The Naked Green

I was driving home from my Mom’s birthday party yesterday afternoon when all of a sudden, my head went BOOM! My eyes opened to watch my body quickly direct the car back onto the road and off the large median. I had some sort of revelatory blankness up there that, coupled with the painful shock, gave me an adrenaline pumping fear and alertness. Alert to the fact that the other cars around were avoiding me. Alert to the fact that I came to a grinding halt at the yellow light just ahead. Miraculously, I instilled no damage on the car, nor did I damage any of the nice trees on the high median which, I assure you, was not made for driving on. I’m glad that Jamie is safe in Michigan right now and I thank Jesus for protecting me (as I’m sure he did)!

It wasn’t really my fault. It was the car that actually went up there. I wasn’t directing it at all as my brain apparently either shut down or went somewhere else. I guess twelve hours of snow plowing with no sleep will do that to you. Somehow I safely made it through the last 25 minutes of the drive, surviving by fear and a constant muttering to myself about whatever I saw and especially, where I was.

Returning home, I promptly got undressed and into bed for a seven hour nap. The cat decided that was enough before eating was essential, so I got up. After eating some breakfast (or something) and feeding the cat, I read for a bit and snuggled in for my real seven hours of sleep. It was the cat that woke me up again, which was a good thing for once because I had my alarm set for Saturday’s wake up time. Not that it mattered much as the company I work at is on a two hour delay.

Thinking about the experience again this morning, I realized that many of us are like that too. We’re cruising down the road with no driver. God wants to come in and take the wheel to make sure we’re not flying around doing damage to ourselves and others. He wants to drive in style, not a piece of junk, so He plans a work of renewal and restoration that will make us the envy of that new Mercedes. Who is your owner and driver? Are you going the right way, but keep running into things, knowing that when the turn at the bottom of the hill comes, you’ll be headed for destruction? I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but Jesus wants to be the driver in your life. He wants you to end up parked in His beautiful mansion. He even goes way beyond this allegory, desiring a relationship with you! Don’t wait for a BOOM to wake you up!

I’ve really been missing Jamie lately. It’s only been three days since I saw her, but it’s the longest time we’ve been apart since we were married. The last time was for one night when I went camping with the guys. I’m glad she’s having a good time with family, but I’ll be happy when she’s snuggled in bed with me. = )

Thankfully, I ran across The Happy Husband and read some of his joyful and humorous posts. I was reminded again, with cheery nostalgia, how great Jamie is and how much I love her! Thanks to Eric Siegmund for the link!

Jessica, my sister also has a brand new blog, JustIcca.com! She just wrote her first post yesterday to keep up with her big sister. It looks like they both had quite the adventure geocaching in the Michigan snow. Not only is she my sister (in-law), but she also writes a great story!

Have fun writing and keep the stories coming The Icc!

My beautiful wife, Jamie is up and blogging at QueenGreen.com! She just made her first blog post ever and I’m so proud!

I’m excited to see her blogging because she is a good writer, has a lot of wisdom and great thoughts on all kinds of things. Now you don’t have to read her inspirational ideas second hand! That’s right, she’s my inspiration and the queen of my heart. Watch her words closely, but remember, she’s mine!

Love to the wife!

Right on the heels of Ben Goodger’s announcement, comes another from the Mozilla community. Darin posts a very short and cryptic message which amounts to the same thing as Ben’s: ‘Oh yeah, I’m working for Google (and Mozilla) too!’

If that’s not enough, Google just announced their beta Google Video Search. Contrary to the name, it’s actually to search recent television programs. I haven’t tried it yet, nor am I really interested in searching T.V. content, but it seems to be a good idea. Google: Good ideas, scary implications!

This news first noticed at: Glazblog and The Fire Ant Gazette.

Well, I just spent a couple hours (almost exactly two) working on a new design for this blog. It looks much better than my old design, but I’m still not completely happy with it.

I left index.php alone and am working off a highly modified default CSS template. I also threw in some ideas from an Alex King CSS template, Deviant. It’s riddled with overflow: hidden, overflow: auto and other things I don’t quite understand just to make it work right. The problem is, all that overflow stuff makes my max-width do really strange things, so I’m stuck with the “horizontal scrollbar of doom” for large text sizes. I don’t like complexity in code, especially when I don’t understand it!

I do like the look and feel better, though and this will hold me over until I have time and know what I’m doing. Now, on to much bigger things, like implementing a CMS and doing a redesign of our website.

Update 2004.01.27: In all the excitement, I forgot to mention where I got the picture. I downloaded it from stock.xchng along with several other great pictures. It was taken by jefras a.k.a Joao Estevao A. de Freitas with a Nikon D70. Thanks, Joao!

Update 2004.01.27 1.48pm: Well, I found a weird bug with all those overflow statements. When I would make the text bigger and scroll down the page, at a certain point it would freak out and just start looping one small section. Then I noticed that December’s archive page was long enough to have the same problem with the regular sized text. That’s when I knew overflow had to go. I think the only thing it was doing was keeping the menu bar exactly right aligned to the header. Sacrificing that is no problem if it will mean people can actually read my posts.

Discoshaman tipped me off to a great English translation of Yushchenko’s speech. AussieGirl, at Ultima Thule has done some great translation work to bring us Yushchenko’s Inaugural Address and includes a translator’s note in a different post.

The speech is certainly quite moving! I mean I actually had tingles and stirrings in my heart! How often does that happen? Take some time to read this historical and monumental speech.

It looks like it’s finally official…Victor Yushchenko was just inaugurated as president of Ukraine! All I have to say is, it’s about time! The Ukrainian people have spoken and they enforced their decision. One more point goes to democracy.

For pictures, celebration and news, I’ll refer you again to the bloggers I’ve been following:

• Le Sabot Post-Moderne
• Orange Ukraine
• TulipGirl

This is an interesting development, though I can’t say I’m surprised. Ben Goodger, the Lead Engineer of the Firefox project for the Mozilla Foundation now gets his paycheck from Google. According to his weblog, his role will remain “largely unchanged”. Here is what he says:

I will continue doing much the same work as I have described above - with the new goal of successful 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0 releases. I remain devoted full-time to the advancement of Firefox, the Mozilla platform and web browsing in general. I’m sure you have many questions. While I will be spending more time at Google, I will work out of the Mozilla Foundation offices regularly as the need arises. For all questions regarding Google, I ask that you contact Google directly, rather than myself.
–more–

This is an interesting and, admittedly, a smart move for Google. I, along with others, wonder what they have up their sleeve. It’s nice that Ben will get what’s probably a larger paycheck and have funds freed up for the Mozilla Foundation to continue on with their excellent open source software. I’m sure that Google has plans much bigger than helping out Mozilla, though. This brings back rumors of Gbrowser and as much as I like and use Google’s products, I must say I’m getting a little nervous. They apparently have plans to take over the world (or at least the internet) and their secrecy about everything always brings up those dark questions. It will certainly be interesting to see what happens in the future as Google sees it.

Of course, maybe this all has to do with Goodger’s name. I’m sure some good conspiracy theories could be formed, at any rate.

Noticed at MozillaZine: Ben Goodger Going to Google.

That’s right folks, more information on browsers…but wait! This is not merely a comparison table with data most of us can’t pronounce much less understand. This is not a rant on security or a breakdown of rendering speed. This is the big dog, IE and the new scrappy competitor, Firefox battling in the ring of reality.

BBspot has the browser fight coverage and announces the winner of this mighty Browser Showdown. The winner who received the famed Technical Award of Excellence!

Noticed at MozillaZine.