I just happened to be in the room when a story came on the news about a lawyer getting shot in broad daylight outside of the court house. That sounds aweful, but it's ten trillion times worse when you see the video or slideshow here: http://www.nbc10.com/news/2600656/detail.html.
"I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out." Luke 19:40
It would be a sin for me not to share the way the Lord has been providing for Stephanie and I these past few weeks. The Lord has used some unexpected "problems" to get us to rest on Him for His provision.
Last week, BigBlueHat was supposed to be publishing its first e-commerce site. Everything was in place, all we thought we'd have to do is "flip the switch." Turns out, one has to be a certified flip-switcher before that can happen.
We were told the certification process would take 6-8 weeks. That was about 6-8 weeks longer than we had expected. After a few sales calls, it looked like we had a Plan B available that would cut the time down to 1-2 weeks. The time frame was much more to our liking, so after some prayer we jumped. I'm confident the Lord has used every piece of this circumstance to focus us on Him.
After jumping, we found out (Monday of this week) that Plan B was actually (due to one of the companies current work load) going to take the same amount of time as Plan A. Tuesday came. We prayed some more and decided to go with Plan A. We had already started the transfer of $199 to facilitate Plan B. After some research, we found that if we were going to get any use out of our $199 investment, we'd have to spend at least another $195 (ask me about Merchant accounts some time).
The Lord gave us grace and strength. We were able to call the company we had spent the $199 with and cancel our order. To the Lord's praise, that company doesn't actually fulfill transactions until the first of each month. We were able, by God's grace, to cancel the order and never spend a dime.
His way is perfect. In the midst of all this he has pushed us farther than we thought we could go, brought us to a new horizon of expansion (being certified with a major payment gateway), and increased our faith 100 fold.
I did find that after circumstances became a little more "stable," that I began to put my faith back on the shelf and start to worry about what to do next. I know my Lord is greater than myself. I know that He provides food and clothing for His children. I just never thought I'd have trouble believing that.
If you ever catch me worrying, ask me who owns my business.
Today I had reasonably long conversations with 5 different sales people: John, Tony, Michelle, Wade, Aaron.
I now have some very formal opinions about sales and tech support positions.
John, Tony, and Michelle all work for Paymentech. All three of these people were pleasant, kind, and generally helpful. It did take a few phone calls to get the information that I needed, but I didn't mind because the waits were very short and the people were pleasant enough.
Wade works for Authorize.Net. When I called, I asked for pricing for their payment gateway. He gave me straight up answers to all my questions.
Aaron works for another company (which will remain nameless as I have not used their product and do not want to speak ill of them for just a couple sales calls). My experience with Aaron was a little, one sided. He was extremely helpful in the area of education concerning payment gateway, which was nice. After the education time was over, things went a little down hill. It took me about 5 minutes to get to the price. Once I got there, it was rather steep (at least it wasn't in my price range).
Perhaps I reacted to the price, or maybe it was my mention of using Authorize.Net. From that point on I heard nothing but the accolades of the product he was selling. He encouraged me to call Authorize.Net back to ask them more questions. I did. I then called him back and gave him the info. My comparitive shopping was not to his liking. "Well if you don't care about your transactions..." and "That's not the prices they quoted yesterday. Did you ask him to give it to you in writing?"
It was a little overwhelming since I only intended on getting a price quote. After the "brow-beating" I decided that I would take my "risks" with Authorize.Net.
Wade, my dear friend at Authorize.Net has sent me the sign up form. Sorry Aaron.
Last night I added the subscribe/unsubscribe feature for comments on Ben's Friends. If you would like to have this feature added to your blog, please let me know.
Special thanks to ScriptyGoddess (don't worry, it's a good site) for creating the script.
3D Border Demo 2 by Chris Hester
For those of you interested in CSS, feel free to figure out how they did this. 8o)
The Scripturizer 1.2 plugin by Dean Peters and Jonathan Fox is now available for use on your blogs. Basically, this little plugin turns all your Bible references into links to bible.gospelcom.net. For those who like to hack their own templates here's how to add it:
Change any <$MTEntryBody$> that you find to <$MTEntryBody scripturize="ESV"$>. The available translations are NIV, NASB, AMP, NLT, KJV, ESV, CEV, NKJV, KJ21, ASV, WE, YLT, DARBY, WYC, NIV-UK. Whichever one you pick will be used for all scripture references.
