Tim in the Hands of an Angry God?
When I run into Jonathan Edward's Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God once in a week, I stop and think about his masterful sermon. When I run into it twice in the same amount of time, I start to really ponder it. When I run into it three times in a week, I start to wonder if someone is trying to tell me something.
On Sunday, our pastor preached a sermon that was based in part on Edward's sermon. On Tuesday morning, my American Lit class studied Edward's sermon by chance, since the professor had been sick the week before and therefore was behind schedule. On Tuesday afternoon, my Religion in America class took an unscheduled detour to hear part of the sermon preached by the professor. I don't know but I'm starting to get a bit paranoid!
102.
That's the number of brute force attempts on Cedar since November. It is depressing to think that so many people have tried enough to set the alarm off. There are, of course, many more that tried only a few times. Like e-mail spam and blog spam, all of this seems to be done by bots; if the number of bots continues to increase at its alarming rate, it seems inevitable that the house of cards will fall… it is just a matter of when.
Road Map
Ok, so here's the deal. I'm (re)learning Koine Greek. So far, I'm making progress on parts that stumped me previously. I've also spent a good amount of time refreshing myself on stuff I already knew at sometime in the past but no longer could recall in a productive fashion. I wasn't sure if taking 3 out of the 15 hours of my semester schedule and dedicating it to a course that fulfills absolutely no requirements was a good idea, but now that I'm in the midst of it, I think it was a good choice.
The interesting thing is that the instructor taught himself Latin last year so that he could teach that as well. Apparently, he says it is relatively easy to learn Latin once you get use to Greek. Ideally, I will be good to go with Greek by the end of the semester — not a Greek whiz, but with enough knowledge to work my way through it. Where to go from there is the question, but the professor's remarks about Latin have me intrigued.
I'm thinking about trying to see if I could teach myself Latin later this year. If I could do that, presumably, it would make it easier to reach a practical goal: to learn Spanish. In the future it will be a necessity to know Spanish around here (see my previous post on that, here), so I need to quit talking and accomplish something about that soon. This might help and allow me to pick up one of the nicest sounding languages ever to be created along the way.
Ayeeeee! IE!
Well, it dawned on me - stupid me - that I have IE:mac at my disposal. Sure, it isn't the same as IE for Windows, but maybe it wouldn't hurt to try out the site in it… Ouch! It looked horrible. So, I tinkered until I realized that my position: relative settings made IE go crazy in some cases (not all). So, I removed as many as I could without disrupting the design and IE:mac now shows the front page pretty well, save for the missing logo on top (I can't figure out why that doesn't show up). The site continues to load fine for me on my browsers, but if y'all would let me know if I messed up or fixed anything from your perspectives, that'd help. Thanks for being guinea pigs.
As I mentioned to Kevin in the comments of the last post, the boxes on the right side are suppose to be sticking off a bit for visual interest. Of course, if it just looks bad, let me know.
Welcome to the New Design
Finally Moving Ahead for My Blog's Third Year
2001: Original Site
There wasn't a blog here yet, nor much of anything else. I built the site because I thought it was time I had a personal website. For years, I had been building sites for my company and for others, but never one for myself. Thus one Saturday evening, Tim's Site was born. Minimalism was the object — it was going to be a site where I posted stuff, not were I spent lots of time tinkering with the design. |
2001-2002: The Blue and Penguin Theme
The site took a turn for the worst in the summer, in my estimation, here when I introduced this interesting combination of my “famous” little rendition of Tux, an ugly blue color and Comic Sans MS for the text. This was a dark day in my web design history. My blog premiered on the site one month before the demise of this design. |
2002-2003: Green the First
Green being my favorite color, it was inevitable that it would show up on my site eventually.This design was one I worked on over Easter weekend, maintaining the navigation bar of the blue theme, but soothing colors, a more professional feel and no more Comic Sans MS. This design is the foundation of all future iterations of the site until the present one I am introducing today. |
2003: asisaid premiers
Sitting one day with a notepad in front of me, I started writing down names I could use for my site. Now that it had become mostly a blog, it seems to deserve a decent name. I picked asisaid while thinking of e-mail debates in which I would often reference back to what I had said by saying “as I said,” since people often don't seem to listen in debate (yes, I love to debate). I could also imagine some nice looking logos for it. The first asisaid design was the same as the 2002-2003 green design, save for the header. I do not have the original asisaid header handy, but the one in the picture was incorporated into the design within about two months. |
2003-2004: Blue Returns, or the Christmas Theme that Stuck
This was the last design to grace the late, great Ciaran's Journal blogging tool. It started out with the Christmas theme with a nativity and then gained the green hill when I got attached to the design and wanted to keep it for the rest of the year. The design was the same as the 2002-2003 green design and 2003 asisaid green design, save for the colors, the hill on top, and the purple/blue background behind the blogroll (instead of the previous white background). |
2004-2005: SAFARI Blues
After the old blog tool died, I started restoring the site, and came close to making it look the same as the 2003-2004 design. However, I never completely replicated it, leaving out a few things such as the “Recently Said” graphic in favor of a quote du jour (I had started using quotes at the top in October 2004, but had kept the “Recently Said” graphic until I imported the theme into SAFARI. |
2005: Green the Second
This is the present theme. It is the first theme to ditch almost all tables in favor of a CSS layout. The blog entries may violate W3C standards, but the template is verified as XHTML Transitional and CSS 2.0. Not exactly as dramatic as the War of the Roses, but the battle between green and blue continues as green sweeps back into control of the site.
