As I was praying this morning, I was thinking and praying for my father. And I realized how blessed I am to have a father who works hard with his own hands to provide for his family, following well the Scriptural commands with regards to our sustenance and maintenance in the world.
So thanks, God, for such a father, who works to supply his family, fears You, and is just and right in his dealings. And thanks, Dad, for modeling such a godly life.
I think I’m going to attempt to start a pattern of writing a meditational/devotional reflection to publish on Sundays. Here is Issue #1.
I’ve been reading lately in Ezekiel for my devotions. The end of this week, I’ve come to chapters 36 and 37, which contain some crazy-cool stuff.
People like being thrilled. This topic came up last week in my Friday morning men’s Bible study/accountability group. We are attracted to things that provide us with excitement and awe: beautiful mountains, Tchaicovsky’s 1812 Overture, great art, awe-inspiring movie sequences (read: the last hour of Transformers), a beautiful sunset.
Few things thrill my soul as much as a good hymn or song of praise well-sung. A clear, majestic rendition of A Mighty Fortress or O Worship the King, for example. Or a new favorite of mine, And Can It Be. Tonight at church we closed the service with Crown Him with Many Crowns.
For a long time, I’ve liked Python. My interest in it has dwindled some in the last few years, but I still return to it on a somewhat regular basis to get things done. Its relative cleanliness, well-defined and understandable semantics, and mix of paradigms is a pleasant environment.
I also enjoy Scheme and Common Lisp. In particular, Lisp’s macro system and the power of a good interactive environment such as Slime make these languages a joy to work with.
Now that I have a few posts up, I thought I’d put a post on the record so that you, my readers, have some idea of what this place is for and what to expect from me. Then I’ll try to stop metablogging for a while.
My blog serves as a dumping ground of ideas. It’s for things that are on my mind, and I want to get them out of my head in a public fashion. Most of the stuff here will be written in one shot, without thorough review or revision. Don’t expect tightly-reasoned arguments or crystal-clear structure. I’ll do my best, but I’m not going to slave over my posts. Subjects of particular interest may become the subject of more refined writings to be published elsewhere, but if you’re looking for perfection, this isn’t the place to find it.
One thing to add to my previous post with regards to Jeremy Archer. I think that Archer is doing the right thing — he is not convinced that his previous baptism is invalid, and to say that it is in order to appease some would be lying and going against conscience. Jeremy, I applaud you, and will be praying for you.
Note: long rambling post ahead
A topic that has crossed a segment of the blog world in which I run recently is the issue of baptism and church membership. Specifically, credobaptist (believer’s baptism) churches barring pedobaptists (infant baptism) from church membership.
I guess that this is a real blog now — I’ve implemented a commenting system. So now the world can tell me they love me. Or hate my guts. Or something like that.
RSS feeds are also enabled. LINK REL tags have been put in place, so Firefox picks up that there’s an associated RSS feed where appropriate. I still need to add manual RSS feed links on the right, but that’s a task for another day.
Until recently, there have not been may seriously viable free/libre options for virtualization (running one operating system in a guest virtual machine on some other host system is the common setup/pattern for this). There was Bochs, which was an emulator, not a virtualization environment, and was thus highly slow. There was qemu, which (when coupled with kqemu) had reasonable speed, but still had some lag. There’s Xen, which is a heavyweight solution that seems to be primarily applicable to servers and also seems (unless coupled with Red Hat’s tools) to be rather poor for quick-and-easy VM creation and destruction.
There’s always the proprietary options such as VMware. This is feasible for the hobbyist now that VMware has made their server product free/gratis (I use it to run my mail/web server VM on our desktop), but it’s still proprietary. I’m not the biggest fan of proprietary things in my kernel (although VMware’s stuff does seem to be solid).
In line with my desire to write about books I read, I’d like to devote this post to a book I’ve put on the back shelf for a while — E. Dijkstra’s A Discipline of Programming.
Discipline seems to be a rather excellent work. It sets out a formal framework for reasoning about programs. And not just that - it does this in the context of imperative, iterative programming, rather than the declarative or functional styles commonly upheld as the material most conducive to rigorous reasoning.