What is Man?

I’m not sure if I should be ashamed for shamelessly promoting a brand, but I just tried a new flavor of Doritos and I really like them. They are called Tacos at Midnight. I am pretty sure, with the “Late Night” designation and the neon styling, that the idea of Taco Bell is being evoked. And rightly so, because these Doritos are blatantly Taco Bell flavored. I’m serious, they taste like a Taco Supreme. If you are interested, I found them at Wal-Mart. 

Found a neat tutorial at justintadlock.com that shows how to use custom fields to add images to posts. I modified the instructions a bit for my needs, so that a nifty icon is inserted into the beginning of all “single.php” posts. When I set my custom key, “Thumbnail Class” to a value of “invisible,” the icon is assigned a CSS class with the property “display: none.” This tells the icon to load in the html source code but not to show up and not to take up space. So it’s there, but doesn’t render on the screen at all.

So what’s the point then? Well, when I past a link for a single blog post into Facebook, the Facebook script sees the invisible icon in the html source code and uses it as a thumbnail. It makes the Facebook post look cool and also is much more eye-catching.

Update: I figured out an easier way, though a bit more kludgy.

<img style="display: none;" src="/path/image.jpg">

Stupid simple. Just paste this in the source code of your post.

I got a piece of literature in the mail today from Radio Bible Class. RBC was started in 1938 by Dr. M. R. De Haan, then continued by his son Richard De Haan in 1965, and in 2006 his grandson, Mart De Haan took over. Mart has a blog called “Been Thinking About” and the literature I received was taken from a four-part series of posts written in that blog during October of 2008.

I’d like to point out that I like RBC Ministries and that “Our Daily Bread” has been a real blessing to me. I’m not addressing the ministry as a whole, just this particular article. 

The literature was titled “Emerging Churches.” In it, Mart points out the pros and cons of the emergent movement. He closes with a plea:

Whether in emerging or traditional evangelical churches, all of us have our blind spots. Only when we are willing to listen to one another, and to come to terms with the downside of our own way of “doing church,” will we have the humility and spiritual sobriety we need to work for, rather than against, the body of Christ we share.

I agree that different churches have different ways of “doing church,” but I don’t want to fall into the trap of making excuses for bad doctrine, either. Mart uses the Seven Churches of Revelation 2 and 3 as an example of church issues and after citing their various problems, he states:

In each case, the Lord encouraged them to look at Him, as a way of seeing themselves, and then work to come to terms with the problems that were threatening their ability to represent Him.

But what if the seven churches had been doing the equivalent of writing books, posting Internet articles, and adding to the rumor mill about the problems of the other “six.” What if they had been calling attention to the failures of one another as if there were not serious issues with themselves?

So it is today.

Mart writes in a blog comment on his post that “the ‘elders’ who are doing the confronting and correcting need to do so with the attitudes of Christ…” But a reading of Revelation  two and three will indicate just what the attitude of Christ really was when doctrine was corrupted:

Revelation 2:14-16 – But I have a few things against thee, because thou hast there them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication. So hast thou also them that hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which thing I hate. Repent; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.

Revelation 2:24 – Now to you I say, and to the rest in Thyatira, as many as do not have this doctrine, who have not known the depths of Satan, as they say, I will put on you no other burden.

Revelation 3:19 – As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Therefore be zealous and repent.

In his defense, Mart does say that “if someone within any church, either traditional evangelical or emerging, denies that the Bible is the Word of God or that Jesus, who died and rose for us, is the only way to God, they are denying foundational truths of following Jesus and need to be confronted in the appropriate manner.” On the individual level, if you know someone struggling with or questioning core biblical truths, a loving and measured response will go a long way toward resolving their problem. But a response in needed.

Jude 3 – Beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.

Last note: While doing a little searching, I found an Christian research organization that charges RBC with allowing references of books written by proponents  of “contemplative spirituality” to be placed in RBC’s publications. Lighthouse Trails Research defines “contemplative spirituality” as:

A belief system that uses ancient mystical practices to induce altered states of consciousness (the silence) and is rooted in mysticism and the occult but often wrapped in Christian terminology. The premise of contemplative spirituality is pantheistic (God is all) and panentheistic (God is in all).

You can find the article here.

So I’ve had this bug for a while on the blog. If you’re logged in, everything works fine. But for someone not logged in, the right navigation menu column would sink under everything else on the page, and it was a bit centered.

