Oh yes, I blogged again on my church's blog. This time I blogged about killing in the old testament.
http://wakingthesleeper.blogspot.com/2007/04/thou-shalt-kill.html
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Impending Blessings or Impending Judgement
After I sat through the eight-hour Fundamentals of Engineering exam on Saturday, I found that I was nearer to Monroe where I used to live than usual, so I decided to travel there and attend the Quinceañera of the adopted daughter of the pastor of the church in Monroe that I attended when I lived in Monroe. It was the second birthday party of a teenage woman that I can remember ever attending.
As everyone else (or seemingly so) was busy dancing, I was standing and sipping my punch and talking to the father of a high schooler about the advantages of comedy colleges for science majors. My friend of a number of years entered and I congratulated her because of her recent marriage engagement:
Me: lady'sname! Congratulations upon your impending marriage!
Lady: Thank you Joshua! But you make it sound like such a bad thing. I think that you have just associated my upcoming wedding with doom, gloom, and destruction.
Me: I did wonder if that use of 'impending' was appropriate--
Lady: No, I don't think that it is.
Me: --So I looked it up in an on-line dictionary to find out and the only example in the first definition was 'impending marriage!'
Another source in the on-line dictionary indicates that impending is a good word to use for describing the day of God's judgment because it is impending just like 2 Peter 3 says. The sweet thing about the impending day of the judgment of God is that many people have actually had the judgment that was to be applied to them diverted.
As everyone else (or seemingly so) was busy dancing, I was standing and sipping my punch and talking to the father of a high schooler about the advantages of comedy colleges for science majors. My friend of a number of years entered and I congratulated her because of her recent marriage engagement:
Me: lady'sname! Congratulations upon your impending marriage!
Lady: Thank you Joshua! But you make it sound like such a bad thing. I think that you have just associated my upcoming wedding with doom, gloom, and destruction.
Me: I did wonder if that use of 'impending' was appropriate--
Lady: No, I don't think that it is.
Me: --So I looked it up in an on-line dictionary to find out and the only example in the first definition was 'impending marriage!'
Another source in the on-line dictionary indicates that impending is a good word to use for describing the day of God's judgment because it is impending just like 2 Peter 3 says. The sweet thing about the impending day of the judgment of God is that many people have actually had the judgment that was to be applied to them diverted.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Pancakes
I built the first pancake that I can remember ever building today. I built it because Luke and I decided that Luke should visit me for breakfast this morning. I told him that I could provide him with some protein in the form of chicken noodle soup (kind of like I built with my stir fry on Tuesday night), but he told me that he doesn't like to eat chicken noodle soup for breakfast and that pancakes are much more acceptable. I realized that his visit was an opportunity for me to learn to build some food that I am not supposed to eat and yet not waste it. Both of these pancakes turned out well so that Luke was able to eat them. Even though I forgot to buy margarine and syrup last night when I was purchasing the pancake mix, the pancakes were edible because of the jam that I found in my cupboard since then. Maybe someday I will bother to build pancakes without a pre-packaged mix. In the meantime, I am debating whether or not it is worth my time and money to learn to build protein-laden food even when there is no one to eat it (thus wasting the cost of the food and the nutritional value of the food, but gaining knowledge for myself). What do you think? I will probably make that decision after my engineering exam.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
My first Acts 29 Resurrection Sunday
The alcohol that I consumed on Sunday was located at Mike's house and had been built previously (i.e. prior to being consumed by myself) by the lead pastor of Seaside Church. I had never had such an easy time with getting a beer (this one was an ale) down before then.
Mike had just finished leading one of the three (or so) bands at Seaside Church during the Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday services and pushed me and a bunch of people through a fair amount of work that we all wanted to do. I didn't find myself thinking about anything explicitly ultra-spiritual except for the rebellious attitude that rises to my head so that I realize its presence every time that I am told to do something that I wasn't about to do regardless of the opinions of others. When this happens I can't very well say to myself, I'll do it because I want to, not because you told me to.
Oops. That last paragraph probably made you think that Mike wanted me to do something that I didn't want to do anyway, but that is not the case. I may blog about this later.
The good part of the whole thing is that after all of the bullets had been bitten, the result was appreciated a lot and I got a better idea of what the sound system can do after working with it for four days straight. One church member commented that some of the music was the best music that she had ever heard in church or elsewhere, and a number of others indicated that the services were spiritually beneficial to them!
Let me also point out that he Good Friday service did not include commentary. Just about every other Good Friday service that I have ever attended (e.g. the ones at other churches) included quite a number of little interpretive readings that were placed in the program between songs and scripture readings and I always thought that they were stupid because many of them seemed quite distracting and a number of them seemed unbiblical. The Good Friday service at Seaside Church went like this:
Song
Scripture reading
Song
Scripture reading
Song
Scripture reading
Song
Scripture reading
Song
Mike had just finished leading one of the three (or so) bands at Seaside Church during the Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday services and pushed me and a bunch of people through a fair amount of work that we all wanted to do. I didn't find myself thinking about anything explicitly ultra-spiritual except for the rebellious attitude that rises to my head so that I realize its presence every time that I am told to do something that I wasn't about to do regardless of the opinions of others. When this happens I can't very well say to myself, I'll do it because I want to, not because you told me to.
Oops. That last paragraph probably made you think that Mike wanted me to do something that I didn't want to do anyway, but that is not the case. I may blog about this later.
