March 2004 Archives

My Dad sent me an email with a Mike Yaconelli quote. I liked it, so here it is (source unknown):

"The nature of God is playful, that is why he hides. God is not only present when we can see him, he is present when we can't, and joy comes from recognizing God in places we never thought he would be. God hides in difficulty, he hides in suffering, he hides in poverty, he hides in failure, and he hides in the stories of our lives. Whatever our circumstance whatever the status of our lives, God is present--invisible, hiding, waiting for us to discover him, waiting for us to learn from him in the shadows as well as the light."

Mike died last October 29 in a vehicle accident. Quotes like the above were commonplace and a source of constant challenge to me during the years when The Wittenburg Door was published by Youth Specialities.

Recently, a new wave of spam has hit, using my own email address as the sender, but with a different Name as the Recipient in the Outlook Inbox. Does anyone know how I could use Outlook to filter these out, when I already have the "SafeLists Only" option turned on, and my safe senderslist has a only a few addresses PLUS my Contacts list. I don't want to filter out all mail from myself, since I often need to send myself mail to test things, or in forwarding something home from a mail login on another computer. I need to filter out these scumbags who use some other name and my email address as the actual email address. Is this doable? (Example: My Inbox shows a note from :

Scumbag Spammer [me@mydomain.net] (thelatter is my actual email address, but the Scumbag Spammer is somethign other than Dale Lature.

The previous entry about the Dissent Zones that made its way into an episode of The Practice last night, is betterknown as "Free-Speech Zone". The writers in the episode last night had Elanor say in her closing "I thought all of America was a free-speech zone". When I did a Google, I found the term "Free Speech Zone" is the term used by the administration. Interestingly enough, it was a post on the site for The American Conservative magazine where I found one article. Apparently, the Rumsfiled/Bush crew has offended a lot of American conservatives. On the site's Title Graphic, there is this subtext:

The article is from their December issue, and is entitled
“Free-Speech Zone” The administration quarantines dissent.

The Practice will no longer be practicing. After the ouster of most of the cast (they only kept Eugene, Elanor, Jimmy, and Lucy from the old crew)...gone are Lindsey, Rebecca, Bobby, Helen...all the "big money people". In came James Spader, and at first, I was amused by his character. After a bit, I grew tired of it. Apparently so did the people whose opinions make it in to the ratings factors.

It seems that this was like a "salary cap" issue. They axed several big contracts and replaced them all with rookies and one "free agent", James Spader, who often , in his movie roles plays some snobby, stuck-up rich kid with an attitude to match. His role in the Pratice seemed to be the same. What he allowed to get away with (and finally now that they are cancelled, they're finally getting rid of him.....or , another temporary- cliffhanger for a farewell, grabbing for those last few ad dollars).

Nearly every episode since Spader's arrival was all him. I'm sure that the Eugene and Bobby charcters were not too pleased (or maybe they were just out looking for new roles/jobs....they were often very involved in plots, even when the big stars of the past (McDermott, Flynn-Boyle, and the others) were still there. It seems that the entire storylines all switched to follow the "entertainer". The strategy backfired. Oh well, I enjoyed the series, for the most part, over the years (I started watching in about 1996)

Last night on the soon-to-be-defunct TV Series "The Practice" (comments on the demise of that show in my Video section, there was a little treatnment of the Bush administration's use of "Dissent Zones" where they remove people who are at a Bush appearance site to a "special zone" reserved for "Dissenters", and implied is that these zones are often so far removed that the president would never see them. I was a little miffed that the case being tried was one where a lady punched a policeman/security person when he tried to remove her.....while I am aware that there are people like this (ie., prone to angry outbursts) on both sides, ......ah, it's just a story. Never mind.

I had not read a whole lot about what this might be based upon, but it seemed to "fit" the "Homeland Security" measures mode of operation, and so I was wondering what kind of stuff is out there. I'll do a Google on "Dissent Zone" and see what comes up.

Tim Bednar at E-Church put up an article (Social Justice At the Emergent Convention)
a couple of weeks ago, quoting Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo about the need for Churches to address the needs of society STRUCTURALLY as well as in individual programs.

