Dumping Grounds

I’m about to start a series of blog entries that some of you may not be interested in, others of you may be offended, and still more of you may be shocked that I would write such a thing.

It’s one of those taboo subjects that is virtually guaranteed to generate controversy, because of the variety of opinions, and the deeply held nature of those opinions.

It’s religion. Not only Christianity, not only the Methodist denomination (of which I happen to be a member), but also a variety of religions that are common throughout the world today.

I know exactly how often I will post these entries. I will post each one the moment it is done. Unlike the majority of posts I make as I think them, directly in ecto, I will be composing these offline, complete with footnotes, references and generally a lot of thought as to what I am writing.

The genesis (no pun intended) of these entries was my realization post 9/11 of how little I knew of Islam. I used to have a close friend that I worked with who was Buddhist, and I learned a lot from him about the view of life from the perspective of a Buddhist. I thought that this newfound knowledge was enriching, and helped me think about what it was that I believed. I even incorporated certain concepts from Buddhism into my own philosophy. When Islam was thrust into the forefront of the American consciousness, I decided to take upon myself (as I do not know any practicing Muslims) to learn what I could about the message of Islam. While undertaking this self education, it dawned on me that my favorite author is a Mormon, and I knew even less about the Latter Day Saints than I did Islam. So I started to read their literature as well.

I learned something. I learned that there is not nearly as much difference in the world’s major religions (certainly the â??big threeâ? that all trace their roots to Abraham) as many would have you believe. I learned that many of the stories that children are taught in Sunday School (or your chosen religion’s equivalent) are the same, whether you are Christian, Muslim, Jewish or Mormon (and yes, please, I understand that Mormons are Christian, no offense intended to the Mormons, but I think that they have enough beliefs unique from the others in the list that they warrant their own entry). Children in a variety of faiths learn about Noah and the Ark, they learn about Joseph and his coat of many colors, and they learn about Moses and the Exodus from Egypt.

What we have in common tremendously outweighs our differences, despite hateful rhetoric, and despite the hundreds of websites pertaining to subjects such as “Why the Bible is wrong”, “Why the Koran is wrong” and “Is the LDS Church a cult?”

I don’t expect to definitively answer any of those questions, and I don’t really expect to change anyone’s mind about anything. If I manage to make one person think a little bit about what they believe, and maybe become better informed about whatever it is that they believe then this will have been worthwhile. It’s already been worthwhile for me, and honestly, this website does not exist for anyone other than me. I love that people read it, I love that people tell me that they enjoy it (although I wish some of that silent majority would comment once in a while )

I’ll stick them all in their own new category (Religion) so if anyone really is not interested in what I have to say, it will be easily avoided. No offense taken. I hope you continue to read my other entries. I don’t intend this to become the overriding topic of this blog, and I don’t believe that it will be an exhaustive treatment of the subject as well. The topics I have chosen so far are: creation, Abraham (Isaac and Ishmael), Noah (and the Flood), Moses (and the Exodus), and Jesus. I may add, delete, or change the order of subjects as I see fit.

With that exceptionally long-winded introduction out of the way, I mind as well get to explaining why some of the entries that I make may offend, so you can make up your mind as to whether or not you ever want to read anything I have to write again. So here it is…

The Christian Bible (certainly the one we read) is not the literal word of God. All conservative Christians, Protestant and Catholic, can just stop reading now and direct the hate mail to matt@dumpinggrounds.com. I can assure you that all flames will be promptly routed to my trash can.

There are a number of reasons that I feel this way, and I don’t personally feel that this point is debateable, nor particularly controversial.

• The Bible was written over a number of centuries, and had hundreds of authors, and even more editors. Many scholars believe that Genesis alone had three authors. Of the hundreds of priests, rabbis, translators, scribes and scholars that had a part in the production of the modern Bible… not even one spoke English. Not even one.
• If one were to assume that the Christian Bible was the literal word of God, how would you choose which Bible was the official one? The most common answer, the King James translation (and I am using the word translation in the very loosest sense of the word), is quite possibly one of the worst translations ever. There are very few things that I know for sure about God, but the fact that he did not dictate the Bible in such a way that someday it would translate perfectly into English iambic pentameter is one thing I am pretty sure of.
• Having been written over hundreds of years, by hundreds of people, and almost certainly based originally on an oral tradition, the Bible does contain contradictions. I have no problem with the belief that these contradictions are the result of human nature, and not mistakes made by God.

This, in my mind, in no way invalidates the message, or lessens the impact of the Bible as a piece of scripture. The Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, the messages of the Psalms or the teachings of Jesus have no less meaning becasue of my assumption. For this reason I will discuss difference in the accounts between different books, but I am not going to fall into a discussion of minor semantical inconsistencies within a single book. To me, it just does not matter.

