I’m tired…

• of arguing
• of nagging other people
• of being nagged
• of working on meaningless projects
• of trying to find worthwhile projects
• of thinking worthwhile projects even exist
• of having the same week every week
• of dealing with money
• of dealing with politics
• of trying to be nice all the time
• of dealing with homework
• of learning stuff I won’t remember two days from now
• of writing notes that are thrown in the trash
• of having ideas that I can’t use
• of having the same problems every day
• of not being authentic
• of staying home
• of being bored
• of wasting time
• of sitting around
• of looking forward
• of looking back
• of imagining
• of seeing success
• of knowing stuff
• of doing things no one notices
• of not doing things everyone notices
• of hearing praise
• of being right
• of trying to help
• of being lazy
• of procrastinating
• of owning stuff
• of buying stuff
• of wanting stuff
• of caring about my social life
• of having mountaintops
• of falling off of mountaintops
• of empty words
• of lost causes
• of infighting
• of divisional drama
• of everyone’s own opinion
• of everyone’s high horse
• of always needing more
• of never breaking off
• of thinking about the same topics
• of coming to the same conclusions
• of taking too long
• of losing opportunities
• of expressing myself
• of being on my high horse
• of having my own opinion
• of being offended
• of caring about being offended
• of people acting superior than me
• of acting superior to other people

I’m not depressed or anything.  I just think there’s a point where you get worn out.  You really can only go so many years with the same stupid responsibilities, with the same stupid projects.

I’m sure everyone goes through this.  But what matters to me is that it’s happening to me.  I guess what I really want is a goal to work toward.  Something that “makes a difference”.  Not changing the world or anything.  If I could devote my time to helping just a couple of people a day, and make their lives better, that would be great.  Why is everyone so focused on what benefits them personally?  Why do we still worry about money, or work, or politics, or property?  Nearly every person that I saw today had their own personal motives for doing what they do.  And I work at a church.  Isn’t a church supposed to be a place where other people bless you?

Not everyone I saw is like that.  There are some great people who have sacrificed nearly everything just to help others.  But plenty of people, tired people, who are totally unaware of it, are just pursuing their own agenda, where they’re at the top of the list; just above impressing other people.

I really try to be nice and friendly around everyone I meet.  I try to avoid getting angry.  But I’m not perfect; there are times when I stay away from encouraging someone, or when I ignore bad things going on around me.  But I wish I could embrace every circumstance and help out someone. An existence where I live my life out of love would be the ideal existence.

That’s why I’m a Christian.  That’s why Jesus’ teachings strike a chord with me.  Jesus was the ultimate “lover”.  He helped people regardless of their need.  He invited people to him, and if they didn’t come right away, he was always waiting.  Such an attitude strikes me as being one of the ultimate truths.  Jesus recognized and understood that the life we’re given is more than a chance to pursue our own goals, but a chance to help others reach theirs.  To better others’ lives.  I don’t believe in Christianity because of the science of it (or lack thereof), or the evidence of it.  It’s not because my parents are Christian.  It’s because Christianity demonstrates a love that you find nowhere in nature.

This was supposed to be a rant, but it kinda shifted nature a bit. I hope it blessed someone. It sure blessed me to write it.

Guess the Picture

You would never guess this, but this is a satellite picture of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. It’s a huge, uninhabited tract of land set aside as an oil reserve, and only recently leased out to oil companies. The satellite photos of the area are absolutely stunning from the abundance of lakes in the region and the way they reflect the sunlight. And at the very top of the region is the small town of Barrow, Alaska, famous for being the northernmost city in all of the United States.

I stumbled on to this while messing around with the new terrain feature in Google Maps.

The Me from Six Years Ago

So I was cleaning my room today, and decided I so ahead and sort through the contents of the filing cabinet I’ve had since I was 12 or 13. Let me tell you, I was a weird kid when I was 13. There were plenty of interesting little gems from back then. For example, a photo backup cd from an crappy old digital camera with a lower resolution than my current phone, an old “physics” drawing, and an essay that my 8th grade Science teacher (Mr. Lee Wagstaff, best teacher I ever had) gave me on the topic of faith.

Old Digital Camera Photos

My hair was pretty short.

We still have those pillows…

I was so proud of that moon map.

You can see the wire for the temperature sensor in my alarm sneaking over to the window.

I’m pretty sure I had a map for just about every region of the world.

I never quite finished Luigi’s Mansion

Good ‘ol Starcraft on a Pentium II with 6GB hard drive

Not too long ago…

My Physics Drawing

I guess I was trying to prove to someone that swinging your arm would result in a harder impact than a straight jab-punch. I now see the flaw in my logic; there’s no such thing as centrifugal force!

