Psalm 9:15-20 (NKJV):

The nations have sunk down in the pit which they have made;
In the net which they hid, their own foot is caught.
The Lord is known by the judgment He executes;
The wicked is snared in the work of his own hands.
    Meditation.  (Selah)
The wicked shall be turned into hell,
And all the nations that forget God.
For the needy shall not always be forgotten;
The expectation of the poor shall not perish forever.
Arise, O Lord,
Do not let man prevail;
Let the nations be judged in Your sight.
Put them in fear, O Lord,
That the nations may know themselves to be but men.  (Selah)

Oh, let it be soon.

A few notes the pastor made during church Sunday that I thought were interesting (from the book of Esther):

Spiritual warfare can only be fought with spiritual weaons (prayer, fasting, etc)

Deliverance always comes in unexpected ways.

The wicked are commited to the anihilation of God and His people.

Sarrow is a universal language.

God judges our motives, not necessarily the results.

Self interested should never be taken over duty.

Never return wrong for wrong.

Note to self: Die Mentally?

I came up with a new quote…

There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel; the question is, how long is the tunnel?

Matt Nuzum, 2004

Argh! Office 2003 Frustration: Well, you may or may not know that it’s not easy to create a report for a cross-tab query in Access. Access is a useful database for small projects, but I generally prefer something much more robust with PostgreSQL being my personal favorite (free and robust). Well, one of my customers has me working on their access database and the report they wanted required a cross-tab. In order to get all of their features, I had to write a module that generates a report in Excel that displays the cross-tab and then generates some formulas to show the penetration of the products mentioned. By this I mean the average where product sales for a region was >$1.

I get it done, it looks and works beautiful (albeit very slow) and I’m right on schedule. Perfect, right? nope. Turns out, they just decided to upgrade to Office 2003 and although my program works great in Office 2000 and 2002/XP it doesn’t work right at all in 2003. I checked the security settings, which are much more stringent by default, but that doesn’t fix anything. Basically, the errors are that the method or property isn’t suppported in Excel. Of course, I don’t own Office 2003 so I’ve either got to go buy it or come up with another solution. I think “other solution” is the answer, cause they’ve really outgrown access for this project. Maybe I’ll throw some dollars towards MS and move them up to SQL Server, maybe I’ll move them to a different product all together…

Funny thing is, I’ve looked all over the MSDN website and there’s no mention of the changes that I can find. Frustrating.

Typing the Greek alphabet.: Sometimes, you may want to type greek letters on your english keybaord. Windows XP allows you to easily add alternate keyboard layouts. Once you add greek (EL) you can press Left Alt + Left Shift to switch from English to Greek. Then, use the following table to type your greek letters:

lower:	  α   β   γ   δ   ε   ζ   η   θ
upper:	  Α   Β   Γ   Δ   Ε   Ζ   Η   Θ
english:  a   b   g   d   e   z   E   th
keyboard:(a) (b) (g) (d) (e) (z) (h) (u)

lower:	  ι   κ   λ   μ   ν   ξ   ο   π
upper:	  Ι   Κ   Λ   Μ   Ν   Ξ   Ο   Π
english:  i   k   l   m   n   x   o   p
keyboard:(i) (k) (l) (m) (n) (j) (o) (p)

lower:	  ρ   σ   τ   υ   φ   χ   ψ   ω
upper:	  Ρ   Σ   Τ   Υ   Φ   Χ   Ψ   Ω
english:  r   s   t   y   ph  ch  ps  O
keyboard:(r) (s) (t) (y) (f) (x) (c) (v)

A few random thoughts:

Admit that you are not perfect, then acknowledge that other people are just like you. THen you can forgive them.

There is a god, and you are not Him.

Choose today which god you will serve… As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. Joshua 24:15

I sent the hornet before you which drove them out… Not you with your sword or with your bow.

The law of Polarity:
On several occasions I’ve discussed the Gospel message with people who could not accept the fact that there was a just and loving God. Their argument often focused on the fact that because there was injustice in the world or pain that a truly good god could not exist. It’s important to understand that there are many reasons God allows injustice and pain. The law of polarity is only one explanation.

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In a nutshell, God allows bad things to happen because without bad things, we have no understanding or appreciation of the good things that happen.

The fact is, when it comes to defining God, we have no say in the matter. God is who He is. We do have the option to perceive God in ways that are different from His true character; however that does not in any way change God.

We have two choices, we can acept Him and love Him or we can reject Him.

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If we believe that God is the Creator, then we must also acknowledge that is is all powerful.

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Where in the Bible does it discuss morals? Why are children supposed to obey their parents? How do we know that God is perfect? HOw do we know that we can trust Him?

ChristianBlues.net – The home of Christian blues music on the Internet: “Christian Blues? Isn’t that an oxymoron?” I’ve asked this question before. I’ve longed for good blues. By blues, I mean old-fashioned R&B, not modern R&B which isn’t bad, but really isn’t anything like classic R&B. The problem is that old-fashioned R&B is about sadness. Can there be such a thing as Christian Blues?

To quote from ChristianBlues.net, ‘Traditionally blues music has been about deep feelings of sadness and despair. Honest, raw emotion. Glenn Kaiser said it well: “(Blues) tends to be very honest, because it ‘tells it like it is’ rather than posing or pretending that life is ‘cool,’ nothing hurts, people always treat other people fairly, etc…”‘ ChristianBlues.net then goes on to say, “We all experience the pain and disappointments of life in this fallen world. Can we sing about it?”

I’ve only spent a few minutes here, but already I’m so intrigued that I just had to write about it.

Proverbs 1:19 says that material posessions (and greedily seeking after them) take away the life of their owner.

A few questions that popped into my head recently: These are things that I want to put a little more thought into when I can.

• Must a person understand the sovereignty of God prior to accepting that He provided a means of salvation through the death of Christ?
• Must a person understand that Christ was not only perfect, but was the son of God in order to accept His sacrifice as payment for sin?
• Is Doctrinal precision more important than Unity?
• Does God honor the prayers of the unbelievers when he prays out of a desire to know who God is?

Here are a few other random ideas that popped into my head and deserve further thought:

The law and love are not irreconcilable enemies.

A man courting a woman seeks to show her that he lovers her. He tries several things, all of which fail to impress her. Finally, he cries out, “How can I show you that I love you?” When we want to show God that we love Him, we should do it in a way that he wants. cf. Cane and Abel.

Project Looking Glass by Sun Microsystems: 3D windowing capabilities OK, this is a pretty cool demo. It certainly makes me want to use it. Plus, I think about what new software user interfaces would become available once we move into a 3d world. Can you imagine replacing a cluttered “tabbed” interface with a slick, “cubed” interface where each tab is moved onto it’s own side of a cube? Imagine not having a “properties” menu item, but instead have a “properties face”.

Think about presentations where each slide in the presentation sits at the top right of the window until it’s time to show comes. Once viewed, it slides up to the top left giving you a visual cue to your progress in the presentation.

Sun gets major kudos for this. This is one of the most unique ui concepts I’ve seen in a while. By the way, the “medium” bandwidth option of the demo saturates my Cable modem connection so I don’t know what type of system you need in order to view the “high” bandwidth presentation.