14 Apr 2008
His disciples said, “Ah, now you are speaking plainly and not using figurative speech!”– John 16:29
Yay for clarity! You can find the fulltext of John 16 here. Apologies for the slight ramblingness of this post. It gains clarity towards the end… twas somewhat shaped off a Skype conversation that I haven’t the time nor energy to properly edit at this point :)
John 8:14 is pretty funny in its portrayal of the sheer incorrectness of the Pharisees’ assertion of the passage prior: It’s like… you can’t speak truth because you’re speaking truth about yourself (!!)… and then, fastforward back to 16:30 – “We know that you know all things and don’t need anyone to question you; this is why we believe that you came from God” – then, in verse 31, Jesus — “oh, so NOW you get it…”
Verse 32 — “But, seriously… yeah, right. Even if you say you do you’re all about to pissbolt… Oh, that’s now, btw.”
33 — “but I’ve said this stuff so that”… You’ll know after the resurrection what’s going on… The resurrection is the act that will make sense of all of this; there will be no figures of speech because it’s a concrete demonstration of what the Christ is achieving — “overcoming the world” and bringing peace for those who are in him — kinda like way the Father is with Him even when all others desert
Verse 23 is confusing… “You won’t ask me anything” vs. “My father will give you whatever you ask in my name”… are they both talking about prayer or is the first talking about information/knowing stuff about Christ’s identity and relationship to the Father and the second talking about prayer?’
Perhaps its about the perfect sufficiency of the cross — reading 22 AND 23 together:
(Paraphrase of Jesus:) You will be sorrowful til I’m back, and then I basically won life (literally! haha) and you have a joy that can’t be taken away from you and what you’re asking the Father will be asked in my name!
You’re not trying to ask it directly of Him (the Father) anymore. You won’t need to, because you have the Spirit of Christ once Jesus has conquered death and returned to His Father. What I think that means, in the context of the “Spirit of truth” from earlier in the passage, is that the things you ASK for are asked as Jesus would (i.e. you’re not standing alone before the father with an impaired relationship asking things for yourself once Jesus has conquered and we’ve received the spirit of truth that speaks what He hears from the Father and Son. Our hearts will desire different things, and we’ll have a complete joy that can’t be taken from us in Christ.
We don’t get the Spirit so we can ask for crap, but so that He can declare what he hears (from the Father) — AND — in verse 14-15, His purpose is to glorify the son, who is King over everything that is the Father’s; the Spirit will declare the things of Jesus to his people. So, asking of the Father “in my name” is about asking to receive joy in full…
“I am not saying that I will ask the Father on your behalf” — Does this mean Jesus ISN’T an intermediary (as in Hebrews 7:25)? And Romans 8:26 says that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us when we don’t know what or how to pray. But this passage (John 16) says that the Holy Spirit will speak only what He hears from the Father and Son: therefore, His intercessory prayer for us will necessarily take the shape of prayer for things that God desires. And that should be our prayer always.
Christ needn’t ask the Father on our behalf because His act of death and resurrection/victory OVER death means that our sins have been paid for if we trust in Jesus and call him our Lord. When our sins are paid for, we can be in relationship with God the Father and pray to Him; the High Priest that Hebrews 7 talks about is presenting us blamelessly in unblemished relationship again with God, so we can approach Him. When Christ’s perfect sacrifice was made, we are able to and should do as the writer of Hebrews says we should in chapter 10 of that letter: Where there is forgiveness of sins and lawlessness, there is no longer any offering for sin. Therefore… let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
We are able to draw near to God. Right now this is in the form of prayer to Him and for His purposes; that He might achieve them and use His people to this end in His service. We don’t need to pray in a church or temple, we don’t need to burn incense or hear music to uplift us — though these things are not intrinsically bad. We have freedom as we are saved by Christ’s sacrifice for us; we have a new Spirit which He has put in His people to allow them to draw near to God without impediment or constriction. We needn’t pray to Christ, because He has opened a new way to the Father for us, having fulfilled the law of the scriptures and making perfect that which we (His people) could not.
God’s presence used to dwell in the holiest place of the Temple; now, He dwells in the hearts of His people as Christ has made us His own.
When Jesus says “It is to your advantage that I go away”, he means it. If Christ hadn’t gone away from His followers to the brutal Roman cross to pay for our sins, we would not have peace with God, and there’s no way He could say “I have overcome the world” without lying through his teeth unless He faced death and came out the other side, opening a new way to God for His people.
08 Feb 2008
These things can be had from PayPal for about five bucks. Or $7.50 if you’re an Aussie. Verisign will flog them off to you for $30, if you’d like, but basically PayPal rocks for this kinda stuff. It’s a one-time password token that effectively enhances your authentication by a massive degree. It’s cool because it works with PayPal and eBay. It’s cooler (and worthwhile) because you can potentially use it with OpenID.