Wallis: When we privatize God, we are betraying the very public God of the Bible

Campolo (via an Interview at World Vision)

also from EChurch: Why We Ought To Aggregate The Emergent Phenomenon Toward A Movement

The latest Sojourners has an interview with Bruce Cockburn, fresh back from a trip to Iraq. (Image to the left is from the article)

I often use my Sojourners Category here as a container for issues that I comment upon that are either from Sojourners, or in the category of Faith, Politics, and Social Policy that I discover elsewhere. Often, in posts last year and in 2002, I would put such things under Theoblogical, but this broadened the theoblogical category too widely. Sojourners magazine was one of those early influences on me that enabled me to do some of that "theological sociology" which calls into question many of the things that are "assumed" by cultural Christianity that may well be results of the slow, often unnoticed melding of theological views and values that are "of this world".

This year, I will have been reading Sojourners for 20 years. I began getting it after hearing Jim Wallis address a Lutheran Synod convention in Phoenix after he had been in Tuscon during the Sanctuary Trials.

This post on Mike James' weblog says something I've often pondered when I see the collections of decals that often appear together, on things like SUVs.

Oh but your flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven any more.
We’re already overcrowded
From your dirty little wars.
Now Jesus he don’t like killin’
No matter what the reason is for,
And your flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven any more.
John Prine 1971 via Mike James via Ralph

A while back someone in our neighborhood had a sign in their yard that says "Jesus saves". I commented to my wife Janet: "If you believe with your heart and confess with your lips, and put a sign in your yard, thou shalt be saved"

Continuing with the theme of the previous post where Al Mohler is complaining, or attempting to poke fun at whathe perceives as "hypoctrisy" at Duke in their representation of "Conservatives" on their faculty: Robert Brandon, chair of the philosophy department, observes:

"Conservatives are about indoctrination, not education".

That's sort of my take on it as well, although there are conservatives who don't fall prey to that....but sadly, they often do. It seems to be a requirement that signifies how deeply you believe. Part of that belief system seems to require that other conclusions come from the realm of the demonic; suggestions of Satan to deter us from the important stuff. Then Mohler goes on to accuse the "Liberals" of indoctrinating intents, which is , I suppose, often the case , as with any "learning institution". But it is also the case that efforts to persuade are always perceived by opposing viewpoints as "indoctrination" and the "real truth" is being taught by the "good guys".

In one of his most inane, but less agregious postings (less agregious because it's not so hurtful as some of their other crusades, just indicative of their "stupidity") Al Mohler accuses Duke University of hypocrisy in its claim to diversity becuase it has so few Republicans. Hello! Hello! Anybody in there? How ridiculous! IN my experience, conservatives tend not to hang out and insist that they be included in places they wouldn't feel comfortable, just as I wouldn't complain much about the Southern Baptist Colleges that are of Mohler's ilk not representing liberal attititudes (which Mohler is trying his darndest to make less and less likely).

I had thought, when I heard that they were seeding the number ones in the brackets, that they were re-seeding the final four, so that the highest remaining seed played the lowest remaining seed. Not so. They merely seeded the region's number one seeds, so that the number one nuumber one seed played the number four number one seed (which resulted in Kentucky's region pitted against St.Joe's region).

I like my original impressions better. Re-seed the final four, and let the number one overall play the lowest overall. I suppose that would put too much power in the hands of the committee. Plus, I WOULD think that since Kentucky would reap all those "benefits" this year. Oh well. So Duke did lose out on getting pitted against St. Joe's instead of Stanford by losing to Maryland. I still like that , as Kentucky fan.

I'm looking around (so far, on ESPN.com and CBS's Sportsline.com, and nobody, that I can find, is showing the times for next week's regionals semis and finals! They have to know when the games are! Where the heck are they?)

I know that Kentucky plays UAB, and the matchup between today's two winners in Milwaukee ( BC-Ga.Tech and Pacific-Kansas games) are in St. Louis. That's two games on Thursday or Friday (which is also what I want to know) and times, both night games, but who's first?

