I Cor 9: 19-27: "For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.
Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified."
I have a question to pose to any church, any pastor, any Christian: what are you saying about Christ, the Gospel, and your walk if you never change your practices?
Are you saying, "I've arrived, I don't need to change"?
Are you saying, "I'm better than everyone else, therefore they need to catch up to me before I advance"?
Are you saying, "I don't care about 'advancing', I'm satisfied with my progress"?
Or are you saying, "I am who I am, and I don't have to change"?
I am not an advocate of change for the sake of change.
I am not an advocate of change if means compromising Truth.
I will advocate EVERY change that BETTERS myself towards God, and that brings more people to His Gospel.
What does it say about a pastor, church, or individual Christian if they refuse to change to society, when that change does not affect their walk with God? What does it say about a pastor, church, or individual Christian when they won't listen to others who have Truth to convey, or who have received insights into God's Holy Word that they haven't yet?
Does it say that they are stubborn, and won't hear what others have to say, won't take the time to see if what they're saying is out of line with the Bible, won't come out of their 'comfort zone' because somebody else might know something they don't?
Does it say that they're staying with what they've become accustomed to that is in line with the Bible, but that they won't move away from that 'safe zone' because they're afraid they might do something wrong in the process?
Or does it say that they are stagnating in their walk and no longer advancing along their Christian walk? That they're happy enough with where they've gotten to; that they don't need to get any further along their walk because they're getting into heaven from where they are - and, after all, isn't being "a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord" better than a thousand days elsewhere? After all, why get any further into God's kingdom than I have to, because the world is fun? Why become a "choice servant of the Lord" if I can just be a servant?
The only belief system that must be right is that held by atheists.
It's the only logical conclusion to draw from the available evidence: they are among the most vocal, most argumentative, most defensive, most worried group of people on the planet.
If I, a Christian, am wrong about the existence God, what have I lost? Time on Sundays, time reading the Bible, time trying to convert my friends... but only time. If a Muslim is wrong about the existence of Allah all he has lost is time. If the Jew, Hindu, animist, Mormon, etc are all wrong about the existence of any god they've only wasted time.
But if an atheist is wrong about the non-existence of any God, he's in for a heap of hurt: eternal damnation, Hell, reincarnation as a rat, etc.
For the sake of the atheists in the world, I could pray there is no God. Of course, I don't know who I'd pray to. But for the sake of those who believe there is no God - of any kind - I could hope they're right, and that I've just been wasting thousands of hours of my life I could better spend on me.
I am convinced there is a God, though, so the only logical course of action I can take is to try convince others. After all, if I'm wrong, I just spent a bunch of time doing something that doesn't matter.
But if I'm right...
We're worried about peoples' feelings - and not about being honest and faithful to their souls. We all act like we're following Paul's directive: "in humility count others more significant than yourselves." And we all forget the first half of that verse: "Do nothing from rivalry or conceit".
We live in a false humility when we are afraid to speak to one another honestly. "Do not rebuke an older man but encourage him as you would a father. Treat younger men like brothers, older women like mothers, younger women like sisters, in all purity." As Christians, we are a family - we are God's adopted sons and daughters. In almost every physical family I've ever seen, there is a dynamic of communication and honesty that is sadly lacking in the church of God.
The public face of American society has become one full of political correctness - make sure you never say anything that might be offensive, and spend massive amounts of effort in qualifying what you are about to say so that no one could possibly misunderstand what you are trying to say. Though Paul was writing to a fellow minister of the Gospel, we would all do well to heed his words to Timothy: "I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus ... preach the word; ... reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths." It is the duty of every Christian to be watchful of his brother: unlike Cain, we may not come to God and say, "am I my brother's keeper?" As members of the body of Christ, we must be concerned for every other member of that body - just like parents worry about their children and we are concerned that not only our hands, but also our ears and feet are healthy, we must be concerned for the other members of the church.
Jesus told us to "be innocent as doves but wise as serpents". It is a false humility - indeed a failing of the command of Christ - to 'only' be "innocent as doves". It is part and parcel of that command to likewise be "wise as serpents".
In writing to the Galatians, Paul certainly didn't hold back when he says, "even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed." Or when he called Peter to the floor for hypocrisy: "when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, 'If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?'"
The modern church has mostly lost this level of confidence and fearlessness to confront others when they are wrong.
I pray that if I have written or said anything amiss, that it would be forgotten and that I would be corrected. What I have written and said that is NOT wrong, though, needs to be taken to heart. On matters of opinion, I am happy to discuss, debate, and argue. But on matters of truth - there is no discussion. Truth cannot be argued with.
Indeed, "let God be true and every man a liar": God's Word as recorded in the Bible is unalterable and perfect. The modern church needs to come back to this and not be afraid of rumpling a couple feathers to present the Truth, to correct error, or to rebuke sin. Far better if a couple of your feathers are rumpled, but you finish the race of the Christian life and enter Heaven than if you're molly-coddled and end up in Hell.
Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.
God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.
If you have ever read the Westminster Shorter Catechism, you, no doubt, are familiar with these two questions, and their answers. Indeed, they are the 1st and 4th questions of that document, respectively.
Great. So, as mankind, our job is to glorify and enjoy this eternal, unchangeable, infinite, spirit that calls Himself God.
'Unchangeable' is pretty straightforward: it is immutable, permanent, unyielding, unwavering, unalterable, and unfaltering. 'Spirit' is also a relatively simple concept to understand: noncorporeal, ethereal, invisible. But what does 'infinite' mean? What does 'eternal' mean?
Eternal, quite simply means having no end point in time. And likewise, infinite means that there are no boundaries upon its existence. There is no measurable height, length, width, depth, or breadth. But, as creatures who exist in both time and space, the concept of eternality and infinity are difficult - at best - to understand: we, by definition, are finite. According to the Bible, men's souls will exist onward into eternity, but as an individual human, we have a definite start point. The Bible also states that God existed before time (from eternity past) and will exist forever (to eternity future).
The God that Christians worship, then, has no boundaries upon His existence, in time or space. And, if He has no boundaries in time or space, then certainly He could have no boundaries upon His power or abilities.
As good, and wonderful, and awesome, and amazing as all that is, humans can't understand it. I don't claim to have some higher understanding of God's infiniteness or His eternality than can be gained from His Holy Word. But I think that I might have a helpful construct in forming a [limited] understanding of His most unfathomable attributes.
Infinity is a concept that has many useful applications in our world and our minds. For example, from grade-school geometry, you recall that rays have a start point, but no end point. Lines, likewise, have no start or end. However, they have no start or end in only one dimension. "Lines", as such, by definition cannot exist in two dimensions. Basic geometrical figures, such as triangles, quadrilaterals, hexagons, circles, etc may all exist in two dimensions, but a line, per se, cannot. The math adage pops to mind: "two points define a line; three points define a plane".
A plane is an object which has a set up defining points, most typically represented by three X,Y,Z coordinates sets. And once those three points have been defined, the plane extends across all points in "straight lines" away from those points.
However, again by definition, a plane cannot exist in three dimensions: it has no "bottom" (or "top"). So, though like the line it is infinite, it can't exist in the world in which we live: we live in a polydimensional world. This life is made up of height, depth, width, length, and time. We can comprehend the infinite natures of planes and lines because we exist in a dimension above them.
Perhaps some of you have read the book Flatland. In it, Edwin Abbott follows the life and times of a square that lives in a land wherein there is no height. Everything is just flat - there are lengths and widths, but no height. As the tale wends its way through, a sphere appears in Flatland, and whisks the square off to see Lineland and Pointland, and then takes him higher into the world of three dimensions wherein the sphere resides. As established earlier, a square can't exist in three dimensions. Of course, a sphere can't exist, as such, in 2 dimensions. A sphere has a center point as defined by an X,Y,Z coordinate, and a radius: a way of establishing how far away from that center point, in all directions, the sphere extends. So, when the sphere appears in Flatland, he is visible as a constantly morphing circle, based on how much of himself he has "dipped" into the land.
We see in shadows. The shadow of a three-dimensional object is two-dimensional. If you don't believe me, go stand in front of a light near a wall: your shadow has no depth: it's flat. It has width and height, but no depth. (If it did, you would be able to grab it and move it, as it would exist in "our" dimensions.) The shadow of a two-dimensional object is a line or line segment - it has one dimension: length. Likewise, the shadow of a line is a point. It has no dimensions: just a point.
Because we exist in three dimensions, we can see the inards of two-dimensional objects. In Flatland, when the sphere descends into the square's realm, he claims to be able to see the square's "guts". And when the square is raised from Flatland into the sphere's world, he can now see the guts and inards of all of the inhabitant of his home world or Flatland.
In Flatland, you can touch and manipulate other two dimensional objects, because you are a two-dimensional "person". This is rational since we can touch and manipulate other three-dimensional objects in our lives. But near the end of the book there is an interesting line of reasoning exposed by the square that the sphere has chosen to enlighten: certainly, if there is Pointland, and there is Lineland, and Flatland, and the world in which the sphere lives, must there not be a land in which you could "see the inards" of spheres, because you would exist in a higher dimension. And, carrying that logic to its reasonable conclusion, there is a land of five dimensions, six, seven, all the way through the Nth dimension.
Perhaps God is infinite to us, and to all who interact with Him, because He exists above the dimensions we can experience. If a planar projection is the shadow of a three-dimensional object, could it be that we, as three-dimensional objects, are projections or shadows of the fourth dimension in which we exist, that of time? And perhaps, since God created time for us, He exists in a realm above that of time. Certainly, if He has existed - eternally - since before time began, and will continue to exists eternally into the future, He can't be bound by time (which would be irrational since He made it: you can't really be bound by something you create).
I propose that God can exist in infinitely many directions, with infinite power in each of those directions, and perfect control in each of those directions precisely because he is above time - he is outside of our existence, looking-in and down upon us as we do upon those geometric representations we call shapes and lines and points.
...it's what I'm for.
I've decided that denominations are a good thing - mostly. When they directly decribe a confessional or creedal standpoint, they're great. However, when they become a point to divide Christians over, they're bad. Very bad.
I'm a baptist because I believe that only true believers in Christ should be baptised. I'm reformed because I believe that the entire point of being a Christian is to become more like Christ - to be reformed to His perfect mold. And I'm independent because I think a better association for churches is for them to be autonomous units fighting Satan in this world; they can (and should, maybe even must) work towards that goal in a combined fashion, and should (perhaps must) build relationships and fellowship with other Christians in other churches in both their own and other areas of the world.
Any time I can join another Christian in doing good or promoting the gospel, I will try my best to do so. Where we do not disagree on fundamental issues of doctrine and belief, I will try to both learn from them and show them my views as backed-up by the Bible. When they are promoting a heresy, I will do my best to call them to the floor, and show them their error - and if they won't listen to words of Christ and the rest of the Holy Bible, I will do my best to ignore them and stop fighting - I'll let the Holy Spirit do His work in them, if He wills. But when our disagreements are on trivial, non-moral (or non-primary) issues, I will work with them to reach the lost, and to grow in my walk with Christ.
Drawing lines of battle over whether or not I'll even speak to you because you're a Presbyterian and I'm a Baptist, or you're a Southern Baptist and not Reformed - that's just idiotic. We're in this fight together. Where we can't reach agreement, I will attempt to pass peacefully by. But in those vast swaths where we do agree, that denominational title hanging over our heads just gets in the way of fellowshipping and accomplishing Christ's work on earth.
It seems that everything I decide to write about here involves prayer. That's a good thing, though. Since prayer is the means God has given us to communicate with Him, it's profitable to consider it frequently.
My consideration today is on what God will do in extreme situations by dispatching His angels to our aid. The first example I want to cite is that of King Hezekiah in 2 Kings 19 where Sennacherib, king of Assyria, has come up to Israel. Hezekiah is desperate for God's intervention and prays thusly: "O LORD the God of Israel, who is enthroned above the cherubim, you are the God, you alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; you have made heaven and earth. Incline your ear, O LORD, and hear; open your eyes, O LORD, and see; and hear the words of Sennacherib, which he has sent to mock the living God. Truly, O LORD, the kings of Assyria have laid waste the nations and their lands and have cast their gods into the fire, for they were not gods, but the work of men's hands, wood and stone. Therefore they were destroyed. So now, O LORD our God, save us, please, from his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you, O LORD, are God alone." [15-19]
Hezekiah knew that Israel was the specially-chosen nation that God had set aside for Himself, and he also knew that Sennacherib was a ruthless, cruel, merciless conqueror. God knew this, too, and didn't need to be reminded of this fact, but He had to hear it from Hezekiah to have public witness that Hezekiah knew who God was, and what role he was playing in His nation.
God's verbal response has been saved for us, as He spoke through Isaiah: "Therefore thus says the LORD concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city or shoot an arrow there, or come before it with a shield or cast up a siege mound against it. By the way that he came, by the same he shall return, and he shall not come into this city, declares the LORD." [32-33]
Now, if God had just stopped there, I am positive Hezekiah would have been thrilled to bits. But God had more to say: "For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David." [34]
How exciting must this prospect have been for Hezekiah?! God told Hezekiah not only to not worry about the Assyrian army, but that He Himself would defend Zion, Jerusalem, His Holy City! Now there's an answer to prayer we don't typically expect: not only does God answer Hezekiah in the affirmative, He answers him with a specific promise to take all of the responsibility of the defense of the city upon Himself - He wasn't going to use the means of Israel's armies, as He often had in the past. No, God decided to handle this one Himself - no earthly means are necessary here.
God had already determined that Sennacherib's reign was to end soon, and his reign of conquering terror was now over. The first part of God's verbal response to Hezekiah is recorded in verses 21b-28, where God unlooses a harsh string of curses against Sennacherib, mocking him and his presumed continued conquests of weak nations.
God's judgment of Sennacherib was both incredibly swift, and incredibly frightening. But from it we can derive comfort in God's ways. Verse 35 explains in a very short sentence what God did to the Assyrian army: "And that night the angel of the LORD went out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians." Wow: one angel, in one night, single-handedly wiped-out 185,000 of the toughest, meanest, strongest men ever to be assembled into an army. One hundred eighty-five thousand men following Sennacherib on his incredible string of successive victories. One hundred eighty-five thousand men reveling in their king's cruelty when vanquishing the next nation in his path. One hundred eighty-five thousand men sent in a few hours to eternal judgment for their sins.
The second example I want to cite is in the book of Exodus, and the record of the final plague brought upon Egypt. God promises to eliminate every first-born in all the land of Egypt, except for the first-borns found in houses marked with the blood of the Passover lamb. Exodus 12:12-13;23 records this thusly: "For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the LORD. The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt...For the LORD will pass through to strike the Egyptians, and when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the LORD will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you." For the Israelites, that night was going to be one of eager anticipation of their coming emancipation. For the Egyptians, it was to be a night of never-before-heard mourning, even howling to their gods for the calamity God was to bring upon them.
God brought a destroyer upon the entire population of Egypt, from animals to servants, citizens to the Pharaoh's house itself. The Egyptians weren't made privy to the means of salvation, and were punished. We are never told how large the nation of Egypt was, but we do know that they were about the same size as the Israelites living in their midst. When Israel was finally chased out of the land by the Egyptians, we are told there were about 600,000 men above the age of 20. If we presume that all of them were married, there were about 1,200,000 adults in the nation of Israel at the time of the Passover - plus children. Since the Egyptians numbered about the same, it is not out of line to think there were about 2,000,000 people in Egypt. Presuming 10% of them were first-born, that means that 200,000 people were killed in Egypt by God's destroyer in one night - along with all the first-born livestock.
In one night two hundred thousand souls were ushered off into eternity by God's destroyer - punished for not just their own sins, but also for Pharaoh's refusal to let Israel leave his country. That's a very busy night for any being - it's hundreds of people per second that God had killed by His destroyer.
