Thoughts on God, Fatherhood, and Computers

Feedreader

2011-09-04T09:51:00.001-05:00

My last post never showed up in my feedreader so I am posting another test post.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Preparing for NaNoWriMo

2011-09-03T13:48:00.000-05:00

I have been starting to prepare for NaNoWriMo already. I have been doing some editing of my previous nanowrimo books in preparation as I was thinking about being a nano rebel and working on adding to an existing work instead of starting a brand new book.

Last year I wrote 50,000 words of mixed fiction and commentary on the whole writing experience, so I was a rebel last year as well.

I am pretty sure I will stick to continuing my To Move the Stars stories with the goal of actually getting this series to the point I feel it is good enough to publish on smashwords and maybe even on create space.

I think I will write a mixed set of shorter works this year instead of one longer work. I am also considering writing at least one of these shorter works using Scrivener on the Mac. The one problem with Scrivener is that I use Dropbox extensively during Nanowrimo to both backup the work and to allow me to do my writing on different computers, and the other computers I use are not Mac's and thus don't have Scrivener.

We will see what I decide when November rolls around.

Why go to Church?

2011-06-12T08:39:00.000-05:00

Why is it important to "go to church"? Honest question.

If you attend church (on Sunday morning or some other time) why do you do so?

I love the community of my Monday night men's group. I am also challenged and fed spiritually by this group. Recently this hasn't really been true about Sunday morning Church services. In fact I can't really say it's been true of Sunday "church" for a long time and multiple congregations I have been a part of over the last several years.

I wish Sunday "church" was more like Monday men's group. I am struggling to define why I keep going to church on Sunday when overall it is not deepening my spiritual life, and I have become more and more convinced over the years that what we call church is an unbiblical model that is generally ineffective for making and growing disciples of Jesus Christ.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Just Be

2011-04-05T21:39:00.001-05:00

I am "off" tonight. Which means I am depressed. So I am laying in bed and I ask myself "what do you want Keith?" which is a method I use to figure out how to cope with and maybe get out of depression. And what do I mentally reply tonight? "Nothing." I don't want anything tonight, or I am refusing to identify what I want. Either way I picked a hell of a time to just exist in the moment with no thoughts or desires about what I want to do next. What a messed up time to finally choose to "Just Be."

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

2011-03-07T12:25:00.002-06:00

My favorite author's latest book is now out in paperback.
Donald Miller's: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

Get it at Amazon or Barnes and Nobel or for your hippies Powells Books

See this video for some info on the book:

What story are you telling? from Rhetorik Creative on Vimeo.

Pluralism

2010-11-21T14:59:00.002-06:00

Pluralism

I am participating in the National Novel Writing Month this November. During NaNoWriMo people from around the world try to write a fifty-thousand word novel in just thirty days. That comes out to one thousand, six hundred, sixty-seven words per day throughout November. I am about a day ahead as I have thirty-six thousand, eight hundred, forty-six words written so far and we need to have written thirty-five thousand by the end of the day.

I like NaNoWriMo because it gives me a chance to use my creativity in ways I don’t usually get to. It also challenges me to accomplish something creative, not just puts around with it. I am writing a science fiction novel this year, set in the same universe as the short story I started on this blog but never finished last year, and featuring many of the same characters as the NaNoWriMo book I wrote last year. I am hoping this year’s book will come out better, as last years book still needs a LOT of editing before I would even consider it to be a decent first draft.

How does Pluralism fit into my writing a Science Fiction novel? As a Christian on of the decisions I had to make when writing these books was how God was going to fit into them. Christian writers tend to go one several directions with this question. I am going to hi-light three.

One: The main characters are or become Christian in the book. This is usually chosen by Christian writers writing “Christian” science fiction set in an earth centric science fiction universe. God may or may not be actively involved in their lives other than their belief system sometimes guiding their actions.

Two: Leave God out entirely, either because they are Christians but are not trying to write an explicitly Christian book or because they don’t want to assume how god would act in any particular circumstance.

Three: Have God or a God figure be a defined character in the book, much like C.S. Lewis did in his fantasy Narnia books. In this case God’s actions are as central as those of the other characters and the God character is most certainly NOT passive like it sometimes is with the first option.

I have chosen to use a mixture of these and am still trying to solidify my decision.

My universe is NOT earth centric and in fact it is an entirely separate universe from our own. That being the case I cannot just have my characters be Christians and therefore settle the religious option.

I don’t like the second for several reasons, mostly because I think everything we do as Christians should be colored and guided by our relationship with God.

I am not writing a Fantasy book and most certainly not an allegory so having God be a character in the Aslan from Narnia fashion is just not an option.

What I want to do to the best of my ability is have God in my Universe be essentially the same God as we have here in ours. I have my characters refer to God primarily as either the Creator, the One Who Is, or when using a pronoun as they or them referring in a non-explicit way to a Trinitarian view.

As a side note I find it disturbing how often God is essentially passive in “Christian” books. The main characters may be Christians and believe in God and pray, but it is almost never made clear that God answered their prayers in a solid way. I know this can be hard to do well without being weird or preachy, but when your main character is running for their life from a bad guy and are they are supposed to be a Christian the way they get out of the problem should not be exactly the same way a character who isn’t a Christian would in a non-Christian book, based on the character’s own ingenuity, strength, cunning, or luck. At the very least the author should make it clear that God led the character to the clever answer or gave them the strength or cunning to fight back, or the lucky happenstance should be attributed to God’s actions. Even CSI: NY had an episode the other day where Mac Taylor essentially said that his personal opinion was that science had nothing to do with a certain victim’s survival, implying instead that it was the love of his mother that had somehow mysteriously kept him alive.

If a secular TV show can reference a belief in the supernatural why are so many Christian authors who are supposedly writing Christian fiction so reluctant to do so? Could it be that this is a reflection of their view of God? That God is essentially passive at this point in time, and practically speaking Christianity is only a religion that is good for anything as a moral compass and a ticket to heaven after we die. I don’t want to sound harsh but I am afraid that is exactly how many Christians view their faith and their God.

I don’t want to have the kind of faith that doesn’t really make a difference in my life; in a God I don’t really believe is active in my life. That just seems sad and pointless to me. I don’t always live this way, but I want my relationship with God to be vital and vibrant. I want it to be a central spring of life, inspiration, energy, and purpose that drives and guides every other facet of my life. I am not always sure how to get there but that is the goal.

Coming back to the main topic, my universe is made up of many different worlds, each and every one of them created by God. I have come over time to accept the probability that there is a lot of truth to the theory of evolution, and would probably say I believe in some form of theistic evolution. I think the odds are too crazy for this world and all life on it to have evolved purely by chance, but I no longer believe in a literal seven day creation of the world some six thousand or so years ago. That being said, most of the worlds in my story universe have “evolved” at the more or less the same rate, from around the same beginning date and most of them attained “hyperspace” travel within a few hundred years of each other. All the “human” species in my story are genetically and otherwise compatible, and I have not chosen to include any non “humanoid” sentient species at this point. These choices were not just made to simplify the writing, they were very deliberate references to the idea that God would probably choose a consistent “design” for humans across all the worlds God created in my story.

I realize that some great writers like C. S. Lewis chose otherwise in their Science Fiction writing, having God create completely “other” characters from us that were children of God, but I have not chosen to do so.

Having a vast science fiction universe with multiple worlds, that is also supposed to have our God as its God brings up a very interesting question. What do we do with Jesus? This is where the Pluralism question comes into play. As a Christian I believe Jesus is unique. I believe he is the one and only son of God, and it is only through him that anyone is saved. (Whatever being “saved” really means, but that is a huge question for another blog post.) Having said that I also need to say I recognize how arrogant it can sound to someone who isn’t a Christian. However, my response would be that most of them probably believe some version of the same thing about their religion.

Traditionally, believing in the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and believing that it is only through him that anyone can be save has been equated with believing that it is necessary for anyone who wants to be saved to hold these same beliefs. I no longer fully believe that.

My, that was a complicated paragraph. Perhaps an example would help here.

To say that it is only because of gravity that we are kept on this planet and do not go flying off into space is NOT the same thing as saying that it is only by believing in gravity that we are kept on this planet and kept from flying off into space. You can believe whatever you want about what keeps us here on earth, that doesn’t change the facts, and gravity isn’t going to throw you out just because you don’t believe in her.

Now admittedly God isn’t an inanimate force, but too often I think we think of and treat God that way The traditional Christian formula has people being “saved” by “believing that Jesus is Lord and confessing that God raised him from the dead,” and there is certainly biblical evidence for this formula and I believe it is true as far as it goes. I believe that if you “believe and confess” you will be saved, biblically I can’t not believe this even with the odd biblical evidence that this isn’t always so. (IE the verses about judgment where Jesus talks about God saying “Depart from me, I never knew you.”) What I don’t believe is that “believing and confessing” in Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection is necessarily the ONLY way a person can be saved.

Let me be completely clear, I don’t believe that there is any other way to be save outside of Jesus Christ. He is the door and no one enters except through him. I just don’t see why it is absolutely necessary for a person to KNOW this side of death that they are being saved through Jesus Christ. The obvious example is a people group in South America or somewhere else who has never heard about Jesus. Are they all doomed and cannot be saved because of this? I don’t think so. I believe a person is saved by a relationship with God, and that because God is Trinitarian by nature this relationship will also be with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but the person doesn’t necessarily HAVE to KNOW that in order for this relationship to save them.