Essentially, it’s a random number seeded with a unique key that gets appended to your regular password. This defeats keyloggers and pretty much all kinds of phishing currently out there. These kinds of devices have been used in corporate VPN/dial-in scenarios for years now (predominantly, in the situations I’m aware of, with technology by RSA SecureID), but this is the first I’ve seen of it from Verisign.
And, sure, it’s only as secure as physical security or the endpoints themselves are, but it’s a massive step up from “what’s your cat’s name?” two-factor auth (though, unfortunately, I think PayPal/eBay offer that as a backup).
I’ve ordered mine and will probably be having a play with OpenID implementations of it (backed by Verisign’s PIP service, but not overly tied to it because of OpenID’s identity-delegation ability) once it arrives (10 business days).
Can’t help but wonder what Verisign’s rates for these things are in a standalone sense. Normally on 5 year contracts, but in terms of cost-per-token. Seems like a great way to defeat the idiot users who insist on having passwords that are blatantly obvious (argue all you like about strength policies: it’s often not feasible when balanced against support load for resultant forgotten passwords).
Also, to those who argue PayPal = evil, if you’re in Australia then please… don’t. Unlike in the US, here they’ve basically got the same financial reporting obligations as any bank does, and customer service necessarily to match it. All the horror stories from the ‘States (not that I think them universally untrue!) pretty much couldn’t happen here or they’d be chucked out of the country. And, whilst they’re so heavily subsidising (or at least obtaining bulk discounts for) this kinda tech, that’s cool with me.
07 Feb 2008
He seemed like someone you would meet in a movie, whose life was falling apart and who was attempting to begin something new. Only, this ‘something new’ had its origins in sameness, and the driving force behind it, mediocrity. His wife and dog, unbeknownst to him, had planned to leave him for some time now: his presence, his insistence upon ‘white space’, bore all the markings of an insufferably inanity. Living in an obscure corner of an increasingly insignificant part of the world, dealing with diminishing clientele (both in calibre, number, and conspicuousity), it didn’t much matter what he said next. No-one was listening.
But, you see, they were. At least fifty of them, hanging on his every indifferent word. Such is the metooism of the Internet, deserving of its proper-noun-capitalisation as one would capitalise the title of any film of the ‘my-life-is-falling-apart-and-oh-I-hope-something-interesting-would-happen-to-substantiate-sales’ variety. These days, however, not even all such films declare themselves worthy of said capitalised status. The deliciously ambivalent “definitely, maybe” sports no such accoutrements common to film, and, you know, things with names – but its name provides for fascinating displays of nothingness in all kinds of contexts, so it can perhaps be forgiven. I sat across from a workstation preparing the launch of this and other films in this country on Monday, and listened, enthralled, as the male lead declared he was thrilled to hear “definitely, maybe is releasing in Australia”. Well, that is a non-announcement, now, isn’t it? (Launching on V-day… vacuous?)
Still, when even our most influential and award-winning actors and directors lament the dearth (or, perhaps simply the death) of cinema’s golden age, we must pause to consider what is being achieved by the broad spectrum of media before us. All the trends of Internet media cannot save us from its dubious creative potential in the face of browser limitations (I have recently been working myself into a lather over the indefinite lag between multi-touch reaching the Internet compared to the rest of consumer technology — let it be noted, mobile client-side is the future?). All the films in the world cannot save us from the mediocrity of their scriptwriters, as all the blogs in the world cannot save us from trends of buzzwords and analysis and not a single real client or solved problem in sight. Neither can google (that not requiring proper-noun-capitalisation as it is used synonymously with ‘search’) save us, investing its vast resources into online platform advances. Platforms are not content. Content drives growth. Enough of that. Clooney says we should all watch TV, because that’s where the innovation is going on these days. I struggle to come to terms with that, somewhat. Part of me would (honestly) be quite content to sit and watch endless episodes of whichever series is available on DVD. DVD, because, as much as I occasionally enjoy advertising, I have absolutely no desire to see the same commercial over again fifteen times over the course of a single episode — get your bloody ads on YouTube and if they make consumers care enough, they’ll find you… nothing wrong with democratising TV advertising values, except, ironically, the potentially diminishing production values of such ads in light of the decreased expenditure on production — yeah, that’s what I thought.
The other part of me finds it’s all much the same. We all know The Simpsons is brilliant, because it pushes boundaries and made certain people in the 1990s acutely uncomfortable. Family Guy fills the void, now, only without the coherency. Its near-absurdist “we-don’t-actually-expect-you-to-get-this” irreverent take on pretty much anything is funny, but not for reasons we can comprehend. And it’s hardly going to stand the test of time. An animated analogue to The Chaser’s War on Everything, only less coherent. But let’s look at The Chaser *for a moment — it *is the news. Oh, wait, The Colbert Report used that line first. At any rate, The Chaser made international media before Stephen Colbert, for the audacity of — wait for it — actions beyond mere commentary.
