Dallas Willard, Forcing Religion

Forcing religion on the young, even though it makes no sense to them is a major reason why they graduate from Church about the same time they graduate from high school and do not return for twenty years, if ever.

From Willard's discussion of Pearls Before Swine: when good things become deadly in The Divine Conspiracy. One example of where Willard takes quite a different view than most. Here he focuses not on the swine being the issue but the pearls. A pig can't eat pearls, what else would they do but attack one who feeds them pearls.

- Peace

Skywalker

Blogger and Comment Spam

From Keeping Comments Clean in the blogger help files.

Blogger has several built-in measures for dealing with comment spam and other associated dastardly behavior.
...
3. You can choose to receive notification by email when new comments have been posted on your blog. This way, you can monitor them for spam and delete them when necessary.
4. You can enable word verification for your comments. This will require an extra step in the commenting process, which will deter automated comment spamming systems.

They need to improve #3 by adding enough information so you can find the comment. The post title and perma link needs to be included in the email. I now I have two comment spams sitting in my archives, but no idea where. One of them came after enabling #4.

- Peace

Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?

reminding on the Psychology and Aesthetics of Coding By Charles Petzold. As seen on /.

Been wondering the same thing about Eclipse. After using it for a couple of years now, I find wring code in plain old jEdit quite a jump. When I taught I used jEdit and PFE before that. Students raised on VB would complain and I'd point them to The dumbing-down of programming part one and two. Seven years later and I now use code completion cause it comes with eclipse and a bunch of good refactoring tools. Is it a step forward? I'm not always sure.

- Peace

Time Waster

Grid Game reminds me of the Game of Life. Best Score so far 1905.

Thanks Shane.

- Peace

home wifi working

Did this post on my ipaq.

-Peace
Dave

Update: so while the post came through I had to log onto blogger to publish it. I guess I need to find and up to date pocket pc blogger tool.

Dreamer

Normally I'd handicap a family sports movie at something like 80 to 1, but Dreamer paid off. It's a heart warming movie about a Father, Daughter and Grandfather following their dream of raising a champion race horse. Dreamer plays lightly on your heart strings drawing you into this family of horsemen. The group I saw it with cheered at the end.

My daughter was the cynic of the group, saying it was just like Seabiscuit (2003) . The last horse movie I saw was The Black Stallion (1979), so I can't say.

BTW we were given three free tickets to see the movie.

- Peace

Millrise Sunrise

Sarah took this while wating for the bus. I think it's breathtaking. Yes I'm a proud dad! She's set up her own flickr account.

- Peace

3300 km, best year ever!

I passed the 3300 km mark on the ride home last night. Making 2005 my best biking year ever in terms of distance. Last year I did just over 3200 and previous to that my best year was 2500 km in Edmonton in 96 or 97. Even if I don't get the last 200 kms for my goal of 3500 it's been a good year.

- Peace