I would just extend this principle farther than many would, to the Muslim who has never heard anything good about Jesus or his followers, and even to the American who has been very hurt by the Church and wants nothing to do with Jesus if his followers act that way.

So if this belief makes me a Pluralist than I guess I am one.

As for how to deal with Jesus in my Science Fiction Universe, I still haven’t figured that question out, except to say that people in that Universe, just like people in ours, will be saved by a relationship with a God I believe to be Trinitarian in nature.

Join me in donating to help make Blue Like Jazz the movie

2010-10-24T22:28:00.000-05:00

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2128223578/save-blue-like-jazz-the-movie-0?ref=popular

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Studying jQuery

2010-05-25T20:13:00.001-05:00

I ordered a new programming book today from Amazon: jQuery Novice to Ninja

http://www.amazon.com/jQuery-Novice-Ninja-Earle-Castledine/dp/0980576857/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274835288&sr=8-1

I will do a review here when it has arrived and I have read it.

One of my personal life goals is to never stop learning new things. As such I have been looking for something new to learn about in the programming area. I looked into studying Ruby on Rails but I have so much time and energy put into Microsoft technologies at this point that I knew I was not going to switch over. I also considered getting a book on .net 4.0 but really wanted to study something new. jQuery seemed like the perfect choice. It is a technology I do not yet know but that I know I will use a lot in my web programming if I learn it.

Keith

Mother's day Church service

2010-05-09T10:29:00.001-05:00

Kristen, Kati and I have started attending First Family Church in Maize http://firstfamilywichita.org (meets at the Maize middle school at 10am) and really feel at home here.

(Pastor Mark)

One of the distinctive things about First Family is that they take a few minutes out of each service for a family interactive time where a family can sit together and answer some age appropriate questions about the weeks topic.

Pragmatism

2010-05-07T22:29:00.001-05:00

I am growing to be more of a pragmatist as I grow older. I see the world less and less as straight black and white and find even the bible actually is full of what I would call grey or perhaps colorful stories. Stories of justified (or not) mass murder etc done by the seeming good guys without the bible condemning them and this does not even consider the stories where God seemingly orders genecide. Stories where the hero is a prostitute who harbors spies who eventutally bring an army and kill everyone in her city but her and her family.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Living the dream or not

2010-05-07T21:13:00.001-05:00

My friend Ike is about my age and is pursuing living his dream.

This is Ike playing at first Friday tonight.

I don't know if I am pursuing living my dream or not. Somehow it does not feel like I fully am. I love being a husband and a dad. But sometimes it does not feel like enough to fill a life. I just do not know if my life is telling the best possible story it could be to refrence Donald Miller.

I think a big part of this is that I WAS living my dream job in a lot of ways when I was working for my former church and then they laid me off and I have felt a little lost ever since. I don't think I know what my dream is anymore.

One more pic of Ike who is playing a great set and who I admire for knowing what his dream is and having the courage to live it.

Healthcare and the failure of the Church

2010-04-29T13:19:00.003-05:00

Without seeming to be bitter of jaded, I believe God intended for the Church to be the primary institution that takes care of the poor, sick, and needy, and that the church has failed in this mandate, and it is only because of the failure of the church to be what God intended that the Government has had to step in and take up this mandate.

Granted this failure of the church is not universal, many denominations build hospitals etc... that provide free or low cost care to those in need, but as a general rule the church has stopped being a place even members can go to have their needs met.

I hope your church is different than those I have experienced but honestly I doubt it. Here is a simple question to test this: Does your your church offer health insurance to its part time employees that have no other source of health insurance? The last church I attended and worked for did NOT. Your church may not have part time employees so this may not apply, but you can still ask if they WOULD offer this insurance if they did have part time employees.

If the church is not even willing to take care of the health care needs of those who work for it, you can be sure they are not going to be willing to pay the medical bills of members who cannot afford to pay them, not to mention people who are not even part of that particular church.

If the Church will not take care of the poor and needy as God intended by providing for their physical health care needs than someone else is going to have to. In this case the Government has decided that they are willing.

I think it is nothing less than immoral to first refuse as a church to do our duty by the poor and oppressed by providing for their health care and then add insult to injury by opposing those who are willing to take up that duty for us.

Why I Support the Healthcare Reform Bill - part one, the one sided conversation.

2010-04-15T18:29:00.000-05:00

The other day my wife commented that no one she knows from our friends and family supports the healthcare reform bill and that got me to wondering why. Why do so many “Christians” oppose a bill that does something I see as a moral imperative, providing affordable healthcare to millions of Americans who otherwise could not ever hope to afford it.

One of my conclusions was that people are not hearing from those who support the bill, only from those who oppose it. None of my friends or family except my wife would know from what I have said that I support this bill, and perhaps there are more people like me in our circle of acquaintances. People who don’t like to argue and so just keep quiet when the topic comes up. In other words, the people who oppose the healthcare reform bill are talking louder than those who support it, perhaps because they are angry that they lost and we are not angry because we won.

I am going to post a small series of blogs about why I support the president and the healthcare reform bill. I figure this is America and healthy respectful dialog should be something I can expect from my friends and family no matter what the issue is that is being discussed.

My dogs and my kid

2010-04-12T20:19:00.001-05:00

Judah

Dinah

Kati

My dogs and my kid ;-)

MIdwife in Wichita, KS

2010-04-12T11:59:00.001-05:00

If you are looking for a Midwife in Wichita KS or just thinking about a home birth check out my sister's website. http://karamidwife.com

2nd degree condemnation

2010-04-11T21:05:00.001-05:00

I have problems with people who think other people are going to hell simply because those other people don't think some 3rd set of other people are going to hell.

I hope that makes sense.

CHMS

2010-03-19T10:21:00.000-05:00

What church management system does your church use?

What size is your church?

Do you think churches of under 200 attendees would pay 5 to 10 a month for a chms?

- just some thoughts I a processing.

Changing a column display name in vb when using dynamicdata

2010-03-17T15:52:00.004-05:00

I am working on a completely new version of the Church Management System I started building back when I was working at CHF. Since this is a new project I thought I would use it to learn a new technology. I am building this site using Asp.net Dynamic Data.

One problem I ran into was how to change the column display name since my database uses column names with underscores for spaces and I want an actual space between parts of the column name when using the app. To do this you need to use the Display Name attribute in your meta class. Unfortunately this attribute only works on a full property and not on a simple object like other System.ComponentModel attributes seem to. So in my Meta Data class I created a dummy property with the same name as the actual property I want to change the display name for.

<DisplayName("Address Type")> _
Public Property Address_Type() As String
'These are not actually used, they are just required to make this into
'a true property which is required for the DisplayName Attribute.
Get
Return ""
End Get
Set(ByVal value As String)
End Set
End Property

Here is the entire class for you to look at:

Imports Microsoft.VisualBasic
Imports System.Web.DynamicData
Imports System.ComponentModel
Imports System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations

<MetadataType(GetType(CHMS_Address_TypeMetaData))> _
Partial Public Class CHMS_Address_Type

End Class

<TableName("Address Types")> _
Public Class CHMS_Address_TypeMetaData

<DisplayName("Address Type")> _
Public Property Address_Type() As String
'These are not actually used, they are just required to make this into
'a true property which is required for the DisplayName Attribute.
Get
Return ""
End Get
Set(ByVal value As String)
End Set
End Property

'Columns I want hidden
<ScaffoldColumn(False)> _
Public Church_ID As Object

<ScaffoldColumn(False)> _
Public Created As Object

<ScaffoldColumn(False)> _
Public Created_By As Object

<ScaffoldColumn(False)> _
Public Last_Edited As Object

<ScaffoldColumn(False)> _
Public Last_Edited_By As Object

<ScaffoldColumn(False)> _
Public IsDeleted As Object

End Class

A New Kind of Christianity

2010-03-07T17:12:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I finally bought Brian D Mclaren's http://www.brianmclaren.net/ latest book A New Kind of Christianity. I an liking it so far. It is messing with my overarching worldview in a good way.

iPhone

2010-02-28T18:22:00.001-06:00

My wife bought me an iPhone! :-)

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

NaNoWriMo I did it

2009-11-27T11:41:00.002-06:00

I did it. I successfully wrote 50,000+ words in less than one month.

My novel is not finished but I completed the NaNoWriMo goal.

I am looking at options for self publishing now.

nanowrimo

2009-10-29T20:33:00.003-05:00

Kristen and I are going to do the National Novel Writing Month. We are each going to try to write a 50,000 word book during the month of November. This means I will be putting my other writing and misc projects on hold for November.

Come join us if you dare: http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Nebo Station Part 6

2009-10-09T22:16:00.000-05:00

“With less than half the self-destruct charges working, we can’t count on anywhere near a full self destruct. The best we can hope for is that the Durement Nebo will break up into pieces, and with all those life pods out there we’re likely to kill more of our own people with debris from the ship caused by that kind of uncontrolled explosion.”

The bridge engineering officer’s report was succinct and to the point.

