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I finally replaced a ZAMP helmet that I had received when purchasing my old bike with a Shoei RF 1100 Firestrike.

This is a great helmet. The only problem was that it whistled at 60+ mph. Turns out that all you have to do is make a couple of adjustments to make it stop.

1. Push against these clips on both sides to remove the face shield.
2. Loosen (do not remove!) these screws. About a half-turn is all you need.
3. Push the whole shield assembly towards the back of the helmet.
4. Hold the assembly and tighten the screws in step 2.

That's it! The shield should be held against the gasket properly and there should be no more whistling.

Midway USA is a business out of Columbia, MO that has “just about everything for Shooting, Reloading, Gunsmithing, and Hunting.” At 2nd Annual TSRA Foundation Banquet, they donated $100,000 for TSRA youth shooting programs.

That is awesome. They’ve never been a disappointment to me either, and it is great to see someone who gives back to the communities that support them!

Support Midway USA!

These questions are for people who consider themselves pro-abortion (aka “pro-choice”) and affiliate themselves with a Christian denomination.

I have seen the following reasons why a pregnant mother should consider an abortion:

1. Danger to the mother
2. Danger to the fetus
3. Lack of financial responsibility money
4. Unwillingness or inability to properly care for child
5. That’s it’s not a baby
6. True freedom of the mother
7. Abusive partner’s control

1. Unplanned or unwanted pregnancies (rape or incest)

So… where exactly does God’s providence and sovereignty fit in? As Christians we can all agree that God is sovereign, right? A quick search notes about 300 places in the bible where He is called Sovereign Lord.

If we are His created, and he is Sovereign over creation, then He is sovereign, that is, having a royal dominion and power over us… determining His affairs in our daily lives… over us. If He is over us, and “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:9) then surely He knows things we don’t know. He has plans for us that we cannot even fathom.

We are created in His image. He is the potter, we are the clay. We could not be made without Him. So, too, could our children, who are also made in His image, not be made without Him? They have to in order to be made in His image, do they not? If He was not a part of them and didn’t bestow His image onto them, they would not be made in His image, would they?

So if we are His and they are His and the Lord is sovereign over us then surely he is also sovereign over them: mother and child alike. And since God came before all, and formed us from the dirt, on the first try, surely that means that he knew us before we had taken form. We as a race were conceived in His mind first, before being created. So, too, are not all children conceived in His mind before they were created? God didn’t create man, mess up, and start over again! He got it right the first time. He had a plan.

So if God has a plan for that child, whom He knew before conception, then how on earth can abortion be justified? How can you be certain that this child isn’t meant for something great? If the mother or child is in danger: do you not trust God to protect those lives? I mean, if the child is in danger, what is the big deal if it’s “just a fetus” to let the mother try to carry to term? Do you not trust that the Lord is sovereign over the whole situation? The same goes for non-Christians: are you saying that the Lord can’t be sovereign over all for them? Is the Old testament’s chronicle of Sarah’s giving birth to Isaac not proof enough that God is not only capable of controlling a woman’s reproductive system, but will, for His glory, not only control it but will protect the mother and child for his purposes?

Is it “just a fetus?” The bible makes it pretty clear that all of creation was known before it came into being, and not just in Genesis. The world was created once and only once, because He knew it before it was made and it was Good! Jesus was preached about for hundreds of years before his coming. Prophesy is exactly that — telling the future before it happens. You cannot say that God is incapable of knowing each and every child before they are born. That would be too limiting to an all-powerful, all-knowing, and ever-loving God who created everything we know!

In the same way, over all of the perceived problems that a potential mother or family might have, is it not… showing a distrust of God to want to take matters into your own hands? Is it not claiming to the Lord, “I am in control, not you! I do not trust that you will provide for me and my child.” If that’s not it, then what is it?

Consider this: Your wife consents to an abortion because of a problem endangering her life if she continues to carry the child to term. She has the abortion, but then her life is taken from her in a car-wreck. What was gained? Is not her life not her own, but God’s own life to do with as He wills? The same as my life, your life, and all of the other lives on this home-away-from-home? If he can take a life, surely he can save a life.

I’m really curious about this. I can’t stop thinking about it. What in scripture leads people to believe that abortion (in any form) is okay?

