Gear Shift

Dear Readers,
For the past two and some years, Blogger has been my online home. I believe it is now time to do a little growing up and a little moving on. It's been a veritable jumble of all things from aesthetics through music to techy goodness. Here on Blogger I've ranted, reviewed, and posted photos of all things cool, funny, and emo. Now, I think it's time I migrated to a different host, much like how a student must graduate. Enter WordPress.com, a service that some friends have been using for some time now. I'm not ritzy enough, for the life of me, to pay out for hosting, so in keeping with my free hosting traditions (Blogger, I won't easily forget you!) I'll be on WordPress' online services. thankfully, I can (and will) import all my Blogger posts and comments onto WordPress' servers, meaning you'll be able to go back and read all the P.Pole v. 1.0 posts you want. For your information, the new page can be found at larker.wordpress.com and I've named it the P.Pole v.2.0 in loving memory of this place. Anyway, without further diddle dawdle head on over and bookmark away (unless something insane happens, I won't be coming back here to post, as sad as that is for me to say). As far as I know, Blogger has no "Import Posts" option meaning I will not be able to make a reversal migration from WordPress if things should go awry. And it just seemed like the other day where I was going on about not changing to the new Blogger template format... Fly-out menus, I will miss you.
Blogger, you and I had a great run. You were fun while we lasted. I've grown to know you much better. You were my first real blogging host and now, to borrow words from Christ (simply for linking purposes and not for blasphemy), "Where I am going, you cannot come." - John 13:33.

With love,
Carl

info @ the P.Pole 07.19.07

This is the big 500th post! Woo! Thank you! Thank you! This place couldn't have come this far if it weren't for you (or me, I suppose).
Last night's LoaH didn't really go as great as I'd have hoped but I suppose it can't be helped. Anyway, I still think it was alright (it could've been better... or could it?). The amps never came (in time) and I assume they are probably going to arrive between now and next week (right when we're done "needing" them). I guess it's probably best though, that we didn't get new bass and guitar amps to play with in the rain. I think we did what we were decided on doing. I just hope we've got some better weather foreknown for us in the weeks/Wednesday evenings to come.
In other news, I've officially begun a new game of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together on my PSP as of two days ago. I finished Final Fantasy Tactics rather abruptly (I had no idea I was fighting the final battle until I beat it and credits were scrolling) and so I've put that aside now (I plan on going back to it and unlocking all the other special characters, weapons, and items for the hell of it some other time). TO is looking finer than ever on my hand-held screen.
I remember I'd "accidentally" cheated in one run through of the game where I changed the level of one of my guys to 99 (when he had originally been level 30 or so) meaning that I basically skipped all the stat gains I could've had between levels 30 and 99. Of course, this made training my other characters easy (I had them throw rocks at the uber leveled guy and gain instant levels) but left me with a completely useless character (think... level 100 Magikarp with Splash).
Anyway, this time I'm going clean and I'm not going to use any Gamesharks (even though there are such homebrew applications for the PSP). I rather enjoy strategy games like FFTactics, Tactics Ogre, and the super cool Disgaea series. There's something about collecting characters and setting them up how I want that makes for fun times. Of course, that sounds a lot like how little girls play with dolls and dress them up so I'm now going to sulk in my accidental revelation of homosexical tendencies. Just kidding. "For goodness' sake, it's a gay pride parade, not a gay shame festival!"

P.Pole's [Custom] Template

I'm quite proud of my template for this blog that I've slowly created and altered over the years. It started out as a generic, one-size-fits-all kind of template that most blogs run on but I didn't want my page to look exactly like all the others. Okay, to say that it's completely groundbreaking in its layout is a huge exaggeration, but for someone without any actual knowledge of how to code (apart from some very primordial HTML), I think I've done quite nicely for myself. I mean, I had to pretty much move, shape, shift, and shapeshift by trial and error. Here's how I "coded" the stuff on this page (which, by the way, looks proper only on Firefox so far, by my testing, because of my "coding"):

1. I imagine something cool I want to achieve and catalog it away for a rainy day.
2. I take note when I see something I cataloged on another site I happen upon.
3. I press Ctrl + U (read: "View source").
4. I sift through to the good part and see if it's something done without javascript (which I don't know how to use).
5. If it's javascript, I sigh and move on. Otherwise, I move on to step six.
   