The problem ended up being caused by a misplaced </div> tag in the comments.php file. Here’s what was supposed to be there:

<?php endif; ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>

Instead, the div tag was first. This caused non logged in users to lose their div tag, which kept the main container from forming. All the text at the top expanded and the left nav column, which was supposed to float to the right, was forced down to the bottom.

I haven’t had the time to fix this before today because of school. And no wonder; it took me about 6 hours today to find it.

I just discovered, by total accident, a super neat trick for a long-time annoyance. When I’m writing in Microsoft Word and the red squiggly line for a misspelled word pops up, I usually just backspace and correct the typo. But sometimes I don’t know what the correct spelling is. This means taking my hand off the keyboard and right-clicking with my mouse to get the pop-up context menu with the correct spelling. Now, that may sound like a really picky annoyance, but it breaks the flow of typing. Here’s the solution:

Most (Wintel PC) keyboards have a context menu button next to or close to the space bar. It will have a graphic on it that looks like this one. It’s called the menu button, context button, or application button, depending on who you ask. Essentially, it’s a right click. When I make a typo, I just hit backspace or left arrow and then the context key. The pop-up context menu will appear with the spelling options up top. The down arrow key selects the one you want, the enter key selects. If you don’t get the right suggestions, the escape key cancels the pop-up. It takes using it a few times to get used to the action and make it a habit, but it’s well worth it once you start using it a bunch.  

The Joseph Institute Center for Youth Ethics published their annual ethics survey this week. They’ve been publishing surveys since 1992, but this 2008 survey in particular caught my interest because of the closing questions.

The survey shows that:

30 percent overall admitted stealing from a store within the past year.  In 2006 the overall theft rate was 28 percent.

More than two of five (42 percent) said that they sometimes lie to save money. More than eight in ten students (83 percent) confessed they lied to a parent about something significant.

Cheating in school continues to be rampant and it’s getting worse. A substantial majority (64 percent) cheated on a test during the past year (38 percent did so two or more times), up from 60 percent and 35 percent, respectively, in 2006.

(Ok, I need to change the quote color in my theme, it needs more contrast.)

This survey represents the people who are going to be our CEO’s, governors, and other leaders in the coming 10 to 15 years.

Really though, the most startling facet of the survey  was the closing statements:

As bad as these numbers are, it appears they understate the level of dishonesty exhibited by America’s youth. More than one in four (26 percent) confessed they lied on at least one or two questions on the survey. Experts agree that dishonesty on surveys usually is an attempt to conceal misconduct.

Despite these high levels of dishonesty, the respondents have a high self-image when it comes to ethics. A whopping 93 percent said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character and 77 percent said that when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know.

Two Biblical references come to mind:

2Timothy 3:1-5a
But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power.

Luke 18:10-14
“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other men–extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess.’ And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ I tell you, this man [the publican] went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Comments?

I had an old Thinkpad 570 laptop in the closet, 366Mghz, 192 megabytes of ram, 6 gig hard disk, Windows 2000. It has a dock, but without it, it’s got 1 usb 1.0 port and no optical drive. The 5000 series was at one time a line of premium ultra-portables with a sterling reputation, and some people still use them with Linux. This one does have a pretty glaring flaw… if I pick it up by the corner and it flexes, it blue screens.  I know what the problem is, it’s a break in the hard disk connecter. It won’t do it if the hard drive isn’t in, and it does it with any hard disk. The other problem is the the battery lasts about 8 minutes.

I tried to put Linux on it at one point but it was really flaky, even though I tried three different distro’s. I never even got it to boot reliably.

So I found a good use for it, one that doesn’t require handling.

I use it as an audio bridge for the sound system.

I have an older Logitech Z-680 surround sound system hooked up to the DVD player in the living room, it sounds great and I love to listen to it. I wanted to be able to play music from my laptop over it, because it can convert stereo into something that sounds like surround sound. My only way to do this was to run a cable from my laptop to the control box’s analog input. That was cumbersome, so this is what I did:

I took the Thinkpad and got it on the wireless network with a 20 dollar Trendnet wireless PCMCIA card from Newegg. After I got it going (no hang-ups there), I downloaded and installed Winamp 5.5 and UltraVNC. I use Winamp as my music library and UltraVNC allows me to remotely control the Thinkpad’s desktop from another PC. Both programs are free. The newest version of VNC (1.0.5) gave me some problems on Vista, so I used 1.0.2 and it works fine. This is what it looks like from my tablet laptop:

The window in the center is the Thinkpad’s desktop, which is running Winamp at full screen. I set up an icon with the VNC username and password on my desktop so all I have to do is click the icon and I get a connection.

