The Lengths I Go to Organize My Books
A few years ago I installed OpenBiblio on one of my websites to keep tab of all my books. I wrote a Perl script that uses a book’s ISBN number to retrieve the bibliographic information from Amazon and then enter the book into my library. I can now search all my books as well my DVDs and I have a complete list for insurance purposes. Also, now if someone wants to borrow a book, I can check it out and know who borrowed what and when.
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Needing Goals & Going Dark
So after I ran the CowTown at the end of February, I found myself in a funk. I dropped off the digital landscape and even withdrew socially in person. Looking back, much of it had to do with goals. When I started seriously running, my goal was to lose weight. After losing over 60 pounds by the end of last year, I needed a new goal. That’s when I decided to run a 10k. So I spent the next 2 months training for the CowTown. I ran it and reached the goals I set. I also found myself a graduate from seminary. For four years my goal had been to preserve and graduate.
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Driving & Coding… but not at the same time
Over the last two weeks I’ve done a bit of traveling. I drove to Dallas three times in a weeks time. Now, for most people in the MetroPlex that is a daily occurrence. In my case however, I have lived in Fort Worth for two years and had not been to Dallas. My first trip was to attend the Dallas Open Source Group. I found this group several months again through Meetup.com but had not been free on a Saturday to attend.
I got up early that Saturday and bought me a large coffee to get me ready for the trip. I found my way there without too much trouble. We met at Atlanta Bread Company. The management doesn’t mind the group meeting there and they have free Wi-Fi. There were about 10 of us with a range of experience and vocations, but we each had an interest in using open source software and seeing its adoption increase.
We discussed the body of software available on Windows. We would get distracted and chase rabbits but it was a fun hunting experience. Afterwards a few of us went to have BBQ and continued our conversation. It was during this trip that I was introduced to Nerdbooks.com.
Tuesday evening found me leaving Arlington for another Meetup group, DallasPHP. This group is a collection of programmers, managers and owners involved in the use of PHP & MySQL. The meeting was held at the Yahoo! offices in Richardson. Jason Ragsdale, a Yahoo! employee, gave a presentation on scalability and optimization.
This presentation was beneficial because several of the concepts I could implement immediately. I am a decent programmer but being self-taught I do not know all the best practices. I have been programming in PHP for close to four years but I have barely scratched the surface.
Finally, last Saturday, the DallasPHP group had a Q&A session at Nerdbooks. It was a smaller group and this allowed us to bring up coding problems or questions and get advice and feedback. Being my second time to Nerdbooks I couldn’t help but buy something. I picked The PHP Anthology
It occurred to me later that I had engaged in two activities that I really enjoy. I like pulling out a map, locating some obscure or interesting place and then figuring out how to get there. I also revel in programming. Coding at its simplest is stringing logic statements together to accomplish a task. The fun is piecing those logic blocks together to complete the puzzle. “Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father.”
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Spherical Geometry and other things that I learned in school or should have
A few weeks ago I was working on a project that included a store locator. It required the user to input his/her zip code. Then the site would return a list of stores in order of their proximity to the user’s zip code.
I have to admit that I’ve seen this functionality on a variety of sites but I was never sure how the distances were calculated. As I began reading the source code, I learned that the previous programmer was using spherical geometry. That is after reading a few of the comments he included and then making a trek to Wikipedia. I came across an article on Great Circle Distance. Because of the curve of the earth you can’t just use linear geometry.
To say I was stymied was an understatement. I took geometry in high school and trigonometry in college but this beyond what I had ever attempted. After a few minutes of confusion, I got a clearer picture. I understood that I was taking various angles and distances and running a multitude of calculations. My biggest problem at first was that I wanted to actually figure out the cosine or tangent of each angle. I finally reached the point where I understood that to make this work I didn’t have to understand the inner workings I just needed to plug in the right pieces in the right places. Once I began breaking down the equation by its orders of operation it made more sense. I coded the whole equation and it calculated the same distance as Google on the first try.
Granted, I didn’t learn spherical geometry in high school but it is similar to the type of things I would have lamented over, “I’ll never use this in the real world.” This got me to thinking. What other things that I learned in school have I used in “real life.”
- Spanish – I didn’t learn Spanish until college but I’ll include it. I’ve been to Mexico several times and it was a definite advantage. I also used it from time to tome while working at Pizza Hut. There were times when I had to converse with customers in Spanish. I would also eavesdrop on my hispanic coworkers who forgot that I could speak Spanish.
