Consciousness – Page 31

Should we forget the forgetful?

Another day, another thought provoking iMonk post.

I don’t know if I mentioned this at the time… but during our Westminster Confession/doctrine classes at church a while back (so long ago I don’t remember the exact chapter we were discussing) I asked a question about whether non-Christian Alzheimer’s patients can be evangelised.

There’s a whole theology of disability that’s a little bit anemic. The post I’m referring to by iMonk is a question about how the Baptist Church handles the baptism of people with mental disabilities. It’s profound. Read it.

Then tell me what your thoughts are on the issue…

Also, if you’re an atheist and you want to hijack this post for your own snide purposes – I’m going to delete the comments. Feel free to comment constructively, but we’re working on the assumption that evangelism is a good thing and not a form of brainwashing or abuse.

October 2, 2009

While my uke gently weeps

So, I’m sitting at home, watching Spicks and Specks, writing our work Annual Report… and this awesome ukulele player named Jake Shimabukuro did a segment. I looked him up on YouTube. Here he is in a duet with Tommy Emmanuel. It’s times like this I wished I kept at the ukulele lessons… and only times like this…

PS – I did, briefly, learn the ukulele as a child. Our church didn’t have tambourines, we had a ukulele group…

October 2, 2009

Status update

I’ve been sick all week with something a bit gastro like. I won’t overshare. This is more to explain the number of posts you’ll be getting today – there’s not much else to do when you’re sitting on the couch. I tried going back to work yesterday, lets just say lunch didn’t work out so well.

The turtles are copping a little bit of the blame because my symptoms look a bit like Salmonella, and turtles are known to carry that bacteria.

I’m thankful that it’s school holidays so Robyn is here to keep me company.

I feel pretty ok, except when:

a) I stand up.
b) I eat.
c) I haven’t taken any anti nausea medication.

That is all.

October 2, 2009

Fandom Facts

I created the St Eutychus fan page on Facebook yesterday and became the number one fan. Literally. I was first. Now there are eight. That’s an 800% increase.

Three in eight fans share my surname.

One in eight fans is named Eutychus.

Currently 25% of my fans are named something piratey (one is named Roger, the other has the surname Davey)

Become a statistic.

It has useful benefits. If I get over 100 fans I can claim Facebook/st-eutychus. You can post links there for me to blog here, and if you do, you’ll win a nice, intangible prize…

October 2, 2009

Five essential skills for being a better husband

This is perilous territory, but I’m running out of areas to hand out my wisdom… But two years in I know everything there could possibly be to know… except the parenting stuff… I am being sarcastic by the way…

Learn to say sorry, and mean it.
Figure out the subtle non-nonverbal communication – when your wife says something and means another, or doesn’t say something in an ominous way.
Learn to cook dinner (and to clean up).
Learn your wife’s “love language” it sounds dumb, but this was a pretty helpful book.
Learn that when your wife comes to you with a problem she doesn’t want an immediate solution, but rather someone who’ll listen.

October 1, 2009

Five essential skills for trainee geeks

I’m not sure if I’m a fully fledged geek or not… but here are five areas I think are essentials…

Learn to put together wires and boxes (like an amp, TV etc) – particularly learn about cable varieties and all the terminology involved in audio and visual stuff.
Learn to put together a computer – learn what the parts do from the CPU to the fans, and everything in between.
Develop an obsession – past the point of normality – for me it’s coffee. Once that obsession has gone past normal points pick something new.
Learn as many subsets of jargon (or niche languages) as possible, particularly acronyms.
Get a multitool, like a leatherman.

October 1, 2009

Five essential skills for men

As a follow up to my last post – here are five skills that are almost essential for successful manliness…

Learn to BBQ – especially steak.
Learn to kill bugs/mice/pests.
Learn to buy flowers without thinking it’s a waste of money.
Learn to read manuals.
Learn to cook breakfast.

Again, feel free to share your own “skillz” in the comments…

October 1, 2009

Broadening your culinary horizons

I haven’t had fast food from a major chain for more than three months. I stopped on July 1. It’s a pretty big effort because I love fast food. Especially KFC.

I was just reading an article about “secret menu items” that I’d kept in the blogging queue for a couple of months. I just hadn’t got around to posting it yet.

