Tag Archives: Social

Crash

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It’s been 24 hours now since we gained the latest addition to our family.

His name: Crash

His age: 10 weeks

His weight: 20 lbs.

He’s a Golden Retriever mixed with something unknown, we picked him out at the SPCA yesterday. He keeps becoming true to his name: particularly when steps or running are involved. He seems to be really good at falling down steps, and likes trying to run between peoples legs when running in the yard. We worked on teaching him “sit” today, as well as beginning work on not biting which he has been doing a lot. Right now he is out in the yard on the leash with Kelly, running around with his “cousin” Bella, Katie’s dog. They played a little at Katie’s house yesterday, and Bella was running circles around Crash, and he’d kinda wobble after her.

So far the cats are keeping their distances, Peel is definately getting the closest out of the three. Kreamer and Emma are just kinda there, and get very hissy when he runs after them.

I’m gonna go out and hang out with them for a while before we come back in for dinner!

For those interested, photos and videos: Here

April Fools

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Nearly 2 months ago I posted about what I had planned to do to my brother-in-law (see http://bananabiter.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/miley-miley-miley/). Now I’m going to run through briefly what happened.

At Kelly’s suggestion I changed his desktop background to one of the pictures used, this worked amazingly well to lure him in, as the first thing he did (after yelling my name in annoyance ;-)) was open firefox to google images to find something to replace it with.

This was met with “what the…”‘s from Matt, and laughter and high-fives all around from me, Kelly, and Matt’s friend Gary who was in the room also. Matt quickly saw the funny side and started laughing, pulling up Youtube and MySpace to see how they looked as well. I think the best quote from the evening was “That is probably the best April Fools prank I’ve ever seen. I’m calling Will!”

I was also credited as having “Probably the most creative” joke he’d ever observed. All around a good 15 minutes of fun, and I lived to go to choir practice (remind me not to agree to singing with them again..).

Babies

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I got to hang out with two cool young boys today. Aiden, 2, and his brother Devon were hanging out with my sister-in-law Katie today, and Kelly and I went to help her out with them. Devon spent most of the time drooling, drinking, bouncing or crying, with a few bursts of hair pulling thrown into the mix. Aiden, on the other hand, liked to follow people around, throw things, and otherwise be generally cute. I might put up some photos somewhere at some point.

I haven’t had any complaints about the new UCCN sites which is excellent, I was a little worried about that. I’m thinking I might just build a support site from scratch and dump wordpress altogether. It works well, but I’m not sure if it will do everything I want/need it to do. Will have to see. I’m thinking it’d be really cool to have a fault resolution system tied in with a HelpServ bot (ticket opened on joining the help channel, as well as monitoring the network and opening tickets when things split etc), as well as web-integration etc.

Tonight is NCIS, after we’ve been out to eat at Chick-Fil-A to support Big Brothers Big Sisters (CFA in Harrisonburg is donating 15% of all profits between 5 and 7 to BBBS). Kelly’s best friend Anna works there, so as well as supporting the awesome work they do in general, we’ll be supporting her too! And I like chicken. And fast-food. Sounds good.

Maintenance

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Today was the go-live for the new Christian-IRC.com and UnitedChristianChat.net sites. Everything seemed to go fine, and the old UCCN site was re-themed as a support site. In the next few weeks I’ll be writing a bunch of new stuff in PHP/JavaScript to help out with webmasters and such.

I also did a bunch of .htaccess redirect rules, and I was able to delete a bunch of direcories and clean up the public_html folders too!

So, check out the new sites:

And now ends my shameless plugging 😉

Dreaaaam.. Dream Dream Dream!

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I had the weirdest (and historically inaccurate) dream last night.

I am going to share it here for the intrigue and amusement of any and all who read it.

Now, I don’t know how, but I travelled back in time (and location?) and ended up in 1920’s England, at the primary/elementary school of my Grandad. I had my big camera with me, which was clearly out of place (Digital camera pre 1990 is very out of place!) in the time period so I was trying to take photos and being discreet as possible.

Anyway, I was in a lunchroom kinda thing, it was very grey and dull, and my 7-8 year old grandfather was at a table with 3 other boys talking quietly (I was across the room, my big 22 year old self). I recognized him almost immediately, as he looked pretty much like the photos of seen of my Dad as a young boy, and a few times he turned his head I noticed characteristics and resemblances of how he looks and acts as I’ve known him. The people I was there with decided it was time to leave, but I mustered up the courage to ask my young grandfather for confirmation that he was who I thought he was.

“Is your name Brian?”

“Yes, it is.”

“That’s your middle name isn’t it?”

“Not any more!”

“Do you mind if I ask what your first name used to be?”

“Coraline!” (I have NO clue where that came from.. I saw the movie like…a month ago and haven’t really thought about it since. Now that I think about it though, I played Tic-tac-toe/naughts and crosses with a 5 year old girl the other night, only we used pink and blue ‘buttons’ on a board of 9 squares, each containing the picture of a character from the movie. I digress..)

At this point I really had to follow the rest of my group out the door (they were all late teens/adults) but I took the opportunity to snap some more photos of my granddad across the room, he wasn’t watching having returned to the conversation with his friends.

I was led outside, and it was kindof like a gameshow. I’m not sure if I’ve had similar dreams before, or if it really is something I’ve seen on TV or in a movie, but I was to be given challenges to complete either for money or for the people I was working with (they were all teens I think) to live, big difference but I don’t remember which. May have even been both!

