One down, three to go…

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DSC00291

Immediately after graduating from St. John’s College, I began a re-read of all the seminar works (according to a list I scribbled down in 2005, so not necessarily the exact works I read, or the works they are reading now, but close). I just finished reading the Freshman year yesterday. Here are a few reflections:

People commonly say at SJC that you are either a Plato or Aristotle person and I tended to think of myself as the latter, but this time through I engaged better with Plato (most of the time.)

The two books that took the longest were the first volume of Plutarch’s Lives and Aristotle’s Metaphysics. I decided to read the entire book rather than trying to do the excerpts we used in seminar, so Plutarch was much longer. In both cases if I had stuck to my plan of reading a little each day they wouldn’t have taken as long. I would occasionally get frustrated in how much was left and leave off reading for months at a time.

I really warmed up to the dramatic works, which is making me excited to read Shakespeare in the near future, I’ve never quite resonated with him as much as others seem to. My decision to try to read the entire work is making me a little nervous about finishing Sophomore year since it ends with the Summa Theologiœ.

Another reason I took a while longer to read through was I did quite a bit of other reading interleaved with the seminar works. I really enjoy when some other book interacts with a seminar book in a cool new way. Aristotle and C.S. Lewis have a habit of dialoging when I read them.

You can see a schedule of my reading here

The lights are back on…

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…over at FAQautism.com after a 2 year hiatus. If you are one of the people who reads this blog and are not my mom (who makes all the content over there), you should go over and check it out. We’re planning on posting once a week instead of 5x a week in hopes that that is a little more sustainable.

If you know anyone who has an interest in autism, please pass this site on. It is very practical and helpful.

Pixelmator vs. Acorn (2012)

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Both Pixelmator and Acorn are about $50 and, while they are probably competing more with the $80 Photoshop Elements, they do most of the tasks light users would want to buy the $200 PhotoshopCS5 for.

In my first comparison post Acorn got the edge mostly because their demo saved files with no watermark which meant one could actually use it before biting the bullet and spending $50.

Because of the various updates (i.e. heal tool) promised in Pixelmator 2 I bought Pixelmator 1.whatever and started using it as my go to editor.

As of January 2012 however, there is a weird bug that does not let me arbitrarily set the width and height pixels when cropping an image. Strangely both programs have a bug in this tool although they have different symptoms. My version of Acorn is behind since the Acorn 3 update is another $20 (I thought it was $50, but the author corrected me), so it may not have this issue, but I’m stuck using other programs to work around this bug which is annoying (we’ll see if it is $20 annoying soon).

I can’t speak to Acorn 3 vs Pixelmator 2, but in Acorn 2 vs Pixelmator 2, the latter wins handily.

On Helping Others:

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My Friend Emily Terrell asked:

how did you grow past hating helping people and enjoying it?

Not that this is something with which I’m finished.

My response:

I’m not certain.

It is mostly an offshoot of being less self-centered. I am at times still self-centered, so I try not to let myself stew in the thoughts (e.g. I really hate this… this is stupid… why do I have to do this) because they seem to start a vicious cycle.

A practical idea I’ve used to rein in my thought-life is just to think of myself in the same situation and what I’d like people to do. A place Satan can attack in that thought process is that it is easy to leap to “Next time I’m in a situation like this they are going to owe me.” Like I’m going to build up a bunch of chits that I can call in when I need help.

The final little hurdle to clear is the “Kristian Karma” idea. “I’m going to do this to get points in heaven.” The more mundane thought is just “good stuff will happen later because of this” but I’ve even, with the wrong heart, coveted an eternal reward. This last one is subtle because it’s pretty clear there is some sort of credit system, but as usual my heart loves to grab on to things that are good and turn them evil.

Matthew 5:11-12

11 “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

(Obviously helping someone isn’t quite persecution.)

Matthew 6:1-4

1 “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. 2 “Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,4 so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

which is always an interesting juxtaposition to:

Matthew 5:14-15

14 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.15 Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Pointing pretty clearly to the heart of the matter being the heart itself.

Wise Old Ladder Safety Song

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If all four out of four legs of the ladder are touching the ground,
go get someone to hold the ladder while you climb so that
the ladder doesn’t tip over. Also climb the middle of the ladder
so you don’t tip the ladder over.

If only three out of four legs of the ladder are touching the ground
climb the side of the ladder farthest from the leg that’s not.
The electric ladder
If only two out of four legs of the ladder are touching the ground
make sure the two that are touching the ground aren’t
on the same side and then climb the side above the leg that isn’t
touching the ground so that it is.

If only one out of four legs of the ladder is touching the ground
you are on your own.

WordPress Posts Issue

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WordPress version: 3.0.1

Symptoms:

1. The content of my posts were not editable. When I pushed “update” wordpress returned a “post edited” message, but the content did not change. I could change categories, tags, publish date, etc. but not the content of the post.

Later:

2. All the posts disappeared. The home page displayed a 404 error and when I went into wp-admin, it showed that I had 0 posts.

Solution:

Open up phpmyadmin and run “repair table wp_posts”

Print Multiple Files

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My friend Nate Fancher asked me if there was a way to print multiple files without opening each one and selecting print. Automator.app has an action that lets you do this, so I made it into a service. If you want you can download this file, un-zip it, and put it in your Library>Services folder.

Then you just select your files in Finder and activate the service from Finder>Services>”print multiple files”

print multiple files.workflow (32KB)

Combining Many Garage Band Projects

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Because Garageband only lets you have one project open at a time, it can be frustrating to pull together a series of projects into a single project.

This is only useful if you want to combine the raw audio. I’m pretty sure none of the effects travel with the audio. Also, if your project has a lot of separate audio instead of one chunk, it’s probably better to go through the process of copying the audio from one project and pasting it in another.

A shortcut if you are combining multiple garageband recordings into a single project:

  1. Open the project you want everything combined into.
  2. Right-click on the project you want to add
  3. Select “Show Package Contents”
  4. Open “Media”
  5. Grab the .aif file and drag it to the project in step 1
    (If there are multiple .aif s you can use QuickLook to make sure you get the right one)
  6. Repeat 2-5 for each project you want to combine.