I have CDO. It's obsessive-compulsive disorder, sorted alphabetically
Occasionally I get forwarded email. Not just the junk that some people pass around, and not even the good stuff that people pass around. This tends to be a legitimate forward of information I want or need, coming from people who are a bit technically challenged. I can tell this because I can’t immediately see the forwarded email – it comes in as a text attachment.
Inside, it looks messy (yes, names, addresses, and IPs have been munged).
I go through my Gmail spam every so often. Google is pretty good at parsing what is junk and what is good, but they aren’t perfect. So I look in the spam bucket and clean it out occasionally.
Tonight I found a subject line that made me laugh.
Now my new friend Greg ought to know that I don’t live near navigable water. I’m not a boater. I don’t need 52% more surface area in my sails.
But boy, that Greg sure knows how to make it easy to put up a blog entry.
Thanks, Greg.
And what a beautiful day it was! Crocuses and daffodils, sunshine and cold weather.
God is faithful.
Sometimes you hear an echo, your own words coming back to you.
Sometimes the echo is a bit distorted, not exactly what you said.
Sometimes it’s coming from someone else, and is malicious.
“It’ s not really automatic – you still have to press the button.”
In a similar vein, I can say that this music isn’t really free – you still have to provide your email address.
Page CXVI (I think one-sixteen, but I have heard them say see ecks vee eye) is giving away their whole music catalog to celebrate their Year of Jubilee. Pop over to here and grab it during the month of March.
These are the folks who make Hymns, a reworking of old classics into something modern. They do it well. I have blogged about them before, f o u r different times. I’m quite happy to accept and promote their music, and I would pay to go see a show of theirs.
The only other caveat I need to include is that to give their server some breathing space, they limit you to a single album download every five minutes. That’s not a terrible burden – grab one while you’re in the midst of something else, come back when you’re finished.
Recommended, and you can’t beat the price.
I wish people would get out of the “it sounds good” school of journalism, and get into the “what is it called?” school.
My latest rant is about this:
instead of this:
Brendan Keefe should have known better. His editor definitely should have known better. And yet, in the middle of a story about bridges collapsing, we have shooting flames instead of solid metal.
Brendan, Brendan, Brendan. What shall we do with you and your editor?
(original story here. Metal picture from TOMTEC, cropped and brightened. Cool sparks from Brendan Burton. Yes, I know they are eye beams instead of eye bars. It’s called creative license. Critics can do that. Journalists have to use footnotes to explain, or use the right term in the first place.)
I’m staying away from politics for a while – I find that I get bothered easily. So here’s something from the real world that bothers me.
I’m part of a FreeCycle group. People post to the newsgroup when they have something they don’t want anymore, rather than pitching it. I’ve seen everything from egg cartons to projection TVs. People can also post with wants – a family gets burned out and needs new furniture. A kid wants a particular doodad for a school project (the last one I saw was for hearing aids). Lots of people offer excess plants. We have been the beneficiary of multiple things, never posted a want, and have supplied at least one person’s want.
This want was astounding.
WANTED: Laser for a 40 caliber handgun
Thu Jan 24, 2013 8:42 am (PST) . Posted by: (redacted)
Springfield 40 caliber hand gun, I read it is attached to the barrel rod? Need it for training.
Well, then. That makes sense. This person has applied for a job somewhere and wants someone else to donate a $350 piece of hardware. If the donor has it, they bought it on purpose – this isn’t a plant that self-propagates or an egg carton that has outlived its usefulness.
Earlier this year, when we were cleaning out our shed, we came up with a bicycle, an electric mower, and a metal cart that we didn’t want/need anymore. We took them down to the street, taped FREE signs to each of them, and let the market work. We were gone that Saturday, and when we got back, the items were gone. Somebody benefited from our generosity.
But begging for a $350 specialized piece of equipment? Naah.
Another aspect: if they need this for their job, it’s part of job start-up costs. Count that in when you apply. At my old job, I needed a piece of software so that everyone could upgrade their software easily. I wrote up the business case and we purchased a worldwide license for Beyond Compare. I switched jobs, but the software didn’t. Last month I bought my own copy (personal) for my workplace. I can use it, work and home, forever. I bought it, and I plan on using it at my current job for the rest of my work life. My employer didn’t owe it to me. The world didn’t owe it to me. I wanted it, and I bought it.
