New Blogging Tool

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Yes, I'm Here

What's that you say, something about voting in Super Tuesday? Well, yes I voted. First time I have ever voted in a primary actually. Who did I vote for? The winner of course!

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Prime Example of why you should vote for Ron Paul

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New PCA School Video

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Fighting Colds

I woke up Tuesday morning with a dry and slightly sore throat. I immediately gargled with warm saline water. When I start to get a cold, this is one thing that I do a couple times a day. One of my wife's Filipino friends who is a doctor told me about this. It does seem to help with upper respiratory viruses. As the day wen on Tuesday, I could sense that something was coming on. So I started taking more vitamin C. I mean like 2 to 4 grams an hour. I might take a gram or two every 20 minutes. I noticed Tuesday afternoon as I started taking more that I was tolerating well. That is to say, I was not passing gas or feeling any rumbling in my stomach. This means something is going on. The vit C is fighting free radicals caused by a virus.

When I got home, I took some niacin. 300 mg in a no-flush time release capsule. Gargle again with warm saline before bed and try to go to sleep early. I woke up around 4 am feeling a bit sick. Don't let up at this point. Since I was up, I hit it with more vit C and warm saline water. I was able to get back to sleep after a while and when I woke up, I felt a little better. The cold was mostly in my head. I had a little congestion but the vit C has an antihistamine effect and I could still breath through my nose through all this time.

I went to work but made sure I had enough vit C to take throughout the day. I also took another niacin tablet to take in the afternoon. I was feeling a bit tired but I still had enough energy to work through the day. In fact, I first thought I might go home early but there was plenty of work to do and I felt well enough to make through to 5.

It was now Wednesday evening and I felt things were on the up. I suspected the cold would begin to migrate to my chest as these things typically do. But I was optimistic that I had it under control and would be well by the weekend. I still kept up the same routine. Letting up slightly on the amount of vit C as Thursday afternoon came around.

It's now Friday morning and I am almost recovered. There is slight congestion in my nasal cavity and very slight coughing left over but I should be in near perfect shape by tomorrow.

Yes, this approach takes a bit of work. Compared to taking a 24 hour cold pill, you have to take vitamin C frequently throughout the day. But the energy level is quite different. There is no antihistamine haze. That dull, loss of energy, sleepy feel that you get from cold medication is completely absent. In fact, I have lots of energy with just some congestion to contend with. Also notice that this particular virus is shortened quite a bit (maybe a subjective observation but I've seen this frequently enough to say it's true for me).

How about you? If you would like to try this method, the first thing to do is start taking more vit C, even when you are well. I would start with a gram with breakfast and dinner. Start adding more if you wish. At the first appearance of cold symptoms, try a gram an hour and see how it goes from there.

One more thing is to take vitamin D in the winter. I ran out of my vitamin D supplements last week. Normally I take 2000 IU per day. I had not ordered more to arrive in time so this could have contributed to my catching a virus. I would also take more vit D if I catch something.

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A Strange Beast: The 18th Century Baryton

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Training Circuits

• 8 squats. These are body weight done fairly quickly. Might bump these up to 10 soon.
• 5 push ups. Done fairly quickly.
• 15 jumping jacks. Foot work and a little aerobic space in the circuit is good.
• 4 modified curls. This is a form of ab curl. raise your back off the floor a couple of inches and hold for about 4 seconds.
• 2 side bridges (2 on left, 2 on right that is). Hold for 10 seconds.
• 15 seated rows using blue resistance band. Pull back to sides of chest quickly, release slowly.

Repeat this circuit 4 to 6 times. I will try to get in 4 to 5 of these workouts per week. As the temperature warms up I will do more running at lunch and add bicycle commuting. My primary goal this year will be to do a 5k under 22 minutes.

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Ron Paul on Health Care

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

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Calcium Supplements Questioned.

And notice the irony of the natural food store banner in the photo accompanying the Yahoo News article. Calcium is one of the few supplements that doctors frequently suggest that older people should take! So it's not really in the realm of an alternative therapy.

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Blowback

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Why Ron Paul?