Man, talk about a frustrating problem! I kept getting this errors while calling pdftk (from the mac installer, which the version as of this writing is 1.12):

Unhandled Java Exception:
java.io.CharConversionException
   <<No stacktrace available>>

Anyway, after much hair pulling, the answer was found! Before calling shell_exec (or whatever function you use to call pdftk) you need to unset the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.

# unset this so pdftk will work!
putenv(‘DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH’);
 
# put the output in a variable
$pdf_data = shell_exec(‘/usr/local/bin/pdftk ‘. $file_name .‘ fill_form ‘. 
$fdf_fn. ‘ output – flatten’);

I listen to AFR Talk in the morning on the way to work… specifically the Matt Friedeman Show, and every Friday morning they do “Attaway awards, outrages of the week, and a prediction for the days to come.”

Since my commute is only roughly about 7-10 minutes, I figured that I’d start documenting it here instead of trying to call in… so here we go!

Attaway Award

Gotta go to Brit Hume when on the Fox News Network, told everyone watching that

The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith, he’s said to be a Buddhist, I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith, so.. my message to Tiger would be, “Tiger, turn your faith–turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a GREAT example to the world.”

There have been a whole slew of people beating him up over it. A Haredi community was asked to speak out against his comments. People are calling him intolerant and are asking him to apologize and “take a class in religions.”

Brit Hume explains himself more in a Q&A Article in Christianity Today. The fact that he is getting lashed at by other proves that God is at work here. If we all were so lucky!

Outrage

During his presidential campaign, Obama promised to put the Healthcare negotiations on C-SPAN. Now he wants them to be secret. Downright shameful.

Prediction

It’s going to be a cold weekend. Also, the cold weather will cause big media to forget about Global Warming for a little while, until it’s time to push their agenda again.

I would encourage you to post your attaway, outrage, and prediction each week and share them with us.

Very proud to announce my first contributed drupal module! Permission Report:

Permission Report calculates and displays permissions a user has and shows which roles grant those permissions. It also provides ability to list users in a role, look at role membership information, view which users have a particular permission, and dig down into complicated role and permission problems.

Hope that this is the first of many contributions to come!

Looking at the internet though the eyes of a web designer while browsing the web is a lot sitting at a high school lunch table with a bunch of the preppy girls. You judge everything. It’s instinctual. You know all the latest tools, lingo, and trends. Everything gets evaluated by how it appears. Sure, finding that a site runs on a certain language/platform/cms/framework or uses a certain library/flash component/technology can be interesting when it doesn’t meet your expectations, but let’s face it: Everything gets judged by how it looks and performs to our standards.

And those are pretty high.

Every time I visit any website, whether it’s big or small, low- or big-budget, corporate or homegrown, it goes through a rigorous set of evaluations that happen in the background while I’m purchasing, researching, or just plain looking around. I do this because as a web guy myself, I tend to be mindful or “aware” of all of these things going on behind the scenes.

Awareness of what is going on around you is always a good thing. It’s required by people on a daily basis. We are all called to be mindful on a daily basis. We get paid to be mindful when we notice a mistake that needs to be corrected before getting published online or in print. We get rewarded for being mindful when we send our wives flowers on anniversaries (or for no occasion at all!). We feel a little bit safer when we see a police officer walking around being mindful of the environment and looking out for danger.

With all of this reward and need for being so mindful all of the time, why is it that we have become such a mindless society?

It seems like hardly a few hours go by where someone, somewhere has to make reference some sort of jingle, slogan or some other such bite-sized talking point used to sell or influence someone or something into changing their behavior. Sure, the change might be to get someone to go to Jack in the Box instead of Wendy’s. It still achieves it’s purpose. We mindlessly receive, consume, and slowly change our behavior.

This isn’t a bad thing, though, right? I mean, chances are you were going to go out to eat somewhere why not make one place instead of the other. Chances are unless you’ve built up some unnatural amount of distrust or distaste for someone or something, you’ll probably be swayed to try it at some point.

Take me and McDonalds for instance. I despise McDonalds. I dislike them so much I won’t even take my wife or step-daughter there. The closest I get to one is the Red box outside when the one down the street doesn’t work. Their advertising is horrible and cheesy. I’m not the only one that feels this way, either. Their “McLatte” radio ads turned the fire against them so bad, I smell ashes every time I drive by.

