Idaho wins!
Second time this season... It is a Banner year!
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Second time this season... It is a Banner year!
Sometimes God evangelizes people directly. One such story, out of Iran is featured on the Persecution.com website.
Arfooz was praying to her God, Allah, the god of Mohammed, begging him for relief from the pressures of her life.
Much to her surprise Jesus Christ appeared to her and inspired her to write in her native language "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Later a friend showed her that verse in the Christian bible. (Matthew 11:28) And she became a Christian.
God does still perform miracles here on earth. He can call us out of the darkest places.
For the last several months, I have been taking my kids to the local general aviation airport to watch airplanes, takeoff, land, and to watch folks stop for their $100 dollar burgers. The kids love heckling the pilots who walk by with complements. "I like your blue airplane" and the like. It was cheap entertianment at it's best.
A few weeks ago, I started to become interested in flying. Now they have a Sport pilot certification that allows you to fly small airplanes with a lot less time investment than it takes to get a private pilot's license.
Even at half price, though, flying is a very expensive hobby.
Today we where harvesting Corn stalks out of a stranger's yard to use as decoration for our Church's annual Harvest Party.
Andee was cutting the corn stalks down, I was digging out the roots, and Julia (4) was hauling the stalks we wanted to keep over to a pile. Nathan (2) was trying to find as many ways as possible to keep himself in trouble.
Julia comes walking back from the pile after her 30th trip or so, and announces "We are going to be on TV"
"Really?" Andee and I both asked.
"Yes, this is a very dirty job" she replied. "We should be on the Dirty Jobs show"
Today I was sitting on the couch minding my own business, and Julia, my 4 year old came up to me and said "Daddy, you are wearing a Teletubby shirt"
I am certain that I do not own a teletubby shirt, so I told her she was mistaking. The shirt I am wearing is a purple t-shirt that one of my former employers distributed at a trade show in 1996. It is kinda a funky shirt, but I only paid 3 bucks for it, and I have been wearing it occasionally for 8 years.
Much to my surprise, Julia then proved me wrong. I am indeed wearing a teletubby shirt.
My wife had a photo of me wearing this particular shirt sitting on her desk at Spokane County 911. One of her co-workers took the photo out of the frame, and installed a Tinky-Winky head over my face. Andee never bothered to fix the photo. Julia ran across the room, picked up the photo, and brought it to me. Indeed, Tinky winky wears this shirt.
I love the Biblegateway.com website. I use it at least daily.
I have the Biblegateway Quicksearch integrated right into my firefox search box.
I prefer reading on my computer screen than reading out of my bible for one reason or another. I would suppose that I read online most of the time, and books are a bit more combersome to navigate.
Over the last 3 or 4 weeks I have taken to doing my BSF reading online. I like how I can enter all of the passages for the day into my search bar, and they all come up at once on a single screen. When I read a question that asks me to compare several passages, they are all right there, and I don't have to fumble around looking for the right page. I like this meathod enough that I am likely to stick with it for the year at least.
I built a BSF reader website to share the appropriate links. The website has an RSS feed, so you can pull it into your my yahoo, or whatever rss reader you read. I plan to update these each week on Monday night after my BSF class, but no guarentees on that.
It looks like Linksys has a replacement line coming out for the Sipura SPA-841 phones.
I think this is likely a good move. I have been relatively unsatisfied with my SPA-841 phones. Unless my PBX was transmiting a fairly flawless SIP Signal, I had quite a few problems with the 841s. Once I finally had the PBX set up right, the phones worked fine. There where also some quality issues (I had 2 of the 4 I ordered replaced) Overall, the design on the 841 was not great. The keyboard was rubbery, the context menus where not intuitive, and the LCD display was fairly poor.
It looks like the 941 phone will be a bit beefier, but will cost a tad bit more.
The WBP54G wireless bridge looks like a very cool option. There are lots of places where it would be handy to put a phone without having to run cable.
