John Piper on the Prosperity Gospel

I had the opportunity today to talk to somebody about the danger of the "prosperity gospel" - that somehow if you accept Jesus to be Lord over your life that you will become wealthy or that everything will go well for you.

Truly accepting Jesus as your savior will fill you with a joy unlike any other. But not because of some object here on earth that is protected, but because you've acquired an inheritance that can never perish, that will not fade or tarnish. But until that time comes, Jesus makes promises like these:

Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of men, for they will deliver you over to courts and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them and the Gentiles. When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.
Matthew 10:16-22

To be completely honest, Jesus was speaking specifically to his disciples at the time before he sent them into the towns in Samaria. But the message still applies. Even though those of us in Jesus have a Redeemer, we still live in a fallen world. How much more valuable is He who made the world than anything that is in it?

Books That Changed My Life

Sorry if your reader picks this up twice.  I only now realized that the Amazon links don't show up in readers, so I'm putting titles in - it might show a second time in your reader.
 
Lifehacker ran a post called "The Books That Changed Your Lives".  I didn't vote, but I'll post some of the ones that changed my life.

The Bible. Not sure there's a whole lot left to say. What book could possibly have more impact on a person's life than inerrant truth, inspired by the God of all the Universe? Most of it is simple enough that a child can comprehend it, but there's such a wealth of knowledge that you can spend your entire lifetime swimming in it and always learning something new. The Bible is God's primary means by which He makes Himself known to us. If you're waiting around for God to speak to you, open up your Bible.

Lately, I'm reading the ESV translation.

Knowing God by JI Packer. This book was what finally motivated me to read the Bible from front to back for the very first time. And this is one of those books that I've bought many copies of. It's such an amazing read by a great theologian who's still alive today. I've bought it many times because every time I buy it, I get to read through it once, and then give a copy away. Which really says a lot about a book - if I really value a book, I keep it for myself. But this is one of those books I value so much I give it away every chance I get.


Let the Nations Be Glad by John Piper. This was my first introduction to John Piper. And with a title like Let the Nations Be Glad, I was certain it was going to be stuffy reading. While John Piper does know his theology, and he does work to make that clear to others, this is a very important read to anybody who is considering life as a missionary, particularly in frontier missions. However, even if you're going for one week, the principles in this book still apply - missions are a means to another end - that God would be glorified. There will be no missions in Heaven because there will only be worship - the end for which the means exist today.

Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell. I didn't want to make all the books on the list theology. But I did want the bar to be high - books that have truly changed my life. This book hasn't really shaped my worldview or my way of thinking, but it was the very first book I read that showed me some real value to reading. As an adult, you would call it a "real page turner". The story is riveting, and I don't recall ever getting bored with it. The few characters are extremely well-developed, which is requisite for any story to really get my attention. By the end of the book, your thoughts are wrapped up in her life - you want so badly for her to see her family again. Sorry - I don't have any great life-lessons to extract from it.

I'm not much of a reader, which is unfortunate. I've read many other books (I don't use "many" as relative to other people, but I've read more than 10 books in my life, some without pictures), but there are surprisingly few that truly changed my life. I hope you take some time and look into the ones I've listed here, and let me know if your life is changed as well.

Christ and Cutting Language

A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to go to the Desiring God National Conference. I had enough airline miles, a good friend to share a hotel room with, and approval from both the Budget Review Committee and the Executive Scheduling Committee to go. That was the first time I had the opportunity to hear Mark Driscoll teach. I had heard of Driscoll before, but had not heard him in person.

I don't think all the talk ended up on the conference audio, but there was some hoopla after Driscoll that Piper might not have appreciated all the strong (no swearing, but certainly colorful) language that Driscoll uses.

I've always had the following as my litmus test for people who use that type of language in the church:

• Does the message exalt the Lord Jesus Christ?
• Is the message biblically true (see the first point)?
• Is the use of such devices effective for the target audience?

In Driscoll's case, the answer is almost always "absolutely yes!"