Here’s the setup:

The cable going into the left of the laptop is the USB connector for the external hard drive. On the right top is the green audio connector that goes from the headphone jack to the surround sound control pod. You can see the wireless card sticking out on the right, too. On the far right of the picture is an external 100 gig hard drive and the Z-680 control pod. All this except for the pod goes behind the gas fireplace and next to the subwoofer.

This is what it looks like from the couch:

Only the control pod is visible. It’s remote controlled, so I can switch between digital and analog inputs and control volume, though I usually use Winamp’s volume for that.

Here’s a (blurry)  picture of me using it on the tablet, no wires attached:

So far, so good. It’s turned out to be even cooler than I thought, because created a share on the external drive and I now I back up files to it across the network.

I love JB Waterweld.  The stuff is like duct-tape for men. When I was in the Navy I used it for everything from packing and and tapping a stripped out bolt hole to fabricating parts for a biometric lock.

Yesterday I fixed a laptop for dad that had I promised to fix a while ago but just got around to doing. It still worked but dad had to prop up the power cord on something to keep upward pressure on the socket. I took the thing apart and immediately found the damage.

The top circle is the plastic socket, the bottom circle is the mount on the laptop body. The socket had grooves in it to hold it flush to the laptop body, but the flanges on the body had snapped off, leaving nothing for the grooves to slide over. Additionally, the socket connector itself was damaged.

 
Plug — Socket ——Connector — Wires

The center (hot) rod of the socket was attached to power on the back of the socket with a rivet-like flair over the power wire’s washer connector, but the flair had broken off leaving the red power wire with nothing to hold it against the back of the center socket rod. That’s why holding up the plug worked… It leveraged the little hinge under the failed center rod connecter, pushing the center rod and connector out against the red power wire. Sorry, it’s hard to explain without a better picture. The whole back of the plug was covered with another plastic cap as well.

I ended up scrapping the back cap and soldering the red power connector directly to the socket’s center rod. I then insulated the red (hot) and green (ground) wires from each other and created a cap to strengthen and protect the back of the socket with a blob of waterweld.

I went ahead and used the rest of the Waterweld to cement the socket into the laptop body. Dad’s pretty happy with it, so I’m happy too. There’s only one problem with Waterweld. When you mix it (it’s like putty) it warms up and smells like urine… and the smell is a bit hard to scrub off. Oh well.

I used to pirate software. Until 2007, every piece of software I used was either pirated, free, or open source. Music wasn’t spared, either. At one point I had nearly 80 gigs of music, most ripped from friend’s CD collections or downloaded. I could write a whole post on how I justified piracy. I came under some personal conviction about stealing in 2007 and started a long trek to “switch” to legit. I thought it would be hard, but I made some interesting discoveries and found out in the long run that going legal has its own rewards.

Music: mp3.amazon.com 
This site is great. All music tracks are 89-99 cents, most albums are around 9 dollars. All tracks are encoded at the very high quality of 320kbps. Most important: NO DRM. If you buy from iTunes, you’re getting stuck with files chained to Apple’s software. Amazon’s files have no such restriction. I’ve found that buying a track or album off of Amazon is a satisfying experience. It’s easy to find the files, purchase is one-click, you can preview anything you buy, the file quality is always good, and you don’t have to worry about cooties or getting sued.
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So I’m experimenting with Windows Live Writer as a manager for this blog. It’s part of the Windows Live suit, which includes Live Mail, Messenger, Photo Gallery, and a toolbar for access (get.live.com). I don’t really have a use for the rest of those, I already have Outlook for email,  Pidgen for text messaging, and Picasa for photo organization, and I’m not big on toolbar clutter.

But Live Writer is pretty nifty. I’m still experimenting with it, sticking some plugins into the program, etc. My biggest need right now is for flash implementation, since sermons.albanygospelchapel.com used imbedded flash audio in every post. My work-around is a plugin called “Text Template” that allows me to dump in saved snippets of html and javascript.

So far live writing is working out well, and it’s a HUGE improvement over the built in editor that comes with the
Wordpress suit.