“Ok people, it looks like the self destruct charges aren’t an option at this point, but I don’t want to just leave the ship here for the enemy to salvage either, give me another option to consider!”

When the captain demands something you give it to him, even if what he is demanding seems impossible, so we threw out options from the top of our very tired heads and nothing seemed workable until I hit on an idea.

“What if we set the auto-pilot to jump the ship out of here?” I asked and could tell from the looks I got that the bridge crew thought I had finally snapped under the stress. “I know the ship can’t actually jump out of here.” I replied to the looks I was getting. “The hyperspace engines are probably shot even if the real space engines could reach jump speed. But if I set the realspace engines to over-max on the current course, override what’s left of the safeties and set the hyperspace engines to engage in fifteen minutes there’s only two possibilities that I can think of. One the hyperspace engines fail and without the safety lockouts they feedback and explode in a small nova, taking the ship with them. Two, the hyperspace engines work if only for a microsecond and the ship makes a semi random if very very short hyperspace jump. Still, that should be enough to make it hard for the enemy to find at the very least.”

The bridge engineering officer agreed with my assessment and the captain liked the plan well enough so that was what we did. With the captains key and some quick jury rigging we turned off the few safety systems that were still working, setup the blind jump in the autopilot, the captain recorded the last log entry and we pulled the backup log recording, pushed the engines back up past redline, and took the bridge life pod.

We spent the next twenty minutes watching the ship recede and waiting for it to blow up. When the explosion never came we concluded that against all logic the jump had been a success, and then spent the next several days waiting to be rescued.

After the Nebo ‘disappeared’ as it were, the battle pretty much ended. Our five remaining capital ships jumped out soon after that and jumped back in a few hours later after the enemy ships had collected their life pods and left. Then what was left of our squadron jumped for regional headquarters where ships and crew would be re-assigned into new squadrons.

Multiple DataKeyNames in GridView

2009-07-19T16:50:00.001-05:00

I like to post links to programming tips I find helpful so here is one for a problem I was having today.

http://graciesdad.wordpress.com/2007/05/07/multiple-datakeynames-in-gridview/

and in VB Dim SID As Integer = StudentTextbooksGrid2.DataKeys(StudentTextbooksGrid2.SelectedIndex).Values("SID")

Death

2009-07-11T11:41:00.000-05:00

My grandmother died last night. I am going to miss grammie.

Nebo Station - Part 5

2009-07-06T16:57:00.000-05:00

Right after I realized we were going to loose the ship, the captain gave me an order.

"Pilot, do whatever you have to do to break away from this battle to give us some space to launch the escape pods safely. You have forty minutes before we launch the first pod. I am going to be organizing the evacuation of the ship. I'll order engineering to keep the engines running as long as they can at the expense of every other ship system, even life support if they have to. Just get us to a safe distance from this battle to launch the pods!"

Then the captain was gone to oversee the evacuation and I was spinning the ship, as much as it is possible to spin something that big, to avoid another attack, and looking for a vector with a somewhat clear path to some open space. A few minutes later I heard the order go out for a phased abandon ship. Non-essential crew would head for the life pods first, then any fighter pilots who made it back in time, then the weapons crews would fire every missile they could back at the enemy and set the ships guns on auto, with orders to shoot at anything that did not read as a life pod. Then the damage control crews, engineering, crews, and lastly when everyone else was off the captain would set the ship to self destruct and the bridge crew would be the last to leave the ship.

That was the plan. Nothing in war ever seems to go according to plan. We took a three more solid hits right about then and we lost engines for a couple of minutes and were holed to atmosphere on several decks. However, I found that piece of open space the captain wanted, and the remaining capital ships in the armada covered our retreat as I pushed what was left of our engines past their max to get us some distance. After the damage control crews along with everyone else who could help, rescued all the people they could from the holed decks, most of the rest of the evacuation went according to plan. Right up to the point where the captain set the ship to self destruct and the computer reported that at some point in the battle the control lines to the over half of the ships self destruct charges had been severed. It probably happened during that last attack when the ship was holed, but right then we had a problem.

Nebo Station - Part 4

2009-07-05T22:54:00.002-05:00

In the end the battle lasted a little over five hours for us. We fought hard but our ships were in no shape for a battle at that moment. We should have been having a complete re-fit at a space force orbital shipyard, not doing voyage repairs at an out of the way piece of supposedly safe empty space. I never found out if it was just luck that they attacked right then or if they had timed the attack somehow for when the ships would be in the worst possible condition for a fight. How they knew where we were was a question that bothered me for years afterward, but the answer to that question belongs to another part of the story.

Mothership class carriers never actually traveled alone, there were eight other capital ships traveling with the Durement Nebo along with the fighters and small freighter sized missile carrying Mosquito Boats we carried. Only the presence of those other ships kept us fighting as long as we did. We were down almost half our complement of fighters at that point in time, and three of our five assigned mosquito boats.

We took a lot of hits early in that battle. There just wasn't any way to avoid fifty incoming missiles from one direction, and twenty more plus the ships that were firing them coming at us from another. I know they didn't from the three other capital ships we lost in that battle, but the enemy seemed to be targeting the Durement Nebo almost exclusively. No matter where we turned, no matter what we tried, no matter how hard we fought, the enemy was always there pounding us.

A little over four hours into the battle we knew we were going to loose the ship! I remember looking over at the captain and seeing this look of such utter despair on his face and at that moment I knew. Up until then I had been too busy piloting to realize how bad a shape we were in.

Nebo Station - Part 3

2009-07-02T22:00:00.001-05:00

We had seen nearly constant battle for the last month and a half. Fifty-four days with only a handful of those not having seen some conflict. According to the SF news our side was supposed to be winning this war. According to the battles we had actually fought in, nobody seemed to be winning. We killed a few of their ships, they killed a few of ours. We seemed to be fighting a war of attrition with the key question being who would run out of ships, ammo, or pilots first.

Hoping for a few days break to calm frazzled nerves and make some critical repairs, we had jumped to some empty space, chosen seemingly at random for no other reason than that it was empty, with no stars, planets, space stations, or most importantly enemy ships.

It was two days into our planned week long repair sabbatical, just about the time the repair crews had things taken apart and were starting to put them back together again, and I had just come on shift as the duty pilot when everything went to hell. The first warning came from the jump sensors, alerting us to first one, two, four, then a dozen incoming ships. Then the weapons sensors started blaring, "incoming missiles . . . incoming missiles" the sensor tech on duty muted the alarm only to parrot its message.

"Incoming missiles, multiple tracts, inbound from the ships that just jumped in. I am also picking up a bunch of hi-velocity stuff at extreme sensor range coming at us from the opposite direction. Those hits are not accelerating at this time, but size and shape are consistent with more missiles. There must be over fifty of those out there."

Nebo Station - Interlude - 1

2009-06-24T23:49:00.002-05:00

*******
This is an interlude that will probably not be part of the story when it is finished, or the details will be built in. However, while I want to post everyday except weekends, I am tired tonight and not feeling overly creative so will post some stuff I already have written more or less.
*******

In the year CGA 680 (The Central Galactic Authority for trace and commerce, is not really a governing body but rather a standards agency that sets common measurements to facilitate trade.) war broke out between the GerChi republic and a coalition of other republics. This war lasted a little over 4 years and after the war a "non-interference" zone was created where both sides agreed not to send military ships.

Nebo Station - Part 2

2009-06-23T20:24:00.005-05:00

The chain of events that lead to my being here, a little over two weeks into a series of short hop hyperspace jumps while hunting for a ghost ship I knew was out there somewhere but could not pinpoint the location of, had started a number of years ago during the war.

I joined the SpaceForce in my mid twenties after having already spent a couple years as a freighter pilot and advanced rapidly because of my previous experience. At what I consider to have been the height of my SpaceForce career I was third pilot out of eight on the Mothership Class Carrier Durement Nebo. We ran two pilots at time, with shifts running four hours on, four off, four on, twelve off. Each pilot would fly with two others during a day, and shifts would overlap by one hour. None of that is really important now, I just enjoy reminiscing about those days once in a while.

Nebo Station - Part 1

2009-06-22T22:15:00.004-05:00

I brought the P3x72-A out of hyperspace after another short jump and started extending the twin grids of antennas, dishes, scopes and other electronics that made up the Hopeful Folly's custom built sensor suite. It took almost five minutes for the grids to fully extend, but trying to jump with them extended would have sheered the grids right off the ship during the acceleration of a run to jump.

An hour later I started retracting the grids and getting ready to make another jump. Just like it had for the last three days, the sensor sweep had picked up lots of random ambient background fuzz, a very slightly higher than galaxy normal concentration of space dust, and a few solid blips between the mass of my head and the mass of my body rolled up into a ball. What they had not picked up was anything reading even remotely like a ship, let alone a mothership sized carrier from the last war, which was what I was out here looking for, while risking my life by running solo on not enough sleep in the empty reaches of space in what is variously called the out-planets, or the neutral zone depending on your particular viewpoint or inclination.

Nebo Station

2009-06-22T22:06:00.004-05:00

Like many other geeks I have a liking for Sci-fi. I also have a love of reading and have at times tried my hand at writing a bit of Sci-fi. Mostly I struggle with where to go with a plot, after all I need conflict but what kind of evil horrible person would want to harm my wonderful lovable characters? I just have trouble even imaging such a person. :-)

Anyway, as an exercise in creative writing I am going to try to write a short sci-fi story over the next two weeks, writing and posting a new portion of the story every day.