OK, I just found this on cnnsi.com:

All times EST. * -- approximate start time.

Second Round -- Saturday, March 20
Reg. Site Game Time
ATL Raleigh Duke vs. Seton Hall 1:10 p.m.
STL Seattle Nevada vs. Gonzaga 3:20 p.m.
ER Raleigh Manhattan vs. Wake Forest 3:40 p.m.
ER Buffalo Saint Joseph's vs. Texas Tech 5:30 p.m.
PHO Denver Maryland vs. Syracuse 5:40 p.m.
PHO Seattle Stanford vs. Alabama 5:50 p.m.
PHO Buffalo DePaul vs. Connecticut 8 p.m.
ATL Denver North Carolina vs. Texas 8:10 p.m.

Second Round -- Sunday, March 21
ATL Orlando Xavier vs. Mississippi State 12:10 p.m.
STL Milwaukee Boston College vs. Georgia Tech 2:15 p.m.
ER Kansas City Memphis vs. Oklahoma State 2:20 p.m.
ATL Columbus Illinois vs. Cincinnati 2:30 p.m.
PHO Orlando Vanderbilt vs. North Carolina State 2:40 p.m.
ER Milwaukee Wisconsin vs. Pittsburgh 4:45 p.m.
STL Kansas City Pacific vs. Kansas 4:50 p.m.
STL Columbus Kentucky vs. Alabama-Birmingham 5 p.m.

Regional Semifinals -- Thursday, March 25
ER E. Rutherford Saint Joseph's-Texas Tech winner vs. Manhattan-Wake Forest winner
ER E. Rutherford Memphis-Oklahoma State winner vs. Wisconsin-Pittsburgh winner
PHO Phoenix Stanford-Alabama winner vs. Maryland-Syracuse winner
PHO Phoenix Vanderbilt-North Carolina State winner vs. DePaul-Connecticut winner

Regional Semifinals -- Friday, March 26
ATL Atlanta Duke-Seton Hall winner vs. Illinois-Cincinnati winner
ATL Atlanta North Carolina-Texas winner vs. Xavier-Mississippi State winner
STL St. Louis Kentucky-Alabama-Birmingham winner vs. Pacific-Kansas winner
STL St. Louis Boston College-Georgia Tech winner vs. Nevada-Gonzaga winner

Regional Finals -- Saturday, March 27
ER E. Rutherford Semifinal winners
PHO Phoenix Semifinal winners

Regional Finals -- Sunday, March 28
ATL Atlanta Semifinal winners
STL St. Louis Semifinal winners

Final Four -- Saturday, April 3
San Antonio East Rutherford champion vs. St. Louis champion
San Antonio Atlanta champion vs. Phoenix champion

Championship -- Monday, April 5
San Antonio Final Four winners

Wow. What a first half! 60-52 at the half. Kentucky shot 60% from the field, and about the same from 3point range. trouble is, so did Florida A&M! They were fast, and they hit everything! Kentucky gives up an average of 63 points a game on defense, and here they'd surrendered 52 at the break! It didn't get much easier anytime soon. it wasn't until about halfway into the second half, when the pace of scoring slowed down dramtaically (only 11-10 Kentucky) thatKentucky began to pull away (it had closed to a 66-62 game after about 5 minutes of the second hlaf.....then I think A&M began to tire (evidenced by several wild out of control turnovers, many of them by their scoring star of the first half).

I had just said out loud to myself, "When is this going to end?" as A&M cut it to 66-62, but then it began almost immediately, and a 15-5 run made it 81-67, then another 11-2 run made it 92-69. It ended 96-76, and not even the highest scoring game of the night (UAB beat Washingtpon 102-100, in regulation time, later last night). UAB will be Kentucky's opponent tomorrow.

Well, I thought I'd try the Toshiba PDA support, to see if there's any news at all about Windows PocketPC upgrades...and the answer: Nada. When I told the support person that I know of nobody that owns an e740 that will EVER buy a Toshiba product again, and that I will never consider Toshiba for any new Pocket PC (which I'm going to have to purchase-- when I'm able--- just to saty current.)

