Posts from May, 2007
-
Did some more work on For The Hour
Did some more work on Alex and Jaclyn’s website. I basically made it fixed width.
Mazel Tov!
-
Opened up a new section in the blog…
Well, I went ahead and opened up a new section in the blog that will contain commentary that I feel like I should make on what other people are saying. So far none of it shows up on the home page but if you want, you can click through to the actual blog and read it. Sorry, but the blog still doesn’t look very good. I still have to learn about smarty templates…
-
Voices of Reason in Education
Ahh… Voices of reason in education!
Every once and awhile, it’s refreshing to find a voice of reason in the education business. As one who didn’t get great grades but truly valued intelligence and educating myself, I loathed and despised tests that simply required me to spit back information that I wouldn’t remember in 2 years because the only way I was going to learn it was to memorize a list of facts and figures. The only classes I thrived in (and the only information I remember still) were classes that had me work on creative solutions to problems based on a subset of facts and figures.
Bravo!
-
Women in IT
Well, this is a really interesting article on how well women are being represented in the Web Design and larger IT work force. It is interesting to me as more of a part timer in the industry that so little data is available in regards to the profession. I wonder what can be done about the said phenomenon…
At Chestnut Hill College, the computer science department is roughly, I would say, 85% male. In High School, I had a total of 2 girls with me in my high computer classes (as in programming, not touch typing). What does all that mean? I don’t know. I certainly wasn’t aware of any gender based discrimination, it just seemed that my female companions were not interested.
hmm…
-
Facebook Fears
<p><a href=”http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6639417.stm”>Facebook fears?</a></p> <p>Jeeze! I didn’t know that facebook caused so much of a ruckus!</p>
-
Is it counterproductive to reinforce differences?
It’s ok for an Australian Gay bar to ban heterosexual people&8230;
Truly, I’m totally against hate and discrimination of any kind. I’m vehemently anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-hate. However, I’m also a Christian and unlike many of my fellow believers I do believe in Universal and Absolute definitions of Sin. One of those sins which I believe is clearly found in the Bible is that of Homosexual sexual relationships. Now, that being said, I do not believe that homosexuals should be treated as second class citizens, I do not believe that the fact that their lifestyle is sinful means that they deserve love any less than I do or deserve judgement any more than I do. We have all fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3). Therefore, I have to question the wisdom of an Australian Gay Bar (That’s how it describes itself) winning the right to ban heterosexuals from its premises.
As a human being, I am offended when any group is discriminated against, and I find it to be uniquely counter-productive when the majority is repressed due to the minority’s uncomfortableness with how the majority is reacting to it. I think this way because when you repress the majority, it reinforces the thought in their head that the minority is different enough that it needs official protecting and thus it is actually inferior due to the fact that it needs something that we (the majority) do not need. You see this with something like affirmative action which, though a noble effort to solve the problem of officially sanctioned racism, has in fact reinforced in the minds of many people (at least in my sampling of society) that minorities are worse than white americans because they need help.
This is a complicated issue, and I do understand that in any free society it is a responsibility of the society to protect its minorities from the tyranny of the majority. However, I think that when you legally begin to protect aberrant social sectors you almost remove part of their identity. It’s simply a fact that homosexuality, as of this point, is still considered to be somewhat different from the norm. This is something that a homosexual person should be proud of as a member of that minority because it does give them a sense of uniqueness. When I was much more outwardly punk than I am now, I gloried in the fact that society didn’t get me, because I was different. However, I suppose a lot of this comes down to the fact that I still think that homosexuality is something that is mainly the product of environment (a statement that is still hotly debated). I chose to be a punk (even though at the time it didn’t really feel like a choice) and therefore it made it much easier for me to accept when some one didn’t accept me because I knew that I had chosen that path. I suppose a homosexual person who never feels that they made a choice would be deeply hurt by society not accepting who they are&8230;
So, all this boils back down to the inherent backwardness of a faction of society that is attempting to find equality and acceptance with its heterosexual brethren counting it as a victory that it has won the right to ban heterosexuals from its bar. This does not do anything but reinforce the already present differences between the two communities.
-
Better Gmail Firefox Extension
Super Charged Signatures in Gmail via Better Gmail Firefox extension
Just a quick note on this, as I haven’t even installed it yet, but this Firefox extension sounds like a bit of a dream come true for me. I used Mail.app for quite some time while I still had my .Mac account (which went bye-bye a few months ago) and got very used to having the ability to insert pretty pictures and other such things into my signature. When I made the switch to Gmail, I felt the hit there quite a bit. Now, if everything works as promised, I should be able to do that via Gmail. Fun fun!
-
5 tips for leading a happier life
5, yea, 6 ways to live a happy life
Just found this wonderful little list of 5 ways to live a happy life, yea, 6 actions that will help you find that elusive quality of happiness. I would add one more though… Cultivate a relationship with God. Other than that, great tips!
-
Freedom online
Nice little thought piece on online freedom
With internet social networking services growing daily, it’s interesting to see how governments and societies will begin to react to the unprecedented ability to share information…
-
God steals my golf balls, and I love him for it!
OK, this is my blog entry, and it’s 6 days late. Hopefully I’m going to to actually post a Second Blog entry tomorrow… I know, I know… You’re now saying to yourself, “this little blog in its little infancy already has massive problems keeping up with its blogging schedule, as both of the official bloggers missed their official blogging days this past week, so how am I supposed to trust this place anymore?” Well, the answer is that you’ve just gotta bear with us as we continue to get used to the idea of being on a schedule and such. Eventually, this place’ll run like a well-oiled machine, but until then, have a little grace and a good sense of humor, and subscribe to us via the RSS feed for easier updates checking.