Faith Essay

My eighth grade IPC science teacher, Mr. Wag, was probably one of the best teachers I ever had. He taught both evolution and creationism equally, stating the weaknesses in both theories. He let students have Bible studies in his room after and before school. He wrote papers on the topic of Evolution vs. Creationism in plain English that were very interesting. He even offered to talk to kids about faith after school (since teachers can’t legally do it during a class, unless specifically asked) and openly stated his Christian beliefs. He really was a great guy. I got pretty close to him, and he was definitely a great influence on me and several of my friends.

What I found was one of his original essays on faith, basically an introduction to sin and what we can do about it. And pretty easy to read, too. Here it is.

He still works at North Richland Middle, and you might find his faculty page interesting.

Open Letter to Taco Bueno

Dear Mr. Bueno,

We, the peoples of North Richland Hills, Texas, love and appreciate the longtime commitment that you have kept toward the presence of mediocre Tex-Mex fast food in our community. You have won our hearts and the better halves of our BMIs from the foul addictions of sleazier restaurants such as Taco Bell and Taco Casa.

However, I am not writing this today to simply praise the high ethics that you have demonstrated toward your loving customers. Instead, I seek to gather attention to a problem which may contradict said affection.

Today, when I drove through your drive-thru, I was received cordially by a cheerful pre-recorded welcome. I quickly went about ordering my food, until the dreaded question came out of my server’s mouth: “Would you like hot sauce with that?” My pulse quickened. A clear “No, thank you” drifted out of my mouth, but I knew it was useless. I pulled around to the window, amidst a ever-growing fear as to the contents of my bag. I paid the cashier, received my order, and opened up the bag.

What I saw, Mr. Bueno, I can safely call the Bane of The Loyal Consumer. Put simply, I received hot sauce. I specifically had asked for no hot sauce. Why did I get hot sauce, when none was asked for? But alas, it was not even that simple. I had received, not one, not two nor even three hot sauces. Four hot sauce containers, Mr. Bueno. Four. Aside from not wanting them, the containers are of, ahem, crappy construction. They fall apart when you try to remove them from your bag, when you throw them away, any time. They leak all over the contents of my perfect number five combo meal.

Please, Mr. Bueno, hear my plea. Hear the pleas of thousands of loyal customers around the world, crying out for justice. We don’t want hot sauce with that, no, we don’t. Save your tomatos and petrochemical plastics for a better use, Mr. Bueno. We’re begging you.

Regards,

A Loyal Consumer

Being a Distracting Christian

This has been on my mind for a while.

It seems like so many kids in my youth group are becoming so much closer to God than they have been. I’ve sort of been trying to do the same, but there are so many distractions.

This is not aimed at any one person. I am not saying that anyone is doing anything wrong. This is just my shortcomings. I can’t be in worship and not be distracted by the people around me. It’s all fine and good until someone sticks a hand up or stands up in praise. Then I start wondering ” Well, they’re really into worship, should I be into it too?” or “Maybe I should do the same so they won’t be completely alone.” My instincts always seem to push the whole worship concept out of my mind, and I have a hard time getting back into it.

You’ll notice more often than not that I close my eyes during worship. This is not so much because I’m totally absorbed in the worship, it’s that I’m trying to keep my mind off of the visual distractions standing all around me. I rarely raise my hand, either, mostly because I believe that I shouldn’t be a distraction to anyone else should they feel the same way that I do.

None of this is wrong; in fact, it’s mentioned in the Bible to “raise your hands” in worship and prayer. But it’s not totally necessary to do so.

The thing I find so wonderful about worship is that sometimes I’ll stop singing for a little bit so I can hear the whole congregation singing around me, corporately worshiping. It’s so awe-inspiring to hear thousands engaged in praise to the same God, it’s almost tear-jerking awesome.

Oh, Email

I changed my email address recently. I set it up so all the email from my old address is sent to my new address, and a notification is sent to the original sender notifying them of the change.

This resulted in a long overnight conversation with a no-reply type email address from my hosting company. They sent me an email to my old account that I wasn’t supposed to respond to, and my old email faithfully sent a notification back to them informing them about the change of emails. They replied with an automated message saying that they don’t answer email sent to this address. My old email again responded with the same message automatically.

This went back and forth between both emails all night last night, a battle of the auto-responders. What’s really ironic is that the company that hosts my old email address is also the company that keeps trying to send me that notification. The company is Bluehost, a really great webhosting company.

I find this whole situation pretty hysterical. It’s no one’s fault, really, and it doesn’t bother me a bit. My opinion of Bluehost is still held pretty high, but I can’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation.

Jesus and the Decremental Thousands

Hmm…

Most people have heard the story of Jesus feeding the Five Thousand (Mark 6:30-44). It’s mentioned in all four Gospels (the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). Some people have even heard the story of Jesus feeding the Four Thousand (Mark 8:1-10), which is only mentioned in two Gospels (Matthew and Mark).

Well, I’m reading through Mark right now. Shortly after Jesus feeds the Four Thousand, he speaks to the disciples. The original text is from Mark 8:14-21, but I’m going to paraphrase it.

The disciples were getting out of a boat on the other side of the sea when they realized “Hey! We forgot the bread! We only have one stinking loaf!”