It's absolutely unbelievable hpow utterly callous Toshiba is being about this, and how utterly CLUELESS they are about how this affects their POTENTIAL BUYERS as well as their CURRENT (and often NO LONGER) customer base.

CONGRATULATIONS Toshiba, on one of the biggest customer reputation blunders of all time. Add to that the Blogging population of the Toshiba victims.....this is spread throughout ther Internet......nearly every customer review I read that is not on a sales site, reflects the disgust e740 owners have with being left in the lurch like this.

I have told many people that although I can't complain , given that I paid only $140 by getting it through EBay (where it was probably available because of the upgrade issue), I STILL will never EVER buy a Toshiba product, given this kind of abandonment of existing customers.

So, let me say: NEVER BUY TOSHIBA, or you may well get screwed in the same way ---- I would have chosen the IPAQ (that was an option I had when I bought the Toshiba). I wish I had. Boy do I ever. As it stands, I am happy with having a 802.11b device which I can use to check my email. But as soon as the job front situation resolves, it's one of the first items on my list. I'm a developer, and one of the things I want to be workign on very soon is making my sites PDA-readable, and I wanto tbe able to develop for devices which will probably be dominated by devices powered by Windows Mobile 2003 . Whose to say Toshiba won't be just as clueless about customer perception and compatibility with new upgrades? It's something I'm not willing to risk, when there's plenty of competitors out there.

I found an "unlisted" free wifi access spot that was, as far as I could tell, not mentioned among several listings when I did a search on Free WiFi Atlanta. It is in The Mall at Peachtree Station, Atlanta Bread Company. My Dad, 2 brothers, and I were staying at the Marriott Marquis, which is conected by walkway to the Mall, which then has a Marta entrance on the other side. We took the Marta to the games at the Georgia Dome each day, and I would logon and check email each time we walked by, after finding it initially on Thursday Morning, the day the SEC tournament began.

The georgia Dome apparently had TMobile access available, but not for free since I couldn't get on.

Of course, my email got stuck, as it often does, when there is are certain types of spam in my inbox (why, I don't know).....what I usually do is logon to the web mail interface on Comcast and delete spam messages, but their site wouldn't work via my IE for Pocket PC 2002....it told me my browser was out of date. I think it probably wouldn't recognize ANY pocket pc browser. so, who is it that's "out of date". I think it is Comcast. (To be fair, few websites are PDA friendly --- Bloglines, Google, and ESPN are the only ones I've seen , and Macromeida is not too bad.

Jut returned from Atlanta where Kentucky, thanks to Duke's loss, grabbed the number one overall seed, and the easiest bracket according to all. While AKMA was comforted that Duke still got a #1, the difference in their winning and losing could well have been more significant than losing a #1 seed , looking at the bracket they got compared to Kentucky's. Then again, Kentucky did lose to Georgia twice this year (although they got 'em back in the SEC Tourney to stop the dogs hopes for a bid) and Vanderbilt (who got in by knocking off Mississippi State) ---- so anything can happen. But the key ingredient for Kentucky is always peaking in March, which is a good time.

Add to the above about the difference in getting number one of number ones and number two: the tourney this year is RE-seeded at the final four, which means the highesty remaining seed gets the lowest remaining seed, so any cinderella automatically gets the highest seeded remaining team. That could be huge.

I was sent this link (Why Internet Church?) by by friend Larry, about the Church of England's new venture: an Internet Church, led by a paid pastor. the article is written by the Oxford Diocese Director of Communication, Richard Thomas.

It has some important things to say, such as:

And it may be that the increasing failure to participate is a direct result of a loss of faith in such institutions as places that are effective in their key tasks, and that make demands on us that do not contribute either to mission or personal growth.

Loss of participation in the traditional church (traditional as in "ftf") due to a perceived lack of emphasis in, or concern for, their own concerns and convictions about what Church should be. I perceive the main problem to stem from the almost total lack of communication among the many. The information is largely one-way, pulpit centered, and the populace is increasingly becomng aware that much more "conversation" and "exploration" is available elsewhere. The pulpit is no longer a conduit of information as it was in pre-information age days. But also , and as the Cluetrain authors insist, the thing that most people are interested in is the "Real market", which is the conversation.