The amazing thing about all of this to me is that that self-same God is on the side of His chosen people today. I don't know if He still answers prayer by sending angels directly to comfort His people, or to exact His judgment on evil doers, but I do know that He can. Imagine what would happen if God sent His angel, His destroyer to eliminate the terror camps of Islamists. I know that's not what we typically think to pray for in the New Covenant in Christ's blood, we think to pray for salvation for those people - that they would stop shedding blood, that they would come to know God's free gift of grace in His Son Christ Jesus, and leave their evil ways behind them. But I think it's time for Christians to start praying that if God won't pour out His grace and mercy on those people, that He instead pour out judgment. I think it is unwise to pray just for the destruction of God's enemies since we no longer live in a specially-separated, geographical nation for His glory like David did when penning some of the Psalms, but praying for peace doesn't mean we pray for pacifism. Peacemaking is one of the lofty callings of the Christian. And sometimes peacemaking can only come after violence.
I pray that God would do a mighty act for His name in the earth - and whether that mighty act is a mass conversion and salvation of Islamist terrorists, or whether that act is a single night in which His destroying angel is sent out to rid the world of them, I pray that He will receive the glory for it.
There is coming a day in which every evil doer will be eternally punished, damned to Hell. That same day will prove to be the initial glory of God's chosen people when we no longer have to deal with sin and temptation and evil and distress and fear. When Christ returns to purge the world of all its evil, those left who have not bowed their knee willingly to His authority will be on their faces in fear - knowing they are going to be burning for eternity in a fire that was designed to punish fallen angels. I can't imagine the horror that will be, and I hope you bow before the Lord Jesus willingly as I have before it is too late.
His destroyer is prepared for the final coming in judgment of the world. I'm claiming Christ's sacrifice to protect me just like the Israelites claimed the blood of their lambs spread on their door posts and lintels. And I'm looking forward to the day when I awake, as Hezekiah and the inhabitant of Jerusalem did, to see every enemy gone - dead and no longer a threat to me.
I wrote a short series a few months ago about the importance of prayer (1 2 3). Today I am building on that.
Just this weekend my church in Mebane hosted Pr Brian Borgman from Minden Nevada who spoke in all three of our services on "The Church Getting Her Hands Dirty".
Something that jumped out at me from the evening message was Acts 20:24 "But I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God." Paul flat-out told the elders in Ephesus during his last hours with them on this earth before going on to other ministries that he selflessly proclaimed the gospel to them, and, by implication, they were to do the same.
Not all Christians are called to be elders but all are called to proclaim salvation through Jesus Christ. Matthew 28:18-19 "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age." The so-called 'Great Commission' was not merely given to the 11 disciples on the mountain with Jesus before he ascended into heaven. If it were, they failed miserably. But because they went out and shared the gospel with any who would listen, I'm here today able to claim Christ as my savior.
Interestingly, God seems to like to do things for His servants when they ask for others - Job 42:10a "And the LORD restored the fortunes of Job, when he had prayed for his friends." Too often, I suspect, we focus most or all of our energy expended in prayer on ourselves. This is especially true in affluent America, where I live. What time we do spend praying is generally spent asking God for stuff for ourselves. Of course it is right to want to talk to our Heavenly Father and make requests of Him, but Christians are just as prone to selfishness as the unsaved - perhaps more so.
Before we were saved, all of our energy was spent on ourselves. Unfortunately, after many of us have been saved, we continue to focus energy on ourselves. But now we ask for God's help in getting what we want. We think of God as our personal Genie ("PHENOMINAL COSMIC POWER!!!! Itty bitty living space!" [Aladdin]) merely around to do what we ask.
I hate to break it to you, but God's not in the business of making our dreams come true. He's in the business of making Himself known in the earth, and garnering men, women, and children to Him who will take the time to praise Him as He is due.
God does answer prayer. He answers every prayer we ever pray. Sometimes He answers "No", sometimes "Yes", and sometimes "Not yet - you're not praying hard enough". But focusing our prayers on ourselves will most likely not accomplish much in the grand scheme of things, and maybe not much - or even anything - in our own personal experience. But when we flip our focus off ourselves and onto others - in the church, our neighbor hood, at work, at school, relatives, the cashier at the corner drug store - those we have some form of interaction with regularly, or that we want to have interaction with, God tends to start doing some pretty cool things.
Want to grow closer to God and His word? Ask God for someone to witness to. More often than not in both personal experience and from observation, God will plop somebody in front of us shortly after asking. Maybe it's the coffee shop girl who pops out with a "why don't you ever come here on Sunday", or maybe it'll be a professor who makes a comment inviting a response from the Bible, or maybe it'll be that panhandler near your favorite restaurant. It's not up to us to make them listen or believe, but it is up to us to tell them about Jesus' work on the cross.
It has been said that people do nothing if it will not benefit them in some way. I happen to agree. The benefit Christians should be looking for from their actions, however, shouldn't primarily found in this life. Jesus told us that some of His servants would bear fruit 100 fold, some 60, and some 30.
But the only way any of us can bear any fruit is to try. Spreading Christ's message doesn't just come from speaking - it comes from our lifestyle, too. But in order to have the opportunity to speak we need to get out of ourselves just a little, and get selfish in a good way.
It's easy to get comfortable in our church, and our clique in the church, and among our closest circle of friends. But those folks probably aren't the ones that need to be witnessed to so much. They'll be watching us to make sure we keep following what we claim to believe in our lives, but it's the unchurched, the unsaved that need to be witnessed to.
Such witnessing can be done through physical acts of kindness like going on a medical mission trip to some third world country. Or going to storm-ravaged regions and helping clear debris and getting people back on their feet after disasters like hurricanes. Trips and efforts like that are great. But I would put money down that you don't need to traverse more than a couple miles (unless you live in Podunk Wyoming, where you nearest neighbor is 65 miles away) to find people who could use help, real, physical help in your own community.
Where I grew up in upstate New York, there were (and are) scads of people who could use some real physical help. I'm sorry to say that I didn't help very many people outside my comfort rings when I lived there, and that I have only done so in small ways since moving to North Carolina three years ago.
I'd wager that just in the apartment complex I live in there are folks who could use some kind of help, but I haven't found them. A few months ago I schlepped a small end table inside for an elderly neighbor who has trouble with her wrists. It took less than 2 minutes of my time, and saved her several hours of waiting for her son to come by and get it out of her car for her. In the very brief conversation I had with her, I found out that goes to a Presbyterian church in the area, and never would've found that out (probably wouldn't have met her, either) if I hadn't noticed her struggling with the end table on my way to work that morning.
It doesn't take much for people to notice that you're willing to expend a little effort to help them. Helping my neighbor with her table didn't cost me anything more than a couple minutes, but we've been promised that in as much as we help the least of Christ's brethren, we're helping Him. So moving her table was a selfish act - I wanted to get noticed by God.
Some people need more motivation than just being told that they should do something. Jesus gave us that motivation when He described the separation of the sheep and the goats on the last day. "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.' Then the righteous will answer him, saying, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?' And the King will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.'
"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.' Then they also will answer, saying, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?' Then he will answer them, saying, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.' And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." [Matthew 25:31-46]
We've been given the best possible motivation to be Good Selfish Christians: we will be rewarded in Christ's kingdom when He returns. And we've been given the best possible motivation to not be lazy: eternal punishment for those who merely claim to be Christ's followers, but do nothing about it - those who want to use God as a backup plan in case He really exists and not those who are trusting only in Him.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon is famous for being a Baptist preacher in the 19th century (1834-92). But more interesting than his career of regularly preaching to 10,000+ congregants is how he lived his life outside of 'merely' preaching the Bible.
Charles was born in Kelvedon, Essex, England on 19 June 1834 as both the son and the grandson of independent preachers. The first of 17 children (9 of whom died in infancy), Charles came from a large family, but was under the care of his grandfather for several years as a youth. Though trained in the Bible by his grandfather and father, Charles didn't truly understand the gospel and find Christ until he was nearly 16 years old. He claimed, "that I never would have been saved if I could have helped it. As long as ever I could, I rebelled, and revolted, and struggled against God. When He would have me pray, I would not pray, and when He would have me listen to the sound of the ministry, I would not. And when I heard, and the tear rolled down my cheek, I wiped it away and defied Him to melt my soul. But long before I began with Christ, He began with me." [bio ch 2]
His parents and grandparents - but especially his mother - prayed for him for many years while seeing him continuing to rebel against God and do the opposite of what was required by God for salvation. His self-beratement for knowing God's law and will, and yet also knowing he didn't measure up, and never would, took a toll on him as a teenager. The majority of the preaching and teaching he heard was accurate and faithful to the Bible, but young Charles never heard the pleas of God as recorded in the scriptures and proclaimed by the preacher to believe and repent of his sins for God had provided a just means for his salvation.
It was the 6th of January, in the middle of a snow storm when Charles meandered into Primitive Methodist Chapel. The preacher was not the ordinary one, and there where only a handful of souls who had come out for the service that morning. The text was "'Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.' Even though the preacher did not pronounce all his words correctly, there was a gleam of hope in them for the seeker in the side pew." [bio ch 2] The preacher, having noted Charles' visit, noted him specifically and told him what his problem was. He was miserable because he wasn't looking to the right man: "Young man, look to Jesus Christ! Look! Look! Look! You have nothin' to do but to look and live." [bio ch 2]
From that moment, when Charles saw the way of salvation, the truth of Christ, and the life possible through Him, he was Christ's.
His entire life-course had been altered: no longer was he a sin-tormented adolescent, but a new creature in Christ, pushing himself to carry that call to the lost. He began preaching 'for real' the week after his baptism as a Sunday school teacher, and continued to proclaim his savior until his death 41 years later. His early ministry encompassed the distribution of tracts, and engaging on a personal level those who would talk to him.
Charles, who became widely known for his magnificent illustrations, was nonetheless always in earnest about his topic. He served his Lord and Master daily, hourly, with everyone he met. His was not a privatized or compartmentalized faith - it was on public display for all to see. And the public did certainly see him. After being converted in 1850, Charles became a pastor just 2 years later, and just a year after preaching his first 'official' sermon. [wik]
At age 20, just 4 years after his conversion, he was called to pastor the New Park Street Chapel in Southwark. Outgrowing their building shortly after his arrival, they moved to Exeter Hall, and then to Surrey Hall wherein Charles would routinely preach to crowds of more than 10,000 people. This God-granted and -sparked growth happened within 2 years of his arrival in Southwark. The church moved in 1861 to the Metropolitan Tabernacle, where Charles did more than just preach. He wrote, taught aspiring pastors, and began an orphanage.
In his lifetime, Charles published 49 works, including commentaries, sayings, anecdotes, illustrations, and devotions. [wik] He married a young Christian woman in 1856, and had twin boys - both of whom were converted to Christianity under his ministry. Among his most famous published works are Morning and Evening - a devotional, and The Treasury of David - a treatment of the Psalms. In the 1860's he was known to preach a great deal: "it was no uncommon thing for the young preacher, in the exuberance of his early days, to preach ten to twelve times a week. He was in demand in all parts of London and the home counties." [bio ch 3]
He preached all through Great Britain, and visited Ireland and France several times. On each of his trips, whether officially in a church service setting, or just on an interpersonal basis, Charles exuded the gospel message he so dearly loved. His service to Christ's kingdom extended wherever he was, and perhaps no more famous preacher has lived.
While he was by conviction a Calvinistic Baptist, he was not strictly bound to a denomination, and would preach in any church that would have him - including St Peter's Cathedral. From chapter 3 of his biography:
Preaching in Leeds for the Baptist Union in a Methodist Chapel on a memorable occasion, he read the tenth chapter of Romans. Pausing at the thirteenth verse, he remarked, "Dear me! How wonderfully like John Wesley the apostle talked! 'Whosoever shall call.' Whosoever. Why, that is a Methodist word, is it not?"
"Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!" came the responses.
"Yes, dear brothers," the preacher added, "but read the ninth chapter of the epistle, and see how wonderfully like John Calvin he talked - "That the purpose of God according to election might stand.'" Smiles on the faces of those that had before been silent were the only response to this utterance. "The fact is," continued the preacher, "that the whole of truth is neither here nor there, neither in this system nor in that, neither with this man nor that. Be it ours to know what is scriptural in all systems and to receive it."
He tried to proclaim the full counsel of God, and whether or not that 'fit' with a given denomination's creeds was not his problem - if it were in the Bible, he proclaimed it. This caused some consternation to his hearers who didn't necessarily fully agree with certain aspects of Christian doctrine, but Charles' view was that if God said it, and it was recorded for us in His Word, that it should be taught and expounded.
He held that faith in Christ's atoning work on the cross to reconcile us to God was a fiercely personal faith. Simultaneously, he understood that such a personal conviction and faith can not be lived-out merely by one's self - it must be lived in public. Christ did not call us to separate ourselves from the world by removing to some monastery. He called us to be separate in heart and affection, but to live in the world and try to bring those we come into contact with to faith in Him.
Eph 4:11-12 "And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ". Charles was an exemplar for the ministry. Perhaps no other preacher in the history of the church had the impact he did on both his and future generations. To this day, pastors of many denominations look to Spurgeon as a model for preaching, passion, and patience. Charles was not afraid to preach bluntly to his congregation - to make them sit up and pay attention to their plight as unbelievers, or their reward as believers. His impassioned pleas for repentance are famous. And his eagerness to share his faith over and over and over again with the lost is astounding.
His self-effacing claim was that "he had no wish to speak to ten thousand people; his only ambition was to do the will of God." [bio ch 3] I think it is fortunate for the rest of us that God's will seems to have been for him to preach to thousands, and write to millions. Charles' life has been studied, reviewed, and used as an encouragement to churches, Christians, and the lost around the world for over a century.
He proclaimed what, at the time, were unpopular political views, especially with regards to slavery, war, and the opium trade. But for each he would start with the Bible, study out the issue, and exegete the verses therein. He didn't attempt any runs for political office, start any protests, or encourage marches. He just tried to follow God's word where ever it led.
Charles' calling was to teach others, to share the gospel, to prepare men and women for service in the kingdom of God. How he found time to lecture for hours several days a week, run an orphanage, raise two children, keep a wife, and pastor a church I don't know. But God gave him the ability, for which the world has benefited much since.
George Whitefield once said, "We are immortal till our work is done." Charles Spurgeon's immediate work ended in 1892, and "like John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Jeremy Taylor, George Whitefield and William Tyndale, Spurgeon was fifty-seven when he died, but he was not young, for he began early and he had laboured long, and departed full of days and of grace." [bio ch 19] He has lived-on in his published works, and the memories of those who heard him.
I think if more Christians took their faith and Savior seriously, myriad more 'Charles Haddon Spurgeons' would appear. He didn't set out to become famous. His goal wasn't world renown. He was merely looking to share his faith and love of Christ with others.
It is staggering to think of what he accomplished in such a short time. It is humbling to realize I am already almost 10 years older than he was when he was converted and began preaching. But more amazing is that God has used a man from a pretty small town, in a small country, during a time of formalism and disinterest in God, Christ, and church to bring so many to Himself. I pray that I will be used for the furtherance of Christ's kingdom here on earth in some measure. All Christians may not be Spurgeon, but we can all share our faith with those we meet like he did.
Works Cited:
The name's something of a misnomer, but internet radio is very cool. As a way to listen to a wide variety of music without actually using a radio - and therefore having more choice over what you listen to - internet radio is great. I regularly use Winamp, iTunes, and Windows Media Player to listen to 'real' and internet-only stations. If you're looking for a change from your current listening patterns, give it a try.
Prayer is lots of things to the Christian. It's our communication line to God. It's our way of providing support to other Christians. It's also what some have called the 'weapon of last resort'.
