Seizing Joy
I feel joyful tonight. While I'm no way like Jacque, I've quoted him the last two days on here, and I felt like I was feeling somewhat melancholy. I'm rarely depressed, but I do have a melancholy streak (I'd make a distinction between those moods). Now, I'm feeling joyful. I feel like today I've seen some things more clearly than I have for awhile and that's exciting.
The thing with joy is that it doesn't last, but the things that joy brings about do last. Some things I saw today might normally lead me to be depressed, but instead brought joy because they all fit together. Joy isn't having everything go right, it's something much more than that. True joy is coming closer to seeing God's purpose for you, and I feel like I got a glance at that today from some of the least likely places.
The Question of God: Sunday School Edition
In other news, the C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud discussions have been going great. If I ever get some free time, I should like to consider how it can be reformatted for a Sunday School class. After the first time I saw this material, I thought the videos would be perfect in such a setting, and I'm even more convinced now. It would be a class for people who want to discuss things — perhaps it would not draw a large crowd, but I think it would be a healthy thing to do. Faith needs to be pushed to become stronger. Looking at the arguments and counter-arguments of these two men works for that purpose, I think.
Challenges to faith ought to be dealt with in the church. Not by insulting the opposition, but understanding it. Freud's views are popular and powerful today, and the only way for the church to properly apologize against it is to make members informed about the challenges in an objective way. These are serious challenges that can be given by perfectly rational people, and it is only by presenting the arguments as such, and then dealing with them appropriately, that the church can move to a firm foundation in the information age.
How would I present it? I'd cut out the panel (which isn't that good anyway) and focus on the portions that delve into the beliefs of the two famous men. Perhaps you could play two segments (one from each) per week, which would take about twenty minutes, and then discuss for the remaining 40 minutes of an hour long adult Sunday school.
Internet Problems?
Anyone else having trouble getting to sites on the Internet? Google seems to be inaccessible, as does Barnes and Noble and Apple, among others. I can get to my site, SCF and Amazon. Interesting.
Update (2005.03.14 22:06): Everything appears to be up again. Yay!
Speaking Out
I'm a written word kind of guy. Now, I can give a decent presentation (although I'll never be an orator), but I'm much better writing stuff down and pouring over it and then publishing it in some form than spontaneous speaking. I seem to just put my foot in my mouth all the time when I'm speaking to people. While I enjoy trying to be witty, too often I'm not quick witted enough to ask the right questions when I should. Despite all this, I talk too much and must check myself in that regard (something I fail at too often).
It is true that I do not always edit blog posts very carefully; however one can choose present a carefully crafted statement when writing should one decided to. I rather wish I could figure out how to edit what I was verbalizing as well.
You know, I see a trend brewing in my posts lately. I don't seem to have any conclusions. I have been staring at this post for a bit now, wondering exactly where I was going to go with it, but I don't think I can think of anything all that good. Perhaps I'll return to our friend Jacques whom I quoted last night:O worthy fool! One that hath been a courtier,Yes, indeed. To be as one of Shakespeare's fools; to perceive things and state them without irritating people… that would be good.
And says, if ladies be but young and fair,
They have the gift to know it: and in his brain,
Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit
After a voyage, he hath strange places cramm'd
With observation, the which he vents
In mangled forms. O that I were a fool!
I am ambitious for a motley coat.
The Joy of Amazon
There's nothing quite like the joy of getting a new book from Amazon. The package appears in the mailbox and you know there is a whole wealth of new information just waiting to be read. I received a new book I am looking forward to reading today: Karl Barth's Dogmatics in Outline. I don't know when I'll find time, but it seemed like a better place to start on Barth than the volumous Church Dogmatics.
Presently I only have second hand knowledge of Barth, and I hope this book will give me a better understanding of this theologian's views. He seems to have some good ideas, we'll see how it all fits together.