It was then that I realized there was snow on the ground, and my first challenge was related to one of the people on my team sliding around the school, I just wasn’t allowed to let him damage any classrooms in any way. You can probably tell by now that while my dreams are fairly specific, there isn’t a lot of detail as to how things happen, I just know they do. I guided the guy between buildings and managed to get him out onto the open sports fields, which I realised too late was a bad thing to do, as the fields themselves were/are a classroom (for PhysEd! Whether that even existed in the 20’s I doubt… We’d also slid along the inside edge of a clearly marked football field). Anyway, it was at this point where the host/gamemaster was walking along the field either with cameramen or henchmen and was about to reveal some kind of information when I woke up.

It was a weird night last night – I wasn’t sleepy, then I was really sleepy so I rolled over to sleep and couldn’t, then I got awake and somewhere in that mix (and a lot of “Are you OK?’s” from Kelly (who was also having a difficult time sleeping)) I fell asleep. Then had to get up at around 8:30 to go let the chickens out (I HATE CHICKENS.. more on them later) and came back and fell asleep awkwardly on the yellow chair, where the dream continued.

So there you have it, my weird dream of weirdness, laugh or analyze, or if you REALLY must, do both 😉

Selling the Jawbone

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Two weeks ago the Sunday School class looked at the story in Judges 15 I believe, where Samson kills a thousand men with the jawbone of a donkey. Last week we put together an infomercial to sell or market the jawbone. Using the jawbone of a deer, belonging to my father-in-law, we unscriptedly performed in order to create what we disrespectfully call, Ass Bone.

Lies in the Media

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So this morning I came across another rant-topic and this is aimed particularly at Christian broadcasters, but also at the media in general.

Lies within the media are probably the biggest reason why few people pay attention and why those who do are so misled or uninformed about the reality of the world today.

The case in point is the story told on a Christian Radio station this morning: A child goes to school for the first time and coming home after their first day the parent asks the child what they learnt. The child replies “I learnt that there is no way to prove that Jesus ever existed!”

There are several problems with this story, allow me to outline them.

Firstly, let us look at the first day of school logically. Elementary school is primarily for learning the basic subjects – English, Math, etc. Theological debates or discussions typically wouldn’t occur until at least Middle School, or more likely High School.

Even then, and this becomes the second point, they cannot be initiated by a teacher. The teacher may prompt, but cannot explicitly begin a discussion. The teacher also cannot teach their personal beliefs as fact. If it isn’t in the curriculum, it isn’t being taught. And if it is it should be being reported to the appropriate authority, and not reported on by the media.

This has been a trend for the longest time and it’s not just within the media, it’s by word of mouth also. Here are 3 simple ways to check if what you’ve heard is true:

  1. Look at it logically. If you add 2 and 2 and get 5 while you’re looking at the statement, there is something wrong.
  2. Research it. Whether online, in the library, or discussing with others who know or have experience, find out more about things rather than just mindlessly repeating stories in a chinese-whispers fashion.
  3. Ask the person who told you what proof they have. If a person is just passing on a story, there is every possibility that it is not 100% true.

In the case of the story above, it is possible that aspects of it are true, but if mis-told down the line then it becomes what it is today. Consider a High School student on the last day, happening on a theological debate where the comment arises – that it is possible Jesus was not a real person. The student comes home and tells mom and dad. The parents tell the story to a few people that the student was taught Jesus wasn’t real. Keep this going down the grapevine and it only takes a few steps with mis-tellings, incorrect recallings of the story etc and it becomes a 5 year old going to Elementary being taught as fact on the first day.

It seems silly but if you’ve ever played “Chinese Whispers,” or even just observed people in groups, you’ll realize it translates into reality dangerously closely. Next time you receive a “Hey check this out” email, go and take a look at Snopes website, an amazing resource for finding out if the rumor being spread is true, false, a combination or was unverifiable. A good 90% of emails I receive like this are either blatantly false, or are mostly false merely with enough elements of truth to be believable.

Here are some common examples, particularly related to the religious group:

As you can see from the written evidence these are all lies, and from a little research and/or thinking it can be proven in quite simple terms that the claim is false.

My plea to the Christian community, to the media, stop mindlessly passing on stories, stop making up stories that could be taken as fact, in all seriousness it just makes us look bad that so many are so gullible, and makes the truth look that much less truthful.

The Joys of Becoming COPPA Compliant

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One of the IRC Networks I work with (UCCN) is looking at a proposal drawn up recently to allow children under 13 to join us and chat on the network. To begin with, it looked very difficult to do this in a law abiding manner. Then it looked really easy. After studying the “How to Comply” page on the FTC site, it turns out it is somewhere in the middle.

While it will indeed require some changes in the network configuration, as well as in staff policies and such, the most difficult aspect is the consent phase. Ensuring that parents are who they say they are (or at least having a record that verifies to a legal standard that they are who they say they are) is the hardest thing to do.

All in all, the best method found so far is a signed form from the parent sent by post, or by fax. For our purposes, this will also hold some verification information, and technical details regarding the children in particular.

It also means network changes, only permitting underage users to do specific things, and blocking anything else that might endanger them, or that would be out of our control as administrators, and their guardians while on the network.

The other difficulty is going to be designing and building a secure database system for storing the personal information, that will log who accesses what. This is one of my areas of expertise, however, so it shouldn’t be too high on the hard-scale.

AwesomeChristians.us Singles Site

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This is a shameless plug for a new site I’m helping out with (Yes, I’m married. Yes I have an account. It’s for testing. Really. Thats all.)

AwesomeChristians is a site that has been around for a while, and has recently been through a reorganization and refocus, and today was GoLive for the new AwesomeChristians Singles site.

If you’re a Single Christian, looking for your mate, this may (or may not) be your answer to prayer. Just a suggestion, you might want to give it a visit. At least make friends, perhaps find your life partner.