Old Blog

Created by the 2007 JAARS IT summer interns.

When I develop new websites, I hope to move to developing on PyLucid so I can start coding in python more than PHP.

Today, over lunch, I gave presentation/demo of Google Apps that I use, Del.icio.us, Assembla, and Facebook at JAARS.

I really enjoyed it! I looked at my watch when I thought I may have been speaking for maybe 15 minutes or so and realized it had probably been over 30 minutes! My presentation lasted about 45 minutes (including questions and comments from others).

Next time I'll hopefully remember to look at the audience. ;)

It was a great experience! Now I have more Facebook friends who work at JAARS. :)

At about 3:30pm today I suddenly remembered that I'd forgotten to eat lunch, a glimpse of how much I enjoy my internship here. ;)

From Scaling on EC2 « WebMynd Blog:

Google’s key breakthroughs were the Google File System and MapReduce, which together allow them to horizontally partition the problem of indexing the web. If you can architect your product in such a way as to allow for similar partitioning, scaling will be all the more easy. It’s interesting to note that some of the current trends of Web2.0 products are extremely hard to horizontally partition, due to the hyper-connectedness of the user graph (witness Twitter).

From Life on the Edge by James Dobson page 174:

In the 1993 movie Shadowlands, writer C.S. Lewis loved a woman who died prematurely. Her death was intensely painful to him, causing Lewis to question whether he should have permitted himself to care for her. He concluded in the last scene that we are given two choices in life. We can allow ourselves to love and care for others, which makes us vulnerable to their sickness, death, or rejection. Or we can protect ourselves by refusing to love. Lewis decided that it is better to feel and to suffer than to go through live isolated, insulated, and lonely. I agree strongly.

Dr. Dobson goes on to say that "Emotions are unreliable and at times, tyrannical. They should never be permitted to dominate us."

Life is short: Glorify God, Do Hard Things, and let God write your love story.

Wow, this is powerful: "Don't Let It End This Way" Always remember: the time to love is short By Sue Kidd. I found the story in Life On the Edge

I'm really enjoying my time here at JAARS in Waxhaw, NC and I've enjoyed learning about Use Cases, Python, and more. I'm considering applying to come back here next summer. :)

Good thoughts from Nathan Creitz: Engaging the Culture for Christ:

Instead, we need to be as bold as the street preacher, but with some understanding of our cultural context.

...

That's how we engage culture. We pattern our lives after Jesus. We speak when He tells us to speak. We walk where He tells us to walk. We listen to Him always. We honor Him with our lives. We don't shy away from a tough discussion for fear we might get laughed at. Engaging the culture is spiritual work that demands a lot of prayer and walking with the Spirit. It isn't something I do by casually heading out the door with my 45 pound Bible tucked under my arm and a megaphone over my shoulder. No one will ever know that I care for them and that Jesus cares for them if I hand them a Gospel tract and walk away. Engaging the culture is exactly that: intentionality and interaction and friendship with those who don't know the Truth. Jesus was full of grace and truth. Let's always try and keep it in that order as we engage the culture for Christ.

I think this follows with what I've been hearing from people I respect such as Dr. Bill Graff (Engineering Professor at LeTourneau University) about the need to build a relationship with people.

In a comment on the above post, Nathan says:

... I'm not against giving someone a piece of literature that outlines the "Four Spiritual Laws" or something of the sort, but I do that in the context of a relationship. I love giving people things to read that I think they would find engaging and that we can have follow up discussions about. Sometimes it's a book of the Bible, at other times it's a tract of some sort, but I don't hand them out to people I haven't started a relationship with. ...

God can use many methods, but it does seem that the most effective evangelism is in the context of relationship. This sounds like one of the Hard Things that is important in our quest to glorify God in everything

carrot clarinet - Google Search :)

Ok, well twitter.com is #8, but it's my twitter. ;)

I was about to blog about wanting to leave twitter because of this on http://twitter.com/:

Twitter is currently down for maintenance to prepare for the holiday.

Then I remembered, I have website I maintain that are still down. It'd be hypocritical to criticize a website for being down when I have like 5-10 that I maintain that are down or having problems. I really should get to work on those.

I talk/think about engaging culture, these guys talk to people.

On the flip side, I keep hearing about how important it is to build a relationship with people that one witnesses to. I guess it could be that people are called to different things.

