So I've added in French and German Bibles, and made it possible to select your preferred version when reading the Morning or Evening offices. That's all. End of post.

Posted by Michael at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday, after much to-do, I finally got down to attempting to put the first stitches into this dalmatic that I will eventually wear (not the one in the picture, which costs $525.00 and is therefore a no-go for me).

The fancy ribboning that runs down the front and across the chest is called Orphrey Braid, and I happened to have picked up a rather nice bunch of stuff from a company in England called Turley Textiles. It's called the St. Patrick/Trinity weave, and is braided with gold thread.

So in preparation for all of this I went to Joann Fabrics and picked up some nice white fabric and some gold thread to sew down this nifty orphrey braid, and after getting the machine all set up, I attempted my first stitch.

Now, I think I might be out of practice, because after last nights excursion into sewing like the wind, I ended up with three stitches in my palm, a hemline on my calf, and a gold threaded buttonhole around my bellybutton. Funny thing is, I don't remember having to use a leg to push fabric through the machine the last time I attempted to become a tailor.

Oh well, for the moment I've decided to just anty up and buy a deacon's stole, then make this dalmatic when I'm not under pressure to try and finish it in record time, and I can adequately deal with all the frustrations that may arise. ....And when I can deal with the fact that my pride in in my own abilities has taken a bit of a beating at the moment.

At least I still make a killer chili.

Posted by Michael at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Yesterday, I stayed at home to recover from my bout with afternoon migraine on Sunday, and just get back up to speed. Then, as my day slowly got going, I put together a to-do list to accomplish all those things that really needed doing - like getting tires replaced on my car after the Sunday afternoon blow-out. Now, I still had just as much to do as always, but I was fully in control of scheduling the day, something that doesn't quite happen as often as you'd like to think.

See, the big thing for me is that I've got all of these many tasks and sub-tasks that come at me from various locations, and if I were left in charge of my own day, I could adequately schedule certain tasks at certain times - like tasks that require concentration and focus, they go in the morning; tasks that require concentration, but I can pretty much do blind (like coding), they go in the morning after the focus stuff; and the stuff that I could probably do while sitting in front of the television would come last.

Unfortunately, this is not what happens. Instead, I go to a job, where the majority of my work is things that no longer require much of my concentration or focus - but need doing. So then I finish with these tasks, and begin doing things that enlarge my programming knowledge, but are on my own task list, and finally, when I come home, I attempt to read and/or study for things that I need to prepare for. Only one problem. My brain is tired, and my concentration and focus are shot.

But not so yesterday. Since I had full control, my day ended up with me reading quickly and efficiently, and then taking care of the non-concentration tasks after. And everything happened so efficiently that I made myself muy happy, and ended up pleased as punch.

Now, I suppose I could do this every day, and be an excited, content and happy man, or - motivated self-starter to borrow that career phrase....

Of course, there's that little detail of a living wage that I've got to deal with.

Posted by Michael at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today, as I was sitting in a lovely chaird given to me by Joann reading Alexander Schmemann's Eucharist, I realized once again the beauty of the Incarnation of our Lord. Here is a man who in His suffering and death on a cross brought about the possibility of my unity with God. And, every Sunday, as I partake of the Eucharist, I not only am reminded of His death, but by eating His flesh, and drinking His blood, I am transported - if only momentarily - into the throne room of God, and am made One not only with my Heavenly Father, but with all those who partake in this ritual. It is a thing of beauty, made possible by the death and resurrection of a man fully Divine and fully human, and something that longs for the unity of all believers.

So, fast forward to my exit from Barnes and Noble, where I had just purchased another version of the Bible to help me minister to others. As I exited, a man asked if I had a moment to complete a survey, and if I wouldn't mind answering some questions, and I could pick any of the questions he had on a sheet. As I read them, I noticed that they were good questions - questions about family, about God, about the nature of man's search for God - so I opened my big mouth and said, "These are really good questions. I'm studying to become a priest." Oh, the joys of blathering.

"Really? I'm a minister too," he said.
"Oh yeah? What church?" I asked.
"The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of the Church," he responded, "Our aim is to unite Christianity, and bring together the various facets of the church."
"Sounds like a good thing," I said, "My own denomination works toward uniting the separate streams of Christianity."
And so began the conversation.