It is fair to point out that both the Koran and Mormon scripture can make a far better claim to being the literal word of God. Both of those books were written by a single person. Muhammad, the prophet of the Koran, is said to have been completely illiterate, and drew the letters as he was inspired directly by God. The text of the Koran, which officially cannot be translated becasue the words of God were in Arabic, has traditionally never been changed from the original text written by Muhammad (in reality, small changes were made, and later removed.) Needless to say, I am dealing with unoffical translations of the Koran, as I do not read Arabic. Mistakes in interpretation due to bad translation are my own.

The Book of Mormon was recorded to metal plates by Mormon, and then presented (and translated) by Mormon’s son Moroni (once a human, but by then a resurrected, “glorified being”¹) directly to Joseph Smith who wrote the messages in English. There are not alternate versions of the Book of Mormon, although small editorial changes have been made over the years. The Book of Mormon is another Testament, any Mormon references in my discussions of Old Testament topics come from The Pearl of Great Price, another piece of Mormon scripture which (in part) contains books written by Moses and Abraham (which, like The Book of Mormon, were revealed to Jospeh Smith).

Any piece of scripture of any length (and for those who have not read them, I assure you, these three are long, although the Bible is by far the longest) is going to have passages that can be taken out of context to present just about any message that a biased editor might want to make them say. I will say that over all, all three books contain a message of love, and spell out the way to eternal salvation. In particular, I found the Koran to be a tolerant, mature, and very coherent volume. I only single out the Koran becasue of the amazing amount of bad press that it received due to the actions of a fanatical, insane minority. I will try very hard not to present passages out of context, in a way that changes the intended meaning of the author.

I am going to spend a good amount of time researching these entires, and trying to find actual references for opinions that I form while reading. These entries will take time, and I would not expect to have a new one every week or so. I can pretty much guarantee you, that isn’t going to happen. I’ll write as the mood moves me, and I’ll post when they are done.

Well, this is undoubtedly the longest introduction to anything I have ever written, so I guess it’s time to sign off. As always, I would appreciate any comments, positive or negative, that you may have.

References: * www.mormon.org and www.lds.org * Text of the Koran * I didn’t use an online Bible. I will list the exact translation when I quote from the Bible.

¹ No disrespect intended by the quotes. Moroni is commonly called an Angel, but the Latter Day Saints website (you can’t get any more official than that, can you?) uses the term “glorified being.”

The detailed IQ test.

OK, sure… it’s bogus. It’s certainly not your typical IQ test… for one thing, it’s shorter. You are supposed to spend a maximum of 12 minutes on the whole test, and it didn’t take me that long.

So here it is, all you folks who never ever post comments… take the test, and post what you got. I got a 163. (Now of course, you know why I featured this site in my blog… any site that declares me to be a genius gets a mention on Dumping Grounds)

Now, I can assure you, I have had an IQ test, and this number is not accurate. As much as I would like to be a certified genius, I’m not :-).

I think I have been good this year, so here’s a list of things I would like. Some I am pretty hopeful about, and some, well, do your best.

Now that Avalon Hill has bought back the rights to Axis & Allies, I’d love a copy of the new game, the one with the new map and new pieces.

I’d also like a copy of the other Avalon Hill game, Axis & Allies D-Day.

(My first impossible wish…) and I’d like someone who enjoyed playing war strategy games with me. Preferably someone who was ALMOST as good as I was…

The snow was nice, and Delaney and the neighborhood kids enjoyed it very, very much. Thanks.

(Impossible) I’d like for the Cowboys to have a coherent strategy at quarterback, and I’d like for the Stars to have some reason to have a strategy at any position.

I’d like a hefty gift certificate to Williams Sonoma.

(Impossible) I’d like for Sauza to brink back that wonderful alca-pop, Diablo.

(Damned unlikely) I’d like for every single soldier in Iraq to make it home for next Christmas.

I’d like a gift certificate to the iTunes Music Store.

I’d like an easy to implement anti-spam solution for Movable Type.

I’d like a 15-20% market share for Apple in the personal computer market… but no more. (Notice I didn’t say this one was impossible.)

I hope that everyone who reads this has a wonderful holiday, and a happy and healthy 2005.

–Matt

I know that I once got told it was romantic to write an e-mail to someone while on a plane. I dunno if the vast majority of people feel that way, but hey, different strokes for different folks, right?

A truly amazing array of random thoughts (I have not done this in a while)

So I am sitting here at 30,000 feet, contemplating the rude things people do on airplanes. I have had a woman (on a previous flight) so intently looking at my screen as I typed that I mentioned her in the e-mail I was working on. Nothing rude, just that “The woman next to me seems awfully intent on what I am doing.” Once she realized I was writing about her, she got visibly huffy and made it clear that she was mad at me. /sigh

If you don’t want me to write about you, don’t do something so worth writing about while I am typing. Imagine how mad she would be if she knew I was still writing about her.

