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Most people don’t imagine that I was ever poor. No, I don’t have a “pulled myself up by my bootstraps” story. Instead, I have a story that is full of ups and downs–times when my community failed me and times when it saved me. That’s why poverty will always be a social issue to me–not [...]
Native video and audio support in the Firefox 3.1 beta. Sounds like a cool idea.
This is the first beta from Mozilla to include support for the and elements. This beta includes support for the OGG Theora and OGG Vorbis formats on all platforms. There are quite a few free tools for encoding to OGG Theora and OGG Vorbis. We are also working on backend support for GStreamer for Linux, QuickTime for Mac and Windows Media for Windows. However it’s not clear if those backends will land before 3.1 final is ready.
Web Tech Blog » Blog Archive » Firefox 3.1 beta 1 - an overview of features for web developers.
Happy Schereschewsky day, everyone!
It's the feast day of this blog's patron saint, Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky. I intended to write something commemorating the day. You know, use a few words to honor the man of many words.
And then, instead, I sent a LOT of words. Spam happened. And it's my fault. I clicked the wrong button.
As far as I can tell, an email has been sent to every person in my address book telling them to check out my facebook page and asking them to sign up for an account. (yes, I do have a facebook page. I'm late to the whole facebook party, but finally got there. That's another story for another day.)
Then I tried to send a "sorry, please disregard earlier email" message, but my email program wouldn't let me, saying that I had exceeded the maximum number of messages in an hour. As if I was a spammer... oh, wait, I guess I am.
My whole freakin' address book. It includes three quarters of the active members of my current congregation, about a hundred core leaders from other congregations I've served in and still keep in touch with, at least three ex-girlfriends (don't ask), all of the clergy of West Texas, three judges, fifteen or twenty bishops (one of them a primate), my Senators and Congressman... Ah, crap.
Right. I'm a spammer. And I have egg on my face. (Spam and eggs, get it?)
I'm going home to hide in the closet.
Are you like me? Does it seem like this presidential campaign has been going on for two years or more? And NOW, the local politicians are running their own ads on TV. Also, living where we do, a lot of the ads we must endure during commercial b...
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Fuzz Kitto, Sydney-based consultant and international speaker, has teamed up with The Work of the People and To Be Told to produce a series of film clips on Christian faith.
Worship and Mission
It’s not about making worship more exciting. It’s more about connecting worship with an all-week lifestyle of mission. In the past I’ve been involved in introducing new technologies for worship, including the visuals Fuzz talks about. But I strongly relate to the questions Fuzz raises here.
The Work of the People
Does your theology come from a system or from Jesus?
… in one easy graph (x is year, and y is $billion):
I guess we’re all looters.
Christopher Buckley, after endorsing Obama, joins Kathleen Parker in exile after quitting the National Review:
Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted—rather briskly!—by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.
[...]
While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.
So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.
I much prefer working in Excel 2007 to Excel 2003. Despite the issues with backward compatibility, there are a lot of advantages and benefits to using the new version.
Some little things that have been changed are
The previous limit on nested brackets in formulas from 7 has been increased to 64. I used this today
The number of columns and rows has increased. I used this today.
I had to develop a file for a client that involved a complex work roster arrangement to calculate days off in repeating 2, 3 or 4 week cycles for the next 20 years.
Here is the nested formula that got me the logic for a roster.
=IF($X5>=AJ$4,$X$4,IF($Y5>=AJ$4,$Y$4,IF($Z5>=AJ$4,$Z$4,IF($AA5>=AJ$4,$AA$4,IF($AB5>=AJ$4,$AB$4, IF($AC5>=AJ$4,$AC$4,IF($AD5>=AJ$4,$AD$4,IF($AE5>=AJ$4,$AE$4,IF($AF5>=AJ$4,$AF$4,$AG$4)))))))))
I then used one formula to generate over 600,000 cells and create a map that looks like this.
=INDEX(data,MATCH(C$1,codes,0),(IF(MOD($A3,VLOOKUP(C$1,Rules!$AH:$AI,2,FALSE))=0,VLOOKUP (C$1,Rules!$AH:$AI,2,FALSE),MOD($A3,VLOOKUP(C$1,Rules!$AH:$AI,2,FALSE))))+2)
I used the VLOOKUP formulas because this was a quick and dirty application, not one that needed to stand the test of time. Also the speed of the calculation wasn’t an issue on my development machine. I would have built more robust formulas if this application was going to see regular use.
