The Two Sources of Truth

I recently listened to this book on CD by Francis Collins called: The Language of God a Scientist Presents evidence for belief. Dr. Collins who has a PhD in chemistry, an MD, and various other degrees and who was the head of the human genome project spoke at our dental school graduation this past May. I was stunned when a good portion of his speech was about God, Family, and making contributions to society. He said that eventually all of us will have to deal with the big questions of life like: "What is the purpose of life?" and "Why are we here?" The amazing thing about this renowned scientist is that he was once an atheist and it was not until his residency following medical school when he was confronted with patients facing imminent death that he came to question his lack of belief in God. He then said that a friend recommended the writings of C.S. Lewis which he read and began his logical basis for belief in God. I highly recommend Dr. Collins' book, he also has a website dedicated to reconciliation of Faith and Science called the BioLogos Foundation. I agree with Dr. Collins: you can be a firm believer in God and still be a good scientist, and the two main sources of truth are rigorous science and God himself.

How to save space on your hard drive and extend the useful life of your computer

I recently have been worried that my computer was running out of space on the hard drive. With all the modern files we store on our computer nothing takes up more space than digital video. I have been taking home videos of my family for about two years now along with digital photos. My little 160 GB hard drive only had about 7 GB left.

I found this amazing free utility that helped me save 30 GB of hard drive disk space in a matter of minutes: SequoiaView this amazing utility graphically displays all of the files on your hard drive by how large they are. You can use this utility to quickly locate where these large files are and if you don't need them you can delete away! I found an old episode of The Office recorded on my hard drive from my TV tuner that was taking up nearly 15 GB of space. I saved some space by disabling hibernation mode on my Windows XP machine. Finally, I am going to burn all of our home videos onto DVDs so they don't need to sit on our main hard drive. I have a large external hard drive but I use it strictly for back up so now I will have an external hard drive copy and a DVD copy of our family videos.

Other ways I could save space was by using the free Duplicates Killer which allows you to search by file type in a specified directory on your hard drive. By using this application I was able to find large duplicate files of video (AVI files), MP3s, and other large files. I recommend searching by file type starting with the largest file types first. I still have a lot of duplicates that I can find and get rid of so my 30 GB of saved space is likely to increase.

I was so glad I was able to save so much space on my hard drive and that I won't have to buy a new drive. It's not that expensive to buy more storage space but I'm on a tight budget and why waste the money if I don't have to. Maybe now I could install Windows 7 Beta but that is a whole new ball game.