Well if you ask me...

Thanks be to God

There is no denying this was a dificult Thanksgiving, but…I still have so much to be thankful for:

My loyal devoted wife — the love of my life. Two beautiful, brilliant children. The love and support of my mother. A sister & brother, and a brother & sister who provide an example of character for my children (and me). A job that I love and students I can put up with.

Thank you Lord for the many blessings in my life.

Remembering Dad

I shared some of my Dad’s favorite Scriptures in devotions yesterday. It was difficult to do. Someone had to pass me a box of tissues about half-way through. I had to ask someone to finish reading Psalm 34:1-8. It was worth it no matter how hard. Several people came to me to tell me how glad they were I shared. My father was an amazing man. I miss him very much.

Wow, that was easy!

I have just decided to switch from Blosxom to pyBlosxom. Mostly because I use Python in my classes. I like Perl a lot and I really like Blosxom, but I wanted to try this. Frankly, I did not think it would be this easy. In my experience, any Perl script I grabbed from the web has always worked more ‘forgivingly’ than any Python script. Now I just have to find (or write) the right plugins. I will not be moving old posts here.

The 100

One of my favorite books is titled The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. It contains short pieces about the most influential persons from history, including an enlightening collection of ‘honorable mentions.’. It is a fascinating book. Recently, I added a similar book to my wishlist — The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today. With all of this, I have never thought about putting a similar list together on my own. Then I read this, and this. Well, really I did not read the lists. It dawned on me that I should work on a list. I will post the list when I finish it.

The Eagle has Landed

Billy became a Young Eagle today. Check out the pics on the photoblog, or check to see if he has finished his slide show of the event.

Using BookMarklets

While doing some research for my next project, I ran into some JavaScript code that intrigued me. I don’t use JavaScript, because a long time ago I was brainwashed into thinking that JS was never to be used for anything. I have always thought it was ‘cool’ but thought that it was bad design to use it on the web. I remembered vaquely (from Simon Willison’s Blog as it turns out), reading about something called bookmarklets. After a quick Google for bookmarklets, I decided — “this is what JS is best used for!” I added several bookmarklets to my links and now I can use them to navigate websites, analyze website designs, and much more. The Google link above will take you to most of these but my favorites are:

• Simon Willison’s Blog

• Bookmarklets.com

• Site Analysis

• Jesse’s Bookmarklets Site

• More Bookmarklets

Fun but Not Funny

We watched Two Weeks Notice with Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant last night. When I watch a romantic comedy (I admit — I usually enjoy them), I don’t really expect much comedy. The point is the love story, right? Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but in most cases my wife and I watch these movies together because we enjoy the predictable storylines and the ‘Awwwww’ moments sprinkled throughout. If you like your romantic comedies to be genuinely funny, this movie is not for you. If you are interested in a feel-good love story (predictability aside), you should see this film. Sandra Bullock’s character is the same combination of cute and neurotic that her fans have grown to love, and Hugh Grant provides the little bit of comedy you will discover in this movie.

America Loves a Longshot

We’ve just finished watching Seabiscuit Exceptional acting, breathtaking scenery and an inspirational story. How could one go wrong. To be honest, I was very leary of even trying this movie. Normally, these cliche ‘underdog wins’ movies don’t sit well with me. I’m also not a big fan of sports movies. As a huge sports fan I feel like most movies don’t do justice to the ‘real thing.’ Many reviewers promised that since the film was based on a true story it would not seem as sappy or predictable. Of course, I am always suspicious of the based on a true story tag anyway. In the end the movie did not disappoint. The first hour seemed a little slow, and frankly I was not sure I would make it through. I’m glad I did. Not really sure if too much could have been removed. Part of the appeal at the end is the kinship you feel with the characters due to your history together. Some would say it was worth it, but it seems unfortunate to me that somtimes we have to justify the beginning of a movie by saying the ending is better. Truth is, though — this is one of those movies! If you get bored, just joke about it like we did and keep watching.

Jupiter’s Moons

Tonight we got an excellent look at four of Jupiter’s moons. Billy & Becky both saw them. It was the first time for both of them so this was an exciting night.

Whadya mean, What’s goin on in this house?

We saw the school production of Arsenic & Old Lace last night. Hilarious! The student’s did a brilliant job.

More Junk

Today it was time to wrap up the details from last week. I returned a few things to storage, and pulled out some more to toss. Feel’s good I also grabbed some books to give away. Slowly but surely, we will remove the clutter.

Update on Dad

I spoke to Mom today. Dad will be admitted to the hospital tomorrow for 24 hour chemo. I considered going to spend the day with him, but I will go on Thursday instead. I will spend the day and then I can take him home and get him settled.