Consider foreign policy for example. I have always thought that the concept of a pre-emptive strike in order to defend ourselves was in theory justifiable. But still I have felt reservations about the war in Iraq. The question which always surfaces in my mind is one of cost. Cost in lives and money. Is the action worth this cost? I haven't come up with a positive answer to this even after several years if the conflict and the surge in troops implemented recently. There is also the question of purpose in Iraq. Are we there to defend ourselves or to Nation Build? Nation building in the name of democracy is certainly a positive idea but the question of cost in this is also a highly worthy question as well. How much are we willing to pay in lives and financially to accomplish this? Again, I am not coming up with a highly affirmative answer. But on the other hand, the liberal side has seemed overly pacifist and lacking in understanding the importance of religious world view as it relates to the world of Islam.

I have been aware of Ron Paul for a couple of years now. Mostly his work in defending dietary supplements has been most encouraging to those of us who take supplements. But as this election process has starting winding up, I have increasingly started reading and listening to Ron Paul's ideas in other areas. I think Ron Paul's ideas on foreign policy are misunderstood by my conservative friends. His main thrust as I understand it is to emphasize making war in a constitutional manner. That is, getting a declaration of war from the congress. Consider if we had a declaration of war against Iraq for the purpose of deposing Sadam Husan and establishing a democracy. If such a declaration were made and passed by congress, the military would have a full mandate from the American people to prosecute such a war to the fullest. It would be over quickly and done. So that's the main thing that resonates with me. Let's real in these actions initiated by presidents and get back to the way our constitution was designed. I encourage all my readers to consider voting for Ron Paul in the upcoming primaries.

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Legos Now Supporting Ron Paul?

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Chanting the Psalms

But of course, we have no idea of what this music sounded like or how the text of the Psalms was set to music. The obvious conclusion from this is that God simply did not regard the form or style of music as important. But that they are meant for music is perhaps much more important than most churches think today. So the next question is how do we go about setting the text of the Psalm to music today?

Part of this question involves the importance of being faithful to the text. Because when you try to put the Psalms to a metered style of music (with a strict time signature), you immediately have trouble. So many composers alter the text and paraphrase it. Or just use fragments of a Psalm. Now this can be good and useful but there is still the need to set complete Psalms in exact wording to music.

One way to do this is to use chant. This may not sound very appealing to many of my church going friends but don't dismiss it without good consideration.

One of the resources in our class was a book published by Concordia Publishing here in St. Louis, Reading the Psalms with Luther. This book primarily provides some good insights into the meaning and purpose of each Psalm. But it also has these 8 chant (listed below) tones and each Psalm is pointed in a manner that allows you to chant each Psalm using one of the tones. These tones are fairly simple. And since there are no suggestions as to which tone will go with any particular Psalm, I decided to try and help with selecting a tone by giving a brief analysis. Thanks also to my interest in the Lilypond music typesetting program, I am able to share my thoughts and the tones with everyone. I have highlighted words and phrases so you can quickly determine the character of each tone. So by printing this out and going through the Luther's book, you can hopefully more easily determine which tone might work for a particular Psalm. Without the book it's a little more tricky as it adds the points where you change from the sustained tones. I suppose you could try to do this yourself but for the novice, this might be difficult.

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Converting Old LPs to Digital Form

Update

Sometimes, there are other types of vinyl artifacts that the pop filter will not get. There is a repair plugin that works quite well on these. You have to use the zoom tool and isolate the artifact very precisely. The repair plugin seems to use some kind of interpolation to smooth out the wave form in between the end points. So far, this tool works excellently and I have been able to eliminate some hiss and scratch type things from the recordings.

As far as selecting tracks, I am doing this visually. I check the time of a track and scroll through the display to find it. Then select the whole track. I don't see any kind of automated way to do this but I actually haven't looked very closely to see if there is. Perhaps because I am picky enough that I want to do it all precisely with my own eyes and ears. There is an export selection item on the file menu that allows you to save to whatever format you desire. I have been saving to WMA which I can then convert to Ogg or MP3 at a later time.

Many of the recordings I have are not re-released on CD so I don't think there is any information available from CDDB. But I haven't really looked into this. I don't see anything within Audacity in this regard.

As you can imagine, there can be a significant amount of time involved with selecting and refining all the tracks from an LP. This can depend on several factors. How picky you want to be with eliminating noise, pops, and hiss as well as what kind of shape the recordings are on are the most obvious factors.

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