Merry Christmas!

It’s Christ­mas Eve and I’m off to bed, so have a mer­ry Christ­mas. The well-known words of Isaac Watts express my sen­ti­ments best:

Joy to the world! the Lord is come:
let earth receive her King;
let every heart pre­pare him room,
and heav­en and nature sing,
and heav­en and nature sing,
and heav­en, and heav­en and nature sing.

Joy to the world! the Sav­ior reigns;
let us our songs employ,
while fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
repeat the sound­ing joy,
repeat the sound­ing joy,
repeat, repeat the sound­ing joy.

No more let sins and sor­rows grow,
nor thorns infest the ground;
he comes to make his bless­ings flow
far as the curse is found,
far as the curse is found,
far as, far as the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,
and makes the nations prove
the glo­ries of his right­eous­ness,
and won­ders of his love,
and won­ders of his love,
and won­ders, won­ders of his love.

Now I’m off to have visions of sug­arplums dance in my head.

The Greek New Testament Online

I just ran across a most remark­able online Bible study tool: the Greek New Tes­ta­ment brows­er. If you ever want to do some seri­ous study this site will be pret­ty help­ful. I can’t say enough good things about this site’s ele­gant inter­face and sol­id con­tent.

Hat tip to the two excel­lent blogs who brought it to my atten­tion: the New Tes­ta­ment Gate­way and the Bible Soft­ware Review.

On A Cool Tangent

Yes it is our anniver­ary (as well as Jayne Zick­afoose’s birth­day), yet I still find time to blog. I’m such a roman­tic.

I just noticed that a friend of ours, Earl Creps (UPDATE: Earl also has a blog: RSS feed here), has been nom­i­nat­ed to host one of the cohort groups at the Emer­gent con­ven­tion in San Diego.

Although they mis­spelled his name.

Any­way, I just thought that was cool.

And to stave off any mar­i­tal-coun­sel­ing com­ments, Paula and I have been hav­ing a per­fect­ly won­der­ful anniver­sary and are in the process of get­ting ready for an evening out.

Prepared To Party

Hear ye, hear ye: today is Glen & Paula’s 8th wed­ding anniver­sary.

That will be all. Move along.

Too Pooped To Party

Paula, Dana and I just returned from our Christ­mas pil­grim­mage to Louisiana. And we’re all exhaust­ed.

It was a nice vis­it, and Dana behaved like an angel on all the flights, but it’s nice to be back in our own home with our own wire­less interenet con­nec­tion and our own weath­er and our own time­zone.

Oh, and our own beds. Dana has already become reac­quaint­ed with hers and Paula and I will soon ambush ours.

Christ, Christmas, and Credit Cards

Randy Jumper, an old friend from grad school, just post­ed a won­der­ful piece from NPR.

Excerpt:

I’m not fight­ing the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of Christ­mas; that fight was lost ages ago. What I’m after is more rad­i­cal: Dis­en­tan­gling Jesus entire­ly from this blight on his good name. I’m out to change the bumper stick­er from ‘Keep Christ in Christ­mas’ to ‘Free Christ from Christ­mas.’

Heresy? Well, com­pare Christ­mas with Mar­tin Luther King’s birth­day. On his birth­day, nobody ever pays any atten­tion to his birth. Instead, it’s ‘I have a dream’ and his impact on soci­ety. We mark Dr. King’s birth by focus­ing on what he said and did as an adult. Christ­mas, by con­trast, has no time for what the adult Jesus said and did. Christ­mas keeps him safe­ly shut up as a baby in the manger, where he can’t make his usu­al noise about peo­ple repent­ing and liv­ing a god­ly life.

…

I’m not propos­ing that we can­cel Christ­mas. I know, the econ­o­my would col­lapse with­out it. Fine. Keep the gift-giv­ing and the jin­gle bells. Let’s just sub­tract the remain­ing Jesus ele­ment from it and move that over into East­er. Call Decem­ber 25th Sol­stice. Call it Retail Day. Call it Hol­i­day Num­ber Nine. I don’t care, just leave Christ out of it. He was not born to be the patron saint of fourth-quar­ter earn­ings.

Merry Christmas, Nina!

You know those white ele­phant gift exchanges–the ones where you bring a gag gift and it goes into a pool and every­one picks out a lame gift at ran­dom and then opens it in front of every­one?

Well, they just did that at UNC Chi Alpha, and they caught the fun­ni­est gag gift I’ve ever seen on tape. See what Nina got for Christ­mas! (a 40 sec­ond movie in Win­dows Media Play­er for­mat)

It’s not obvi­ous on the video, but the gift is indeed a live rat.

My com­men­da­tions to Brad Novosad for his most excel­lent dis­ci­ple­ship of these stu­dents in the ways of mer­ri­ment.

Thanksgiving 2004

Thanks­giv­ing was quite won­der­ful.

My broth­er Greg vis­it­ed (and we played through Halo 2 on co-op–he had the same reac­tion I did to the abrupt end­ing), we had a ton of stu­dents over for Turkey Day itself, my friend Antho­ny got XBox live and we gamed togeth­er, and I bought a 200 gig hard dri­ve for under $50. Got­ta love those Fry’s “day after Thanks­giv­ing” spe­cials…

Any­way, giv­en my new abun­dance of disk space I decid­ed to install Lin­ux. I did it once in col­lege and enjoyed play­ing with it. I expect­ed much the same expe­ri­ence (name­ly a few days of fight­ing with arcane and need­less­ly obscure con­fig­u­ra­tion files), and I have to say I’m blown away by how far it’s come. I down­loaded the Fedo­ra Core 3 dis­tri­b­u­tion and set­up was a snap. Fedo­ra auto-detect­ed every­thing (includ­ing my sound card and net­work con­fig­u­ra­tion) and installed a very nice graph­i­cal inter­face called Gnome.

And to top it off, it kept all my exist­ing infor­ma­tion intact so that my com­put­er will now boot either Win­dows XP or Lin­ux at my whim.

How cool is that?

Strongbad 118

On a much hap­pi­er note, Strong­bad #118 is one of the fun­ni­est Strong Bad emails in a long, long time.

Ouch.

I was out of town all day yes­ter­day and got back late enough that I did­n’t both­er to check any sports scores. I had had some inti­ma­tion of the rude infor­ma­tion that await­ed me in the San Jose Mer­cury News sports sec­tion (owing to an ill-timed con­so­la­tion call from the Chi Alpha leader at Berke­ley).

So we lost Big Game. Again. And we lost Big Game big. Almost as bad­ly as it has ever been lost (although out­ranked by our 1930 41–0 romp over Cal).

I think the prop­er atti­tude is con­veyed in Mark Pur­dy’s col­umn:

Oh, it could have gone worse for Stan­ford on a windy, blus­tery after­noon. But only if a tree had fall­en on The Tree.

Cal’s 41–6 vic­to­ry Sat­ur­day was so awful, Stan­ford fans spent the sec­ond half leav­ing in droves — in lux­u­ry cars, actu­al­ly, but in drove-like for­ma­tion.

Heh. It’s a game we lost, but it’s only a game.

Of course, had we won I’d be singing an alto­geth­er dif­fer­ent tune about the rel­a­tive impor­tance of squash­ing one’s rivals like bugs. But we did­n’t win, and so I adopt the more ratio­nal atti­tude. 🙂