Disclaimer: This is pre-first draft, live without a net material. As such it may have bad grammer, spelling, mis-directed plot lines, etc. This is not an invitation to proof read and correct my work. If the story is good enough I may do that eventually but not now. Feel free to comment but please be nice.

Copywrite: The universe, characters, ships, stations, etc are copywrited by Keith Rowley and all rights are reserved.

‘ScriptManager’ is ambiguous in the namespace ‘System.Web.UI’

2009-06-15T20:11:00.002-05:00

I ran into an odd programming problem today, but as usual google came to the rescue.

I am linking to the blog that had the solution.

"Well, that was the end, as it turns out I had installed both the Ajax that comes with the .NET 3.5 and the Ajax that comes with ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions, and I had referenced them both! All I needed to do was to remove one of the references and that’s it."
Solution

Getting Better

2009-06-07T23:03:00.002-05:00

I have been very sick this week. It hit me on Wednesday and still hasn't completely gotten better. I lost 3 days of programming since my brain was mush and I hardly got out of bed for half week.

Odd Thoughts

2009-06-01T20:03:00.002-05:00

I have been wondering today if in some "odd" (coming from a Pro-Life background) way Dr. George Tiller could be considered a "Hero"? I am so used to thinking of him as "the bad guy" that this is a very odd thought for me. I know for sure that his murder was wrong no matter what a person may think of his occupation! NO ONE should be murdered at their place of worship! I am wondering today if he chose to keep being an abortion provider because he believed that this was important, rather than because it was profitable as the pro-life side always claimed. There are just as lucrative ways to make money that don't involve putting your life in danger. So maybe if a hero is someone who stands up for what they believe in despite trials, toil, persecution, and danger then Dr. George Tiller WAS a hero.

There is a veggie tales song "Stand Up For What You Believe In" with what I am thinking of today as the un-acknowledged sub text "if you believe in what we believe in". We as Christians are so quick to encourage our young people to stand up for what they believe in, and at the same time to demonize people who stand up for what THEY believe in IF we don't agree with them. We demonize those who stand up for a woman's right to control what happens in her own body, or those who strongly believe in equal marriage rights for homosexual couples, and at the same time consider people who stand up for things we believe in to be hero's.

Maybe it is time for an end to this double standard.

GracePoint Leaves UMC a New Paradigm

2009-03-06T09:50:00.000-06:00

I have been thinking about the whole situation with GracePoint Community Church choosing to leave the United Methodist Church quite a bit this week. I have googled as many different ways as I could to find all the information available both from new sources and blogs. Overall, the reaction from most of the UM bloggers has been grace filled but not overly hopeful. I would like to suggest a new paradigm for how we can view this situation.

My experience tells me that the way I think about a particular situation will change my emotional response to it, and the way I react to it and can in the end change the situation itself.

So, if I think a particular situation is terrible and a catastrophe I will treat it as such and it will more likely become a catastrophe.

If however, I think of a particular situation as being hope filled and full of unexpected possibilities I will treat it that way and it will, once again, more likely become so.

I would like to suggest that GracePoint UMC and the leadership of the KS West District of the UMC view GracePoint Community Church as a daughter church of GracePoint UMC. Granted this was not an intentional church planting, but unexpected and even at first unwanted children are often an amazing blessing. True, they can be inconvenient and they may even cause a scandal when they first arrive if they do so in an “unorthodox manner.”

GracePoint Community Church started out within the UMC and will always have some of United Methodist genes, so it truly is a daughter of the United Methodist Church and of GracePoint UMC. Sometimes our children grow up and don’t choose a direction we would want them to choose. Sometimes they even do things and make choices that hurt us. But the time comes when we just have to let them go and trust God to take care of them. After all they are his children too, even more so than they were ever ours.

Leaving the UMC

2009-03-04T11:43:00.002-06:00

If someone truly feels that God is leading them in a particular direction shouldn't they follow that calling even if the action will be unpopular etc?

I know some might not view this as a fair way of phrasing the question but hey, its my blog. ;-)

Seriously though, 90% of the time most Christians I know would answer that question with a YES.

The only times the answer would normally be NO are when the action in question would be considered sinful. (As in I really feel God wants me to sleep with my boyfriend/girlfriend - or some such statement.)

So I guess the real question before us (I had no idea this was where this post was going) is to ask if Leaving the UMC is sinful.

First, here is a list of links that might me of interest on the question of GracePoint leaving the UMC:

http://www.mandoron.com/
http://andrewconard.wordpress.com/
http://thoughtsofresurrection.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/gracepoint-communityunited-methodist-church/
http://www.kansas.com/news/local/story/718983.html
http://www.mandoron.com/2009/03/03/1186/
http://lyricbrianne.blogspot.com/
http://www.mandoron.com/2009/03/01/sunday-setlist-march-1-2009/
http://godsteknon.blogspot.com/2009/03/gp-leaves-um-church.html
http://bishops.umc.org/Directory/ChurchDetails.asp?mid=222&FAC=131842
http://bishops.umc.org/Directory/RegionalOffices.asp?mid=556&FAC=131842
http://www.godspeedmediagroup.com/gracepoint/Site/Welcome.html
http://www.kswestumc.org/dsite.asp?dv=7
http://www.gracepoint.com/
http://www.gracepointchurch.tv/

The above links are in no particular order. They simply represent everything google seems to know about this topic. Which is naturally everything there is to know since Google is the fount of all knowledge and information ;-)

I think this quote from the Eagle article is informative:

Butts said the move is one that church leaders believe is necessary for the church to do what God has called it to do -- reach as many unchurched people and people who are hurting as possible.

"We're excited about the future that God has for us," he said.

GracePoint Community Church leaders stressed that their church has no malice toward the United Methodist Conference.

"I think the more churches, the better," Butts said.

And this quote:

In the end, Butts said, he hopes people will see that the issue was not the result of fighting within the church.

"It just came down to God's leading us in a different direction," he said.

"I guess at the end of the day, people are not concerned about a denomination. They want to know how you're going to help them change their lives."

So, the leaders of GracePoint believe God was leading them to do this. With that said, the big question I see is this one:

"Is leaving the UMC in this way sinful?"

I don't think so but would be interested in your opinion.

Grace Point leaves UMC

2009-03-03T16:08:00.003-06:00

I am re-posting this press release from the KS West UMC Conference office here and will be commenting on this story more over the next few days.

A press release from Bishop Scott Jones and the Kansas West Conference Office.

CONFERENCE COMMITTED TO GRACEPOINT UMC
WICHITA--The United Methodist Church's commitment to a new church start in northwest Sedgwick County remains strong a day after the leadership of GracePoint United Methodist Church announced plans to leave the denomination and begin a new community church of the same name.

"We want the membership of this congregation to know that we are deeply committed to this church and that we hope they will continue to be part of GracePoint UMC," said Kansas Area United Methodist Bishop Scott Jones.

GracePoint United Methodist Church will continue to worship at Maize South Middle School at 37th Street North and Tyler Road. Jones and the district superintendents are working to name an interim pastor this week and plan to introduce the new pastor to the congregation at 11 a.m. worship Sunday, March 8.

"We would have liked to have some opportunity to discuss this in advance to see if the issue could have been resolved in a different way," Jones said. "While we knew there was some disagreement about the church's desire to expand faster than we were able to support, we were unaware of Rev. Bryson Butts' decision to leave the United Methodist Church."

Butts has surrendered his clergy credentials in the United Methodist Church and is no longer a United Methodist minister.

Hope

2009-02-13T11:09:00.002-06:00

Today I am feeling hopeful.

God has promised that He will take care of us and I know that I can trust Him!

I am starting to realize how much I was getting stuck in a rut in my current job. There are so many possibilities out there to explore.

I am also starting to wonder if I have compromised too much of what I believe about what the Church should be and do, in order to be able to work within the institution. I have loved working at Chapel Hill, but there is much about the way this church operates that I don't think is either biblical or the best. However, I have pushed these thoughts aside whenever they came up over the last couple of years because some of these same ways of doing things were essential to the continuing existence of of my job position. And for that matter, pretty much any paid ministry position within the Church.

Lost Job

2009-02-11T20:58:00.003-06:00

Today I met with Jerry Vogt, the Executive Pastor at Chapel Hill, and Terri Gurthrie, the head of the staff parish committee. At my last evaluation I had asked about the possibility of their increasing my hours and was told going in to this meeting that they were going to address that request. Instead of increasing my hours the staff parish committee has decided to eliminate my position as of May 1st, 2009 and fill the position by using volunteers. I was told this decision was not in any way because they were unhappy with my work. I believe it is mostly an economic decision.

Frankly I think they are crazy as Chapel Hill does not have a culture of volunteerism and I believe much of what I do will end up falling back on to Cheryl Ashley, our church secretary. However, this is their decision to make and theirs to deal with the consequences. I wish this was not happening but it is.

I write this for three reasons:
1. I need to debrief, and get this off my chest.
2. I believe in being open and transparent.
3. I am starting Job hunting and would ask all of you to keep me in mind and in your prayers.