In other book news, I received Sigmund Freud's Future of Illusion in the mail last Thursday. I haven't had time to start it yet, but need to do so rather snappily, since that one is not reading for pleasure but rather assignment. While I know I will disagree with Freud, it will still be nice to finally have read a primary Freudian text instead of (again) depending on second hand knowledge.
Here Shall He See Gross Fools as He
I took the “What Mood Are You In?” quiz after seeing it over on Michael's blog. It told me that I am in a “decent mood.”
You aren't turning cartwheels, but you're having a pretty good day. Some ups, some downs, but overall you're coming out ahead.
And who knows? Tomorrow could be even better!
I guess that is appropriate enough. Personally, I was feeling rather like the following instead:
More, I pr'ythee, more. I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs. More, I pr'ythee, more.
I'm too short on time right now to work up some challenge questions, although I should. 5 pts. if you can identify that quote. Of course, feel free to post what mood the quiz says of you, below, as well.
Music with Tim
Cantico (Andrea Bocelli): This is a nice, soothing piece from Bocelli. He is a very talented gentleman, although I probably prefer Josh Groban's style a bit better. This particular song has a bit of a mysterious sound to it, I think, which is something I always like.
Please Only You (Steven Curtis Chapman): Like the rest All Things New this is a great song. How good it would be if I focused on only pleasing God… unfortunately, I'm not good at staying that focused.
Arms Open Wide (David Phelps): This is only the second time I believe I have heard this song. It is from the Dove Awards 2004 CD, a disc I was given awhile back, but have not listened to all the way through yet. I like it. It is not the most original, in fact, it reminds me of something that the adult contemporary stations have been playing lately which I cannot conjure at the moment, but I'm not necessarily complaining.
See the Glory (Steven Curtis Chapman): Odd. First the iPod played two songs with Leigh Nash in the first set of five, now we have two SCC songs in the second block. It isn't surprising that SCC would come up twice within ten songs, though; he is the third largest “contributor” to my music library (70 songs), behind Sixpence None the Richer (87) and Michael W. Smith (79). He leads Twila Paris who has 66. At any rate, I especially like this song since I saw him perform it live, but it is a generally good wake up call reminding us not to miss the glory of God.
Open the Eyes of My Heart (John Tesh and others): This is a very good rendition of an oft recovered song, like most of the songs that were done by Tesh for his worship CD's. He's a talented CCM artist, which really surprised me at first about the former Entertainment Tonight host and PBS new age music pledge drive special star. I recommend “A Deeper Faith,” the album this song comes from, if you'd like to give Tesh a listen. It won't put you to sleep, unlike the WoW Worship Blue Disc.
Please Carry Me Home (Jesse Colter & Shooter Jennings): This song is OK. It comes from “Songs Inspired by the Passion of Christ,” a disc personally assembled by Mel Gibson last year. The disc, as a whole, is excellent, and this is really one of my least favorite songs on it. It is a bit too much like old style Gospel music for me.
The Riker Manuever (Jerry Goldsmith): From Star Trek: Insurrection, it shows off the mastery of the late Goldsmith. John Williams may be “the” composer for soundtracks and special events over the past few decades, but Jerry Goldsmith could more than hold his own. He will be missed.
The Waiting Room (Sixpence None the Richer): Sixpence's self titled CD can be divided into problem and resolution sections, this is the third song in the first section. It fits nicely with the previous song (“Anything”), which has a very good bridge leading into this one. It really fits my mood when I'm waiting for something — when will it finally happen? That the “problem” for Sixpence was they couldn't concentrate on writing music, due to an unfortunate legal battle with their old record label, makes this CD a good choice when doing creative work (I believe Kevin agrees with me on this). It's all about the struggle to be creative, after all.
The Change (Steven Curtis Chapman): Chapman, not to be surpassed by Nash, comes up next to level it out to 3-3 for a tie on who has the most songs that have played thus far in this shuffle cycle. Normally the iPod seems to pick some other CD's as its favorites, for instance, I've heard Shapoopi from the Music Man probably five times in the last two weeks. At any rate, this is an excellent, convicting song: sure I have the t-shirts with the Christian sayings and all the other stuff Christians now have, but what about the heart of the matter: “what about the change/what about the grace/what about the difference?”
