Author: Glen

Stanford Rakes It In

I get blown away some­times when I think about how inno­v­a­tive Stan­ford is. I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out which dorm room Google was found­ed in (I bet it’s in Escon­di­do Vil­lage).

Any­way, I start­ed think­ing again about the incred­i­ble tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs at Stan­ford when I read that the Farm raked in $45.4 mil­lion last year from roy­al­ties.

That’s a lot of mon­ey.

Wow. Wow back­wards.

Email Bankruptcy

Stan­ford law prof Lawrence Lessig has declared email bank­rupt­cy.

In a script-dri­ven note sent out last week, Lessig wrote: “Dear per­son who sent me a yet-unan­swered e‑mail, I apol­o­gize, but I am declar­ing e‑mail bank­rupt­cy.”

He went on to note that he had spent 80 hours the pri­or week sort­ing through unan­swered e‑mail built up since Jan­u­ary 2002, and had deter­mined that “with­out extra­or­di­nary effort” he would sim­ply nev­er be able to respond to these mes­sages.

Evi­dent­ly he gets an aver­age of 200 non-spam emails a day. I have to say that makes me feel bet­ter about my own email inad­e­qua­cies. My next three days will be chiefly com­prised of a con­cert­ed effort to whit­tle down my inbox. I start­ed this morn­ing at 387 non-spam, non-newslet­ter emails. I end today at 347. It does­n’t look like much progress, but I had two hour long phone con­ver­sa­tions and a bunch itty-bit­ty ones that kept me from the com­put­er most of today.

My goal for tomor­row is to get my inbox down to 200…

Discipleship By Design fixed

I got the prob­lems with Dis­ci­ple­ship By Design fixed. Now you too can learn from cam­pus min­istry leg­end Har­vey Her­man!

Shrek 2

Pub­lic thanks to Eliz­a­beth Gar­cia (good friend and Stan­ford Chi Alpha alum­nus) for babysit­ting Dana last night so Paula and I could go enjoy an evening out.

We watched Shrek 2, and loved it. It was dou­bly cool, because Hec­tor Yee (a friend of ours) works at Dream­Works and wrote the code that ren­dered the shad­ows cast by the fur on the cat. He’s list­ed in the cred­its.

Any­way, we had a great night. Thanks, Eliz­a­beth!

Why Didn’t I Say That?

“There is noth­ing so piti­ful as a young cyn­ic because he has gone from know­ing noth­ing to believ­ing noth­ing.” ~ Maya Angelou.

Lust After William and Mary’s Commencement Speaker

William and Mary had an off-the charts com­mence­ment speak­er. Not to dump on a Supreme Court Jus­tice, but I have to say Stan­ford lost out by com­par­i­son.

Need Help Procrastinating?

Finals are near­ly upon us. On the oth­er hand, it’s a hol­i­day week­end. Go ahead, take the geek test and kill some time…

Scripturizer in PHP

UPDATE 12/23/2004: I’ve moved my ver­sion of the code to the new WP Plu­g­ins repos­i­to­ry, so you can down­load it at http://dev.wp-plugins.org/file/scripturizer/trunk/scripturizer.php

UPDATE: plans are afoot to merge the three exist­ing code­bas­es (Dean’s, Scott Yang’s, and this one) into a sin­gle Source­forge project. (UPDATE 12/23/2004: noth­ing has real­ly come of that–we’re all a lit­tle busy and haven’t real­ly worked to make it hap­pen. Oh well…)

Not real­iz­ing that Mean Dean was port­ing Scrip­tur­iz­er to PHP, I went ahead and did it so that I could begin using it on this Word­Press site. At about the same time Scott Yang made one, so there are two ver­sions out there. Sor­ry about that.

I orig­i­nal­ly was­n’t going to pack­age it for release, but it turns out that I had to do it to actu­al­ly use it on my site :), and so I fig­ured I might as well put it in the pub­lic ver­sion to make it easy for any­one else to use. Also, fig­ur­ing out how to use add_action was nonob­vi­ous (at least when I first did this–I believe the doc­u­men­ta­tion has improved con­sid­er­ably), so I want­ed to pro­vide a clear exam­ple.

It extends the func­tion­al­i­ty of the orig­i­nal and also changes the data per­ma­nent­ly in the user’s data­base (as opposed to Scot­t’s, which fil­ters it on the fly). You can set mine to do that (see the source code), but Scot­t’s will work that way out of the box. Which you pre­fer is up to you. Mine is more effi­cient, his affects all the archives with­out mak­ing you man­u­al­ly edit any­thing.