6. I go to Google.ca and look up something along the lines of "HTML (or CSS) [tag] tutorial" where [tag] is whatever the hell tag or function or whatchamacallit I saw the other page using.
7. I then read through and try to understand how the tag and its parameters work.
8. This is the fun step: I spend hours and hours typing in stuff mostly haphazardly, clicking "Preview", and then going back to make the appropriate (i.e. guess and check) corrections.
9. When this is all done I marvel at what I've created for a few moments before I check its rendering in Internet Explorer (explosion) and then in Opera (assplosion).

If I had any idea whatsoever how to code this all properly without relying so much on guess and check, I'd be able to make changes so that my page would render decently across all forms of web browsers. Sadly, I do not have the patience to sit down and really learn this stuff as it bores me. And anyway, I think I sort of enjoy my current way of doing things too much to give it up. Firefox tricked me into thinking it kept web standards before, but now I know that the developers took a few liberties with it (or so I've heard from watching videos of conferences with web standard discussions). Apparently they decided that some rules were better kept and others bent/broken. I don't know what that means in detail but hey, I don't think I'll need to know all that to be able to enjoy my Webernets.
Nevertheless, I thought maybe since my current template is running a bit cluttered I would consider upgrading my template to Blogger's new way of handling templates that much resembles Xanga's styling pages. This would mean pretty much wiping my entire template settings (even though I simply love my fly-out/mouse-over menu things). And so, I decided to check out Blogger's version of the template designer on my other "blog" (which is just there to reserve the domain and for testing such as this). I wanted to see if I could make it work towards my needs, whether it was worth the switch, and whether there might be a chance of my reworking my menus (again, my favourite part of this template) to work there. So far, no luck. I mean, it's convenient to have them do kind of what I've done with the hierarchy look that now comes default but it's not a mouse-over fly-out.
It's got auto-adding and -sorting of new stuff (like links, archive links, etc...) whereas I update my template every month with the new links myself (every month I add a new list item linking to the new month's posts). Still, I'm not convinced. It looks as if the new template designer thing is great for adding page elements and quickly editing them but it doesn't do much in terms of allowing me to really tweak stuff with the HTML/CSS editor and that's what I need to be able to do above all else. It's either that or I just don't know enough to be good at manipulating (the right bits of) code. Sigh.
Anyway, I'm going to stick with my current state of affairs until I really find a reason to switch over and get rid of/recreate my mouse-over menus. I love that thing. Mouse... over! Mouse... over! Wee!

Why I Prefer Tuesdays

"Lucky Star" episodes are subbed (thanks yous a.f.k.!) and available for viewing (read: torrent lovin') every Tuesday (at least, that's what I've been told and I don't bother checking on Monday night). This series, although consisting mostly of conversation between a group of teenage Japanese schoolgirls, just does it for me. I don't know whether this is a schoolgirl-fetish in the making or just the fact that this show is so different from the other stuff I like to watch (see Mythbusters, The Colbert Report, and anything conspiracy fanatical).
Last week's tribute to otaku and anime convention behavior was a real laugh for me because I sort of identify with that kind of stuff. Have you seen my Gundam collection? What about my Yu-Gi-Oh card collection (before they got steal-ded)? I've always wanted to go to Anime North and maybe I will next year if I can get veterans (Queenie and Joshua, I'm looking at you guys) to take me there so I don't get spawn-pwn't.
This week's episode was also quite good (not as funny as last week's IMO) but I simply loved the ending video that played during the credits. I even uploaded a copy (and I hope it doesn't get taken down since it's not my content). It's Minoru Shiraishi, a male voice actor/minor character from the show, singing (and karate-ing) to "Hare Hare Yukai" from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (yes, the "Haruhi-Dance" song). Here's the original song and dance from the anime too.

