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Sooo Early

Well, it's the day after and--due to the "open bar"--people are a little slow waking up. Breakfast featured a "trickling" effect as everyone woke up and stumbled in. We have yet to clean up the site of the reception before heading back to Omaha.

It's My Birthday

August 17, 2008, Jeff and Stacey's wedding, Nebraska City, NE

I'm about to head over to the Morton Historic Barns, near the Lied Lodge in Nebraska City, to prepare the music for this evenings wedding. It's been a fairly relaxing day, thankfully. The wedding will be late this evening, at 6:00 pm, so we'll be busy until midnight in all likelihood. It sounds like there will be some drinks at the reception too, which could be nice.

The deep breath before the plunge...

Wedding Fever

Yesterday marked the beginning of the festivities for Jeff and Stacey's wedding! The event isn't until Sunday at 6:00 pm so we've got tons of time. Plus, it'll be my birthday!!! Party time!

Renovation

This website is currently under construction. Please be prepared for minor turbulence.

Framework Development

It's official. This website is about to not suck. I'm refactoring the entire site, specifically including the blogger and flickr syndication, using a new framework for php I've been working on. It's based on concepts I've picked up in all my research in the last two years, and work I've already done for this website. Here are the features, which ought to look familiar to framework conisseurs:

  • URL rewriting using the routing pattern
  • module/action based organization structure
  • templating in raw php, with capability to use templating engines
  • request filters
  • class autoloading
  • native caching
  • configuration system
  • zone/slot system
  • simple template helpers system

The only thing that's actually revolutionary about this framework is that it's not bloated. It's lean, mean, and lightning fast. To process a single request, you hit basically four (4) scripts. That's compared to a typical framework with a stack trace usually 10-15 deep.

Nonexistence of Atheism

One day, I was walking along in the park and I encountered a young man, just over thirty I think. I decided to stop and talk to him, on no account of my own. "Hello, how are you doing?" I asked.

"Just fine." He said. "Just enjoying the weather."

"It is nice out, isn't it?" I asked, hypothetically. "Do you live around here?"

"Sure. Just up the street, there." He pointed towards a nearby neighborhood.

"Do you go to church?" I asked, swinging the conversation rather differently than he expected.

"Nah.. I don't believe in religion." He quickly stated.

"Religion...?" I asked. "You mean, you're an 'atheist'?" I used my fingers to indicate quotes.

"Yes, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in God."

"Can I ask you a question?" Questions were just flying, already.

He paused a moment. "Yeah, go ahead."

"What if I said to you, 'I don't believe in atheists.' What would you say?"

He replied, "I'd say that's insane. I'm standing right in front of you, telling you I'm an atheist."

"Interesting... But do you know how many hairs are on the back of a full-grown male Tibetan yak?"

"No..." He stuttered.

"Do you know the combined weight of the sand on all the beaches in Hawaii?"

"No..."

"So you don't know everything?"

"No, I don't. Nobody knows everything." He seemed smug to admit his ignorance of all things.

"Thomas Edison once said, 'We don't know one millionth of one percent of anything.' That seems quite a statement, doesn't it?" I paused, but continued quickly. "Suppose you know one percent of everything. That's quite a generous hypothetical, isn't it?"

"Yes, I suppose." He replied.

"Well, in the 99 percent of everything you don't yet know, wouldn't it be possible that there is ample evidence to prove that there is in fact a God?"

"I... suppose." He stammered again, irritated just a little.

"If I were to say, 'There is no gold in China.' What would I need to prove that statement? I'd need to know that there is no gold in the rivers, coasts, mountains, dirt, pawn shops, or fillings of teeth in all of China, right? I'd literally have to know everything." He nodded, and I continued. "But if I were to say, 'There is gold in China.' I'd have a much safer statement. I wouldn't need to know much at all, would I? One ounce of gold produced could prove my statement absolutely correct." He nodded yet again, really bewildered by my reasoning. "So, I say to you sir, 'I don't believe in atheists.'"

He blinked. "I... I don't see how you arrived at that conclusion, from gold in China."

"In order for you to know that God doesn't exist, you'd need to know everything." I continued. "And we've already agreed that one percent of everything is more than you know. So, in fact, since nobody knows everything, no one can know that God doesn't exist, and therefore atheists do not exist."

He began to speak, but I kept on speaking. "In fact, you are only really saying that you don't really know whether God exists or not. They have a word for that: 'agnostic' or 'those who profess ignorance'."

He cringed, and I said, "Yeah.. I know. It's painful, but now you see that my unbelief in atheism is a lot safer than your unbelief in God, simply by logic alone. And here, I see God's creation all around us. It takes only a child's intelligence to know that a painting has a painter or that a building has a builder. The Bible says, 'The fool has said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that does good."

Adapted from Ray Comfort, The School of Biblical Evangelism.

New Phones!!!

I'm so excited.. I can't stop thinking about my new phone, coming tomorrow! It's a _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _!!! Yeah, I'll let you figure it out, but I'm excited. Hopefully I'll be able to do more moblogging (blogger), networking (facebook), tweeting (twitter), eating (del.ico.us), etc.

Another New Theme

...and yes, I did change my website's theme again. I get bored easy. Don't you know this by now?

Contact Page

There is a new Contact Me page on the site, complete with contact form+validation and hex-encoded email address. Check it out, and drop me a line.

Flickr Page

Check out my new photos page integrated directly into my site, using similar technology to that of my blog!

If anyone needs some help getting similar in-website syndications of their blogger or flickr feeds, let me know. The code is surprisingly easy to use and extremely customizable.

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