What Wondrous Love Is This, Oh My Soul?
The Crucifixion
{20} When they had mocked him, they took the purple off of him, and put his own garments on him. They led him out to crucify him. {21} They compelled one passing by, coming from the country, Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to go with them, that he might bear his cross. {22} They brought him to the place called Golgotha, which is, being interpreted, “The place of a skull.” {23} They offered him wine mixed with myrrh to drink, but he didn’t take it.
{24} Crucifying him, they parted his garments among them, casting lots on them, what each should take. {25} It was the third hour, and they crucified him. {26} The superscription of his accusation was written over him, “THE KING OF THE JEWS.” {27} With him they crucified two robbers; one on his right hand, and one on his left. {28} The Scripture was fulfilled, which says, “He was numbered with transgressors.”
{29} Those who passed by blasphemed him, wagging their heads, and saying, “Ha! You who destroy the temple, and build it in three days, {30} save yourself, and come down from the cross!”
{31} Likewise, also the chief priests mocking among themselves with the scribes said, “He saved others. He can’t save himself. {32} Let the Christ, the King of Israel, now come down from the cross, that we may see and believe him.” Those who were crucified with him insulted him.
{33} When the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. {34} At the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which is, being interpreted, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”*
{35} Some of those who stood by, when they heard it, said, “Behold, he is calling Elijah.”
{36} One ran, and filling a sponge full of vinegar, put it on a reed, and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Let him be. Let’s see whether Elijah comes to take him down.”
{37} Jesus cried out with a loud voice, and gave up the spirit. {38} The veil of the temple was torn in two from the top to the bottom. {39} When the centurion, who stood by opposite him, saw that he cried out like this and breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”From Mark chapter 15 (WEB)
The Explaination
{3} He was despised, and rejected by men; a man of suffering, and acquainted with disease. He was despised as one from whom men hide their face; and we didn’t respect him.
{4} Surely he has borne our sickness,and carried our suffering; yet we considered him plagued, struck by God, and afflicted.
{5} But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought our peace was on him; and by his wounds we are healed.
{6} All we like sheep have gone astray. Everyone has turned to his own way; and Yahweh has laid on him the iniquity of us all. {7} He was oppressed, yet when he was afflicted he didn’t open his mouth. As a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and as a sheep that before its shearers is mute, so he didn’t open his mouth.
{8} He was taken away by oppression and judgment; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living and stricken for the disobedience of my people?
{9} They made his grave with the wicked, and with a rich man in his death; although he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. {10} Yet it pleased Yahweh to bruise him. He has caused him to suffer. When you make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed. He shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of Yahweh shall prosper in his hand.
{11} After the suffering of his soul, he will see the lightand be satisfied. My righteous servant will justify many by the knowledge of himself; and he will bear their iniquities.
{12} Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.From Isaiah chapter 53 (WEB)
Not So Victorious
Well, my votes didn't go so well today. Mayor Tom Brown, who has been considered virtually invincible in the past, lost by over 10% of the vote. Two tax hikes passed, one for $.86 per $100 going to the Francis Howell School district (who has had money “disappear” — as accounting fraud and the like — in recent years and was claiming the hike was necessary to save extracirricular activities such as sports). FH School District really should learn how to manage the money it has before getting yet another tax hike.
Depressing. I'm especially disappointed to see our long-time mayor lose. The new guy (Shawn Brown, no relation to Tom Brown) made his big campaign issue the fact that the new mayor's salary increases by $3,000 a year, and thus Mayor Brown would have been paid $100,000 this year ($40,000 base + $3,000 for each of his twenty years of service as mayor). On the other hand the new Brown only gets the $40,000 for his first year. It is too bad, Mayor Brown has been good for the area.
In lighter news, here's the latest quiz (thanks go to Kevin):
You are a GRAMMAR GOD!
Behold the Power of Cheese
Here's another quiz from Christopher — he really picked a cheesy quiz and even made a cheesy joke about it.
Cheese Test: What type of cheese are you?
Interesting.
Trying OneBase Linux
I've been meaning to try a source-based Linux distribution for some time. For those of you who aren't sure what that is, it's a distribution where you build all of the software from the source (and thus it is all optimized for your hardware). Josiah is a big fan of Gentoo, which is one such distribution.
My problem with Gentoo and other previous source based distributions is that they leave all of the configuration work for you to do yourself. I never have that much time. I'll admit it — I like my operating system to do most of the work for me. I'll tweak things when and if I have time, thank-you very much. Thus, up until today, I never even bothered trying a source-based distribution.