Christ has called us to pray for our enemies. He rebuked His disciples for wanting to call down fire on folks who weren't 'with them' but were still proclaiming Jesus as Messiah. We have the example of Paul and Silas in jail where God caused an earthquake to open their bonds while they were singing and praying to Him.
Shifting to the Old Testament, we have the record of Elijah's confrontation with the prophets of Baal with his ardent prayer to God to display Himself as the true God of Israel rather than Baal. Elijah's prayer that it would not rain in Israel for a long time, and then his prayers that it would rain again showcased God's judgement and blessing to the evil king of Israel Ahab.
As New Testament believers in Christ, we have been promised the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We have also been promised that whatever we pray for in Christ's name, and for His glory, will be accomplished. Elisha prayed for his servant to see those who were ready to defend him against the Syrians. When he had done this, God opened his servant's eyes to see the mountains covered in horses and chariots of fire.
When is the last time you prayed for your eyes to be opened to the spiritual realities around you? I know it's been too long for me. God has placed us in the world to accomplish evangelism. I think we spend too much time coming up with reasons to not do anything for God that we lose sight of the possibilities set in front of us. What might God do if we all started praying for God to open our eyes to opportunities to witness, do good, and repel the attacks of our 'Syrians'?
To quote Paul, we are to be "praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints" [Eph 6:18]. As Christians in the world, we are engaged in a constant battle against evil. We are fighting daily to hold territory claimed for Christ, and to push a little further into Satan's strongholds.
As the capstone to his analogy between the "whole armor of God" and the physical donning of "real" armor, Paul orders us to "pray at all times..for all the saints". Any army needs logistics personnel, and God's army is no different. To quote Andrew Fuller encouraging William Carey, "It is clear that there is a rich mine of gold in India; if you will go down I will hold the ropes." Fuller knew he couldn't go with Carey to the front lines to harvest souls for Christ with Carey, but he could stay behind and support him. Fuller helped organize prayer services, raised funds, and shared news of Carey's work with congregations in England. Carey may have been fighting at Satan's doorstep, but Fuller was right behind him, calling on God to protect and favor him.
Returning to the primary example from the Bible, Acts 12 records for us Peter's imprisonment, and the church's prayers for him. Peter was in the prominent front of leading the church in Jerusalem, and Herod had imprisoned him expressly to kill him to please the Jews. While we admire Peter's quiet sleep the night before his scheduled execution - his confidence in God to protect him, or take him home - we can't ignore what the earnest prayers of the church accomplished: "And behold, an angel of the Lord stood next to him, and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him, saying, 'Get up quickly.' And the chains fell off his hands. And the angel said to him, 'Dress yourself and put on your sandals.' And he did so. And he said to him, 'Wrap your cloak around you and follow me.'" [Acts 12:7-8]
There is no way the church could have expected Peter to be free in such a tremendous way. I imagine they were probably praying for Herod to have a change of mind, or even for Herod's death. Maybe they were praying for Peter to know God's peace even to the moment of his beheading the next morning. I am convinced, though, they didn't pray, "God, send an angel, have him slap Peter to wake him up, and then lead him out without the guards knowing". But God doesn't always answer our prayers the way we want Him to.
Peter was certainly happy to be out of the prison, and Carey was happy Fuller was organizing prayer for his efforts. Are we contributing to the war in a similar way? Not all of us are called to be missionaries, or even pastors. But we can all pray: in the car on the way to work, before a meal, during a break between classes - we can pray anywhere, at any time. God is always ready to hear us, and is eager to encourage our faith with His amazing response.
God is in the business of saving sinners; I know because He saved me. It's often a struggle to remember to pray for others, but it's such a simple thing we can all do to supply those on the front lines of the battle with God's grace, peace, and strength.
"The fervent prayer of a righteous an accomplishes much." [Jam 5:16b]
Have you tried to accomplish anything with prayer?
I know what many who read this will think: duh! We're told repeatedly in the Bible to pray to God. The model prayer given to us by Jesus begins with "Our Father Who art in heaven". Jesus prayed to His Father a lot, and as "little christs", we should be mimicking that example.
The real question for many Christians, though, is why don't we take advantage of this tool more often? Why do we neglect opportunities to talk to God?
Initial responses might be, "I'm busy", "it's too petty to worry about", or the famous "I forgot". While these are typical, they are all wrong. Going back to Jesus' example, He would often spend entire nights in prayer - talking directly with the Father. I find it hard to believe we can't find even 5 minutes where we can spend time talking to God.
In the Bible we are also given the example of Nehemiah, cup-bearer to the king, who uttered a prayer to God while talking to the king to make a request [Neh 2:4].
There really is no excuse to not talk to God. In any relationship, communication is really the vital link between the parties. Whether it's a marriage, a business, a family, or the Christian's walk with God, all the parties of the relationship have to talk. God talks to us through His word, and we talk to Him via prayer.
From personal experience, I can say that the worst times in my walk have been when I wasn't listening to God, or talking to Him. And the opposite has been true, too. When I've spent more time reading God's word and listening to it, and then talking to Him, I've grown.
Atheism is a belief that there is no god. Contrasted with agnosticism, the belief that we can't know whether or not there is a god, atheism is predicated upon a basic belief held by others that there is a god. Interestingly, though, many atheists take great pains to attempt to prove their beliefs.
Some say that belief in a god is not useful to life. Others claim it is dangerous to an individual's psyche. Most, though, claim to not care what anyone else believes, so long as they can go about their business believing in nothing. If neither believing nor disbelieving in god really matters, why would an atheist care to defend his position?
Atheists defend their position, because they know that they have to be right to have any security in their beliefs. Realistically, if there is no god, it doesn't matter whether or not you believe in one. If an atheist were true to his/her claims, they wouldn't care about defending themselves. We're all going to some great oblivion when we die, and we won't know about it, since we're really just animals that can think.
The problem faced by any defensive atheist is that they have nagging at the backs of their minds that they might be wrong. What if that Muslim is right? the Jew? the Christian? The only reason to defend a belief there is no god of any kind is to give confidence to the defender. The atheist has to be correct in his beliefs. A Jew doesn't have to be right in her belief - if it turns out there is no god, she'll never know. The same is true of the Muslim or Christian.
The atheist, on the other hand, will be sorely disappointed if it turns out there is a god. After a lifetime of espousing nothingness, if there is an eternal realm after death, the atheist will end up spending it in some form of separation from the god he claimed didn't exist.
For the sake of the atheists, I could hope there is no god. I could hope that my belief and reliance upon the omnipotent God of the Bible is wrong - that I'm just wasting my life going to church, participating in the sacraments, and spreading my faith to others. But I can't do that. I believe the God of the Bible is real. I believe in eternal, happy, fulfilled fellowship with the triune God for those who have trusted in His proffered method of salvation, those who have trusted in the atoning work of Christ on the cross. I believe in an eternal separation from God's favor for those who have scoffed at Him, where they will suffer forever.
I believe any who claim there is no God will be in that place of suffering for eternity. I don't want to see them go there, and will continue to tell them about the God I serve as long as I'm capable in this life.
Just consider whether or not I might be right.
My title today is a compact pair of acronyms. From a presentation I saw this week on WalMart's investments in RFID (radio frequency identification) technologies as a cost-savings measure, they expect to be able to save around $6.7b dollars annually in salary expenditures by moving to RFID tags and scanners to reduce theft and ease purchasing.
With a quick, back-of-the-envelope estimate, that comes out to 1 billion man-hours they won't have to pay for. Considering the size of their workforce (estimates are placed between 1.25 and 1.5 million [mostly part-time] employees), that's about a 65% reduction in their workforce. Getting RIFd is a common euphemism for being down-sized, itself a euphemism for being laid-off or fired.
RFID technology is a very promising means to promote accurate inventorying, better shipment tracking, etc. However, laying-off ~1 million part-time workers in the process raises some interesting economic questions in my mind. Stereotypically, WalMart's primary workforce - teenagers, housewives, and older folks - don't tend to have high educations, and often aren't qualified to do a lot of the work necessary in our technology- and service-based economy. Admittedly, the younger workforce will be more likely to go on to higher education and improve their careers in the future, but I do see an issue over so many others being more-or-less dumped on the unemployment rolls.
So here's the ethical question: is it right for a company to lay-off a huge percentage of its workforce to improve its bottom-line? Legally, it's legitimate. From a business perspective, it makes a great deal of sense, too: RFID tags don't need training, sick time, lunch breaks, or bathroom trips. And, if the stereotype is even 25% true, those folks WalMart lets go from their jobs will not be able to go out and replace their jobs elsewhere.
One of the beauties of capitalism is that those who can market a good idea can make out really well with it. The dark side of it is that they will pay people as little as possible to produce that service or product. WalMart takes a lot of heat for paying its workers not much, and employing folks as mostly part-timers to save on benefits costs. It's their right to pay their employees whatever those people will work for, but cutting that many people off from a job all at once could have some interesting repercussions.
I'm all for the company improving its bottom-line, reducing theft, and cutting prices to its customers. However, I would like to see them take some initiative along the way to help train at least some of their workers to do something else productive after they leave.
(For more information about RFID, see these Google results.
I've been taking GST 430 Food & Culture this winter term at Elon, and just turned in my research paper about sustainable personal production, ie growing enough food for yourself and/or family. Living off the grid has been interest of mine for many years, and this class has resparked my interest in the topic, so I have just posted my paper as a pair of PDFs, along with a text introduction, in my articles section. I'm be interested in hearing what you have to say about it, so please email me any comments you have.
Have a great weekend.
It is essential for anyone claiming to be a Christian to believe in a literal 6-day creation timeline. Upon that basis rests the entirety of God's revealed word in the Bible. My employer has recently added a page defending evolution on its website, and I am very disappointed in that move. Evolution cannot speak to origins of life. Since no one was around to record how the earth was created, the only valid understanding of origins is provided in God's account, as recorded by Moses in Genesis chapters 1 & 2.
The cornerstone of evolutionary theory is that there is no God, or that if He exists, He merely started everything off, perhaps giving some divine guidance along the way, but that natural processes have accounted for the formation, and deformation of life as we know it. Evolution is more than just a way of explaining natural processes. It claims that life can arise from non-life, that mutations can be beneficial and be passed to offspring in such a way as to promote the development of new and better versions of themselves, and that this process has been in place for billions of years. Evolution claims that we are all the product of dumb luck (evolutionists would word it 'chance', but it's the same).
Besides the incredible mathematical improbabilities of every mutation as we see it now having begun with chance interactions of chemicals in some primordial ooze spawning the first form of 'life', evolution and its proponents have other bizarre realities to contend with. A prime example is the supposed age of the universe. Based on current estimated rates of expansion, these scientists can claim to calculate the initial time of the universe's 'big bang' at approximately 10-12 billion years ago. Since there are stars 10 billion light-years away, they say, and light travels at a more-or-less constant speed, the light we are seeing now from those stars was first started that many years ago (minus a slight adjustment for the fact that the universe is apparently expanding).
However, if the light we are seeing from these incredibly distant stars is in fact that old, why are we seeing stars near the end of their life spans? Light arriving from those distant objects should show the state of stars near the beginning of their existence, not the end. Yet, the light we are now observing coming from these distant stars, constellations, and galaxies is 'old'. We should be seeing the early stages of galactic formation, and should be observing more and more stars in an on-going fashion.
Contrasting that position, Christians understand that God created the world in 6 days, resting on the 7th, and the deterioration of the universe is the fault of a single man's transgression. Evolutionists, and even some claimed Christian theologians, claim that the universe is billions of years old, and that God could not have possibly made the earth, and everything it contains in 6 literal days. The earth, they say, looks too old. But there is a problem with their thinking: no one knows what a 'young' earth looks like. We've never observed a planet being formed. By merely flipping the time-table around, and saying that things have proceeded in the past as we observe them now, scientists can claim to know how old the earth and universe are.
The laws of thermodynamics, among which state that matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but can only merely be translated into a different form, argue against evolution also. If it is true that matter and energy can not be created or destroyed, then the universe must not have originated in the 'big bang', but that it must be eternal. Since everything is in a state of constant decay (observe any chemical or physical process, and how there is loss due to friction, noise, heat, etc), thermodynamics, which scientists claim to believe, bluntly shows that things are not getting better, they're getting worse.
Scientists who believe in evolution as the source of life merely transpose their faith from an infinite, eternal God who made them in His image, as the crowning element of creation, for whom the universe exists, into a faith in the eternality and infiniteness of space, matter, and time.
My journal entry's title is important. Without a literal 6-day creation period, Christianity (and Judaism, too) falls apart. When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, He flatly announced the reason for keeping the Sabbath Day holy: "For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy." [Ex 20:11]. If the days listed in the creation account in Genesis are not literal days, then the reason given in the fourth commandment for observing the Sabbath is groundless. Previously, in Exodus 16:26, God tells Moses that the people may only gather the manna He miraculously provided for them on the mornings of the 6 days of the week, and could not gather any on the seventh day, since it was the Sabbath, and God was not going to provide food that day. The day previous to it He would provide twice what the people needed, so they would have enough for the next day, but the Sabbath was to be a day of rest. The entire Mosaic Covenant falls apart if the creation week is not literal.
Jesus Himself declared that He was 'Lord of the Sabbath', since He was the Son of God. Declaring Himself to be 'Lord of the Sabbath' would have been irrational if the creation days are merely figurative and do not reflect accurately the amount of time God spent to create the universe.
God really did make the earth, universe, plants, animals, and mankind in their full forms in 6 days. The 'evenings' and 'mornings' recorded were not figurative, they were real. Just like days we have now. It has been said that the word 'day' or 'days' can be taken to mean several different things, such as a 24-hour period, the daylight hours, a period of time ('in those days'), or a reminiscing ('back in my day'). However, every time a numerical qualifier is used with the word 'day', it indicates a real, honest-to-God day. The repeated use of the phrase, "and there was evening, and there was morning the 1st day" (and 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th) can only lead you to understand that each day is a 'real' day.
Another issue that evolutionists have to deal with is the matter of reproduction and maturity. According to the Biblical account, each creature was made and then told to "reproduce after their kind". When God specially made man on day 6 of the creation week, he told him to "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth." God would not have told an infant to "be fruitful and multiply". He would not have brought "every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens to the man to see what he would call them" if the 'man' was an infant and not a 'man'. Nor would it make any sense to have made a "helper fit for him": "So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man." Infants don't need spouses, they need parents! The evolutionist's solution to this conundrum is that, since life started with single-cell organisms, as those organisms got larger and more complicated, they gradually adapted ways of raising their young. Unfortunately for them, though, many (if not all) single-cell creatures do not reproduce sexually, they just get to a point where they're too big to continue as one cell, and divide into multiple cells, who then each go their own way. There really is no logical reason for single-celled critters like amoebae to ever evolve into a form that needs to reproduce sexually: their reproductive manner works fine, why change? With the inerrant light of God's holy word, though, it is obvious that God intended for there to be multiple ways of reproducing, myriad different types (that had the ability to speciate over time), and that mankind did not come from 'lower' life forms.
The wholesale rejection of God and His word by modern science is disheartening. Paul, in writing to the Roman believers says in Rom 1:18-23, "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles." (emphasis added). God's astonishing creative diversity is witnessed billions of times a day all over the world. Yet, even with His incredible daily displays of variety, order, uniqueness, and beauty, scientists propound that God did not create the world, that we're all a giant cosmic experiment, an accident, just one of an infinite number of possibilities that could have been.
Truly, those who espouse belief in evolution have professed themselves to be wise, and yet are fools. God's word is clear about what will happen to them: "Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator" [Rom 1:24-25] & "For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them." [Rom 1:26-32].