Back to work on the CHMS

2009-02-03T22:44:00.003-06:00

I have been (frantically) working on the online Church Management System for Chapel Hill again.
I decided to move this to a DotNetNuke back end so I had to move all the database tables and rebuild the Datasets and Business Logic Layer. We are doing an in-house photo directory at church and I REALLY want to be able to use this for the registration. The opportunity to get buy-in is just too great to pass up.

I just imported the families and individuals tables information from our Shelby database. So I am more or less back to where I was before sans groups.

Conversation

2009-01-24T18:56:00.002-06:00

I have been engaging in a fun and enlightening conversation in the comments of a blog http://aunitedmethodistemerging.blogspot.com/ though the author took down the particular blog post for the conversation. I would have just closed the comments as taking down a post feels like lying and denying the conversation ever happened to me, but it is not my blog.

So,

Eric Mattson

if you are reading this, I think your last comment really cleared things up for me. No, I don't mind measuring things or using numbers to continue to do the work of ministry better. I just always want to be aware of the temptation to measure our success based on the ABC's (Attendance, Buildings, and Cash) rather than the growth of God's Kingdom on earth, both within and outside of the traditional church.

The church should be about the business of changing the future

2009-01-14T17:00:00.000-06:00

Cool thought from Matt Cleaver,

"The church is the place where imagining a new future should be a perpetual practice, not just every four years. The church should be about the business of changing the future, not just preparing people for it. We participate in bringing about God’s kingdom on earth, changing old to new, and seeing life where there once was death."

http://mattcleaver.com/2008/11/05/why-politics-is-more-exciting-than-christianity/

Third-party modifications

2009-01-09T21:11:00.002-06:00

Bruce Chapman commented on my post about looking at the source and pointed out a free product from his site that is a good mid-point between the base DNN Friendly Url provider and his full featured Url Master Module. This mid-point module called the iFinity Friendly Url Provider http://www.ifinity.com.au/Products/Friendly_Url_Provider_For_DNN/ was something I had looked at but was unsure what it provided beyond the basic DNN functionality before he provided more clarification in his comment.

Essentially to quote Bruce "It adds features such as preserving the human friendly urls when using additional modules. The standard DNN provider stops producing Human Friendly Urls with add-on modules like the core blogs and forums. The iFinity Friendly Url Provider provides built-in 301 redirects to maintain a single, canonical Url for your DNN pages."

All of this looks cool but is it worth the trouble of modifying my DNN configuration? After all, to quote Nyls Jessan from Starpilot's Grave "Third-party modifications screw up everything." Of course he was trying to do voyage repairs on the hyperspace engines of a ship that had been moded beyond recognition while floating outside the ship in a pressure-suit. He can be forgiven for his feeling that "You should be able to do voyage repairs withou having to suit up and go out in vacuume." However he does still bring up a good point, since I am do all of my work on the newly released DNN 5 core and even the Url Master Module is not completly compatible with DNN 5 as of my last check, I will paraphrase and say "You should be able to do upgrades without having to go back in to the code to fix a problem." BTW Bruce should be updating this forum thread when he has a new version of the URL Master out that is DNN 5 compatible, but that still does not guraruntee that the iFinity Friendly Url Provider is.

As a side note the Mageworlds series by Debra Doyle and James D. MacDonald is one of my favorite sci-fi / space opera book series, I higly recomend is with only some slight reservations due to some of the fantasy elements. Book one is available from amazon.com here.

My Blog in a picture

2009-01-09T20:12:00.002-06:00

Visual representation of my blog.

Sometimes you just need to look at the source code

2009-01-08T22:59:00.004-06:00

I have been playing around with Dot Net Nuke recently, trying to figure out if I want to move to this as the main core backend for future websites and web applications I build.

One thing I have never liked about DNN is the way it creates urls. This is a link to the Blogs section of the DotNetNuke website and a typical example of what a DNN url looks like. http://www.dotnetnuke.com/tabid/825/default.aspx - with all pages having default.aspx at the end and actually being identified by the tabid number. This is just not a very friendly url and this is one of the main reasons I have avoided using DNN in the past.

With the latest round of research I have been looking for a way to get DNN to use a more friendly url structure such as http://www.dotnetnuke.com/blog.aspx etc...

I was looking at external addon modules to do this such as the cool looking Url Master Module from iFinity a company owned and run by Bruce Chapman from Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia http://www.ifinity.com.au/Products/Url_Master_DNN_SEO_Urls/. However, hesitate to commit myself to buying a $95 dollar add-on for every site I build. This kind of expense can really cut into your profit margin.

So today I took a good look at the source for the Friendly Url provider that comes with DNN and came across this setting: urlformat="HumanFriendly" which does exactly what I wanted.

To use this, just open your web.config and locate this tag:

<friendlyurl defaultprovider="DNNFriendlyUrl">
<providers>
<clear>
<add name="DNNFriendlyUrl" type="DotNetNuke.Services.Url.FriendlyUrl.DNNFriendlyUrlProvider, DotNetNuke.HttpModules" includepagename="true" regexmatch="[^a-zA-Z0-9 _-]">
</add>
</clear>

Change it to :

<friendlyurl defaultprovider="DNNFriendlyUrl">
<providers>
<clear>
<add name="DNNFriendlyUrl" type="DotNetNuke.Services.Url.FriendlyUrl.DNNFriendlyUrlProvider, DotNetNuke.HttpModules" includepagename="true" regexmatch="[^a-zA-Z0-9 _-]" urlformat="HumanFriendly">
</add>
</clear>

Save it and refresh your DNN application. Then you will see no tabid is in your urls.
Thanks to this post for helping me figure out the details of how to do this: http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/111/threadid/203804/scope/posts/Default.aspx

What I wanted was right there all along. However, I would not have realized this was built in if I hadn't taken a good look at the source code for the application and seen a switch that was turned off by default to use Human Friendly urls.

The moral here is that sometimes you just need to look at the source code.

Avoid Shelby v5.08000 etc

2009-01-06T22:28:00.002-06:00

Don't update your Shelby systems software from the v5.07000 version to the .08000 version using the current end of the year update. There is a bug in the update and you will have to uninstall Shelby and re-install after getting the older version from support.

That is what I did today, uninstall and re-install the Shelby Systems Church management system after doing a end of the year update last night.

As all my loyal readers will already know (that's a joke as I think there are probably 2 of you) I am not at all a fan of Shelby Church management system. This just makes it worse. I am a programmer and have created programs and updates that had errors in them, we all do no matter how much we test. However, I don't continue to encourage people to install my software KNOWING there is an issue and it may completely fry their install. That is just bad business practice. Granted most people will be doing an update from an 8000 version to a later 08000 version which should work fine, but for those of us like me who were still using an earlier 07000 version at least warn us not to install the 08000 version. Come on.

Happy New Year

2008-12-31T22:12:00.002-06:00

Happy New Year everyone.
2008 was a wonderful year, with the birth of my first child and everything else that happened. I hope and believe 2009 can and will be even better.

Arena

2008-12-13T01:31:00.004-06:00

eJOn Edmiston posted a great response to a little rant I put in his comments wondering why Arena was not open sourced. Here is a link to his post http://churchcrosstalk.typepad.com/jonedmiston/2008/12/why-ccv-didnt-release-what-is-now-arena-as-open-source.html

And you should really check out his blog in general http://churchcrosstalk.typepad.com/jonedmiston/

I have re-posted a comment I made in response to that post below, and hi-lighted the part about creating a "competing" open source church management solution.

Thank You so much for the response.

I did not realize when I posted the "rant" on the comment that your church was the one who created Arena.

Given the continuing support you would have felt compelled to provide your decision makes a lot of sense. It is just frusterating to be the IT guy at a church of 500 looking for a new church management system and realize there is no way we could ever afford the best system out there, the one with all the features we could REALLY use and\or want. Honestly even for a "small" church no other system really comes close to matching the features of Arena so good job. And thanks for deciding not to just keep the project in house but to share it with the world.

All that being said if there are people reading this who would like to join me in creating an open source church management system for the rest of us, probably based off a Dot Net Nuke backend, please let me know.

Kati

2008-11-13T13:11:00.002-06:00

Its been a while since I have posted on here.

I have hit a mid to long term pause on the CHMS project due to my not having enough paid time in the week to get all my other Chapel Hill work done and my having other things to do with my volunteerable time.

I am working on an update for the Central Homeschool Family Ministries site, including some front end design work and more back end functionality improvements. The online web base school class registration system I built for them was one of the first real ASP.NET web applications I ever built and is still the largest programming project I have ever worked on.

I am spending most of my free time with Kati and Kristen these days. Being a dad is great and Kati is growing so fast. I love her so much and feel so blessed.

Postmodern Math

2008-09-27T13:28:00.004-05:00

Last Saturday I wanted to do something just for fun since we take Saturday’s as our Sabbath. Thinking about fun things to do (that are free since money is tight right now because car registrations came due this week) I decided I wanted to go to the library and get some books on math. This is something I do every once in a while, and we have been watching a lot of the show Numbers lately (Netflix is great) so my brain has been in a math mode.

We took Kati to the library for the first time, which we enjoyed much more than she did, and Kristen got some books on house design and scrapbooking. I brought home and armload of fun looking books about math and mathematicians.

