We Should See Other Blogs

I would like a few things.

• Move the “Create a New Filter” link to toward the top of the page. I end up with a lot of filters and I don’t really want to scroll down all the way to the bottom just to make a new one. Or put a link at the top and the bottom. There’s no reason it can’t be in both places at once.
• Under the “Reply” pull-down box, place a link to make a filter from that sender. This is a lot easer than, say, copying the email address, going to filters, making a new filter, pasting the email address, etc.
• For Google Apps, could we perhaps get a “Global Filter” type page or something to mass-manage email? There are quite a few message types I would prefer no-one receive, and I don’t have time to modify each account.

Thanks!

I want to plug a DVD player directly into a monitor. Anyone have any experience with this sort of thing, any product recommendations?

Bryan asks an interesting set of questions.

1. What time do you usually leave for lunch?

Anywhere from 1130 to 1230 depending on what’s happening at work. The odd time I skip the whole dog and pony show altogether, but most days I take it.

2. How long do you usually take for lunch?

I get a half hour as mandated by Ontario law, and that’s it. Most days I’m under that. Rarely, I go over by a few minutes.

3. Ever eat lunch at home?

I suppose I could, as I live 10 minutes from home, but I dislike driving enough already thankyouverymuch.

4. What are your favorite places to eat out for Work Lunch?

Wendy’s or The Country Kitchen (part of Highland Farms). I don’t do that as often these days.

5. How often do you bring food in from home?

Almost every day. We always have something around here, even if it’s just a sandwich with lettuce, ham, provalone, horseradish mayonnaise, mustard, and pepper.

6. Are you a lone ranger or a community eater?

I don’t like eating with people. I’m solitary. Groups of larger than two — especially people I don’t know — make me long for solitude.

7. How often does your company pay for your lunch?

Never in a blue moon would my company pay for lunch. Well, there was that one time with the pizza.

8. What is your favourite lunch meal of all time?

Left-over pasta that I made. Especially angel hair noodles with a really nice sauce. The ground beef, Spanish onions, green onions, green pepper, red pepper, garlic, and diced Roma tomatoes kind. Kills me.

Welcome to the Nodcast: A podcast so boring it doesn’t even have an RSS feed.

Nodcast 1: A Reading From Truman Capote (Ogg Vorbis)
Nodcast 1: A Reading From Truman Capote (MP3)

Who will follow me into the sky?
Will they train their telescopes
to catch my silver sail?

Who will leave this dying world behind?
Will they build a ship to set
their better angels on my tail?

The meek can inherit the earth
we’ll take the stars.
The meek can inherit the earth
when heaven’s ours.

Who will give their daughters to my sons?
Will their generation stretch
as far as they can fly?

They can have the cradle we’re done
growing into giants upon
giants standing high.

The meek can inherit the earth
we’ll take the stars.
The meek can inherit the earth
when heaven’s ours.

