This just in from the "hand of God" department:

A drunk man driving his 1995 Jeep Cherokee on I-495 in Wilmington, DE hit a guardrail. He was thrown from his vehicle into oncoming traffic in the opposite lane. As he attempted to rise to his knees, a tractor trailer barreled down upon him. He was not injured, however. The tractor trailer passed over the prone man leaving him uninjured.

Police later cited him for drunken driving.

If I was him, I'd take this as a sign from above never to touch another drop.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Due to circumstances beyond my control (the malfunctioning of the volume switch on my Creative Labs Zen V) I have not been able to complete my St. Thomas Aquinas book. Over the holidays, driven both by desperation and an unwillingness to buy another MP3 player, I did attempt to get my Zen to work by cracking open its tamper-proof case and unjamming the micro-switch that controls the "down" volume with an x-acto knife. For the moment, this seems to be working and I am again working my way through G. K. Chesterton's "The Dumb Ox".

I don't know why it didn't occur to me before, but this morning I decided to wikipedia St. Aquinias and found somewhat to my surprise that "Aquinas was declared patron of all Catholic educational establishments". I had no idea that St. Aquinas was so preeminent.

Wikipedia also mentions that "Many modern ethicists both within and outside the Catholic Church (notably Philippa Foot and Alasdair MacIntyre) have recently commented on the possible use of Aquinas's virtue ethics as a way of avoiding utilitarianism or Kantian deontology." I am looking forward very much to learning more about how this is so.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This just in from the "why didn't I think to do this before?" department. In VS2005/ASP.NET, code-behind classes inherit the System.Web.UI.Page class. I have a small hoard of frequently used functions, constants, etc. that I have been pasting into pages on an as-needed basis. Code such as "Protected Const Q As String = Chr(34)" or the following function to side-step null values in data tables:

Private Function NullToString(ByVal oValue As Object) As String
  If oValue Is System.DBNull.Value Then
     Return ""
  Else
     Return oValue.ToString
  End If
End Function

Well, it's quite easy to put this code in a reusable class which inherits System.Web.UI.Page then have the code behind pages this reuse class instead of System.Web.UI.Page. This is stone-cold simple and will save me a lot of time.