The first book I ended up reading was Philosophy of Mathematics: an introduction to the world of proofs and pictures by James Robert Brown. C 1999 published by Routledge an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. ISBN 0-415-12275-9

This ended up being a fascinating general overview of the different strains of philosophy behind mathematics. I never realized there was so much debate among mathematicians about how to think about how math works.

There were several strains of thinking represented in the book but one debate that stood out was the question of whether mathematical concepts actually exist in some sort of platonic abstract realm of existence and mathematicians just discover these truths, or if mathematics is really just a social construct. The author believes in the platonic version of math and after reading the book I mostly agreed with him, but think he puts too much of a hard separation between the realm of math and the world we actually live in.

I found it particularly interesting to note that some of the extreme questioning of reality that has been connected with postmodernism has also made its way into mathematical philosophy. In particular chapter nine on how human’s follow “rules” especially when working from an existing sequence of numbers and seeking to extend them.

Suppose a teacher gives the following list of numbers to her student and asks them to extend the sequence (see page 133-134) 1, 4, 9, 16, …. “What is the next number? The student will likely answer 25. Why? Probably he will reason that the sequence obeys the rule of taking each number in turn and squaring it, i.e. 1 squared, 2 squared, 3 squared, 4 squared, and so on; the next number in the sequence would then be 5 squared which is 25.

But what if he answered 27? Would this be wrong? His reasoning might be as follows: The sequence is growing by adding successive odd prime numbers to the elements of the sequence. The odd primes are: 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, …. Thus the sequence is:

1
4 = 1 + 3
9 = 4 + 5
16 = 9 + 7
.
.
.

And so the next number in the sequence is 16 + 11 which equals 27.”

Both of these are reasonable continuations of a mathematical sequence and the only sense in which one answer could be considered wrong has to do with the teachers “intentions” but are her intentions enough to justify considering one answer wrong?

The book goes on to give more extreme examples of a student following a rule to the best of his ability and getting an answer that is “obviously wrong” or is it? The answer given is absolutely not the one the teacher expected or intended, and would be considered wrong by most people, but is it really?

A mathematician named Kripke extended an argument by one named Wittgenstein on this topic to give the following set of arguments.

Causation is just regularity – nothing more; our inferences about the future are based on custom and habit – nothing more. Thus in this view:

· There is no fact of the matter about whether the teacher/questioner meant one sequence rather than another.
· The only way to solve the problem is to abandon the view that meaningful sentences purport to correspond to facts. Language does not word by being representational.
· However, this is not to abandon language. There are many useful things that various ‘language games’ can do.
· The conditions for the use of any language game involve reference to a community, all of whom play the same game.
· Ultimately, we act without hesitation, without justification; but this is not to act wrongly. In following a rule we simply do what we think is right. There is nothing deeper. But it is not enough to do merely what we think is right. ‘To think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule “privately”; otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.
· We are trained by others, and we are judged to be following a rule correctly when we give the same answers as other members of the community. There is a strong tendency for all members of the community to give the same answers – a shared ‘form of life’. This is just a brute fact, like Hume’s regularities in nature. There is no explanation for this, no hidden cause: ‘What has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say – forms of life.
· Our answers are (in some loose sense) in accord with the rule; but they are not caused by it. We do not grasp a rule which then determines our behavior; we do not agree in expanding a sequence because we share a common conception of some mathematical function. Rather, we say that we share a common conception because we agree in our answers, we agree in how we go on expanding the sequence.

The author of the book finds this conclusion “wholly absurd and thinks it ridiculous to say that it is only an amazing coincidence that we all agree in developing a sequence in the same way.” He concludes that “something is wrong with the premises of any argument that leads to this absurd outcome, and concludes that there are, after all, independently existing mathematical entities and we can grasp them, just as the Platonists have been claiming all along.” (Page 144-145)

I tend to agree with the author though I find Kripke’s argument to be challenging and I hate to link myself in any way with a Platonic view of the world. What do you think? Answer in the comments below.

Several times in the book, the author expressed what I would term a “negative view” toward religion, which I found to be interesting in a book on math. However I found his conclusion, especially coming from someone with this negative view of religion to be challenging.

“The real action today – the living philosophical issues for working mathematicians – cluster around visualization and experimentation. The clarification of this cluster of problems presents us with our greatest challenge. If our philosophical duty lies anywhere it is here, after the elimination of poverty which, of course, must be the first duty of all.”

How is it that a secular anti religious mathematician can view “the elimination of poverty” as “the first duty of all” and so many Christians can seem to view this issue as being unimportant compared to questions like “what style of worship is best?” Shouldn’t all Christians treat this issue as being at least one of our first duties?

Image Upload Web Service in VB.NET

2008-09-18T16:14:00.004-05:00

Image Upload Web Service in VB.NET

We are going to be doing and in house pictorial directory here at Chapel Hill this fall. I want this directory to be integrated with our website and allow us to view the directory pictures online.

The process as I envision it would include a family taking some time out of their Sunday or Wednesday night to have a picture taken. The photographer would take a family picture as well as individual pictures and transfer these to a computer. It would be ideal if the pictures transfered as they were being taken. We would then have a piece of software that would allow us to look up the info we have for this family, update it if needed, and upload pictures for the family and for each family member.

This software will need to re-size the images down from the hi-quality images taken by the camera to something that is a web appropriate size, upload the image, and update the family / individual profile to indicate which image belongs to them.

In order to do this, I needed a way to upload an image to a website using a VB program. I decided I would use a web service to do this and through some Google research I was able to put together a web service to do this.

Here is the code I used for the web service with a web form to test it out.
When I have finished the vb program I will post that code.

First the web service
-----------------------------------------------
Public Function UploadImage(ByVal imgdata() As Byte, ByVal FileName As String) As Integer
'Find the path on the server of our apps images folder
Dim FilePath As String = Server.MapPath("images")

'strip the path and .jpg etc out of our filename
Dim i As Integer = InStrRev(FileName, "\")
FileName = Mid(FileName, i)
Dim j As Integer = InStr(FileName, ".") - 1
Dim k As Integer = Len(FileName)
FileName = Mid(FileName, 1, j)

'Create a memory stream to hold the image data
Dim MS As New System.IO.MemoryStream(imgdata)

'Convert the memory stream to a bitmap image
Dim BM As New System.Drawing.Bitmap(Image.FromStream(MS))

'Convert the bitmap to a png and save it in our images folder
BM.Save(FilePath & FileName & ".png", Imaging.ImageFormat.Png)

'eventually we will create a database entry for this image and return the image ID
Return 1
End Function

---------------------------------------------------

Now the VB code for the web form
------------------------------------------------
Imports System.IO
Partial Class _Default
Inherits System.Web.UI.Page

Protected Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
Dim ws As New localhost.ImageUpload
Dim fs As Stream = FileUpload1.PostedFile.InputStream
Dim img(fs.Length) As Byte
fs.Read(img, 0, Convert.ToInt32(fs.Length))

ws.UploadImage(img, FileUpload1.PostedFile.FileName)
End Sub
End Class

---------------------------------------------------------

I hope someone finds this useful.

Buying a Server

2008-08-26T17:56:00.002-05:00

I have been having problems with my website hosting company. I host 11 websites with hostonce.com and twice now all of these sites have been down for a couple days at a time, and the site for the company was down at the same time as well, so there was no way to submit a support ticket. After this happened the second time I decided I had to find a new hosting company. I wanted to be able to host all of my websites on one account with room to grow. I have 3 different accounts with hostonce since they offer a deal where you can upgrade to a 5 site host for 45 dollars above the 80 something price of one site. This was a good enough deal at first since I had locked in a yearly rate of 60 odd dollars plus the 45 for my first set of 5 sites, but over time it has proven to be a bit of a pain.

I looked into getting a dedicated server hosted for me, or ever a Virtual Private Server. The dedicated server setup would have cost over $4000 dollars a year, more than I can afford, and the VPS solution I found would have limited me to 30 websites and cost over $800 dollars a year.

Looking at those prices I began to wonder what it would cost to host my own webserver.
AT&T recently raised the price I was paying for internet from around $35 dollars a month to around $55 becuase we lost a discount we were getting.
Cox business internet service offers a plan with a dedicated IP and an OPEN port 80 for website hosting for $69 dollars a month. Not that much more than AT&T.
Dell offers a varity of servers for different price ranges. I found and ordered a very basic one on sale with a dual core 2.0ghz processor, two 80 gig hard drives, and 2gig of ram for $423.08 with taxes and Shipping. It should arrive next week.

Now I need to save up for the software to put on my server. Windows Web Server 2008 $469 Web Server-only product, no CALs required. Available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Fortunatly there is a 60 day downloadable trial version of this software (which I am downloading right now) so I can install and setup my software now and pay for it next month.

Fun, Fun, Fun, I have a new toy on the way.

Importing Data From Shelby Systems

2008-08-04T19:59:00.002-05:00

Today I did most of the Spark, caught up on email, and did the following work on the new CHMS:

Worked on Creating the Ability to Import People and Families from Shelby, this included creating Data Access and BLL layers for the needed Shelby tables, and new methods in several of the BLL Classes along with some Data Access methods to go with them.

