Today was a new experience, one that I hope doesn’t become commonplace. In my travels (down Wade Hampton to the local VIOC and down Pleasantburg to the local Cingular store) I passed upwards of seven gas stations. All were priced at $2.999/gallon and all had lines coming out onto the streets. Really bad. There were reports of some gas stations going dry. Click for more…

I’m doing my part in finding bloggers - Hannah Goodman of Wistful Thinking is now included in the list.

Also classes started today. Bleh.

I’m going to have to start paying Iggy if she keeps pulling in sites. Lydia Schaefer, an incoming freshman (one of many!) has her site up and running, and it’s been added to the list. Jared and Doug take note; my submit program doesn’t seem to be emailing like it was. Got this and one other waiting in the wings, so just a heads up.

Ever wonder what on earth I’m talking about? PHP this and XHTML 1.1 that, with a dash of client-side SQL to boot. My poor mother has to put up with two in the family - if my dad and I start talking numbers she’s quickly lost. For her (and others that may need a quick guide), I would like to lay out a list of things that I frequently talk about. Click for more…

Had a reader stop me and say that he reads (and I assume enjoys) my blog. That’s cool. It’s the little things in life that make me happy.

Also a thanks to Iggy and Anglea (not a typo) for helping me test out my new site additions page. I successfully added their submissions without having to touch phpMyAdmin (except to verify that everything was in there as it should be). New to the list are Andy Anglea’s site (manthano) and Jordan Furbish’s site (A lonely road…). I’m please to announce that my new method is pretty functional, if not necessarily up to web coding standards. But it works, and I’m the only one that can access it. Sites submitted via that page will cause a notification to be sent to BJUBloggers.com, sister site of mounty’s corner, so the site can be included in their blogroll, too.

Thanks to the best ESPN sportscaster ever for that quote in my title. Keith Olberman, wherever you are, we miss you.

A few days ago I was overwhelmed with the sheer electricity on campus as people started to trickle back in. More accurately, the construction projects kicked into overdrive to finish before people started to trickle back in. Now, the people aren’t trickling so much as cascading. Click for more…

Taken from http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/9787/ with a tip of the hat to Il Filosofo.

Mad props, kudos, and all manner of huzzahs to former and soon-to-be BJ faculty member Dan Forrest. He beat John Rutter, arguably the king of high church choral anthems, in the John Ness Beck Foundation’s composition contest with his (IMHO) outstanding arrangement of “The King of Love My Shepherd Is.” This is quite an honor for Mr. Forrest (whom, I might add, was my Basic Aural Skills I teacher my Junior year). This arrangement beat out Rutter’s setting of Psalm 150 [+/-] [150:1]Praise the LORD! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens! Praise him for his mighty deeds; praise him according to his excellent greatness! Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp! Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe! Praise him with sounding cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals! Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! Praise the LORD!, quite a feat. Obviously Mr. Forrest is very talented, and while we first praise the Lord for the skills He’s given him, we also congratulate him for a job well done.

For all concerned:

I have recently implemented a new system for collecting links of new BJ bloggers. With the new crop of freshmen coming in, I expect that this might be put to service within the next month. One can only dream. Anyway, head over to BJ Bloggers to check it out. Click for more…

FOXNews.com - U.S. & World - Robertson: I Didn’t Say ‘Kill’ Chavez

“I didn’t say we should kill him, just assassinate him. Really!”

Other “humorous statements of the decade” -

• State Department spokesman Sean McCormack on Tuesday called Robertson’s remarks “inappropriate.” - No…really? You don’t say! Congrats, McCormak, you’ve won the “understatement of the year” award.
• Rumsfeld said he knew of no consideration ever being given to the idea of assassinating Chavez. “Our department doesn’t do that kind of thing. It’s against the law,” he said. - Not that illegal things are actually off-limits to the government.
• …some foreign-policy experts regard him [Chavez] as little more than a blowhard. - How many dictators of 3rd-world countries aren’t pretentious blowhards?
• …polls suggest he [Chavez] is the favorite [for an upcoming election]. - anyone want to hazard a guess at who runs the polls for Chavez?

Pat Robertson is an idiot. If that statement makes me a democrat, then I’m a democrat. But to go on the air and say what he said indicates a serious lack of connection between the brain and the mouth…and this isn’t the first time his mouth has gotten him in hot water. Honestly he probably does more harm than good to his “constituents.”

courtesy of Esin:

My “ear+ground=info” formula has roped in another BJ blogger, recent graduate Cory Godbey. Visit his site at light night rains. And of course thanks to Gwen for picking this one up.

As always, an up-to-the-picosecond list can be found at http://bjbloggers.mountyscorner.com/.

In aviation news, USAirways and America West Airlines today unveiled their new paint scheme for the soon-to-be-merged fleets. Honestly, for a kit-bash of the two paint jobs, it doesn’t look half bad. Supposedly the lighter scheme is a bone thrown at the ground crews in Phoenix and Las Vegas, since the darker schemes heated up faster in the summer and baked the workers. Whatever.

