Spoilers for the "American Idol" eliminations -- and the not-as-nauseating-as-feared new twist -- coming right up... So, short version: Jasmine Murray and Jorge Nunez go home. Megan has to stand on stage with Jasmine, and Anoop has to stand with Jorge, even though DialIdol said Noop Dogg was safe(*)...

Here in the US, the topic of electronic medical records has popped back to the top of the agenda, due to an impending mass injection of government money. Long talked about, long promised and long mandated ( remember HIPAA? ) -- electronic medical records in the US are for all intents and purposes st...

Can anyone help me pick a new hard drive for my first generation MacBook? I have a first generation Intel MacBook, the 1.83 GhZ white model. It has an 80GB hard drive. These are not enough gigabytes, I'd like more (250GB/500GB/1TB) I'm comfortable cloning my existing drive and popping a new drive in...

Spoilers for last night's "Reaper" coming up just as soon as I get a Bluetooth... The CW sent out two episodes for review: the season premiere, and next week's "The Sweet Science." Yet "Dirty Sexy Mongol" was by far the most entertaining of the three. Weird how that works sometimes. This one was a v...

Spoilers for tonight's "American Idol" coming up just as soon as I keep my wife a secret to avoid alienating the 'tween demographic... Before we get into the song-by-song breakdown, a few general thoughts: 1. This was an incredibly long show. I'm not sure I've ever felt more exhausted by the end of ...

As the seventh novel in David Hewson’s mystery series featuring Nic Costa, DANTE’S NUMBERS is the first to take its protagonist away from his native Rome. But that alone is not why this book is so uneven and frustrating. Costa and his associates are assembled at the Villa Borghese in Rome for th...

Yesterday YouTube announced it would no longer run "high quality" (aka legal) videos in the UK as the Performing Rights Society is charging too much for performers rights to make it viable (here is the BBC article). US internet radio station Pandora had a similar issue last year and pulled out of th...

A few folks asked me to update how the Bible study went on Saturday. Jason and I read through the first chapter of "Stranger on the Way to Emmaus." Of course, it didn't start there. I spent over 2 hours on Friday night reading it and looking up about 60 words I didn't know. We discussed the main poi...

One of his church members described Pastor Fred Winters as "a happy soul."  He had good reason to be. Fred Winters was the loving husband of a wonderful wife and the proud father of two beautiful daughters.  He was by any standard of measure highly successful in ministry. ...

Spoilers for tonight's "How I Met Your Mother" coming up just as soon as I alert the sommelier... Wow. I've been enjoying "HIMYM" for the most part this year, but an episode like "Sorry, Bro" -- both the funniest and most uniquely "HIMYM" episode dating back to at least "The Naked Man," if not to la...