Then I started reading about OneBase Linux. OneBase is a source-based distribution that autodetects most of your hardware for you. It allows you to choose between source and binary packages at any time. This sounds pretty nice, I think. So, I fired up my test box (the Shuttle XPC I mentioned last fall) and gave it a freshly burned OneBase 2004-R2 CD. I booted the system up just about three and a half hours ago. The initial installation and compilation process took about two and a half hours. A few minutes ago I told it to start the next set of compilations (insanely simple to do — I want GNOME, so I typed olm -s gnome, and it does the rest).
At any rate, I'm anxiously awaiting the finish of these compiling tasks to see how usable this system turns out to be.
Life Mimicks Humor
Remember last year when I joked about being Dan Richardson? Well, now I'm in trouble. It seems like the real Dan Richardson read that post and is suing me now for tarnishing his name. Here's the letter I got today from his attorney:
Johkin, Laffen and Funknee, LLP
Dear Mr. Butler:
Our client has notified us that you have engaged in acts of impersonation of his identity on your site. Our client has since received questions from potential employers who found this information when searching the Google search engine about him. We have calculated a net loss of over $28,000 in actual damages since you posted this message last year.
This is your official notice that our client is filing suit against you and shall attempt to retreive the $28,000 plus punitive damages for this disgraceful action on your part. If you are interested in settling this dispute, our client is open to accepting $26,000 upfront to drop litigation.
Thank-you,
Arntu Laffen
Johkin, Laffen and Funknee, LLP
Count+Stat Remote
The referer script is finished. Only it isn't just a referer script anymore. And to represent that, it has become heir of the name that I gave my first published CGI script. Count+Stat is hopelessly outdated these days, so bring on Count+Stat Remote!
Here's what this puppy can do:- Show a list of referers.
- Adjustable minimum to display (one referral, two referrals, etc.)
- Adjust whether the information just comes out as one referer per line or as a nicely formatted HTML list.
- Choose whether to show non-referred hits in the list or not.
- Hide referrals coming from your own page and/or site.
- Keep a separate count and list of referrals for each page or unify all of the information on a per-domain basis.
- Show a text counter of hits and visits.
- Show both at once.
- Be an almost invisible little box that just tracks the stats for your private perusal.
- Turn all of this information into an interesting statistics page.
- And even more… This is the kitchen sink of referer list tools.
Thoughts? Problems? Successes? Please post 'em below. If you have suggestions for improvements I will try to implement them if they are feasible within my time limitations.
Update: I forgot to mention that you can find a sample of the script in action at the bottom of my blog pages. I have it set to show two days worth of referrals formatted as a list, without self-referrals, with non-referred hits, a two-referral minimum and the counter.
Referer System
Yesterday was one of those days. I spent most of the day answering phones (I think I was in phone central) so inbetween, rather than start some important project I'd keep getting interrupted on, I decided to write a JavaScript referer system like I has said I would do over on Michael's site. After I started I noticed someone posted a URL to an existing replacement script, but I was undeterred — instead of stopping I just added more functionality to my script.
For the moment I'm setting it up so that you can use it just by inserting a little JavaScript (like the old system). I'm also contemplating releasing the backendcode under the GPL for anyone who might want to install the entire system on their own server (as opposed to using JavaScript), but I'll worry about that later on.
I'll post more information about it soon for anyone interested.
Server Migration Moves Slowly
Well, I got asisaid moved over to the new server, as I noted a few posts ago, but I haven't gotten much further. I made a copy of the rest of my sites last weekend, but this past week was so busy that I didn't make the switch over. Now the copy of the sites I made is outdated. sigh
I'm hoping to get OfB and company moved early this week so that posting can resume (and I can stop be billed from two web hosts). It appears that OfB operated mailing lists have quit working, so the sooner the move the better.
Trip Down Memory Lane
Perhaps it was the fact that, despite forgetting to write about it, my blog turned two on March 4. Maybe it was something else. But, I spent a little while tonight browsing the Internet Archive's WayBackMachine looking at some of my favorite blogs back when I first discovered them. In particular, I was looking at the two blogs I've been reading the longest that still exist: Sakamuyo and What in Tarnation!?!?!?.
It was interesting to look back into what Kevin and Christopher were saying in 2002. It was interesting to see what the respective sites looked like at the time. Sakamuyo was still in its green theme with Kevin talking about his new hard disk on which he was going to install two or three GNU/Linux distributions (Kevin has since betrayed the PC world and switched to Mac). On the other hand, I took a look at WIT as of November 2002, when I first started reading it, and Christopher was answering a Friday Five about thanksgiving (incidentally, that post was the first one I commented on at his site).
That's definitely one of the great things about WayBackMachine — it's really neat to get a snapshot of the way things were a few years back. Maybe reminiscing about web sites is a geeky thing to do, but when you've come to think of the people behind the sites as friends, maybe its not. It is sort of like a blending together of a photo album and old news paper clippings. Or something like that. A nice thing to do on a Saturday afternoon when nothing else terribly urgent had to be done.
