I thought I might write an entry about how Ann Coulter is right — maybe caustic and a tad bit over the top, but right nonetheless. However, these two gentleman do a fine job of it, so I’ll just link to them and say, “Yeah, and stuff!”
When picking a name for a dog, imagine yourself standing on the front porch yelling the dog’s name out into the neighborhood. If you think you’d feel like an idiot yelling that name, then choose something else.
Replace “dog” with “program” and you should get the idea.
As some of you who read this are probably aware, Angela and I bought a minivan last month. That means, of course, the my transition from coolness (weak as it was) to “boring” old man is now complete, and I don’t mind it a bit. I love driving that thing.
At any rate, I went to the tag agency finally to transfer the title into our name, which means, of course, we have to pay excise tax on the vehicle. I put it off as long as I could, because I knew they were really going to let us have it. That is what governments do, of course: tax and stifle. Much to my chagrin, I was not disappointed. The hammer dropped to the tune of $749.50. When writing the check, in the memo field I almost put “Excess Tax” (instead of “Excise Tax”), but, in the end, I sucked it up and said nothing like a boring old man. 😉
In all genres of music, there are some really inane lyrics. Derek Webb, regarded by some as the poster child for insightful lyrics, recently released a song called “My Enemies Are Men Like Me.” While I like the overall statement of the song, I think, the line below aggravates me beyond description:
Those two lines make two erroneous assertions, in my opinion: that war is always wrong, and the capital punishment is never justified.
…
One of the most common position pro-life positions is opposition to all abortions, except in the case of rape and incest (tangent: a good friend of mine doesn’t add “and incest,” as incest is technically rape). The reasons for this exception are plenty, I’m sure, but my hunch is that is a nod to the victims of such a deplorable act, and heinous it is. I can’t imagine a more vile crime a man can commit against a woman. Lost in that discussion, though, is the fact that in those rare cases where rape results in a pregnancy, there are at least two victims: the woman and the newly created child, both of which are deserving of our love and support, as well as justice.
This is where things get odd. The pro-life position is that of the defense of life. We hold that all life is sacred and deserves protection. We also hold that life begins at fertilization. Not at implantation, for there’s nothing morally significant about attaching to the uterine wall. Nor at 24 weeks, as there’s nothing morally significant about getting bigger and looking “more human.” No, we hold that life begins at fertilization because it is at that point that two distinct sets of DNA (rather, two incomplete halves of sets of DNA) form to create a distinct third; at which point a genetically distinct person is created with his or her own gender, eye color, hair color, blood type etc. That person, even though he or she is small is a person and deserves the right to life. When we make exceptions to our pro-life stance, though, to except cases in which a child is conceived through the violent act of rape, we tell the world, and that sweet, little child, that all children are valuable and have the right to life, unless they are conceived in a distasteful manner, in which case it’s alright to snuff them out, and that makes an incoherent defense for the sanctity of life.
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. 🙂