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NPR miscellany #2

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I heard a great story yesterday on This American Life that was apparently a repeat, but I hadn’t heard it before so it was new to me. I only caught the first act1, but it was a hilarious true story of a kid named Alex who got shipwrecked on a desert island in the middle of New York City. The island he got stuck on is Ruffle Bar which is situated in the middle of Jamaica Bay to the Southeast of New York City, within two miles of civilization on all sides. The story involves drinking and some generally irresponsible behavior which I should say I don’t condone. What makes this story so entertaining is the irony that someone could get stuck on a deserted island so close to civilization.

I can’t link straight to the episode because This American Life has a horrible archiving system (no permalinks!), but if you want to find it (to order a CD or whatnot), go to This American Life, click the 2006 archive on the left sidebar, and look for the episode that originally aired February 3 titled “In the Shadow of the City”. What I can provide a link to, though, is the streaming audio feed for this particular episode: Listen. Enjoy! 

  1. This American Life is typically broadcast in two to five acts, usually different stories on a similar theme. The theme of this episode (in three acts) is strange places within short distances of major metropolises. The third act, about the government cracking down on smoke stack emissions in Chicago even though the residents like the emissions, sounds like it could also be entertaining, but, as I mentioned, I haven’t heard it, yet. [↩]

Galatians

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If you’re a Latter-day Saint, please read this and consider posting a comment. There are a few questions for you and I’d like to get as many responses as possible. Thanks.

I’m starting a personal in-depth study of the book of Galatians and I have a few observations to make and questions to ask.

I’ve noticed that many Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals employ Galatians 1:6-9 when preaching against or defending themselves from each other. Even if you don’t recognize the zip code, you’re probably familiar with the passage:

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

It’s clear to me from our mutual use of this passage against each other that Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals preach different and incompatible gospels—either one of us or the other is correct, or we are both wrong, but we cannot both be right. When considering a passage like this, whether we are LDS or Evangelical, it’s natural for us to assume we’re the ones with the true gospel and they’re the ones with the false gospel. But how many of us simply jump to that conclusion without reading through the rest of the epistle to see if Paul further expounds upon the gospel he advocates? This is the aim of my present study. I want to get to the bottom of this, not to prove my own beliefs, but to better understand the gospel Paul is really trying to preach here.

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NPR miscellany #1

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I hear a lot of interesting stories on NPR, so I’m going to start highlighting a few of them from time to time on my blog. Tonight I heard a couple great stories on All Things Considered that I’d like to share.

The first story is about a bizarre problem that’s killing commercial bees all over the U.S. called Colony Collapse Disorder. This is a big deal because a lot of the crops we consume are pollinated by these bees. Here’s the story: “Disease Hits Bees, and Vital Crops Suffer” (Listen).

The second story is about one the best Iranian food chefs in Washington, D.C. The kicker is that he’s not even from Iran. Instead, he’s from El Salvador. He started as a bus boy in an Iranian restaurant and worked his way into the kitchen. Now he owns his own restaurant and flies all over the world to cook for special events. My favorite part of this story is the part about the deeply religious people who are shocked to find out that a Christian Latino had prepared their Islamic Halal dinner (they calm down when they learn he does everything by the book). Here’s the story: “In D.C., Top Iranian Chef Hails From El Salvador” (Listen).

Syzygy playlist the first

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I’ve really enjoyed listening to Steven Garrity’s Acts of Volition Radio sessions. He’s got an eclectic taste in music and has introduced me to more than a few artists and songs that quickly became favorites. I don’t have the time or the patience to start up a podcast, but I found a neat service recently called Finetune that lets you build playlists to share with other people.

The music on Finetune is all properly licensed and there are a number of restrictions in place to ensure the service stays legal, the first being that each listener can only hear each song once. Another restriction is that playlists must contain at least 45 songs with no more than 3 songs from any given artist before they become playable. Their Flash player was envisioned for use on services like Myspace, but can be embedded just about anywhere.

So, without further ado, I present Syzygy Playlist the First for your listening enjoyment:

Car-free

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It’s been a while since I mentioned my car accident, so here’s a little update about how all the loose ends got tied up. My car was declared totalled about a week and a half after the accident (there are pictures). I’d been driving a cute little 2007 Volkswagen Jetta rental in the meantime, but of course they made me give that back.