Usage: just copy the source code to a file named scripturize.php in your wp-con­tent/­plu­g­ins fold­er. Go to your admin­is­tra­tion pan­el, click on Plu­g­ins, and acti­vate it. Then just refer to the Bible in your posts. If you don’t want a Bible ref­er­ence hyper­linked, be sure to enclose it in pre­for­mat­ting tags, like so: 

<pre>John 3:16</pre>

Changes from Dean’s orig­i­nal:

  • You can spec­i­fy a trans­la­tion you want to link to by putting the stan­dard abbre­vi­a­tion after the ref­er­ence like so: John 3:16, NIV or 2 Cor 5:20 (NET). This one is huge, for me.
  • Added New Eng­lish Trans­la­tion. I like this trans­la­tion for sev­er­al rea­sons, but most­ly for its philo­soph­i­cal under­pin­nings.
  • Made syn­tax a lit­tle more per­mis­sive. For instance, you can now spec­i­fy a ref­er­ence by say­ing Gen. 12:1 or Gen 12:1 (period/no peri­od).
  • Made syn­tax a lit­tle less per­mis­sive as regards white­space. Just write things nor­mal­ly and every­thing will work fine (I changed this to cor­rect some errors I was see­ing where­in the link would run into the blank space after the ref­er­ence).
  • The reg­u­lar expres­sions han­dle link­ing a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent­ly. It does some­thing more use­ful when con­front­ed with a crazy ref­er­ence like Rom 1:3, 5–8, 10,12 that the online Bibles don’t know what to do with.
  • As I men­tioned, by default it will actu­al­ly change your post as stored in your data­base. For­ev­er. Irre­versibly. With no back­up. Just be aware of that.
  • You can now spec­i­fy a default trans­la­tion. It is ini­tial­ly set to the NIV, because I assume that’s what most peo­ple will want.

Please Report Bugs In Bug Track­er
I’d real­ly like to know if you catch any bugs. I use this plu­g­in myself, so bugs direct­ly affect me! 🙂

There is a bug track­er set up at http://dev.wp-plugins.org/newticket, so please report any prob­lems there.

transitioning to new content management software

I’m migrat­ing the site from Mov­able Type to Word­Press, so please par­don any tem­po­rary funk­i­ness. I’m also try­ing to refor­mat things to dis­tin­guish use­ful con­tent from fun con­tent using a cool tech­nique I ran across free cha­rade movie down­load .

A Message to Stanford Students

Hey–glad you stum­bled across the site.

You’re wel­come to poke around here and learn more about Paula and I. Just so you know, this web­site is a tool we use to keep fam­i­ly, friends, and min­istry part­ners up-to-date on our lives and min­istry.

So if you came here want­i­ng to learn more about Chi Alpha, check out Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford or nation­al Chi Alpha.

If I’m Freak­ing You Out
If you just stum­bled across this web­site while search­ing for some­thing else and are grow­ing increas­ing­ly hor­ri­fied as you read of my nefar­i­ous plans to engage stu­dents in spir­i­tu­al dis­cus­sions, allow me to explain myself.

Some stu­dents are real­ly uptight about reli­gion, but most are not. Stu­dents gen­er­al­ly enjoy hav­ing a non-pushy and thought-pro­vok­ing dis­cus­sion with some­one about inter­est­ing things like the mean­ing of life, the exis­tence of God, the nature of moral­i­ty, and the pow­er of reli­gious belief.

Those are the peo­ple I inter­act with. I don’t roam about the cam­pus like a lion seek­ing unwit­ting stu­dents to devour. I talk with peo­ple about things they want to talk about.

For the record, Chi Alpha is an orga­ni­za­tion in good stand­ing with Stan­ford Asso­ci­at­ed Reli­gions and is also a reg­is­tered vol­un­tary stu­dent orga­ni­za­tion at Stan­ford. That means our pres­ence is sanc­tioned by the uni­ver­si­ty.

So chill.

If I’m Freak­ing You Out Now
If, on the oth­er hand, you were fine with every­thing I said until I explained that I’m not pushy and obnox­ious, read on.

Being pushy and rude isn’t the Bib­li­cal mod­el for evan­ge­lism. Don’t believe me?

  • Con­sid­er the Gold­en Rule (Matthew 7:12), where­in Jesus tells us to treat oth­ers the way we want to be treat­ed. That applies to evan­ge­lism, too. If you would­n’t want an athe­ist, Mus­lim, or Mor­mon talk­ing to you a cer­tain way, don’t talk that way to oth­ers.
  • Notice Peter’s advice that we are called to live in such a way that peo­ple ask us ques­tions about our beliefs, and when they do we answer them gen­tly and respect­ful­ly (1 Peter 3:15–16)
  • Con­sid­er Paul’s prayer request in Colos­sians 4:3–4, in which he prays for oppor­tu­ni­ties. Note that he does not announce his clever plans for trick­ing peo­ple into talk­ing with him. He prays that God would bring the con­ver­sa­tions about.

In oth­er words, I’m not shirk­ing back from pro­claim­ing the gospel clear­ly, nor am I capit­u­lat­ing to some insane cam­pus speech code, nor am I liv­ing in fear of the sec­u­lar sta­tus quo. I’m mere­ly being wise and bib­li­cal.

Just think about it: I’m an ordained min­is­ter and nation­al­ly appoint­ed mis­sion­ary with the Assem­blies of God, which the world’s largest Protes­tant denom­i­na­tion and which is con­sid­ered by many to be the most effec­tive mis­sion­ary move­ment in the his­to­ry of the world (reflect on this: we did­n’t exist 100 years ago and are now one of the largest reli­gious move­ments any­where). The Assem­blies of God did­n’t send us to reach Stan­ford because we’re some kind of cow­ard­ly wimps. They sent us because they believe we are called, gift­ed, and guid­ed by God for this task.

So chill.