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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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”

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

print multiple files.workflow (32KB)

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My mom sent me a link to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center’s photo contest, so I entered this picture. The contest is judged, but they also have a “people’s choice”, so if you want to vote for me, you can go here. (Let me know if that doesn’t work. It does for me.)

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Here you can see how many tries it took to get a good shot. Click on the image to see the final product at higher resolution.

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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.

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I saw on CNN today that Rahm Emanuel put down Democrats who oppose Obama’s health plan by calling them “f******* retarded”. This caused quite a bit of outcry from all sorts of people including the head of the Special Olympics and Mr. Emanuel signed a pledge to stop using the “r-word” as a derogatory name.

While I understand the desire to get people to stop using certain words in ways that are derogatory, we cannot just make a list of “bad words” and “bad usages”. For any real change to occur we must change the heart behind the words that we find so offensive.

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Especially in the context of Matthew 5:39: “But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”I would not be surprised to learn that there were leaders in the black community at the time who pointed to this verse as a reason to avoid confrontation.

I’m also sure that there were many in the civil rights movement who were entirely uninterested in loving their racist oppressors, but King saw a more perfect way. In order to love a racist you must resist the racist in his racism.

So Matthew 5:39 most likely falls under the purview of Ecclesiastes 3:1: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven”

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1. I’m surprised at the low price. I was expecting entry level to be around $800 at the lowest. I’m guessing they are selling these without as much margin as most Apple products, they probably can make it back on AppStore sales.

2. $30 a month for unlimited 3G data is pretty good. Especially since that is “pay as you go” with no contract. Surprised it is with AT&T (isn’t this going to kill their network even more than the iphone?), but it isn’t exclusive (as far as I can tell).

3. iWork Apps are selling for $10 each. Sets a slightly higher bar for “premium” apps than the iPhone, but it is much lower than the price they set on the Mac (iWork Apps would be $27 each if you could buy them separately).

4. Like that there is a keyboard easel (costs extra?) Hope this is open to third party development.

5. This seems to be the Apple entry into the “netbook” market. I would buy one of these before I’d buy a netbook.

6. Two apps I’d buy immediately: GarageBand (recording app) and Acorn (photo editing) or their equivalents.

7. Interesting that Apple is making their own chip. I wonder if Intel is happy about this.

8. Still pretty sure I won’t dive into the ebook side of this, so it is nice to see that isn’t the main focus of this device. That makes it much more desirable to me, which might help me to make the jump to ebooks. (I never thought I’d buy only mp3′s of music, but I’m doing that now.)

9. For my use, I could see this taking over all of the mobile use of my laptop if I had a real desktop. I mostly use my laptop as a moveable desktop anyway.

10. Interesting to see Jonathan Ive is now going by Jony Ive: http://www.apple.com/ipad/#video

11. Kindle DX is $10 cheaper than the entry level iPad. It has better battery life and no fee 3G access, but is only B&W and more book focused.

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Sidewalk from Dwight Knoll on Vimeo.

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More and bigger pictures in this flickr set

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I think I have three options: Google Picasa (free), Apple Aperture ($199), or Adobe Lightroom ($299).

Picasa is nice because it is free. I’ve fiddled with it a little bit and it should be able to handle multiple volumes. Does anyone know if it has performance issues with large volumes? (I’ve only loaded a few pictures at a time.) It seems to have most of the image editing capabilities that I use often, however, I would like to have more. I can open the photos in an external editor, but it would be nice to simplify my workflow.

From the product pages it looks like both Aperture and Lightroom let you use multiple volumes. Beyond that I don’t know the strengths and weaknesses of each. How difficult is it to migrate from iPhoto? What about from Picasa? Does Lightroom have the performance issues that other Adobe products have on the Mac? Is Lightroom $100 better than Aperture?

They both offer free trials, but I’d like to get some feedback before jumping in on one or the other.

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When I forget this, it is easy to do things for the wrong reason. An example is imbibing in media simply for the sake of distraction. If I think the cool thing I’m going to do tomorrow is “real life” and I just need to get there so I can live, it becomes much easier to do things I don’t really want to do in order to pass the time until tomorrow gets here.

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Growing up, we didn’t run our heater very often. Some years, despite it being very cold in the house, we would only run it when guests were over, usually around Thanksgiving and Christmas. There was always a distinct odor when the heater first came on and Mom always said it was burning dust.

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Some of the references can be interesting, e.g. each president’s inauguration verse is noted as you come to it in the text. While it is convenient to have the notations directly in the bible, it seems the utility would only slightly be lessened by separating this into a separate bible study.

It is, however, as far as I can tell, completely non-critical, choosing to pick only supporting bullet-points for the culture-war’s battle over the role of Christianity in government. I for one would have preferred to see an honest discussion of the positives and the negatives rather than the party-line listing of the various rhetoric used to whip christians into a frenzy.

But perhaps that is a better topic for a separate book. And perhaps interleaving the bible with rhetoric isn’t the best idea in the first place.

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There are a few issues I have with it, but overall it does 9 out of 10 things I need to do, and most projects I set out to do have fewer than 10 steps, so no problem there.

I do recommend two enhancements:

If you want to be able to pick colors using their hex code:

http://wafflesoftware.net/hexpicker/

If you want to see a preview of the font in the font menu:

http://flyingmeat.com/wikka/AcornHIddenPrefs

Unfortunately this really slows down opening the font list. But it is worth it to me.

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Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the LORD. Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the LORD.

(KJV)

It is clear to me that this (omnipresence/omniscience) is the first thing I deny when I sin.

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Many times I have refused to do what God wants me to do because it seems ludicrous to me. The tension remains, however, to distinguish between God’s guidance and my own guidance (or worse). The guidance seeming ludicrous is apparently not a disqualifying factor.

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