At some point in the conversation, the concept of family came up, and how Jesus had come to establish a family. Not just a family of believers, but a real, honest to goodness family, because "God had planned for him to get married." "Of course," he interjected, "we're not associated with this whole DaVinci Code thing." Needless to say, our conversation quickly took a turn, and I began to hear things like "Jesus was not really God. We don't believe that. But, we do believe that he was the only human without original sin, and became divine through his obedience to God's will," and that "the Holy Spirit is the feminine aspect of God," and that "Jesus could not accomplish anything without the Holy Spirit. That's why God sent the Holy Spirit. Jesus needed the Spirit to accomplish these works." Finally, I heard that "Jesus, by saying 'It is finished,' meant that he was only able to finish what God had apportioned for him to do, and not what God had originally planned. That is yet to come."

Now, suddenly I'm realizing that there's a huge bit of HERESY going on here, and I make the appropriate comments, like "Jesus said, 'I and the Father are One,' which means that He is God. And, are you suggesting that Jesus was 'Adopted' - so to speak - as a Son of God?" and "If you make the distinction between Jesus and the Holy Spirit, you run the risk of separating the Trinity into three separate entities," and finally, "Jesus accomplished everything he set out to do, and that was victory over sin, over death, and the unification of God with man. His death was once for all, and the kingdom is here, now."

Nevertheless, my comments only brought back responses from a man who was clearly well versed in the Bible, but who had taken the verses and attached different meaning to them. It was clear to me that the conversation was going no where, and that this could not be resolved with me standing there knowing that I was talking to a man spouting not only an adoptionist & modalist heresy, but also a rebirth of Arianism, and some other stuff to boot, and not having an intricate knowledge of these heresies, or of this man's particular heresy, I wouldn't get very far with Bible quotations since he had his own interpretation of everything. And so I took my leave. Pleasant fellow, really, just bent in the wrong direction - I mean seriously in the wrong direction.

Now, the funny thing about all of this is that while sitting in this comfy chair of mine this morning, I looked over at my bookshelf, and stared at a tome called "Heresies," (Harold O.J. Brown) and thought, "It's high time I read that, since I'm going to encounter that in my ministry. Hmmm... maybe when I'm done with Schmemann." Then I put that thought aside, and continued my reading. Even funnier - at least to me - is that the initial conversation also included the name Rev. Sung Young Moon, but all I could say was "Yeah, I've heard that name before." Then, as the conversation progressed, and I realized more and more heresy piling up, it suddenly dawned on me: Heresy + Moon... Heresy + Moon..... Ding, Ding, Ding! "Dang it! I'm talking with a Moonie."

Now, out of all of this I'm happy to have walked away knowing the following 1) for every heresy the man spouted, I responded with the Word of God, and 2) I was able to spot the heresy as it came out of his mouth, and even name it while it was being spoken. Nevertheless, it would have made me happier had I actually digested the "Heresies" book and been able to respond with even more arguments to refute this man. Oh well, next time.

Posted by Michael at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Tonight The Stacia is coming over and cooking dinner for me, and then we're going to study. Or rather, I'm going to study, while she reads for fun.

She's cooking dinner because a) she knows she's loving on me when she does that, and b) she's trying to prove to me that she can cook.

You see, she lives with seven other girls in one big house, and they share the duties of cooking for one another, so each girl cooks twice a month. However, every time I caught wind that Stacia was cooking, it turns out she was making chicken burritos. Not exactly the hardest thing in the world to make, and the fact that it seemed like every time I asked her what she was making I got the answer: "Chicken burritos."

Needless to say, I started getting a little scared, thinking that she couldn't really cook (I mean seriously, heating up a flour tortilla, slapping some reheated refried beans and fried chicken breast onto it isn't exactly Betty Crocker). She obviously picked up on that, because the other day she matter of factly stated, "You were getting scared, weren't you?' then laughed. Apparently the joke was on me.

In any case, she made a stellar stuffed bell pepper the other day, and tonight I'm getting some kind of Mexican casserole thingie - at least that's how she explained it...

Anyway, I'm not scared anymore that I would have to whip out my Future Homemakers of America* club card, because of all these fantastic dishes I keep getting.

