I wish I was going with Dave.
I will be praying that they will have a safe journey.
God is taking me on a journey too.
I met with a couple of friends who were with me in a bible study at work.
They want me to join their small group. Sounds good, sounds easy right?
So how come I'm terrified?

Ok one last thing, Last Saturday we got our copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and so far it's the best book yet. I'm only half way through, I've been reading it in secret. See I'm waiting for our daughters first "I'm bored!" statement on the trip before telling her we have the book. :) I expect much excited screaming when she get's her hands on it, and she'll be ticked that I'm a head of her. But I can't read and drive, even on the prairies.

I'm glad that J. K. Rowling has stoped the habit of retelling chunks of the previous story, just so folks who skiped previous books know what's going on. She still fills in the details, but does it in a way that's integrated into the nartive. So that almost 800 pages you've heard about? There's no filler.

- Peace

OK just doing a last few things before we go. I've posted a detailed trip plan. This map will show where we will be sleeping each night. Talk to you all when we get back.



- Peace

It was a year ago today that IdeaJoy [at the time Ideola] got it's first in bound link ever. Thanks again Bene Diction.

- Peace

I'm posting from the new version of blogger "Dano" and I'm pleased to report it plays nice with Mozilla 1.3. The old version worked but you had to do the HTML by hand. Not that typing A HREF= by hand is a big deal.

- Peace

I'm printing the first page of each blog on my blog roll to take to me Cornerstone Semminar - Blog On! We won't have a net connection, projection being the limiting factor, so I want to beable to hand out a sample of blogs. A picture is worth a 1000 words.

One of the points I'll be making in the semminar is that the look and feel of a blog helps the voice of the individual come through. In previous text based systems on the net there was no personalization other than text.

- Peace

Bloggedy blog points to a preview of the sixth Harry Potter book: Harry Potter in the Lake of Fire.

- Peace

Most Evangelicals Like Harry Potter. Really.. as seen on Josh Claybourn's blog.

I know my sister doesn't like the books, but she's never read them. I love my sister, but we tend to disagree on alot of things.

- Peace

User Friendly remakes a classic Far Side cartooon What we say to SCO, What They Hear. You might need some back ground reading to put this in context.

From the house of 'Livenrom' Gary Kotter and the Theologian's Drone - With today's Harry mania this is bang on.

- Peace

The Ghetto Mini-Pattern- now that's funny. Who says geeks don't know how to have fun.

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Help Find Weapons of Mass Destruction.

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Learned two things on the bike ride home.

1. I'm thankful for bus shelters.
2. Hail hurts.

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Under the headline Don't kiss off marriage the Globe and Mail is running an article on Statement on the Status of Marriage in Canada. It's an well done op-ed piece on why the goverment should not change the marriage laws as directed by the Ontario Courts, to allow for same-sex matrimony.

I think this is where the goverment has wanted to go for some time, but didn't have the guts to come out of the closet and say so. At least now their position is out in the open, where it should have been sometime ago. If elected officials won't deal with the hard issues, then the democratic system has little value.

- Peace

Blogging from Calgary, Alberta puts IdeaJoy at the top of The List. ;)

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10 Rules To Blog By -- Karen Haluza

1. Write about what God is teaching me.
   
2. Do not use my blog as a substitute for direct verbal communication
   
3. Do not claim divine inspiration for blogging about something that is about to trash another person.
   
4. Be prepared for shocked reactions from friends and family even though you were just trying to be a sincere follower of Jesus.
   
5. Don't write to your audience
   
6. When blogging becomes a running dialogue between me and myself, instead of between me and God, it's time to take a break.
   
7. Try really hard not to blog when angry
   
8. Consider it divine intervention when Blogger loses your post before it is published.
   
9. Don't be afraid to share really personal, embarrassing stuff about yourself
   
10. Remember that blogging is only part of the process and that, most importantly, there is no spoon.
    

Wise words from Karen.

- Peace

From Analyze this! A Conversation with James Gosling [James is most widely know as the father of Java.]

Lots of engineers are complexity junkies. Complexity is in many ways just evil. Complexity makes things harder to understand, harder to build, harder to debug, harder to evolve, harder to just about everything. And yet complexity is often much easier than simplicity. There's that really famous Blaise Pascal letter, where he starts, "I apologize for this long letter. I didn't have the time to make it any shorter." And that's really true.

