The Naked Green

I have not died, nor have I forgotten to bestow upon some poor unsuspecting soul the glorious Green Cite award.

We have come to the paragraph where I ramble on about random things to make it look like it has content and to bother the reader. Hey, it’s not like you can’t skip these sentences if you’re in that much of a hurry to find out the winner, but you’ll never know what you may have missed. Actually, if you’ve read up to this point, you haven’t missed much. So, with no effort at transition, the winner: Green Dezire “the personal blog of Andy Kettle, a web designer and developer from Worcester in the UK”! His love of green extends all the way into his eyes! With all the web design I’ve been involved in, I figured I would pick on a colleague. Congratulations on winning the award you never knew you wanted, Andy!

Brought to you by Mr. Green. All contestants will receive “really cool points” just for qualifying. Stay tuned for more wonderful greenery right here on The Naked Green.

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at SimpleBits about typing. Hunt and peck vs. ten finger and then there’s the hybrids. I don’t feel so bad after seeing so many people that don’t type “properly”.

Why is that so many people seem intent on putting God in our Love Box: God is Love, therefore He behaves in a certain predictable manner based on my definition of love. Now don’t think I’m going esoteric and relativistic on you, because that is what many are doing who are using this model. The Love Box seems to constantly be used to justify some sin: “God just wants me to be happy (because He loves me), so I can cheat on my wife”, “God is Love so He wouldn’t judge me for [enter sin here].” What makes us think that a loving God cannot have moral absolutes? Like the highway engineer who tells his three year old, “I love you, so I’m going to let you follow your curious nature and walk out onto the highway because hey, you were made that way.” No, God designed us and the world we live in with certain rules (albeit, rules twisted by sin) and in love he says, “No, that’s not the way it works and I’m going to discipline you to bring you into line with my will for you.”

My wife made a brilliant point last night. I had said that “I don’t know how to love her” and she was hurt by that and confronted me. She said, “What makes you think you have to understand love to give it?”. She told me that I do indeed love her and she can feel it. [I love her for her insight and passionate love.] I thought I had a good understanding of love before I was married, but I have learned that that is so much more. Now it’s not as easy to “do” love or to quantify and specify it, but that doesn’t negate the fact that love exists. I don’t understand love completely and I’ll go out on a limb by revealing my opinion that most do not. What makes us think then, that we can put God in a box we can’t even define? God IS Love…the definition of it. We don’t get to tell Him how he should behave.

I started thinking about this, in conjunction with Jamie’s thoughts after running across Ben’s blog, ScatteredWords.com He is “Turning away from homosexuality and toward God.” He has received plenty of flak which he discusses. Many of the arguments used rely on The Love Box, in my opinion.

Keep up the good fight, Ben!

Venomous Kate has struck again with this bit of news on lights:

No time to put up your own holiday lights this year? Never fear. You can borrow Alek Komarnitsky’s between the hours of 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. (Mountain time). All you need is a computer and a browser, and then you’re in control of his lights. –more–

The Komarnitskys, called “the Griswolds of our neighborhood” are a family that loves lights. At least Alek does, and he has hooked up his 17,000 lights to a Linux box for the world to control (literally). ” This month alone, more than 1.3 million Internet browsers…have visited the site.” Yesterday, the site received 369,023 requests! - Gleaned from the Yahoo News story: Interactive Christmas Lights an online hit and Alek’s Christmas Lights Webcam page.

This is great and I will have to try it out. It reminds me of sitting in front of someone’s house with my parents and brothers a couple years ago. I’m not the type that likes Christmas lights much, but I can enjoy them when they are tastefully done. Unfortunately, most don’t have a sense of taste, or balance apparently. This house was different: There were tons of lights, but not all on at once. They all faded on and off, making a wonderful show. We ooed and ahhed as the lights around the roof faded from one color to another and gasped as a deer appeared on the front lawn. We must have spent an hour just watching and I don’t remember a repeat in the pattern. I think it must have been controlled by a computer, but not thousands of internet users (it would have been too chaotic). The Komarnitskys’ house is off the hook and I look forward to adding to the chaos!

The Komarnitskys’ site also has links to other wacky stuff with lights like the Texan DriveMeInsane.com where you can mess with a table full of lights, turning them on or off. There was also La Bastille, that turned Brown’s fourteen-story Sciences Library in a gigantic Tetris game or Project Blikenlights in Germany.

It’s nice to have your own cozy spot on the WWWeb to sit and pontificate or curl up for a nice read. Too bad I can’t get in there.

I’m going to crawl under my desk now to try and sleep off all that Mag Chloride.

I am very interested in this Ukrainian election and protest. It is probably due to wife and I recently returning from doing our DTS, which spent one month in Russia. I loved it there even though it was a difficult and oppressive environment. The Russian people have big hearts and I now have a heart for them.

I have been following reports primarily from Jennifer’s Blog who is and American living and teaching in Western Ukraine. Just today, I followed a link from The Politburo Diktat to The Orange Revolution, an article by Time Magazine.

I have never had much use for news, but this news has brought my usually entrenched head out of the sand as far as political affairs. I have not read enough to even make a semi-intelligent comment, but wanted to state my interest in the matter.

To follow this interest, I have looked up a few blogs from Ukraine in English:

• Discoshaman and his wife, TulipGirl live in Kiev.
• Veronica’s blog is a good place for information
• Orange Ukraine has news from the Yushchenko camp.
• “Maidan” – An Internet Hub for Civil Resistance to Authoritarianism in Ukraine

I’m sure there are many more good blogs and websites, but my poor little head is hurting from all this news. After quite a while of searching, I can’t find a blog in support of Yanukovych. So much for being balanced. If you know of any other good links (preferably blogs from Ukrainians), put them in a comment.

I got my first SPAM comment (in triplicate) the other day! Isn’t that important? Isn’t that some sort of milestone for a blog? Thanks to WordPress, they didn’t get posted but are awaiting my approval. I guess that could get annoying too, but it’s not too hard to delete the lot of SPAM comments in one fell swoop and I don’t have to worry about doing it quickly because they don’t appear on my site. I may just let this one slide though (only one copy), because hey, it IS a milestone of some sort.

Now, thanks to Electric Kate, I know how to fight back with Lycos’ SPAM attacking screensaver.

Last night I read 2 Kings chapter 2 and was reminded of one fact I learned in DTS. One of our leaders, Sean pointed out that Elijah was not taken up in a fiery chariot as most people think. Read it for yourself:

“It happened, as they still went on, and talked, that behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, which parted them both apart; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.”
-2 Kings 2.11 [WEB]

It’s interesting how we have a certain idea of what the Bible says and even read a passage several times and not realize what it’s saying. There are other things like that as well. It reminds me that I would like to do an SBS (YWAM’s School of Biblical Studies) some time.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary
and those who don’t.

I don’t remember where I originally saw this, but I picked it up just now from here.