Man's refusal to acknowledge God has led to every form of evil in the world today. Our refusal to believe God's revealed self has devolved our race into murdering, thieving, lying, coveting, idol-worshipping, adulterous people. God has revealed so much of Himself in creation that no man has an excuse to not believe in Him. But, to shut up their consciences, to make themselves feel good about not believing in God, men have come up with 'alternate' theories of how things came to be. Their proclaiming of evolution is an act to appease their minds and consciences. By making other people believe their lie, they feel better about it themselves.
If we really are no better than the animals, laws have no purpose. If we really are just a 'higher' life form, societal structure doesn't matter: there is no right and wrong; there is no crime; it's an "every man for himself" environment.
But not even the evolutionists really believe that. They may profess to believe the current philosophy du jour, that morals are all relative, and your truth is good for you, and my truth is good for me, but they don't hold to their professed ideals. Everyone demands justice for acts committed against themselves. They may demand it in different ways, but they all want retribution, vengeance, vindication, justice.
Fortunately, God has provided a way of escape from this enslaving mindset: He sent His Son to die on a cross to pay for our sins and transgressions against Himself. Hebrews 9:22b, "without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins." Jesus came and lived a perfect life, proclaimed a perfect kingdom, died a perfect death, offered Himself as a perfect sacrifice, and rose from death never again to die, but having conquered death, has proffered us, fallen humanity, to have the reward of His perfection by giving us eternal, perfect life in fellowship with God.
I pray for those who hold firm to their evolutionary beliefs. I pray that God will open their eyes to see their error, and to believe Him and His perfect word. I don't want to see these people suffering eternal judgement for their erroneous beliefs and their spreading of such a heinous lie. I want to see them saved, to join the throng worshipping God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for all eternity with me.
Jay Loden has an interesting journal entry from yesterday (1 Dec 05). Apparently, while in Seattle on a buiness trip, he had the, ahem, priviledge of driving a Chrysler PT Cruiser. I have driven them on a few occasions in the past when I worked for Hertz, and generally agree with him about the layout of the car: it pretty much sucks. Putting the window controls by the radio is dumb. Visibility sucks worse than any sports (or sporty) car I've driven other than the Celica and Tiburon. The looks, well, as he points out, if you like 'em, you like 'em, and if you don't, you don't. I think the car looks like a monkey turd with wheels, but that's me.
I have to disagree with him, though, on his general statement, "American cars by and large just can't get a grip on this whole build quality and reliability thing". While working at Hertz during and after my stint at HVCC, I got to drive almost everything Hertz rented (I also had to drive everything they rented). I found out that I don't fit well in the Ford Taurus for long periods of time, but that the Escort (while not visually appealing to me) fit me fairly well. This is totally counter-intuitive when you look at me, since I'm a decently-big guy. I'm about 6'1" and have long legs, so the Taurus should've been a better fit (more leg and head room), but the Escort's seat was better shaped to me.
Outside size of the vehicle, it turns out, doesn't always correspond 1-1 to inside comfort. The Lincoln LS, for example, is a semi-compact sports sedan. However, the back seat is just about useless to put anyone over 5'3" into for trips over 30 minutes. I found the driver's seat quite comfortable, but the front passenger seat leaving something to be desired. I hate the Toyota Avalon, and it's not just because I dislike most Japanese-make cars (I find them generally unattractive, and set-up weird inside). The Avalon, for all it's niceties and appointments inside, and it's decent ride, offered really bad visibility for me. I generally sit with the seat as far back as it will slide (that whole longlegs thing), and the back pretty much upright. Even with these shifts to the seat position, though, I had trouble knowing where stuff was around me. And that was on a lot I drove on 10 hours a day 4 days a week. I'd hate to think how driving it on the highway would have been. On the other hand, any time I'd hop in the big 15-passenger van to clean it, I knew where every corner was, and could put it quite precisely where I wanted it in the lot.
I generally pride myself on knowing how big my vehicle is (important when you want to pass someone on the highway or pull into a parking space), and where it's performance limitations are to be found (the Lincoln LS sucks in light snow). One of the things the managers, and cleaners and transporters, at Hertz noticed about me very soon after I started there was my comfortability with driving almost everything we had. From little Prisms on up to Excursions, Sportages to Mustangs, Land Rovers to Miatas, I knew where my vehicle was just about all the time, and could back it into any spot it would fit into.
For those who know me, they know I'm a Ford fan. Not everything they make, but a lot of their vehicles. In straight-up comparisons, I'd hasten to point out that cheap Fords - Focuses, etc - have nicer-looking plastic in them than expensive Cadillacs. Don't ask me why, but GM seems to chince on the plastic. Volvos ride smoothly, have good power (even on the cheap editions Hertz rents), and are comfortable to drive, with good visibility and room inside at least the front. Camrys on the other hand, a very popular car in this country, felt loose on the highway to me. However, the driver's seat was pretty comfortable on them. They didn't have a dash set-up I was especially thrilled about, but internally they weren't too horrible. I hated driving Towncars because you feel like you're floating when you're driving - a very disturbing feeling when you're the driver and want to know you're still on the road. Compare them to a Grand Marquis or Crown Victoria, and you have the same frame, less expensive internals, but a better feeling of road grip in the 'lesser' models.
Jeep Grand Cherokees' driver's seats feel like you're being swallowed into the back, and the dashboard is a garish green that tends to blur, making it hard to read. Pontiacs just suck. There's no two ways about it, they're horrible. The dashboard lights are all variations on a theme of red. The warning lights are just different types of red (ooh! or maybe this time it may be orange!). The instrument clusters always look weird, and finding information out about the car, especially if there's anything wrong with it is difficult.
From my experience with Hertz, I've had the opportunity to drive more different types of vehicles than probably anyone else I know outside of fellow Hertz employees. I discovered that Subaru Outbacks don't do well in the snow. That whole "transferring power from the wheels that slip to the wheels that grip" mantra leaves out the fact that if all four wheels slip, the power stops. Doesn't matter if you mash down on the gas pedal. It just idles. The wheels are slipping, after all, so why send power to them? I found this out when I managed to beach an Outback in a small snowbank turning to come down the access road to Hertz from the Albany Airport. The wheels quit turning, and the only way to get the car moving was to have two people pushing on the front to get it out of the snow and get the back wheels back on the pavement, then wait a few seconds for the computer to realize the back wheels could grip again, which allowed it to pull out of the snow. All in all, a poor design. Also, the Outback, while a higher-end vehicle than the Forrester, doesn't have as much headroom, legroom, or shoulder room. And, from my experience, the Forrester accelerates better, too. It may not be quite as nice inside, but it's the better car.
Coming back to what Jay was talking about with the American vehicles, I agree that most of the American brands don't have fantastic styling across all their product lines. The Corvette has good styling, as does the Mustang, and Viper. I like the way Ford trucks look, and will never buy a Dodge product (truck or otherwise) because they look kludgy. The grills look like they belong on a dump truck, not a sedan, and the trucks they make look bad, and I don't like the Dodge/Chrysler/Jeep dashboard layout. Contrast that with what, to me, seems a very natural layout in the Ford dashboards, better visibility in similar vehicles, and I'm sold on Ford. I liked driving the pre-2005 Mustangs, as they had a fair amount of pep in those V6s, even if it was metered to you through an automatic tranny.
I was disappointed with the Windstar, though, Ford's follow-on to the successful Aerostar line. It rode funny to me, since it's based on a car chassis and not a truck chassis as the Aerostar was, so you don't sit up as much in it. I like the way the Ranger looks and drives, but the S-10 (which GM has since renamed and resized) was horrendously under-powered. Ford's higher-line trucks, the 150, 250, and 350 all looks like trucks to me. They have gobs of power, great visibility, comfortable seats, have great road handling, and enough room in them to put stuff along with passengers. I've ridden in several GM trucks, and driven a couple, and they feel unwieldy to me. The GM 2500 I drove several months ago felt incredibly sluggish in turning, getting up to speed, and in backing. GM also likes to put touchy brakes on their vehicles, and gas pedals that are already almost all the way to the floor. When I drove my uncle's Blazer a couple years ago I flet like I was searching to the gas pedal to leave the parking lot. So, by the time I found it, my foot was moving quickly, and I hit the pedal hard. GM apparently wants to start with your foot on the floor and just feather the gas to get the vehicle to move. The brakes systems I've seen in their cars and trucks is the same way. Most vehicles have brakes that you can start to apply, and they have a nice, smooth curve of braking power. Not GM. They have on and off, and very little in between.
Ford is not without blame in all of this either. The older style Explorers were great SUVs, I don't like the new ones at all. Taking an older explorer off-road seems natural, while the new ones are really just glorified, 4-wheel-drive minivans. The whole 'bubble' era in car design (which wasn't just a Ford thing, rember those 'cab-forward' jellybean Chryslers and Dodges?) was just nasty. And it bugs me a great deal that most new cars have funky radio shapes which make changing the stereo out for an after-market model painful at best - impossible in some.
Admittedly, I haven't driven any brand-spanking-new cars on a regular basis since I left Hertz, but the design on many doesn't seem to have gotten better. Their are, obviously, people out there who keep buying cars that I think look like crap, and that are laid out in a very unergonomic fashion from my point of view. However, I have to point out that I've known many people who have driven their American-make cars well over 200k miles, or at least gotten up in that range. The last van my parents owned, a 94 Aerostar, got to about 230k before it croaked, or at least needed 'major surgery'. The 94 Tracer wagon I owned for 3+ years made it all the way to 186k before it died (in Pennsylvania, driving home on spring break in 2004). And my roommate only recently got rid of his 91 Bonneville, with over 300k miles on it.
I think most people don't drive their cars a long time because they get bored, that "keeping up with the Joneses" mentality that pervades our culture. Every vehicle I or my parents (and several of my friends) have owned, we've driven till they wouldn't any more (sometimes because we put them into large objects, others because they finally broke). Vehicles being sold today, with very few exceptions, are expected to last 100-150k miles before needing tune-ups. I expect that anything I buy made since 1995 will last to around 200k, maybe further, if I can push it. The car I have now, a 95 Mazda MX-3, has 148,500 miles on it, an increase of 21k miles in the eleven months I've owned it. I drive a lot, but it's been running pretty well so far. I'd like something different, but for now, this is what I've got, and it's what I'll drive.
Lasting a long time is more up to the owners, generally, then the manufacturers at this point. Outside of crashes, most vehicles have no reason to be discarded before they hit at least 150k miles - many till past 200k. So long as regular maintenance is performed, you don't hit anything, and there weren't blatant problems in manufacture, the car you buy, be it for looks, name, comfort, etc, should be one that you can plan on driving for 10-15 years from when it was first sold.
I have just launched a new homework help site with my aunt! Please check it out, and email me if you have any questions: Homework Help Question & Answer.
Fall break was this past weekend, so I found myself driving north to visit Jay in Princeton. Saturday we went to the Bridgewater Commons mall in NJ, and found perhaps the best store on the planet. Who knew, but Lego has stores. Ahh. The entire back wall was a grid of bins with myriad bricks in a veritable cornucopia of colors. We also found a powered technic truck crane that I want: almost 1900 pieces, and it's only $150.
Sunday evening I discovered that going to Montville the day leading into the Pastor's Conference is a really bad idea. After the evening sermon and a midget break, there about 40-45 minutes of introductions, reports, and updates from a few of the pastors in attendance. This is all well and good, but it meant that I only had ~20 minutes to visit with friends afetrwards instead of an hour or so. But, you live, you learn, then you get Luvs.
Yesterday was an interesting cap to the whole trip. I left NJ a bit before 7a and drove to DC to find the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. I was doing well, too, except that I got off the highway at the wrong spot, and ended up driving all through and around DC trying to get to the river and come back to the museum. Once I finally got in, though, I was pretty excited to see SpaceShipOne hanging in the lobby. I also saw the Imax film 'Magnificent Desolation', in 3D no less. Very cool film about the people who've been to the moon and what it would be like to be there with them. Not really sure how they filmed it, but it was quite nice.
I have integrated RSS into my website. If you're running Firefox, you should notice the little RSS icon in your status bar right now. Clicking on that will allow you subscribe to my blog and/or update feeds.
I have also begun posting more to my Xanga, so you might be interested in checking that out, too.
That's it for now. Have a wonderful day.
Quick excerpt: "MasterCard said it wants to take a central role in expanding contactless payment. But, Steeley said, the first step might very well be ditching the credit card itself and giving that payment power to some other device, most likely a cell phone.
'People think of MasterCard as a credit card company. But the truth is that we're about a payment brand and, in the future, we'll be less about the card itself,' Steeley said. 'The form factor issue is a crucial and critical one for the payments industry. Payments will be less about the cards and more about how devices communicate with one another.'"
When I read this, the first thing that popped into my head was, "I like using cash, but my debit card is awful handy." After thinking about it a bit longer, though, using my cell phone (presuming it didn't get lost/stolen) to activate a transaction could be really easy: just use SMS. On one of these "PayPass" devices, post a SMS number that you can send a text message to. My general thinking is like this:
This could mean that you could have your favorite theaters programmed into your phone's address book, and order the tickets before you leave dinner, arrive at the theater, punch in your confirmation code, and get your tickets right away. If they were really clever, they would only charge your card the full price if you actually type in your confirmation code, so that if you can't make the movie, you're not out the cost of tickets, just a few cents per ticket as a surcharge.
I would be willing to hook my cell # to my credit card account for such a purpose. What do you think? Send me your thoughts.
It may not be a perfect solution, but it has a bunch of interesting possibilities.
Before going any further, let me state the fact that I was home-schooled. For all 12 years of grade-, middle-, and high-school. My parents had various reasons for doing this, from the horrible state of the public schools in Albany NY at the time to wanting to be more involved in my education, but I enjoyed it. I also managed to come out pretty well 'adjusted' socially: I can have useful dialogues with people of almost any age, enjoy learning, am a fairly productive employee, etc. Mr Edelen, the author of Cerulean Sanctum, has an impressive set of credentials, and I am not trying to impinge upon his education or research in what I am about to say.
Recently, Mr Edelen wrote regarding "The Myths of Home-schooling" (1 2 3 4). Many of his points were quite valid, and I believe that he has taken a very brave approach in pointing out the hypocrisies of many home-schooling parents.
Myth #1: If you don't home-school your kids, you're a bad parent. Mr Edelen correctly points out that having one parent the primary, or even only, teacher is not well-aligned with Biblical principles, especially when that one is the mother. God gave parents - note the plural in that word parents - to be responsible for rearing their charges up in the 'fear and admonition of the Lord' [Eph 6:4]. Interestingly, and counter to what seems to be the majority position of home-schooling families, this directive was given to fathers, who are responsible for the well-being of their families. Quoting Mr Edelen, "the stress of forcing all schooling onto one parent is too much for most people to handle." And he is correct: the responsibility of training children is not the job of just one parent.
As I was going through my schooling, while my mom was the primary teacher for several subjects, there were some she couldn't handle well, and for those my dad or aunt helped out. And both of my parents had an interest in what I was doing, even when one was less formally involved than the other.
Myth #2: Home-schooling more actively involves parents in their children's educations. From personal experience, I can say it was true for me, at least through 9th grade. We didn't use video-based curricula, and only used a CD-based math curricula my last year. Before that it was strictly book- and personally-presented material. By the time I was in the higher grades and my sister was starting school, most of my work was performing assignments from the text books we used, which involved a lot of reading on my part, and then executing the instructions in the books, or writing about what I had read, and often, by that point, on my own.
Mr Edelen correctly says that claiming the video- and computer-based curricula disinvolve the parents is pretty accurate, and that the parents really are as involved as they would be if their children were at a public or private school. Some of those video-school programs don't even require the parents to grade their children's work, but rather expect everything to be sent in to a central grading house, and then returned. If anything, this could be considered a gross mistreatment of the student, since feedback on assignments is not available for a long time.