• Here we go again!
• One of the great tragedies of the modern church is that we’ve for the most part lost the language of covenant. We still have some of the ideas. But there’s hope. Imagine, if you will, the power of context and the power of covenant wedded to each other; perhaps this is an unholy union of the ancient and the post-modern, but which covenant doesn’t have context? The church and God in the context of his schema of salvation; the covenant of marriage in the context of God and the church’s covenant; these are powerful concepts.
• Share the Well is — and I hate to say this, as much as love Long Line of Leavers — probably the best Caedmon’s Call album ever. So many years and I still love CC. It’s true. I’ve listened to them longer than I’ve been a Christian.
• I’ve heard it said that if God seems distant it’s probably because you’ve drawn away; the implicit assumption is, of course, that God is static and that he always wants to be close. In light of scripture, does this seem true? Are there not many people in scripture who were desperate to draw close to God only to find him still distant? I think when we talk about God we need to remember that he’s also a person, or a Person if you will, who has thoughts higher than ours and a plan greater than we can understand. God’s not static. He moves, we move, it’s the grand danse (as you may have heard said). If God seems distant and you don’t understand why — if you want to draw near and nothing happens — all you can say is that there is a reason. It’s almost blase in its simplicity. But there is a reason. Sometimes you don’t get to understand, sometimes you do, but there’s always a reason.
• It’s hard to synthesise the appalling poverty most of the world labours in and the almost limitless prosperity we enjoy. The question is, of course, at what point does prosperity become a curse? This very blog begs ask that question: I have enough money to buy a computer and enough free time to contribute this ocean of dross that is the internet. How much time do I spend feeding the hungry and how much time do I spend feeding my own various hungers? How much should I?
• Candace is getting baptised on Saturday, which is totally awesome. Baptisms are amazing things, no matter which side of the spectrum you fall on. It’s a powerful symbol no matter how you look on it. I’m a paedobatist by preference, but anyone who fulfils God’s command to baptise is terrific in my books. I have a special bit of confusion for “Reformed Baptist” (decide which side you’re on, you freaks!) who seem to have forgotten that Reformed theology leads inexorably to the baptism of children, but hey, it’s all good.
• It seems to me that a little introspection and self-knowledge is a good thing, but a http://www.aldaily.com/lot leads to confusion. Maybe it’s because people function on a sort of quantum level: You measure yourself enough and you change. Then you have to start over again and it becomes a full-time occupation. And not a fun one.
• Beer is proof that God loves us; dentist are proof he can change his mind.
• I’m less three teeth, by the way.
• You ever have it where you say, “It can’t get any better than this?” and then it does? Yeah. I got that. It’s called marriage. I’m an incurable optimist, it’s true.
• This is probably the best thing I have in my feeds.
• It seems every nation has its legacy to overcome. US, India, China, all the big ones.

• Sometimes when Laura leaves the house to go out and do whatever, I do dishes and listen to post-rock. You know, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions in the Sky, Mono, Red Sparrowes, that sort of thing. Right now I’m listening to This is Your Captain Speaking. It’s good stuff! If you’ve ever listened to post-rock, you’ll know how hard it is to come across truly interesting material, even by those veterans of the genre such as (and especially) Mogwai. TIYCS seems interested in being interesting. That’s good.
• I don’t like megachurches. I mean, I can see where they fit into the ecosystem of Christianity — if it can be called an ecosystem as opposed to a burgeoning, idiotic choas — but I don’t like them. I don’t think I ever will. It’s not simply that they’re generally white, suburban, middle-class and almost always utterly devoted to not offending anyone. It’s that they’re not distributed enough. They’re too centralised. Thus, one pastor boffs his secretary, the whole thing goes under, and your sanctuary gets converted into indoor soccer field. I’m pretty sure churches should be small, efficient, face-to-face, involved, local, community-based, and active. But mostly small. Enough that you can’t hide in the crowds. But also enough that if something goes wrong, and entire faith community isn’t left floundering in the shallows.
• Let me ask you this: Why do you dislike Thomas Kinkade’s art? Is it because his art is bad? I bet it isn’t. I bet you don’t know good art from bad art even if such things exist. What you probably mean to say, instead of, “I dislike Thoman Kinkade’s art,” is, “I dislike Thomas Kinkade“. That would probably be more accurate. You don’t like his commercialising of his art (but when was art ever not commercial?), you dislike his subject matter (though his paintings are quite nice to look at), and you especially dislike the types of people who buy his prints (you think they’re generally the unwashed white trash living in trailer parks somewhere, their floor and ceilings and furniture covered in linoleum). You don’t want to be one of them, because that wouldn’t be… something. Wouldn’t be cool, wouldn’t be acceptable to your peers, wouldn’t truly speak to your sensibilities and your good taste. Maybe what you should say instead is, “It’s not kosher to like Thomas Kinkade… so I don’t like him.” Because at least then you’d be a bit more honest. In the meantime, look at some of his paintings. They’re quite nice.
• This may be some indie music heresy, but you know what’s wrong with My Bloody Valentine? They’re completely and mind-numbingly boring. Sure, they came up with sounds no-one had ever heard a guitar make before, but none of those sounds is interesting.
• I hate modern classical music. I really do. Things started going off the rails in the early 1900s and haven’t gotten back on since. Once I thought, “Why have people accepted abstract art, but not abstract music?” The answer is, of course, that a bunch of different colours splashed on a canvas a la Pollock can be extraordinarily — if unintentionally — beautiful. It doesn’t hurt me to look at. Notes seemingly scribbled on a page at random, however, has the capability to make me — and from the look of it lots of people — wince. (I am abusing my dashes; I know.) Harmony and melody aren’t old social conventions meant to stifle the artists. They are a common framework in which we as Westerners operate. It may indeed be that this only a custom, but that doesn’t matter: It’s ingrained and there’s no point in the composer trying to wiggle it loose. You are literally hurting me with your atonal disasters, your craptastic 12-tone form, and your alternative rhythmic nightmare. Go write some music someone wants to listen to; see if there is perhaps something of value to be found in those old forms everyone seems to have abandoned without a reasonable alternatives. Rediscover, for heaven’s sake, the power of beautiful music. Don’t make it your mission to question what beauty is. It just is.
• My, there are far too many dishes here.

