Should I just give the e-book away? I wanted to make sure that my printer, who did all the formatting, got paid for his time, but sales are so low, I don’t think it matters. The book mostly appeals to a niche market within a niche market, so I wouldn’t be losing anything by giving it away.
Archive for December, 2009
Give It Away Now
Thursday, December 31st, 2009Imported Haloscan Comments
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009Thanks to Bethyada of True Paradigm and Justin of justinsomnia.org, I was able to import all my Haloscan comments into Wordpress. Thanks, guys!
Heel
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009The only thing worse than being hurt by a good friend is hurting a good friend back.
The Freedom of the Law of the spirit
Monday, December 28th, 2009Defying gravity feels pretty free, too.
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Until you hit the ground.
More Database Woes
Sunday, December 27th, 2009Somehow in the course of upgrading and then restoring my Wordpress database, the Marriage category was dropped and all of its blog posts were added to the History category. I don’t know if I’ll get around to fixing all of them. Just so you know…
Wordpress Comments
Sunday, December 27th, 2009The native Wordpress commenting system is back online for now on a trial basis. I asked js-kit to make me pay to keep Haloscan, but they declined. Then I tried to upgrade to Echo, but they said my blog didn’t have Haloscan installed. Whatever. I didn’t like Wordpress’ comment system when I tried it years ago, but maybe it works better now. We’ll see, eh?
(“Eh?” What is that? You Canadians must be rubbing off on me.)
Anyway, I exported my Haloscan comments to an xml file, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to import them into another system. Too bad. We had a couple of good conversations over the last couple of months.
If you had an account on this site before, it is still there, but you shouldn’t need an account to post.
Near Disaster
Sunday, December 27th, 2009I upgraded php, Perl, MySQL, Wordpress, and other applications on my server and discovered that the upgrades had completely wiped out all my SQL databases. No blog. Sweet mother of pearl.
Fortunately, I had backed everything up just before the upgrade.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the restore to work.
As you can see, I did finally get everything working again with the help of the excellent tech support people at WestHost. For a while I thought I was going to have to put everything back in manually. I still have some serious cleanup and repairs to do, but it’s not nearly as bad as it could have been.
Prohibited Degrees of Kinship
Saturday, December 26th, 2009There are numerous methods of charting degrees of consanguinity, so I thought I should post something about my own. Especially since I mentioned in my book that God prohibits marriage to anyone closer than the fourth degree. Ancestors and descendants, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and siblings are all out of bounds. First cousins are acceptable. At least to God. You might feel differently. Don’t use this chart for legal purposes, of course. Many jurisdictions define the degrees differently.
Marriage in the Bible
Vayigash 5770 – Two Sons, Two Kingdoms
Friday, December 25th, 2009Genesis 44:27-28 And your servant my father said to us, You know that my wife bore me two sons. (28) And the one went out from me, and I said, Surely he is torn in pieces. And I never saw him since. (29) And if you take this one also from me, and mischief befall him, you shall bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave.
I frequently wonder if Jacob knew the details of the future history of his sons. Although he certainly only meant Joseph and Benjamin here, his words and the story that followed prophesied of events centuries away.
In the 8th century BC, the Assyrian armies captured the northern kingdom of Israel and scattered her inhabitants across the Ancient Near East. Many of the old prophets referred to the northern kingdom as Ephraim, the son of Joseph. Ephraim didn’t stop in Persia but continued across the whole globe. In their long diaspora they have forgotten their identity and have become lo ami.
Three hundred years later, Judah was invaded and scattered by Babylon. When the two kingdoms split during the reign of Rehoboam, Benjamin became part of the southern kingdom known as Judah. Remember that Paul was of the tribe of Benjamin. Unlike Ephraim, Judah never forgot their identity. They have remained a relatively distinct people to this day.
This is the explanation of the prophecy:
Ephraim is Jacob’s first son, Joseph. He was taken away, and, to all appearances was destroyed forever. Judah, including the tribe of Benjamin, is Jacob’s second son. He was also taken away but was never in any real danger of being annihilated. Both of Jacob’s sons were restored to him, and both of the houses of Israel will also be restored to their Heavenly Father. The house of Judah is returning to the Land en masse while the house of Israel is awakening to their identity and bringing much of the rest of the world with them. The first stage of Hosea’s words concerning Israel was fulfilled millennia ago (Hosea 1:9). The second stage is coming to pass right now (Hosea 1:10), and the third stage, the reunification of the entire nation under the singular banner of the Messiah (Hosea 1:11), cannot be far behind!
Google Is Watching out for You
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” -Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. (The Register, Dec 7, 2009.)
In case you need a review of why Schmidt’s opinion matters, see my previous blog post about Google. Everybody thinks everybody else is doing something they shouldn’t. Privacy is essential to freedom.