23 Feb 2007
I just did the maths and figured out that if I were to spend an average of 0.4 seconds checking each spam message that evil people threw my way, I’d have already saved two hours of my life because of Akismet’s filtering.
Two. Hours. I only started using it on the 13th of January — that’s a little over a month ago. Just using Akismet wins me back half a day every year! (Probably more, coz 0.4 seconds is for scanning over each spam message, not including the time it takes to flag legitimate messages that wind up in mod queues and save them)
23 Feb 2007
After staring at a file with intent thoughts of opening it for a good two seconds, you wonder why the computer’s not responding. Then you realise people normally use an input device other than their mind to achieve such mundane tasks.
22 Feb 2007
Dependence on God in prayer is appropriate because He is all knowing, loving, and powerful. Inaction masquerading as dependence isn’t, because He is all knowing, loving, and powerful. Prayer and bringing stuff before God doesn’t mean forgetting about that stuff/thinking He’ll take it out of your sight. There’s no reason to anticipate that God mightn’t involve you in answering your own prayers — in fact, there’s much more reason to expect that he may.
He’s prepared works in advance for us to do, and Ephesians chapter 2 says that we’re created in Christ Jesus (that is, I think, re-born as Christians accepting Christ as Lord over our lives) for this purpose. Action is an essential part of our being created/becoming Christian.
Elsewhere in the New Testament, we’re told that “it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” [ESV translation, from Philippians chapter 2:13] and, elsewhere [1 Cor 2:16], that we have the mind of Christ — so our will and God’s should line up. The letter to the Colossians talks about our seeing that we “have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator”.
So, if the will of God and His people is to line up, it’s ridiculous to think that praying is some kind of personally-empty endevour — it’s not just a matter of putting things on a plate before God, saying “here you are, deal with it”, and walking away without another glance back. No, we’re being changed into the image of God, which means denying (literally meaning, to disown or deny utterly) self and following Christ alone.
If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he also will deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful– for he cannot deny himself.
[ESV, 2 Timothy chapter 2:11]
Living with him means being prepared — indeed, expecting — to be used by God in answer to some things we come before him to ask. Of course, we’re still ultimately dependent upon God for forgiveness–”If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” In all these things we can only depend upon the love of God in sending his son, Jesus, to take our place… and we should be prepared respond to the enormity of that sacrifice.
21 Feb 2007
I just got a somewhat-bizarre phone call about how best to mix jelly and vodka. A spot of quick googling later (yes, take that, I just used it as a verb without respecting your trademark, punks) yielded this inebriation-friendly post from the BBC’s website:
The idea of vodkajelly is a simple one: get drunk as quickly as you can, by eating a food most commonly found at young children’s birthday parties.
The basic recipe is just that – very basic. Make up a packet of jelly, using between a quarter and half of the amount of water suggested. Top up with as much vodka as you like (or can handle).
Trust the Brits ;-)
Sounds worth trying sometime, though… probably not something to leave in a family-friendly fridge, and probably not with that sort of ratio… ½ Vodka jelly might be a bit much for those of us who would prefer not to get totally sloshed whilst eating dessert.
21 Feb 2007
I don’t know what kind of Internet access work are using (well, I know who they’re using: it’s not quite the same), but they should seriously think about changing things around a bit. Aside from wierd peering issues a few months back, now they’ve just dropped off the face of the planet for *counts* I think about three days now. Predictably, someone is pointing the finger at Telstra.
Everyone always points at Telstra. Customers don’t care whose fault it is — they’re paying whomever to provide a reliable service, not Telstra. Upstream contracts/networks are someone elses’ responsibility altogether!
It’s pretty abysmal that it takes three days to get Internet servicing more than 100 people working again… Sigh.
I’m here at home on perfectly functional Internet, but the things I’ve needed to do the last few days have involved the project website which has been equally unavailable. If I were a full time employee I’d have been paid for two days of doing nothing this week… why don’t people take redundancy a bit more seriously?!
It also may or may not be diplomatic for me to whinge about the corporate VoIP service they’re using at this point… it’s still working (presumably a separate link altogether), but it sounds like a really bad pre-DECT-era cordless telephone service, and that’s when your ears aren’t being blasted by the sounds of a modem as you dial in.
Grumble grumble. I might delete this post later if I think better of it… for the minute, suffice to say Josh is in a pretty bad mood about quality of service he’s meant to be depending upon. I learnt last week that I don’t have the freedom to negotiate service contracts (yes, even where none expressly providing that kind of service yet exist — think mobiles…) which made me a little upset (because I thought I’d done really well talking with a certain vendor who will remain nameless), but saw the point of it all. But when reliability gets this bad, for an all-online venture, I am afraid to entrust hosting to that kind of environment. You can get really good hosting in Oz for way under $300/month (and even less if you’re prepared to commit to contracts, because that’s the way most Aussie providers do things) — not necessarily myth-of-the-nines hosting (SegPub are one hosting company with a really good rep, but they only do a 99.5% SLA), but waaay better than three days of downtime in a month.
In case you were wondering, that works out to about 90% availability per annum. And it’s not necessarily going to flake out at times no-one is using it, and, given the demographic, it’s not an office-hours-only kind of service. And I wouldn’t be looking at alternate service providers because…?
(Yeah I’ll probably pull this article soon… just wanted to whine.)