Myth #3: The educational methodology behind most home-schooling curriculum is superior to the methodology used in public schools. From having seen a small sampling of public school textbooks and assignments methods, I agree with Mr Edelen's assertion: "there are dozens of educational methodologies available to home-schooling parents today. All have blind spots and problems." One thing that I appreciated about the way my parents taught me was that they didn't presume there was only one 'right' answer, or method to teaching. Yes, in many subjects there is only one correct solution to a given problem (eg math, physics), but there are lots and lots of ways of instilling the concepts in the student. I happen to be able to learn in many different ways, reading from a book, from lectures, from multimedia presentations, and from hands-on application, and my parents, recognizing this, taught me using all sorts of different methods. And if they didn't know how to get the point across, they tried to find (and were pretty much successful) someone who could figure out how to relate something to me. They realized that they were finite, and couldn't be the best at everything, and that understanding was borne out to my benefit.
Myth #4: The ________ method is by far the best way to home-school kids. "Fill-in that blank with 'biblical,' 'classical,' 'constructivist' or whatever the hottest trend in home-schooling is and I'll bet dollars to donuts that it misses the point most of the time." [Mr Edelen]
He's right in this statement, as I pointed out above just in myself. "Whenever I hear someone saying that they are giving their children a biblical education, I ask if they're teaching crop rotation and animal husbandry." While this strikes our western ears as quite funny, it's also very true. In expounding on this myth, though, Mr Edelen goes off on a pretty strange tangent: discussing out-sourcing of high-tech jobs, and suggests that the most responsible thing for parents to do is to teach their children how to survive (agricultural skills), rather than "calculus if all the jobs that use it in the United States are fleeing to cheaper markets." Perhaps I am misunderstanding his point here, but the parents' job is not to make their child the next Bill Gates, Nelson Rockefeller, or Warren Buffet. Without an unusually large amount of money, no parent anywhere can make their kid a person like that. It is the parents' job to prepare their children to be a productive member of society, but more importantly to teach them the Bible, and the good news of salvation. It doesn't matter how smart or well-educated a child is when he hits the 'real world' if he ends up spending eternity separated from God. While no parent can ensure their child is saved, they can ensure that they hear the law and the gospel.
Myth #5: A parent is a child's best teacher. For some things, this statement is absolutely true, but for myriad others is a patent fallacy. For Christian parents, it is proved weekly in that they leave their children in the care of nursery workers, Sunday school teachers, and pastors to be educated in God's word. I'm quite happy that my parents decided very early on that they would always get me a correct answer to any question I asked, even when they didn't know. They found someone who could answer my curiosities. Sometimes they didn't need to go far; there would be someone in church who knew the subject I was asking about. Other times, they spent time on their own finding someone they worked with who could help, or went to the library and got me a couple books that covered the subject area.
For example, in middle school, I got interested in wood-working and basic carpentry. My parents found someone (who happened to go to our church) who was willing to teach me at least the basics of wood-working, and I asked him a lot of questions, most of which my parents couldn't have answered.
My parents did have family times of studying the Bible, but never claimed to be expert theologians. They're continuing to learn even now, but they understood that the 'heavy lifting' in Biblical study was being done by my Sunday school teachers and our pastors. They reinforced what I was hearing at church, but didn't claim to be better at teaching those things than my teachers were.
Myth #6: It is more "Christian" to home-school. Mr Edelen continues, "Many of the home-schooling pundits today make it sound like you can't be a good Christian and not home-school your children. But, wow, that's a huge slap in the face to their parents, isn't it?" & "God has not placed His sole imprimatur on home-schooling. In fact, I sometimes doubt how concerned He is with just how are our children are educated and what methods are used in that education than He is that our kids serve Him and love Him with all their hearts, souls, and minds." Mr Edelen makes a good point here. An awful lot of very good Christian parents utilize non-home-school options to educate their children. Many have opted to use a Christian school. Others use the public schools, and some have used charter or private schools. For me, most likely the best option was to home-school. I would have gone nuts in a public school where they have to teach to the median, since I would not have been challenged much. When I got out of high-school, I worked for a year before going to college, at which my coworkers taught me what I needed to know to do my job, but were willing to teach me more when I asked, and they could teach me at the speed I was able to learn, since it was more of a one-on-one setting. When I started at the local community college I had a hard time waiting for my professors to teach at the speed I expected to learn. I had to find other things to occupy my time, because I was learning faster than they taught, so I ended up getting a long way ahead of my classmates in most classes.
Myth #7: Home-schooling protects our children. This is one of the biggest dangers I have witnessed occurring in many solid Christian homes. They have become extremely sheltering and protective of their children, forgetting that they have a 'quiver full' of children that God has entrusted to their care. Some parents think they're supposed to hold on to that quiver for ever, but the point of having arrows is to fire them at the enemy, not to hold onto them for some later date. Parents that shield their children too much end up, from my observations, with children who get into the 'real world' after high-school, and then go crazy trying out all sorts of things in college: drugs, getting drunk, sex, partying, etc. Since they didn't have a metered exposure to the world growing up, they don't really realize just how bad sin is, until they've managed to dive head first into it.
Mr Edelen states: "Good parents will work with their kids to combat bad messages. If we want to train our children to think, what better way than to have them experience lies firsthand." This is exactly right. Children need to be exposed to the world. Not to become like it, but to understand what they're being told, and what they're being sold. With a healthy understanding of what the bill of goods is that the world is trying to offer, they will be prepared to counter it far more effectively than if they are prevented from seeing any of it until they get out of their parents' home.
Myth #8: Home-schooled children are smarter than their peers. People get confused as to what exactly 'being smart' is. I have met a lot of people who knew a lot (and knew that they knew a lot), but were incredibly unintelligent. I have also met a decent number of people who are very smart, but don't know a lot. Intelligence isn't demonstrated exclusively by how much you know, but by how you use that knowledge. I've met people who have a nearly photographic memory, but can only regurgitate facts for tests and trivia, and never figure out how to apply what they have read, heard, and seen into their daily lives.
I happen to be very good at standardized tests, I tend to take them very quickly, and I generally don't need to study for them to still do well. I have tried to help some friends of mine prepare for the SAT or ACT who are patently great students, and who do well learning, but freeze up on those kind of tests, or just can't answer enough questions in the time allotted.
What this myth really speaks to is that for students who are willing to learn, and who have teachers who are willing to challenge them, whether they be parents or 'real' teachers, those students will do very well. They'll do well because they're highly motivated, and because they have a high native intelligence. Students who don't want to be challenged, or ones who can't find teachers who will challenge them, will find other things to occupy their attentions. Those who don't want to be challenged will go through school, doing 'well enough', finish up, and start working somewhere that is not very demanding. Maybe they'll go to college, but they'll likely pick 'easy' majors, and get out and do something that doesn't require lots of effort. Those who can't find someone to challenge them will either find stuff to do on their own that challenges them, or they'll lose interest and just eke by, as their less motivated classmates do.
Smarts are really shown forth when students are given the chance to excel, when they're given a challenge. I would venture to say that most good tradesmen, like mechanics, roofers, carpenters, etc, are also very smart. Their intelligence is shown in very applied areas, often even in areas that don't require lots of training, but a good carpenter knows exactly how much wood he needs, how long it will take him, and what the finished product will look like. He might not have gone to school to learn his craft, but he knows it well, and is smart. If you hand him a standardized test, however, he could easily do very poorly on it, just because all of his intelligence is focused on his trade.
Mr Edelen finished up his series with the following points:
Home-schooling is not for everyone. "One of the backbone beliefs of the home-schooling movement is that parents know their own kids best. Then why do some home-school advocates lambaste parents who believe their children would thrive in a non-home-schooled environment?"
No one educational method reigns. "Frankly, I believe that anyone home-schooling to a lone methodology (e.g. - classical, unschooling, behavioral, etc.) is robbing their kids of a broad-based education. That goes for private and public schools, too."
Don't despise the basics. "I firmly believe that instructing our children in a locally-needed trade may be the best work prep we can offer our kids. If we subsequently add into this mix an understanding of the land, animal husbandry, and small farm techniques, we can ensure them a better future than the one that is already upon us." Learning a marketable trade is fantastic, and is a great way to spread the gospel, in my opinion. There is an auto shop near my apartment that is closed on Sunday, expressly because everybody who works there goes to church on Sundays. I don't know them well personally, but it's a huge testimony that the whole place is closed just so they can go worship God. During the week, they routinely have Christian music playing quietly in the background, and have Bibles and Christian books lying around the main office for anyone who wanders in to see, and read if they want. I don't know if teaching children basic farming skills is necessarily required, but it can't hurt them.
God is a God of grace. "If we firmly believe that He is in control, then we will entrust the care of the children He's given us - children that are not ours, but His - to Him and Him alone."
Education is not the path to salvation. "Home-schooling, like anything else, can become an idol. God would much prefer a non-scholar with a heart that burns for Him than a Nobel-winning scientist who claims He does not exist. That's where our focus should be, raising kids for Christ, no matter where they go to school."
One more point needs to be made about this topic, and it's something my parents did with me, that they learned from some close friends of the family. It is not the parents' job to pick the career their children will follow. We got to know the parents of one of the men in our church many years ago, and one evening while chatting with them over dinner, his father said something very interesting. He knew that his son was never going to be a farmer like he was; his son loved trains, and wanted to work with them. Growing up on a farm meant lots of relatively unenjoyable tasks that needed to be done daily, weekly, and seasonally, that had nothing to do with his son's interests. While he required his son to do those chores, he recognized that his son wasn't going to follow in his footsteps, and he encouraged him.
Some parents get it in their heads that their child will be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, take over the family business, whatever. Parents who force their children into their preconceived notions about what they should be can often be ignoring their children's personal strengths, and more living vicariously through them, instead of letting them live their own lives, and do what they are interested in.
Some people claim that you can't enjoy what you do for work - that's why they call it work. Parents who force their children into what they want them to do instead of letting them follow their interests do their children a great disservice. I happen to enjoy system administration, programming, and other IT-related tasks. My parents saw early on that I was really interested in computers, and not just in playing games, or frivolous activities, but that I really wanted to know how they worked, and I wanted to build stuff with them that was useful. They encouraged me to do that. They bought a lot of books about programming, hardware, networking, etc for me. And they encouraged me to go to school for information systems.
If parents who are trying to push their children into some particular career path instead encouraged them to find something they a) like, b) can get paid for, and c) is ethical, I think they will find that their children grow up to be much happier adults. I still find it somewhat astonishing that people are willing to pay me to do something I do for fun.
Yesterday I filed our membership roster (14) and organizational goals (3) with the SGA so that we can remain a functioning organization. Now we just need to meet our goals :)
There's a group at Elon that call themselves "Students Against Sexual Assault" (see note). I have to ask, who is going to go around calling themselves, 'Students For Sexual Assault' or 'Students Supporting Sexual Assualt'? It's stupid.
Before he graduated, my friend Jay and I discussed how we need a moron squad on campus, armed with billy clubs. If you're not against obviously bad things (like sexual assault), you should be whacked a couple times upside the head.
No one in their right mind is going to parade themselves as being for sexual assaults.
Ok, rant over. SASA is a fine organization, and I'm happy they raise awareness of this problem, but their name implies that there is a counterpart somewhere.
Reprinted from The Saratogian
Donald J. Neilson, 80, a resident of Mowry Avenue in Greenwich, died Tuesday, 6 Sep 2005, at Glens Falls Hospital.
Born 4 Oct 1924, in the town of Easton, he was the son of Edwin and Bessie Hagadorn Neilson.
He retired from Hollingsworth and Vose Paper Co. in Center Falls and had also been employed by Whiteman Chevrolet in Glens Falls.
For the past 30 years, Don was known around Greenwich as the village walker. Any time of the day, he would be out walking and waving to all who passed by. The many friends that he made along the way will surely miss him.
In addition to his parents, he was predeceased by a brother, Charles, and sisters, Mildred Myers and Amaryllis Locke.
Survivors include a brother, Marshall Neilson of Vischers Ferry; two sisters, Lottie Fasoli of Greenwich and Bertha Goman of Henrietta, Okla.; his aunts, Mamie Bozony of Saratoga and Alice Skeals of Cockeysville, Md.; and several nieces, nephews and cousins.
The family suggests memorials in his name be made to Washington County Hospice, 415 Lower Main St., Hudson Falls, NY 12839, or the Easton Greenwich Rescue Squad, P.O. Box 84, Greenwich, NY 12834.
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I was up in NY from 2-4 Sep to see him in the hospital. I'm happy I made it up before he died.
Last week my hosting provider had a large DDoS attack, so my site was down for 3 days, and mail service just got restored late Wednesday night, so if you've been trying to reach me, I'm not a jerk, my server was down.
Some Katrina-related stories:
Please note: links in this post are not necessarily an endorsement of the web sites they are hosted on, they're just provided for your information.
Updating from an earlier post, I am no longer scheduled to take "US History through 1865", but have replaced it in my schedule with "Discrete Structures", a requirement to graduate (and now only offered in the fall, rather than only in the spring).
I am completely set up to be full-time this fall. I had to go in and straighten-out some financial aid paperwork last week, but am looking forward to classes starting tomorrow.
I've also been having a prolonged dialog on Slashdot with a guy who calls himself "Some Random Username". You can read my posts to him in order here: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
I won't quote here what he has said, suffice it so say that he has problems supporting his point of view without name-calling and cussing people out. You can see soem of his other posts on Slashdot, and see what I mean.
School starts up again on 30 Aug. That's now less than two weeks away, and I'm really looking forward to it. I've stayed pretty busy this summer with work at Sigma Xi and Elon, and should be continuing a similar schedule this fall. I've also had some success selling stuff on eBay.
This past weekend I was up in NJ for Jay and Marlana's engagement party. This is, of course, different from the one I went to in June, as this one was for family and wedding party people, and that was for random friends. Jay put up a brief note on what we did while I was up, too. In addition to what he wrote about, he helped me on soem odd config issues with the website for our discussion group in church, ngmen.net. You can expect a redesign of that site soon.
Enjoy the remaining days of summer.
The mailing list/study group we started a few months ago in church (http://ngmen.net) has been quite lively recently. I just added a new wing to my website to hold some resources from a recent discussion, and plan to take some of what I've written and turn it into a publishable article over the next few days. Also check out the RSS feeds page I set up on our group's website.
I got the Final Value Fee credited back to my eBay account after the non-paying high bidder issue. You can see what's up for sale now, and through the menu link 'eBay Stuff'.
The second bidder on my car ended up not wanting it, so I'm trying to sell it still. If you might be interested, drop me a line.
Elon's computing sciences department chairman, Dave Powell, placed a notice about my article having been published to his news page
Business at school is improving, too. I offer computer clean-up and upgrade services on campus, and I have several customers to visit and work on over the next few days, including two this evening. If you're in the Elon - Burlington - Mebane NC area, and you need your computer worked on, you can email me at school. I will explain my normal rates when you email me.
That's all for now. Check out some of my friends' xangas, journals, and blogs.
I'm meeting with the second bidder about my car this afternoon after work. Hopefully all will go well, and the car will be fully sold tonight.
You've probably also noticed the recent redesign of my website, with a new color scheme, 2-column layout, and overall readability improvements. There are probably some remaining hiccups to the site, and if you see any, please send an email.
I got set up yesterday to be full-time this fall, so I should have a nice 2-day schedule. Class from 0800-1600 Tu & Th, with a short break after my first class before going class-to-class the rest of the day. I'm expecting to take "Computer Organization and Architecture", "Interpretations of Literature", "Applied Math with Calculus", and "US History through 1865", so the semester should be something of a snooze, with a bunch of reading and papers, but nothing horribly technically difficult. I took a computer architecture course twice (audit, then for credit) before when I was at Hudson Valley, but Elon wouldn't transfer in a sophomore class into a junior requirement, so I get to take it again.
