Of Black, White and Gray’s. April 22, 2008

I was remembering the other day of the early days of Internet Chat, you know, when it was easy to get a 7 digit ICQ number. I was a High Schooler and a newly born again Christian with a thirst for debate. Back in those days all chat clients had a button to press to find a random person to chat with. When it was 2:00 AM and all my friends were in bed it provided some entertainment.

I really only remember one of the conversations I had with a random person. It was a random middle aged guy from Australia. We got in to talking about life, religion, and growing older. I was of the opinion that I was right, Jesus was awesome, this was good, that was bad, etc. He was of the opinion that, well… I was just a kid and I’d see that as I grew older my vision would change. All the things I saw as black and white (and there were many things I had strong right/wrong opinions on) would become multiple shades of gray. The world is just too complicated to be black and white.

I wish I still had those chat logs. I remember very assertively stating that he was wrong and if anything I’d just discover more details about what was right and what was wrong. If anything the black/white would become sharper, not duller.

So here I am today, with a vision full of multiple shades of gray. Who knew the random ICQ Australian stranger was right? I’m not going to be so foolish again and say this is who I am and who I will be for the rest of my life, and I can’t believe I was ever OK with thinking that I had it all figured out. How could anyone have it all figured out?

When it comes to morals/religion/whatnot… I pretty much go by this logic (although, I don’t expect it to hold true 100%):

1. Does it make you happy?
   1. No? Stop doing it
   2. Yes? Continue
2. Does it hurt anyone or anything else directly or indirectly?
   1. Yes? You should in most circumstances stop doing it then.
   2. No? Continue
3. Does it hurt you?
   1. Permanently? Stop doing it.
   2. Temporarily? Really gotta make a judgment call here to stop or continue yourself.
4. Hey, you found something good, you can most likely go ahead and do it.

For me, being a Christian violated this simple logic. I had an amazing friend my last couple years of college. He was one of the kindest, funniest and smart guys I’ve ever known. He was a Christian too, and he was gay. We developed a strong friendship and I was one of the very few Christians he came out to. I think it was good for him to have me to talk to, I think it ate at him inside.

I did a lot of reading and studying on the subject of gays and what the Bible says about it all. The conclusion I came to was that it was wrong. It’s a sin and you should not do it. But after knowing my friend so well and what he felt and goes through daily… I didn’t understand. How can you not do something that you are? It makes no sense. But I believed every word of the Bible and it had to be the truth.

One night he asked me.. he told me that there was a guy in his life he was crazy about. And there was a girl in his life that liked him. He had a choice he could make. Happiness or “the right thing”. I told him that it was not OK to be with a guy. I told him to try a relationship with the girl. I believed I was doing what was right. Inside me I felt like I was doing the most wrong. Especially the look on his face when his own best friend told him to deny his own happiness.

He did not choose the girl. And we didn’t really talk about those things much any more after that. He knew I lost my faith years later. As far as I know he was a strong Christian till the day he died in 2002. I still wish I could apologize, tell him I was an idiot. I know that he didn’t need me to, but I think I needed me to.

So, the meanest, worst, most wrong thing I have ever done, I did because it’s what God wanted me to do. I did it because I believed the world was black and white, there were very little gray areas.

My kid is cuter than yours.

I know, I just posted pictures of the kids. But I had to post these too. Kincaid, who’s 4, took Jillian outside yesterday because he felt he needed his picture taken. Jillian let him do whatever he wanted and got some great “caid” moments.  Go here to see the full set.

Spring Time in Boulder April 20, 2008

We had quite a nice weekend here in Colorado. We went out to explore some more of Pearl Street in Boulder. Here’s some pics of the kids being cute, oh and flowers.

phpitter 0.10 beta

Just packaged up a version 0.10 beta of phpitter.  It’s really looking prettier.  And now has a gtk notify plugin that looks much fancier than the libnotify plugin I had going.

It also does spell checking if you compiled php-gtk with –with-spell.  And I’ve got some good timeouts set for pulling the timeline so the UI doesn’t go all unresponsive when twitter is down.

Here’s a screenshot:

Of God, love, hate, and apparently Oprah April 15, 2008

Last night I stumbled upon a post on this dear-god website and found the conversation interesting.

The gist of the post is that everything in the world is going so wrong so where in the world is God? It’s very obviously talking to the Christian God, even though it is addressed to Buddha and even Oprah. I know all the typical Christian responses to her questions/complaints, since I was a Christian and even went to a tiny Christian college for 3 years of my life. It’s not so much her complaints that I found interesting, but the responses.

All the Christians are responding with the same basic response: “that’s not God’s fault, that’s sin’s fault. We sin because of free will. Free will is a good thing. God is love, not hate.” Here’s one quote in particular: ‘god’s will is never hatred. in fact the scriptures say that “god is love”.’

It’s that part that caught me: ‘god’s will is NEVER hatred.’ And I think that has a lot to do with the whole losing faith, becoming agnostic, drifting closer and closer every day to atheist. The statement is clearly false. The Old Testament in particular is pretty damning evidence that God’s will does involve hatred.

Instead of looking for examples, I googled some. Now I know, this website is clearly biased and full of crazy anti-christian loonyness, but just use it for the scripture references. Please again, just use it for the references to scripture and what God did in that scripture. Warnings over, here’s the link.

Anyway… those are my late night thoughts while I waited for my oven to finish self-cleaning so I could sleep without worrying about the apartment burning down. As random and jumbled as they may be, my point last night was that God is not just love. God is pretty damn mean and cruel at times and the Bible has plenty of examples of him being mean and cruel.

phpitter beta release.

Well, I switched from GtkTextView’s to GtkHTML’s for the tweets and popup. This way it’ll handle hyperlinks for me. I was getting close to figuring out how to figure out which word someone clicked on in a GtkTextView, but this was way easier.

Since now hyper linking works, sending updates works, the reply/retweet/direct buttons work, and the libnotify plugin works… I’ve stuck it out on code.google.

Check out the project and download it to give it a try.

phpitter shapping up April 14, 2008

Last night I hacked at it some more. Here’s what it looks like now:

Ok, now see that message from @jimctc that says “@micah pic from the breeder. she arrives first weekend in may.” Check out what happens if I hover over @jimctc’s avatar for that message:

Also, here’s what the simpleLibNotifyNotice plugin does (note, this requires libnotify and the cmd line tool notify-send):

I really need to get hyperlinks working in GtkTextViews… but that scares me.

I don’t get along well with CSS, will try to get the blog formatting to work right…

More fun with php-gtk. April 13, 2008

Can’t stop fooling with this.  GTK is a funny funny system.  You have to know all the tricks to get things to layout right and capture the right events.  Wish it was more intuitive.

This new cut of phpitter is much cooler.  It looks better, updates the timeline every so often, saves/loads timeline data, will keep a history of 40 tweets deep (configurable actually), and has a couple of plugin hooks.

There are two plugins with it to show how the plugin hooks can work.  One will turn the tweet entry text red if you go over 140 characters.  The other is a sample notification plugin.  All it does is output to the cmd line who tweeted what to you.  Would be really easy to hook it in to a gtk window pop up, or the libnotify system.

Here’s the code.  And the screenshot:

php + gtk + twitter April 12, 2008

So… yeah. This was a fun Saturday morning. I wrote a gtk twitter client in php. Well… I wrote a proof of concept gtk twitter client in php.

The code is ugly and I’m sure has tons of issues, but it pulls your timeline and allows you to send updates. Check out the horrid screenshot, and here’s the rough code..