And I’m staying away from politics.
Note: details of the want ad are munged for privacy.
My church partnered with another church in town to put up white crosses in their yards, as a memorial to the four thousand babies who are aborted every day.
That was how we left it on Saturday. There were a few crosses that had fallen down by Sunday morning – deer, wind, and feeble hammer hits accounted for those.
On Sunday night, though, somebody decided they didn’t like the crosses standing up in nice rows – so they drove through the crosses.
Twice.
In all, after the police had come and a group of men had set up the crosses, we lost about ten to damage.
That was a sad picture for me – it reminded me of the broken bodies of aborted babies. Which reminded me of Jesus dying on the cross, broken under the weight of the sins of the world (including mine).
The people that did this – they shouldn’t have.
And Jesus dying on the cross? He shouldn’t have, because He was sinless and perfect. I’m glad He did. And though I have to work to remember it sometimes, He died for the people who drove over the crosses. The difference between those people and me isn’t a matter of kind – we are all sinners – it’s a matter of degree.
And whether they have accepted Jesus as their savior.
I doubt I could make a living at it. I would probably get frustrated, and my productivity would wane rather quickly.
But for a while I’d rack up some pretty high scores in “find-an-error” – sort of the whack-a-mole for words and communication.
Like the one I found in this story:
Ouch. That government practice, owned by CEB, is six words distant! Wouldn’t the world be a nicer place, and easier to understand, if that had been originally written (or corrected by an editor) to say
Kris van Riper, who heads the government practice at consulting firm CEB (formerly known as Corporate Executive Board), said she is seeing increasing interest in agile development at agencies in this turbulent environment.
Who she is, what she does, what she said. Simples. I don’t know how to diagram a sentence, but I see six segments in the original, with only three or four in mine. And I like mine better. Hanging “In this turbulent environment” on the front seems dramatic and breathy. We are all living, working, and reading bad journalism in this turbulent environment. Everybody knows it’s rough, everybody is getting squeezed on several fronts. Tossing that in makes it seem like a silent cliffhanger from the twenties, where every episode ended with the heroine at grave risk, only to be saved by the hero at the start of the next installment.
Sigh.
Here is the communion meditation I gave yesterday, before the Superbowl.
In life, as in football, things go wrong. Sometimes it is accidental – you find yourself above the speed limit while driving down a hill. You get back a dollar in change without realizing it until you get home. Sometimes it is intentional – you might be leaning on the gas pedal, thinking you can always use the hill as an excuse if you get caught. You might know that you ended up with an extra buck as change, and you decide not to tell the clerk, because prices are so high these days.
Intentional or not, there was a transgression. A law was broken – somebody was wronged.
It’s the same in football, accidental and intentional. You might go off-sides because you think their count is ready. Or you might try to spear the quarterback, and hope the ref doesn’t see you.
So there’s a transgression, and there’s a penalty. In football, that penalty goes against the team that committed it, and the penalty varies according to the transgression. In life, there’s really only one transgression against a holy and perfect God, and that is sin. It takes many forms, but it’s all sin. And there’s only one penalty – Romans 6:23 says “The wages of sin is death”.
In football, a coach of the offended team can decline the penalty. They decide that they would rather have the results of the play instead of having the transgression paid for. God doesn’t work that way. That wouldn’t be a just or fair thing to do – decide that the penalty doesn’t matter, that the transgression wasn’t really that big in the overall picture. God is holy and pure, and any transgression against Him, any sin, must be paid for.
What happens, though, in real life cannot happen in football. Someone else – Jesus Christ – has offered to pay the penalty for the transgression, even though He never sinned. That death penalty, because of the sin that we have committed, will still be paid – but instead of you and I dying for our sins, Jesus has died for them. Romans 5:8 says “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”. The play was still on-going, and the penalty was paid.
It is only through Jesus’ death on the cross, and His resurrection from the tomb, that this penalty can be paid. We can’t be good enough. We can’t pay enough money. We can’t make promises. Every sin which we have committed or will commit against our holy Heavenly Father is a blood crime – and Jesus has already paid that debt. Thank you, Jesus!
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