Just saw in the Insurance Journal that GMAC Insurance just released a study that shows 1 in 10 drivers (nearly 20 million) would fail a state drivers test it they had to take it again. They asked 20 driving-knowledge questions of 5,000 licensed drivers between 16 and 65 from around the country. The test measured basic knowledge of driving and safety laws, as well as attitudes towards basic driving situations.

Looks like those of us in the Northwest did the best. Oregon, Washington, and Idaho scored 1st, 2nd, and 4th.

Michael Spencer, the Internet Monk, writes in “Prepare To Be Blogged: Thoughts From The Pirate Blogosphere” that blogging is kind of like pirate radio:

I always loved the idea of pirate radio. Here at the school where I work, we used to have boys occasionally broadcast on a pirate radio station in the dormitory. I loved the idea of some kid with a radio station under his bed, playing illegal music, making fun of the administration. I wished I’d been able to do something that exciting when I was a teenager. There was something wonderfully subversive and dangerous about broadcasting where you weren’t supposed to have a voice, right there alongside the real stations.

I ran across this scary piece of video on Boing Boing and have to admit to a real queasy feeling in my stomach till I started listening to the words that this alien puppet was singing. Then it was ROTFLMAO time! I guess I am not familiar with Christian Science beliefs, or at least this this guy’s version of Christian Science. I had to do a Google search to see what else I could find about this truly amazing piece of work.

Summary by “A Welsh View : “A really freaky clip of a God-loving alien singing improvised Christian songs on a show with awful video editing.”

Rich Lusk, pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, AL, writes a very well thought out response to the president of Covenant Theological Seminary, Dr. Bryan Chapell’s article, An Explanation of the New Perspective on Paul(NPP). Although the article’s stated purpose is to deal with NPP, it is definitely aimed at those who are labeled among the Federal Vision, Auburn Avenue, or Monrovites clans.

I especially appreciate the way Pastor Lusk starts out:

The controversy in Reformed circles has been rather ugly at times . . . well, ok, it’s actually been ugly most of the time, unfortunately. In that regard, Chapell’s attempt to speak with clarity, charity, humility, and integrity is greatly appreciated by many. His style and tone are commendable. Again, I have nothing but the highest respect for Dr. Chapell, the institution and denomination he represents, and his Covenant Theological Seminary colleagues.

Status: Installed

Related Entries (or Post) Plugin allows one to add links to the page to posts that may be related to the current post. The plugin creates an index in you database and then based on the title or keywords in your post lists the most likely related posts on your blog.

I placed the function call in my comments.php template right above the ‘leave a comment’ routine at the top.

I was reading another article by Rich Lusk, pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church Birmingham, AL and came across this pastoral letter about Trinity Tavern Thursday.

One of the stated purposes of these get-togethers is:

The church is God’s new humanity. As such, it is to be a counter-cultural community, demonstrating to the world what God intended genuine humanity to look like. What does it mean to be “counter-cultural” in a godly way in Birmingham in 2005 AD? We live in a highly “baptistic” culture that has a highly distorted, often dehumanizing, view of “holiness.” The “good” person would never drink alcohol, listen to “worldly” music, befriend a non-Christian, etc. I think part of our distinctive calling as a church in this area and culture is to witness against those very things. It shouldn’t be “in your face” as if we were flaunting our Christian liberty. But it should be very evident nevertheless that we believe in the intrinsic giftedness and goodness of God’s creation. As a church, we are to show how to “do the world right” — how to use music, wine, sex, money, power, the intellect, etc. in accord with their God-given purposes.

My daughter, Mystie, and her husband Matt have blessed us with another grandson! I was able to stop by and visit the young man for a bit this morning and I can tell you that he is one cute baby! His older brother was quite proud to show off his new brother.

I just cannot figure out how I can have a daughter old enough to have 2 children – - I mean I have a hard time coming to grips with the fact that I am the father of more than 1 (ok, 7) children.

Dear friends,

I am pleased to be able to exhort you to praise God today for the birth of our second son, Jaeger Matthias Winckler, early this morning. He weighs 8 pounds 2 ounces, is 21 inches long, and is very healthy.