Here is an interesting blog entry I ran across today.
in the outerI wonder why they get so emotional about this. I dont think it matters whether or not the ten commandments are posted, in public buildings or elsewhere. For what good is it to post it in all of the public buildings if the Spirit from Whom the commandments came isnt posted in the hearts of the people who occupy these buildings? Perhaps more effort ought to be exerted to figure out how to post the Spirit in more hearts, starting with those within our own communities, churches and families.
It seems to me that Christians spend a lot of energy getting worked up over symbolic battles, when we are losing the spiritual battle at most every turn. I frequently hear that Gay marriage is going to destroy the institution of marriage. Actually divorce is destroying the institution of marriage, and Christians are participating in divorce at the same rate as the rest of the population. Why are we worried about preserving the sanctity of the marriage certificate, while we are neglecting to preserve the sanctity of the marriage?
Does it really do any good to have children mindlessly utter the words "under God" each day when they don't know who God is, or what he has done for us?
Does it matter if a judge walks past a ten commandment monument each day, if he sees it a piece of furniture?
I don't see the value in making our government pretend that it subscribes to our God's teaching when it really doesn't.
I think we should use our voices to speak the truth about these issues, but these issues should not be our main focus. Our focus should be on Jesus. If we walk in his ways, God will shine through us, and others will see God's love. If we focus on the battles, our behavior appears to be just another form of idolatry.
Check this blog out! It looks like something right up my ally:
Sleepless in SCI'll admit, I don't sleep much; I find it a waste of time. Recently, I came upon an interesting post on Hack a Day which introduced me to polyphasic sleep. Basically, I'll be experimenting with taking 30 minute naps every 4 hours. In order to accomodate my normal schedule, I've chosen to sleep at 12am, 4am, 8am, 12pm, 4pm, and 8pm. I'll be sticking with this schedule for at least the next two weeks to see if it actually works.
Sleep deprived people are usually pretty funny. (At least at 3:30 AM) It will be interesting to see how well this works out for him.
I have been quiet lately, so I figured I should drop a line. The family has been pretty sick for the last week or two. We seem to keep passing the bug around. It seems like a lot of people are sick at work as well, although that doesn't affect me too much on the graveyard shift.
I have been enjoying the BSF study of Genesis this year. It is always challenging to keep up with the daily study. I often fall behind and have to play catch up at the end of the week. I am certain that this is an indicator that my priorities need some adjustment. Life is so much easier if you put God first. If you try to fit him in where you have space, pretty soon you are strugging through every life challenge all by yourself. After all that God has given us he deserves our best effort. Too often our gift to him the scraps of our life. I am working on being better about giving my best.
Andee is doing BSF this year, and the kids are going as well. It has been pretty neat to be able to talk about what we are learning, and all be able to immediately relate.
I think Liferoads is emerging from their transition in leadership with a renewed energy and passion. I see a lot of growth going on, and God is using a lot of people in new and exciting ways.
The Asterisk PBX system is finaly totally stable. it has been running for about a month without any trouble. I reboot it every 10 days or so just for good measure. Once I got the OEM X100P - FXO PCI Card from Digit Networks and tuned the Tx and Rx values, my Sipura 841 phones started behaving themselves.
Graveyard shift is not bad. Sometimes I get myself into trouble by staying up too late. Seems that if I don't go to bed by 10 AM or so, I have a lot of trouble going to bed at all. A couple of weeks ago, I went for an entire workweek with 8 or 10 hours of sleep total. I don't think I will let that happen again.
Turn of the Blackberry devices of all of the CEOs in the U.S. and see what kind of an uproar ensues.
Court Ruling in BlackBerry Case Puts Service to U.S. Users at Risk - New York TimesAs part of that litigation, NTP, whose only assets are wireless e-mail related patents, had been granted an injunction banning the sale of BlackBerry devices in the United States and forcing Research in Motion to stop providing e-mail services to all American customers except government account holders.
I have been playing a lot with Feedburner lately. RSS is an amazingly powerful tool.
I have been noticing a lot more traffic coming to the church website from blogs. I figured my blog is a great place to tell my friends and co-workers what is happening at my church. I set up some "BuzzBoost" scripts on feedburner, and now I have exerpts of the church website displayed on my page.
Any Liferoaders out there who want to add the content to your website let me know. It is as easy as pasting a few lines of code into your blog's template.
