It is the story about Father Brendan Flynn and Sister Aloysius Beauvier. The Sister believes the father is guilty of something terrible and she is trying to convince the other in the church . The Problem is, there is no proof that he committed a crime, only circumstantial evidence. But she is certain of his guilt, despite the lack of proof. It’s a strong story, and the director left up to the audience to draw their own conclusions.

One of the best scenes in the film is when Father Flynn gives a sermon on Gossip:

A woman was gossiping with a friend about a man she hardly knew— I know none of you have ever done this—that night she had a dream. A great hand appeared over her and pointed down at her. She was immediately seized with an overwhelming sense of guilt. The next day she went to confession.

She got the old parish priest, Father O’Rourke, and she told him the whole thing. “Is gossiping a sin?” she asked the old man. “Was that the hand of God Almighty pointing a finger at me? Should I be asking your absolution? Father, tell me, have I done something wrong?”

“Yes!” Father O’Rourke answered her. “Yes, you ignorant, badly brought-up female! You have borne false witness against your neighbor, you have played fast and loose with his reputation, and you should be heartily ashamed!”

So the woman said she was sorry and asked for forgiveness. “Not so fast!” says O’Rourke. “I want you to go home, take a pillow up on your roof, cut it open with a knife, and return here to me!”

So the woman went home, took a pillow off her bed, a knife from the drawer, went up the fire escape to the roof, and stabbed the pillow. Then she went back to the old parish priest as instructed. “Did you gut the pillow with the knife?” he says.”Yes, Father.” “And what was the result?” “Feathers,” she said. A world of feathers.

“Feathers?” he repeated. “Feathers everywhere, Father!”

“Now I want you to go back and gather up every last feather that flew out on the wind!”

“Well,” she said, “it can’t be done. I don’t know where they went. The wind took them all over.”

”And that,” said Father O’Rourke,“is gossip!”

The acting is spot on. Philip Seymour Hoffman, really shines in this role. Streep, plays the part of a paranoid spiteful nun perfectly. Amy Adams is also a good pick for the young nun who doesn’t know what to believe, and wishes everyone could resolve the issues peacefully.

The greatest asset of this film is that it really makes you think. This man’s reputation was destroyed because one woman accused him of something awful, without proof. She is so sure that she knows what she is talking about. But by half way through the film, you have to wonder if she has the slightest idea what she’s doing at all when it is clear she is ready to ruin any relationship in their circle without pause to consider the consequences for those not directly involved.

You don’t hate the Sister so much as feel bad for her for the way she handles the situation. Everyone in the church is on edge, unsure what to believe. However, he may very well be exactly what she thought, but that does not make it alright to spread rumors and opinions as fact. Because of this, the Father has no options available, he is ruined.

I have to repeat that: Regardless of your personal feelings towards someone else, no one should present third party information, otherwise know as rumors, and personal opinions, as facts. There is a words for that. “Libel” and “Slander”. Otherwise known as Defamation.

I had to do some research or this on this thought provoking concept. Here is what Wikipedia has to say:

In law, defamation (also called calumny, libel (for written publications), slander (for spoken word), and vilification) is the communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group, government or nation a negative image.

This could be a lesson to some. In Doubt, Sister Aloysius, got her way when the Father left the church that he so passionately wanted to help, all because his reputation had been hurt beyond repair, by slander.

But it came together nicely in the closing scene, when the sister breaks down and cries uncontrollably on the shoulder of another nun. The truth in her heart is revealed. She see that she really wasn’t sure about anything, and she destroyed an innocent man, and left the the relationships, and trust, of everyone else in ruin.

Gossip. Slander. Libel. DEFAMATION.

When a person lets their personal feelings and opinions get in the way of what is the right thing to do, and if a person becomes blinded by anger, they may mistakenly say something they will regret.

An accusation that someone is committing a crime. As an example, if it was said, “I know this person is a criminal” instead of “I personally think this person is a criminal” and you have no evidence what so ever that the the statement you are portraying as fact, is based in truth…

Well then, you crossed the line from “harmless gossip” to something else. Something much, much worse. And if that thing that you say, either in written text, or spoken word, does in fact turn out to be a lie or false, then it is you who have really become the criminal.

Just like in the sermon that Father gave… it’s too late to put the feathers back in the pillow.

What do you think?

With the release of Version 3, Smplr is no longer just a glorified google search. New functionality allows a user to quickly and easily go to a direct Url, search for a stock quote, news, weather, wikipedia, the internet movie database, tv shows, recipes, ebay, bittorrent, price grabber, and yes, even Thottbot for those World of warcraft fans. and more still to come.

And lets not forget that is still looks great, Version 3 currently allows for 5 distinct and amazing wallpaper visual styles that are easily changeable.

