Waggle Dance

Our cell group has begun the ten week series from Mark Virkler and Communion with God Ministries, How to Hear God’s Voice!
It’s based on four, simple principles or keys:

1. Still yourself down,
2. Fix your eyes on Jesus,
3. tune to spontaneity,
4. and write.

I couldn’t help be reminded of the Kim Hill song, Be Still and Know, based on first part of Psalms 46:10:
Be still, and know that I am God . . .

I have been hearing it pretty regularly when things get crazy or frustrating, I feel the need to remind myself that “God is in charge”, not me, and to take a moment to let Him know that I had forgotten that fact for a while, but I remember now . . .

And I hear that phrase like a little voice, like a tune had just played on the radio, but still lingers:

Be still and know that He is God, be still and know.

It seems a bit strange to consider that the Creator of Everything would speak to my heart in a small, still voice. Maybe a big. booming voice, or better yet, as a message passed on through someone more qualified to speak to the All Mighty. But, then again, His word says that, by my faith, I am in Christ Jesus, and that His Holy Spirit is in me, so I am surround, inside and out by two-thirds of the what is God.

I remember seeing, someplace, how shepherds, when a lamb died, would skin it and wrap a lamb that had been rejected or orphaned in the skin. That way, the mother of the dead lamb would see the orphan as it’s own and allow it to nurse. When the camouflaged lamb had fed for a while, the mother’s milk would have altered it’s smell enough for the mother to accept it as it own, and the skin wouldn’t be needed any longer.

I think God’s relationship with us is something like that: It is only by accepting the atoning death of His Son, by being in Christ, that God can allow us in His presence and it is by the Holy Spirit in us, that we can hear His responses back to us. Perhaps the metaphor breaks down a bit at the casting off of the old lamb skin, for we want to continually abide in Him, in Christ, but I think I get it.

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I’ve realized I’ve gotten into a bit of a rut when it comes to web surfing lately. I could probably count on my fingers and toes the number of sites I regularly visit to keep up on events, technology, coding, linux… Luckily, one of those places I check off and on is mozilla.org to keep up with firefox. I recently decided to give the 1.5 beta of Firefox a spin, and while attempting to updated some of my favorite extensions, I ran across one for StumbleUpon a collaborative site review and grouping system that includes a button to randomly pick a site based on your preferences and sites you’ve recommended. Unlike other “random” link systems, this one tends to take you to a quality site you will actually be interested in.
Well, I was hooked, so I installed it at work and at home, but while my bookmarks lists grew in both places, I felt it might be more useful put my bookmarks online so I can share them - enter another website and cool extension Del.icio.us and Foxylicious, an extension that make it easy to add and maintain my Del.icio.us social bookmarks. Del.icio.us makes keeping and sharing bookmarks easy, but it also ranks and list new links and most popular links, as well as popular tags. I can see another time sink-hole opening…

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I gave my 91Courtstreet WebGUI template tinker-itis so I’m taking it as a sign that I can play with some other tools. We needed an industrial strength wiki at work, so I gave WikiMedia a test drive. I liked it so much I bought… I mean I recommended it for work and left it as the front page to replace my broken WebGUI template. I’ve always liked wikis - especially the cognitive dissonance they encourage amoung leadership-types when told that the relinguishing of control over the quality of information can result in something other than anarchy.

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I think most IT types have an open source project or two that they follow. Whether it’s for business, watching for patches and security issues, or for fun, tracking cool enhancements and living on the bleeding edge, it can become a bit of an obsession. I was just checking some of my favs, in auto-pilot surfing mode, when I thought I should list them here, just in case this blogging thing lasts long enough for me to look back and see what I was “in to”. Understand, I’m not saying these projects are better than others, I just happen to be hooked on them …

(more…)

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My “Intro to Programming” kids attended a “Learning Day” event today. It was meant to give them (and other homeschoolers) an opportunity show off what they have been learning. It didn’t work out that way - the person that was supposed to let everyone into the build didn’t show. After waiting for a while, the dozen of so families that showed up choose to make the best of a bad situation and setup their displays and projects on the lawn. We managed to get some space on a concrete entryway so the ‘bots could run, but MindStorm’s classic roverbot doesn’t run well on rough surfaces and the linefollow code we created didn’t like the bright sunlight.

The good thing about kids is they don’t always know when to be disappointed. After messing with ‘bots for a while, a challenge was issued between my group and another group with a MindStorm (I’m not sure who threw down the gauntlet first ;-). An impromptu round of BattleBots ensued

Since we lost 1 round and tied three, I’m betting I can motivate the guys to work on their programming/engineering skills before the next time we play sumo-bots.

The lesson I learned today is that given the choice writing cool programs and writing cool programs that allow you to attack your opponent and destroy his ‘bot, any group of pre-teen boys will go with door number two every time!

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