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.)
20 Feb 2007
Either I have supremely bad timing when it comes to trying to access their website, or their reliability sucks of late. I normally pop in to view or upload photos every fortnight or month, and of the last four times I’ve tried to access it (counting uploading/tagging session as one “access”), it’s been unavailable “having a massage” twice.
I am slightly more grumpy (only slightly) about this because I pay for it. Obviously it’s a system wide thing, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Blogger just dropping off the radar like that multiple times in a couple of months. LiveJournal has been known to, but their community give them enough crap about it they know people are unimpressed. (And, yes, MySpace does this all the time, but anyone using it as a benchmark of technical excellence should be taken out and shot.)
It just all came back online & it was fascinating watching as different parts of the site slowly came back together (presumably the caching servers were all flushed and slowly filling up again from the content servers via load balancers stopping the whole thing falling over again… so much geekage…)
Shrug, I’ll probably renew when it’s time, just coz it’s so good to be able to dump a couple of GB of photos up there whenever I want, and tag & search them easily later on. Plus it’s cheap storage (potentially cheaper than BingoDisk, even, though obviously more limited in scope) which is always a good thing to have around.
20 Feb 2007
And that’s just what it’ll do.
I made the mistake of ordering an affogato at about 8 this evening, thinking that between going out with some friends after & general geeking out when I got home after, I’d be in bed by a fairly reasonable time (like 1am or thereabouts).
Clearly, I was wrong. Ah well… It’s been a good several hours! I don’t drink coffee often, as evidenced by the fact that a single shot of espresso can keep me up til 3 in the morning! On the plus side, I started learning InDesign by designing a timetable! It’s a sufficiently unpolished beast (as is Illlustrator) on PC when compared against Photoshop (and, to a lesser extent, Premiere Pro), but it feels far simpler than Illustrator.
I’ve recently subscribed to Before & After magazine and they’ve got some articles around using Illustrator, and when I see how it’s done things do just click, but I still feel a very long way from anything vaguely resembling proficiency with the app.
If you’d care to know what I consider “proficiency”, basically I just mean being able to sit with a client and have Illustrator in front of you and use it without embarrassment. I’m inches away from that goal with Photoshop, and Premiere Pro has always felt like something I can just guess at and get right 95% of the time, but for the rest of Creative Suite/Production Studio… not so much.