Of Guilt and Directions
A situation arose recently in my church where we were praying for healing for one of our members, and God told me - in these actual words, i.e. this is a direct quote: "She needs to forgive". Just that - "she needs to forgive" nothing more. About fifteen seconds or so later, as I was sitting there going "ok Lord, is that you or me?" …
The ANDs and BUTs of Construction
A year or so ago I started the process of adding a major expansion to my house. At this point, it is nearly a reality - construction *should* be starting in earnest within the next few days. Getting here, however, has felt like one road block after another. On the other hand, for every road block (AND...), there has been a BUT that takes care of the issue. …
Tunnel Vision
Some time ago in church, we read mark 4, specifically Mark 4:11-12. The lead in to those verses is the well-known parable of the sower, and the lead out is Jesus explaining said parable to his disciples (and us), but smack dab in the middle of that Jesus says this:
11 And He was saying to them, "To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but those who are outside get everything in parables, 12 so that WHILE SEEING, THEY MAY SEE AND NOT PERCEIVE, AND WHILE HEARING, THEY MAY HEAR AND NOT UNDERSTAND, OTHERWISE THEY MIGHT RETURN AND BE FORGIVEN."
Thus ensued an hour long discussion on why on earth Jesus wouldn’t want them to “return and be forgiven”, as that passage seems to imply. …
The fall of Apple Inc.
No, Apple is not doomed. They are doing quite well, thank you very much. And I don't see that changing any time soon. Where they are falling down is on the design of their hardware offerings. More and more lately it seems like the latest hardware revision makes things worse, at least in some ways, than the previous. …
Python, Postgres, and People
Recently I had to figure out a way to get data from an application I wrote to the backend database - to be used in a trigger. The solution? Python's with command and Postgres's temporary tables. Read on for the details.
Judge not...
Judge not, lest you be judged - a topic that has been making the rounds at my church in some depth lately. Several things that were said on the topic kinda got under my skin this past week, so I decided to write down my thoughts and counter arguments here.
God's Promises
So here’s the issue: we, as christians, accept the Bible as God’s absolute word. If it’s in there, it’s true, and that’s that. Contained within the Bible are any number of “promises” - protection, provision, healing, comforting, etc. Some of these we see- for example, I have never been unable to pay a bill, although I am often left wondering how we managed to spend an extra $800 in a given month and still break even. …
Proper Support Etiquette
Please, people, if you are going to ask for help with a problem you are having with my software, be prepared to follow-up with me about it. It is very rare for an initial support request to have all the information I need to solve an issue that you are having. If I reply to your request asking for more information, then send the information! …
How the E-Mail was Re-Won
So after getting the notification that my @macosx.com e-mail was about to expire, I sent a response stating, essentially, “Good riddance”. You may recall my previous rant about how they lost my messages, and so I switched. About an hour later I got a response from Scott (sysadmin there I believe) stating that they do, in fact, keep backups and it was just that the support agent I was corresponding with didn’t know about it. …