You can still buy the hardcopy of A Commentary on Marriage in the Bible, volume 1: the Torah at Amazon (see the link to the right), but now you can get a full pdf file right here.
Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category
Free eBook
Thursday, January 7th, 2010Publishing Private Thoughts
Friday, January 1st, 2010Everything I write is inspired somehow by my real life. I imagine that’s true for all writers. Some things I’ve written–some of the most profound things–were directly inspired by real life events, by meat space interactions with real people. I realized a long time ago that most people don’t appreciate their dirty laundry being aired in public, so then I tried to couch those thoughts in ambiguous and impersonal terms, to remove them a step or two from real life. I thought I was doing good by hiding names and specific details.
That wasn’t enough.
I just removed forty-six posts from my blog. Not because they weren’t valuable. Many of them contained profound and important truths, but I can’t say the things I need to say and still maintain good relationships with the people around me. I don’t know how to reconcile the two right now, so the world will just have to survive with a hobbled version of my personal truth.
Imported 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.
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.
Thank You, Veterans
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009To those of you who have been willing to put yourselves in mortal danger for the rest of us, Thank You!
To everyone else: Tomorrow is not the day for patriotic disclaimers. Don’t say, “Thank you, but…” Don’t say, “Serving in the military would be ok if only…” Just say thank you. Show sincere appreciation, and leave it at that. Resume your political commentary on Thursday.
World’s Largest Golden Orb Weaver Spider
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009A researcher says that he has identified the largest known golden orb weaver spider in the world. It’s an impressive looking beast with a body length over 1.5″ and leg-span over 5″.
I have read several articles claiming it’s orb can be more than a meter wide and that it is also the largest web-making spider in the world. I think what they actually mean is that it is the largest web-making species of Nephila in the world. I have seen much bigger orb webs made by much bigger spiders, such as Japan’s onigumo (Araneus). Their leg-spans might be shorter than Nephila komaci, but I have seen them with bodies well over 2″ long (I’d say over 3″ long, but that could be a case of inflated memory!) and orbs more than 5′ across. I saw one eating a dragon fly while suspended midway between two electric poles more than 40′ apart.
Once, an onigumo almost landed on my head when I opened my back door. It gives me the willies just thinking about it. I think that onigumo means demon spider in Japanese. It’s an appropriate name.
Update July 18, 2010: I saw several golden orb weavers in Nail’s Creek State Park in Texas that had bodies over 2″ long, but the leg-span still wasn’t as wide as Nephila komaci’s.
Also, check out the photos of enormous communal webs in the same park.
See Wired and Spiegel Online.
[Update: Disabling comments on this article because of the number of spam-bots it attracts.]
Parents Know
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009They might get some of the details wrong, but when it comes to your essential character, your parents will always know you better than you will ever know yourself.
Prayer Request
Monday, October 12th, 2009Life after the big move has been tough. I gave up a well-paying job to follow God’s leading and have been scrambling for survival since January. If it were not for some good friends I would not have made it past February. Even so, I have been spinning my wheels in several directions and getting nowhere. In the words of one of those good friends, “[It is] time to clarify values, assign priorities, and let go of subordinate desires.”