In Sunday school, we're studying the Book of Acts right now. Just before moving to Charlotte, Mrs. at Home and I had spent what seemed to be about 2 years in the Book of Acts, but every time you read something over again in the Bible, you learn something brand new. This time around, I've been almost shocked by Peter's sermon at Pentecost, Peter's sermon at Solomon's Portico and Stephen's sermon before the Council. To quote our teacher, these messages don't seem very seeker sensitive, do they? But these strong words result in the glory of Christ and the salvation of people!

Certainly this year's conference will also have talk about when it's appropriate to use tender language or sensitive language or more inviting language or less biting language. But if all these types of language pass the litmus tests above, they're all loving language. You're parents sometimes use firm language in order to correct you, and they correct you out of love. Yes, phrases like "whom you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men" are strong, but they're spoken out of love for people and jealousy for the name of Jesus Christ to be glorified.

The New Digs

This week I started working out of a new office which is much closer to home. Same company, same position, just a different location. I don't have a space with my name on it anymore, but that's okay - this is the view I have when I need to stand up for awhile. And, if I have some teammates in the office at the same time and we need to have a standing thinking session, there's always the putting green downstairs.
Oh - and yes, that's a storm rolling in. Another benefit of working there is I get to watch God's meteorological handiwork in action if the mood strikes me. And believe it or not, with all this distraction, I've been much more productive this week - largely because without people I know in the same vicinity, I get fewer distractions. And I have little distractions like these that take a minute to enjoy and take my focus away from the screen so I can come up with my next great idea.

Time to Turn Green

If you live in "A Whole 'Nother Country" - and you know who you are - it's time for you to turn green. With envy.

When we lived in Texas, I complained almost constantly about the weather (or lack thereof). Mrs. At Home's aunt and uncle were here this weekend for me to commiserate with on the subject. Here, it gets every bit as hot in the summer as in Texas. But in Texas, it seems that from Memorial Day until Labor Day, the temperature never drops below 80°F. This becomes grueling after a couple of months - going outside at 6am with a temperature of 83°F.

Tonight, Mrs. At Home and I walked over to the nearby shopping center for a smoothie. As we walked we thought it felt a bit cool. With the humidity, by the time we got back, we weren't as shocked at the coolness of the air. When I got home, I checked emails, then glanced at my menu bar. Noticed that the CPU's were running at 151°F - which is hotter than normal, but I wasn't surprised because I've been encoding M*A*S*H Season 8 to H.264 for the past few hours.

Then this other temperature caught my eye. 83°

Now, that doesn't seem too cool - except that it had been 90°F today, and it usually takes until 11pm or so for the temperature to get that low. So it reminded me of how cool it was tonight. So I looked at the forecast for tonight:



Yes, readers. The low tonight is supposed to be 58°F. And you can bet we already have the windows open, and we'll be sleeping blissfully, hurried off to sleep by the cool wind, and the soothing sounds of traffic on the nearby highway they affectionately call "The Autobahn". That, my friends, is the beauty of living in North Carolina.

And for a current shot:



And it feels much, much cooler.

HOWTO: Blogger Template in YUI

I'm not necessarily going to have all the steps here that I used on Mrs. At Home's blog, but I'll do what I can.

Backup your existing template
Under Layout, Edit HTML, there's a link that says Download Full Template. use this first and quickly. And make a backup of that backup. This is the code required to "recover" your blog to what it is today.

Make another blog
With a single blogger account, you can have more than one blog. Make a secondary one to be your sandbox for making these changes. As you start from scratch with a really simplified design, using the sandbox without any cruft will make the code more understandable.

Make your banner and upload to the sandbox
The banner is a very critical part of your new design. I'm not a CSS expert by any stretch, and I tried every combination of text-align: center in every selector I could come up with, and never got it right. So in the case of Mrs. At Home's blog, I punted and made her banner 950 pixels wide - the width of the page layout. It works, but it's still not "right" So with a bit of going back and forth between Blogger "stretch" templates and reading up some more on CSS, I finally found out that to center an img inside a block properly, you need to add the following attributes:

margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;

Maybe one day I'll reduce the size of Mrs. At Home's banner again to save some bits on the wire.

