This is Shtanto’s submission for the HP Magic Giveaway. Feel free to leave comments for this article as you see fit – your feedback is certainly welcomed! If you’d like to submit your own how-to, what-is, or top-five list, you can send it to me. Views and opinions of this writer are not necessarily my own:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Either everything is a miracle or nothing is. I can solve hard drive failures by playing some music to the gremlins inside the machine. Welsh folklore was never applied to computer science before. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Lots of things shouldn’t but do. I don’t question these. I just give thanks.

I can believe in magic because there are things which just can’t be explained. I believe and thus I have faith. Catholic flavoured. Life is not logical. Life does not always make sense. Why should it? It wouldn’t be much fun if you could logically predict everything now would it? I for one cannot simply accept that everything and everyone I have and will ever know will return to the dust from whence it came. I must make some small difference. The alternative is unacceptable.

Having faith means I go to mass every week. I pray as best I can and sing a few songs. The internet runs at the speed of light five times around the world every minute so nothing beats a good mass to change things up. Besides, it’s easier to have a life with faith than one without it. My faith comes with Saints, feast days and holy days (holidays, too). There’s no need to over-generalise it.

Every problem has a Saint to help. St. Anthony helps find things. St. Isadore helps fix computers, and St. Jude helps with desperate cases and lost causes (PC people get plenty of those). I think religion means knowing about your faith. Practical applicability means learning as much as you can. A quick prayer of grace to St. Isadore has helped me fix dozens of hard drive faults.

Uninformed opinion writes a lot of stuff on the internet. I see it all the time. Luckily, Research is on hand to clear up the worst transgressions. Wikipedia proves this works. Opinion tempered and tamed, sum total of human knowledge gained. Like the great Pyramids of Egypt, simple copper means the names of everyone who ever worked on either are preserved.

There is only one way to win – if you can call it that. If the time comes and it turns out I was wrong, I at least gave myself a chance. The sum total of my knowledge and memories continue in this world either way because I’ve uploaded a lot of uninformed opinion onto the internet. It is my other half and my legacy. So even if I am wrong, I don’t need to worry too much. Write to be remembered or to be written of. Don’t despair. Those who follow may benefit from my actions. Please give yourself a chance. Have faith.

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So, I posted about potential dangers of aspartame the other day – and a flurry of comments came in, including loads of links back to Snopes. However, Snopes doesn’t seem to tell the whole story (not surprised, as no site on the Web is 100% complete). I let all the dissenting remarks come through since there were no personal attacks within, per se. The video seems to have surfaced a few more “stop thinking about anything other than what I think you should be thinking about” people, so I guess I’ve gotta take the extra step to do your work for you again. ;)

Okay, maybe I should also tell you that I… simply do not trust the FDA, nor any government institution that thinks it knows what’s best for my body. Let’s not get into the stories of internal FDA ineptitude that have already been discussed (that, again, is for YOU to read about independently). Here’s another resource that’s bent on posting news updates on aspartame. There’s also the DORway site referenced by several insiders.

Hey, I’m just saying: don’t assume truth is static, or that truth hasn’t been paid for (partially or entirely). When it comes to “truth,” you have to consider the source – and you also have to consider more than one source for “truth.” You must come to understand that sometimes “truth” is relative, not absolute.

And SOMETIMES “truth” is as absolute as we understand it to be.

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