Who Is Crying (V. Keith Mason): This is from Borderlands, a neat CD that did a fairly “new age” rendition of many folk songs from around the world. This one is from Latvia. It is an entirely instrumental CD. As you might have guessed when I used the term “new age” above with John Tesh, I use this in the musical sense, not the religious sense. This CD isn't one I'd listen to all the way through without shuffling, but I'm glad to have it in the mix.
Pardon the Coming Dust
Awhile back, I made the decision to retain the UNIX time stamp system of dating within SAFARI, which I had started using when I first created SAFARI to be used without a database. The UNIX time stamp (seconds from the UNIX epoch of January 1, 1970) is easy to process in Perl, which makes it attractive to work with.
Big problem: this means more of the date processing must be done after a given piece of information is fetched from the db. If I was using the MySQL date-time field format (2005-03-13 16:12:30), I could do some processing within the SQL queries and therefore streamline things. Therefore, I'm going to undertake switching SAFARI over to this, right now. Unfortunately, SAFARI's sandbox that I built shares the database with the live asisaid copy of SAFARI, so while the code changes won't go into effect over here until I have things working, some things might behave oddly.
Update (2005-Mar-13 18:50): All done. Now on to fixing things to use my time zone (central) rather than UTC.
Update 2 (2005-Mar-13 19:45): The time zone is now appropriate too. That was a bit more difficult. As it turned out, I had accidentally set my code to store posting dates in Eastern Time (well, or more properly, to use the server's localtime(), which I have set to Eastern for the sake of matching other U.S. servers, despite the fact that it is in the Central time zone). So all posts from the old program were in UTC/GMT, but all after around noon on December 24, 2004 were in EST. Therefore, I put together this little SQL query:SELECT cid,FROM_UNIXTIME(UNIX_TIMESTAMP(gmt)+18000) FROM uninet_comments WHERE ('2004-12-24 12:00' <= gmt)Afterwards, I exported the resulting output and did some regex magic to turn the insert statements into update statements:
s/INSERT INTO `uninet_comments` VALUES ((.*?), '(.*?)');/UPDATE uninet_comments SET gmt='$2' where cid='$1';/sgi;Finally, I took the those SQL commands, fed them to MySQL. Rinse and repeat for the articles table.
After that, it was a simple matter to add the new time zone adjustments within SAFARI to take the GMT time information and convert it to Central Standard Time (UTC-6:00). Now, I just need to figure out how to implement daylight savings time support, so that posts and comments posted during DST will be UTC-5:00 without making standard time posts and comments switch as well.
40 Questions
1. What time is it: 11:36 a.m.
2. Name as it appears on birth certificate: Timothy Ryan Butler.
3. Nicknames: No “true” nicknames. Just call me Tim.
4. Piercing: None — I avoid pain and things like needles that bring pain.
5. What is the most recent movie you've seen in the theatre? The Incredibles
6. Eye color: Blueish.
7. Place of birth: St. Charles, Missouri
8. Favorite foods: Potatoes, pizza and other things that insure I'll never become an Atkins-ite.
9. Ever been to Africa: No, and I don't have a desire to, other than perhaps to see Egypt.
10. Ever been toilet papering: No.
11. Love someone so much it made you cry: Yes.
12. Been in a car accident: Yes, but (thankfully, thus far) not when I was driving.
13. Croutons or bacon bits: Bacon bits, unless they are really good croutons.
14 Favorite day of the week? Friday — the only day of the week I don't have to worry about getting up at a given time the next morning. This past week I enjoyed reading the Da Vinci Code until about 1:30 A.M., something I can't do on other days.
15. Favorite restaurants: Lewis & Clark's (St. Charles), Faraci's Pizza (Manchester), Wooden Nickel (Branson), Devil's Pool at Big Cedar (Ridgedale [Branson area]), Red Lobster, Hen House (Bourbon).