Yay for me! I'm getting good food tonight.

Posted by Michael at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Added two new additions to the Book of Common Prayer: An Order of Service for Noonday, and An Order of Service for Compline.

These are accessible from the Daily Office page.

In addition, I made some bug fixes to the Readings Parser, to not throw a glitch when it comes across things like Revelation 22:12-17,21 or 1 Corinthians 4:8-20(21). You may see some glitches upcoming, that have to deal with suggested evening and morning readings. They'll throw a glitch that has [evening] or [morning] in the line. Still working on fixing that one up. Hopefully I'll get to it before it's too visible.

Posted by Michael at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The other day I was reading through the Daily Office, and I ran across this verse:
Was any man called being circumcised? Let him not become uncircumcised. Hath any been called in uncircumcision? Let him not be circumcised. -1 Corinthians 7:18

Ok, if you were circumcised, you should not become uncircumcised. Is that even possible? Yikes. I imagine it would involve some form of surgery that would border on the miraculous. Not to mention you'd .... never mind.

Seriously though, it was actually practiced, this surgery, as described by Celsus, a doctor of which almost nothing is known, yet most likely lived around 25BC. Nevertheless, while this surgery was physically possible, I'm sure that's not what St. Paul had in mind - entirely.

The whole chapter is about being content with the situation that God has given for us to be in. If we are slaves, remain so, but avail ourselves of every opportunity to become free (v21). Taking the opportunity to avail ourselves of surgery to return to an uncircumcised state is to allow outward appearances to take precendence in our display of our faith. Paul is asking us to serve God, and Him alone, and to be content with our position, our situation, and our physical concerns.

Let's forget about the surgery - I know I will - and just be content in everything, relying on God for all our needs.

I pray that it may be so.

Posted by Michael at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So this new site I've done has a back end in MySQL. The original thought was that I would produce a web front-end to deal with all the data that we received from registrations. You know, a management system.

Instead, I get the "You know, I'd rather deal with the data in Excel. Can you just output a file that I can open in excel?"
..."You mean, you want a comma separated values file?"
"Yeah, that would work."
"Done."

It means, a page that takes about 20 minutes to code and debug, versus 8 pages to process data. How's about that? Easy to please....

Posted by Michael at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week's Daily Office (Week of 2 Lent), contained readings from 1 Corinthians 5:9-6:8 for Wednesday, and 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 for Thursday. When I first started reading on Thursday morning, I thought, "Hey, wait a minute. I thought I stopped on 8?" So I double-checked, and sure enough, there are verses dropped out.

I wonder why anyone would want to ignore verses 9-11? Especially when verse 11 is so beautiful: "...but you were washed. But you were sanctified. But you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and in the Spirit of our God."

Maybe it has to do with the tense of the verb to be in the first part of verse 11: "That is what some of you were, but you were washed. But you were sanctified. But you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and in the Spirit of our God." Who knows. Maybe I'll look it up in the 1928 BCP and see if it's there or not.

Posted by Michael at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So on Friday night I got to go and enjoy a "Real Live Cartoon" with the Stacia, and Fr. Rich and Joann, and one of the catchphrases for fixing himself after a particularly nasty disfiguration was "Baaaaack to Normaaaaal!!!"

Well, the show itself started at 11:15pm, and being old and virtually gray, I am usually in bed around 10pm, so this was a bit more than I was used to and left me dazed and confused for all of Saturday, as well as most of Sunday. I think on Sunday to Monday I slept about 10 hours straight.

But that's not all.

I've been working on a website for Caltech which got finished Friday - for the most part, and had some feature creep on Monday, so I needed to get that taken care of and finished out, and so today, I'm back to my basic maintenance gig.

Baaaack to Normaaaaal!!!

It feels great. And, you all might be so very excited that I could potentially find enough time on my hands to post, not one, but two blog entries for the next several days - to make up for all my pent up musings.

In any case, my fifteen minutes are up. I better get back to work.

Posted by Michael at 1:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So I've known about a website that we needed to build at work for a few months now, but didn't get to work on things because I didn't have any information - or content. But suddenly, I'm told it's a priority, and I need to get it up asap. So from Monday until today, I've been furiously pulling together the details of logo, type styles, and what data we need to collect, as well as piecing together some of the content in order to design, code, and program this little site (I'm told the content is still in flux - and I hope so, because most of it is stuff I pulled out of my nose).