Vista Fraggers

Remember a couple months ago when I went on and on about my mail-order gaming mouse? Well, when I got my Logitech MX310 I had to tweak my driver files (read: overclock my mouse) before I could take full advantage of the mouse's abilities. Ever since I migrated to Vista, I've never gotten too much into the FPS games since my mouse ran at the average polling rate of ~125 Hz which just doesn't cut it when I'm trying to blow a baddy's head off with a 50 caliber sniper rifle.
Up until today, my searches for a way to overclock my USB ports on Vista turned up nothing. I don't know whether it was my searching or people not having invented some way of doing it yet. Anyway, long story short, for all those fragging on Vista, check out this thread (you need to register on Overclock3d.net to download the zip file) to overclock your own ports for better and smoother fragging all around. I am now happily chugging along at ~450 Hz.
In related news, Battlefield 2142 is fun. It was fun even when I could hardly aim but now that I've got almost 4x the sniping power, well, it's great fun and I'd suggest it to anyone with even a half-decent machine to give it a go. I just can't wait until Gears of War comes out for PC. Curbstomping and chainsawing can never be a bad combination.

Sermon Junky: Taize's not for me

My dear Pastor Arthur (now Reverend), God bless him, has taken to doing "taize" (pronounced "TI-zee" I think) style services for mostly scattered and sporadic occasions. Lately, however, it seems as if we've been having more and more of these very mellow and very different services at TJCAC and I'm not too sure I think this is a good thing.
For those who are unfamiliar with this (I myself do not know too much about it at all actually), it's basically a simplified way of seeking God's will in Scripture. That's the best that I can describe it, it's a form of church, like a Sunday morning service, but different. Instead of the usual message and preaching from the Bible by the pastor/speaker, there are specially chosen verses that are prepared ahead of time, read, and reread to the congregation. After each reading, there are a few minutes of quiet reflection while Arthur (or whoever running the program) asks a few questions like "What words jump out at you?" or "What's God saying to you through these passages?" or "What in your life do these Scriptures speak about?" Obviously, a lot of what the congregation gets out of it is very personal and will no doubt differ (probably drastically) from person to person. That's the general gist of the concept of a taize service.
Now, first, I do not wish to have anyone mistake my statement for something along the lines of "This is boring" because that isn't what I'm saying. Now that we've cleared that up, I want to go on and also say that the taize style bothering me isn't coming from any opinion that ordinary people should not interpret Scripture for themselves. I mean, that's one of the reasons why the Protestants split off and reformed from the Catholic system in the first place, if I have my historical facts and summary thereof correct. Luther understood that the Word of God (i.e. the Bible) must and was intended to be available to the common Christian. We take for granted that we have access to the Bible because we can just go and buy one (and pick a version you like!) at the store, but it was not always so. I'm thankful that Luther stood up for what he did and so I'm also grateful for the chance to own, read, and interpret my own copy of God's Bible.
So we've got it cleared up what my problem with taize is not, but now I've got to explain what it is. To be honest, I'm afraid of coming off as nothing more than a lofty-minded talker instead of a realistic doer here, but I do think it deserves to be said. Basically, I just don't think the taize style of worship fits very well into how we ought to approach corporate worship. I've got a few reasons for this, but here are the three main ones:

1. It is sometimes dangerous to leave interpretation of Scripture and the discernment of Biblical truths up to the common individual.
2. Pastoral preaching really ought to be the focus of occasions where we have corporate (i.e. large group and community) worship.
3. Personal interpreting of Scripture does mostly nothing to clarify or deepen understanding in Bible passages (especially to newcomers and young Christians).