But the point of this post is to share with you my infinite fast food wisdom… some of you may know this already, but other people I’ve spoken to don’t…

You can literally create whatever you want at Maccas from the available menu items – and they’ll make it for you.

Some of my favourites included the Chicken Patty Big Mac, the Flake Shake with chocolate sundae sauce, double bacon cheeseburgers (before they were put back on the menu), and the legendary “pounder”… used in Christian bucks parties around the country.

If you really want to broaden your fast food horizons though – check out the Fancy Fast Food website I posted about a while back.

October 1, 2009

iBlog 2.0

A similar nomenclature was enough to sink the latest Vegemite flavour – so perhaps I should expect too much from this. But I’m fiddling with some new Facebook connect options that have recently been developed before I unleash it on our work websites.

To do this I’ve had to make a fan page on Facebook – you should join up. I’m hoping people will use it to give me ideas for things to blog – like Ali has been doing lately via her comments.

Here’s the link to the fan page, and feel free to add me as a friend (I may ignore you if you look weird).

Eventually you’ll be able to do all sorts of funky interactive stuff between here and Facebook – if I can get it working. I love being a technological guinea pig. You can keep tabs in the sidebar – where I’ve also added a live traffic feed. Interesting times.

If Facebook isn’t your thing but you’ve got a google account why not join the Google Friend Connect thing also on the sidebar… it’ll even add my blog google reader automatically if I’m in the “blogs you follow” category.

Finally, while I’m talking technical stuff and appealing for online friendship – check out my link list in the sidebar too. If you think you should be on it (or would like to be) let me know… and if you’ve got one, well, you could always add me too…

October 1, 2009

Spammers get philosophical

My latest off beat spam raises an interesting (well not really) question completely unrelated to the post.

“If a missing person sees their picture on a milk carton that offers a reward, would they get the money?”

Let’s give the guy some answers…

October 1, 2009

On the flipside

Have you been reading Tim and Amy’s blog (a misnomer if ever I’ve heard one… Tim has posted once). It’s pretty awesome. Like this post with a little map tool that lets you figure out where you’d end up if you were to drill a hole right through the earth.

If you were to do that, and you dropped a rock down the hole – would it get stuck in the middle or shoot out the other side? Ignoring all the effects that lava might have on the composition of the rock…

Here’s where you’d end up if you lived in Townsville. Somewhere off the coast of Mauritius.

September 30, 2009

New beginnings

Right, well, I have a new host. Hightek Hosting were great – they just seemed not really to know how to handle WordPress.

PZ Myers’ rebuttal of my five tips for atheists got me 4,000 hits (so far) – and about 60 comments – feel free to join the fun. Here, or there.

September 28, 2009

PZ Myers killed my blog

So, Christians have been pretty guilty of wrongly accusing atheists of doing bad stuff before – but the prominent atheist PZ Meyers wrote a rebuttal to yesterday’s post, linked to it, and I was flooded with angry commenters.

I’m trying to keep up with moderating the comments (most of which seem to assume I’m an American writing for an American audience).

I’m getting there – but the traffic and comments were the straw that broke the camel’s back with regards to my webhosts, so I’m currently moving.

I’ll flick the switch soon. In the meantime – try to hold off on commenting because new comments and stuff won’t come through.

See you soon.

September 28, 2009

Unmitigated soppiness

This post should potentially come with some sort of gag warning. But I’m sure all my female readers will appreciate it – and single guys can probably learn something from it…

We watched the Baz Luhrmann version of Romeo + Juliette this afternoon.

Now that I’m married I enjoy romantic tragedies even less than before.

Speaking of which, we had our two year anniversary this week (on the 22nd). And my wife is still wonderful. I don’t normally go for soppiness online – it falls into the category of sharing information people don’t really want to read (oversharing).

I do love my wife very much though, and I’m happy for this fact to be published.

September 27, 2009

Holiday snaps

I took lots of photos during our holidays – most were at a wedding and will be boring to all of you. Some were at the beach. Like these (and whatever else I eventually upload to this album).

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with aperture and exposure settings.

And here’s the dust storm on the Sunshine Coast.

September 27, 2009