Use a style inspector
In Firefox, you can use the Firebug extension. I've found Firebug to be one of the most useful tools for a browser you can have. I've used it for hacking AJAX'y types of sites, and for skipping lots of pages in paginated data. But in the case of developing a blog, you'll need it for seeing the styles that contributed to the calculated style of an element - right click and select Inspect.

For calculated styles, however, what has turned out to be even better in my personal use is built in to Safari. If you go to Preferences, Advanced, there's a checkbox that says "Display Develop Menu" When this is activated, you can right click an element on a page and inspect it, and on the right side, you'll see the calculated style and where the attributes came from and which were cancelled.

Use YUI
Ever since I saw the YUI CSS libraries, I was thrilled to have a "CSS Framework" that works across platforms and that is simple to use. It seems that a very large number of sites have the same basic structure - a header at the top, the middle has navigation on one side and content taking up the majority of the middle, and then a footer. The YUI Grids stylesheets make setting up various configurations of these a snap. In fact, if you use the YUI Grids Builder, it will generate the code for you, and you just fill in each of the sections. YUI Reset takes all formatting down to nothing so that styles are added and it makes cross-platform styling much simpler. YUI Fonts makes sizing of fonts more consistent across all the browsers, although their fallback system doesn't seem to be working 100% correctly. (Mrs. At Home uses a pretty rare font for the post titles on her blog, and on Windows, the fallback on Firefox is a serif font, and on IE it's a sans-serif font.)

I used the grids builder to make the framework code for Mrs. At Home's site, then started making changes.

Start filling in
If you're starting from scratch, this part is really easy. In order to take advantage of some of the easy configuration tools on Blogger, you'll need to add these sections to the appropriate places in the framework:

<b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='1' showaddelement='no'>
</b:section>

<b:section class='crosscol' id='crosscol' showaddelement='no'/>

<b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>
</b:section>

<b:section class='sidebar' id='sidebar' preferred='yes'>
</b:section>

<b:section class='footer' id='footer'>
</b:section>

The sections get picked up by the Layout editor in Blogger, so you can just use the layout editor to add all your widgets - like blogrolls, history, pictures, etc.

Finish Up
If you want to use the Blogger color and font picker, you need to do some "creative merging" of the template stylesheet that comes with a template and the YUI stylesheet. If you want to make the template as clean as possible, just do the font and color setup in your own CSS. For Mrs. At Home's blog, we used our own CSS rather than the Blogger template, but the decision is up to you.

Of course, look at it on lots of different browsers. Even with YUI, there are little annoyances that we've had to work around, like IE 6 not dealing with transparent images exactly right, so we had to switch to non-transparent ones.

Tourists and Climbers

Since the girls are out of town, Mrs. At Home and I had a fabulous dinner, just getting to talk.  Nothing earth shattering.  We've made no life-changing decisions or anything like that, but it was wonderful just to get to talk for awhile.

I don't recall what brought the conversation up, but we were both just marveling at how people brag about some of their feats when it's just daily activity for others.  Yes, I know we all need to have goals, and nobody is the best at everything, and exceedingly few, even, is the very best at any one thing.  But there are some extraordinary feats that people do that they have to qualify in order to somehow shoehorn themselves into the category of the elite.

Now, I don't want to take anything away from people who have summited Mt. Everest.  However, it seems that there are many, many records for people who summit Everest, and those who don't read much about it, or haven't seen enough IMAX films on it or just don't know much about Everest think that people who make the news in their amazing feats on Everest are somehow unique in doing so.

For example, Fox News had a story about a man who has made it to the summit 10 times.  I couldn't do it - that's absolutely astounding.  And he's broken a record by doing so.  He became the first non-Nepalese to summit Mt. Everest.  This guy has made it 10 times and is now a record-holder, but they have to put him in a category of "non-experts to do an expert thing."  Many people brag of their exploits of prowess, but they have to put themselves in a new category in order for it to make any sense.