But I’ve been down this road before and I’ll be down it again. Probably within the next year or so, I’ll have one of those days where I suddenly become stupid and say to myself, “Maybe I’m wrong about McDonalds. Maybe their ‘McLattes’ are actually worth checking out and perhaps having a McRib and fries wouldn’t cause me to get sick.” And so I’ll go to McDonalds, have my 10 minutes of omnomnomnom and then i’ll take another 3 to 5 year trip to regretsville via the experience express. All because of those stupid, incessant, carefully placed, disturbingly bad yet catchy jingles that bombard me whenever I happen to leave the radio, TV, or stray browser window on.

Why can’t I be mindful about those things as I am with other websites? Why can’t I approach conversations with the same well-thought out and emotionally balanced arguments I generally have with people I trust? Why can’t I filter out crappy advertisements for food I know I’ll regret eating later on? Why is it that I find myself singing songs in my head that are inappropriate/stupid/or otherwise meaningless? Why do I see others doing the same thing? Why does it feel like I don’t have any control over this?

Why am I not mindful on a weekly/daily/hourly basis of the fact that Christ died for my sins, the sins of my brothers/sisters, and for all humanity? Why can’t I see that everyone is just like me: lost without Him? Why can’t I look at problems and ask the right questions? Why do I look to myself for answers instead of to the Truth? Why do I not always seek Light when I see darkness approaching? Why do I not yearn for the Word as if it were my only sustaining source?

Why do I always seem to treat Jesus like the friend I call when I’ve tried everyone else and nobody has answered?

These questions keep me up at night. I take some comfort in that seeking him is better than not seeking him at all. I know that Prayer should be my first line of defense, not my last bastion of hope.

So here it is: I want to be a mindful person. Not just when I’m browsing websites. Mindful all the time. Mindful of my thoughts, words, actions, emotions, and what is going on around me. Mindful of what the God who saved me might have me do for Him or on His behalf while I’m here to put Him first and myself second that He might be glorified.

I want my mindless life to be transformed into a mindful life. Aware. Awake. Not asleep.

What do you want your life to be?

At a recent get-together, a bunch of IT people were asked about their preference in processor technology. Not surprisingly, Intel was the most preferred and AMD was all but left in the low-end bargain bin.

This observation is not new by any means, and I personally subscribe to this way of thinking. What strikes me as interesting though, was this recently ZDNet article about the Cray XT5 Jaguar:

Irrelevant factoid that may only interest me: Four of the top five systems are based on AMD tech, while 402 of the top 500 are powered by Intel.

I’m not sure of the author’s numbers, but here is what the November top500.org list has. In the US AMD has 4 of the top 10. PowerPC has 3. Intel has 2. PowerXCell (IBM) has 1.

Why is it that the IT masses think that AMD processors are low-end value processors but yet they power 4 out of the top 10 supercomputers in the US?

I’ve been doing a lot of cleanup of certain modules at the office. Two in particular are heavily used apps that incorporate pre-made default views with screens to add nodes or do information lookups.

Part of the problem with this is that although I had a decent URL structure (many paths were aliased), my breadcrumbs were never right. I usually had to override them to make them work the way I wanted to (Drupal 5 on my end):

drupal_set_breadcrumb(array(...))

This is a hack! path.module is great for aliasing content paths. But stay away from it for stuff in your module.

Drupal’s drupal_get_breadcrumb actually calls menu_get_active_breadcrumb to figure out what to put in the breadcrumb list. Essentially, this function goes through the url, and looks at each element, gets the title of them if they have the MENU_VISIBLE_IN_BREADCRUMB flag on them. Both MENU_NORMAL_ITEM and MENU_ITEM_GROUPING have that flag by default.

Basically, if you write your menu hook properly, your breadcrumbs will automatically populate for you without any extra work.

The key here is putting this in your menu hook. If you use path.module’s path_set_alias or you add it manually via the interface, it won’t work! The reason is due to the fact that this is an alias. If you do this, menu_get_active_breadcrumb will see the “true” path and not the “aliased” path.

For example: Let’s say you have a node form that you want to put inside your path somewhere. If you do:

path_set_alias(‘node/add/claim’,‘agents/claims/create’)

Your breadcrumb for “agents/claims/create” will show the breadcrumb you will see on “node/add/claim.” (probably just “Home”)

However, if you do this:

$items[] = array(
	‘path’ => ‘agents/claims/create’,
	‘type’ => ‘callback’,
	‘callback’ => ‘node_add’,
	‘callback arguments’ => array(‘claim’)
);

Your breadcrumb will display something along of:

Home » Agents » Claims

Which is exactly what you want!