16. Favorite flower: Star gazer lilies, irises…
17. Favorite sport to watch: None, but if I must pick, I guess baseball. Unless I can just say “Winter Olympics.”
18. Favorite drink: Water (followed by coffee and iced tea).
19. Favorite ice cream: Freshly made. Chocolate, real vanilla bean, blackberry and the like are all good. My favorite ice cream treat is a chocolate ice cream soda, however.
21. Favorite fast food restaurant: There is only one possibility for such an obvious question… White Castle.
22. Color of bedroom carpeting? Green
23. How many times did you fail your driving test? None.
24. Before this one, from whom did you get your last email? My mother.
25. Which store would you choose to max out your credit card: I wouldn't purposely max out my credit card just to max it out (I have used the full credit of it once, but only because I simply prefer the security of buying with a credit card and then paying for that over using a check, should the transaction go wrong). But, back to the question… probably CompUSA.
27. Bedtime: Between 11:30 P.M. and 12:30 P.M., typically.
28. Who will respond to this e-mail the quickest: N/A
29. Who is the person you sent this to that is least likely to respond: N/A
30. Who are you most curious about their responses to this questionnaire: Sure, if anyone else responds, I'll be interested to see that.
31. Favorite TV shows: I'm a classic TV kind of guy: I Love Lucy, The Beverly Hillbillies, I Dream of Jeannie, Dick van Dyke Show, etc.
32. Last person you went to dinner with: family.
33. Ford or Chevy: Neither, but probably Ford. If I had to buy an American car, it would presently be a Chrysler product, however. Otherwise, I'd go with a Toyota or VW.
34. What are you listening to right now? Savior by Steven Curtis Chapman. Getting ready to listen to a dramatic recording of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards. Update: I am now listening to the sermon.
35. What is your favorite color: Green.
36. Lake, Ocean or river: Lake.
38. Time you finished this e-mail: 11:59 a.m.
39. Which came first God or Evolution? God is by definition the First Cause, the uncaused causer, the Ultimate, so how could anything else come first? Microevolution would obviously come after life; macroevolution, even if it was proven, would also come after the Ultimate Reality. A supreme being that came in to being through something else would be contingent, and therefore not supreme.
40. How many people are you sending this e-mail to? No one. Zero. Nada. Zip.
(Grumble) AudioScrobber (Grumble)
Josiah turned me on to AudioScrobber, which tracks what music you play for the purpose of recommending songs as well as comparing common musical themes between members of AudioScrobber groups (for instance, Josiah started one named after his blog).
The problem is that its update application leaves some functionality to be desired. It isn't a plugin to iTunes, it runs constantly in the background instead, watching for when the Recently Played playlist is updated in iTunes. Not quite comfortable making it an auto-start application until I used it for awhile, I started it manually. Shortly thereafter, I was away from my desktop for ten days, during which time I did not synchronize my iPod (I don't synchronize it with my laptop).
Tonight I plugged it in, forgetting that I had restarted my desktop (and therefore needed to restart AudioScrobber's tool) and therefore despite the fact that I had listened to a lot of music during the evenings the past two weeks, none of it will show up on my statistics page. Since some of the stats are only produced once a week, I'll wait another week before linking to my page on the site, since the stats still aren't that useful (grumble) unlike how they would have been if the app had just been a plugin and therefore would have caught my iPod sync.
CYOA Reminder
No one has picked up the mantel to continue the Choose Your Own Adventure from 4.5: Gregorian Chants. Haven't tried CYOA yet? Why not try running with this branch of the story as a way of dipping your toes in the water? Already written something for CYOA? Here's a chance to expand the story some more, perhaps in a different direction from your last entry, perhaps the same — it is all up to you!
(Since my blogware does not yet notify me by e-mail when you comment, please comment on this post if you'd like to sign up for one of the Gregorian Chants options.)