It is important that I say "sometimes dangerous" and not just "dangerous" because, again, I do believe the individual Christian should be able to and is even responsible for reading and interpreting Scripture as an individual. But the key thing there is that it's done as an individual act of worship and should be kept separate from (instead of substituting) corporate worship. I can read God's word alone and personally seek out His revelation to me. That's fine and good, and a privilege too, but that act of worship ought not replace what we do as a congregation together.
Given a passage selected and read from the Bible, and told to "reflect on what it means to you," people in the congregation are left to draw their own conclusions which may or may not be entirely correct. I'm all for multiple opinions (even if I may not take much delight in seeking out others'). You and I may have different opinions, and I'm okay with yours being different from mine and I don't need to have you conform to my ideas. At the same time, however, I know for a fact (read: I know apart from opinion) that there are some things that are certain. This means, by implication, that there are some opinions more valuable than others (take Jesus' for example).
God has a reason for having only one "shepherd" (figuratively, a pastor) per flock. Like it says in 1 Corinthians 12, the "Body of Christ" (our congregation/church) is made up of a variety of parts and we can't all be feet, or ears, or appendixes. Every body has one head and even though all body parts have the ability to "know" certain things (like how to walk, how to grab things, etc... muscular memory is what it's called, I think) we still leave deeper and higher reasoning up to the head. Here I'm confronted with a little problem. I want to, for the sake of argument, say that it is the pastor who is represented by the head since he (or she in some churches) is the one who leads the congregation and decides on direction and vision for the church. However, it also says in the Bible that Christ is the head of the church so some people might take issue with my referencing here. Anyway, you get the point.
The pastor/preacher's job is to study Scripture, seek God's revelation in it, and then share his/her findings with the congregation and the congregation should be trusting and still discerning of the speaker's words. We trust that this person has been spoken to by God but should still listen alertly to see if their preaching agrees with what is Biblically true. 2 Timothy 3:16 says "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness..." (NIV) and so we can definitively say that, yes, God does speak through (potentially all of) the Bible and people can say "God says this: ..." if they are basing it on the Bible and it really does say that.
There are some truths that really just need to be affirmed and not discussed or opinionated. Too often we shy away from infringing on someone else's comfort and so we avoid confronting the issues head on, saying that what you think is as valid as what I think. This is tempting to believe, but rarely ever the case. The Bible is very clear about some things and we should be submissively accepting these rather than interpreting our way to (or more often than not, interpreting our way sinfully away from) these truths.
Without rambling on anymore, I just want to reiterate my first point: people interpreting Scripture is good, but interpretation that replaces what should be done in a pastoral capacity is dangerous, subjective, and a little wishy washy -- the pastor must take hold of his role and speak from the Bible, by the Spirit, and with authority given from God. People can read and think all they want about the Bible, but that shouldn't replace hearing the voice of God through authoritative speaking. Read, reread, and reflect on your own time.
This ties well into my next point, which is that when we get together as a collection of Christians, we should focus our attention towards to preaching of the Gospel, of God's message to man in the form of the Bible. I'm not pulling this stuff out of thin air, by the way. 2 Timothy 4 goes on to charge in a most grave and serious fashion the importance of preaching.

1 I solemnly urge you in the presence of God and Christ Jesus, who will someday judge the living and the dead when he appears to set up his Kingdom: 2 Preach the word of God. Be prepared, whether the time is favorable or not. Patiently correct, rebuke, and encourage your people with good teaching.

3 For a time is coming when people will no longer listen to sound and wholesome teaching. They will follow their own desires and will look for teachers who will tell them whatever their itching ears want to hear. 4 They will reject the truth and chase after myths. (2 Timothy 4:1-4, NLT)

Verses 1 and 2 are very clear. It's infinitely important that the word of God be preached to the people. Not just read to the people, but preached. This pretty much always involves discernment and definitive "This is what God is saying..." statements on the part of the preacher. Anyone can read Scripture, but it takes a special calling and enabling by God to draw exceptional degrees of meaning from the Bible and to be able to communicate that to a congregation.
Reading on, you'll see that verses 3 and 4 are where I find Biblical support for my previous point, though it paints the congregation in a more sinister light. Same idea: people can interpret things wrong (especially if they want to).
So Paul clearly marks the importance of preaching. I remember reading somewhere (I think it was on Alex's sixsteps) that one of the defining characteristics of a church body is that there is regular and consistent preaching from the Bible whenever it gathers. How true! Church just isn't church without preaching. It'd be just a country club for whiners.
Moving on, I recall a sermon by John Piper that presented things as follows:

Words >[Preaching]> Works >[Inspiring]> Wonder >[Stimulating]> Worship

To explain this potentially confusing diagram of sorts, Pastor Piper understood that when the word of God is preached it should lead to good works (i.e. a physical, tangible change in the way people live). These good works in turn inspire wonder and appreciation of God's goodness, power, majesty, and gloriousness and so lead to worship. Thus, by association, the word of God and preaching become necessary for worship to take place. Talk about a shameless plug (but hey, he's right).

Understanding must always be the foundation of feeling, or all we have is baseless emotionalism. But understanding of God that doesn't give rise to feeling for God becomes mere intellectualism and deadness. This is why the Bible continually calls us to think and consider and meditate and remember on the one hand, and to rejoice and fear and mourn and delight and hope and be glad on the other hand. Both are essential for worship.

