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.
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.
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.
We participated in Earth Hour last night here in Denver. The kids (Janelle is 5 and Kincaid turned 4 yesterday) were very excited about it, way more than I expected them to be. It was amazing the quiet and that darkness that first hit our apartment after I shutdown all computers, t.v.’s, fans and lights.
We didn’t think ahead and get candles or flashlights.
Normally I shut all the lights out in the apartment and it’s not big deal… but I never realized how much light even an idle T.V., and the leds on the front a computer give off. So we made our way through our apartment using my blackberry as a flashlight. It was an amazing Spring day here so we went outside for a walk. My kids immediately asked several questions:
Where’s everyone else?
I guess they thought of it like Halloween. They expected everyone to stop their electronic lives around us and enjoy the night.
Why does everyone have their lights and t.v.’s on?
This was a harder one to answer. It seems that here in Denver, and many other places in America, the word of Earth Hour didn’t really spread. We had fun with it though, walked down to the courtyard of our complex and the kids ran around in the dark in a huge field. After about 30 minutes we got cold and headed back to the dark apartment. There we searched for jammies with my blackberry flashlight again, then we read Horton Hears a Who by the light of the phone. In the end we tucked the kids in just before the hour was over. They really seemed to like it, almost as much as a holiday.
I wondered what other experiences people had with Earth Hour and my wife found this great photo set. I was especially amazed at the pic of the baby in the NICU.
Anyway… I hope to see more American cities participate next year. It was a nice hour to get away from the Internets and the constant hum of electronics. And those pictures of major cities going dark are just surreal.
There was no hidden camera as far as I could tell. Normally when something like this happens you expect some host of a show to jump out from behind a bush and say some cheesy catch line. Well.. I don’t know, maybe “normally” is the wrong word, since that has never actually happened to me.
As of yesterday I’ve been in Denver for 5 months. It seems like it’s only been a week… Getting here, from Ann Arbor Michigan, was by far the most stressful period of my life.
I had been working for Careersite since 2005 or so… maybe it was 2004. I got quite attached to the infrastructure we built for running the re-write of the old perl code to the Java based version. It was the first Sys Admin position I had that actually had to be concerned about high volume traffic and uptime for a website. I learned a ton from the smart people there, especially my boss Bruce Kohler. While everything was going fine and dandy, we read in the news that a massive number of newspapers signed a deal with Yahoo HotJobs. And sure enough, that meant our customers.
It’s true, I’m weak. I gave in to peer pressure and I have started a blog.
Hopefully it’ll contain posts that are at least half as popular as the posts I’ve contributed to my company’s blog.
Here’s some of my posts that got some great feedback, including one that got about 40,000 unique views from the digg front page:
I hope to keep the same kind of theme to my posts here, plus a little more personal blogging since this isn’t a company blog. Plus I’ll have some help from some friends who’d like to contribute.
