Random Morning Thoughts

It’s random thought time!

General Stuff

• Sometimes my job is pleasant and relatively stress-free. Ocassionally it manages to make me work long hours. This week definitely fell under the latter category.
• For a while I was organizing my to-do list in Excel. That was working really well as it was helping me not forget to do things (a constant problem) and also giving me a better view into what I spent my time on. It’s time to pick that up again. BTW, I totally love the new ribbon stuff in Office as it helps with formatting significantly, which is a big part of my system.

Biblical Studies Thoughts

• Tomorrow I am teaching the morning lessons at FBC Parker. We will be starting chapter 2 of Mark. Last week the other teacher, Edward, pointed out that leprosy (an issue in the last paragraph of Mark 1) is often used metaphorically of sin. I thought that was an interesting point and fits in with the beginning of chapter 2. So far post-intro narrative of Mark has been focused on power of demons and disease. Perhaps the last paragraph of Mark 1 was meant as a segue into a discussion of sin and forgiveness, a topic obviously important when trying to present who Jesus is.
• I started a system about a couple months ago from which I have really benefitted. I started writing out significant thoughts on index cards, which usually consist of chunks of Scripture (though I have one thought from Heraclitus in there). If it is in a foreign language I am fairly comfortable in (like Greek), I go ahead and put it in its original language. Sure it may take a little longer to read what is on the card, but once read you can still meditate upon it. And you get language practice as a bonus as well.
• I’ll have the next podcast out today. As mentioned above, this week just killed me at work.

Tech Stuff

• Silverlight 2 was released this week. I am uber excited about this! You will most certainly be hearing more about this from me in the future (but don’t hold your breath as it won’t be that soon).
• And speaking of rich internet media platforms, it looks like I’m going to be upgrading my version of Flash. I’m currently around five or six years behind (I own a copy of Flash MX), but I am about to do a decent amount of work for a client in Flash, so I think it is time to upgrade. As I already own Photoshop, I think instead of dropping $700 for Flash, I may drop an extra $400 down and get the full Creative Suite Production Premium package. It kinda hurts to pay that much for software, but I’ll be making money enough to pay for it (plus quite a bit) and there are some programs in the package that I want that I do not have, like Illustrator and Soundbooth (I’ve been using Audacity, which is good, but maybe this is even better). I don’t do anything with Video, but if that changes I’ll have software for that as well. But still...that price tag hurts. I’m used to dealing with free Microsoft software (go to enough events and you can generally get their developer software for free) or having the company I am working for pay for it. But since it is me in this case, I have to foot the bill.
• And since we’re on the topic of Photoshop, it is fortunate that I bought CS3 when I did. I bought it 29 days ago, which means I was eligible for the free upgrade to CS4 for that package. Neat. That saved me some money.
• I’m now almost a week into my experience with Windows Vista and my new laptop. Unless something changes soon I’m going to have to call "bull crap" on those who seem to insist on slamming Vista. I am really enjoying it so far. I know part of this has to do with the fact that a significant hardware upgrade went into this laptop, but it is running great and is very fast. I have only had problems with two pieces of software. One was Sql Server 2005 and the relatively small task it was to setup IIS correctly for the integration between the two was acceptable. Of course Sql Server 2005 was released before Vista, so I shouldn’t be too surprised if some setup steps are required for something like that. The only other problem was Dell Media Direct...
• ...which is a problem introduced by Dell and not Vista. It hadn’t shown its ugly face till this morning, but it kept opening up over and over on my machine. I couldn’t kill it. I opened up my task manager to kill the process and there were (I kid you not) at least twenty instances of MediaDirect.exe running on the system. As I killed them manually more kept popping up. I tried to uninstall but it wouldn’t let me as it was currently running. Conundrum. To solve the problem I rebooted and immediately opened the add/remove programs control panel and task manager again. As one instance popped up I killed it and as as quickly as I could I uninstalled the program. Success! I beat Dell. It is a great laptop, but I wish they wouldn’t install their trash on it.

That’s it for now. Thanks for being random with me.