Simple little site. One design, with lots of data to collect. The registration form actually does two things: 1) takes user information and stores it in a MySQL database, then 2) processes their credit cards in realtime, and if payment is successful, updates the database with a "paid in full" flag on their record. So basically what that means is that if you're going to go and play around on the site, you shouldn't play around with the registration forms, because we'll take and store all your personal data before you even get to the payment part. Bummer, huh?

In any case, spending a week learning how to make it all go smoothly made me excited to get up and go to work in the morning, which makes me realize that this sort of thing just gives me the yeeehaw's, and it's probably a good thing that I have a job doing it.

In any case, it means that now that I'm done, I can get back to finishing up my external clients' websites, and messing around with all the stuff over at All Saints, as well as finally doing more edits on the Daily Office Script.

Posted by Michael at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You may have noticed that I haven't posted in a while. This isn't just because I haven't really had the time, but also because when I upgraded to the new server, it meant that my blog software program got warped - specifically, I couldn't log in any more. It didn't recognize me, and certainly didn't want to play nice.

Today, though, I found all the necessary details for fixing it, and my helpful server people helped with the details of adjusting things in the MySQL server. So, back up and running.

But I'm still pretty busy. Here at Caltech we just put up one remodeled site yesterday, and I'm supposed to have another new one up by the end of the week. I can't say that I'm all that excited about this green giant going up, but I had to keep the look and feel identical to what it was before. The only difference is that we have put everything into a content management sysetm called ZOPE - again, something I can't say I'm excited about.

Anyhoo, off to work. Details, details, details....

Posted by Michael at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My reading task for the day at work. What does it mean?

For you, dear readers, absolutely nothing - unless you use some of my programming schtuff, in which case it means faster programs and less bugs - but if you don't, then well, end of story.

For me, it means a rewrite of all my existing programs. I'm excited.

Wheeeee!

Posted by Michael at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Ok, a friend at work sent this to me. All I can say is this guy is amazing. The best yet, is that his act is so well timed to the music that you can help but get mesmerized by these three balls dancing around him. [4.27 minute video, but worth it.]

Posted by Michael at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Remember the duplicate of me who lived in South Central L.A. and ordered cable service? Well, after mailing two sets of documents to ComCast, they have officially decided that the account was "opened inappropriately." That means that they will discontinue trying to collect, and that my credit report will take a turn for the better.

Thanks for your prayers.

Posted by Michael at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Hypothetically speaking, of course, if Jesus ever said, "YEEEEEHAW!" I'm sure it would have been when he was riding his bike.

This morning I rode my bike to work, which on the way to work isn't so hard, since it's mostly downhill. Downhill translates into FAST, which is why I happily exclaimed YEEEHAW. Of course, screaming down the hill in bright yellow windproof coat, with a lower layer of spandex made me a Charter Member in the Muffin Top Bike Club, but nonetheless, what a joy. Tonight shall be less so, since it'll be biking back up the hill. I'm pretty sure I'll be saying BOOHOO.

But back to the hypothetical ramblings of this Jesus. The Nicene Creed states that Jesus is "true God from true God," but that he also was born of a virgin and "made man." That "made man" thing is important in so many ways, but today I'm just going to focus on Athlete Jesus. God became fully man, and that allowed Him not only to experience all the same temptations and sufferings we do, but it allowed Him to truly experience all the joys that we experience, and, I'm sure to partake of riding a bike down a hill. Ok, ok, don't get started on the whole, "There weren't any bikes in ancient Palestine," because I know that. But still, if God wanted to hop on a bike, some skis, or a snow board, He easily could have done it. I mean, He practically water skied on the Sea of Galilee - just minus the boat. The point is, He would have liked it, because, after all, He created it all. And to that, we can say YEEEHAW!

Posted by Michael at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

So today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, the season in which we remember the Suffering of Christ, and his subsequent death and resurrection. And we do this by entering into our own forms of suffering and sacrifice, in the hopes that we, through our own suffering, might begin to rely on God for all things.

And that should bring you joy.

Posted by Michael at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)