You'll notice it uses similar colors and a similar logo backdrop to the 2003 asisaid design. It's logo background also recalls the November 2002 logo banners of the Sakamuyo log, which I had designed for Kevin. On the other hand, I have aimed to make this theme cleaner, more legible and more user friendly than past designs. I nuked the 2001-style navigation bar that linked to a bunch of outdated pages in favor of a new one, placed a special box just for quotes on the right side, and made a few other tweaks. You'll also notice that I kept the hill scene, but moved it to the bottom of the page. What do you think? Let me know in the comments. |
Blank
My mind is blank right now. I sat down with some ideas to post and they vanished. Oh well.
I did realize something tonight. I can now say that I am now just two months away from completing my first pass through my One Year Bible. Assuming I stay on track, that will mean I'm just about four months behind (or eight months ahead). I really like the One Year Bible. While I've tried other reading plans, the fact that I can just flip it open and have that day's reading organized right there in front of me, rather than having to look at a schedule and then flip to the passages. Despite being behind, all I need to do is use a bookmark and I can easily keep track of what the next reading should be.
Now, just to stay on track for the next two months.
There Goes Another Night
I've just spent the night trying — well, I guess I shouldn't post quite yet, since I post under my real name. Let's just say sometimes I feel even more reassured than normal that I am doing the best thing getting out of the consulting business.
I'll also say that this incident can be blamed for it being at least tomorrow before I'll get the new site design up here. sigh
Fellow consultants and others that must deal with “users” trying to figure out computers, feel free to share your “war stories” below.
Still Soon
I'll have the new design up tomorrow, I think. I got tied up trying to make it validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional tonight. I have a few bugs that cropped up during that process, but I hope to have everything arranged OK tomorrow. We'll see…
Time for Change
Maybe it's because Christopher and Kevin just switched to spiffy new designs. Maybe it is because I am procrastinating on some work. Maybe it's because it has been years since I did more than a cursory update to my site design (2002, if my memory serves). Whatever the case may be, I feel that it is time for change. I'm going to try to dabble in CSS and see if I can bring my site into the modern age. If my dabbling goes well, things may look different later today, if my dabbling fails, you'll just have to live with this look for awhile longer.
Update (2005.02.19 23:59): It isn't going to go up today, if you didn't already guess that. I'm aiming for tomorrow. All I can say is that I have come to really like doing layouts in CSS today. All of my cratchty complaining about CSS layouts may have been ill advised. You can teach an old web-dev dog new tricks!
If All Else Fails...
I cannot seem to get myself to finish the various bits of posts I've started writing for this blog. I have one of the critical study of religion as well as my oft promised reflection on Sixpence None the Richer. I have a few others on the burner too, but they just aren't getting done. So, for tonight, I'll just post another sonnet. This one was started on December 13, when I drove past a field in Maryland Heights filled with puddles lit by the setting sun.
A field barren, the harvest long complete, Ponds formed, glimmer in the early evening.
So as the soul can feel so hard a defeat,
Half drowned below the cold water pooling.
The growth of summer past still remembered,
Spring sprouts still months under the dark, cold ground.
Though sun does shine on water’s jewels now gathered,
Frost’s war continues ‘gainst the glowing round.
Invoking summers past and yet to come,
Lose all impact amidst the icéd earth.
The path so long, so cold leaves one all numb,
Has the still earth morphed to hostile turf?
Show me, Almighty Liege, the way to go,
That I might know before fields again grow.