The power behind this reality; what actually undergirds its status as "reality" or "driving force" is that the Christian community is dependent upon just that: Community. The Pentecost event occurred as they were "gathered together in one place". The question we are now asking, rather than "What is truth?", is "What is place?" What is the power of "one place?" Is this a physical reality or does it have something to do with the things that can happen there (and in the first century, people could not 'exchange" in the immediacy of give-and-take except by physcial prescence. But......

Al Mohler has more to say that I find representative of stuff to "be afraid, be very afraid" (in the sense that is used in the movie "The Fly").

Today he lauds the efforts of the Baylor University President Robert B. Sloan, Jr. to move Baylor U. toward a "Christian worldview".

Mohler observes:
Under his leadership, Baylor has added a number of scholars with international reputations for a serious embrace of the Christian worldview and its application to all areas of thought and research. These new professors--and the "Baylor 2012" plan promoted by President Sloan--have run into direct confrontation with many of Baylor's older faculty members.

Taken in the most positive sense, a "Christian worldview" is certainly desirable. Taken as Mohler intends it, it is something to which I react with the "Be Afraid, be VERY AFRAID" warning. The "Christian worldview" that is forwarded here is a severely "neutered" one. I find it neccessary to my sensibilities about the Christian faith to forward an apologetic for these attempts to define Christianity in terms I find very irritating, embarassing, and , at worst, dangerous.

The previous post about Brainstorms leads me to post a little reciting of what I was raving about back in October 2002: Howard Rheingold's book that had just come out , Smart Mobs (which has a BLOG by that name which continues to keep us updated with continuing findings, studies, articles (many of them by Howard, since it is, after all, HIS blog)

I posted to Brainstorms today (Howard Rheingold's online community which is very "Well" like (as in "The Well", from which Howard led many in his convictions about the emerging power of the Internet for creating new types of social and peronal ties (In his groundbreaking book, The Virtual Community in 1992, online here). I have included it here because it is fittingly "rant-like" as a weblog entry, but it echoes and summarizes many of the things I often say in numeous posts attempting to "cover the ground" I posted to a topic I started on Sept 18, 2001, called "Online Theological Community".

Mike James last night posted about Tony Campolo, after reading an article in The Oregonian

Mike's response :

Wow, I didn’t realize Tony Campolo was so sane. Cool!

I think Campolo just may well be one who kept me focused on some of those Omissions of the Church of our day; of its propensity to "uphold the status quo" and to construct theological systems of interpretation that uplhold a lifestyle that conforms to that status quo, with a sufficient amount of "religous trappings" and pious language to make it seem palatable to the church crowd.

I first heard Tony when I was a seminary student Youth Pastor, and had brought a small group of guys from my Youth group toLncaster County Pennsylvania to Creation '80, a kind of a Christian Music Woodstock. I was so impressed. As a Sociology professor, and a very good one, (that was my college major-- probably highly repsonsible for my "liberal" slant on many things----when one begins to "question" how groups of people create systmes of belief which serve to give them a place in a culture, this is treading on ground that many Churches do not care to face about themselves).

If you want to read other things that I have mentioned or blogged about Tony Campolo, check out this search result list from my blog

I have a second interview with a Church related organization on the 16th of this month. I had a phone interview with them about 4 weeks ago, and I had given that possibility up for dead after a couple weeks went by. The email I received said I was a "possible match", so we'll see. I jotted down in my notes yesterday that if that job does NOT come to pass, then I will be desperate to find some addtional leads for development projects. The consultant that handed me some web work recently has said there was more to come (and the present project, the first phase of which is complete, has more to add....I already put out a photo-browsing album of about 440 photo captures from a DVD PR piece put out by a local church.