This sums up my last point better than I could ever attempt. To be able to worship properly, we have to both understand what we're worshiping (i.e. we have to "get it") and be able to grasp why God deserves our adoration, while having an emotional experience rooted in that understanding (I know I'm just paraphrasing, but what else can I do). If we don't understand why God should be worshiped and do it for the good feelings, well, that's similar to saying sorry but not knowing what for. You don't know what you've done (or rather, what God's done for you) but you're going to admit to agreeing with things you don't even know about.
Preaching, as opposed to "do it yourself" taize interpretation, fulfills the need for guidance and correction in the people of God. We all need to be set straight, some more often than others, but without (confrontational) preaching, who is going to do the rebuking? If your teachers themselves don't point out your mistakes, why bother looking for/at them? There is no reason to change if all goes well. For this last point is one that I think must be made, especially about Jaffray. Everyone here knows one another since it's a small church, and very well at times, but instead of this allowing for frequent and necessary correction of one another, we've become too afraid to speak up and consequently shake things up a bit.
John 17:17 says that we are to be sanctified (fancy word for "become more and more like Christ") by the truth found in the Bible. We need to hear God's message from the mouths of our pastors, to hear "You've been a good steward, keep it up!" and "Honestly, this needs fixing. Shape up!" from our preachers. If there's one complaint from the congregation that every speaker should fear, it's that they are not challenging enough.
This last point becomes all the more important for new believers and newcomers. For the latter, I'm sure most non-churchgoers would not be able to understand for themselves what God has to say to them, especially if the passage selected was, like today's, mainly to do with issues faced within the church body itself (issues that outsiders would have little to no experience in, making them not immediately relevant to them). For new believers, they still lack the maturity to figure out for themselves the "solid food"of the Bible. You don't give babies steak or entire boiled eggs because they can't handle it. Similarly, new believers can't be expected to interpret Scripture for themselves yet since:

1. The passages for taize are usually taken out of the larger context since there is little to no preaching to fill in the gaps.
2. New believers do not have the wealth of Biblical knowledge to compare and cross-reference with what they interpret from a single passage.

The second point above would mean some people are quite haphazardly drawing conclusions, as best as they can, which may or may not have come from God at all -- the litmus test for whether something is from God or not is whether or not it agrees with (the rest of) the Bible. This is also why it might be dangerous (to revisit my first point stated many words ago).
For the seasoned Christian, taize might not be such a bad idea, but still, I'd argue that reading and rereading Scripture does not forward understanding of it significantly. I mean, you can only get so much out of hearing and reading it. That's why there are entire courses on hermeneutics for pastors and ministry workers to take in seminary. That is (in part at least) what you (pastors and preachers) are paid for, so get on it!
I'm not going to go as far as saying that taize is a complete waste of time, since I do think it calms the heart to let it soak in the word of God among doing some other things, but I just don't think it's appropriate for Sunday services given all the things that could go wrong with it, the things we ought to be doing instead of taize, and its general lack of substantial content for most. But hey, all of this could just be me so feel free to leave a comment (or send me inflammatory hate mail in defense of taize) telling me what you think.

Geekdom

So today's little trip down south was a fruitful one and my feet are effectively sore-ish from all the meandering. Anyway, one of the stops for our party of three lightly seasoned with a hint of otaku was the Silver Snail. This, of course, is a comic book store, but so much more! It's located near Queen Street and St. Peter Street (southeast corner, if I'm not mistaken) and it's full of all the things a nerd could ever ask for. There are busts (as in the "shoulders and up" statues, not fun-bags) of anime, movie, and comic book characters, modeling kits (Gundam, Evangelion Neon Genesis, and even a giant submarine), comic books of course, figurines, pre-built models for display, toys, etc... They even had a Samurai Champloo Zippo that I would totally buy if I had the money. Needless to say, the place left some of us in a mutliple geekgasmic state.
We saw a lot of stuff downtown and you can find the photographic evidence at my flickr. I've been using flickr for the last couple months and I'm quite fond of its convenience and clean look and feel. I especially like the nifty description and image name editing that are quick and simple (i.e. doing these things on other service providers such as Mediamax is a real chore). For image hosting (like the image you see at the start of this post) I use Imageshack. Queenie told me to use it and I finally got around to it (I never bothered to try it out for no reason before... FTW).
Anyway, flickr and Imageshack honourable mentions aside, destinations of today's trip all over downtown include the three floors of the Eaton's Center (the Coast Mountain Sports there had three floors worth of Nalgenes but sadly, not a single one that was pleasing to my eye), up and down Queen Street, Burrito Boyz, the Silver Snail, all down what I think was Neville Street, a closed Bay-Bloor Radio, and Ginger for dinner (a little Vietnamese restaurant beside a strip club). After dinner, we just started strolling along Yonge and walked off all the food we had (burrito was decently sized but dinner wasn't super heavy). All in all, a fun day.
I don't know why but I felt very anxious at times (mostly the quieter times on the subway) and it's a stirring feeling. Fun though. It was funny when I received a 2007 calendar full of, what I think was, Hugo Boss or Calvin Klein (or something to that effect) male models as a gag gift. I didn't bother taking a picture but I was genuinely relieved when Queenie busted a Shrinky Dink "bones fish" out of her purse. This one was to replace the one I'd made myself (and snapped accidentally months ago) and serve as the actual gift (or bonus... to the very homosecular calendar). Very sweet.