What do you think of street evangelism? It seems like something Paul might do in Acts.

Update: I think this comment by Nathan Creitz on Cultural Engagement? « Larry Temple - Cross, Crown, and Covenant: 4 days ago is quite on target (I hope he doesn't mind me quoting his entire comment! ;)

Hey Larry,

I think we are mostly agreeing. My point is primarily that we go to two extremes sometimes. There are the lazy Christians who rarely do anything to engage culture and they just hope their lives are interesting enough to invite questions from unbelievers. Then there are those who turn people off to Christianity by damning people to hell without even knowing them (I’ve been confronted on the streets of Boston by a person who yelled at me and said I was going to hell…and I’m a Christian!).

I’m advocating for the kind of person who does neither of these two things. I try to live like Jesus lived among unbelievers by spending time with them in their homes and inviting them over to my home and loving them regardless of their beliefs or behaviors. I don’t get in their face every single time we get together (or they would stop listening to me), but I have made sure that every single one of my friends knows what I am praying for them that they will come to know Jesus because He is the only way to the Father. Some have come to know Jesus as a result, others are still friends and they often bring up spiritual conversations. Other times I feel that I can raise an issue or confront a behavior because I have that close relationship with them. On the other hand, there are times I know to keep my mouth shut. In other words, I know them and I care for them. They know my message is sincere. While a person holding a sign or yelling through a megaphone could be sincere, the person on the other side will never know it. I want to engage culture with my sincerity because I know that’s the harder road and the more rewarding. With a tract or a sign, I can be sincere, I can be insincere and no one would ever know. So, I never question a street preachers motives, just his methods. Sometimes it is effective, but it’s hard to measure how effective, non-effective, or counter-effective it can be since no one knows the hearts of the people who hear other than God. You always know where you stand when you are sharing Christ with someone you care about.

...

...

Update 2: I just realized that Nathan posted his comment as blog post on his blog, so I've removed the full comment in order not to quote too much. You can read the rest here: Nathan Creitz: Engaging the Culture for Christ (Part 2)

By using my tags on http://del.icio.us/elijahlofgren/, wordle.net generated this interesting picture:

Be careful what you listen to! I find words of songs I've heard going through my head quite a bit. It is therefore helpful to listen to pure, good, and encouraging songs.

I took these notes on my PDA while riding in the car (back from New Attitude?).

 Mr. And Mrs. Thing measure success by their thingodometer
America has too many things to think about
But THINGS DON'T LAST! One day Mr. And Mrs. Thing will hire a second-hand thing dealer to come get their things.
 One day you're gonna die and there's gonna one thing in the box.
We stand here in our things and miss the God who gave us everything.
I'm against people who put things above God.
COVETING IS THE ROOT OF ALL THE OTHER 9 COMMANDMENTS.
Let God give you the things. He knows how to handle your life.
V.5 Blessed are the meek.
Greed leads to immorality.
If you can stop greed in the bud you can stop immorality.
God cares more about what you think than what you say or do.
Wealth
v.19-24 luxuries
the ways money can corrupt or bless up
why are we in recession? Greed.
You are not gonna like this
2 treasures: on earth or heaven
2 visions
2 masters
God doesn't want you broke.
God doesn't care what size house you have or if you have a new car, but He does care if you charged.
Do not lay up for YOURSELF treasures on eart...but lay up for yourselves treasures on earth.
necessities
franklin crossroads baptist church.
90.1 radio.
By: Ron Davis Kentucky preacher 270...
Franklincrossroads.com
cecilia KY
elizabethtown KY

Let me know of any problems you run into as I try to migrate all the websites that I host to a new web server (which I've run for a few months and I'll have more control over).

Sorry for the unplanned downtime! I'm not sure what went wrong with my old web host. It seems like it may have been an upgrade that didn't go very well.

Update:

After thinking about it, and realizing that my RapidVPS server might get overwhelmed and I want to switch away from RapidVPS as soon as I need more ram (because cheaper elsewhere), I've decided to switch to Linode now instead of later. It's $20/month for 360mb of ram.