The main two templates you'll need to make the change in are the "Main Index" template and the "Individual Entry Archive" template. Your welcome to add it to all of them if you'd like.
There are more Ben's Friends additions in the works. Stay tuned. 8o)
If you haven't been to "A Glimpse...That Place" yet, you need to go and see the blog storm that's been going on over there for the past few days. They're new to blogging, but not new to writing. 8o)
It seems Apple is taking on a somewhat more agressive front.
In reading through the "why upgrade" page I posted a link to earlier today, I found that you can look up words at dictionary.com from within the location bar (where you type web page addresses).
To search for a word simply type "dict {your word}" and hit enter.
Yet another reason to upgrade. 8o)
Reasons to switch to the Mozilla Firebird browser
If your browser has a funny little flag in the top right corner, you need to read this and follow the instructions at the bottom.
If you like Tolkien, Narnia, or hobbit-like-conquests-against-mordor, you should check out A Glimpse...That Place. It's run by a "hobbit" who goes by "Key." A few other friends will be joining her on her blog soon.
To find out more about Key and her hobbit companions check out kumiko's post over at Ubertati.
Take Flash, XML, and Java.
Put them in a bag.
Shake vigorously.
And presto!
Cool GUI apps for the web.
(and they look pretty simple to build too; but not for $999 per CPU at least not now)
I just watched the trailer for another hero movie coming out this November. It's called Mater and Commander: the far side of the world. I don't know much about it except what I learned from the trailer.
It seems to be primarily focused on courage. It seems that most of the conflict deals with endurance, commitment, and leadership rather than good guy vs. bad guy.
I would like to find out more, but I thought I'd let you all know about it for those who follow the film industry.
The Mozilla Foundation (who's site seems to be temporarily down due to extreme traffic) released the latest and greatest versions of all of three of it's five software packages yesterday.
Because the Mozilla.org site is experiencing some down time, I thought I'd help out and offer the downloads here:
- Firebird 0.7 (browser only)
- Thunderbird 0.3 (e-mail client)
- Mozilla Applicaiton Suite (browser, e-mail, web page editor)
The App Suite gives you the whole array of Mozilla applications including a decent web page editor. Firebird and Thunderbird are smaller and therefore faster. I generally run Firebird and Thunderbird, but because I'm a web designer/developer I keep the Mozilla App Suite handy just to check it's progress.
To install Firebird or Thunderbird, download the '.zip' file and unzip (or extract) it into your "Program Files" folder on your "C:\" drive.
To install the App Suite, download the installer and run it. The installer will handle walking you through the rest.
Hollar if you need anything. 8o)
It seems the Mozilla foundation was thinking the same things we were.
The games not over yet.
And that was just one idea.
Just wanted to let everyone know that I changed the why my blog entries are archived.
The old URL's used to look like this: http://www.bensfriends.com/archives/000488.html
The new URL's look like this:
http://www.bensfriends.com/archives/2003/10/13/thems_fighten_words.html
The new URL's are a good bit more descriptive (hence the change). The old archive files are still there for backwards compatibility, but the new ones are in place for future happiness. 8o)
How did I do that?
- In the 'Weblog Config' section of your blog, click on 'Archiving.'
- Once your in the 'Archiving' section you should see a 'Add New..." button at the bottom. Click it.
- Pick 'Individual' in the first box.
- Pick 'Individual Entry Archive' in the second box.
- Click 'Add.'
- Select the radio button (the little circle) next to the second 'Individual Entry Archive' line of fields.
- In the text box to the left past this string:
<MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d">/<MTEntryTitle dirify="1">.html - Click 'Save.'
- Click 'Rebuild.'
- Go check out your new Permalinks (click the time at the bottom of one of your entries).
If you have any questions, let me know.
