticker, an hourly weather report, multiple resource monitors, and a blog aggregator): 6 Gb.

i’ve been running in Linux without a reboot for two weeks (minus a few hours where my power supply died on me for some strange reason) and haven’t needed to reboot at all.  Linux is definitely nicer than Windows.  By the end of summer, i may be removing Windows completely.  i’ll post screen shots of my desktop next week after i’m finished all of my papers.
Speaking of papers, here’s my “official” topics:

1. “Knowledge and Certainty” for my epistemology class.  My primary sources for this on are Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, Plato’s Theaetetus, and Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.  i am arguing here that one cannot have knowledge with certainty if that is seen as “being possibly wrong (i.e. falsifiable) but not being such” or (in other words) “being right without being wrong even though it’s possible.”
2. “After Nietzsche” for my (gasp!) Nietzsche class.  My primary sources are Mark Taylor’s Erring, Heidegger’s Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, and Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. i may also use Beyond Good and Evil for some citations.  i’ll argue here that Nietzsche is no long appropriate for theology, especially in a postmodern paradigm, because theology has evolved in such a way to make Nietzsche’s critiques inapplicable.  In other words, he’s good reading, but no longer useful for theology.
3. “Becoming Fundamentalist” for my (you guessed it) fundamentalism class.  My primary sources (so far) are Juergensmeyer’s Terror in the Mind of God, Tibi’s Challenge of Fundamentalism, and Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture.  In this paper, i argue that fundamentalism in Christian and Muslim circles have very strong influences in their respective religions and, in fact, both groups have been gravitating away from a “middle” and towards the sides of “fundamentalist” or “liberal.”