My New Workstation

So A few weeks ago I met up with my brother at our annual family Apple Picking trip. I was quite annoyed because he had a Core-Duo Dell XPS Laptop. I could not believe I had been topped. I knew that I could not convince my boss that I needed a new Laptop. However after a week of convincing, and then a week of waiting for my new Kensington Docking Station and 4 Monitor Adapter, I present to you all, my new workstation. It is every programmers dream. I have my Laptop which outputs to a Code Window, A Local View Window, A Remote View Window, and My Email. I also leave my database manager open on the email screen so I can easily flip between those two windows. It has only been a few hours but, "I AM LOVING THIS!!!!"

Wii Montage

Mario and Zelda fans can see footage of the first Wii games to feature their Fave characters and everyone can see that fun new controller.... Way 2 Kewl... I feel like a little kiddie waiting for Christmas ... I am going to be SOOOOOOO excited Christmas morning when my girls open up this gift. Wii is Cool

Thanks For The Prayers

Thank you to everyone who was praying for Lane. He is home and we are blessed to be watching him heal.

On another note. I am proud to have gotten the RSS feed working on our Church Site. Now I have some great ideas for TaskPads for my coworkers using RSS...

Baby Lane In Surgery

I am writing to ask for your prayers for my son. He will be in surgery tommorow morning at Loyola Children's Hospital in the morning. Please pray for his fragile little body and for the surgeouns attending to him!

OH Man!!!

I can not get the RSS to work on the CDDiscipleship Blog! I'll keep trying this evening after work!

Thoughts On Loving Like Christ

This Is Copied From Our Discipliship Blog at church. It might make more sense in the context of the message it was a reply to. I wanted to post it here, because I believe it is vital that I remember the kind of Love Christ calls us to:

Who do I want to keep? How far do I want to love? Do I want to love the crack whore on lower Whacker as much as I want to love Bob who goes to my church? Do I want to love the 11 year boy in the Ivory Coast who is beaten regularly if he does not pick his daily quota of cocoa? Do I want to love the gay AIDS patient in East Grenwich?

Jesus separated his disciple and set them apart from the rest of the world, by the measure of their love. The measure was not for their love of the fellow church goers. The measure was the love of the dark places of the world.

Friar Thomas writes the following:

He told them another parable: 'The kingdom of God is like yeast which a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.' (Matthew 13:33)

Jesus says the kingdom of God is like leaven. In the ancient Mediterranean world as we saw, leaven had very negative associations. It was the archetype of uncleanness and corruption. Leaven was made by putting a piece of bread in a dark, damp place until it molded and stank. Both leaven and the process of leavening were symbols of corruption... In this parable Jesus addresses the popular idea that the kingdom of God is holy, good, and triumphant. The kingdom turns out to be active in the marginalized and the poor, both of whom regarded in Jesus' day as objects of God's abandonment. The state of poverty was regarded as the result of sin and hence was a symbol of corruption. Natural calamities"

Jesus' call to his disciples for "Love One Another" is best understood when we understand that this kind of love for tha marginalized is the yeast and that the dough is the Kingdom of God.

Any religous body will work to love each other. A group of Christians seeking to be a part of the disciples of the Kingdom of God will work to love the unloveable. That too who we need to keep!

Raymond Camden's ColdFusion Blog: Question on Instant Messenger Gateway

Save only my original CF instructor and my brother I have learned more about CF from Raymond Camden's ColdFusion Blog than ANYWHERE else. The man is a giant in my skills development!

Anyway I was honored today when he answered my question about checking buddy status using the XMPP gateway.

All Your Dharma Initative Questions Answered.... Sorta :-)

Malthus , Darwin and Christ

The New Republic examining Evolution's radical new theories has a quote by Darwin:

"In October 1838, Darwin read An Essay on the Principle of Population by the clergyman and former professor of political economy Thomas Malthus. The idea that population increases geometrically while food supply increases arithmetically was meant by Malthus to prove that starvation, wars, death, and suffering were never the consequence of the defects of one political system or another, but rather the necessary results of a natural law. A Whig and a supporter of Poor Law action to ameliorate the condition of the destitute, Darwin was not sympathetic to Malthus's reactionary politics, but applying the clergyman's law to nature was a different thing. In his autobiography, Darwin recalled his immediate realization that given the struggle for existence everywhere, 'favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory'--the principle of natural selection--'by which to work.'

I decided to read about Malthus and his Malthusian Growth theories. His conclusions seem to me to draw from a flawed scientific model coupled with a very poor reading of scripture.

You can take a read at both sets of links for an intresting set of reading.