Jesus, standing nearby, overheard them and added, “Hey guys: Watch out for the yeast of the religious leaders and the king.”

They were all like, “Huh?” and stood around scratching their heads until one bright guys said “Oh! He means that because we have no bread!”

Jesus sighed and shook his head “Seriously, guys? How did you get that out of what I was saying? Are you still taking everything I say literally? I’m speaking metaphorically. And do you not remember what I just did like five verses ago?

“Alright, I’ll help you out here: When I took those five loaves of bread and fed five thousand people with ‘em, how many basketfuls were left over?”

“Uh, twelve?” they replied

“Good!” Jesus replied, “What about when I fed the four thousand? How many basketfuls were left over then?”

“Seven!” one responded enthusiastically.

Jesus smiled and nodded. “Okay. Now do you get it? Am I gonna have to feed the Three Thousand next?”

That’s my interpretation. As I’m reading, I keep noticing that the apostles sound like idiots and suck-ups almost all the time. Then you have Jesus, who is this guy who is just trying to teach the love, grace and mercy that the world needs, while trying to make sure that his followers understand. Jesus said earlier (I can’t find which verse it was) that he always speaks in riddles for the masses of followers, while he tries to explain things for his closest followers, the apostles, as much as he can. I can’t help but think that he is tempted to get annoyed and impatient with them. I mean, seriously. The apostles are the ones who are supposed to “go and make disciples of all nations” after Jesus is gone, and they have trouble understanding a lot of what Jesus is saying.

Pokemon!

After playing Pokemon Blue on my Gameboy Color (I’ve played Red before too; very similar), I really want to create a database of everything Pokemon; what types work well against what types, what Pokemon can learn what moves, what each item does and it’s importance, et cetera. It would be really easy to do with my database experience, I think.

The hardest part would be entering in all the information for all the Pokemon and items. The information’s already available in different places online, but there no really excellent centralized database anywhere for it. All I’d have to do would be to compile it.

Who knows, maybe I’ll do it.

The Jargon File

Hah. I was just reading The Jargon File and I came across the general description of a hacker (The Jargon File, if you don’t know, is basically a large hacker slang dictionary with information on hacker folklore, pranks, and descriptions). Funny; I match almost every category except the education and food categories.

If you read further into The Jargon File, you discover several common traits and misconceptions of hackers. Here are a few goodies:

• Leet-speak (saying “u r 4n 31337 hax0r,” or the like) is a distinct trait of a wannabee (that is, not a hacker) or, in my personal opinion, just a plain lazy person (an exception can be made sometimes for shortening words in text messages, but with the advent of T9, this too is becoming inexcusable).
• A hacker is not someone who breaks into security systems (like breaking into NASA or the pentagon). That would be a cracker. Hackers are much different, and generally are not doing anything illegal.
• Hackers have a really strange sense of humor by the measure of most normal people. For example, see RFC 1149; this demonstrates a standard upon which computer-to-computer communication (basically a network or the Internet) could be created by using carrier pigeons to fly messages back and forth between computers and scan them in. The RFC documents, by the way, are documents that standardize quite a bit of the Internet and other technology.
• Not mentioned explicitly in The Jargon File, hackers do not use pretty interfaces with lots of slick looking graphics and a mouse (see the movie “Live Free, Die Hard” if you want a prime example). Most tend to generally use a “command line” or shell, which is purely text with no graphics. Nowadays, however, many hackers do use a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for their work simply because it can speed things up.
• Hackers have a serious aversion to anything made by Microsoft. They tend to use Unix-based systems (like Linux or BSD), which have been around since the 1970’s and are generally faster and more stable than “Windoze” (a common nickname for Windows, also “Winslow”). The only reason that I personally use Windows is that there are no good multimedia programs for Linux that have the features that I use often. Otherwise I would’ve switched over to Linux years ago.

I’m pretty sure I just alienated over three quarters of my regular audience, but hey, it’s my blog anyway, right? This is the stuff I care about quite a bit, and I’m planning on making a career out of it eventually.

Metaphor of the Cross

In Matthew 10:37-39, Jesus says:

“Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (NIV)

I’ve heard this verse before. I’ve heard the metaphor “take up your cross” before too. My assumption was always that when Jesus was resurrected after crucifixion, he used the metaphor of taking up a cross as a poetic device to enhance his message. Problem is, Jesus says this before he was crucified.

My question is this: When Jesus mentioned a cross in this verse, what did he mean? Imagine the crucifixion never happened. Would this verse still make sense?

I have to admit, I’ve never really understood the metaphor of “taking up your cross” in the first place. The best guess I can come up with is that Jesus says to minister even to the point of costing you your life. If you must give your life, take up your cross and “be Jesus” to your last, your “crucifixion”.

Maybe a cross was symbolic of something in Bible times. It doesn’t seem like it would be though; it was mostly used as a form of execution for slaves and criminals.

I don’t get it.