Entries Tagged 'Personal' ↓

I thought I might mention a couple of things I have found online recently. The first is something called Readability, which is a button you can add to your browser toolbar. On web-pages that are very busy with all kinds of adds, pics, etc, it will find the relevant story and eliminate all the clutter for you, making it easier to read.

I found out about Readability at a NY Times site, Pogue’s Posts, a blog by one of the NYT technical writers, David Pogue. Mr. Pogue is an interesting writer and covers a wide variety of gizmos and gadgets if that is something you are interested in. The Readability column is here.

Last, this one is kind of … different. I suppose several web-news sites have these kinds of aggregators, but I stumbled across MSNBCs “Weird News” feed a couple of weeks ago. They often come up with hilarious and interesting stories, some of which would make great sermon illustrations, if only one could find the text they go with. Of course, some of what they post is drivel, but I am finding that I am clipping columns for later use fairly regularly. With Readability of course!

An interview in the New York Times reminds me of a great blessing from God our family received a little over six years ago.

I have written about this before, but I just want to again give praise to the Lord for the gifts he gives to men.

Six and a half years ago, my wife began to lose weight rapidly and was bruising easily. She was becoming more and more exhausted each day. (She was enjoying the weight loss part!) We called our doctor who immediately got the ball rolling in our health care system, no small feat. The diagnosis was Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML). Our hematologist was very upbeat, however. The new therapy for this disease was a drug called Gleevec, just approved for CML treatment two years previously. We haven’t looked back. Gleevec has very minimal side-effects (we haven’t really noticed any). My wife is living a normal life.

The interview with Bryan Druker, the doctor in charge of developing Gleevec reminded me of how close my dear wife was to death’s door:

The problem [with a CML diagnosis] was that the death rate in the first year was 25 to 50 percent.

The life expectancy after diagnosis before Gleevec was about 5 years. And the previous treatments would make those years pretty miserable.

This interview gives you a bit of insight into the persistence and dedication of Dr. Druker in bringing Gleevec into production. It is now approved for ten different forms of cancer, but is most successful with CML, I believe.

My wife takes a couple of little orange pills every morning and God has given her six and a half years of normal life. If there is a drawback, as I was commenting to a friend, is that she would have been in heaven these last five years or so … instead, she gets to live with me.

Maybe there is a purgatory?

If a conference is billed as a conference on preaching, why is it that so many of its speakers are obviously reading a prepared manuscript? Jonathan Edwards notwithstanding, it does seem that preaching should at least sound extemporaneous, don’t you think?

I thought some of our friends outside Victoria might like to see some pictures of the damage done by vandalism to our church property last Friday evening, Oct 2.

This photo is the worst of the damage – our  completely destroyed storage shed:

More photos are posted here, at our church site.

The damage could have been much worse. We thank the Lord for His protection in this incident. No one was hurt and really, the damage was very minor.

And in the meantime, we had great services this weekend with significant spiritual victories happening in lives. That is the main thing in all of these distresses. And Thanksgiving is next Monday! So Praise the Lord!

I woke up this morning to the realization I didn’t have to get up and spend all day at the church building painting! Praise the Lord!

Here is the finished product:

What a blessing to be done!

This link will only be active for a few weeks, I think. But here’s the headline:

Monkeys prefer metal to Mozart

The article says a recent study shows that monkey’s somehow found heavy metal music relaxing. The researchers wrote music specifically for monkeys, imitating the sounds they make in their calls and cries. The conclusion?

The results suggests music is species-specific. It may be used to communicate an emotional state and try to induce that same emotional state in the listener, Snowdon said.

I’m just wanting to know if they played ‘Hey, Hey, it’s the Monkees’ for them?

We’ve been a little busy lately. Our church building is badly in need of paint and new gutters. So…

We have decided to attempt the work ourselves. It will save cash. The wear and tear on our inexpert bodies is free!

Here’s a look from the front of our building:

And me running my saw:

Our men installing the gutter brackets:

The beginnings of a new colour scheme:

We’ve been putting in many hours each day. Not my normal sort of activity so I am pretty weary. No energy for arguing on blogs!

That’s probably a good thing!

I don’t know if you are aware that blogs get spam too. I have a plug-in on ours that catches almost all of it. Moderation of course gets the rest. Some of them are obscene, but this one caught my eye:

You know so many interesting infomation. You might be very wise. I like such people. Don’t top writing.

A very discerning spammer! My sentiments exactly! I don’t think I can top that one! (I probably could spell it better, though…)

Note this line taken from a new rating system explained here:

FINO—fundamenalist in name only

This can only mean one thing…

Continue reading →

… is sweet to the soul.

So says Pr 13.19a. I wonder if we take that out of context, considering the parallel phrase in Pr 13.19b, but…

But I just finished a massive amount of re-coding our Thru the Bible html index project.

Between August of 2005 and April of 2007 we took our church through a marathon chronological Bible reading and preaching project. We read the same passages together, worked through study guides, and preached messages covering the material we were reading each week.

I created Thru the Bible 1.0 with just the Old Testament index. It was kind of clunky looking, basically really really old-fashioned HTML, back eons ago when the web was young (and ugly). This index contained only our written material.

Tonight I finally finished the re-write of the whole project, OT, Intertestamental period, and NT. It looks much better than the earlier effort, although I am not sure it reaches the level of what the geeks call “Web 2.0”. Anyway, it looks a lot better than the first version.

And it contains all the audio files.

I plan to burn these on DVDs, and will make them available to anyone who asks for the cost of postage. (These will be on basic cheap DVDs, if you want a “100 year” DVD, it will cost $5 plus postage.)

I still have to double check all my links, but praise the Lord, all the coding is done.

Now its time to go to bed. How many late nights has this been?

UPDATE: DVDs now available!