Fortunately, Shelby stored its data in a SQL Server database as well, so I was able to shutdown SQL server on our Server computer, make copies of the database files, re-start SQL server, bring the copied files to my computer, and attach them to my local SQL Server Express edition. Thus I can work with the Shelby database without having to connect to the actuall database on the server, and thus risk data, or kick other people out.

I may eventually work on a way to move updated data back and forth, but for now, getting data out of Shelby and into the new system is enough of a challenge.

AJAX

2008-07-29T15:47:00.002-05:00

Today I finished up the bulletin for next Sunday and worked on the BLL and started the presentation layer for the Open Source Church Management System named Hill CHMS I am working on building for Chapel Hill.

I need to AJAX enable the site before I can go much further. I want admins to be able to start typing in a last name and have a list of choices appear below, with the list getting smaller as more letters are typed. I know this is possible with AJAX, I just don't know how hard it would be to actually do. If I can't do this right away I will settle for a list that populates when a button is hit.

I need to think of this in terms of versions, with version one just working and later versions having more features.

Today's Update

2008-07-28T16:52:00.002-05:00

I know no one reads this, or really cares about the Church Management System I am working on at the moment. I suppose it is just my geekishness that makes me want to post all this here.

Today after getting all my other Church work done I worked on the CHMS and did the following"

Created tblContactMethods to hold of all things contact methods.
Created tblMembershipStatuses to hold membership statuses.
Created table adapters for these two tables.

I had forgotten to add these to the original database map, they connect the the people table

Changed tblPeople and re-created its table adapter.

I need to talk to George Retter, who is doing our Jump In - get people involved ministry here at Chapel Hill before I go any further.

More table images

2008-07-25T13:28:00.003-05:00

Here are the images from some more tables for the CHMS

Business Logic Layer

2008-07-25T13:24:00.001-05:00

Free Open Source Church Management System Business Logic Layer

Much of the basic logic for my BLL's comes from the following tutorials. ASP.NET Data Access Tutorials

Here is the updated code for the Families BLL

Imports Microsoft.VisualBasic
Imports FamiliesTableAdapters

_
Public Class FamiliesBLL

Private _theAdapter As tblFamiliesTableAdapter = Nothing

Protected ReadOnly Property Adapter() As tblFamiliesTableAdapter
Get
If _theAdapter Is Nothing Then
_theAdapter = New tblFamiliesTableAdapter()
End If

Return _theAdapter
End Get
End Property

(System.ComponentModel.DataObjectMethodType.Select, True)> _
Public Function GetFamilies() As Families.tblFamiliesDataTable
Return Adapter.GetFamilies
End Function

(System.ComponentModel.DataObjectMethodType.Select, False)> _
Public Function GetFamilyByID(ByVal FamilyID As Integer) _
As Families.tblFamiliesDataTable
Return Adapter.GetFamilyByID(FamilyID)
End Function

(System.ComponentModel.DataObjectMethodType.Insert, True)> _
Public Function NewFamily( _
ByVal FamilyName As String, ByVal FamilyDescription As String, _
ByVal SalutationID As Integer, ByVal Salutation As String, _
ByVal Address As String, ByVal City As String, ByVal StateID As Integer, ByVal StateName As String, ByVal ZIP As String, _
ByVal HomePhone As String, ByVal FamilyCellPhone As String, ByVal FamilyEmail As String, ByVal ShelbyFamilyID As Integer, _
ByVal ImageID As Integer _
) As Boolean

Dim SiteID As Integer = 1

Dim TBL As New Families.tblFamiliesDataTable
Dim ARow As Families.tblFamiliesRow = TBL.NewtblFamiliesRow()

ARow.FamilyName = FamilyName
ARow.FamilyDescription = FamilyDescription

ARow.SalutationID = SalutationID
ARow.Salutation = Salutation

ARow.Address = Address
ARow.City = City
ARow.StateID = StateID
ARow.StateName = StateName
ARow.ZIP = ZIP

ARow.HomePhone = HomePhone
ARow.FamilyCellPhone = FamilyCellPhone
ARow.FamilyEmail = FamilyEmail

ARow.ShelbyFamilyID = ShelbyFamilyID

ARow.SiteID = SiteID

ARow.Created = Now()
ARow.CreatedBy = HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name
ARow.LastEdited = Now()
ARow.EditedBy = HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name

TBL.AddtblFamiliesRow(ARow)
Dim rowsAffected As Integer = Adapter.Update(TBL)

Return rowsAffected = 1
End Function

(System.ComponentModel.DataObjectMethodType.Update, True)> _
Public Function UpdateFamily(ByVal FamilyID As Integer, _
ByVal FamilyName As String, ByVal FamilyDescription As String, _
ByVal SalutationID As Integer, ByVal Salutation As String, _
ByVal Address As String, ByVal City As String, ByVal StateID As Integer, ByVal StateName As String, ByVal ZIP As String, _
ByVal HomePhone As String, ByVal FamilyCellPhone As String, ByVal FamilyEmail As String, _
ByVal ImageID As Integer _
) As Boolean

Dim TBL As Families.tblFamiliesDataTable = _
Adapter.GetFamilyByID(FamilyID)

If TBL.Count = 0 Then
Return False
End If

Dim ARow As Families.tblFamiliesRow = TBL(0)

ARow.FamilyName = FamilyName
ARow.FamilyDescription = FamilyDescription

ARow.SalutationID = SalutationID
ARow.Salutation = Salutation

ARow.Address = Address
ARow.City = City
ARow.StateID = StateID
ARow.StateName = StateName
ARow.ZIP = ZIP

ARow.HomePhone = HomePhone
ARow.FamilyCellPhone = FamilyCellPhone
ARow.FamilyEmail = FamilyEmail

ARow.LastEdited = Now()
ARow.EditedBy = HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name

Dim rowsAffected As Integer = Adapter.Update(ARow)

Return rowsAffected = 1
End Function

(System.ComponentModel.DataObjectMethodType.Delete, True)> _
Public Function DeleteFamily(ByVal FamilyID As Integer) As Boolean

Dim TBL As Families.tblFamiliesDataTable = _
Adapter.GetFamilyByID(FamilyID)

If TBL.Count = 0 Then
Return False
End If

Dim ARow As Families.tblFamiliesRow = TBL(0)

ARow.LastEdited = Now()
ARow.EditedBy = HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name

ARow.Deleted = True
ARow.DateDeleted = Now()
ARow.DeletedBy = HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name

Dim rowsAffected As Integer = Adapter.Update(ARow)

Return rowsAffected = 1
End Function

(System.ComponentModel.DataObjectMethodType.Delete, False)> _
Public Function DeleteCompletly(ByVal FamilyID As Integer) As Boolean
Dim rowsAffected As Integer = Adapter.Delete(FamilyID)

Return rowsAffected = 1
End Function

End Class

Today's Update for the Church Management System

2008-07-23T16:51:00.004-05:00

Today's Update for the Church Management System

Today I created table adapters for most of the tables in the church management system, and also made images of the tables for documentation.

Here are some of the images of tables in the system.

Today's Updates to the Church Management System

2008-07-20T16:39:00.004-05:00

I think I will call the CHMS "Hill Church Management System", at least for now.

I need to eventually re-do some of my existing code base to make it faster, and eliminate any copyrighted code so I can distribute this system.

Today I:
Created tblGroup positions to hold info on the various positions people can hold in A group, such as leader, facilitator, member, former member.

Created tblGroupTypes to hold info about the various possible group types. There are a lot of these Whole Church, Commitee, Small Group, Wednesday Night at the Hill, Children's Sunday School, Adult Sunday School, etc...

Created tblLocations to hold locations used by the Calendar and to denote where groups meet.

Created tblLocationMapping so that I can have locations that map back to multiple other locations for purposes of seeing if a room is busy. For instance, the basement at Chapel Hill might be listed as a location "Lower Level" but would actually comprise many smaller locations that would be busy whenever the entire basement is busy.

Created tblEvents to hold information about events for the calendar.

Worked on this from 4:30 - 5:15

Requirements for Open Source Church Management System

2008-07-18T20:21:00.000-05:00

Requirements for Open Source Church Management System

The new CHMS must:
• Allow staff to view and edit information for individuals, families, groups, small groups, ministries, calendars, individual spiritual gifts and abilities.
• Allow ministry and small group leaders to login and communicate with people in their small group; create events for their ministry, etc.
• Allow people to sign up for a login, and edit / enter their own information, plus allow them to indicate interests in different ministries.
• Have a process for tracking and managing tasks/processes (i.e. a new visitor process: who follows up with them, when etc...)

Change Log for Open Source Church Management System

2008-07-18T20:16:00.001-05:00

Change Log for Open Source Church Management

7/15/08
Created tblFamilies Table, Table Adapter, and Business Logic Layer

It took 40 minutes to create all three of these. There are around 20 tables in the current design leading to 13.333 etc hours of work if every table takes 40 minutes. This still leaves the pages to actually put data into these tables.

7/17/08
Created tblPeople and PeopleInFamily tables, also edited tblFamilies to add some fields, including ShelbyFamilyID to be used to import date from Shelby.

Deleted PeopleInFamily table, Added FamilyID and FamilyPosition fields to tblPeople and removed a few fields duplicated from tblFamily. I am designing as I build this.

Created tblStates, found a list of US states with postal abbreviations and imported this data into tblStates.