There is always a way to make the menu do what you want it to do. This includes using node_add to put node creation forms where you want them or using views_view_page for displaying views. It will make your breadcrumbs work right and make your code cleaner since you won’t be putting urls and menu information in your default views hook!

• I can never get someone to call me back. They only respond if I happen to get them on the phone or I start sending e-mails.
• With our account rep, there is always an excuse: “I was out of the office, family emergency” or “I was away from my desk” or “our unicorn was have babies.”
• The tone of our account reps voice doesn’t seem to be “I’m glad you got me on the phone because you’re going to spend more money with me” but rather “I don’t want to talk to you right now so let me get this done so I can get off the phone”
• The answers to my questions aren’t correct. Maybe it’s just my rep, but she likes to answer questions she thinks I’m asking, and not what I really asked.
• Have you ever had them do something right the first time? Me neither.
• Working to the rule.
• It’s all fun and games until it’s 7:30 pm on a friday, and you’ve got 7 people on a conference call trying to figure out a single problem.
• It’s no wonder they are unionized. If they didn’t have them, most of them would be out of a job because they are useless!
• They want you to pay for mistakes because you “signed off” on a change order that had the mistake on it.
• Have you ever seen their change orders? I’d rather try to order chinese food from a hieroglyphic menu written in egyptebonics!
• Voicemails go nowhere. I end up calling back every 30 minutes in order to talk to someone.
• Know why AT&T gives you an account team? Because 2 out of those 3 people will never answer!

• After looking at how we were serviced, I’m starting to wonder if the NSA warrantless wiretapping stuff even worked!

Just thought I’d throw these out here. They are a couple of AppleScripts that have helped me manage what I have going on in Things.

Followup Tomorrow

This script closes the task for today, creates a new one for tomorrow and adds the label “follow-up.” This gives me a warm fuzzy that I got something accomplished for the day but that there is something else tomorrow that needs to be followed-up on. It doesn’t copy notes, just the title.

Followup Next Business Day

This script functions the same was as the one above, but if you execute it on a friday, it will schedule it for Monday.

Just throw these guys in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Things and you’re set! To use them, click on a task and then select them from the Scripts menu in the top-right corner of the screen (or assign them a hot-key).

Anyway, hope this helps someone!

I usually switch my system to “Better Energy Savings” while on battery. It kept switching back to “Custom.” I ended up tracking the problem down to a program called SmartSleep. It appears that it was changing my settings to Custom about every 30 seconds or so:

de.jinx.SmartSleepDaemon[54] SmartSleepDaemon: setting hibernation state to: 0

If you are wanting to get the best out of your battery life while not connected to a power source, you might want to disable SmartSleep. It consistently shaved 30 minutes off of my runtime when it was set to “smart sleep.”

After moving out of Waco, I truly feel that a veil has been lifted from my eyes. As if, suddenly I am able to reason and think clearly. There are many benefits to this, however it has pretty much made me an outsider politically and socially as far as my views and beliefs are concerned. Some are open to this idea, and I am appreciative to this. Some however, are pretty much convinced that my views and beliefs make me both “ignorant” and “intolerant.”

And to those that think that I am both ignorant and intolerant, I will present the evidence that you are the ignorant, intolerant one.

Firstly, I have the right to speak my mind about whatever I want. Yes, I think Obama was the worst possibly choice for president. Yes, I think abortion is wrong. Indeed, the bible tells us that homosexuality is a sin and is wrong. Now, these are my views, and it just so happens that these views are not only shared with me by my wife, the members of our church and many of our friends. You might consider it intolerant, that I oppose “women’s rights” or homosexuality. Friend, the moment you disrespect my right to express myself, you yourself are showing intolerance.

I was listening to a radio show a few days ago and they were talking about how the word “discriminate” used to have a positive connotation. A person with “discriminating tastes” only like the best. It was a good thing to be labeled discriminating in certain respects.

But now, the world is crazy, and a group of people who are already have equal protection under the law want something that I don’t think they deserve: the right to call their union a “marriage.” If I am ignorant and intolerant, then so were the millions and millions of people who came before me who thought the same way. You see it as intolerance, but I say it’s calling it what it really is. Homosexual relationships can never be fully equal to a real marriage. It’s physiologically and spiritually impossible. And if you think can read all of the material that has brought us this far and conclude that something in there says otherwise… then you probably need to really re-evaluate your reading and/or comprehension abilities.