If you'd like to read some more about how this was done, check out these links:
- http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mtmanual_blog_config.html#archiving
- http://nslog.com/archives/2003/03/13/starting_a_blog_with_movabletype.php
Enjoy.
"Beating on your chest and saying, 'We are taking on Microsoft' is one sure way to get their attention. No one who has done that has survived." -- David Smith a Gartner Group analyst
he he 8o)
I've ranted about the Browser Wars many a time on this blog. Well, here's another rant. Hopefully this one will go a bit further than the ones in the past.
If you would like to read the goad that got this cattle moving, check out Developers gripe about IE standards inaction at News.com.
k. Now to the fray.
The Scenario
Microsoft has seemingly given up IE for dead. The browser war (in their minds) is essentially won. IE owns 90+% of the ground. Mozilla, Opera, and Safari's ground pale in size comparison. Their standards implementation is far superior.
Microsoft seems to be saving major browser changes for their Longhorn opporating system. A plot, perhaps, to make uninformed users upgrade to their new OS.
Here's the fun part. Longhorn is at least one more year away. In the mean time, IE will continue to age, and the web, Lord willing, will continue to develop. Macromedia and Adobe are both working on more CSS focused products. Web designers and developers will become increasingly aggitated by IE's antiquity.
That means, we have at least a year to change the face of the browser world. Pipe dream? Perhaps. But practical thinking is never a good place to start if your into radical innovation and world changing schemes.
The Plan
BigBlueHat will take the open source browsers Mozilla AppSuite and MozillaFirebird along with the open source e-mail client MozillaThunderbird and offer them through it's web site. We have already begun to offer MozillaThunderbird as a multi-inbox alternative to Outlook. After offering them through the BigBlueHat site for some time, we will move into burning distributions on CDs as well as customizing installs for small and medium sized businesses.
The strategy is based on Microsoft's "Proliferate, Overwhelm, Destroy" tactics at the beginning of the browser war. Internet Explorer was everywhere. Users didn't know any better. Some of them assume that the little blue 'e' icon on their desktop is the Internet.
The one major feature that Mozilla software packages need is a "windows update" style web site. The Mozilla browsers get many updates. In its current state, mozilla.org simply provides download links to the latest browser. Downloading a 10 mb file over a dial up once is bad enough. Downloading a 10 mb every two months is unacceptible. But not an unsolvable problem in my estimation.
Let's change the world.
Accidently found this on my daily web wandering. I have a feeling we may find this useful in days to come.
Meetup: Organizing local interest groups.
New day.
Lots to do.
Many ideas.
No room on my desk.
Some on the floor.
The whiteboards there.
Need to put nails in concrete.
Later.
New morning.
Full of promise.
Full of drowsyness and English Breakfast Tea.
Some oatmeal too.
Nice and cold outside as well me thinks.
CSS guru found on page simplebits.com.
Need to be a guru myself.
Just in what God's given me.
No need to covet.
Too much to do now.
"Iron sharpening iron."
Today I will glorify Him.
"In Dow we trust." by Cal Thomas
"If Christians really want to see culture transformed... they need to begin with their own transformation."
The problems with the megachurches are obvious.
The problems with the smaller, closer to home churches are similar.
Let this world go and Live in your new Life in Christ.
Then and only then will anything make sense, have purpose, and change for the better.
In God we (at least) will trust.
Find out which Chronicles of Narnia book you are.
So, now you know. 8o)
10 points for blogs!
For the past four months or so, I've hardly used my Clie. When I was in school and teaching it was one of my most valuable assets. Now that I work at home and my schedule is comparitively simple, I've found enough storage in my head and on my laptop to keep my appointments and todo list strait. Hence this blog entry.
I'm probably going to put this up on UniversityYardSale.com soon, but I thought I would offer it to my blogging audience first.
Here are the stats for the Sony Clie 710c:
8mb (6.5 available for storage)
8mb Memory Stick
65,000 colors (upgraded OS to 4.1)
HotSync Cradle
Built-in MP3 Player
Head phones with volume control on cord
Original Software and documentation
If your interested, let me know. If your in the Greenville area I'll be glad to bring and by and show it to you.
I'm asking $125 for the whole shebang.