I must say, life this evening is pretty good. The internet went down here on campus this afternoon, so I was in the dark as to what was going on in Eagle land. After getting back from church this evening, I found out that Philly knocked off Baltimore 15-10 to open the season 7-0, a franchise-best record. Ray Lewis got trashed when TO mocked his TD dance. The InMotion video on that ESPN link is priceless (people actually get paid for this kind of stuff??). To top it all off, the Flash Intro on the Eagles’ page is hilarious. Here’s the link to the intro and a link to the flash file itself. Play it in FireFox, because it can go full-screen, and all flash videos look good in full screen. I’ve watched it myself seven or eight times. I’ve laughed hard each time.

Oh, and also to find out that the Pats are down by a large margin with only one quarter left to play…I smell #1 in the NFL!!! Of course, they still have to work on their offense - it isn’t clicking like it used to in the first few weeks. Still, who cares! We’re 7-0! Wheee!!!!

[Listening to: Adonai roi - Royal Philharmonic Orchestra - Fauré: Requiem; Bernstein: Chichester Psalms (05:19)]

Reading today’s Non Sequitur, we find that “trick-or-treating” is also defined thus: “[going] door to door, [pretending] to be something you’re not, [making] a vague threat of vandalism, and they’ll [the people in the house] give you candy to go away.”

By the way, happy Reformation Day! It was this day in 1517 that Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg, formally protesting the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgances (prepaid forgiveness from sin) and kicking off what we now know as the Protestant Reformation. Any protestant today owes Luther bigtime on this. So don’t celebrate Halloween (or do; I don’t care); celebrate Reformation Day!

I can’t believe this. After fooling around with this far too much over the past few days, I can use my favorite blogging tool to post to mountyscorner! Cheers to the folks at w.bloggar and whoever runs mycvs.org for their fix. So, now, everything works just fine. (Insert Hallelujah Chorus here.)

Anyway, at the moment I’m at Port City Java in Greenville, SC - quite a nifty little coffee shop. The weather was great this evening, and unbeknownst to me some friends had already decided to come over and hang out. So, I had an hour or so chilling with them trying to avoid the BJ girls here - although considering I’m sitting across the way from the girls’ senior class rep, I don’t think I’m going to get in any trouble. I suppose if you want to go letter of the law I have to have a dating pass. I mean, I’m surrounded by nine girls from campus. Whatever. Oops, make that 10. Still, whatever. Coffee was good, internet is fast, and life in general is pretty nice. Except for the parking fee I’ll have to pay to leave here. Downtown Greenville is a beast, especially around Main St. on a Saturday night. Looks nice, but it takes forever to get anywhere. Terrible on the gas mileage, too, I’ll bet. But it was worth it for the coffee and fellowship.

Well, here’s the proof I spoke of earlier. Click the thumbnail for a bigger pic of my car in front of Inter-City Baptist Church in Allen Park, MI. You can compare the pic of the church from their website with the pic in front of my car - it’s one and the same. So, in “Yo Yo” I really was checking in from that quiet little suburb of Detroit, or whoever I phrased it.

So what was I doing up there? Each year, the school and seminary hosts the Mid-America Conference on Preaching (MACP). It’s always the Thursday and Friday ofthe third week of October. Mostly people from around the Great Lakes area come up, and they usually don’t go more than two or three hours. But, the seminary uses the conference as a sales pitch to ministerial students from around the country. To do that, they have the undeniably good deal of paying the gas both ways for any college student coming up, paying the registration and course fees, and providing free housing. That’s too good to pass up. So, since I didn’t have much due that week or the next, I decided to go (again). 1,531.4 miles and $87.41 paid for 44.791 gallons of gasoline (mostly at BP) later, I returned to Greenville, tired but refreshed. The conference focused this year on the Sovereignty of God and the Growth of the Church. I lined things up so I attended the workshops that had most to do with issues I know have come up in urban church work, including cross-cultural ministry and worship in the church. As happened last year, this conference helped shape my philosophies I’ll take to ministry. I also had a good chance to speak with Dr. Compton for the better part of an hour. The man is just so smart. He brought up things I had never thought about, asked me questions that forced me to defend to him why I wanted to go to city ministry (not that he was trying to discourage me at all), and suggested reasons that an assistant pastor needed a seminary degree (and, of course, why I should get mine there).

I’d feel guilty about all this if it weren’t for the fact that I’m still considering the school, some counsellors’ advice notwithstanding. (Strange statement? Not really - while I respect the opinion of those men, they’re still men and fallable at that.) I have counsellors who, theologically speaking, have very far-removed interpretations on soteriology compared to Detroit. (Translation, they are starkly Arminian, while Detroit is unapologetically Calvinist.) It’s no surprise that they would recommend I not go there. Why? Because “Calvinism has done nothing but hurt the church anytime it’s come up.” Never mind that a slew of godly church men, men who gave their time, talents, and sometimes lives to spread the gospel, were Calvinists: Spurgeon, Bunyan, Carey, Andrew Fuller, A.W. Pink…the list goes on. And those are just the Baptists. (Funny thing is - the roll call of early Baptist history is chock full of Calvinists until about 50 years ago. Wonder what happened? How many Baptists would jump ship if they only realized their heritage?) Spurgeon had one Sunday where his congregation gave up all their seats for the visitors. His entire auditorium was full of visitors listening to the gospel message, and his congregation stood in the back and sides to give them their seats. Dulled gospel? Very likely not. In any case, I’m considering Detroit for seminary as well as Central Baptist Seminary in Minneapolis, MN…assuming I can ever get up there. So, I don’t have conscience pangs taking their free ride up there, even though I’ll be starting grad school down here next semester. Cool, huh?

