While wandering further through various blogs, I saw this link to Johnny the Baptist. I about pee’d my pants it was soooooo funny. I’m not sure what this guy is hoping to accomplish, but if he’s accomplished anything… it was to become an even greater embarassment to the other Baptists out there trying to be serious. Poor guy.

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So I don’t know what posessed me to do this, but I was checking my hotmail and for some reason clicked on “My MSN”. I thought to myself, uh, I don’t have my own MSN, and I’m pretty sure I don’t own one. So I clicked it to get a personalized portal—and glancing at my horoscope (which I don’t ever read) and something struck me as being really odd here. I think they’ve got my gender wrong—either that or they’re suggesting I give cross-dressing a try (along with breast implants):

Scarves are out, cleavage is in! Sensible shoes and practical clothes get the boot in favor of stiletto heels and sensuous fabrics. Your passion and sense of romance is at an all-time high, dear Aquarius, so you might as well take advantage of it for all it’s worth. You can expect to reap a tremendous payoff as a result of the extra efforts you have been making with your appearance.

Yeah, um, not gonna go out and spend 80 bucks on a pair of high heels and even more on “sensuous fabrics”. The last thing I want to do is make someone’s gaydar go off the charts.

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In my quest to find healing and deal with the issues that have been a source of stress and anxiety for me, a friend emailed me a message by Randy Dean. I haven’t gotten all the way through it yet (it’s an hour long), but it’s already asking some tough questions and demanding a cry for mercy. In short he’s stating that as a true follower of Christ there is no reason to maintain grudges or bearing unforgiveness in our hearts. He also goes into religiosity/religianity and just how bad it is/can be. I’ll give my thoughts on the message when I get through it.

Download Message 2.2 MB WMA File

Filed under: Awareness, Christian Subculture, Spirituality
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Found a new source of distraction online called Anagrammatic at miniclip.com. It’s pretty fun—you play other users online in a game of words. The object, take nine letters that you’re given (or have been selected) and find the longest word out of those series of letters. You have four rounds and then a fifth round where you have to guess the “nine-letter word”.

With every win or loss your global ranking is adjusted. On the whole, it’s a fun game but once in awhile gets kinda buggy—on about a half dozen occasions the game would freeze in the middle of gameplay. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s a bit annoying—especially when you’re winning a game. I also noticed that it is a bit resource-driven and my laptop gets a bit sluggish after a longer period of time of gameplay. I think that it is quite possible that the game slowly consumes more and more memory to run the game, a side effect of some Flash games/animations that I’ve seen over the years.

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Something unusual has been happening lately—or perhaps just a bizarre string of coincidences. For the past month or so, I have been seeing a number of MN license plates with the letter combination “MHT” preceding the three numbers—my initials are MHT. This has been happening on a weekly basis for a few weeks now. Just last week I followed a taxi cab in rushhour half the way home that had the MHT prefix. This morning leaving Woodland Hills, there was a car in front of us that also had the letters MHT on his plates.

Now if I wanted to overanalyze this and perhaps spiritualize it (which had been my tendancy in the past), I’d say oh, God must be trying to get my attention–but these days I’m not sure what to think. Maybe He is, maybe it’s just a strange string of coincidences. This I know however, I’m not going to rush out and get vanity plates with MHT on them—that’s only something a retired man would do.

Filed under: Awareness, Spirituality
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This morning instead of attending the service, we went to the Discovering Woodland Hills class, the first of six or seven classes one takes to become a covenant partner of WHC. To be honest though, I was having a desperately tough time staying awake and my interest was most certainly not piqued. The last thing that I can imagine is being involved in “ministry” before these issues with “church” and my cynicisms are dealth with—and on that note I am meeting with Greg Boyd this Wednesday to talk about some of those things and to get his feedback. I also plan on talking with one of their counselors there and see if I can’t just get all this out on the table and sort through it with the help of someone else.