Although I have yet to pick up an iPhone, I do believe this may be perfect homepage for any Iphone user. Testing still needs to be done to insure full compatibility but with the visual styles and the ease of use Smplr.com is now a viable home page option.

1. I Feel the same.

I currently like: Apple, Linux, Google, Firefox, Youtube, Web 2.0, Firefly/Serenity, Lost, Family guy, Dane Cook, Colbert, Xbox360, Nintindo Wii, Revision3, and of course Digg.

I currently dislike: Microsoft, Myspace, Bush administration, N.Korea, Fox News, Playstation3

I say ‘currently’ because, like most digg users, I can’t remember what I liked and disliked the month before last.

2. This title is awesome.

There’s a good chance that this post will get dugg by people who only read the title and the short description. They were to busy with other things at the time and they planned to come back to it later, but most don’t.

3. Short lists are great.

This post is in list form. Digger’s love Lists. I was reading something, somewhere, about how digg users attention spans are short, but it wasn’t formatted in a list and I got bored so I didn’t finish reading it.

4. This is a wordpress blog:

I love digg mirror. love it so much in fact, I choose to use wordpress in the hopes that when a story on this site does reach digg’s front page, wordpress, for reasons I don’t quite understand and never bothered to find out, will stop working. So you’re going to have to go back to digg, check out the comments and find the link that someone might have posted to the Diggmirror version to actually read the article.

5. There’s even a tutorial

Digg users love digging posts about tutorials. I even included links to the best tutorials ever!

6. This post has a funny Video.

Digg users love funny videos, so I’ve included one for your viewing pleasure.

TH0rS4hyJzg

7. A Link back to Digg.

This post could even includes a nifty little digg badge, displaying the current numbers of diggs. Unfortunately I couldn’t figgure out how to do that so you’ll just have to settle for a Digg button.

If you found the humor in this article, send me a digg with the link below, otherwise, comment about how bad this article was and digg it for being so bad.

After going through pages of badly designed or just plain ugly themes, Something caught my eye, Green Park Theme by Cordobo.

Green Park is still in beta (ver 0.9.2) but seems to function quite well. The only noticeable bugs I have ran into comes into play with the Flickr and Youtube plugin pages. Both the side bars will render below the content and not along the top where they belong. It’s likely that the problem is the fault of the plug ins and not the theme.

Now the default bright neon yellow Green Park color scheme is not for everyone. I had almost abandoned the idea of using the theme due to the colors. However, there is a very nice tutorial on customizing the color layout using either photoshop or gimp. This guide includes a css converter so that you wont have to manually edit code. It took roughly 10 minutes to convert the images and code to a slate blue.

Green Park is worth checking out. I predict it’s popularity will continue to grow as Cordobo updates it. Perhaps it may earn a spot in the top 10 wordpress themes. I look forward to checking back with this designer to see what he does next.

If you want more exposure for your blog or just want to find the content you are looking for more efficiently then technorati is a service you should be familiar with.

This is geared towards WordPress but the techniques and information can be applied to other blog software as well. As a WordPress user I will be focusing on ways that you can quickly and easily get your blog content listed and updated on technorati and other sites. Using ping back services and tags, which will be explained in some detail, you will be able to reach a larger audience.

Your first order of business is to sign up at Technorati.com/signup

Once signed up, log in. go to the Claim you blogs section and you will be prompted to enter your blog Url and submit.

Here you are given an option as to how you wish to claim your blog. Either of the three options (Quick Claim, Post Claim, Embedded Claim) will do the same thing, however, If you wish to add some functionality I would suggest using Embedded method. Follow the instructions on claiming your blog.

With your blog claimed, now is the time to visit your account profile and and add some information about you and your blog. You can upload a picture and add a personal bio.

Now your ready to add your default tags. On your account page, under ‘Your Blogs’ Select configure Blog. Add a short bio of what your blog is about and then check the box that says ‘Include this blog in Technorati’s Blog Finder’ Now you may enter up to 20 keywords. Select words that describe what you write about.

For example, if you tend to write about sports, use sports as a key word. If your posts are considered funny use humor as a keyword.

You may also choose to enable your advanced content if you chose the Embedded claim during set up. Now that you have your initial tags selected, save your profile. Congratulations, Technorati has now been configured.

Now we will get into some wordpress specifics on how you can keep technorati updated with your latest posts and indexed with your key words.

Pingomatic is a useful tool to ‘ping’ all the popular blog indexing sites including technorati. Basically a ‘ping’ is just the term used to describe what happens when you update a blog and inform the indexing sites of your changes.

