This week, I was reading in a book of Scripture that I don’t go to very often — the tucked-away minor prophet Zechariah. He has to be one of the trippier OT prophets (up there with Ezekiel) — chapter 5 has some strange visions involving a flying scroll and a woman (a personification of wickedness) in a basket.

But the section I’d like to point out today is Chapter 3. In this chapter, Zechariah sees a vision of the priest, Joshua, standing before the Lord. Next to him is Satan, accusing him. Joshua’s clothes are filthy.

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Last night, Jennifer & I went to a fundraiser/concert by presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and his band Capitol Offense play the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake. It was a lot of fun. Those guys know how to rock. They played a lot of old classics - Freebird, Takin’ Care of Business, Joy to the World (Three Dog Night), and a bunch of others (I don’t remember them all).

Huckabee himself is a solid bassist. He didn’t seem to be doing anything particularly flashy or stellar to set himself apart as a stupendous bass player, but you don’t need that for your bassist in a rock’n’roll band. You need a bassist who can lay down a good line, stay in time, contribute well to the solidity of the sound, and look like a bass player. Governor Huckabee qualifies.

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Then the remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many peoples Like dew from the Lord, like showers on the grass which delay not for a man nor wait for the children of man And the remnant of Jacob shall be among the nations, in the midst o fmany peoples, like a lion among the beasts of the forest, like a young lion among the flocks of sheep, which, when it goes through, treads down and tears in pieces, and there is none to deliver. (Micah 5:7-8 ESV)

Reading in the Old Testament, we see many references to the remnant of Israel. Time and time again, judgement is pronounced against the children of Israel, but there is an important notation made: a remnant will be preserved.

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The Renegade awoke suddenly to the crackle of an open fire and the sound of rain falling steadily on the roof of the cottage. The next thing he noticed was the sharp pain in his side. His arms and side were heavily bandaged, and it was painful to even try to move.

Looking around the room, he saw an old man with a hunched back by the fire, stirring a pot. "Where am I?" he asked.

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I went this week to try to use UMN’s Usenet server, so I can get back on that world and start reading comp.object, comp.lang.c++, and comp.lang.functional again. And maybe a few others of interest.

I learned, much to my dismay, that the U decommissioned its USENET service in March of this year.

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In John 8:48ff, we see an interesting exchange between Jesus and the Jews regarding the nature of the Father, the Son, and Abraham.

In this exchange, Christ tells them the following: "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am." (Jn 8:58b ESV)

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I’ve never been a fan of those "Why XYZ is better than ABC language" posts that crop up all over the Internet. Usually, as soon as one is posted, someone else comes along and says that the first poster doesn’t have a clue, and frequently they’re right.

Also, I’ve been apprehensive of peoples’ attempts to compare Java and C++. I’ve said for some time that anyone who says that Java is just like C++ doesn’t know C++ and probably doesn’t know Java, and I’m still sticking by that. They’ve got syntactic similarity (a lot, in fact), but their semantic similarity (which is what I believe is actually relevant in language comparison) is slim. Java is much better compared for similarities with Python or Objective-C, although it is stricter than either of those languages (take my Objective-C statements with a grain of salt; I’ve only dabbled in and read about the language without actually using it for anything).

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Prophecy is pretty cool stuff. Today I was reading in Daniel, chapter 7 in particular. In this passage, God reveals to Daniel the general course of future human history (Daniel gets quite a few pre-occurrence history lessons).

That isn’t the only place where prophecy has crossed my radar of late. In this weekend’s message, Dr. Piper concludes his 7-message series on "Spectacular Sins and their Global Purpose in the Glorification of Christ" with a message on the most spectacular sin ever committed, the betrayal and murder of Jesus. In discussing the role of God in the death of Christ, he points out that His betrayal, beating, death, and resurrection were all foretold in significant detail in the prophets. (Desiring God should have the sermon transcript online in the next day or two, if you want to read more.)

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I’ve been working lately on a parser for Markdown to let me do some more manipulations of web content in our blog generation. It’s not going overly well. I went the other day to the Markdown source code to see how they parse, and much to my chagrin, they don’t. The canonical Markdown parser is implemented using a sequence of regular expression substitutions and hashing to protect things from subsequent substitutions.

This is not helpful. Not helpful at all. And it’s proving somewhat difficult to write a parser (granted, my brain hasn’t been working on it as hard as it could).

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