Joe is back in blogsphere, this time as Jungle Pop
I really enjoyed his blog. It is thought provoking, humble, mysterious, and human all at the same time.
Worth checking out!
I wonder if the true reason for all of the negative reaction within the conservative camp to the Harriet Miers nomination is because they fear having a judiciary system that is on their side.
It doesn't make much sense for the GOP to oppose an Evangelical Christian pro-business nominee. I am totally cynical regarding their motives. Even if she is only moderately qualified, she is by all accounts going to vote on their side on most issues.
How many votes have the Republican Party earned this year because of the gay marriage issue? How many votes do they retain each year because of Roe vs. Wade? If the courts where to settle these issues, those voters would no longer be trapped voting for the Republican Party. I would argue that the Evangelical Christian movement is actually middle-right, not far right. Once the life issues are no longer in contention, other issues like poverty, health care, and environmental stewardship could be voting issues for evangelical Christians, and many of them would vote for more liberal candidates.
Having the judiciary consistently irking the middle-left will be a huge boost for the Democratic Party.
I think that many politicians in the GOP are pretty insincere in their pro-life convictions. They talk the talk to get the votes. It is very odd, how many GOP Senators are very negative regarding Miers' nomination while the Democrats are taking a wait and see approach.
I am looking at this calendar to integrate into some websites that I run. It looks really neat, and is a free service.
AirSet - Shared Calendars, Reminders, Community for Groups and Family
I like that they offer RSS feeds for the calendar. this will make it easy to incorporate into the other websites.
Nobody has ever asked me what fingertoe.com means. Does anyone have any idea?
Comment with your guess... I will reveal answer in a few days.
I love Technorati. It is so handy for finding blogs that may be of interest to you. For example, I can go to my church website, and do a "Technorati this" search from my toolbar, and find every blog that is linking to it. I am adding the results to my blogroll to the left under Liferoads linkers.
If you have never played with the technorati search, be sure to check it out. It is a great networking tool! http://technorati.com/search/
I think the Southern Baptists are correct on this one:
News-Sun, Evening Star & Herald-RepublicanDr. Robert Reccord, president of Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, is strongly opposed to reimbursements for Katrina aid. His organization, the nation's third largest disaster relief agency, has provided 5 million hot meals and vital services to Katrina victims.
"Volunteer labor is just that: volunteer," Reccord says. "We would never ask the government to pay for it."
Matthew 6:24
"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money."
I think the reason faith based programs are so effective is because they are done out of love, with God as the boss. When they are done out of contract with the Government as the boss, then they cease to be faith based.
KRT Wire | 10/03/2005 | Miers possesses qualities important to Bush: loyalty, trustworthinessFollowing Bush's election as governor, Miers accepted a part-time appointment as chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission, which had been beset by corruption charges.
During her five years on the commission, sales fell and the commission fired two lottery directors. But The Dallas Morning News editorialized that Miers deserved high marks for restoring integrity to the commission.
Isn't removing corruption from the Lottery kinda like removing crime from the Mafia?
Overall, I figure that Bush is picking somebody who he trusts to be a conservative on the court. He knows this person, and his judgement is probably correct.
It is interesting to see all of the hostility toward her, particularly from the right. I suspect that this is a sign that president Bush has squandered a lot of his credibility. Evangelical Christians supported him on the war in Iraq, basically because we trusted his judgement. It turns out that his judgement was incorrect, and now that trust is gone.
The right now has a "Trust but verify" relationship with the president.
Yahoo! Sports - NCAA Football - Idaho 27, Utah State 13
Idaho 27, Utah St. 13
Only happens once or twice a year. I better gloat while I have the chance!
After adding the Thinking Christian sidebar feed, I got on a roll and decided to move my RSS feeds to Feedburner. Hopefully it will go off without a hitch, and nobody will notice much aside from this post.
Feedburner looks like a pretty handy service. It gives you statistics letting you know how many subscribers you have. I have always wondered whether it was 6 or 7 people that read this page regularly. Soon I will know the sad truth. ;-)
Apparently somebody still loves my 0-4 Idaho Vandals!