WordPress and Pingomatic makes it extremely easy to, as the name implies, automatically ping the indexing sites. To set this feature up, log into your WordPress admin area. select the Options page. Select the ‘Writing’ Sub-page. At the bottom, you will notice an area that says ‘Update Services’ In the box below that Add the following lines, and then update your options.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://ping.blo.gs/

Congratulations, by adding those three lines you told WordPress to Automatically update a majority of the indexing sites of all posts you make or edit.

Now the problem is that no matter how many posts you make hardly anyone is gong to find them with out an easy way for them to search for the content. Enter ‘Tags’, which again are just keywords for each post you make.

For example, if you wrote about a celebrity you would want to Tag it with that persons name, so that your post would come up when ever someone searched for them.

The first thing you will need to do is install a wonderful WordPress plugin , Autometa. Download the Autometa plugin and install it into your plugin directory. Log into WordPress and activate the plugin ion the plugin page. After you active Autometa, refresh the plugins page and select the Autometa sub-page.

It should tell you that Autometa is installed correctly and that it is ready to use.

Adding tags to your posts is quite simple. After you are finished writing a post, scroll down to the ‘Custom fields’ section. Under ‘Key’ select Autometa and click add custom field. Autometa will scan your post and add suggested tags. Understand that Autometa is not perfect and will sometimes choose tags that don’t seem to go with the point of your post. All you need to do is add more tags and remove unwanted tags. If you want Two or more words as a tag use the + sign between words, such as Stealth+Fiction will create the tag as ‘Stealth Fiction’ instead of both words separate.

Your Done! With your new tags inserted for your post, Update and publish your post. All the Indexing sites will be notified that you had made a post and all your tags will be listed. Now you should be able to head back over to technorati do a search for some tags you used and watch as your blog posts shows up.

Accessibly to your blog has been increased 10 fold. Enjoy your traffic.

Note:these are the technorati tags used in this post.

tag technorati tags technorati+tags ping indexing claim autometa blog pingomatic increase+traffic traffic guide Stealth+Fiction

It takes a special kind of person to go out to a bar by them self and Drink alone. If you’ve ever been at home and going insane with boredom hopefully this will help you….

I’m not a very social person. I have a few good friends that I’ve known for years. Meeting new people is quit frankly; a pain in the ass.

So let’s say it’s 11:00 at night and your bored to hell, your in a city or town that you hardly know anyone and out of the few people you do know, none of them can hang out with you for what ever reason. what are your options?

A) sit around doing nothing.
B) watch TV or playing on the computer.
C) try to just go to sleep.
D) go out by yourself.

A, B, and C are easy. lets say you’ve chose A, B, or C a million times and are ready to do something different! F@ck it go out alone.

So you Go out. First thing you need to figure out is where to?
Are you into county, rock, dancing, jazz, rap, sports bar, etc.

what ever, i don’t care and it doesn’t matter.
there are rules that must be followed to be successful when your out drinking alone…..

You must look like it’s your choice to be alone.
You must not expect anything.
You must not care.
You must drink.

If you follow these three simple steps, er, i mean four simple steps then no matter who you are, or what the circumstance, you’ll have a better time.
—————
Suggestions:

start things off right and order a shot as soon as you get there.

avoid beer for the first hour and have stronger drinks then switch to beer or drink slower later. the idea is to catch a buzz early so you can safely drive home later.

make random eye contact with people of the opposite sex and give a slight smile. (regardless if you find them attractive or are looking to hook up) Confidance.
————

After awhile of drinking and following the above rules and suggestions, even the most anti-social of bastards will be able to get their foot in the door. eventually someone will take notice and when they do, a simple ” hey, what’s up?” will do wonders.

you might have a good conversation, make a new friend or go home with someone… who knows, from there it’s all up to you and what your looking for.

Wecome to the begining of Web 2.0

To get a good idea of web 2.0 read this article. i will be using a lot of these apps and sites listed there. If i mention a program or site and you have no idea what it is, check there and read up on it.

I’ll try to explain all the cool things you can do,some brief descriptions, and give a run down of how my new home page is set up. I’ll make it in dept enough to show how setting up your own personal home page using RSS, Web 2.0 apps and services can change the way you’ve been using the web.

Most of these sites and services will require you to register. The sites i’ll be talking about are reputable and you should have no worries about signing up to them. bottom line: if i mention it. register, and bookmark it.

Here we go.

First thing first. If you don’t have fire fox 1.5, Get it. Tab Browsing and a built in pop up blocker is awesome. I wont get into the other reasons why this is so much better than IE. that info is easily found.

That done, the next step is to import bookmarks from IE or wherever, then create groups and organize your bookmarks using the bookmark manager. this is important. one long list of bookmarks just makes it hard to find what you need.

On to Mail: http://www.Gmail.com 2 gigs plus. if you need an invite just ask. there are other web mail apps but gmail fits in perfect with what we’re trying to do here.