Just uploaded the two files to use the MT Plugin called SubCategories

When I try to go to the mt-sc.cgi file in my movable type root, I get the following error:

An error occurred:

Can't locate Storable.pm in @INC (@INC contains: c:\myhost\myaccount\movtyp\extlib c:\webhost4life_aspnet\dlature\movtyp\lib c:\myhost\myaccount\movtyp\extlib c:\webhost4life_aspnet\dlature\movtyp\lib C:/Perl/lib C:/Perl/site/lib .) at c:\myhost\myaccount\movtyp\lib/MT/PluginData.pm line 9.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at c:\myhost\myaccount\movtyp\lib/MT/PluginData.pm line 9.

where C:\myhost is the root dir and myaccount is myuser subdirectory

Any ideas? I will link to the trackback for David Rayner's site here

Funny thing just happened (I guess it's funny if you're geeky enough to have struggled with and used this feature)......I noticed that a link I had pointing to Chris hammond's post about his new project cDotText, registered a trackback on his blog, which is a dottext blog. I thought, "Hey, why does HIS blog successfully register trackbacks and mine doesn't. So I asked him in a comment under my trackback listing. Then I tried a test on mine gain for the first time in about a month, and Wala! It worked! Then I saw Scott's home page, where he mentioned that he was testing my trackbacks (which will now show up under his entry as a trackback. I wish more people availed themselves of this. I think it's a neat way to converse, and give each other credit and let others know we're listening when we react.

in my dotText blog , back in the beginning of it (Nov. 2003), I was wondering why MT trackbacks weren't being seen. I blogged a link to somebody on weblogs.asp.net , and the trackback worked there (on that dotText blog!). so here's another try, since I've moved the blog to a subdomain dedicated to it at http://blogs.theoblogical.org/blog.

The post , back in Nov 2003

Chris Hammond has done some work on someting called cDotText which he talks about here

How do I add to the Category Pages? I want to have a way for someone reading a post from a Category Page to go back to the "Category's Archive page, or IOW, see the other posts with links to them in that Category. Right now the only way to do that is go back to the "Home-Home" and click a category link. It ought to at least have the name of the Category , which is displayed a the top (on mine it's like this on the "Baptist" category page:

Movable Theoblogical
The Movable Type Version of Theoblogical Community
Baptist Category Archives

the top line is in the h1 style, the second line is the style class "Description", and the "xxxx Category Archives" is in "Descriptio" style with the h3 tag applied. The third line could be a link to a page which displays only X number of links, and if all posts cannot be fit on this one screenfull, then a list of links or a calendar should appear (or have the page display only the posts from the last month, or both : up to X number of posts over X number months).

This would remedy the problem of my "Main Category Page" being extremely huge, since it contains numerous entries (hundreds, which all LOAD in). This seems overkill, and bandwidth hoggish.

Flash is going to have to have its own Category now (but not right now), because I'm doing so much of it lately (at OSG and also with a new project I joined). I think it is inevitable that it will come up that somebody can't (and won't use Flash). Even though it's widely supported and integrated now, I believe that I need to do it (provide alternate non-Flash pages" to conserve bandwidth for bandwidth challenged browsing persons).

I just returned a while ago from the Coffeeshop down the road a bit (Perk Central) where I spent about 2 hours sitting on the comfy leather couch and sipping a cup of coffee, and having one thing after another occur to me that seemed noteworthy, so I wrote down some things, and then some more, and when I was done I had about 8 pages of things (some were ideas of things to work on in the dyas ahead, conversations to re-start, software to invesigate, existing applications installations to tweak and extend or get working something that's broke in those apps. Also , several things to do with the Old Saint George web development, something I thought was immanent back in November, and well,,, you know how that goes. Anyway, I'm gonna put the rest of this into the extended "Read More" section below.......

I got a comment on my blog about The Passion that stirred some passions of mine. There was a pointer to an article about a reformed Presbyterian group in Belfast that made some public comments, which were blantantly anti-Catholic.

The statement that got me: "the message of the film is that of Roman Catholicism, not biblical Christianity". How utterly condescending, arrogant, and totally clueless about the values that said Bible stresses: love, peace, doing it unto the "least of these". When these values are displaced by insiting upon "correct interpretation" to the extent that disagreement is tantamount to "lack of faith", then orthodoxy has sprung a leak from which it does not recover. It has lost its reason for existence. When "right opions" become more imprtant than actual living of the values Jesus taught and lived, then "belief" has become something entirley intellectual and divorced from life.