I'm also working on a couple new essays that I hope to have ready before school starts.
Well, it looks like I'm going to have to relist my car. The high bidder bailed on me, and the second guy hasn't contacted me back about looking at the car and buying it, so I'm getting ready to take up the issue with eBay and relist the car, hopefully this time selling it to someone who will actually pay for it.
In nicer news, my interface article has been published on the ACM Ubiquity site, and I'm pretty excited. Another item to add to my resume, no longer has everything I've written and published been done by me, either on a personal site or Rice University's Connexions project. I'll be adding a link to this article on my articles page shortly.
I listed my car on eBay (eBay item 4559616305) last week, and it has two bids on it as of 1123 today. It ends in a couple hours, and I'm pretty excited about being able to move on to a different vehicle. I'm looking at Explorers and Miatas right now.
I found a pretty non-partial overview of the various Linux distributions today that you might be interested in.
Our guys study group had its second meeting last night, and we had a really profitable time. Check out our new website: ngmen.net. I'm currently the primary developer on the site, and will be porting my blogging tool to it this week.
My first official project as an IS intern at Sigma Xi is almost complete. We have a static listing of all of our chapters. Since it's static, though, for any change to chapter status (inactivite, reactivating, active, change of officers), the page needs to manually updated by hand. I've been tasked with automating this process, and have a first cut done. I need to finish adding in the international chapters and then it goes into test. While it's being tested, though, I'm going to write a new version that will allow you to get just a listing for the state you're interested in, rather than necessarily all of them at once.
Reprinted from the Post Star:
Amaryllis "Anne" Locke, 75, of state Route 9, South Glens Falls, died Friday, June 10, 2005, at Glens Falls Hospital.
Amaryllis was born Dec. 10, 1929, to Edwin and Bessie (Hagadorn) Neilson, in the dining room of her parents' home on Windy Hill Road, in the town of Easton. She was the youngest of seven children.
She was a 1947 graduate of Greenwich Central School.
During high school, Anne worked at Davies Florist in Greenwich. Following graduation she was employed at United Board and Carton. She also served as Town Clerk for the town of Northumberland. In 1960, she joined the National Bank of Schuylerville as part-time summer help and was eventually promoted to the position of head teller. When the Glens Falls National Bank and Trust Company purchased the Schuylerville Bank, Anne was promoted to Bank Manager. She worked as Branch Manager in both the Schuylerville and Fort Ann offices.
During this time, she met Edward B. Locke and they were married on Sept. 20, 1975. She retired from the bank in 1985.
She was also very active in the Mettawee Valley Business and Professional Women's Club, serving as president for two terms, treasurer for the New York State Convention in 1982, and as Financial Chair for BPW District IV.
Amaryllis did not let retirement slow her down. Following her retirement, she served as Secretary to the Fort Ann Planning Board; Clerk for the Village of Fort Ann; Treasurer of the United Protestant Women of Fort Ann; Secretary of the Administrative Council of the United Protestant Church of Fort Ann and Chairman of the Pastor-Parish Relations Committee. Anne was a member of the Queen Anne Seniors Club, where she acted as tour director for several years. She was also a member of the Old Saratoga Seniors.
She enjoyed reading, doing crossword puzzles; taking her ever-faithful companion, Krissy, for car rides; her Friday night dinners at the Docksider on Glen Lake, where she was honored with her own special table; and traveling to Las Vegas to the Lady Luck Hotel and Casino to play the slots. Anne thoroughly enjoyed life, loved her family and friends and was a truly remarkable role model to many.
She was predeceased by her parents; her infant brother Charles; sister, Millie Myers; and by her husband, Edward B. Locke, who died Dec. 13, 1985.
Survivors include her son, George Peters, and his wife, Terry, of Schuylerville; daughter, Susan Peters of South Glens Falls, with whom she resided; stepson, David Locke and his wife, Anita, of Chestertown; and stepdaughter, Donna Haight and her husband, Rob, of Marietta, Ga. She is also survived by her brothers, Marshall Neilson of Clifton Park, Donald Neilson of Greenwich; and sisters, Lottie Fasoli of Greenwich and Bertha Goman of Henrietta, Okla. She also leaves grandchildren, Kim Brunelle and her husband, Timothy, of Schuylerville, Shawn Quinn and his wife, Amy, of Schuylerville, Shauna Locke-Holcomb and her husband, Bill, of Fort Ann, and Sam Locke and his wife, Sarah, of Poultney, Vt. She has eight great-grandchildren: Karen, Fred and Carissa Brunelle, Madison, Sydney, Riley and Chase Quinn and Kaylin Holcomb. She is survived by her aunts, Mamie Bozony of Saratoga Springs and Alice Skeals of Cockeysville, Md. Grandma will be deeply missed by her "granddog," Miss Kriss Kringle, her constant companion for the last 4-1/2 years of her life. She also leaves numerous nieces, nephews, cousins and a large circle of dear friends and adopted family members.
The family wishes to thank the staff of 2 South for getting her back home to us after her stay at Glens Falls Hospital in March of this year, especially Janine and Karen, who treated her with such kindness and love. Thanks also to the nursing and professional staff of the CCU for all your efforts and tender care, and the staff of 3 South for making her final days comfortable. Words cannot express the family's gratitude to her niece, Alice DuBois, for being ever willing to take her to doctor's appointments, make hospital visits and home visits and be the family liaison.
A celebration of Amaryllis' life will be held at 11 a.m. Wednesday, June 15, 2005, at the United Protestant Church, 5 Anne St., Fort Ann, with the Rev. Dewey Armitage officiating.
Burial will be in Gansevoort cemetery.
The three pages that comprise my blogging tool are now completed, at least to my satisfaction, at this time. If you're interested in adding a journaling tool to your website, please contact me. I'm more than happy to share the scripts with you.
After a request from Jay, I updated my arrlist and strlist classes to act like Python in handling index-based access. If you feed a negative index into the object, it goes from the end backwards. If you give it a number that is smaller than -SIZE, it will do a mod on it and then use that value as the reverse index (see code for details). If you've been using either of these data structures, you won't notice any change... the new version of the library works just the old one did, but with spiffy new features. The code is available on my Shodor site: arrlist and strlist.
You also may notice the minor changes in look to the WarrenMyers.com site. I moved the menu back over to the left, and added an add column on the right. I am hoping to be able to go to OSCON in August, and am accepting donations in any amount if you'd like to help me get there.
Thanks for visiting.
From John at the ACM's Ubiquity: "Thanks, Warren. Nice article. We'll run it in the next month or two."
Needless to say, I am a bit excited about this. First time I've been published anywhere, without me doing it, other than the Shodor newsletter.
Speaking of whom, they recently completed their move to a new building in downtown Durham, with tons more space for staff, stuff, and interns.
And on the topic of moving, I just moved into my new office at Sigma Xi today. Beginning today, for about the next year, I am slated to be an IS intern working directly for our director of IS. So, I started the day schlepping my machine and stuff from my old office upstairs to my new one, then resetting everything up, and have just finished getting everything in place, including voicemail, and positioning of the various and sundry pieces of stuff that go along with having a working office.
My trip home went really well. I left shortly after Jay graduated, and got into Cohoes just after 1400 Sunday afternoon. Friday's combination 25th anniversary and 50th birthday party went great. My mom had no clue what was going on until she got inside, and my dad didn't know about the first half until we brought the cakes out. Saturday morning we headed down to Manhattan for Fleet Week, and toured the Kennedy (CV 67) and Shreveport (LPD 12), and a Pakistani destroyer, the Tippu Sultan. Then on Monday was the annual Ballston Lake Memorial Day picnic, which we all went to. Got to play an abbreviated game of baseball before lunch, and then a well-played game of softball later in the afternoon. I headed back to Mebane yesterday, and had a nice, uneventful trip.
Next up on my non-work docket is finishing off the descriptions for the defect photos on Greg's website, prepping a working mock-up for a recently-formed non-profit in Albany, and reading How Now Shall We Live.
I'm gonna head out. Have a fantastic day.
I submitted an article I wrote on human-computer interfaces, and why they're broken to the ACM's Ubiquity publication for possible inclusion in an upcoming issue.
Apparently my grade on the final exam in statistics was somewhere between 87 and 90, because I got a B+ in the class. I needed a 91 or higher to bring me to an A-, and about a 97 to bring me up to an A. The ethics class also finished up reasonably, with a B+ for my final grade. I'm emailing my professor to find out if I can get the two papers back from him with his comments, just for sake of having them.
Next on the docket is my buddy Jay's graduation tomorrow from Elon. Then I head up to NY through Memorial Day.
I'll be continuing in the system admin office at school part time through the summer. My relationship with Sigma Xi is also shifting a bit. I'm switching from a 'programs intern' which has had me working with the UN group, the Sally Ride TOYchallenge, and various other diverse activities to an IT intern as of 1 June. It's mostly an administrative change on their part, realigning how who pays whom with Shodor, themselves, and me. I'll also be switching into doing more programming and sys admin stuff here, which should all be quite interesting.
There won't be many of you, especially by this time next week, but you should probably go see Star Wars Episode III. I set a personal record in seeing the same movie twice in the theaters in under 24 hours. I went to the 0001 showing Thursday morning (aka the midnight Wed show) at Southpoint, and again last night at 2150 with a friend who couldn't go Wednesday night. This is definitely the best of the new three, and did a good job of really tying the new three to the old three, and creating a continuous story arc through them all.
"A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel." --Robert Frost.
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." --Douglas Adams.
They'll bring you down to their level, and beat you with experience. I had another response on slashdot to my series of exchanges with AveryT, and he has degraded to, predictably, personal attacks. When someone has no core from which to argue, they cut to emotional, gut responses. It's not even worth trying to talk to him anymore.
My buddy Jay has had his share of idiocy recently, too. People coming out and defending the authors of some of the AIM viruses, and devolving to personal, knee-jerk statements when they can't argue from the moral high-ground.
But, in more enjoyable news, the TOYchallenge event went great on Saturday. The kids had a blast, and there was no rioting at the end of the day. I'll have a more full report posted after our debrief session next week.
Have a wonderful afternoon. I'm off to my Statistics final tonight.
Someone, using the handle AveryT, posted a reply to my comments on slashdot: here. As should be expected from someone arguing their case without any backing, he's devolved into personal attacks in the past, and may here, too.
My response follows:
How is macroevolution any easier to believe? You've merely tranposed your faith of an eternality onto matter rather than onto a God.
So, I guess the real question is, would you rather have been created, and therefore have some purpose to your life, or just have appeared in your current state, and live and die with no purpose? If we did just evlove from some lower life form or other, then there is no right and wrong, and there's no point in having laws. We should all immediately regress to the 'governing' mechanisms of the animal kindom, where might makes right. I want you food and I'm bigger, so it's mine.
What moral or ethical core can you point to for defining right and wrong if we're just animals? Why can't I go rape any girl I want, kill people I don't like, steal stuff because I want it? Your belief doesn't give you any backing for your insistence on laws, government, justice. So, if we really are animals, let's start acting like them, and eliminate all those fancy laws, customs, and practices we've been operating under for generations uncountable.
I have pasted the entire contents of my slashback to the Challenges Definition of Science article here:
Macroevolution requires just as much faith as does belief in a supreme being, intelligent design, or creationism. Creationists and the Intelligent Design proponents do not argue over microevolution. We have been observing little changes in organisms for thousands of years, we even force change through hybridding and genetic engineering. However, in all the time we've been watching and observing, we've never seen a new species appear on its own.
We've 'created' odd critters, such as ligers, but they can't reproduce on their own, and most likely would not have mated of their own accord in the wild since they live in such different areas. Inspection of the available fossil record shows, if anything, the gradual DE-speciation of earth, not the increase/betterment that we would expect if following macro evolution to its logical conclusions.
Scientists have no reasonable explanation available for where the stuff came from to produce the Big Bang. By insisting that matter has existed for ever, they have created their own faith and belief system, but have assigned god status to matter, rather than a deity who made it.
Any observed and extrapolated results (for that's what a hypothesis is, an assumption based off a sample of data) must lead back to a point where there was nothing, or that what we have now has existed for eternity.
The definition of the Scientific Method, as quoted from [rochester.edu], "The scientific method is the process by which scientists, collectively and over time, endeavor to construct an accurate (that is, reliable, consistent and non-arbitrary) representation of the world."
Nowhere in the realm of Science is there a way of proving or disproving creationism or macroevolution. Later in the article: "the scientific method attempts to minimize the influence of the scientist's bias on the outcome of an experiment. That is, when testing an hypothesis or a theory, the scientist may have a preference for one outcome or another, and it is important that this preference not bias the results or their interpretation." Scientists who do not pursue every avenue of explanation, allowing for results which indicate that their personal preference or bias may be wrong, are not true scientists. "The scientific method is intricately associated with science, the process of human inquiry that pervades the modern era on many levels. While the method appears simple and logical in description, there is perhaps no more complex question than that of knowing how we come to know things."
I happen to be a creationist. I believe the Genesis account of creation, and I believe that God made the earth look 'old' to start with. Considering that we have no idea what a 'young' planet would look like -- we've never seen one being made -- there's no scientific reason to discard the Biblical account of creation in favor of an account of spontaneous generation of life in all its different out-workings as we see it today. I also firmly believe in microevolution, the process of minute changes made and propagated through succeeding generations of a given organism. It's seen daily in the birth of children, where each child gets a unique mixing of the DNA of their parents. There are little teeny changes between generations in terms of resistance to disease, tolerance for certain foods, etc. But there's no recorded point where a species jumped from itself into another, new one.
The 'new' definition of science in Kansas is just a realization that there has been error in the past, and they want to correct it now. Every major scientific discovery has changed the way people think and feel, and has given new light on old beliefs and thoughts. The world is flat. The earth is the center of the universe. Man can't fly. They've all been proven wrong through better observation, experimentation, and the willingness to throw out the old ways of thinking that have true flaws in them. Science can't prove the origin of life; it can merely offer possible avenues of thought. I choose to believe in creation. It's no more UN-scientific than macroevolution is.
Kansas just seems to be realizing this, and is fixing the way science is taught.
Haha! My roommate pointed out on Saturday that a bit-wise rotation is just like shifting a value X bits, and or-ing it with the same value shifted the opposite direction (word size)-X bits. For example: A = (A << 7) | (a >> 25) for a 32-bit variable. This means I can, in fact, perform really big variable shifting using a source array and a temporary holding variable for the first entry. See the following for an example of rotating a 96-bit value 3 bits left (3 32-bit entries): h = A[0]; A[0] = (A[0] << 3) | (A[1] >> 29); A[1] = (A[1] << 3) | (A[2] >> 29); A[2] = (A[2 << 3) | (h >> 29).
It's a bit confusing at first blush, but it works, and it's extensible to any size chunks you want to rotate. And it doesn't have the overhead of an additional 2(N-bit) operations to expand and compress the value into a 'real' array first.
This means that I can also code my Wolf0 algorithm, the first one I'd come up with, without realizing too much of a performance hit.