Homecoming

It's almost been two weeks (actually exactly two weeks including today) since Moyee and Herman (and the rest of the STM @ Longlac Team) left meaning that they will be momentarily home if my calculations are correct. I can't wait until they get back because then I can book Moyee for some day to go have lunch.
Speaking of food, I'm about to head downtown with a couple friends to get stuff and eat. We decided to "just hang out" but I've also got to check out Coast Mountain Sports for a nice water bottle and take them to Burrito Boyz (yeah, the place is actually named with a zedzorz). I've been sans water bottle (and burrito too) for the past many months and it's about time my old one got replaced.
I've gone through a few in my time but my last one was definitely my favourite one (so far). I got it at TC two years back, oddly enough. I think I downed all the water and then, because my backpack's bottle pocket is shallow (funny/plug line: "There's more to you than meets the eye..." - Sam, Transformers the Movie) it fell out. Being empty, I didn't feel the tiny difference and thanks to my ear buds I didn't hear it fall either ("Oh when she breaks your bottle falls down and makes a sound you'll never hear her your damn bottle falling and making a sound!" - Howie Day, She Says). Oh well, it's not a big loss. There will always be other bottles... but not many TC bottles. Sigh. I'm hopeful in the slimness and curves of Nalgenes to more than make up for the minor loss. Photos to come if I'm successful in my search.

Domestic Violence

Psalm 55 : 9-14, 19-21

9 Confuse the wicked, O Lord, confound their speech,
for I see violence and strife in the city.
10 Day and night they prowl about on its walls;
malice and abuse are within it.
11 Destructive forces are at work in the city;
threats and lies never leave its streets.
12 If an enemy were insulting me,
I could endure it;
if a foe were raising himself against me,
I could hide from him.
13 But it is you, a man like myself,
my companion, my close friend,
14 with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship
as we walked with the throng at the house of God.
[...]
19 God, who is enthroned forever,
will hear them and afflict them—
Selah
men who never change their ways
and have no fear of God.
20 My companion attacks his friends;
he violates his covenant.
21 His speech is smooth as butter,
yet war is in his heart;
his words are more soothing than oil,
yet they are drawn swords.

I've been thinking a lot about this (i.e. disputes within church walls) for the last little while and I honestly don't know what to do, or whether what I've already done or said was correct. To my rescue comes this passage brought randomly to my attention as I searched for passages on a completely different topic on BibleGateway.
I'm one of the most confrontational people I know and if you don't think so, you're wrong. Even though it's generally accepted that we, as adult members of a civilized and modern society, ought to settle disputes in a manner as diplomatic and courteous as possible, meaning that people like me are generally labeled "inconsiderate" or "insensitive". But I think sometimes (not always, for sure) certain subjects require a certain degree of "I think you've got it all wrong on this one" -- even more so within Christian-à-Christian relationships.
This, of course, is because within the community we call the Body of Christ we are to fellowship with one another through the Spirit. We ought to be able to encourage as well as criticize, teach as well as rebuke, and share as well as disagree with one another all in a loving and God-fearing manner. We ought to be able to confront one another and not have to beat around the bush with nice words or flattery to get our point across. That kind of tactic (i.e. excessive tact, ironically) is dangerously close to manipulation if you ask me. Sure, it might work for people outside and inside the Body but it's not something a godly person should stand for (v. 21). Convincing and persuading others to an opinion treated as objective truth would go along with this too.
It's a tragedy when conflicts break out in the "Outside World" but when it happens within the walls of a congregation, it's a shame. The psalmist here is archaic-ranting about just this all-too-common phenomenon: infighting between people of God. Really, we (you and I both, along with the rest of Jaffray) should do better if we remember why exactly we gather and why we do the things we do. Well, we could change our ways, or we could end up like those who don't (v. 19). Aside: I don't think we do enough threatening (to match Biblical content levels) within our walls.