Jaeger’s birth announcement is online and so are some pictures of the cute little guy.

Praise the Lord with us for His sovereignty and unceasing faithfulness!

Matt

Status: Installed

Denis de Bernardy over at Semilogic has done it again with his Unfancy Quote Plugin for WordPress. WordPress likes to make things look fancy – so it turns regular single and double quotes into their ‘fancy’ equivelant. This looks nice until you are trying to put a piece of code in your blog – and then someone copies it – and programs do not like those fancy things….

Yahoo News reports on Vigilante hackers

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Angered by the growing number of Internet scams, online “vigilantes” have started to take justice into their own hands by hacking into suspected fraud sites and defacing them.

These hackers have targeted fake websites set up to resemble the sites of banks or financial institutions in recent weeks, and have inserted new pages or messages. Some say “Warning – This was a Scam Site,” or “This Bank Was Fraudulent and Is Now Removed.”

The efforts by the self-proclaimed “hero hackers” come amid a surge in online schemes known as “phishing” in which victims are lured to fake websites to get passwords or other personal data.

<continued at yahoo news>

Hat tip to CowboyNeal @ Slashdot

I always have to go looking for help when I end up dealing with Regular Expressions ( example: WordPress Permalink Options). So will start collecting references.

What the Heck is a Regular Expression Anyway?

Jim Hollenhorst says it well:

I’m sure you are familiar with the use of “wildcard” characters for pattern matching. For example, if you want to find all the Microsoft Word files in a Windows directory, you search for “*.doc”, knowing that the asterisk is interpreted as a wildcard that can match any sequence of characters. Regular expressions are just an elaborate extension of this capability.

In writing programs or web pages that manipulate text, it is frequently necessary to locate strings that match complex patterns. Regular expressions were invented to describe such patterns. Thus, a regular expression is just a shorthand code for a pattern. For example, the pattern “\w+” is a concise way to say “match any non-null strings of alphanumeric characters”.

Orson Scott Card writes well in his article on Belief Net: No Faith in This Force

Memo to would-be Jedis: in the new movie, the knights are elitist, dictatorial, and unconvinced that good is an absolute.
. . .
As a religion, the Force is just the sort of thing you’d expect a liberal-minded teenage kid to invent. There’s no God and there are no rules other than a vague insistence on unselfishness and oath-keeping. Power comes from the sum of all life in the universe, and it is manichaean, not Christian — evil is simply another way of using the Force. Only not as nice.
. . .
So instead of looking at the storyline of Episode III as a conflict between good and evil, you could read it as a conflict between the entrenched aristocracy trying to preserve their monopoly on power, and an ambitious upstart, who is determined to break that monopoly and take control for himself. The only reason we don’t see it that way is because the other side is so much more evil. But the body count left behind by Jedi knights is — or should be — disturbing.

In other words, despite whatever political message Lucas might or might not have intended, the Jedi are the smug orthodoxy, always congratulating themselves on their rectitude. No wonder the whole senate seems thrilled when the new Emperor announces the fall of the Jedi. They don’t know yet how evil the Emperor will be, but they know they don’t mind having the meddlesome Jedi out of the way.

As good as Oron Scott Card’s review of the message of Star Wars, what brought my attention to it was Jim Nicholson’s post at Boar’s Head Tavern: Confessions of a StarWars agnostic

BTW, Orson Scott Card’s dissection of the Jedi rings extremely true, BTW. For those who might know, can I ask if what I call Card’s “exceedingly evangelical-protestant-sounding Mormonism” that shows up in his essays is (a) a fluke of his personal beliefs, (b) representative of how the thinking Mormon laity understand their faith, or (c) part of the vast Mormon conspiracy to sound like Baptists until they get enough political power to legislate funny underwear in public schools?

I just finished watching Your Lightsaber and You and feel that I now have no need to go see Revenge of the Sithies.