So one more server move! ;) I'll try to get everything back up this weekend

See: “You Tell On Yourself” Poem « A Godly Maiden

From: R.C. Sproul Changes his Views on Genesis 1

Renowned Christian scholar and apologist R.C. Sproul has taught an old earth reinterpretation of the early chapters of Genesis for many years. Recently, he corrected his course and now embraces the straightforward 6-day view, held by the ministry of ABR. We applaud him for his willingness to correct his view on this very important matter.

From: Famous evangelical apologist changes his mind: RC Sproul says he is now a six-day, young-earth creationist

But Sproul concludes:

For most of my teaching career, I considered the framework hypothesis to be a possibility. But I have now changed my mind. I now hold to a literal six-day creation, the fourth alternative and the traditional one. Genesis says that God created the universe and everything in it in six twenty-four–hour periods. According to the Reformation hermeneutic, the first option is to follow the plain sense of the text. One must do a great deal of hermeneutical gymnastics to escape the plain meaning of Genesis 1–2. The confession makes it a point of faith that God created the world in the space of six days. [emphasis in original, indicating these words are part of the Confession] (pp. 127–128)

Thanks to my Biblical Literature Professor, Dr. RV Hood for telling me about this! :)

From: ZackSaint.com » Blog Archive » Zack’s wall at the hospital

“For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is, limited in suffering and subject to sorrows and death, he had the courage to take his own medicine. Whatever the game he is playing at with his creation, he has kept his own rules, and he has played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money, to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man, he was born in poverty and died in disgrace, and he thought it all worthwhile. Hallelujah, what a Savior!”

Note: Zack Saint wanted this brought to the hospital where he was.

About Zack Saint

From: http://www.letu.edu/opencms/export/download/community-and-media/Spring06.pdf

ZACK SAINT

Sept. 17, 1983 – Feb. 3, 2006

Shortly over a month later, the university held another memorial service on Wednesday, Feb. 13, to mourn the loss of Zack Saint, 23, of Morgantown, Penn. Zack died Friday, Feb. 3, of leukemia, having successfully battled the disease as a child. Thirty LETU students were en route by car to Pennsylvania to say goodbye to the senior mechanical engineering major when they learned Zack was gone. Students and alumni from all over the country gathered in Zack’s hometown to comfort his family. One of his nurses came to know Christ through the example of Zack’s life and the prayers of Zack’s friends. Zack requested memorials be made to his senior design project, the LETU Powered Parachute Team. His family is also establishing a scholarship fund in his memory.

Note: I had Dr. Green (advisor to the Powered Parachute Team) as my professor for Fundamentals of Engineering Design (AKA Legos) class.

Amen! :)

Step 1: Create a separate login account on your PC for work

I've just created a separate login account on my PC called "elijahlofgren-work".

Don't put any shortcuts on your desktop that don't relate to work. ;)

Step 2: Create a separate Gmail and Google Docs account

I've just created a separate email address and Google Docs account: work at elijahlofgren.com using Google Apps.

Step 3: Block Facebook and Myspace (and any other sites you get distracted by) using the BlockSite Firefox extension

Finally

Be productive! Be more focussed and finish your work faster so that you can more spend time on important things like reading good books, spending time with family and more! :)

Running "top" I find that my virtual server with just 128mb of memory has 150mb of ram used by Plone. It's swapping: not good.

From: Plone system resources for a small site:

Plone and Zopes takes whooping 70 MB just to load.

I'm glad I've already decided to use CMSMS instead of spending extra time with Plone or another Python CMS. :)

After 15 years: Wine 1.0 has been Released :)

The Wine team is proud to announce that Wine 1.0 is now available. This is the first stable release of Wine after 15 years of development and beta testing. Many thanks to everybody who helped us along that long road! While compatibility is not perfect yet, thousands of applications have been reported to work very well. Check http://appdb.winehq.org to see the details for your favorite applications.

What is wine?

Wine HQ

Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code

It's finally here! :)

The Best Firefox Yet: With more than 15,000 improvements, Firefox 3 is faster, safer and smarter than ever before.

I think the proper role of government is being lost.

From: Lunch-Box Nazis?

Australian parents are wondering “what’s next?” after the government implemented a new childcare center policy that restricts the types of food they can put in their children’s lunchboxes.

The program, called Good for Kids, Good for Life, was recently implemented at more than 300 preschools and day-care centers in the Hunter New England area of Australia to combat childhood obesity. Not only have foods high in fat, salt, and sugar been banned from meals and snacks, but even fruit has been limited: sultanas raisins to one, three-quarter-tablespoon portion, and apples to a half-sized serving.