That’s all for today. Now, on to Halo!

Software Only: A work around for the “HTTP protocol violation” error in NewsGator

If you use NewsGator, you need this workaround. By all means, use this workaround!

My roommate just pointed out something interesting to pontificate on for a while. And, since I pretty much haven’t had (or will have) classes this week thanks to High School Festival, I’ve got time to burn. (This HS festival was great - since I’m a music minor taking all music classes on Wednesday and all but one on Thursday, and since the Festival participants take up all the good rooms for competition and all the teachers for judging, no music class has met since Tuesday. I got all Wednesday off and most of today. W007!)

You know how, when your nose is about ready to explode all over the person in front of you, you hastily turn around and ask to borrow a tissue? What exactly do you mean, “borrow a tissue”? “Hey, let me borrow a tissue; I’ll give it right back. (hoooonk) Thanks, pal. Here ya go.”

Same thing with napkins: “Oops, spilled my homemade mocha all over the table, and those undisolved instant coffee grounds are getting everywhere. Hey, girl/boyfriend, can I borrow your napkin? (slosh slosh) Sick. Well, that didn’t work too well. Thanks anyway.”

Even the wonderful Scantrons (or pieces of notebook paper, if you prefer): “Hey, I completely forgot we had the test today. Can I borrow a scantron? Thanks.” …twenty minutes later… “Hey, I finished the test. Here’s your scantron back.” Obviously this has distinct problems when it comes to the ethics of cheating.

So, moral of the story and today’s lesson to learn - don’t ask to borrow things. Ask to steal instead.

I think I’m up and running now. It took a little while to figure out the way the three-column layout had to work, especially since there’s no CSS code for floating a piece of code in the middle of an area. I won’t go into details - email me if you’re really curious - but it’s done now. I’m happy with the layout, more or less. I’ve learned more about CSS and PHP than I think I would have if I hadn’t started off on this. My only beef is that I still can’t use bloggar, which is a major drawback. But after all the work I put into this, I’m not going to bother changing it now. Besides, it works pretty well for what I’m paying per year (less than $12). Anyway, my old blog is still available here, but it won’t be updated anymore…unless this site goes down, so mark that addy down for future reference. Yes, there will be a quiz.

Today’s topic is the importance of good troubleshooting technique. A few weeks ago, my CD-RW gradually stopped writing CDs. I thought the drive was bad, and so I emailed the tech support people over at Artec to see if they could figure out what was wrong with it. After two emails, they have yet to respond, and it’s been over a month. Bottom line - avoid Artec. Five thumbs down. Anyway, I successfully burned a CD with my Newegg-bought DVD-RW, so I thought I’d give the CD-RW a try again. (I noticed upon installing the DVD-RW that the secondary IDE cable was rather loose on the motherboard. I tightened it.) Wouldn’t you know it, the CD-RW works again! So, I just spent $50 unnecessarily; and for a college student, spending money unnecessarily is never a good thing. Maybe I’ll sell the CD-RW on eBay. Couldn’t hurt…

m0un7y here, checking in from a quiet little suburb of…well, that’s the question, isn’t it? I mean, mounty’s corner (NOT mounty scorner, as some [Scott] have guessed) is more or less permanently based in Greenville, SC, right? But Greenville doesn’t have suburbs. Philly maybe? I might be home…

Those of you who know me know that I like surprising people. Maybe I surprised my parents. Maybe I didn’t, but they’ll be surprised anyway. Oh, enough playing around. I’m checkin in from Allen Park, a quiet little suburb of Detroit, MI. Or am I? Those of you who know me also know I like kidding around. Maybe I’m in Greenville waiting for Hymnology to start, and as soon as this is finished I’ll head over to Grab & Go for breakfast. Or maybe I really am in Detroit. Only those who can see will find out…and the proof’s in the picture which is still on a friend’s camera. Stay tuned…

Well, I’m moving right along with this. I’ve installed the basic layout from blog-city, at least as much of it as I can duplicate. Slowly but surely this CSS and PHP stuff is making more sense. Eventually, maybe I’ll become an expert…right.

Truth be told, the learning curve isn’t nearly as high as I thought it would be. Thanks to a few tutorials, wikis, and such, it’s starting to make sense. I’ve even gone so far as to create my own classes in CSS and apply them to the PHP template when I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted. Oohhh…

My only real complaint so far is the lack of xmlrpc support. For the uniniated, that means I can’t use my favorite tool, w.Bloggar. For starters, this particular build of WordPress lacks the right file to accept input from third-party programs, for whatever reason. Second, w.Bloggar isn’t quite to the point where it interfaces on its own with WordPress. It’s almost enough to make me want to download MovableType…until I saw that there were gobs of files that had to be uploaded to install MT, plus there’s no support for the free version. Let’s hear it for open source software! At least with this, I’ve only got two files to play with. We’ll see how things go. At least it’s running, more or less.

I know…there’s nothing here except a boring old test post. Well, consider this test post two. PHP and CSS isn’t quite as easy as I thought it would be, so bear with me. I’m still playing around with trying to get things looking right. At the moment, things don’t really look like anything. It’s kinda depressing, but I suppose I shouldn’t expect to run my first time out of the crib.