We got a nice-sized check for the value of my car, but I’ve decided to rough it for a while rather than buy another vehicle. Janene didn’t have much left to go on her car loan, so we put some of the money toward finally owning her car, which is nice. The rest went into savings. When the weather gets a little warmer I plan to use some of it to overhaul my bike—new tires, fenders, headlight, taillight, etc.

I did end up buying the book I mentioned in my previous post, How to Live Well Without Owning a Car, and may give a full book review when I finish reading it. I’ve done pretty well so far and this is the coldest month of the year. I’ve got a deal with Janene that I get to buy me a truck when I finish school, so that’s the light at the end of the tunnel. But who knows, I may decide I like being car-free. It’s already saving us a ton of money (our insurance, gas, and auto maintenance budgets have been halved!) and I think it will be good for me to ride my bike more.

Syzygized

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My blogs have finally been combined into one. WordPress 2.1 was released a few days ago with a shiny new import/export feature (among other cool updates). Nothing could’ve been slicker about the migration. It was as easy as clicking a button on my other blog, then selecting the downloaded file and clicking a button on this blog. Not only are posts copied over, but complete comments, custom fields, and categories as well.

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Wrecks

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I was in two car accidents within the space of an hour on Sunday morning. Before you worry, everyone involved is okay. We were all very blessed.

It’s about 7:30 am Sunday morning. I’m cruising down the freeway on my way to a worship team rehearsal1. I’m not braking or turning—though the road is gently sloping to the left, so I suppose my wheels aren’t exactly straight—but I’m going too fast considering there are patches of snow and ice on the road. I hit a wet patch that sends me spinning. I strike the inside barrier probably four or five times before coming to a rest on the inside shoulder facing the wrong direction.

The first thing that comes to mind when the car stops is that I don’t have my phone on me—I had neglected to charge it the night before. I wait for a bit sitting in my car, but it’s too early on a Sunday morning for any other cars to be on the road. I put on my hazard lights and climb out of my car to see how bad it is. There’s extensive damage to both bumpers, a busted out headlight and a broken taillight, and I’m sure there’s frame damage. The damage is much worse than the last accident I was in, so it’s probably totalled. As luck would have it I had come to rest directly opposite a freeway exit, so I dash across the freeway intending to find a gas station where I can make some phone calls.

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  1. For those who don’t know, I play the drums in worship service every Sunday morning. We rehearse about an hour before first service. [↩]

Firebug 1.0 beta

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Firebug 1.0 beta

I downloaded the Firebug 1.0 beta the other day and I gotta say it’s fantastic. This is the coolest HTML and CSS debugging tool to come along since the Firefox Web Developer toolbar. In fact, my Web Developer toolbar hasn’t seen much use this past week since I’ve started using Firebug.

Basically, Firebug lets you inspect any element on a web page. Once you’ve selected an element to inspect, Firebug shows you where the element is in the source code and gives you a breakdown of all the style rules that apply to the element, including inherited rules. At any time you can make changes to the markup and the style and see those changes reflected immediately in the browser, just like the “Edit CSS” tool in the Web Developer toolbar.

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LDS Linker 1.4

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Notice: A newer version of LDS Linker has been released.

LDS Linker is a WordPress plugin I created that changes any Latter-day Saint scripture reference into a hyperlink pointing to the Internet Edition of the LDS Scriptures. It recognizes references whether the book name is written out or shortened using the standard abbreviations.

Here are some examples:

Moro. 10:3–5 is a scripture mastery verse. Other scripture mastery verses include Mosiah 4:30, D&C 130:22–23, and JS-H 1:15–20. I have Articles of Faith 1:1–13 memorized—how ’bout you?

Version 1.2.1 stopped working a few months ago when the LDS church made significant changes to the way search queries are performed against their scripture system. Version 1.3 attempts to address that issue but probably doesn’t go far enough. I’m aware that D&C references are broken in this version (because the & symbol isn’t being encoded properly before being passed to scriptures.lds.org). I’m sure there are other issues I’m not aware of, so please let me know if you find anything fishy. I plan to rework the whole system soon so it links directly to passages instead of to search queries (i.e. Moro. 10:3-5 instead of Moro. 10:3-5).

Version 1.4 comes hot on the heels of 1.3 and fixes the Doctrine and Covenants links issue. I found that using the urlencode() function around the book name tamed that pesky ampersand into submission and thus restored the Doctrine and Covenants to the list of books LDS Linker can handle.

A big thanks to those who’ve helped me improve the code. Are you using LDS Linker? Please let me know what you think. End mark