Read more: Lunch-Box Nazis?

You can read it here: Feminine Grace: Once I Tried to Use Him

"As dad always reminds us, we're human beings not human doings. Our worth is not found in what we do, but in what God has done for us."

-- My sister Anna Lofgren on June 11, 2008

Dr. Dobson's response to this question from his excellent book Life On The Edge

A person doesn't go to college just to prepare for a line of work -- or at least, that shouldn't be the reason for being there. The purpose for getting a college education is to broaden your world and enrich your intellectual life. Whether or not it leads to a career is not the point. Nothing invested in the cultivation of your own mind is ever really wasted. IF you have the desire to learn and the opportunity to go to school, I think you should reach for it. Your career plans can be finalized later.

-- Life On The Edge page 74

I want to type up more from other similar questions and answers, but I really should go finish eating breakfast, but this is a really good quote:

There is no more important job in the universe than to raise a child to love God.

-- Life On The Edge page 75

A good song! :)

Re: Poll: How Many Websites?

My old CMS (Plone) was just a disaster and I'm happy to be rid of it. The Plone management UI has a thin veneer that's friendly for entering and editing content, but if you want to go beyond that for customization and maintenance, you have to work with the underlying Zope management console which was the most cryptic thing in the world. I'm a professional software engineer with nearly 20 years development experience, and I found it difficult to work with.

Finally, Plone had performance issues, used too much memory, and some of its modules (news and events) were very inflexible and forced me to work within their limitations. Good riddance.

From: General thoughts on CMS and PyLucid

The reason I'm interested in PyLucid is that it is written in Django.

I've been administrating and using Plone for a year now. I think it sucks greatly, but the other free CMS's I've seen suck even more. What I'd like to see would be a CMS that offers the features of Plone (I mention below which particular features are of interest to me), but that is easy to understand, administrate, and develop. And be a bit lighter, of course.

As such, I think I'll give PyLucid a try before doing much more with my plone demo site

Why would I ever consider not using CMSMS?

1. I now like programming in Python MUCH better than PHP.
2. I want versioning and auto-save, but I don't want to do much more PHP programming (for fun, I'm fine with doing it for jobs) ;)

A great post here: words - Michele Lofgren - Luke's Family Website :)

Some notes I took in the car on my laptop to/from New Attitude (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!)

Communication/Speech

• "... Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks." - Matthew 12:34b (ESV)
• Homemaking - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED BY MYSELF (from reading about 1.25 page of it). ;) Anna's reading it now. Published by Vision Forum. Written by J.R. Miller
  

  Few things are more important in a home than its conversation, and yet there are few things to which less thought is given. The power of communication, which lies in the tongue, is simply incalculable. It can impart knowledge; utter words that will shine like lamps in darkened hearts; speak kindly sentences that will comfort sorrow or cheer despondency, breathe out thoughts that will arouse and quicken heedless souls; even whisper the secret of life-giving energy to spirit that are dead." (p. 181)

From Don Francisco Lyrics - That I May Know You - Sneakin':

...

Say what? You got some sin that belongs to me? Nope-- used to belong to me. Belongs to Jesus now. You go give it to Him; see what He says.... What? It's got my name on it? Naw. That's not me. That guy died 'way back in 1974. Everything he owned belongs to Jesus now. You go talk to Him....

...

You can download the song (and other ones by Don Francisco) for legally FREE as MP3s here: Don and Wendy Francisco MP3s

See this good poem: When I say "I am a Christian"

Thanks to Samantha Brooks for sending it to me!

Cute :)

P.S. John Piper's book, Don't Waste your Life, is very good, and is also completely free as PDF if you want it! :)

Enjoy: My Photos – New Attitude 2008 :)

Good stuff from Rob in Space: Things I know

...
I can live for days on praise from my wife
A child who loves words
I am a sinner
A smile from a child lifts my soul
A child who's kind, sweet and terrible
I am forgiven
I love a consistent routine
I am random
A child who's nuts
I value being valued
Summer in Alabama is hot
A child who builds
There are times to talk
There are times to not

Thanks to Miriam Hart for the links to these!!

Amazing: Libera - Far Away

Also nice:

I really like this song (playing on the radio right now where I am):