I realy see this in learning C#, Microsoft's answer to Java. C# has undone some of the things Java did to remove complexity from C++. I think this was done to keep the 'complexity junkies' happy. While it can make code easier to write in C# in some cases, it makes C# code much harder to read. Thing is writing code is easier than reading it, so I'm not a fan of making it easier to write at the cost of making it easier to read.

- Peace

Blessed are the re-builders - BD has a great first hand report on part of the rebuilding of Iraq.

- Peace

Prodigal son, he'd been away awhile... - another of Richard's excellent paraphrases. Perma link is down, so look for the June 9th entry.

- Peace

I was a year behind Kelly Lamrock in school. Three schools in fact, Garden Creek, Albert St. and Fredricton High School. With a natural gift for rhetoric and that friendly - goofy smile, he was destined for political life. In last night's to close to call provincial election, Kelly Lamrock was elected as a Member of the Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick.

I'm sure the right honorable Kelly Lamrock would have loved the Liberals to have won the night, but being in a house where the balance of power is just one seat has got to be an dream come true.

Congrats Kelly, have fun.

- Peace

There and back again:
I've been away now I'm back.

• Mike's Spot on the Wall: The view of the volunteer.
  I've been volunteering for Harvest Moon and helping with their website.
  It's funny you never really think what goes into an event like this until you watch the people behind the scenes sweating the details.
  Little details like they've booked almost 30 acts for Canada's largest one day outdoor concert and don't have a red cent to pay them with yet.
  I can only hope our city will get behind this and give it the push it deserves.
• Mike's Walk: Why me God?
  Why me God? No, not why all the bad stuff, I figure I deserve that, no why the blessings?
  I look at my marriage and I wonder what did I do to get someone like Carol? (I wonder twice as much when I look at the relationships around me)
  I look at my possessions and my abilities and wonder how I managed to have so much material blessing on so little skill.
  I look at my walk with Him. When He called me. All times He's forgiven me. So many things He's healed me from, saved me from and through.
  Why me.
  And then a light,.. an odd light,.. but one that seems to make sense to me:
  

  1 Corinthians 1:27
  But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.

  
  Here I am so weak and foolish, why I'm almost overqualified.
  The moral of the story is that God loves and uses unlikely people and I'm so glad He does.

What if Google was down? - this story line runs the entire week. I laughed hard at this strip.

- Peace

My bio is up at the C-Stone Festival page.

Amazing Grace - the 6.2.2003 post at Raw Faith. I love true personal testimonies.

The gospel according to Nightcrawler

"Though all people are flawed and struggle with the capacity for sin, none likes to be reminded of our shared human weakness. My appearance does not make it easy."

"Don't it make you crazy?" Wolverine asks with incredulity.

"It did once, but then I found peace by devoting my life to God," said Nightcrawler. "He directed me to this place [the monastery] where they value the character of my heart, not my appearance."

This only sends Wolverine further into a rage. "What are you talking about? God gave up on us long ago!"

Nightcrawler counters, "No, my friend, God does not give up on his children-human or mutant. He is there for us in our times of joy and to help us when we are in pain--if we let Him." He then hands Wolverine a Bible and says, "Open your heart...Would it hurt so much to see the world through different eyes?"

- Peace

This will either make you go wow that's big or huh?

The JBoss Group forks.

I'm in the big section.

- Peace

May 2003, a sad month for the net.

The month of May marked the first time that commercial e-mail comprised 51 percent of all messages received by workers, according to MessageLabs, a provider of managed e-mail security services. MessageLabs only analyzed 133.9 million messages sent to its global network of business customers.

From Spam overtakes legitimate e-mail.

I've been using Mozilla's spam filtering software. It's based on Paul Graham's Bayesian filtering idea. It works for about 90% of the spam I get, I have had the odd false hit. I don't let it just delete the spam, I put it in a folder that I double check. In the last four months I've only had one or two false junk mail identifications. It let's trough 1 or two mails a day and filters out 10 - 30 junk mails a day.

Some how I don't think new laws will do much to help, other than move the problem off shore, but we will see.

- Peace

Professor Christ - now that's funny. Thanks Jen.

- Peace