My Latest Look

I got tired of my Samurize dock and decided to tweak a little. I ended up making a whole other one from pseudo-scratch. That's what you'll see in the bottom left corner. As usual, there is the Winamp track progress bar (the larger blue stripe) and my CPU Idle percentage (I made two smaller semi-circular stripes that meet together at 9 o' clock for this one). The overall effect is pretty sweet I think. There's also the album art, current track number, and artist + title scroller. As you can see, my "dock" is mostly just a Winamp stats displayer replacement with an idle bar.
For the rest of my functionality requirements I've still got my tabbed Objectdock at the bottom of the screen and my invisible'd Vista start menu. A random thing I discovered about Vista (not sure if this works in XP) was that pressing Ctrl + Esc also brings up the start menu just as if I pressed the Windows key. Neato.

A "Do Whatever the Hell I Want" Badge

I went and saw Transformers the Movie today with Allen at the Famous Players/Cineplex at... I don't know exactly, but I think it was around Yonge and something to the north. Anyway, it turned out to be a rather good movie for someone who is a fan (but not hardcore fan) of the stuff. Al had lukewarm thoughts about it all but that's because he was more of the die hard fan. Anyway, I didn't do anything else much today except go home afterwards and just relax in the comfort and the companionship of my trusty radiation bombarding computer set up. I chowed down on a few Bagel Bites and they weren't half bad so I'll have the other ones tomorrow for lunch. I'm still looking forward to practices for LoaH and retreat this Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
Speaking of movies, I got around to watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire last week and there's something about Emma Watson's look that I just can't place. She's definitely not ugly or anything, but I just can't decide conclusively whether she's got a delicately amiable or ever so slightly annoying face. I mean, her character's hair (I'm not even going to attempt spelling the actual name for you off of memory) Hermione is, by nature, quite a put-off, what with being long-ish and frizzy. But the rest of her (as in the way she looks, acts, and speaks) doesn't really bug me all that much (I'd always imagined her character Hermione to be a real know-it-all while reading the book). At least, that's how I felt until near the middle or so of the Goblet of Fire. That one shot of her all dressed up for the ball settled it for me: not annoying looking.
I also spent a good chunk of my evening listening to a lecture/workshop given by John Piper about living by faith in future grace. I regret to say that I had been slightly distracted while listening for the latter half of the message so I didn't catch all the little gritty bits as I normally like doing but the general gist was quite stirring to say the least. I'm not even going to attempt paraphrasing or summarizing the message. If you've got the longing and craving for it, check it out for yourself here (whereas the larger set of links and pages of his work can be found here). It's cool stuff to me, but in random bursts at best. Too much of a good thing (in this case, over-saturation with new ideas on divine matters) too fast is probably not the best--cramming such things all at once proves to be a bad way to really reflect, consider, discern, and internalize well and properly.