I have been working on finishing the imlpementation of my first one-way hash algorithm, named Wolf1. Over the weekend, I devised a second algorithm, aptly named Wolf2, which will be debuting on my website at the same time Wolf1 appears. The general form for Wolf1 is as follows:
Wolf1 is a 256-bit one-way hash algorithm, which operates on 8 32-bit chunks, and uses the following special constants C0..3:
C0 - 0x5538a3e5 0xf1ef632f 0x7df8a258 0xcef9c7ba 0x765f5cda 0x497fecf2 0xfa989ea3 0xd594974e
C1 - 0xc1eac8f1 0xc9858068 0xc9858d68 0xf489d67b 0x16a22887 0x998aa773 0x342df4ad 0x9169f4b5
C2 - 0xc3566e73 0xb8b539b1 0xf19dbaa9 0xb7252916 0x8b3156be 0x6b3163b7 0x59318bb2 0xa4e99a7a
C3 - 0xc477357d 0x7a69bc6c 0x6bca3744 0xb2a0d222 0xc9a8a8b3 0x613b5ad5 0x68588990 0xbc486357
an additional special constant R is defined as follows:
R = (C0 ^ C1) + (C2 ^ C3)
The following functions are defined:
F1 (B,K,C0) -> B = (B ^ K) + C0
F2 (K,B,C1) -> K = (K + B) ^ C1
F3 (C0,C2,K) -> C0 = (C0 ^ C1) + K
F4 (C1,C3,B) -> C1 = C1 ^ (B + C3)
F5 (C2,B,K) -> C2 = (B - C2) + K
F6 (C3,B,R) -> C3 = (C3 + B) - R
F7 (R,C0,C1,C2,C3) -> R = (C0 ^ C1) + (C2 ^ C3)
After the functions F1..7 are performed on the current block B, the following rotations are applied per 32-bit chunk:
if right-most bit is 1, rotate left by 1,3,5,7 bits, the value of the right-most 3 bits
else rotate right by 0,2,4,6 bits, the value of the right-most 3 bits
Other special values:
A - ASCII sum of file contents, a 32-bit value
S - size in bits of file, a 32-bit value
Special rules:
the last block is the last chunk of the file padded to exactly 192 bits with repeating pattern of 10..
the last 64 bits of the last block is A & S appended to the 192-bit chunk to make 256-bit block
Hash signature is the final value of K
That's quite a mouthful, but it describes the full algorithm. Wolf2's specification will be published in a few days.
I am specifically looking for people to analyze the algorithm, and tell me of any problems with it. Being just an amateur, I can't really predict the cryptographic strength of any algorithm I propose, though I can do some statistical tests. I don't understand linear or differential cryptanalytic techniques, though I would like to learn how they work. If anyone can give a response as to the security/one-wayness of the algorithm, and collision resistance, resistance to breaking, I would greatly appreciate it.
"God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers." --Paul Erdős
Last night I went through Knuth's books and converted some of the provided constants into hexadecimal values. I then snagged 32 32-bit numbers and have used them as the initial constants in my new hash algorithm. Wolf1 provides a 256-bit signature, after performing several cascading and avalanching activities on the blocks read in. These operations include rotations, xors, adds, and substracts. The 256-bit hash is broken up into 8 32-bit chunks, and then mutilated, mangled, and masticated until it produces a spiffy 256-bit signature at the end.
A full algorithm specification will be posted in a few days, along with an initial implementation.
In speaking with one of my professors this afternoon, and in re-reading the one-way hash chapter in Bruce Schneier's excellent book Applied Cryptography, I've discovered that the only reasonable way of writing my hashing algorithm is to stick to chunks that are register-sized, or at most the size of all of the available registers (4 on IA32). Implementing such an algorithm, then, will limit me to 128-bit operations on an x86 processor, and having to join the two halves of the hash together to build the entire 256-bit signature. While this isn't ideal, it's substantially faster than the methods I wrote about yesterday, which amount to building a virtual machine for my algorithm to run inside of.
I am now reworking my algorithm a bit to comply with these new restrictions. Until somebody goes off and builds a processor for general use like the one I describe in my second Connexions paper (though IBM's new Cell architecture is close), I'll need to work within these restricted rules. I'm going to write reference implementations of the algorithm for x86, x86-64, and PowerPC architectures over the next several days, and publish them along with the design criteria and algorithm specification here on my website.
"Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science." --Henri Poincare
I have been working on several one-way hash algorithms over the past couple weeks. None of them have yet reached the stage of 'wow this really looks cool', but the most recent iteration has gotten me pretty close. Now I'm looking at how to implement it in software. The algorithm I designed can create any size hash desired, with 256 and 512 bit versions specified in the algorithm description. Right now the algorithm relies on defined permutation 'registers', which need to be uniform across any implementation of the hash. As more details of the algorithm come together, I will be posting it here on my website. The algorithm is going to be released under an open license - GPL or similar - and I want anyone with more experience and skill in this area to provide feedback to me on the design.
As I mentioned, I'm planning on releasing this algorithm in 256- and 512-bit variants, with their associated permutation devices. Implementing the algorithm in dedicated hardware would be quite simple. However, implementing 256 or 512 bit circular shifts and permutations becomes complicated on machines that do not have built-in registers long enough to do this. As it stands right now, my method for doing this will be to read in a 256-bitblock from the file being signed, expand that into a 256-entry array, perform all of the operations (shifting, rotating, permuting) on the array, and then compact the 256 entries back down into 256 bits, and then move on to the next block. Technically, I don't need to compact after every block is read, if I want to hold key information and current block information in memory in one of these large-entry arrays. However, there is still a pass of expanding that must take place before anything else can be done.
I am presuming that expanding 256 bits into a 256-entry array will take 256 iterations through some loop, probably with a few statements inside it adding up to, say, 1024 statements to be executed per expansion. If I only work with these expanded values, my algorithm, while still a O(n) tool, will be more closely approximated by 1024*n operations... and that's just to handle the expansions. When you factor in the (currently) about and additional 1024 operations (4 per bit is about right) needed to maneuver the array around in memory, my algorithm will take approximately 2048*n operations to finish. If you look at a 32Mb file, there will be ~1000000 32-byte (256-bit) blocks to be processed. If every operation takes just one clock cycle, processing such a file would take about 2 billion (2*10^9) clock cycles to run, or 2 full CPU-seconds on a 1Ghz processor. Of course, there will be other processes running at the same time, and the delay between processor and main memory (let alone between the processor and disk storage) is about 10-100 to 1. Let's be generous and say that it's only 10 times slower to access RAM than data on the processor. Let's also assume (for sake of argument) that the entire 32Mb file to be processed is sitting in main memory. I am now running 20 billion (2*10^10) clock cycle, or 20 CPU-seconds to finish my task. And this is only a 32Mb file. Heaven help you if you need to run the hash on a full-disc ISO image (~700Mb). That would take (again, in highly favorable conditions) about 25 times as long, or 500 CPU-seconds on a 1Ghz processor.
Yuck! Hence the need to find a more efficient way of manipulating the data. There are a few things I can do that would directly exploit 32-bit x86 architecture, but I want the algorithm to not be hardware-dependant, so I don't want to use any fancy tricks that only work on one platform or another.
If you have any ideas about this, please contact me with any suggestions.
ICA's website, with the new database and search feature I wrote went live this morning!
I also heard back from Frank at NCSU, and he won't be able to hire the three assistants he planned on. Apparently only able to pick up one, so I had to be passed over. No worries though, work at Sigma Xi is keeping me mostly busy. Right now I'm coordinating the about 30 volunteers for the Sally Ride TOYchallenge Eastern Finals happening at Sigma Xi on 7 May. A grand total of a little under 900 people will be descending on us for the day-long event. 437 of those are the members and coaches of 84 teams. The rest are their support people: parents, siblings, chaperones, etc. Ought to be a lot of fun.
Oh, and I got registered for classes yesterday for this fall at Elon. So long as I can stay full-time, I'll be in class from 0800-1600 Tu & Th, with MWF off.
As you may recall, I used to have the menu for this site on the left. I moved to the right side of the page today. I also fixed the salmonesque background to a more palatable grey.
This morning I had an interview at NC State for a full-time summer internship doing web programming, computer support, and some Linux admin, too. I should know by the end of this week whom he has decided to hire.
Spring break was a lot of fun. My sister came down for a few days to visit, then we headed back up to NY for a wedding Easter weekend. Some friends of mine here in NC also wanted to get rid of their dogs, so I took their van with the two labs in it and drove them up to NY with me. That was quite an interesting ride.
Before I left for NY, though, I had an interview with Red Hat for a summer intrenship with the Global Support Services group. The interview went quite well, lasting well beyond the planned 45 minutes. I received an email, though, just 4 days later telling me that they had hired a different student for the summer, one that had more experience with the specific aspects of Linux support than I did that they were looking for. I will be working on my Linux skills over the next few months, however, and plan on applying to Red Hat again in the future.
Our LAN party last Friday went very well. We had a total of around 20 people show up during the event, and everyone seemed to have a grand time. If it gets any bigger next time, we'll need the whole of Duke third floor.
"He looks like a contented Christian with four aces." --Mark Twain
It probably didn't take much for you to notice the new site look. It's rather striking compared to the last edition. I have received several comments already about the new look. Everyone that's told me likes the new layout, since it is cleaner, and scales to the page better. However, the opinions on color are markedly different. The most controversial seems to be the choice of this salmonesque (#c29e81) background color I've chosen. It comes straight out of the top banner image, but doesn't look as good as the main pallette of the page. All of the other colors used come straight from the banner. If you have any opinions, either way, please email them to me.
I have been working on the database for ICA here in RTP, and have finished the find feaure. All that remains on that front is to ship over the guts of each member page, and then make sure the cross-linking tables are appropriately populated, and the site should be basically done.
I'm progressing with my Python readings, and I now have a student to teach Python to. (More accurately, to teach programming to, since I don't yet know Python, we'll be learning that together.)
A couple weeks ago I was elected treasurer for the Elon chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery (elonacm), and will discharging that duty over the next academic year.
Yesterday I got back my first writing assignment from my ethical practice class. We were told that the best grade we could get without any direct citations of the text would be a B. Well, I had no citations, largely because I didn't have the book handy when I was wrting the paper, so I got a B. However, we were also told that we can rewrite our papers to get a better grade. So, over the next several days I will put in some quotes and resubmit it after spring break. In other school news, my health and wellness class ends tomorrow. It will be nice to not have to be in class at 8a when I don't have another till 1410.
Debugging my scrypt implementation is slowly moving forward, though I expect to have it usable in a few days.
There has been a lot of a lot written about the recent breaks of various hashing algorithms. In the most recent edition of Crypto-Gram, Bruce Schneier writes about how new hashing algorithms need to be designed and published. A lot has been learned since Ron Rivest first published MD4, but all exisiting, available hash algorithms use the same basic methods than Mr Rivest introduced us to a decade ago. I consider myself a hobbiest cryptographer (I definitely can't claim near the expertise Mr Schneier and others have), and thought I might try my hand at designing a hash algorithm. As I come up with ideas, I'll be publishing them here.
Lastly, I am looking for a small group of game programmers who would be interested in working on a new game that I'm designing. I don't have any experience writing such beasts, but am excited about the prospects of building this game I've been working on. If you might be interested, please email me with a short message about yourself, your game experience, and what you'd like to work on.
And I'm going to close today's post with a quote.
"Additionally, algorithms from the NSA are considered a sort of alien technology: they come from a superior race with no explanations. Any successful cryptanalysis against an NSA algorithm is an interesting data point in the eternal question of how good they really are in there." --Bruce Schneier
My friend Jay’s AIM virus remover, AIMFix, has been getting tons of hits since he went abroad for spring semester. Right now the only way of updating the program is to recompile under Windows, and upload the new edition to the server. He and I are working on implementing a reference file format that AIMFix can use. This would alleviate the problems of recompiling the program on every update, just update the reference file, encrypt, and post. To that end, I am developing a general-purpose cryptography library. Right now I have a late alpha of the library in testing, including the abstract base class defining the interface to any encryption algorithm and a single implementation of my own scrypt algorithm.
Scrypt is a simple xor encryption system that utilizes a key of the same length as the plaintext to remove patterns from the resulting ciphertext. Key material is generated using a pseudo-random number generator (I’m using a modified version of my lcgp class) to build the full-length key. There is still a secret aspect of the key, the initial seeding and range values, and those need to be guarded, but the key itself is about as random as I know how to make it.
I have begun work on a new strategy computer game. After church Sunday morning, I was visiting with a couple friends, and came up with a game idea that I don’t think has been done before. I’ve since had a couple days to let the idea ferment and grow, and I came up with an initial write-up of the game ideas yesterday evening. The next stage is building a fleshed-out game plan, and having a few people look over the plan for feedback.
You may have noticed a few minor changes to my site recently. Today I rolled out a new, simplified navigation system, and will be working on making it even easier to use as time goes on. Please email me if you have any comments or complaints.
I mentioned a couple weeks ago how I had difficulty in finding the Durham Post Office to take care of my passport application. After finding it and having them process my application, they told me it should take 6 weeks for my passport to arrive. It arrived Wednesday. I filed on 7 Feb 2005, and got it back 23 days later. I think this has to be close to a record for the federal government, especially since I didn't pay the additional expediting fee to have the whole works done in 2-3 weeks.
Over the past couple weeks I've been working on yet another paper (is it really a paper if it's only ever posted to a website?) for my articles page. This one is about the underutilization of human resources in the American economy. I've taken a bit of flak from some of the students in my statistics class who are trying to figure out why anyone would write an economics paper for fun. But that's what I'm doing. I expect to have it ready for public viewing in a week or so.
I also have my first real assignment for the ethics class. We're supposed to write a reflection paper on the first book we read, Ishmael. That's due Tuesday, so I will be working on it this weekend.
I have another meeting with David from ICA this Saturday, in which we hope to get the last bits of the new database implementation taken care of, so I can hand off complete control of the database and interactions to them.
Greg's website is mostly done, too. I should only have to finish up the defects pages, with short descriptions of problems, along with photos (provided for me), and it should be able to go into a state of constancy and only minor maintenance.
Tonight two friends of mine from church are getting married, so I'm looking forward to that. I have a quite busy weekend in front of me, so have a nice day, and check back next week for more news.
Though it’s not as prominent as it used to be, I do have a books page on my site. Perhaps more interesting, though, than just being able to buy books through Barnes & Noble online, is what I am reading right now. Currently I’m reading Secrets and Lies by Bruce Schneier, The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg, Learning Python by Mark Lutz, and a book for Ethical Practice entitled I and Thou. The first two are fascinating reads; both Mr Schneier and Mr Lomborg provide great insights in their writings. Mark Lutz’s writing style is very accessible, and so far the Python book has been good (not that I’ve gotten far yet, but even so).
My password generator is getting some use. I came across a very strange result the other day:
339328364414861684103255314450122058224554485532That’s right. It generated all numbers. The basic method I use to generate these pseudo-random sequences is to seed the generator, then get numbers in the range of 1..m. If N is in the highest 30% of the range, it gets displayed as a number (N%10). Otherwise, it gets displayed as a letter (N%26). Pretty simple and straightforward logic. (The actual percentage should be closer to 27%, but it’s small matter.) The odds of getting a stream of 48 numbers out of the generator should be somewhere around
7.9766443076872509863361 * 10-26Very very very teeny tiny. But it happened. I’ve since made a couple minor improvements to the generation technique, to prevent the same sequence being displayed if you refresh the page too quickly. If you’re interested in seeing the guts behind the page, drop me a line.
That’s about it for now. Enjoy your day.
After an explanatory email to Dr Lubling, and a brief conversation last week, I set up to to my 40 hours of service learning at a location closer to my home in Mebane. Monday I began volunteering at the Presbyterian Home of Hawfields. I am working with their activity directory, Ricky, and have so far had the first round of orientation. Yesterday morning I also participated in a music therapy session, where a couple singer/musicians come in and sing to and for the more afflicted residents. It was really an interesting time. They sing directly to the residents who are brought to the activity room, using their names in the songs (name tags are provided by the staff). It was fascinating to see some of the more 'not there' residents just open right up during the singing.