The good part of the whole thing is that after all of the bullets had been bitten, the result was appreciated a lot and I got a better idea of what the sound system can do after working with it for four days straight. One church member commented that some of the music was the best music that she had ever heard in church or elsewhere, and a number of others indicated that the services were spiritually beneficial to them!
Let me also point out that he Good Friday service did not include commentary. Just about every other Good Friday service that I have ever attended (e.g. the ones at other churches) included quite a number of little interpretive readings that were placed in the program between songs and scripture readings and I always thought that they were stupid because many of them seemed quite distracting and a number of them seemed unbiblical. The Good Friday service at Seaside Church went like this:
Song
Scripture reading
Song
Scripture reading
Song
Scripture reading
Song
Scripture reading
Song
NewsFox (not Fox News)
I consumed alcohol again on Sunday and I intend to continue my habit of blogging about each instance of my own alcohol consumption, but Bishop Jefro wanted me to point out a particular plug in to you: NewsFox. NewsFox is a plug in for Mozilla Firefox which will run through a list of feeds that a user provides and reports back to said user, indicating which feeds have been updated since the previous run through of said list. If there has been no previous run through (e.g. as at the first time that this plug in is run on a particular system), all available content is marked as unread.
The advantage to the whole thing is that users don't ever have to spend whole minutes at a time by visiting their favorite blogs, only to find that they have not been updated.
Oh, do you know how sometimes a blog posting that was posted last night does not appear at the top of the blog page so that you may be ignorant of its existence for as long as the entirety of eternity future? This little plug in can find those too.
Once again, at least half of the elders at Seaside Church recommend NewsFox because it will allow you to become a better steward(ess) of the time that has been given to you while you keep up with all of the activities of your fellow missionaries and with those of those other people on the mission field.
The advantage to the whole thing is that users don't ever have to spend whole minutes at a time by visiting their favorite blogs, only to find that they have not been updated.
Oh, do you know how sometimes a blog posting that was posted last night does not appear at the top of the blog page so that you may be ignorant of its existence for as long as the entirety of eternity future? This little plug in can find those too.
Once again, at least half of the elders at Seaside Church recommend NewsFox because it will allow you to become a better steward(ess) of the time that has been given to you while you keep up with all of the activities of your fellow missionaries and with those of those other people on the mission field.
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
CFIs & XDLs
I stayed home from work yesterday because I needed to study for the FE or the EIT (Fundamentals of Engineering exam or Engineer In Training exam). I probably haven't mentioned it in a while, but for your benefit (or your boredom) I can be redundant: I am a civil engineer who has yet to take the first real step toward becoming a professional. I used a lot of the time during which I was awake yesterday by reading my transportation engineering book and doing example problems. I am quite happy about the understanding that came to me regarding particular topics that I had not managed to understand as a result of my study of them for the first time or the second time or the third time. I started off with vehicle performance and moved onto vertical curves and sort of skipped over horizontal curves and read about pavement design, levels of service, cues, etc.
Today, while my boss was looking at some of my work (because he is a professional engineer with a stamp and I am not so that I have not), I opened a civil engineering magazine and read an article about reducing congestion at intersections (yes, the kind related to transportation engineering). This article had been written all about a particular engineering solution called a continuous flow intersection. When I first saw the phrase, I thought that the article must have been written about roundabouts (you know, those approximately horizontal rings of pavement onto which and off of which vehicles turn right, but never left). I was wrong.
The CFI (which has also been called a crossover displaced left-turn intersection) is something that I wish that I had invented, and I should have thought of it sometime, but I was always too lazy to concentrate on solving such a problem because I assumed that if such a solution existed, the Washington State Department of Transportation would have thought of it long ago. It turns out that I would not have been the first to imagine such a solution since the CFI was conceived a good twenty years ago, but coming up with a similar idea independently would have been nice.
I suppose that I should let you know what the idea is: http://www.abmb.com/cfi.html
I have read that this solution has only been built at about fifty intersections in the world and that most of those are in Mexico. Take a look at the animations at the above URL and tell me if you don't think that a couple of the traffic lights shouldn't be replaced with yield signs. Perhaps someone should invent a conditional yield signal.
Today, while my boss was looking at some of my work (because he is a professional engineer with a stamp and I am not so that I have not), I opened a civil engineering magazine and read an article about reducing congestion at intersections (yes, the kind related to transportation engineering). This article had been written all about a particular engineering solution called a continuous flow intersection. When I first saw the phrase, I thought that the article must have been written about roundabouts (you know, those approximately horizontal rings of pavement onto which and off of which vehicles turn right, but never left). I was wrong.
The CFI (which has also been called a crossover displaced left-turn intersection) is something that I wish that I had invented, and I should have thought of it sometime, but I was always too lazy to concentrate on solving such a problem because I assumed that if such a solution existed, the Washington State Department of Transportation would have thought of it long ago. It turns out that I would not have been the first to imagine such a solution since the CFI was conceived a good twenty years ago, but coming up with a similar idea independently would have been nice.
I suppose that I should let you know what the idea is: http://www.abmb.com/cfi.html
I have read that this solution has only been built at about fifty intersections in the world and that most of those are in Mexico. Take a look at the animations at the above URL and tell me if you don't think that a couple of the traffic lights shouldn't be replaced with yield signs. Perhaps someone should invent a conditional yield signal.
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