In the style of a 1950s safety film, this little movie gives you all the tips you will need to “make your lightsaber a lot safer”

Lost the link that pointed me to this

Status: Installed

Welcome Back, Dude! is a cool little hack that lets you personalize your blog for your regulars. I set this up on this blog over at the top right of the sidebar (just above the search box). If the blog know who you are it will welome you back, otherwise you will see nothing, and not realize you are unknown. If you have left a comment and allow cookies then your name should show over at the right (along with what has changed since your last login).

It’s always nice to be recognized. I tend to return to the same place a lot if I like it — my favorite sushi and Thai place, my favorite coffee houses, etc. — and they recognize me and greet me. That’s pleasant. It’s similarly nice to be ‘recognized’ online. Not equally nice, but similarly. This is why people do Gravatars, this is why we don’t post anonymously: if people recognize you on sight it makes you ever so slightly happier.

At christianculture.com Ben House writes a very funny (poignant) article titled Farewell to Arts.

But I discovered a tale of a Presbyterian who wrote a novel. This tale may explain why the literary arts and the precision and orthodoxy of Calvinists rarely meet, almost never marry, and even more rarely produce offspring.

Ouch!!

Like the body of that poor dead concubine in the Book of Judges, Wilville’s novel was cut up into parts and sent throughout the kingdom and it aroused quite a bit of fury.

Double Ouch!!

One good thing about the novel is that it did spur the writing of several book length critiques and responses. These works were theology, not fiction, so they were of a higher standard than Wilville’s fabrication. Among the best known were Reformed Comedy or Tragedy? A Reformed Examination of a Unreformed Heresy and Wilville—Prophet of Darkness and Error and Falsehood. Even the ever-resourceful Prof. Leopold Van Humsteder contributed a chapter titled “Wilville, Barth, and Servetus Compared” in a festschrift dedicated to a most orthodox gentleman. In seventy three pages, he got to the heart of the book—somewhere.

How have we got to the point that we think that attacking fellow Christians with the H-bomb (heresy) is God glorifying? Is it really just politics? Is it just another way to rally the (storm)troops?

Christians and social liberals both claim to care for the poor yet cannot work together towards those end. David Brooks in his New York Times article A Natural Alliance makes an interesting argument that they should join forces.

My third thought, which may be more profound than the other two, is that we can have a culture war in this country, or we can have a war on poverty, but we can’t have both. That is to say, liberals and conservatives can go on bashing each other for being godless hedonists and primitive theocrats, or they can set those differences off to one side and work together to help the needy.

I wonder if the time & money we spend fighting this ‘culture war’ is worthwhile, let alone worthy of our God-given resources. Instead of devoting ourselves to loving our neighbor we instead spend our time broadcasting our ‘hate’ of people like him. Who does this benefit? Does it glorify God? Or is this whole thing just a way to keep us ‘alarmed’ and willing to support this or that ministry that is fighting the war against teletubies, spongebob, homosexuals, and filibustering democrats?

Back to a lighter note, I loved the self-deprecating humor of first thought too much not to include it:

My first thought was, How come Christians have all these megachurches but we Jews don’t have megagogues? I think the answer is that if some Jews built a megagogue, the other Jews in town would say, “That megagogue I wouldn’t go to.” They’d build a rival megagogue. You’d end up with 10 really big buildings, each with about 40 people inside.

Hat tip to Shawn Landres at Religion & Society

Status: Testing

GaMerZ’s User Online hack enables you to create a page that displays how many users are online at any one time, who they are; Members, Guests, or Search Bots and what page they are visiting. It also has a routine that displays a summary that is suitable for the sidebar. The IP address of the users is visible to only the admin user.

To install it you need to install a plugin, install two .php files in your root WordPress directory, and add one line to a system php file (therefore it is a hack and not a plugin).

I made a couple of changes to wp-useronline.php:

• conform with my template – removed the <div content> tags and class="pagetitle" in the headings.
• changed "> 1" for plural to "!== 1" so that ’0 Guests’ would be output instead of ’0 Guest’

• changed the output of get_useronline() to show Users Online: X instead of X Users Online for my sidebar