To put this in perspective, the Sherpa are an ethnic group that are centered around the Himalayas in Nepal, and a "sherpa" might or might not be a Sherpa, but is a "tour guide" who gets you up to the summit of Everest.  Appa is a sherpa who has summited Everest 18 times, and there's another who's made it 15 times, and many others who've made it more than the 10 times that's so jaw-dropping.  Even more astounding is that Appa is a guide, and in Everest parlance, that means he carries your junk up the mountain so you don't have to.  It's a remarkable feat even to make it to Base Camp of Everest, but it seems that nobody ever remembers that it was the sherpas who carried all the junk there.  I'm sure that many other sherpas could summit Everest many, many times, but either become bored with it or realize there's more money to be made at the bottom of the mountain - more trips with more stuff, whereas at the top, you don't have to carry as much stuff, and they shove you out of the picture when they make it so that everybody thinks you're a hot shot and made it all by yourself.

Here are some other records of note we should begin tracking:

• All the passengers of the Concorde could be "first 10,000 non-pilots to break the sound barrier" (I don't know how many people ever flew on the Concorde, and I'm sure there were other non-pilots before the Concorde, but I digress).
• In the first season of inter-league play, we heard tons of firsts, like "first out in inter-league play", "first home run in inter-league play", and "first full count with runners in scoring position on a Tuesday in inter-league play".
• First non-astronaut in space.

It also occurs to me that we as consumers just love this stuff.  This is why Circus of the Stars (first non-trapeze artist to do a successful exchange) and American Idol (first non-video-friendly person to get a recording contract) and Survivor (first American-born CPA to survive on an island with a complete television crew where we had to kick all the natives off) are so popular.

Amendment: Red Beans and Rice

Oh my goodness!  I forgot one of the most critical ingredients.  Garlic.  You'll need to add (to quote Emeril Lagasse) "I dunno....40 cloves of garlic."  Or to quote me - enough.  You need to add exactly enough garlic.  If you put in more than exactly enough, then there's too much.  If you don't put in quite enough, you put in too little.

Garlic, in red beans and rice, doesn't seem to contribute too much to the heat or zip.  The cayenne will provide all the zip.  So if you like the flavor of garlic in your red beans, use more.  If you don't like that garlic flavor, use less.

Red Beans and Rice

A friend a few years ago served us red beans and rice for supper. To know me is to know I love me some beans and rice. So she told us how to make it, and I forgot, then decided to venture on my own. I make great red beans and rice now. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients

• If you have a big crock pot, 2 bags of red kidney beans.  If you have a small crock pot 1.
• If you have a big crock pot, a ham hock.  Ham bone will do.
• Enough Andouille sausage
• A green bell pepper
• Enough onions
• Enough green onions (yes, white and green)
• Enough cayenne pepper (if you have kids, a tiny bit is enough)
• Enough Tony Cachere's Original Creole Seasoning
• Rice

Preparation

Soak the beans in water overnight.  While the beans soak, cut the sausage into bite-size chunks.  Dice the white onion.  Slice the green onion all the way up the stalk - use the whole thing.  Seed and dice the green bell pepper.

The following morning, drain the beans.  Put the ham hock in your crock pot.  Add the beans, sausage, pepper, onion, green onions, cayenne, and Tony's.  Add enough water to just cover everything - some beans will still float, so depending on the size of the ham hock, that might be your gauge.  Heat on low heat for what will seem an eternity - 8-10 hours, depending on when you got everything ready.  When the time is up, smash up some of the beans and stir back in to thicken the broth.

Cook up some rice in your rice cooker.  Add some additional green onion as a garnish, and if you have kids, you only put a teeny bit of cayenne in, so add some Tabasco or Frank's.

Notes

Notice I give very precise measurements.  "Enough" means exactly that - no less than enough, no more than enough. With this, since you can't really taste as you go, you're safer to deal with what seems to be a bunch of Tony's - get a good layer on top of the crock pot with it, and what seems to be a pinch of cayenne. Cayenne is very hot, and a very little bit goes a very long way.

Gang! Gang! The hail's all here!

Gang! Gang! The hail's all here!, originally uploaded by wstranathan.

You can't see it in the photo, but it's hailing right now. Not very
large at all, but there's hail. Along with some much-beefed rain.

MOBILE: Updates on At Home

Sorry for the silence the past few days. It's been a bit chaotic.

Mrs. At Home is still in TX. Please continue to pray for Granny,
brother A, and Mrs. At Home's safe travel home.

