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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?"
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.
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.