I read Doc's and Dave Winer's entries on Tivo, and this spurred the following thoughts:

I am a tech junkie. When I was a kid, I was messing with audio cassette recorders when they were new technology. I learned how to use patch cords and all kinds of adapters. I styudied the Radio Shack Catalog, and taped things. When Video Recorders came along, I had to have one. I had my own business about 10 years ago, hooking up VCRS to the cable system in Cincinnati , which made it hard for the average joe to use their VCR as intended to tape one show while watching another. I was one of the first people I knew to have a Surround Sound Processor in one's own home.

Of all people, I am one who "should have a Tivo". It seems like one of those things that WILL happen, as soon as things get back on the right track financially. I have a job interview coming up on the 16th. Whenever things back to enough normalcy that a Tivo is added to the tech portfolio, I will no doubt be one of its biggest evangelists. Especially now that my VHS VCR has died (they sure don't make em like they used to --- the VCR thatjust died I got about 3 years ago. The one it replaced I had for 15.

In my ongoing Web work, the latest project is hosted on a service that offers PHP, so since I am a DW MX 2004 user, and have already added CF to my ASP experience, why not try my hand at PHP/MySQL, in case something ion this project would make it advantagous to know some PHP data binding?

I am typing this post on my second, Win98 based computer, which is a P2-133
with 128MB RAM. So I installed Apache 2, and PHP 4, along with MySQL. After about 5 hours, I finally hit upon the right combination of suggestions......I'll look it up if I still can and incluse that link here later. If it worked for me, it may just help some other poor clueless PHP-challenged would-be developer.

Been doing quite a bit of Flash development lately. I just published a site for a local Church leader, using mostly Flash for navigation and for content.

I would have already connected all the content via External files or data, but thus far, Flash seems to be quirky or particular in the way that one uses the Dynamic Text feature (there seems to be a particular order required to keep font sizes and such standard.

I often seem to return to the critique of the fundamentalist mindsets of many evangelical Christians (and the Southern Baptists, my alma mater, as it will) because they seem to be the present-day representatives of the "people who killed Jesus". Not "the Jews" or "the Romans" , but an unholy mix and compromise between the two; between "Religion" and "Empire". Empires often employ their "court preachers" to "cast the script that theologically justifies the intentions and philosophies and modes of operation of the power structure", and do the "campaign" to "sell" the idea inj religious terms.

Tony Campolo, himself an evangelical Baptist, has come under fire from fundamentalist Christians for his "theology of works" (that's the label often given to these "liberals" who are supposedly "watering down the gospel"; theyDO things, and they HELP PEOPLE. The Church of the Saviour has, for 56 years, in the nation's capitol, worked in the poverty stricken Adams Morgan section of DC (and beyond) to help people get affordable housing (as in Jubilee Housing), given medical attention ---such as the Columbia Road Health Services --- feeding programs , job programs such as Jubilee Jobs, and scores of other programs that truly fit the distinction of being "faith based"....these "missions" derive from the Church theology of COS that believes that ALL OF US" are called; that we each have a call, and that the structure of the Church exists to "enable" this discernment of call, and to do this "as a community" who are accountabhle to one another" in ways which , in terms of Cluetrain "getting it", they "get it" that the "Mission" is "conversation"; that the call comes through individuals who have certain gifts bestowed byGod, and that they "discover" these gifts in community as the community helps them to "develop" these gifts, and to discover a "reason for being" for that gift by sounding a call to a specific task that begins to take shape as a "response" to the discernment of God's reign and their lives.

The previous post got me thinking also about Cluetrain and the "Emerging Church". The SBC , with pundits like Mohler at the various helms, will NEVER voluntarily surrender "orthodoxy" to the "conversation". They have been staunchly "anti-conversation". If Christian theology were to open to "open source", then this would be, for the fundamentalists, the ultimate "relaxing" of what they consider to be the "duty" of the "Christian soldier", which is to "safeguard" and "specify" what passes as "legit" and "Biblical".

