I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.
— @joahua
I know this is an old story, but I stumbled across it again today & found the phrasing amusing:
“They revolutionised Britain’s music industry, conquered America and now the Beatles are set to dominate the download charts after settling a trademark dispute with Apple computers.â€
Apple computers can be used to settle trademark disputes! Yes, even lawyers can use them!
Heh.
So some American rocks up and Sydney stops. There were more police than civilians in some parts of Sydney last night (Circular Quay), public transport is stopped, private vehicles are allowed in, and it must have cost an absolute fortune in overtime.
All for some American power-behind-the-throne. If he’s going to be the key string-puller, he should at least stay invisible so we don’t need to concern ourselves with his (admittedly unwelcome) presence.
They were blocking all useful traffic (but letting private cars through? Bizarre…), and claimed to have been using sniffer dogs on the cars they were letting through. Yeah, right. I didn’t see a single dog last night. I was wearing a backpack the whole evening. OH, LOOK, THERE GOES A TERRORIST!
No-one stopped me…
Then, after having blocked off half of the northern CBD, police stop a protest from going ahead on the grounds that it’s going to cause traffic chaos. Like that was a consideration a few nights back.
And, whilst I’m on this little soapbox, what on earth is a “lawful protest” about? “Oh, here you go, protest in a nice little out -of-the-way place where no-one can see you, much less be seen by the person you’re protesting about/to. Just… stay away from the Rocks and everything’ll be okay.”
Because I’ve seen so many rabid gun-toting uni-students trying to blow up the US puppetmaster. Nevermind that Australia has far-more-sane gun-control legislation than the US does… John Howard isn’t the centre of all this rubbish when he travels to the US, even, and yet over here we’ve got to keep unarmed protestors a good couple of kilometers from their target in case they pull out… well, something.
Meanwhile, I don’t know whether I should be satisfied or frustrated that I was wearing a conspicuous black backpack all evening around various protest sites and didn’t get glanced at once.
Go home, Cheney. You’ve wasted enough of Sydney’s time and resources already.
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)
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.
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.