God's Jackpot

I don't mean to associate God with gambling or anything but today's date is exactly all made up of sevens -- 07.07.07 -- and I think it's also strangely fitting to have my 490th post on such a day (490 = 7 x 70 of course). Seeing as how seven is supposedly God's number, I figured today would be a holy jackpot of sorts... I don't really have anything specific I want to talk about so I suppose I'll write about my comings and goings of late.
As mentioned before, I decided to write about one Clive Staples Lewis for a pretty big paper. To date, I've read all of "The Magician's Nephew" and approximately thirty-four pages of "The Pilgrim's Regress" which is a bit of strange book to say the least. It's not a novel or narrative per se. It is sort of like an allegorical story but on crack where everything is very obviously representative of something else, and dabbling heavily in Christian and Biblical themes. It's a slower read than "The Magician's Nephew" -- the likes of which I thoroughly enjoyed, mind you.
After reading just the first book of "The Chronicles of Narnia" series, I've grown quite fond of Lewis' writing style and quirky humour. I'm beginning to understand why he's so admired by so many people. It has something to do, I think, with his almost childlike demeanor in viewing, constructing, and describing his ideas.
Anyway, this coming week is looking packed with LoaH and Summer Retreat practices and I'm quite looking forward to them. IMO the best part about serving in a musical capacity is the practice and fellowship time I get to have with my peers/teammates. I mean, playing and actually leading is exhilarating too, but I don't really take more joy in that part than one should (since it's leading and not soaking that I'm supposed to be doing). LoaH songs are sounding pretty good for the most part after our intense practice the other day -- Eric (vocals and guitar), Stephen (drums), Adwin (electric guitar), and I (bass) practiced without Melissa Kwan (second vocals) this Thursday morning for three hours. Retreat worship is also looking pretty good so far, but that is to be expected with the competent leadership of mainly Katherine and Gabriel. I think playing my bass in these kinds of settings is pretty much the best part of my summers nowadays. With no job (part-time or otherwise) in sight, I'm going to make playing my summer (pre)occupation for this year pretty much.
My aunt and uncle (Monique and Jock respectively) are over from the states with their young son, Philip. Before you go "Haha, sucker!" because of the addition of an extra young'un (my sister + Philip = 2 little and potentially annoying kids) in my vicinity, I want to sneer at you because with Philip here, my sister is officially sleeping over for the duration of their trip. And with them (my aunt, uncle, and cousin) staying with my grandparents, I am virtually un-childbearing. This means I can do all the things I couldn't do at home (with my sister around) before, like leave my stuff out without fear of annihilation and play with my more dangerous toys (like my totally hot Zippo and... I don't have any other violent toys actually). Of course, this liberation comes at the price of having my aunt and uncle randomly coming over to borrow my wireless Internets... That leads to me thinking "GTFO my Internets before I telegib you." but saying "Hi, welcome! Feel free to use it as you please."

Gotta Love It

Oh the fun times never end when you've got weed... Gotta heart weed. I've never had any myself, mostly because I've yet to contract a serious and extremely painful medical condition or had the urge to blast my teenage brain to hell and back in a shopping cart (why aspire to what's already been done?).

I blurred out everything since I need creeps prying into my private life like I need aneurisms. It's not to hide the name of a secret pen pal or anything sinister like that though.

FWD: You're going to die a lonely, painful death if you don't foward this to everyone and eat dirt and...

I don't know why but I got the sudden urge to hate on forwarded messages during the car ride home tonight. I'm not going to rant (I promise I'll keep it short this time). I'm just going to ask you (all of you, there are now no exceptions or special favourites to be excused) to never ever pass along one of those "Read this or you will have 70 years of bad luck" type emails to me (as if I expect to live to be +80 anyway). I hate them. I never pass them along and I never read them. If you send one to me, you're basically condemning me to whatever the hell is promised inside that email as a warning against ignoring it because I intend on and will succeed in ignoring the damnable thing. With the number of "Read this only if you have time for God" emails I've passed up, I probably need to convert to Roman Catholicism and buy an eternity load of indulgences to get my condemned self out of purgatory. It seems I might have offended some people with that last remark so my work here is done for tonight.

PS: Really, don't send me them, unless you want to be goatse'd. Trust me, you don't want to get goatse'd. I never was but that doesn't mean I've never thought of passing it along.

Light on a Hill v. 2.0 Beta Release

Here at TJCAC co. we like to treat our environment nicely by holding weekly get-togethers and treating our neighbors to some free food, live music, and car washes (saying that reminds me of that Canadian Tire commercial with the man pressure stripping the paint off of his car). We've even got arts and crafts for the little ones. Last year, we managed to come out and have a pretty sweet showing every Wednesday evening/night (starting at seven o' clock or so) and so we're going for the same thing again this year.
So this has been my shameless plug for LoaH 2007 and if you are at all interested in having something to do on Hump Day evenings (other than what you'd normally have planned for Hump Day) then come out and have a burger.
Note: TJCAC can be found at 9950 Sheppard, just east of Meadowvale. It's a giant red bricked building (that looks every bit the church with its high top and chiseled orange steps...) after an open field of nothing. You can't miss it.