- French – Not so much. I wish I had remembered more for the time I went to Paris and Benin.
- American Civics – I understand how our government is supposed to work. As I have grown older, the current state of our political system just depresses me.
- Free Enterprise – I used the subject matter of this class during my brief entrepreneurial period. There was not enough demand for my supply, hence I went out of business.
- Keyboarding – We used actual typewriters in this class. I am so thankful for that class. I spend most of my day in front of a computer, so I revel in the fact that I don’t have to hunt and peck.
- Chemistry – I love watching the chemical reaction of Mentos reacting with Diet Coke. If we could have done that experiment in high school, then chemistry would have been a great deal more enjoyable.
- History – “A person who fails to understand history is destined to repeat it.” I didn’t learn that in my history classes. I think I heard it in a movie somewhere. Most of the time, I use my knowledge in history to point out people’s historical inaccuracies. It’s a bad habit, I know.
- Consumer Math – This is the class where you learned to balance a check book and calculate interest on a mortgage. That was an easy A.
- English Literature – “From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remember’d; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition: And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”
Who hasn’t wanted to quote those lines from Henry V in a conversation to embolden their troops. Sadly, the opportunity has evaded me to this point. - Physics – I didn’t take Physics in high school or college. However, after watching Mythbusters, I would really like to learn. Who doesn’t want to know how much kinetic energy is released when a car collides with the ground after being thrown by a trebuchet. Thanks to UC Berkeley, I can now take the equivalent of Physics for Dummies.
Well, it’s not an exhaustive list, but I think my high school years were well spent. But as the old saying goes, “You’re never done learning.”
Technology and the Ministry of Reconciliation
I ended up writing my Systematic Theology paper on technology and how it has impacted Christianity in the past and how it will in the future. I’m including an excerpt of the paper from my discussion of GodTube Tangle.
Download Technology and the Ministry of Reconciliation(pdf). I would appreciate any feedback you could provide.
GodTube Tangle is a new video sharing site that is marketed to be a direct competitor to YouTube. Upon arriving at the site, you begin to understand that this is supposed to be YouTube for Christians. A look at the top 20 videos on the site confirms this assumption. The number one video is of a little girl reciting Psalm 23. It is a cute video with over four million views. A video called “Baby Got Book”, a parody of “Baby Got Back” from a decade ago is third on the list. There are also three parodies of the Mac vs. PC advertisements, that round out the top 20 videos on GodTube Tangle.
As the body of Christ why is it we must try to emulate or rip off the world’s ideas instead of coming up with our own. We are Christians, which means the God of the universe lives inside each believer. He created this world. He gave each of us minds to pursue thought. Why don’t we ask God for unique ideas that will reveal His glory to a lost world instead of trying to Christianize bad rap songs?
Leaving the discussion of the content, the question needs to be asked. What is the purpose of GodTube Tangle? According to an interview with CEO Chris Wyatt on ABC Nightline, the goal of GodTube Tangle is to reach the 2.1 billion Christians in the world and help them grow in their faith.
This I believe is the problem with many so-called Christian entities. They are inward focused. They take the words of John in his first epistle and use it for a proof text. “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world-the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does-comes not from the Father but from the world.” Alternatively, they take the symbolism in Matthew 5:14-16 too far, that we are to be a city on a hill, shining our light that others would see our works and glorify God.
Dr. Daniel Morgan, Associate Professor of Missions and Director of Nehemiah Project at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, puts forth that the church has moved away from a fire base mentality. With a firebase, a soldier goes to reequip and rest after battle, but then he goes back out to the front line and re-engages in the battle. He states that many in the church have adopted a fortress mentality. They go inside their fortress and do not leave the security of the walls. They eat, sleep and fight from behind the walls.
There are those in the Christian church who have adopted this mindset. They believe that we are to separate ourselves and protect ourselves behind fortified walls. When the world attacks, we will defend ourselves and yearn for when the battle will be over. We will live pious lives so that we can fulfill Matthew 5:16. The world will be able to see our light through the arrow slits in the walls of our fortress.
To begin with, the fortress mentality goes against the Great Commission. Christ commands us to go into all the world. That cannot be accomplished from behind the walls of a fortress. The armor of God that Paul describes in Ephesians is one of an infantryman, not of a fortress guard. We see how we are to live in the world in 1 Peter 2:11-12. “Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.” We are to live among the world but not be conformed. By rubbing shoulders with the world every day and living lives set apart from the world, God will receive glory. Just a few sentences before Jesus talked about believers being the light of the world, he called believers salt of the earth. Not only are we to reflect God’s glory through our actions but we are to be change agents in our culture.