From here I needed to generate a list of the “weekend” periods from their start date to end date.
It needed to look like the table to the right as this was going to be uploaded into their enterprise system.
Given the large number of cells this had the potential to go below the 65535 rows allowed in Excel 2003.
In the end I only used 58471 rows so was comfortably inside the limit. However if they add more rosters this could break.
I cannot display the code here as it is the intellectual property of the client – as they have paid for it.
The result for the client is huge. Entering 230,000 odd pieces of data into a system manually would have been very tedious.
Generating the 90 odd rosters manually and then uploading them would still have been very tedious and needed to be repeated if there were any problems or errors or new rosters.
This application including the initial consulting, logic development and code writing (there’s only 57 lines including all commenting) took a little over 2 days. You do the math on how much it saved! The code runs in about 15 seconds on my system. Probably a little more on a less grunty PC. This is the power of Excel and VBA automating repetitive tasks and what we make a lot of money doing!
Since initially posting this I am sorry to see that Shay is wrongly getting all the credit for this inspired song!
Holly Hobbie was the cutest, most wholesome doll. This was another lunch box I had. I love the falling leaves, the colors of Autumn, and whimsy of little girls.
I never had a little girl. What fun it must be playing with dolls, yet being all grown up. Stretching the imagination along with a little daughter seems like a treasure lost. Sara would have been my daughters name. I did get to enjoy Tabitha, my niece, who was killed post-tornado due to a tree falling on her while she slept. We did the Kaboodle thing every morning. I even bought her a kiddyboodle full of kiddy makeup. And she loved her Mister Potato Head earrings. We painted fingernails, and toe nails. It was a joy.
My sister is having a girl, but I won't get to enjoy her. Possibly, some child of mine, which I doubt, may eventually get married, and have a daughter. Otherwise, I'll just have to babysit the nursery at church, I guess.
Autumn is such a festive time. Although I detest Halloween and everything it stands for, I do love Harvest time. The moon was full this morning, and popping huge just over the horizon at 6:00 am. The smells are different; the nip in the air is fresh. Golds, rustic reds, olive greens, cocoa browns, what a beautiful combination of color.
Here is my short poem: Ode to Autumn
I feel Autumn in the air.
Take a moment, stop and stare.
All the leaves upon the trees,
are now swept up by a brisk, cool breeze.
Doesn't nature ever stop?
Must the leaves change their frock
from lovely green, to red and gold?
What a sight to behold!
It's all in the Artist hand.
Sit back, relax, see Autumn again.
Since I started writing for GeekDad I have been getting a very odd assortment of spam, press releases, and product pitches. Significantly less than half of those actually pertain to being a Geek, or Dad.
These are the “unsubscribe” instructions from an email promoting the book Scratch Beginnings, which looks interesting, but again, doesn’t really pertain to being a Geek, or Dad, let alone both.
P.P.S. If you would like to unsubscribe from the one mass email that I send out whenever my work gets picked up by a publisher, simply reply to this email and type BreaKER BrEAker 1-9, the EaglE hAS leFt the nEst in the subject line. CAPS sensitive.
This past Saturday Austin and I went to the 11th annual Jack-O-Launch in nearby Aurora. We saw frustrated engineers try their pumpkin throwing machines of all varieties. Some were pneumatic, others were traditional trebuchets. Check out this video - it is a catapult powered only by counterweights. The pumpkin goes close to 1/2 mile.
Remember him? Darling of the right? Author of the failed policies that are threatening to cripple the world economic system? (How’s that workin’ for you, Alan?) Can we expect him to step up and admit he was wrong? Any day now?
::: crickets :::
EDITED TO ADD: Here’s what Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman (Gosh I love saying that) said about Greenspan earlier this year.
freeze!
