Hey, I’m moving everything over to a new server. Things might look a little strange until it’s done.

Update – 5/28/07, 1PM –

Still working on getting things set up. Discussion Forum is back up.

I just read this book titled The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. It’s by far the best business/productivity book I’ve ever read. It’s all about cutting out the garbage that robs your time, and pursuing the things that matter.

I think maybe I liked it so much because I’ve been trying to avoid a “real job” so hard for the last couple years.

There’s a lot of really important, counter-intuitive ideas laid out in this book. Like, for instance: Busyness is a form of laziness to avoid doing the important things you need to do. I have days where I check my email 10+ times a day, and get nothing done.

If you’re interested in this kind of stuff, and I suspect a lot of Pastafarians are, check out Tim’s blog here. Or go buy the book here.

Adherents.com has ranked the major religions of the world. What surprises me is that there are only around 500 thousand Scientologists, and that there are more – 600 thousand – Rastafarians in the world. Note that I said Rastafarians, not Pastafarians. Pastafarianism did not make the list, unfortunately.

Now I’m wondering how many Pastafarians there are in the world, and how we’d go about quantifying that. The FSM website has received well over 10 million unique visitors in the last two years. I’m guessing that the number of people vaguely familiar with FSM is in the millions, but that those who consider themselves Pastafarians number only in the tens of thousands. And of those people, I’m guessing that only some of them consider this a legit religion. For others it’s a joke, satire, entertainment, whatever.

I’m wondering how the mainstream religions count members. Do they count only those who truly follow the core beliefs, and disregard those who are there mainly for the social benefits? Or do they count everyone who’s signed up, or possibly those who pay dues?

Is FSM all that different than the other religions? How many Christians Truly Believe the Bible is the Infallible Word of God, and how many are members because they enjoy the social network and lifestyle that being Christian affords them? It seems to me that many Pastafarians enjoy this community, even if they don’t actually believe there is a Flying Spaghetti Monster controlling events around us at will. Of course, many of us do.

The Church of the FSM has no organized registration process – I’ve never liked the idea of it; it seemed too close to what the major religions do… tracking, asking for money – which I’m strongly against. But maybe it’s time for FSM to become more organized. What do you think? What do you want out of FSM?

The National Association of State Boards of Education will elect officers in July, and for one office, president-elect, there is only one candidate: a member of the Kansas school board who supported its efforts against the teaching of evolution.

…

The candidate is Kenneth R. Willard, a Kansas Republican who voted with the conservative majority in 2005 when the school board changed the state’s science standards to allow inclusion of intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism.

Read it in the NY Times here.

It’s unclear what this will mean for Pastafarians. My guess is that it will help our cause if Mr. Willard is elected.

We think it was probably our neighbor’s daughter’s friends.  Some of our other neighbors were around when it happened, and saw them sitting on the stairs, hanging out.  We’re thinking it’s unlikely that someone else walked up the stairs – past them, took a bunch of stuff and walked out.   They (the neighbor’s friends) said that they didn’t see anything, and then immediately took off. We know what school they go to, and the police lifted some fingerprints… so there’s hope.

Someone broke in while we were gone for 30 minutes and stole a bunch of stuff. It could have been much worse, but these things I will miss:

• IBM Thinkpad T43 Laptop – with a giant black pirate-fish decal on it. This had a LOT of FSM-related stuff that was in progress. I had a lot of stuff backed up, but it’s all older versions.
• Nkon D200 DSLR Camera with Nikkor 18-200mm VR Lens. It was less than 2 weeks old. Any pictures taken with it will have my name and email in the exif metadata.

If anyone comes across the above items by some chance, let me know please. I have the serial numbers.
Remember to back up your work frequently, and keep the backup somewhere else.