Of the simple things, there are few things in life nicer than ice cold tea. Likewise, of those simple things, there are few things in life worse than hefting a nice glass of ice cold tea to your lips, tipping the cup, then, as that sweet brewed nectar flows gently into your mouth, you notice a gnat has ended his short existence in your tea.
Here are a couple of fan flicks from Firefox Flicks supporting what should be everyone’s default web browser:
Good times.
One of the difficulties we have as Christians opposed to social evils like abortion is perception. The world expects us (and rightly so) to be “meek and mild” and not prone to anger, hypocrisy, etc. These are high standards and, for Christians especially, very appropriate. When discussing extremely sensitive “personal” issues like abortion (and homosexuality, adultery, etc), it is exceedingly easy to offend those on the other side of the issue, so great care must be taken to defend our position “with gentleness and with respect” (here, here, and here, for example). Of course, it’s probably impossible to avoid completely offending some, as the truth can be offensive, but we need not add to that offense with rude, obnoxious, and abrasive behavior.
As I’ve thought more on my Wal-Mart and abortion blog entry, I think I may be guilty of that very behavior. While my part of me is still somewhat proud of how wity that title was, it was probably too inflammatory to be of much good. To correct the error, I’ve retitled the entry (though I’ve left the body as is, for now at least). I earnestly want to affect positively (for pre-borns) abortion policies and attitudes in this country, but being abrasive will only help to further polarize the situation. Mea culpa.
Recently at work, we looked, ever so briefly, at a new web framework called Stripes. It looked rather cool, as it was largely annotation-based, but, given its glaring lack of any wide-spread usage, we never seriously considered it. Today, I was on The Server Side (you do read TSS, right? 😉 and noticed that Struts has released a Java 5 addon. One of the additions is annotation support whose only problem appears to be that it’s tied to Struts (that’s a joke ;).
At any rate, all of this annotation on the web tier got me to thinking (again) about my favorite Java web tier technology, JSF. The only “real” complaint I have with the framework is the XML, minimal as it is (I’m past the JSF learning curve, so I don’t have a problem with that anymore :). Being a big fan of annotations and IoC, I’ve been wondering if/when JSF will finally support configuration via annotations. Until this morning, I’ve just assumed that I won’t see that support until 2.0, but a thought occured to me: why can’t it be bolted on to 1.x?
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve never written my own annotations, and I’m not too terribly familiar with the internals of either major JSF implementation, but I have in my mind a back-of-a-napkin sketch of a possible solution. My initial guess is that it might be possible to write a class (a FacesServlet child, maybe) that scans the classpath (optionally restricted by context-params, for example) looking for annotated classes and methods. Armed with the knowledge gleaned from the scan, we would then be able to build the context (I’m hoping) in a similar fashion to parsing faces-config.xml.
Is it doable? Am I off my rocker? I don’t know. Hopefully, I’ll have a chance to find out soon, assuming someone in the know doesn’t disabuse of the notion before I get started. 🙂
Evolution is a pretty hot topic. Pretty much every atheist believes it, as do some Christians. Stories like this one only bolster the arguments for evolution being real (or do they?) At any rate, I’ve always been a bit annoyed by the evolutionist’s attack on creationism by claiming the we fall victim to the God of the Gaps fallacy. As people smarter than I have pointed out, evolutionists do this to. Many if not most evolutionists have made up their minds that it actually happened (that is, all life arose from a single organism through a means of natural selection, i.e., macro-evolution. Micro-evolution is demonstrable fact), and refuse to entertain the idea that they may be wrong. Their argument appears to me to be something like, “I know this is true because we’ve decided it is. The evidence we need is out there somewhere. We just need more time to find the evidence.” I think I’ll call that the Time of the Gaps fallacy.
With that in mind, since evolutionists get a pass on it, I’m going to apply it to creationism: I know God created the world because the Bible (which is demonstrably reliable in areas for which is intended,i.e., not biology class) tells me so. I don’t think evolution was the way he did it, and I can’t give you a good answer for the rock you hold in your hand, but someday I will. And, who knows? Maybe when I die, I’ll find out that God did in fact use evolution as the means of creation. Either way, I just need more time.
I was late to work today. Again. The problem is Andrew. This morning, Andrew came in to our room sometime after 5:00 and climbed in to bed with us. After I remove his feet from my neck, he just snuggled up and went to sleep. Knowing that Angela’s parents were going to keep him tonight so he won’t be home when I get there, I was hard pressed to quit snuggling and get up when the alarm went off. So I didn’t, and I don’t regret a single minute I’ll have to work to make up the time. 😛
Wednesday, I went with Angela to see the OB, where we got to see an ultrasound of the baby. At this early stage, it was mostly a jumble of white lines and blobs on a black background, but one item was clearly visible: the baby’s heart beat. Having gone through this once with Andrew, one might think it would be old hat, but one would be wrong. I sit still sometimes and close my eyes, just picturing that little blinking dot. And smile. 🙂
One thing that’s often overlooked in discussions of Plan B is that it presupposes that there’s a Plan A. That plan, given the context, is another form of birth control, which usually doesn’t include abstinence. Rather, it usually means The Pill. The idea being, I guess, that if Plan A fails (or fails to be executed correctly), one can fall back to Plan B. Now, if Plan B really is as evil I’ve made it out to be, we can assume that the primary or preferred plan is a better one, right? Wrong. What most people don’t realize is that there is a strong body of evidence that shows that The Pill is actually an abortifacient. You can read an extensive discussion of the issue over at Eternal Perspectives Ministries, but I’ll highlight it for you right here.
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