The next app on our list is: http://del.icio.us/ it’s a great tool for finding and sharing links, i like the ‘popular’ section. great place to find good content. (again check it out in the for mentioned article) there is also a fire fox extension that makes it easy to share links you find.

Introducing your new Homepage: http://www.netvibes.com/ This will be our key stone. Sign up and get a feel for how this operates. most is easy to figure out, we’ll talk more about this later.

Photos: http://www.flickr.com the best place to keep your photos on line. there is a tool you can download that will make adding photos to your flickr account a breeze.

Social News: http://www.digg.com users submit and rate stories, forcing the best of the best to the front page. mostly tech related but set to expand into other areas.

Writing: http://www.writely.com Much like MS word, but on line. The best part is that you can invite others to edit or add to the document. In Fact i am using Writely right now.

Storage: http:www.openomy.com i am still playing around with this but having 1+ gigs of free on line storage for documents on line is a good thing.

while some would say they don’t fit into web 2.0 the following made the list because the sites user driven and useful.

Deals: http:www.slickdeals.net users submit deals and the best ones get pushed to the front page.

Classifieds: http://www.craigslist.com find your city, then save that link. there are classifieds on, well, everything.

Community: http://www.myspace.com while not perfect, it’s one of the best ways to keep in touch with friends. great potential to fit into a web 2.0.

There are other links in that article that you may find useful. for now, these will do.

So head over to http://www.netvibes.com/ hopefully you’ve been playing with it. If you haven’t already, set up the ‘boxed’ content they offer, like the Web search, writely content box, flickr, weather, web notes, gmail, pick some of your favorite news, and the bookmarks. play around with this for awhile before going on.

All of these boxes can be moved and a lot have options you can adjust for personal taste.

Now it’s time to talk some about RSS. this is something else i don’t want to get to much into. but you’ll know RSS by this: one of the main things you can do with RSS in enabled sites is to get the latest updates with out having to actually go to the site and check. for example, when we’re set up, you’ll know you have 3 new gmail msg’s. and it will give the title of each msg. from your homepage without going to gmail.com. the same goes for blogs, news, etc. etc.

To get the hang of collecting an RSS link go to Digg.com, in the bottom right, click the RSS link then copy the URL and go back to net vibes, click on add content, paste the URL (Cntl+V) and press add. now you’ll be able to see all the front page news from there.

del.icio.us, offers a link to the ‘popular links’ RSS feed
slick deals, top deals.
craigslist offers RSS for every category pick the ones your interested in.

If you have a lot of blogs, or say, a lot of craigslist categories that you check often, you can use: http://feedjumbler.com to combine common types of content for the sake of saving room on your home page. for example, there are 5 blogs i read and 3 sections off CL. instead of having 8 separate content boxes on my homepage taking up a hella lot of room, i can take the 5 RSS links of the blogs and the 3 from craigslist to feedjumbler and create 2 RSS links, 1 for blogs, 1 for CL content. now there are only 2 boxes on my home page to look at. simplicity.

now with the blogs you like, find all the RSS URLs and combine then with FJ, now. click on Add content, then ‘add my feed’ insert the link, and save. adjust the options as you fit.

Repeat this for all the RSS content you want, Some of my favorite RSS content is Yahoo top news, Ask Yahoo, Qoute of the day, Ehows: How to:, Pirate Bay Torrents. There is a ton of stuff out there.

Good Job, your almost done.

Last Step is Bookmarks. If you’ve separated all your bookmarks into categories go to ‘manage bookmarks>File>Export. save that somewhere. Now back at net vibes go to bookmarks>edit>import> select the file, then upload. Now all your bookmarks are exactly how they are in fire fox and can be accessed no matter where you are right from your homepage. just remember to repeat this step every so often to keep it up to date as possible.

Congratulations, now you can check on all you news, mail, weather, photos, blogs, links, etc all from one site.

MY GEN is the best editor for Myspace i’ve found so far. all the cool add on’s are there. it’s easy to use. for complete redesigns, content boxes, extended network covers, etc. etc.
+
Deviant Art a huge database filled with some very nice art from talented people. you can find almost any type of design here.
+
FlickR is bthe best spot to host photos. it’s much better than imageshack because it’s more for albulm use instead of just a picture for a profile here and there. it can also automaticly resize large pictures so you can place them in myspace.
+
Hot Codes whats a profile with out videos. register here and add 3 songs to your play list. then when you ant to change music on your profile just go back to hotcodes and swap out songs. no need to change myspace code.

So far i helped out a few friends set thiers up. I’m not doing anything specail. just trying to make the things look decent. Here are the few I’ve done so far.

My Profile
Brandon’s Profile
James’ Profile
Robin’s Profile

I’ll add more links as i complete them. If you want to redo you profile check out those links above. if you need any help just ask. Good Luck.