External picture links:

• http://www.airliners.net/open.file/905636/L/
• http://www.airliners.net/open.file/905600/L/
• http://www.airliners.net/open.file/905570/L/

In other merger news, AWA announces that several jets will be painted in “heritage” colors, the old schemes of Allegheny Airlines, Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA), Piedmont Airlines, and (of course) America West Airlines, which is the latest devouree of US Airways. One has to wonder, though - for an airline going into that much debt, why are they paying over $50 grand per paint job with the extra stuff?

I finally got links from two coworkers who have been added to the big list in the subdomain - Peter Beninate (http://blog.peterbeninate.org/, pronounced “Ben-in-NAH-tee” and not “BEN-in-ate” as it looks) and David Ruse (http://www.davidruse.com/) both work with me at IT and as such have really cool web pages.

Also Graves was telling me I needed to start podcasting my articles. I find this possibility intriguing. I mean, I try to be funny in the text but it doesn’t always come out. If I podcasted, the humor would stand out. Gonna look into that tonight, maybe. Will keep you, my adoring fans (yeah, right) in the loop.

…listen up. Over the years many suggestions have been put foward on how to improve the e-directory system on campus. One of the more recent changes, the addition of majors and minors, was implemented either last semester or the one before. One more that I think may have been suggested is the idea of linkifying the emails on that page. Fortunately, users of Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension don’t have to wait. This user script for Greasemonkey (instructions: assuming Greasemonkey is installed, right-click and select “Install User Script”) linkifies email addresses on any page. For instance, without this extension, mounty@mountyscorner.com and mounty@mountyscorner.com should look different. The first is plain-text, and the second is a mailto: link. But with the Greasemonkey script installed, both should appear the same.

So after moving the past to the present, I remembered a TW article that moved the present to the past. Full circle and all that. Here it is:

This classic TW article was posted September 12, 2003, the first real publication of the TW that school year. The author is Jordan Poss, owner of Jordan M. Poss: Blog, Ltd.

What if we were in the Mdidle Ages right now? Aside from the temperature, what would life on campus be like? Click for more…

Suppose the Protestant Reformation had actually happened when the Internet was around? Click for more…

Remember when you got your first car and you were going on your first extended drive by yourself? Your dad might have stocked your trunk with some vital things that you later found when you were cleaning your car out three years later. These things are things that you should never drive without, things like an extra quart or two of oil, a jug of water, a jug of windshield washer fluid, and jumper cables.

Thankfully a computer is much easier to maintain than a car, provided you have the right tools. But, just like having a set of car tools doesn’t make you a mechanic, so having a set of computer tools doesn’t make you a computer mechanic. In this case, though, it does give you the tools to do basic troubleshooting. Click for more…

mounty’s corner is happy to announce the addition of A Time to Laugh, the blog of Dr. Camille Lewis, wife of my voice teacher Dr. Grant Lewis. Incidentally, their family homepage is located at the http://www.drslewis.org/. Props to Scott for catching it.

Apologies to those of you who have Firefox and Adblock teamed up to remove any graphic that has the word “banner” included in it - my header graphic and a few images on the sidebar weren’t showing up, and I just now found out about it. I personally think that’s too restrictive a combination, but others may not and that’s fine. The images have now been renamed, so you should see them just fine.

I’ve often wondered what Heaven must be like. The idea of a place that has no sense of time is pretty much impossible to grasp by mortal minds. And yet we sing songs about it:

When we all get to Heaven,
    What a day of rejoicing that will be!
When we all see Jesus,
    We’ll sing and shout the victory!

Or one I picked up travelling with the quartet:

We read of a place that’s called Heaven,
    It’s made for the pure and the free.
These truths in God’s Word He has written;
    How beautiful Heaven must be!

How beautiful Heaven must be!
    Sweet home of the happy and free!
Fair haven of rest for the weary!
    How beautiful Heaven must be!

And yet we still don’t have any idea. We have clues. We know we’ll be praising God for eternity. But we also know we’ll fellowship with the other saints. We’ll have mansions, which implies living. Beyond that, though, we’re mostly clueless. (Don’t all you seminarians jump all over me; this isn’t intended to be a researched and exhaustive list of the activities of the hereafter. It’s just a list off the top of my head.) However, I have to say that, when it comes to what a recently-arrived citizen must feel like, this comic struck me as a good blend of curiosity and comedic timing. Now that school’s starting up, I’m in “go to all the orientation meetings you can fit in” mode. I wonder if Heaven will have an orientation meeting…

mounty’s corner is pleased to announce that Austin Matzko, who does a lot of on-the-side work for Sharper Iron, has his own blog at Il Filosofo, which (as you should already know) is Italian for “The Filosofo.”

I should also mention one post on his site that’s absolutely hilarious. Seems the breakdown between “Soda” and “Pop” as the generic name for carbonated liquified candy-in-a-can follows both political and geographic boundaries. This national map shows a color-coded list of respondants to a “pop vs. soda vs. other” survey done a few years ago, broken down by county. Red states (generally Republican) tend to favor “Coke,” while the majority of Blue State Democrats stick to “pop.” The Northeast Corridor as far west as the Appalachian Valley prefer the (correct) term “soda,” as does southern Florida (which is no surprise, considering everyone in southern Florida is originally from the NE), as does California. Virginia’s just strange, because they have no standardized name. Sorry…