I’ve moved all of my websites to new servers. It’s on the same service provider, but I’m paying less and I have more bandwidth and space. It was a good 4 hours or so to move everything over, but I only lack one server because of a feature difference, which I hope to get resolved soon.
If anyone else is in the market, I really like site5, and I think they do a good job with their servers and the support.
What is “radical holiness?” To be holy means to be set apart. I take it as, to not be used up by sin, or, pure and blameless. Radical can mean extreme, or drastic. So radical holiness is taking drastic measures to be free from sin.
As Christians we’re called to be holy (1 Peter 5:13-16). That seems to suggest that it’s not ok just to live as though grace is going to fix it all no matter what I do. Some Christians seem to have the mindset that living a life that’s extremely good is too much to be expected. They justify sin because perfection cannot be reached, so why even try.
So how do we implement extreme holiness? I’ve been contemplating this for a while now, and it’s not easy to make decisions that proclaim radical holiness. Maybe it’s the shows on TV that we watch that show just enough to be legal, or music that uses cussing. I’d even suggest that maybe to achieve radical holiness, we shouldn’t even listen to music, TV, or radio that uses suggestive language. How about in our clothing, how much skin is too much skin to show? How far is too far to go with a boyfriend or girlfriend? How fast is too fast when I’m speeding?
It’s tough to cope with all the pressures in the culture we live in. High schools break their own school dress codes by giving cheerleaders skimpy outfits, and then they expect everyone else to follow the guidelines. A lot of people want to tag the name “hypocrite” to Christians, but anywhere there are humans, hypocrisy exists.
“Flee from sexual immorality,” Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6:18. Colossians 3 tells us to “Set [our] minds on things above, not on earthly things,” (v. 1) and “Put to death… your earthly nature” (v. 5). “Rid yourselves of… anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language” (v. 8).
He follows up Colossians 3:12 by saying, “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.” Watching Family Guy isn’t going to clothe us with kindness and compassion. Listening to System of a Down is not going to give us gentleness or patience. But will listening to the newest music that’s suggestive, or watching a show that’s a bit risqué send us to Hell? If that’s the case, we’ve got a lot of people in trouble. I don’t think that our motivation not to do these things should be because of Hell, but because we want to live a life that is worthy of the calling of Christ.
In Romans 6:1-2, Paul says that by no means should we continue to sin! Being baptized is not an insurance policy. We were baptized to “live a new life” (Romans 6:4). In verse 5, Paul states that “if we have been united with him in a death like his,” which means we can no longer continue to live in sin, we have to become radically holy, then “we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”
We have been promised a place in Heaven, but that doesn’t let us off the hook. Let us strive daily to be a people that are radically holy!
My new laptop is fully put together now that I got my pen from Toshiba. The battery is here and everything.
The laptop is a Toshiba Tecra M4, and when I push the joystick button in on the screen, it rotates upside down. Here’s the python script in case anyone wants to do something similar:
#! /usr/bin/env python
"Inverts the screen and back to normal again."
import commands
import re
current = commands.getoutput("xrandr -q").split("\n")[1]
if re.match(".* (left|inverted|right) \\(", current) is not None:
commands.getstatusoutput("xrandr -o normal")
commands.getstatusoutput("xsetwacom set cursor rotate")
else:
commands.getstatusoutput("xrandr -o inverted")
commands.getstatusoutput("xsetwacom set cursor rotate half")The pen works well, but I’m still trying to figure out how get the gimp to use the eraser and stylus/secondary button. I wish virtual paper was completed for Tomboy as well.
Sometimes it’s so hard to find the want to do certain things. It seems like I’m most productive at the things that should not be at the top of my priority list. When I had a lot to get done for my job, I wanted to work on ExpoSong more, and now that I don’t have a lot to do for my job, I play BZFlag all the time.
This past week, I took a test in microeconomics, and I made a 100 on the test. I was the only person in the class who got that high of a grade; I didn’t study a lick. It may seem awesome, but my life is full of this, and so I tend to be lazy because I never have to work to make good grades. It’s just an excuse, because I could work hard if I wanted to, but I never found the value in study because the grades came so easy. I’m not saying all my grades have been great, but I would say I average around 80 for all my tests, and a majority I don’t even crack a book after school.
I guess a good thing is that I’ve overplayed BZFlag, and I’m getting to the point to where I may just stop altogether for a couple of months. It’s like an addiction except the fact that the best way to quit is just to go cold turkey—No withdrawal symptoms.
I’m getting a tablet PC today! It was actually pretty cheap, I got it off eBay without an operating system, so there wasn’t a lot of competition. I’m excited! UPS says it has been sent out for delivery. 3 day delivery is pretty good when you pay for the 7-10 day delivery, but I guess it helps that he lives close to Dallas, and it’s only 1 hour away in an airplane.
Divisions have been a long running problem for Churches. Where you have people, problems will arise, and there’s no way to avoid that unless we have the mind of Christ.
In Phillipians 2:1-2, Paul tells the church in Phillipi to be “like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose.” As Christians, we are called to live above bickering that plagues the world. In verse 3 he continues in saying “Do nothing out of vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.” Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. How many of us have taken 10 minutes out of a day to do something for someone else without expecting anything in return?
Paul again says in 1 Corinthians to “agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought.” As Christians, our common ground is that we admit that we are sinners and we have accepted the gift of grace from Christ, our Lord. I see a lot of people picking out favorite people to be around, and when we pick favorites, cliques start to develop, and people are excluded. I’m personally not the best at making new people feel welcome, but we all need to work at making sure everyone feels like they are a part of the church.
Unity is very important. Jesus prayed that we might be one on the night of his arrest (John 17). We have a common goal to preach the word to the rest of the world, but unless we stop fighting, we’ll never achieve what we as a church are to be doing.
There’s just not enough time in my nights. Time in the day is unproductive for me, because I just don’t have the motivation to do it before 5:00. Then I finally get my shows watched and turn off the TV, and I start something up, and before I know it, I’ve messed up tomorrow morning because I stayed up too late working on a project.
I actually got some presentation editing set up in presenter, even though it doesn’t do everything completely right, and it’s not as pretty as I’d like it to be. That’s all I’ve had time to do.
I’ve been working on another project for my job that involves producing graphs in PHP using Image_Graph, but it still says its very much in a testing stage, but it seems to do fine so far. It’s going to replace a current program, but make it a little nicer looking so that it’s worth paying for. I’ve actually gotten it pretty far along in half a weeks time, at least as far as the basic graphing goes. I just wish my boss would answer my emails…
One of these days I’m going to put a few Christian articles having to do with some things I’ve been coming to an understanding with. But, just like with everything else, it’s putting the time in to do it.
I finally have a fully working computer. After spending two weeks ordering a video card, sending it back because it wasn’t compatible, and ordering another video card, it’s finally complete. The via driver that was used by my computer was buggy and would freeze the whole computer with any attempt to use 3D. Now for that second monitor…
I found a pretty good article on the signs of a good programmer. I fit a lot of those, except maybe being in a variety of technologies. I pretty much stick to things that have good documentation (such as programming languages). I do as little hacking as possible, and by hacking I mean things that were never meant to be used. I started programming long before I learned it in a classroom setting though, and it’s never been “just a day job,” in fact, over 75% of the programming I’ve done has been unpaid.
In other news, I should be getting a new video card tomorrow… my computer will be complete, mwahaha (An evil laugh felt appropriate, I don’t know why). I also got talked into adding B-vitamins and calcium into my daily regimen by the guy at GNC, and I haven’t seen anything but positive results.
This is good information that all Linux developers should know: setuid/setgid.