Monday morning I was down at school for van training. Elon has several 15 (trimmed to 10) passenger vans available for student groups to use for various activities. The CS department only had one person qualified to drive the van, so I went and took the class Monday. We started with a brief safety video and scheduling our road tests. The road test was a pretty straightforward activity. Beginning with a fixed radius turn, a fixed radius turn transitioning into backing the van down, and then parallel parking. On the ride over, the guy leading the class asked if any of us had driven a large vehicle before. When I mentioned that I used to work for Hertz, he said 'oh, then this should be a piece of cake for you'. It was.
Right now I'm finalizing the tax reform proposal I wrote last week to get it posted under my articles section. It will be posted by the end of the day.
That's about it for now. Have a nice life.
This morning 3 of us at Sigma XI had a meeting about the proposed 'zoning' project at work. We are trying to build, or find, a system that will allow us to determine what chapter(s) a member is closest to in the event that he/she moves. We discussed various ideas, and I get to go do more research into the topic, with several of the new ideas and thoughts that were bandied about earlier.
I'm considering going to an a capella concert this evening at Duke. All of the proceeds from thsi evening's event support the anti-sexual assualt group at Duke. Not that there is a pro-sexual assault group at Duke, but this concert is benefitting the anti assault folks.
Last Friday afternoon I published an article about the definitions of adulthood, and how they should be improved. So far the feedback I have received has been supportive of the ideas laid out.
This morning I spoke with David from the ICA group, for whom I've been working up a database, and we should have that new aspect of the website live in the next several days. The database is built, and just awaits being installed on their server.
I have been working on a username/password gernator based off my lcgp that I wrote this past summer at Shodor, and will be adding it to my utilities page as soon as it is ready. Eventually, I plan to get the program beyond a command-line utility by building a simplified GUI for it, perhaps based off Qt or gtk, so it's easily transferrable across platforms. I also will be adding it as an online script, written in PHP as soon as I verify it works well enough.
Last Friday's ACM movie night was a lot of fun. Other than the movies chosen, anyways. We met at a professor's house, had dinner, then watched Rintaro's anime remake of the 1927 classic Metropolis. That was an adventure. Anime can be very weird. After a brief break for dessert, we popped in Big Fish, another missable movie. I saw Big Fish this past summer at Shodor on a movie night, and thought it was pretty dumb. That conclusion was reinforced Friday night. But, the visiting and food was great, and I look forward to future events with the ACM.
A while back on my work updates page, I mentioned that I volunteer my computers' spare clock cycles to Grid.org's projects. You should join the project. Right now, my machine is working on Human Proteome Folding. Another proeject I worked on was the LigandFit experiment to find drugs that may interact well with cancerous cells, to slow them down, or kill them off. You can get the little background agent from either grid.org's site, or from me by clicking here. It only uses background cycles, so your CPU will always be about 100% usage, but it cuts down its work when other programs are running. Overall a very neat program to be involved with. If you do join your computer up, be sure to add yourself to the 'Corvette Forum .com' team, since it's the one I'm a member of.
I guess that about covers everything I wanted to say for now. Sleep well.
I came up with a list of topics to write about while sitting in Ethical Practice yesterday afternoon. As some of you know, I like writing a lot, and periodically post what I write to one of my websites. Be on the look-out for new postings shortly.
As a follow-up to my adventures from Monday, I did successfully get to the post office that afternoon and get my passport application going. The woman at the passport window was very happy to handle my application, as I had everything I needed already out for her: pictures, driver's license, birth certificate, completely filled-out application, etc. Everyone ahead of me in line had some problem or other with their application, needing to come back with more documentation, pictures missing, parts of the form left empty, etc. All I needed to do when I got to the window was verify who to make the two checks out to, which I did while she filled-in the non-applicant portion of the application.
Tonight the CS department is holding a movie night at one of our professors' houses, which ought to be quite enjoyable. I've been attending the Elon ACM (association of computing machinery) chapter meetings this semester, and it looks like we'll be having a bunch of fun activities this spring.
This afternoon at work, I got to make an extended presentation on what I've been working on while at Sigma Xi, including the UN project, Connexions, and the teacher/volunteer database. The entire operation took about 1.5 hrs, but it was really nice to be able to explain what I've been doing to a group of enthusiastic listeners. The Connexions piece really attracted a lot of attention, which was a nice change from the last time I presented the Connexions material to UN scientists.
Leadership: Noah bringing pairs of animals onto the ark. Management: When Noah told his wife, "Dont' let the elephants see what the rabbits are doing." -- Ben Rich
I have planned on getting a passport for quite some time, but haven't gotten around to doing it till now. In the upcoming months I am hoping to be able to make some quick hops across the pond and elsewhere, but need a passport to get me in and out. They also come in handy when applying for jobs, since they're in column A on the I-9, the 'one from A' or 'one from B and one from C' form to verify legality of employment. So, on my way into work today I drove into downtown Durham to find the main post office, and drop off my application.
I spent almost 40 minutes driving around downtown looking for the bloody building, and was unable to find it. You wouldn't think a big, old post office building would be that hard to find, but it was. So, instead of getting everything done on my way into work, I'm going back later with a coworker to take care of the application, since she also needs to handle some business there.
This past Saturday, I met up with Greg about his website, and he and I edited out, and merged some of the site together, and all of the changes are now visible. There are a few other ongoing aspects to this project, which will require periodic maintenance on my part, but overall, the site is all set for him to use as a marketing tool. His goal is to have 1-2 inspections per day during the spring and summer, slowing down to 2-3 per week during the fall and winter. Right now, he's been averaging just over 1 a week. Hopefully this new website will work much better as an advertising medium, and he'll get more business (which, in turn, indicates mroe maintenance need on my part).
Last Friday on my way into work, I was listening to Clark Howard on the radio and one of his callers asked about different states' bureaus of unclaimed funds. So, when I had some downtime, I checked out the MissingMoney and Unclaimed websites, and they linked me to the various state bureaus. It is truly fascinating how many people have various and sundry accounts that are just lying around, waiting to be claimed. In New York, after a certain period of time, generally around 5 years, banks and businesses are required to hand over unclaimed accounts and assets to the state comptroller's office. If you know these agencies exist, you can search for any accounts in your name, fill out a form, have it notarized, and send it in to the agency to receive your funds/assets back.
One suggestion Clark made, was to check every state you've lived in, or had accounts in, but also to check Delaware, Nevada, and Connecticut. Many companies incorporate in DE or NV because of very low or non-existent corporate income taxes. A lot of insurance companies are based in CT.
I found several interesting items when searching for my name in NY, and for some family members in other states. You should check it out.
I'm planning to meet with a couple people from work today or Wednesday to discuss the GIS problem I was told about a couple weeks ago. Sigma Xi is an organization broken up into several different chapters. In general, each member of Sigma Xi is associated with some local chapter. These members have a nasty tendency of moving, though, and often would like to change chapter affiliations. Right now, they need to make a specific request to find out if there are any local chapters in their area. We're trying to build an automated system that will check for new local chapters any time a member moves more than a few miles. For example, there are several chapters just in Manhattan in New York City, let alone the total number in the city. So, if you move from SoHo to the upper east side, you probably don't need to change affiliations, as you might still be teaching at CUNY.
However, if you move from the upper east side to Manhattan Kansas, you probably don't want to keep your CUNY affiliation, but would like instead to change to the chapter in KS. We're planning, then, on building this automated system, where when a member indicates to us that he has moved (for example, through a change of address for his magazine subscription), to search for his zip code in our database, and correlate it to the nearest chapter(s) to him, so he knows that he doesn't have to maintain his former affiliation if he doesn't want to. We're also hoping to automate a short announcement to the chapter leaders, so they can contact the member and tell him where they are, when they meet, etc.
Please send any comments here. Have a great day.
Yesterday I resumed my classes at Elon. I'm taking Health and Wellness, General Statistics, and Ethical Practice this semester. The first two should be simple A's, but the last one is going to be... interesting. Our professor has some very off-the-wall ideas as to what we should be doing in an Ethical Practice course, and I can tell I won't like it. However, it's required for my major, so I don't have much choice. Bleck.
In other news, I also started my student worker job as assistant systems administrator at school, and am enjoying it so far. Right now I haven't done anything too horribly exciting, mostly just user creates and such, but it should prove to be an interesting job.
I have the database mostly built for ICA Triangle, a group in RTP that brings independent marketing professionals together with busineses that need marketing help. I will post as soon as it is live on their site.
That's about all for now, have a wonderful day.
Recently a fellow whose wife teaches at Elon asked me to redo his website. Greg does home inspections, and his old page can be seen here. I have nearly finished redesigning it for him, and the finished product will be visible on his main page soon. Right ow my work is sitting in the test directory of his server. You can see the marked improvement that his site has seen. Basically, I took all of the content that was there already, cleaned it up, removed the requirement to use flash (which is dumb for just a menu), and made it easier to navigate. If anyone reading this needs helps redoing thier own website, or setting one up to start with, please email me. I'm happy to talk to you about what you need, and have very low fees to build your website.
In addition to building websites, I also have a small computer cleanup and repair business that I operate in the Burlington NC region. What started off as doing clean-ups for students on campus has morphed into working on computers all over the triad area. I advertise my services on Elon's e-net bulletin board, and have contact information there. Alternatively, you can email me to set up an appointment for me to look at your computer. Looking is always free. Email me for my rates.
I've also been working on an updated version of my resume, and will be posting that in the next few days.
Oh, and tomorrow I officially begin my student worker job on campus, about which I'm fairly excited.
Have a great day.
CNN has the transcript of President Bush's inaugural address available to read: here.
God Bless the President, and God Bless America.
Of course, you probably already noticed that the main page of this site has changed substantially. You will also notice that all of the links that used to be on the main page have been shifted off onto their own page.
It snowed in RTP today, and it looks gorgeous out. In the range of a dusting to 1", there's enough snow to brighten everything up, but not so much to hamper driving. To give a bit of perspective, Cohoes NY, the city my parents live in, has more plows than the entirety of Wake county in NC. So, snow here actually can be an interesting occurrence. Naturally, I would prefer there to be 12-16" or more that fell, but I'll live with what we got :)
I am going to call 1and1, datacities, and tektonic this evening to discuss what I need to do to migrate my domains to their servers. I wish I had done more research into domain hosting before signing up with my current providers, but, alas, I did not. So, instead of having a great hosting package, I merely got an adequate one. Hopefully it won't cause too much disruption in service, especially to email, but I need to move to a larger server with more access (ie ssh). Right now, all of my updating is done via my blogging tool, or ftp. FTP works, but it isn't pretty, especially when I only need to make one short change to a file.
Enjoy the snow.
As many of you are aware, I am an avid F/OSS (free/open-source software) supporter. I have written a few articles on the subject, both published on the web, and as assignments. I run SuSE 9.1 Pro on my computer at home, along with WinXP, use Slax routinely to perform system recovery and backup operations, and am a member of the Triangle Linux Users' Group. At home I also rely on OpenOffice to get most of my word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet work done.
At work, however, we are a dominantly MS house. For small editing problems, though, MS Word is severe overkill, and it is a slow behemoth of a program. Word's proprietary '.doc' format is nasty to read in anything, even with commercial products like WordPerfect. OpenOffice is great, but it is also too big for simple word processing. I, therefore, use AbiWord as my primary word processor for simple jobs. Its native format is XML, so generated files can be opened and parsed by any XML tool. It exports to a variety of formats, including ever-popular rich-text, a non-proprietary document format that makes very compact files.
AbiWord is also fully cross-platformal. They maintain OS X, Windows, and multiple Linux editions. You can also download the source for AbiWord, and compile it yourself, if you're not happy with the speed of the application on your computer, or if you want to monkey with its inards.
For more information on F/OSS, please visit the Free Software Foundation & Opensource.org. All of the code I have posted here and on my work site is published under an open-soruce license. Feel free to email me with any comments you may have.
Shodor has a program called the Mentor Center, in which they bring high school and college students onboard as interns, teaming them with a staff scientist (mentor), to work on various interesting projects.
At the end of this past summer, I wrote a small description of the the mentor center for partial inclusion in our newsletter. One of the requirements of the various grant programs Shodor is funded by is to have the interns provide reflections upon what they accomplished. Shodor implements this by an online weekly reflections journal, and a couple interview/questionaire activities through the summer.
The tool they have been using for the weekly reflections page works, but has a poorly executed user interface. At the end of the summer, I offered to look at the code behind the page, and see if I could fix it to work in a cleaner manner. Unfortunately, the code is very dense, because the page tries to do too much inside itself (it's in PHP, so you web programmers will know what I mean). After some putzing around, I decided that fixing it was going to entail too much effort, and the project got sidelined, since it did work, though it wasn't pretty.
Fast-forward to yesterday. It dawned on me that I could take my online journal update system, rewrite it to work with a database, and hand it to Shodor as a working product in a couple weeks. As soon as I have it rewritten, I will be adding new wings to my website for friends and family to use for their own journaling adventures.
In following-up to last week's post about the TriLUG meeting, it went great! The feature presentation (ppt) was on m0n0wall, and embeddable, open-source firewall package. M0n0wall is very cool. It will run on 486 150 SBC, 4Mb Compact Flash storage, and 64Mb RAM. They also have an image for x86-based PCs. I am quite interested in playing with it on my own, and will write more about it after I've had a chance to use it. I just need to find a clunker PC with a couple 10/100 ports.
Oh, and if anyone has a CD drive that will work with an Alpha box, email me. Thanks.
A couple months ago I became a member of the Triangle Linux User's Group. Tonight their monthly meeting will be held at Red Hat world headquarters in Raleigh. Any one who wants to come out and see what we're about is welcome. Directions are available off the TriLUG site.
If you have been tracking my website much recently, you will notice that several things have changed. Today, for example, I changed the color scheme again. This is now the third color layout the site has had in the last 2 weeks (counting the entire layout/design before the rework last week). However, I expect to be sticking with this layout for the time being, and will only swap colors for special announcements or seasons, rather than just because I can.
If you have any comments about the new look and feel of this site, or you just want to get in touch with me, feel free to drop an email to me here.
Matthew Szulik, CEO of Red Hat is speaking today at 1530 in the Whitley Auditorium at Elon on leadership. I attended one of the 'Road to Red Hat' sessions last semester (and look forward to going to all of them this semester), and really like the company. It should be informative to hear what he has to say.
I also need to register for classes for this spring, which I will do in-person before the talk. As of right now, I am planning on taking 10 credits this semester. However, since I am now old enough to be considered an independent student, I will be going full-time this fall and next spring. With only 54 credits left for me to graduate, I should have no problem finishing next May.
To facilitate getting to school at a reasonable time, I came into work early, so I could leave around 1400.
If you read my updates on shodor.org, you know I work for Sigma Xi in RTP, and that I have been working on several different projects since starting here at the beginning of October. Yesterday the new computational science education wing of Sigma Xi's website went live. You can check it out here.
Last night at trivia, I mentioned I built this new live update tool for my website. One of the instant responses I got was when will I incorporate post-back? Hopefully a simplified talk-back feature will be incorporated into my journal by the end of the month. A friend of mine has already asked me to port this tool to a website she can use to keep track of project ideas and stuff online. A neat idea, and I will be copying this tool for her later this week.
Have a great day.
Jobs was at it again today! At the keynote presentation at MacWorld Expo 2005, he announced the new Mac mini, iPod Shuffle, iLife 05, and much more. Check out all the latest cool stuff from Apple here.
I have also made a minor improvement to the online journal updater to allow more than one entry to be made in a day. Woohoo!
If anyone reading this would like to be able to do this on their own site, drop me an email and I will be happy to ship you a copy of this to test on your server.
After much trial and effort, I have built an automated updater for my online journal on WarrenMyers.com.
It requires a username and password to use, to prevent unusual people from altering my website.
Right now it only allows one update to be submitted per day, though I will be changing that soon, too.
Have a great day.