So, my day today felt like a big gigantic waste of time. I am a nerd in many ways and thus I get easily sucked in to things that promise me they will save me time, especially when they are tech-heavy. That means that I spend a great deal of time using these time-saving gadgets and gizmos when I could instead be spending more time doing important things. The latest thing that has been added to this list is a wonderful little program called Shrook.
So, say hello to Shrook. It’s an RSS feed aggregator that lives on your computer and sinks with any number of RSS feeds. That means that I can subscribe to any number of websites via their RSS feeds and automatically discover if they’ve updated themselves at all since the last time I was there. That’s great, right?Problems:
- I’m not discriminating enough in what I choose to read.
- I get interested in WAY to many feeds.
- When I do bother reading them, I spend all day doing it
So, I now have this beautiful RSS feed aggregator that’s free and beautiful and easy to use that promises to save me time and effort in checking up on websites, only to turn around and make it easier for me to check 10 times as many websites and use 10 times more of my, well, time in the doing of it. Useful? I think not…
I have a few options in my approach to this. I can:
- Become more discriminating in choosing what to read. This would involve learning to be a better inspectional reader (Thank you How to Read a Book).
- Subscribe to way fewer RSS Feeds
At the moment, I’m probably going to go with the second option up there, as I simply cannot afford to spend the kind of time I did today reading them anymore. So, I’d rather subscribe to 10 or so high quality feeds that have content that I should be reading and attempt to choose discriminately among them, and then if I become very good, slowly begin to add more. I’m basically interested in web design information, web standards information, Christianity related information, and world news information. If you have any suggestions of websites that I should check out, feel free to leave us a note here on the blog
Moving on…
So, the title of this blog entry is “God steals my golf balls, and I love him for it!” And honestly, I’m being totally serious. Lately, I have re-taken up the sport of Golf. If you don’t consider it to be a sport, that’s tough. I think it’s a sport whether you like it or not. For Alex’s Bachelor party, we took him out golfing in the morning, and that’s where it all happened. I’ve golfed for most of my life. Well, that’s probably not totally true, we’ll say I’ve golfed since I was in around fifth grade. I really enjoy the game of golf. There’s something about it’s elegance that really intrigues me. I despise golf culture, and probably would not play on a super-high-quality-country-club-esque course simply on principle, but the fact that you get such crazy cool results from a swing that requires intricate and minute adjustments almost every time you do it is fun to me. It’s like aiming towards perfection, even though you know you’ll never get there. Ok, enough waxing.
I enjoy the game of golf, but I haven’t really played much for over a year. I’m not the kind of golfer that will for the most part attempt to play year round some how. Even though that’s possible, it’s just too expensive and too impractical and too time consuming. So, I golf throughout the summer and then the golfing bug moves into someone else brain. This year around, it came back in a big way, and it brought its family too.
Ever since Alex’s bachelor party, I have consistently been golfing almost every day. No, I don’t go out to the driving range every day but for my “breaks” I go out to the backyard at the the Biddle’s house and wack a golf ball around until a lose it. This usually takes me roughly 30 to 45 minutes, even though in my head it always takes me 10 to 15. The funny part is, as I’ve been attempting to go deeper still with God, I’ve been loosing golf balls very quickly, and only when I know that I’m not supposed to be out playing golf at that time.
Has that ever happened to you? You’re on your way to doing something and you haven’t bothered to ask God about it and suddenly you feel in your spirit, “this is totally not what I’m supposed to be doing right now.” That happens to me sometimes, not often, but it does happen to me. And lately the most often time that it has been happening is when I go to play golf. However, I’m a stubborn oaf and I say to myself, “OK God, I’ll only hit the golf ball up the yard and back and then I’ll stop. Thanks for the tip though.” Hopefully, as you read that statement, your face kind of cringed up like you were watching an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos, because it’s a pretty dumb thing to say, especially when you’re dealing with God!
Anyway, inevitably in those situations my first shot—don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that I’m some sort of super-great golfer, but I usually can hit the ball fairly straight, especially when I’m not full out swinging. And if I don’t hit the ball fairly straight, it usually just means that I topped it so it goes skipping off across the ground some where. OK, so inevitably in those situations, my first shot literally flies out of the yard every time, in ways that shouldn’t even be possible. I’m talking, I hit the ball in a way I never did before to make it go out of the yard. Or, worse yet, I hit the ball 10 feet away and walk towards it only to discover that it’s nowhere to be found. It’s really pretty incredible. And every single time, right after I lose the ball, I feel God do his little nudge thing in my spirit and say, “Would you like to go do what you’re supposed to do now?” So I go back inside with my tail between my legs and a smile on my face, knowing that God cares enough about my day to day activities that he won’t let a fun, albeit fairly useless activity such as golf ruin my day if he knows that it shouldn’t that day.
I guess the conclusion of this is that I’m really excited about where me and Jess are going with God. We’ve connected with Lou Engle (as has been previously said in a post) in a major way in our hearts and we’re thrilled that the 40 day nation-wide fast has finally started (for those of you who don’t know, it began May 28th. It’s not to late to start!). Both of us are so sick of being so cold hearted and so out of touch with God and we want more of him. I almost did a little jig the first time it was revealed to me that God was stealing my golf balls because I realized that I had allowed him one step deeper into my life. Yes, God is sovereign, but he has given us a level of dignity and personal responsibility in our lives that is unthinkable. He will only take us as far as we want to go, and as for me and my house, we want to go all the way. So, with that being said, I think I’ll sign off for the night.
May the Lord continue to consecrate us and make us into burning hearted lovers of him!