We survived Sunday! K's coach gave everybody trophies and gave stats
and said nice things about each player. Of the things he said about K,
the one I'm most proud of is that all year, K never once compained
about playing catcher every game. The baptism was awesome. 45 people,
and good barbecue.

After last week's post on Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/), I set K
on front of it again. For two days, that's basically all she's wanted
to do. Awesome!!

K spent the night with friends last night, so L and I went swimming
and had a blast. L couldn't sleep because of the thunder, and this
morning she was asleep on Mrs. At Home's throne. She slept until
9:15, too.

More details when I'm tethered.

Enter the Dragon

Enter the Dragon, originally uploaded by wstranathan.

Bowling fun

Bowling fun, originally uploaded by wstranathan.

Mrs. At Home...Isn't

Mrs. At Home has left for Texas to be with her family during an emergency.  So she hopped on a plane this afternoon headed for....Baltimore.  Funny how airlines find the right route by sending you the wrong direction.

Anyhow, during her absence, I will try to do my best of giving you all of K & L that you can handle.

It occurred to me that I have to do all the stuff this week that she normally has to do. This in addition to trying to hold down a job that actually does pay in money. (I'm sure Mrs. At Home will tell you her job is rewarding - she just doesn't make a salary). Fortunately (ha!) Mrs. At Home said this was a light week.

Here's our plans for Sunday:

• Church
• Pack a bag for the girls to spend the night with friends
• Water Mrs. At Home's flowers
• Feed Tinker
• Water Tinker
• Go to K's softball party
• Go to the outdoor baptism (don't forget cookies!)
• From the baptism, the girls go home with friends
• I help tear down the tables and such from the baptism

And that's Sunday - the Sabbath - the day of rest.

I decided that's simply too much information every day for me to keep in my head.  So we made note cards with checklists for every day that Mrs. At Home is gone.  She promised to be back for L's dress rehearsal on Saturday, so we have stuff for 8 days.  Tonight, we have one more item to finish to complete our checklist - finish making the cookies.  So I'm working on that now.

And just because this wouldn't be a Mrs. At Home post without it, I'm listening to one of her favorite albums (which I introduced her to, thank you) - TFK Phenomenon.

WE WIN!!!

WE WIN!!!, originally uploaded by wstranathan.

Some things I've Learned

I don't often talk about work here - after all, this is Will at Home, but I thought I'd share some phrases I've learned on the job site. Perhaps these will be of use to you in the future. Nah - probably not. But they're fun nonetheless.

• That's [insert time interval here] that I won't ever get back.  This is what you say when you've spent some amount of time doing something non-productive.  Feel free to use the time interval that makes sense to you.  I won't mind.
• Shape the ball of mud.  Another phrase for trying to make order out of chaos, I suppose.
• Weapons-grade stupidity.  Need I say more?
• Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

WFMW: The Mom Dad I'm Bored Edition - Scratch!

This is my first Works for me Wednesday post, so please be gentle.

This week's Works for me Wednesday theme is "Mom Dad I'm Bored!" Now Rocks in my Dryer might not want me hijacking the name, but this one is worth sharing. So my choices are to either hijack the name, or hijack Mrs. At Home's blog.

Scratch is an interactive learning program from MIT. For those who remember Turtle Logo, this is a modern version of the same. The idea is to train kids early in some of the fundamentals of computer programming, but to do it in a very simple way. For my 7-year old, I tried Turtle Logo for awhile, which she thought was fun, but it's actually not long before the geometry gets in the way of the programming.

With Scratch, you're given a stage where you place actors. You also have a scripts area where you begin to put your programs together. But in the programming, you don't have to deal with an odd or cryptic syntax, or have to remember the correct punctuation for a while loop - you drag building blocks from a toolbox of available commands into the script area. On the left is a a script I wrote in about 17 seconds. Whe

The Scratch website has lots and lots of scripts that others have uploaded. I have a friend whose kids wrote a pong game on the weekends. There are lots of videos to explain how to do stuff. And the thing is, there are plenty of event handlers to make games with a little more work. But for younger kids, you'll want to stick with simple animations explaining from the very basics - it does precisely what you tell it to, sequences of events, and control structures.