Big Sale

Every year our civic association plans a community-wide yard sale. With more than five hundred homes in our neighborhood, this event draws a lot of attention from yard sale junkies. Our first opportunity to participate was in May 2003. Billy and Becky were thrilled but rain spoiled the entire weekend. We were anxiously awaiting this year’s event. We made three trips to our storage unit (which we have vowed to downsize by <crossing_fingers> 8/28/2004 </crossing_fingers>), helped the children sort through mountains of toys and made plans for drawing traffic back into our ‘no outlet’ portion of the neighborhood. We were ready! The day had arrived.

• 5:42 a.m. — Coffee in hand, I made one last trip to storage to grab a small pile of things I could not get Friday night because of the rain.

• 7:00 a.m. — Both cars out of the way, we begin to set up our things.

• 7:45 a.m. — Our first rush. Our first two cutomers arrive and clean out the best of the toys and bakeware.

• 10:00 a.m. — Terri holds down the operation as we take a walk to spend some of our profits.

• 1:00 p.m. — Intense winds put an end to our sale (and make a mess of the yard).

In the end we were able to unload a huge pile of ‘junk’ and make a few dollars, but most importantly we had a fun day.

Coincidence?

This morning my alarm sounded nine minutes before I needed to rise. I always set it like this so that I can hit the snooze button once. I remember this morning vividly because the dj happened to be announcing the time when I woke. Over an hour later, thirteen minutes before I would normally leave for work, I woke on my own. The alarm was still set. I checked the radio. The signal was fine and the volume was up. There seemed to be no explanation for why I had overslept. I woke my wife for help getting Billy ready for school, and I began to prepare for work. On Friday, I normally arrive at work 2 hours and 25 minutes before my first class, so I knew that I would be okay. I was rather frantic about getting Billy to school on time. He is trying very hard to earn a perfect attendance award this year and I did not want to ruin that. As we arrived at school, we learned that a large flatbed truck had crashed into the side of the school building.. This took place at the time we normally arrive at school. If I had not overslept, we would most certainly have just missed this incident or worse, not missed it. An event like this begs explanation. Let’s take a look at the two most common explanations for such an event.

1. Master PlanSomehow, the events and actions of the participants were planned. This explanation raises a number of questions indeed.

• Coincidence Yahoo! Dictionary defines coincidence as follows:

  NOUN: …2. A sequence of events that althoughaccidental seems to have been planned orarranged.</p>

  So essentially, either this was planned or it was accidental and simply seems to have been planned. I have never been comfortable with these glaringly opposite extremes. On the one hand, if something seems to have been planned, why assume that it was accidental. On the other, the master plan raises some very difficult quesitons in my mind. Too many questions in fact. I choose to believe:

  • The truth lies somewhere in between these two possibilities

  • I may never know the answers to some (indeed many) of life’s quesitons

  • There is an Almighty God who actively sustains His creation

  • Almighty God is a personal God who cares for and protects His people.

  I thank God for protecting me as I travel to work every day. I am especially grateful for today’s coincidence.

  The article linked above incorrectly reports the time of the incident. I arrived at 7:47 and the police and emergency vehicles had already arrived. Eyewitness accounts put the event at closer to 7:20.

Go Nimrods

My son and I put together a fantasy baseball team every year on Yahoo! and we love it. We participate in a live online draft and then monitor the team all season. It’s a blast. Anyway, this season we’ve had a rough start. The past two seasons we spent in the top 3 in our league (12 teams). This season we have never broken above number 8! We are having trouble adjusting. After about an hour of reading some of my favorite Chrisitan websistes this morning, I stopped by Yahoo! to check on today’s lineup for the week and quickly became frustrated by the interface. They have changed it somewhat from last year and it annoys me. I click on ‘Opponents’ to list the matches for the week. Then I select pitchers for today and click ‘Submit Changes.’ It always brings me back to the default ‘Stats’ view so I have to click ‘Opponents’ again. Just a minor annoyance. I will be writing my own interface to solve this problem. I may not get to it until next weekend, but I will do it. Of course I may need to check the TOS at Yahoo! as it seems many sites are banning scraping. I have been reading on this topic a lot this week (here and there ) and will post my thoughts on it soon. My gut reaction is — You’ve got to be kidding! What’s next? You must read the newspaper in the living room, not the bathroom. No fast-forwarding through ads after you tape (or TiVO) something. (actually this has been debated already) I’m scraping and you can’t stop me! That’s just my gut reaction. *I could be wrong.