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Author Archives: luke
Erwin on Risk
I’m reading Chasing Daylight and liked this:
Long before September 11, I made it my personal mission to crusade against a long-standing Christian cliche. … I lament that it has become an accepted part of pop theology that the safest place to be is in the center of the will of God. …
… [T]he center of God’s will is not a safe place, but the most dangerous place in the world. God fears nothing and no one. God moves with intentionality and power. To live outside God’s will puts us in danger, but to live in His will makes us dangerous. … When we begin to seize our divine moments, we do not begin to live risk-free, but instead become free to risk.
This from the last page of chapter 6, “Risk,” on p. 151 of the paperback edition.
command history
All the top programming-blog people are doing this. Why not small-town pastors, too?
90 cd 77 l 57 mv 42 llr 29 ll 25 rm 18 open 16 clear 14 cp 11 cat
Clearly, the thing I do most is look around: l is an alias for ls, ll for ls -l, and llr for ls -ltr. As a result, I don’t care how bad the finder is, most of the time.
A cool tool? open. I’d like to have something like that on Linux.
cool tool: fluid
Fluid is the heat. It lets you create an application specific web browser. If you want a separate “application” to read email, for your blog, to run the control panel for your web host, etc., you do this and keep Firefox or Safari separate just for browsing.
Rollover
I had to drive west on Wednesday to meet with someone at Presbytery. When I got there I snapped this picture:
That night, the rollover occurred two miles short of my house. Here’s the picture I took the next morning when it was light.
I’m such an old duffer that I remember when this would have been pretty impressive. No more.
This works out to about $0.18 per mile (ignoring fuel and maintenance) and about 7,656 miles/year.
Happiness is a Warm Gun
Cheap shot, I know. But how did they miss that one? It’s a “gimme.”
The Wapo says:
No single morsel of happiness data, though, is more intriguing than this: Republicans are happier than Democrats.
Anyway. I would sure like to see that survey. (Or a one-page summary of its results, times however many years it’s been since they started doing it.)
Hebrew: Not (Quite) Dead Yet
For Lent I’m going to preach from the Old Testament. (That doesn’t mean what you think. It’s just that I mostly preach from the gospels.) It was a trip to be reading the ‘brew again.
I did my translation of Genesis 2:15-17,3:1-7. The first verse was a disaster, because the first word was yiqqach and I’d forgotten about roots where the initial L just vanishes (like LQH). But by the end, I was coming back strong, staring at words like nechmad and thinking that must be a niphal from HMD. (Then trying to remember what the niphal signified, but that’s another story.)
I’m gratified to note here that while my m4d H3br3w sk1llz aren’t what they used to be (i.e., pathetic but serviceable), I was able, eventually, to work my way through the entire mess. Hooray for me and Summer Hebrew.
Foul Queso
We were too lazy at New Year’s to make our own chili con queso, so we decided to try this:
It is foul. We couldn’t get through a single 13-oz tub. Not on New Year’s End, not even half. When we looked at it in the refrigerator a few days later, nobody could work up any enthusiasm to try it again:
Despite what the label says (“New Bowl, Same Great Taste!”) it’s not the same great taste. In fact, it’s a big-ass lie. The cheese sauce at Taco Bell is actually edible. (Arguably. I’m not saying it’s health food, or that it’s all-natural.) And even if you don’t like Taco Bell’s product, you’d see that this isn’t it from the 2nd photo. Tango Bravo cheese sauce is a brilliant day-glow yellow, not this muddy orange sludge. If you’ve never seen it, it’s almost worth navigating through the Flash-only Taco Bell web site to see them. Almost, but not quite. Flash-only web-sites should be boycotted, and you can just trust me that the cheese is a vibrant lemon-yellow color.
Anyway, this tub of whatever-it-is says “Taco Bell” on the label, but it’s actually made by Kraft rather than Taco Bell.
I was going to write Taco Bell’s corporate overlords (NYSE:YUM) and tell them they were morons to let Kraft (NYSE:KFT) dilute their brand selling nasty effluent like this. But the Taco Bell’s web site is content-free; if there’s a place that tells me where to send a letter like that, I couldn’t find it. (My idea was to send the letter to TB with a copy to Kraft.) Then I looked at the YUM! foods web site, which isn’t flash-only but is largely content-free. Kraft is no better.
What the hell is wrong with corporate America? Why do they make it so hard to tell them they’re screwing the pooch? Or are these uniquely stupid companies? I can’t buy a stick of gum from Wal-Mart without being asked questions about my shopping experience by the credit card scanner, and then the receipt importunes me to go online and take a survey. Why does Wal-Mart want so desperately to know what I think and Kraft and Taco Bell not care at all?
Nodebox
If you ever enjoyed playing with an etch-a-sketch, take a look at this. That’s a pretty impressive piece of software.
Quirky?
I was reading this article about Tim Burton’s film version of Sweeney Todd, with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter when I was struck by this line:
Bonham Carter has happily ruled out acting projects for the near future (though she’ll return briefly as quirky prof Bellatrix Lestrange in next year’s “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”).
First, of course, is that everybody in those movies returns “briefly,” or not at all. Snape had like 2 minutes in HP5, Hagrid a little less, and McGonnagal had about 15 seconds.
But second and more to the point: “quirky?” Huh?
“Quirky!?”
How about “demented,” or maybe “psychotic,” or “criminally insane?”
To call Bellatrix Lestrange “quirky” shows how the news media is incapable of calling a spade a spade. Good grief.