I’d consider using one of our in-network counselors, but frankly it’s gotten too expensive to do that—instead of paying co-pays, we end up footing much of the bill. I’d rather go to someone who’s trained (but not licensed) for free, then pay $100 a visit for someone who’s licensed and basically just listens and once in a while throws out a thought or two. I need someone to help me get at the root of these problems and help me deal with not just the symptoms and peripheral items, but the root reasons as to why I’ve been feeling this way.

One thing’s for sure, it’s getting difficult to tolerate doing this “on my own”.

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There’ve been many occassion when I just needed to find out what the date/time value of a timestamp was—and sometimes when I needed to convert a date/time into a timestamp. So I just did it once and for all, sat down, and cranked out a quick PHP script that I run locally on my machine for when I need it.

Feel free to try it out. If you think it’s useful, feel free to download it for your server, too. Just remember to remove the .txt extension and it should work on most PHP enabled servers.

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I’ve been thinking these past few days, how it’s become somewhat of a complex for me—finishing things. I seem to have trouble finishing what I’ve started. There are tons of things that I can think of that I’ve started but have never finished—they remain in the dark shadows of my mind, once in a while reminding me that they’re still there and waiting for me to do something about it.

Our bathroom… probably has about two hours of work left to do on it to be “finished”. The redesign and implementation of a blog for designbymichael.com—on hold for no reason. My hosting invoice tool? Well, I try to keep plugging away at it and is held up by the mucky details of how to properly manage invoices, particularly recurring ones that might occur on irregular intervals. I’ve also got dozens of web-based application ideas that I’ve started with a firey passion but never followed through with to an end product. I’m not sure why I have such a complex about finishing things, but I do.

I’m not sure what the reason is—and I assume the only cure is to actually finish things. But while that sounds simple, it isn’t quite that easy. I’d love to hear a phychologist’s opinion of why this might be. Maybe I have a fear and phobia about finality—or maybe I’m just lazy. I don’t know. Regardless of what the condition is a result of, it still isn’t easy finishing what I start.

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Well, it’s kinda funny—my wife was concerned about how much frustration I’ve been experiencing in regards to, er, shall we say, the slow down I’ve been experiencing and the limitations at the ‘MO. So she says to me, “do we need to get you a laptop so you can get stuff done at ‘MO?”

So, I went to Best Buy, put about half down and the rest on credit and got a pretty decent laptop. I ended up getting an HP Pavilion dv1311se from Best Buy. As much as I always swore I’d never buy a computer from there, it ended up being something I could afford and would meet most of the needs.

The one drawback is that it’s XP Home Edition and I’m gonna have to invest in another OEM edition of XP Pro so I can run IIS 5.1 on it for my web application development (PHP and ASP.NET). For now I’ll just use something else like Apache or Xerver until I get the upgrade.

It’s a pretty decent laptop I think. Lightweight and seems to have much of what I need. It was a pain in the ass removing all the crappy software that it came with, but despite that, I’m slowly getting settled in.

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So I recently purchased a DVD-RW drive for my system, given that both my drives were failing. On one of the packages contained a sticker pointing me to a URL at Nero’s website for downloading the latest version of Nero so I could take advantage of double-layer burning capabilities. Well, that URL left me no information about how to upgrade… only buy.

So I emailed customer support about a week ago… Finally got a reply..

Dear valued customer,

thank you for your email and your interest in our software.

This has something to do with the recorder features. The recorder supports DVD-R DL. Dual Layer burning for - DVDs was only recently included - after the Lite-On package was packed and after the OEM version disc was pressed.
If you want to be able to burn to DVD-R DL, you have to update to any later Nero version.

Conclusion:
www.nero.com/us/**************.html (sensored)

Should you have any other request, please don’t hesitate to contact us again.

Best regards

Natalie Dennhardt
Sales Support

Nero AG
Im Stoeckmaedle 18
76307 Karlsbad
Germany
Fax : ++49 (0)7248 928 499
http://www.nero.com

So I went out to the URL they gave me… and this is what I saw…

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