For more Works for me Wednesdays, be sure to visit Rocks in my Dryer.

The New Valerie at Home

Well, I got a wild hair tonight and decided to go ahead and simplify the template for Mrs. At Home's blog. I'm glad I went ahead and did it. After figuring out how much Blogger code to copy and paste in, and a whole lot of mangling of the stylesheets, Mrs. At Home is finally pleased with it (tonight anyway).

The layout was made substantially easier by using YUI Reset, YUI Fonts, YUI Grids, and YUI Base. I know you're only supposed to use Base for development, but since it's a blog, I don't know all the elements that might end up being used, so it was easier just to have YUI turn those back into something resembling what the browser would use.

So go check it out. If something doesn't lay out right, be sure to let me or Mrs. At Home know.

An Elite Disappointment

I originally didn't want to have to make this post, but after hearing things on the radio toight, I felt I had to. For those who don't know, I've slowly been becoming a fan of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) - what is widely referred to as Ultimate Fighting - except that Ultimate Fighting Championship is just one of the promotions of MMA. I think the best in the sport are some of the best-conditioned all-around athletes, and the sport is very much a thinking-man's sport.

However, last Saturday, CBS finally brought MMA to prime-time network television. This was supposed to be a huge event for MMA because it's finally making it into the "mainstream". The sport has been relegated to B-channels and pay-per-view (at best) for years, and while it's gaining in popularity, has not had the widespread coverage that other sports have had - regardless of whether or not their "stock" is up or down.

Unfortunately, just about the worst thing that could happen to the sport did. Rather than get A-list fighters, CBS got a deal with EliteXC, which basically qualifies as a "C-league" of MMA. Whereas in the UFC, to be a descent fighter you have to have some amount of grappling ability to succeed, EliteXC is largely filled with "brawlers" The end result is that fans of MMA were not entertained, and those who had the idea that MMA was about just plain fist-fighting without rules, got pretty much exactly that.

If you're not a fan of MMA but the idea of it interests you, I hope you get a chance to see some better-class MMA. While I'm happy it's made it to prime time, those who thought it was just about brawling were proven right when CBS brought the scrubs to prime time. If you'd like to see mixed martial arts that take not only brute-force strength, but skill and speed as well, take a look at your listings on your B-channels (Versus, Spike TV) for UFC or WEC.

1337 designer skillz

1337 Designer skillz - I has dem - NOT!

The new Valerie at Home brand is coming along nicely. But I didn't design it. I've gotten to be involved in working on it, messing with the blogger template and tracing Mrs. At Home's work, but the creativity is all hers. But for the more technical, here are some of the things we've done over the past few days:

• Set up a subversion repo here on our data disk to keep this under version control. Just got through fixing the permissions on the repo so that Mrs. At Home and I both can check in.
• Mrs. At Home used Pages '08 to make a very nifty banner concept based on her work at Dish it Out.
  
• Since we couldn't export the graphic from Pages '08 in a graphical format, yesterday, I just did a screenshot of the banner and put that up until...
• I traced over the graphic today with Inkscape.  Using Inkscape, we'll be able to make the graphics as big as we want without losing quality.  Behold the power of SVG (or any vector graphic).
• Based on the color scheme and style Mrs. At Home selected, I made a favicon for the title bar, tab bar (in Firefox), and the title of each post.  I did this using Inkscape again so that I could take the very same graphic and enlarge it for the ping pong drop (see later).
• Mangled and mangled the previous Blogger template to get all the stuff to work.  In particular, there were some interesting spacing issues created by the graphics they were using that it took me awhile to find and get corrected.

Hopefully it will be close to presentable before the She Speaks con.  Mrs. At Home also wants business cards, letterhead, 10,000 bumper stickers, a billboard, a blimp, and to drop 1.84 million ping pong balls on uptown Charlotte with the new logo.  After all that, here are some of the next steps to do to the blog:

• Simplify the layout using YUI.  And I mean completely starting over.  This should seriously simplify things.
• Ensure all the colors are complimentary to the colors of the logo and banner, including ads from Google Adsense and any other external content that's brought in.