Archive for March 2006

March 31, 2006

Chaos Revisited

1:52 pm | Religion | Comments: 0

I’ve talked before about the forces of darkness which exist in the world and seek to destroy anything in it that loves God. Living apart from God has much more subtle consequences, though. Imagine a world where life has no meaning, where no laws exist, and where there can be no basis of trust among people. Just people living their lives aimlessly in search of fulfillment for their physical needs and desires. It takes a very real toll on your life, emotionally and physically. I think Godlessness is easily the biggest creator of stress in today’s world.

God is who holds us in life. I always notice this when I stray from my Christian walk, failing to be in the Word and in prayer. Life gets frantic, my mind wanders constantly, I’m restless and discontent, stress builds up fast, I waste alot of time doing dumb stuff, people find me to be irritable and cold, and so on. I don’t consciously make the choice for all that to happen - all I do is neglect my duties as a follower of Jesus Christ. It all tells me that the comforting effect of the Holy Ghost is real; I can feel his presence when I seek God’s face, I can feel his absence when I turn from God’s face. The most amazing (and fundamental) part about the God of the Bible is that he is.

March 30, 2006

The Case Against Xanga: Part II

12:46 am | Weblogging | Comments: 4

I thought I would share an analogy that has popped up in recent discussions. The analogy began by saying that using Xanga was like fornicating. The issue we ran into there was the moral problem with fornicating, whereas using Xanga isn’t (to my own chagrin, I suppose) morally wrong. However, we came up with a much better analogy.

Using Xanga is like drinking cheap beer. Cheap beer is in itself reprehensible stuff. If you aren’t into beer all that much, you just have to trust me on this one. Xanga is an easy, shallow, popular alternative to something with the possibly of richness and depth. I should say right now that I don’t hate people that use Xanga (or people that drink cheap beer). I personally have tasted the better beer and it is pleasing to my lips. I want to share that with one and all. Therefore, I say to you all that Xanga is the cheapest and most ill-tasting of all weblog services. Do you not want to taste of the better beer? If so, pour that Xanga down the drain!

March 28, 2006

Images from the Calder City

2:19 pm | My Life | Pictures | Comments: 12

Otherwise known as the Furniture City, the River City, Gd Rapids, and the Hometown of J. Dub, Grand Rapids is a pretty cool little town. In the last 10 years, the downtown area of Grand Rapids has gone from slum to sleek, from a few scared people wandering from an office building to their car or vice versa to hordes of shoppers, couples, harmless bums and venue-goers ambulating hither and yon in search of urban pleasantries. Grand Rapids is now a walking city, and recently I took to the streets, armed with a camera phone, with a top-secret team of experts. Here’s a few Grand Rapids landmarks that we happened to walk by. If you pay careful attention, you will find a message hidden somewhere in this post.

The Date Tree; containing a tile marked with every year of Grand Rapids history, dating way back to 1790 or something. I don’t know. Tradition mandates that you find your birth year and stand on it. Tradition!
ARP

Gerald R. Ford Museum Spaceman. These days he has a security guard bumbling around at all times to keep people from climbing on him. Now that must be an exciting job.
owns

The Calder! Love it or hate it, it’s only in Grand Rapids.
you.

Me on the Tire Swing. You can’t really see the tire swing, but it’s big and I’m sitting on it. You can see the head of a little brat that I kicked off the swing shortly after the picture was taken. Please note that I do not have, nor ever intend to have, half of a mustache. That’s just lighting.

March 27, 2006

The Case Against Xanga: Part I

10:20 pm | Weblogging | Comments: 7

To open my case against Xanga, I’ll quote a post from a fallen brogger (a brogger who began with a real brog and fell into the cesspool of Xanga).

On popular demand, I’ve been personally asked to write another post on this forsaken xanga. This post will contain the subject “why I do not use xanga,” and will also be posted on my not-so-forsaken blog. Let us begin from the start (which I hear from Marry Poppins is a very good place to start… or was that the sound of music lady… hmmm…. no matter).

The first and foremost reason why Xanga is not as superior to Blogger is because a.) it does not allow random un-xanga users to comment. Commenting is by far the best reason for blogging. I’ve often said that commenting is the gasoline of blogging, it keeps you going just to see what others have to say on your writing. So limiting Xanga users is nothing but injustice. And b.) because there are no adds on blogger. That’s right, no crazy “FREE IPOD” or “HEY DORK, FIND A CHICK!” or “MAKE MONEY AT HOME”. All blogger that’s up on your banner is YOUR stuff. And finally, B.) because everything is just so much more neat. When you look at anyone else’s blog, it’s all un-orderly and un-capitalized, and for a perfectionist like me, it brings paranoia to my very bones. I end by saying Blogger is better.

That is all.

(originally posted 9.28.2005 by [name protected])

Now, even though the fallen brogger (we’ll call him “John”, for the sake of discussion) in his pre-fallen state was incorrect regarding comments being the “gasoline of blogging”, he makes many great points about Xanga. The question remains, then, what would cause an individual of such an opinion to fall from grace? The answer, sadly, is conformity. The only argument that can be made in favor of using Xanga is, “waaaah but all my friends use it!”. Needless to say, this is unacceptable. If you find yourself in such a situation, it’s obvious that all your friends are toadeying jabber-nows, and it’s your duty to educate them in the true art form of webrogging. We can learn much from the sad example of this fallen brogger, especially of how the Xanga (pronounced “monster”) within us all can take over at any moment. We need to adhere to the pure paths, my friends.