Created tblFamilyPositions, I have had to re-consider what data goes in this table. I don’t really like what using Head of Household says about hierarchy in families, but only having husband and wife does not work for single people who live alone.
Created tblImages, to reference images used by the program.

Created tblGroups to hold information about all kinds of groups.

Open Source Church Management System

2008-07-18T19:20:00.002-05:00

With the current financial situation at Chapel Hill I don't think they are going to be willing to shell out $3000 for CCB any time soon. However, I do think the pastor see the value in going to a web based Church Management System that is one centralized place where we store all our information, that can be accessed from anywhere.

So, given the opportunity and the need, I have started working on building a Church Management System "in house" using asp.net and Visual Basic. The plan is to post this to the Microsoft Open Source system so other churches can use it.

I am going to be posting my logic, progress, change logs, etc... here just because.

Enjoy!

The Human Brain is Amazing

2008-07-13T10:59:00.002-05:00

I don't think Chapel Hill is going to shell out for CCB so I am looking into building our own web based Church Management System from scratch.

Yesterday's planning issue had to do with the calendar part of this system. I want small group leaders to be able to add events for their group to the calendar, which can then be approved later by an Admin if they require a room here at Church.

One of the features of the scheduler should be a warning if someone is going to overbook a room. So I was trying to figure out the best way to tell if two events are taking place at the same time. Here is where the human brain amazes me. We can just tell intuitively if two events overlap without really thinking about how we know.

I ended up deciding to test to see if two events do NOT overlap and deciding that they must overlap if they do not NOT overlap. This may seem complicated but there are four different ways events can overlap and only two ways they can NOT overlap.

New Layout for Chapel Hill Website

2008-06-09T17:46:00.002-05:00

Today I changed the layout for the Chapel Hill website, here is a link Chapel Hill Church Wichita I added the green area streching to the sides and the silver bar for the links, along with putting the links along the top, rather than the left side.

I am trying to increase our google page rank for people searching for "church wichita" so if you would like to add a link to Chapel Hill with the text "Chapel Hill Church Wichita" that would be appreciated.

Three Weeks with Kati and an empty house

2008-06-07T15:01:00.003-05:00

Kati has been with us in person for 3 1/2 almost 4 weeks now. What a blessing! Kristen took Kati to a baby shower for Quin from church today. Quin is expecting in either July or August (I am a guy, I'm not good with dates OK :-) never have been) The house feels empty without either of them here, especially with both dogs outside.

Kristen asked me to go get dinner while she was gone, she was feeling like a burger so I think I will grill out. Maybe I'll pick up some steaks as well if they are affordable.

Baby Girl

2008-05-19T09:53:00.003-05:00

Our little girl, Kati Elizabeth Rowley was born last Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 6:16PM
She weighed 8lbs 3oz and was 20 inches long.

We wanted a home birth but ended up transferring to Wesley near the end because Kristen wasn't pushing hard enough to get that little girl out. (I think she may be stubborn like her parents.) So they put Kristen on some pitocin and about an hour and a half later we had Kati.

We came home Tuesday night around 11pm.

Waiting on Baby

2008-05-11T18:00:00.003-05:00

We are still waiting on Baby to arrive. We are going to induce Kristen with casteroil again tomorrow and our midwife says our little girl should arrive sometime on Monday.

Our Senior Pastor is blogging

2008-05-07T12:58:00.003-05:00

Jeff Gannon has started blogging. This is cool as I think most if not all pastors in American Churches should blog to better reach and communicate with people in this electronic society.

Job interview

2008-05-06T12:13:00.003-05:00

I had a job interview this morning and it looks like they are going to hire me. This is a part time job to go along with my work at Chapel Hill. A big thank you to everyone who prayed for me or suggested job leads.

Video from one of my new favorite Bloggers

2008-05-05T20:28:00.003-05:00

It is official, I am blogging about blogging, or at least about other people who blog. Still, check out this video from Tony Jones book "A New Kind of Christian" and here are links to the first two videos in this series.

http://tonyj.net/2008/04/21/the-new-christians-webisode-one/
http://tonyj.net/2008/04/28/on-the-road-with-trucker-frank-webisode-2/

Being Missional

2008-05-03T00:53:00.004-05:00

I often wish Chapel Hill put more emphasis on being "missional", which to me means joining the "God of the Oppressed", in working for the redemption of this world by ministering to the poor, the friendless, and the needy. I personally am less concerned about witnessing to people in order to save their souls, and more concerned about loving "the least of these", and helping those in need. As a side benefit people WILL come to know Christ when they see our love in action.

One problem I face as a staff member of Chapel Hill is where to draw the line between actions taken as a staff member, and actions taken as a member of the body of Christ.

I did not grow up as a Methodist, and am in some ways I am still not one at heart. I strongly believe that there is no Ontological difference between the so called "clergy" and "laity" (terms which aren't even biblical as far as I know). I really believe in the "priesthood of all believers" something the UMC claims to believe but, in my opinion, denies by their actions in only letting certain people teach in Church, or give communion, or baptise, or even marry people.

Because of this belief I sometimes struggle with wondering what my role should be as a paid staff person at a Church, since I am not even sure I think churches should have paid clergy, let alone staff. The best answer I have found is that our role should be "to equip the people of God to do the work of the ministry." If this is true, as I believe it is, then the staff and ministers need to be very careful not to takeover doing the work of the ministry for the people of God. Hence my dilemma, in not knowing where to draw the line between doing ministry and empowering ministry.

Being on staff brings with it a fair bit of power, and the temptation would be to use that power to move the Church and the people in a direction I want them to go, instead of trusting God to move the Church and the people in the direction He wants them to go.

Solution to Calendar problem

2008-05-02T15:48:00.003-05:00

I solved my calendar problem today and the calendar for the website is up and live at chfumc.org/calendar.aspx.

One of the requirements I had for a calendar on the website was that the computer automatically do all the updating based on events from our current Shelby calendar. I struggled and struggled to be able to make this happen, and in the end it just wasn't going to be worth the time or effort to create this in order to not have to update the calendar every week or so. The final straw was that the start times in the second table I needed to export were not stored as a date time value. (see my previous post on this.) So I gave up and decided to use Google calendar for our website. Shelby has a feature that allows a person to export a calendar date range to Excel and I then modified the excel doc to have the correct column order and headers, saved as a csv file, and imported this into google calendar. From there adding the google calendar to our website was simple.

Exporting calendar data for the website

2008-05-01T22:51:00.002-05:00

I have been struggling with a programming problem for work this week. For our church management system we use Shelby Systems V5. This is a powerful program but it is not very user friendly or overly easy to use. Also it is a server based software system that can only be accessed at the church by people with a user ID / password, and enough training to know how to use it. We have been using Shelby since before I came on staff and we still do not really have a true handle on it, mostly because with a system like Shelby you need one person to be full time dedicated to the software, learning it, updating it, training others on how to use it, etc... and we do not have that person.

My preference would be for Chapel Hill to move to a web based system that would be easy and intuitive to use, and would require very little training for volunteers to use, but we have a lot of money invested in Shelby, and that makes it hard to justify a change. So we deal with what we have.

Right now I am trying to bridge the gap between our Shelby calendar system which we use to schedule church events (and make sure we do not over schedule the building) and our website, which really needs to have a calendar of events for the church on it.

Shelby stores event data in a SQL server database in several tables. The ones I am interested in are a table to store the names of the different locations that events take place, a table for one time events, and a table for re-occurring events. It is this last table that is causing me the big problems, as each re-occurring event is only listed in the table once, along with info on the date it starts happening, the date it stops happening, and how often in happens.

What I need is a composite table of the tables containing one time events, and the table containing re-occurring events, only with each event instance listed as its own record. Shelby creates this composite table on the fly whenever it is needed using an SQL server stored procedure. I have looked at this solution, but my T-SQL is not good enough to figure out how to copy and modify it for what I need, and I am not sure this would not be a licence violation anyway. So I am left with either doing a manual export of the calendar data each week and then importing this into my website database, or figuring out some programmatic way of combing these two tables to get the data I need.

Perfect Church

2008-04-29T23:05:00.004-05:00

What would your perfect church be like?

I have been thinking about this a bit, being on staff at Chapel Hill I get to see and experience the great things about CHF and the not so great things. Seeing a church from the inside can sometimes burn you out on church because you see all the ways the Church and people are disfunctional and just very human.

The other part of my thinking has been caused by my struggling with the question of my being called to the ministry and what this really means.

Some things that bother me about CHF are less a problem with CHF and more and issue of my not agreeing / fitting with CHF and more especially Methodism in general.

My perfect church would:

Truly believe in and practice the priesthood of all believers. To the degree that we would not really differentiate between those on staff and those not on staff at the church. Anyone could baptize, give communion, marry people (we would have to work this out with the laws of the state) etc... and not just one or a very few people would get to teach in our meeting.
Be a VERY communal place. Community would be central to the life and DNA of the church.
Be good for the world and our community.
Be a place that preaches and practices grace.
Be a place that believes in hope for the world.

I will add more to this later.

Starting Blogging

2008-03-09T09:38:00.000-05:00

Hellow World

Jesus Loves You

Our Due date is May 11, 2008

Those are the important headlines in my life right now.