Another thing: I know several gay couples, not many on a very personal basis, but I’ve worked with a few over the years. I don’t think they are bad people. I’ve never hated gays, or talked down to them or even treated them any differently than I did and I attempt to be respectful and polite. Do I approve of their relationship? No. I still think it’s wrong, but there is a difference between these people and the people I read about in the newspaper.

None of these people make a big deal about it. It is not the defining factor of their lives. I do have a problem with people who make it their goal to impress on others a lifestyle which for the past, you know, 5000 years, has been looked at as physically unhealthy, spiritually sinful, and socially disgraceful. They want it to be actively accepted like “regular” people and you know what? I won’t stand for it.

If you want to live your life quietly and don’t want to involve me or flaunt your “pride” up and down the street, that is fine, and I can respect that. So what is it? Am I intolerant? Tolerant? Confused, mistaken, or maybe just fed up? How about ignorant? Am I missing something here? I’m all ears. You can e-mail me, call me, or reply here.

P.S. Obama, you’ve officially ruined June.

I had a conversation with a friend last night and during this conversation, they said that they didn’t want to argue about abortion because “no one knows! is it murder? is it not?”

There are some people that don’t know the answer to that question. But some people, especially Christians should know the answer to that question.

“I do. I understand that nowhere in the bible does it dictate that it is a baby at conception”

I have to admit when I heard this, I was absolutely shocked. I wonder if this person has read their bible lately. The bible indicates that we are created by God, for God. Each and every one of us.

What matters here is the understanding that God creates life. All life is precious. If you call yourself a Christian and think that a “fetus” is not life, then you need to seriously revisit your beliefs.

Maybe this will jog your memory:

Jeremiah 1:5 says “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart;...” (he is, of course, speaking to Jeremiah, but these apply to us also.)

David writes in Psalm 139:13 “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

“Did not He who made me in the womb make him, And the same one fashion us in the womb? (Job 31:15) It’s very apparent. Job understands this. Why don’t you?

I have a big problem reading God’s Word every day. My boss gave me daily-read bible that you through everything chronologically. It’s great and I really look forward to reading it. But i’m behind a couple of days now, but I’ll catch up this afternoon. Sunday afternoons are always my catch-up days. (Right now it’s going through Leviticus and Numbers, which, imo(In My Opinion) are semi-boring because they are very repetitious.)

I had a conversation with myself a couple days ago. It went something like this:

“Why didn’t I read the Bible today?”
“Because I was busy.”
“Yes, but watched 5 youtube videos and looked at lolcats for almost 10 minutes during lunch.”
“Well, yeah, that was taking a break.”
“God’s Word = best break evar.”
“I didn’t have my bible handy.”
“Perhaps you’ve used BibleGateway or Youversion?”
“Yeah, but what am I supposed to read?”
“This.”
“Yeah, but I’m not always at my computer…”
“Ownt.”

Unless you are phone-less, computer-less, and bible-less, there really isn’t a reason to not dive in, even for a little bit, every day. We need it to survive. Our spiritual food. I’ll skip the cheesy analogies that our Pastor gave us a few weeks ago and skip straight to the meat. Living a Christian life in this world takes so much. I can’t tell you how many times I can feel anger in my heart or how many times I almost (or do) speak harsh words to someone. No matter how much I try to cover up that those words were rooted in truth, you would never tell because they were shaped and brought forth by anger and not love.

The Word of God is a seed. A little bit of it gets put in us when we our saved, but it is our duty to make sure it is cared for so that it grows and produces fruit. We are expected to be grow and do something with what God gives us. The Parable of the talents Matthew 25:15-30 gives us a really clear picture of the expectations that God puts on us. It’s a lot of work, really. But it’s all worth it.

After all, we get God’s protection with his Word in us. Ephesians 6:17 says Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.. His Word is also our protection. Like I said in my last post, being able to lean back on the sturdiest foundation of all has been my best defense against the one who would rather not see me thrive in Christ.

There are so many ways to get into the Word. BibleGateway was my favorite for quite some time, but YouVersion seems to have a much more interesting interface and is really made for people like me (web-enabled, bloggers, etc). I go back and forth between the two. If you know of any other good ones, please e-mail me or add a comment.