Christian Rhetoric for the Common Man

12:47 am | Religion | Comments: 3

If you’re a Christian in any respect (Catholic, Protestant, Reformed, what have you), you’re familiar with the Lord’s Prayer. We’ve probably all heard it so much, recited it so much, that we rarely stop to think about what it actually means. I was about to walk into a big-time career fair recently and that prayer started going through my head. The line that I got stuck on was, “Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” The second bit must be in there for a reason, I thought to myself. I then endeavored to hash out exactly what “on Earth as it is in Heaven” means.

How is God’s will done in Heaven? In terms of the agents carrying out God’s will in Heaven, their attitude is one of willingness, love, reverence, and thankfulness; they perform God’s will completely, perfectly, whole-heartedly and immediately; it’s the highest honor, it’s the greatest responsibility, it’s the ultimate goal; it comes before everything else, is more sacred than everything else, and matters more than anything else.

What if we Christians really did perform God’s will, as revealed to us in Scripture, in such a way as it is in Heaven? Life on this earth means that we as sinful people are prone to serve our selves, sin, Satan and the World. Regardless of that fact, it should be our goal as we live out our Christian lives, and as we are enabled by the Holy Ghost, to truly desire God’s will to be done on Earth as it is in Heaven, and to strive toward performing God’s will for us in that same way.

March 25, 2006

Recognition

2:42 pm | SIO | Comments: 17

The SIO 2nd Anniversary is looming on the horizon (only 2 months away or so) and we have decided to honor the Top 50 SIO Commentors by giving them their own section of the Sidebar (see the sidebar). SIO is all about me, but without you it would just be me! Not only does this give recognition to those who have made vaulable and legitimate contributions to SIO, the list contains many anomalies which can only be explained by either A) a thorough understanding of the modern history of SIO or B) magic. All that aside, many thanks to the commentors of SIO!

Note: Many hundreds of comments made in the early days of SIO have been lost for all eternity thanks to Haloscan.

Cue the Pomp and Circumstance

12:12 pm | College | My Life | Comments: 5

I have here sitting in front of me the paperwork necessary for confirming my spot at Grand Valley’s Winter 2006 Commencement Ceremony. It’s a bittersweet thing, really. I’ve completed all the necessary classwork to graduate, so they’re letting me walk. However, I still have a blasted internship requirement to complete before the College of Engineering & Computing sends me the piece of paper that says I have the degree. It’s actually an interesting situation, because I can do the internship whenever I want and it’s only loosely related to GVSU. The only decision to make now is if I really want to sink a few hundred bones into all the graduation bric-a-brac like gowns and stuff.

SIO has always been a great source of wisdom relating to post-secondary edcuation. Once I have had proper time to relfect on all that has happened to me over the past five years, I shall be revealing the great secret of it all. I don’t mean to keep you in suspense, but, well ok I do mean to keep you in suspense. It’s going to be good, though.

March 24, 2006

Journal Excerpts - A Vision

11:25 am | Poetry | Comments: 2

I looked out over a river and as I looked,
the world around me melted away.

I saw light streaming past me,
bending and twisting matter,
Crashing together, shattering
and flashing through an eternity.

The channels of time were opened to me,
and I had a brief glimpse of infinity.

Many centuries from hours expanded,
banded together in great lines of time
All roaring past me
Into past, present and future
Rolled into one.

As I looked into the depth of the ages
passing away,
I saw the vanity
that is youth and beauty.

- James w. Lanning

March 22, 2006

Fighting the Good Fight

1:43 pm | SIO | Comments: 3

In honor of our update from Wordpress 1.5 to Wordpress 2.0.2, we at SIO thought it fitting to explain in a little detail how we protect you and your families from annoying and often dubious spam comments and (more prominently) RandomChat™ shouts. Every comment or RandomChat™ shout leaves an IP address. In fact, every visitor to SIO leaves an IP address (in case you didn’t know, you can view them all by clicking the button above the counter on the sidebar). Spam-perpetrating IP addresses are copied into a list, after which the offending material is removed completely from the SIO databases. The addresses are then added to a very simple and highly effective IP blocking method called a “.htaccess” file. By this means we are able to preserve the delicate moral sensitivities of all SIO readers and slowly but surely keep unwanted activities from occurring. In addition to providing you with this valuable and comforting information, we will soon be making our complete list of banned IP addresses (and ranges) available for all to see and implement wherever necessary.

March 21, 2006

Lawns Are Evil

9:57 pm | Culture | News | Comments: 17

I just read a news story about an old geezer who shot a kid that walked across his lawn. I have a memo for you, Grandpop. Grass is a weed. Additionally, there must be a better way to solve the problem of little whipper-snappers walking across your weeds than shooting the whipper-snappers in the face with a shotgun. I spent too many years in lawn country. If you’ve heard of people with meticulously groomed lawns, I have seen world-record meticulously groomed lawns. It always struck me as the most ridiculous thing to be obsessive about. Grass should only be there to prevent the dirt around your house from eroding. Instead, people pour their heart and soul into their lawns, and said uber-lawns are quite often seen in front of dumpy little houses. Back in my suburban days I distinctly recall three or four old fogeys charging out of their house and yelling at me for stepping on their beloved grass. Little did I know at the time that my very life was in danger.

I recall the story told amongst the grizzled veterans of Kooy’s Lawn Care of an old lady known only as “The Hawk”. This old bag was seen - by my own eyes, as well - spending untold hours of summer days hovering over her already-perfect lawn. Often she would be seen bending down and picking something out of what appeared to be a spotless portion of grass. It is rumored that the old lady was actually removing similar yet slightly different species of grass from amongst her pristine sod. Would The Hawk kill for her lawn? Quite likely. The whole business is most certainly out of control.