And there we find it. The matter in which the public’s interest is held is not the simpering-yet-somehow-hostile satire, but in the violation of the sole sanctified role of government, the defence of its citizens. The noteworthiness of this act came not in the violation of this responsibility for security, but the triviality by which this breach took place. Such is the Leviathan in whom we are collectively engaged by social contract: without defence against the status hominum naturalis, bellum omnium contra omnes as Hobbes rightly presumes it, if we consider ‘nature’ after the fall.
The implication, of course, is that our government is powerless — or, at the very least, powerless to enact that which it is its duty to. C.S. Lewis expresses it thus:
“As a result, classical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good — anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.” (C.S. Lewis, “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State”, in ESSAY COLLECTION: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories)
One might argue this is merely the impact of democratisation of governance. That, as the Leviathan power is somewhat more dynamic in its headship in this present society, it will necessarily reflect ‘leadership’ over lives in ways unprecedented in history, as the will of the individual is closer to that of the state. What pluralist absurdity: the existence of democracy itself demarks the necessity of compromise, the inability of man to, independent of the state, agree. Democracy is responsive to and guarantees the persistent disparity of the will of the individual and the State.
The role of the state, therefore, should be constrained to that of arbiter and defender alone. Anything beyond that is an unnecessary infringement of the rights of the individual. Yet our political clime is such that we assume this necessary, and, historically, this is true. We accept the mediocrity of humanity, celebrate it even. There is nothing new under the sun.
And we *still *trust in our ‘leaders’ for potential change. Hello, Kevin, hello, Obama. You are mere men. Your revolutions will fade. Hello, those leaders who have come before them. Your names are not remembered.
Make poverty history, cry the same people who decry government-sanctioned discrimination against the poor, the indigenous, the homosexual. Their voices are not alone. Make poverty history, cry the same people who decry government-sanctioned secularisation and interest-rate-driven threats to their comfortably prosperous ‘but-not-too-much’ upper-middle class ‘christian’ existence. Their agenda is not that of the Christ.
“A hungry man thinks about food, not freedom”, Lewis continues in that same essay. What then, do we consider? We are hungry, though not for food. We are hungry for meaning that is not forthcoming. Hungry for the righting of wrongs in our eyes; wrongs that are plain to all, but persistent because of… well, how would you finish that sentence?
Let me find your grace in the valley
Let me find your life in my death
Let me find your joy in my sorrow
Your wealth in my need
That you’re near with every breath
In the valley
There is only one meaning, one absolute reality, one Lord, one faith, and one God worth trusting because he is over all and sustains all. Without him, the meaninglessness of this earth’s seemingly-perpetual ability to decay should have us surrender to that entirely. Instead, we are to surrender to Him, or embrace that ambivalent indifference so ultimately characteristic of the endeavours of humankind.
25 Jan 2008
Windows Vista ships with a delightful tool by the aid of which it regularly digs itself a grave. Here are some findings after three months of use, sorted by number of crashes.
|
Microsoft Internet Explorer
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92
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|
Windows Problem Reporting
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52
|
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Application Launcher
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17
|
|
Windows Explorer
|
12
|
|
Adobe Photoshop CS3
|
8
|
|
Microsoft Outlook
|
6
|
|
Microsoft Zune
|
4
|
|
Mobile Networking Wizard
|
4
|
|
Skype
|
4
|
|
Windows Media Player
|
4
|
|
Adobe Bridge CS3
|
3
|
|
Adobe Illustrator CS3
|
3
|
|
Adobe Dreamweaver 8
|
3
|
|
Firefox
|
3
|
|
Sync manager
|
3
|
|
Windows Task Manager
|
3
|
|
Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
|
2
|
|
Eclipse
|
2
|
|
Gephex
|
2
|
|
Windows Live Messenger
|
2
|
|
Adobe OnLocation CS3
|
1
|
|
Adobe Photoshop CS2
|
1
|
|
Driver software installation
|
1
|
|
Filezilla client
|
1
|
|
Microsoft Powerpoint
|
1
|
|
VLC
|
1
|
By vendor, that constitutes 176 crashes/hangs/’not-respondings’ of Microsoft software to 21 of Adobe software over the same period. Now, it feels like I’m cheating the numbers here by reporting Windows Problem Reporting itself, because probably 90% of its crashes occur when reporting on Internet Explorer, but hey — these are the numbers Microsoft’s software itself gave me, so who’s complaining?
In case you think this isn’t a fair comparison for reasons of time spent using various programmes, exclude Problem Reporting crashes (though you shouldn’t) and the Microsoft stat comes down to 124. That is, lots.
I can’t think of a day since owning this computer I wouldn’t have used at least one piece of Adobe software, most commonly more. To be fair, Adobe software is more likely to do weird things (like, ya know, refusing to save) causing me to restart the application rather than letting it ‘crash’ per se… but Microsoft’s junk is vastly less likely to give me any sort of warning before flaking out.
These crashes are reported over a three-month period spanning November 26 until January 25.
Vista SP1 continues to be eagerly awaited.