I really wanted to get this down on the hard drive… and I didn’t realise how bad the piano recording was until I had got to singing. So i just gave up and didn’t bother correcting any of the (obvious) flaws in the levels. It isn’t pretty, I tell you.

Scatterbrain – Ogg Vorbis
Scatterbrain – MP3

Everything I record these days seems to have a ringing noise at the high end… anyone have any ideas how to fix this problem?

I feel old these days, with people I used to know and people I still know getting engaged and married. We’re all growing up and it’s happy and sad at the same time.

This is the best life I can possibly imagine for myself. Married to a woman who (it’s true, I didn’t make it up) loves me and who I love back. Living in a pretty nice apartment in a bit of a rough neighbourhood with access to all the amenities we want. Need a coffee? Walk over and get one. Need some groceries? Five minutes down the road. Want to rent a video? Basically across the street. Want to buy Chinese rice and fish heads? Asian supermarket around the corner. Want cheap (in every meaning of the word) furniture? Ten minutes away, an Ikea. You get the picture.

I mean, I can imagine living in a swankier place, owning a house with a backyard and all that jazz, but I don’t think it would make me any happier. It might be the icing on the cake. But right now I have everything I need and more than I ever thought I could have.

That’s good. I don’t miss my subterranean existence in that miserable hovel of an apartment I used to have. I don’t miss being precariously poised on the edge of infatuation and incandescent disaster. I don’t miss the restlessness of wanting something or someone and being constantly outside looking in. I don’t miss much. Maybe, sometimes, I miss the way there were only two bus stops between me and work, but that’s it.

It was never the best of times. It was almost always the worst.

Yet there’s still something about being young. Or younger. I’m pushing 30 here. I don’t feel it at all and I wonder if anyone ever really does. At 20, 30 seemed so very far away. Now, at 27, it feel right around the corner. There was a time when I counted hours in a day. Now I count days in a week. Soon, I suspect, I’ll be counting weeks, and then years.

I miss being a romantic. Not the action of being romantic, not the things I do to make Laura feel loved, but actually being a romantic. I think it was being on the other side of dreams coming true that made me feel as if it must, must happen. As if getting there was the reason behind so many thing. Now that my dreams have come true — in ways different than I could have imagined — I can’t help but notice all those people whose dreams, whatever they are, have not and may never will.

You may always find yourself chasing a dream and never getting anywhere, feeling like you were destined for something bigger than yourself and falling short of your expectations. Or you will fall in and out of love like a person breaking the surface of an ocean and going under again and again. You may never get there. Maybe you will find it and it will leave you.

I’m not a romantic anymore. Oh, I fall for a good love story like anyone else — Endless Love was almost too good to be spoiled by its awful ending, for instance — but I’m not enamoured of the concept that life works out all the time. Maybe that’s because mine seems to be, so far, despite me. I don’t know. God works in mysterious ways, as the song goes, and despite what you may think about God, I’m pretty sure some of those mysterious ways are to teach concrete lessons. Sometimes people get what they don’t deserve, and sometimes they do. Either way.

Tonight I can’t sleep. I think it has something to do with the coffee I had three hours ago. I know, drinking coffee before bed, not a good thing. I used to be able to do that.

To all you people I used to know: Congratulations. At least five or six of you got married. This is good. And to those that I still know: Double congratulations. You’re great people. I hope very much you remain happy.

I’m 27.