(the wisdom of a dream)
well, i had a dream a couple of weeks ago, she said, and it probably doesn't mean anything...but it really disturbed me... she is new to the dream group...she gave a bit of background of who she is...a long journey of difficult sobriety, fighting to avoid relapses, mostly succeeding, for years at a time, recently falling back, and now re-claiming her health...she has the determined mix of many recovering folks...seasoned with the struggles of life, scared by family history, sometimes overwhelmed by how to deal with the enormous strains of changing old patterns, how to healthfully detach from generational family expectations and demands...and still do her best to love them...without losing her soul and health....she's also very humble...sometimes giving and claiming for herself grace and acceptance... i am with my family somewhere, she begins her dream...all of my brothers and family are there, other people, too...we are at some large, beautiful home, like an estate...lots of trees and grass...it is night...i think we have had a cookout or something...i am uncomfortable with some of the people, like a brother...i am walking toward a large beautiful swimming pool behind the house...suddenly! i see my mother fall into the pool, she is drowning...i think i scream for help...one of my brothers yells at me to jump into the pool to save her...he is up on a balcony, looking down...he is far up...i can't move!! i am frozen! then my brother leaps down, dives into the pool and pulls my mother out...everybody shames me and is angry with me for not jumping in...but i couldn't...i couldn't move...i wake up feeling so guilty... we ask questions to gently understand her dream, not analyze or interpret...she is, she explains, the one who has been the giver and caretaker of others, that she in recent months had been the one to travel over a thousand miles to give care to her aged and dying mother...and how this "threw" her into that old pattern of being expected to take over...to lose herself, her soul in caring for others...while "they", many family members just stood by...taking advantage of her...she, torn by love, loyalty and past training, giving in, at least for a while...fighting to not get lost and finally relapsing, overwhelmed...now promising herself, with anger and clarity to never give in again... so, as we, this group of dreamers, borrowed her dream, owned it for ourselves and explored our own journeys through her journey...feeling the terror and guilt of freezing in the face of death...began to become aware of how we, too, can get lost in the needs of others...how we get trained, programed to rescue others in such a way that we will drown in their needs, losing our soul...drowning ourselves in our own version of alcoholic sorrow...
i remembered out loud about the instinctual wisdom of the beautiful, sleek african gazelle...who survives the african prairie, survives the hunt of the fastest animal alive, the cheetah, by first, of all things...freezing...forcing the cheetah to blow her quiet stalking cover, to make the first move, not able to hide and kill... the cheetah is forced to run...exposing her stalking strategy...and the gazelle, now seeing where the danger is...explodes, darts, zig-zags...running its marathon of obstacle courses, tiring the cheetea...escaping...because, first...the gazelle knows to freeze... freeze in your tracks! all senses hyper-alert...the old pattern says "jump!"... but, instinctual...wisdom...learned from scars...over seasons of seasoning...says... freeze!
… let’s not forget what’s really important, says Paul Raushenbush:
The economic crisis reminds us we are not spiritually or materially alone in this world - and we never were. We have responsibility to and with one another. We must abandon our personal fiefdoms for our communal dwelling place in the kingdom of God. Jesus calls to us each personally, but we are saved collectively. God requires both personal and social repentance and salvation. The two great commandments - to love God and to love our neighbor are not discreet actions but are inextricably linked, together providing the key to God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. [...]
We are called to sacrifice for one another and expect to be supported by one another; to extend and accept a helping hand. As the late Gwendolyn Brooks poetically reminded us:
We are each other’s business
We are each other’s harvest
We are each others magnitude and bond
Or as Walter Rauschenbusch wrote: Humankind is so closely bound together no man lives to himself, and no man is saved to himself alone.
http://www.shocco.org/60thPage.htmlWhat a fabulous place to spend a summer. Shocco Springs Baptist Assembly in Talladega Alabama GA Camp! Tongo, chimney ba ba yo Tongo Cumbade cum by oh. ooo wah lay, molly pa, molly whey! Up and down THE hill. Skinny marinkey dinkey dink. You were skinny after that hill. The 6oth staffer reunion is in December...gotta try and go!
Check out this cute little spider that hit my desktop this morning when Jude brought it round to me. I got a couple of good photos of it but it wouldn’t sit still until i got it out onto a tree.
Anybody know what sort of spidy it is?
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