Here are a few bits of video goodness from the time around Jack’s first birthday. Of our five kids, Jack has been the most excited about the cake and ice cream. He really goes after it. Jack is growing up incredibly fast. It’s incredible to watch him take his first wobbly steps, and to imagine what the next 12 months will hold.
Those of you who keep track of my activities via Facebook or Twitter may know that I’ve been scrambling, over the last week or so, to recover lost data. For a long time, I had used a 250GB external hard drive as a back up to my desktop PC. I used the drive mostly for storage of pictures. We’ve been completely digital since the summer of ‘03, so our digital photo collection numbers around 18,000 files. At some point, I must have thought that it would be a good idea if my picture import program just moved the pictures directly to the external hard drive, and skip saving them on my PC’s hard disk. Something about my programmer mentality didn’t like the idea of doing something twice…namely, saving my pictures to my hard disk, and then having to copy them all to an external disk. I somehow considered having the data in two spots redundant.
You could say that I have learned my lesson the hard way. OF COURSE having the same data in two spots is redundant! Duh! That’s the point! My external hard drive crapped out and now I’m wishing I had been more diligent about creating and maintaining a backup of all that data. I’ve recovered some of it, and the first step in making sure this never happens again is to create an offsite backup of the data that I was able to save. For that, I’m using Carbonite. 
Carbonite costs $49.95 for a year, and the storage space is unlimited. I’ve got about 35GB of data to move over there for the initial backup, so it’s taking a loooong time. I have a pretty slow internet connection, and Carbonite has been hard a work for a week now, and it’s only 67% done. It will be worth it, however, to know that no matter what happens to my PC or local backups, I can restore the data to a new machine.
In a sermon a while back, our pastor made a reference to Luke 8:14, where Jesus happens to be explaining the parable of the sower and the seed. He referred to the verse in passing because of the occurrence of a particular Greek word, but as I read it for myself, something really struck me about it. Here it is, in context…
Lk 8:4 While a large crowd was gathering and people were coming to Jesus from town after town, he told this parable: 5 “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. 6 Some fell on rock, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. 8 Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown.”When he said this, he called out, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
Lk 8:9 His disciples asked him what this parable meant. 10 He said, “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that,“ ‘though seeing, they may not see;though hearing, they may not understand.’
Lk 8:11 “This is the meaning of the parable: The seed is the word of God. 12 Those along the path are the ones who hear, and then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. 13 Those on the rock are the ones who receive the word with joy when they hear it, but they have no root. They believe for a while, but in the time of testing they fall away. 14 The seed that fell among thorns stands for those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by life’s worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature. 15 But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop.
This is a pretty well known story, and, because Jesus takes the time to explicitly tell the disciples exactly what he’s trying to say, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of mystery here. What struck me about the verse was how Jesus described the seed that fell among the thorns…the seed that would be choked out. Choked out by what? By life’s troubles, yes, but what else? Life’s riches and pleasures. How often do we think of life’s riches and pleasures being obstacles to our maturing in the faith? For many professing Christians, life’s riches and pleasures are what we spend our time pursuing. I think we tend to carry Jesus around like a rabbit’s foot, so that we have that whole “heaven thing” taken care of, but then we set out in hot pursuit of the very same things that the rest of the world is pursuing. We read that verse and see ‘troubles’ and can nod our head in agreement. We’ve all seen and heard things, or experienced things personally, that have made us doubt our faith. But how many of us have received a promotion and said to ourselves, “I better watch out, this could be a real threat to my relationship with Christ.”? I think if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll have to admit that the better we seem to be doing, by the world’s standards, the less need we have of God. Turn left in your bible and you’ll see that Moses saw the fat and easy days that the Israelites had in store for them in the promised land, and what did he see fit to warn them about?
Dt 8:10 When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. 11 Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God, failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees that I am giving you this day. 12 Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, 13 and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, 14 then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
17 You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” 18 But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today.
Note that Moses didn’t warn the Israelites about all the hard times ahead. He didn’t warn them to be on their guard if their crops failed, or if their flocks and herds diminished, or if all their gold and silver were lost. No, his warning was the exact opposite. I think there is a real lesson in that. Let the warning of Moses be a warning to us as well, especially as we seek to live godly lives in the middle of the most materialistic and pleasure driven culture in history.
I’ve stuck with the same visual style on this blog for a long time. Partly because I really like concrete, so the background is especially nice. There is one thing, however, that I’ve never liked about it. The main content column, the column you’re reading right now, was too skinny. This site uses a WordPress theme that was freely available on the internet, but I was not familiar enough with web development to try and change it myself. However, I’m dangerously curious, and couldn’t stand not knowing how to fix it. I knew that the site template uses PHP and CSS to control the look of the site and the data access, but that was the extent of it. I’ve gotten into the PHP a little bit when I wanted to add my Google Reader shared items in the right hand navigation column, but I’d never monkey’d around with the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). My typical method of discovering how things work is to change something until it breaks, so I set out in a similar fashion this time. I began opening various site files in a text editor until I found something that might potentially control the look of the site. I finally found what I was looking for in the style.css file in my WordPress theme folder. I’m sure that’s perfectly obvious to any web developer, but I’m starting from scratch here. Anyway, the style.css file looks something like this…
At a very basic level, and web developers out there are going to hate me for saying this, but at a very basic level CSS files allow the developer to set up the visual style of multiple site elements in one central location…saving a lot of time and frustration. That is not a complete definition by any means, but you get the idea.
See width under #content? That was 340px…I changed it to 460px, and I like the look of the site much better. Of course, it wasn’t just as simple as changing that one line in that one file. First, the #rap section had to be widened so that the content area, header, footer, and right side navigation area all had room to expand. Then I had to play around with the width of the content area until I found something that looked nice. Every change that I made to my copy of style.css on my local machine had to be copied up to my site folder so that I could see the effect that the change had on my live site. Graphics also needed to be modified. The header graphic, which I’ve swapped out a few times, used to be 526px wide…now it’s 640 wide. That required making a new header graphic, which you can see above. (By the way, that graphic was made from a picture that I took while in Canada) The navigation menu background graphic, basically a dark gray rectangle, also had to be lengthened to match up with the new width of the site. Overall, I’m pleased with how things look now, and in the process of making this one change I learned a lot about CSS, which, in my line of work, is a good thing.
Man, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything remotely technical. Apologies to the less geeky folks out there.
B6 is the working name for the latest addition to the Boss family, which we are expecting to be delivered sometime before May 15. Needless to say, we’re both very excited and a little nervous about welcoming another baby into our small(ish) home. We do believe, however, that God knows best, and He has seen fit to make us the stewards of another one of his precious children.
We expect that some of our friends and family will be surprised by this news, and we’re prepared for a wide range of responses. I expect that some will say, “Haven’t you guys figured out what causes that yet?”, or, “What’s the matter, your TV broken?” We don’t expect everyone to view children in exactly the same way that we do…we wish that were the case, but people can agree to disagree. Just know that we think each and every child God gives us is a blessing, and not a burden, no matter the earthly sacrifice required.
The other night, I was reading In the Heart of the Rockies
The next day I used the cool “define” keyword in Google, to see what else the word “faggot” could mean…here’s what Google came back with:
As you can see, the last definition in the above list is the definition being used by G.A. Henty.
(Tip: In Google, type define: followed by any word, and Google will come back with a myriad of definitions from various sources. Example define:calvinism)