Almost as if he was responding to my rant on "Fortune cookie preaching" this past week, Al Mohler tackles the "Problem with preaching", and he again displays some sort of "magic potion" approach to the Bible; that all one has to do is "Preach the Word" and people will magically flock to repentance.

Now, I DO believe that there is something holy and special and different about the message and the story that is proclaimed through the Scriptures. But for Mohler and his SBC cronies, it is all too obvious and "set" for them exactly what that is. You can hear them say, often, "It says what it says" and "means what it means", but to hear them talk, one would think that the only thing talked about in the Bible is abortion, homosexuality, and prayer in schools, and the centrality of the Bible itself, supplanting Christ himself as the sole criteria for faith.

A WIRED online article, Living Life in Virtual Reality, does a surface skim on the topic of finding the real in the "virtual", a topic thatis near and dear to me, since I am constantly insisting that there is much REAL to be discovered in the virtual world; and this REAL stuff is not exactly being called forth in abundance by what I would call an "overhyped" face to face reality, particularly in the Churches. I mean, I GO TO CHURCH often, and nearly EVERY TIME, I come away without a sense that I have been heard, known, helped, understood, etc. etc. I come away empty, except for what growth I can muster from my own inner reflections on what's mising and what i would do different. The problem, as it often is, is that there is no "structural support" for two way communication. The Church has become almost exclusively and completely an "event" in a "time slot".

AKMA does a pre-screening take on The Passion, and makes some good observations to consider amongst all the "flack" that is flying around the release of this film. The one I feel most in tune with is how much "embellishment" of otherwise "sketchy" details were done. AKMA's take on that is: "Of Course he does". To do otherwise would make for a pretty stale and unreal telling that would merely repeat the atrocities of traditonal, clean, dainty, non-offensive passion portrayals.

Further, all of the gospels, and the Bible for that matter, were NOT, contrary to however strongly the fundamentalists woud insist otherwise, written to cover all possible angles, all possible audiences, and all possible theological truths. They were written to adress a specific and therefore limited audience. The impact of the Biblical narrative and theology becomes more universal as scholars make the contextual connections for us, and we take all that into consideration along with our own personal responses to the story, and along with our own community's discourse about it.

Dramatic artistry demands a "screenplay", and this is no less true for more "holy" matters and subjects. Anything less would be "unrealistic".

Mike James writes today:

I also think it likely that concerning Christians who have supported this regime it will also "take a generation for them to recover their integrity." Based on my day-to-day interactions with nominal- and non-Christians, I remain convinced that the Religious Right has poisoned the well for Adonai in this generation.

Now I also think that if Jesus can turn water into wine, he can also turn poisoned water into water as needed -- whether literally or symbolically -- and thereby redeem the situation. But should he have to? And will he not hold accountable those who poisoned the well?

Yes, it is certainly becoming rare to hear the word Christian or "values" anymore without it being attached to some generic discussion of "Christian Nation" ("generic", because the ethics of such said nation are extremely non-descript other than some vague call to some "return" to "old-fashioned" values, and usually, the Bible is dragged into the mix and poisoned by association).

The effects rendering and "Test Movie" problem I wrote about on Saturday turned out to be indeed about those fonts. When I replaced the fonts used by the imported PDF stuff with something on the font list, the problem ceased.

Now I am lookiing around to find something on the Progress Bar Component. I made a copy of my latest project, and attempted to insert some progress bars into the pages that called forth Flash movies. I can't seem to get it to work on the server. It renders in the Test Movie mode, but sits idle at 0 when I try to load the pages into my html file. I can see the progress bar work if I browse ditectly to the swf file, but the html file which calls it using the object tag set (as created by the Publish command) is missing something, apparently.

We went to sample a Church yesterday, and I got more of what is becoming alarmingly predictable about large Churches. The preaching is disturbingly plain vanilla, one-size-fits-all, non-specific, general. It seems that to garner the large crowds, one has to stay away from specifics. I call this "Fortune Cookie Theology" becuase this is what Fortune Cookies do. They announce the immanenent future with general, postiive trend type stuff; something that could fit practically anybody at any time.