A better use of the time and resources of GodTube Tangle would be to infiltrate, for lack of a better word, YouTube. They should begin by not posting “Baby Got Book” or the little girl reciting the 23rd Psalm. They should pray and fast as they wait on God to teach them how they should go about redeeming YouTube. Then they create videos that clearly explain the Gospel and God’s work in humanity through preaching, story telling, music and even parables. Jason Moore was quoted in Jennifer Harris’s article about the use of metaphor. “We’ve gotten so far from the method Jesus gave us… Most sermons are informational, mostly removed from story and parable. Jesus gave us the model for a reason. If Jesus didn’t say anything without using metaphor, what does it mean that we don’t use it all?” Those at GodTube Tangle should heed that advice, put forth their very best effort, and create something that is original, culturally relevant, but above all eternally significant.
Book Review: And the Word Came With Power
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, not so much because of the writing style or the exotic stories. I was enthralled at how God worked in miraculous ways among the Balangaos. This gave me a glimpse of how the Holy Spirit is still at work, just as He worked among the first century church. As the Bible Believer church grew, there were many parallels to the early church as they began to be mission minded.
Joanne Shetler devoted twenty years of her life to translating the Bible into Balangao. Even that ministry was sidetracked over the years as God decided to explain the Word in real-life ways. She dealt with cultural issues, death, evil spirits, and countless trials of faith. As she translated, she used deaths and other major events as teaching opportunities. She used her medical training to help women during pregnancy and others with basic medical needs. She translated and shared her life with these people, and as the Spirit moved her along, she acted.
One event that stands out to me was when she had an Elijah moment with the spirit mediums. The spirits were tormenting Benito’s son. Benito was a new believer and Joanne saw this event as an attack against him. The spirits had lost their hold on him and were fighting back in whatever ways they could. Joanne mentions many times that she did not like dealing with spirits but this one day I believe she had been empowered by the Holy Spirit to confront the powers of darkness. She grabbed Chalinggay, the medium and removed her from the house. Then with boldness and faith declared to everyone assembled, that God would prove himself more powerful than the spirits. However, this Elijah moment was not confined to this one experience. It continued for several days.
The next Sunday, Joanne went to apologize to Chalinggay for her rudeness. As she sat there, she was moved to confront Chalinggay about her empty life spent in service to the spirits. During this time, Joanne also spoke boldly to Forsan, another spirit medium. Both mediums were tormented physically for several days. However, with prayer and more teaching both women turned from the spirits to the Living God and were delivered both spiritually and physically. Through the supernatural work of God in those three lives, the Word began to move forth in power.
This book was humbling. It showed me how God can use one person who is willing to obey and persevere. The best part was that this did not occur 2000 years ago in Rome or Asia Minor. This occurred less than forty years ago in the Philippines. This shows me that God is still at work and wants to do this around the world.
Contradictions in Educational Messages
The following post was written while I sat in class earlier tonight.
I’m sitting here bored out of my mind. My professor is attached to the old style of teaching. The teacher stands at the front of the class and talks for hours on end while using an old overhead projector. For some unknown reason, the software on his computer will not work with the projector. I find that hard to believe. Projectors are atheistic when it comes to software. Their job is to display images, not whether a computer is running Office 2007 or not. Anyway back to my rant.
There is no class discussion. No one is asking questions. I look around the room and I can count on one hand, the number of people that are actually engaged in this lecture. Most people are doing what I’m doing. We wait until the professor moves the paper and then we copy down the next fews words. Then we go back to our secondary tasks to keep us occupied. It will be another 10 minutes before he moves to the next section on the transparency. I think one guy is watching tv on his smartphone. It doesn’t help my mood that the paper I had written for tonight became corrupted and I lost the entire paper. Yes, I waited till the last minute to write it and print it out. Regardless, I would have lost it because I saved it to my USB drive.
Why is this professor reinforcing these one-sided teaching techniques to those who will be going out to continue the education process in our churches? Not everyone learns best by having someone lecture to them for 2 and a half hours. I learn best by taking things apart and working with my hands. I learn visually. I learn by discussing. It’s no wonder I have a hard time getting motivated for classes like this. Lectures and papers are the course du jour in school. I understand that at times you have to suck it up and do what’s required of you. However, it feels like a contradiction to be taught that we need to include all the learning styles when we teach yet they refuse to practice what they teach.