On this flight, the child behind me has played some game resembling racquetball on the back of my chair until I told him to stop (again, politely) and his mother (sitting next to him), got huffy. If you don’t want me to tell your children what to do, don’t let them act like cretins. Later in the flight, he climbed up on my seat (I’m kind of surprised at this point that the flight attendant didn’t get involved) to look over my shoulder and see what I was doing on my computer. He was so close to me, I could hear him breathing in my ear. Again I had to turn to the mother and ask, “are you going to tell him to get down, or shall I?”

I know my Mac is incredibly cool, but do all computers get this much attention during air travel?

Speaking of my cool Mac… for nighttime flights, I would like to mention that the backlit keyboard is the coolest thing EVER.

The Markdown tool for MovableType (supported by Ecto) is pretty cool, although it took me about 3 months to figure out what the big deal was.

Several good quotes from the American Way magazine today:

“They say that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. What they don’t tell you is that those who do study history are also doomed to repeat it — the difference is that they know that they are repeating it.”

That, my friends, is the type of thought provoking prose that we pay hundreds of dollars a ticket for.

Well, I just got told by an authoritative voice over a very low quality loudspeaker that I am to put my electronic equipment away, raise my tray table, and return my seat to it’s fully upright position. I guess the rest of my wit and wisdom will have to wait for a while.

BlogTunes v.7 is currently running on my machine. you will notice that the “Currently Playing” and “Recently Tracks” parts of my sidebar have sprung back to life.

Every single feature that I intend to release with is in, except customizable HTML templates. Right now, it outputs one format only… the one I want for DG.

I am 90% sure that I will actually send notifications to the Mac download sites sooner or later. Probably after it’s much better tested, and after the re-do of the DG look and feel.

I’ll be able to get the customizable templates done this weekend, and then I will quietly make it available on the site.

I have learned a TON about OS X programming, Cocoa, and Objective C… and just generally had a lot of fun playing with it. I’m sure I will continue to add features, and write more tools in the future.

No, I will not port it to Windows. Don’t have the equipment, the software, or the interest.

OK, rather than continuing to edit, and edit, and edit the last unfortunate entry, I just deleted it.

Dumping Grounds is not going anywhere, and it looks like I probably stick with MovableType after all. I have taken several measures to stop the storm of spam, and lessen the load on the server.

1. I have renamed the script that handles comments, so that robots that just fire off signals to every server looking for mt-comments.cgi won’t get anything but a 404 from my site. Generating a 404 (and there are a lot of them) is MUCH less taxing on the server than interpreting a comment, storing it in the database, and then marking it as spam.

2. The script should not accept submissions from anything other than the comment pages on my site. The botted “comment generators” should have a hard time getting through, even if they DO find the spot on my site that handles comments at all.

3. I left MT-Blacklist in place. Anything that does submit a comment to my site is still going to be submitted to a set of filters that will not allow posts on frequent spam subjects.

There is still a new look and feel coming. I have a beta up, but I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. It’s not setting my heart of fire with desire. I’ll keep working on it.

BlogTunes is dangerously close to a 1.0 release, and I will get it running on the site. I should have it (not finished, but releasable) in about a week at the most. There’s several features that I need to add to make it competitive with other solutions on the market, but when it can upload formatted files to a web server, I’ll figure it’s ready to have folks hammer on it.

And then? I’d really get back to doing something fun on DG, posting photos, talking about politics, I dunno, all sorts of crap. After all, we’re about to have a nuclear enabled country declare war on Japan. Surely there is some good post material in that. I’ll make fun of Kim Jong Il, and see if I can get him to threaten me with a nuke.

There are not many of you that read this site on Macs, but for those few, I figured I would post the application I have been working on. I’ll admit, it doesn’t do a whole lot yet, but the plan is that it will drive one of those “what I am listening to right now…” sections on blogs. (Yeah, I know, mine has not been updated in MONTHS.)

Well, the main reason was I didn’t like how any of them worked. The biggest problem was that they posted to the website immediately when iTunes played a new song. Which means all that odd crap that I skipped got posted to the site anyway. That just drove me nuts. So I decided to see if I could write my own Cocoa app. This is the first result.

So what does it do so far?

• It installs a menu in the upper right, near your system clock.
  
• It has a tabbed preferences box, and they save from session to session. Currently, only the “Polling” tab has any useful preferences.
  
• As you listen to iTunes, the menu will build a list of the recent tracks you have listened to. The number of songs you would like to track, how often you want BlogTunes to check, and how log you have to listen to a song before it gets added can all be adjusted.
• It provides on screen notifications of track changes via Growl.
• If you select any song from the menu, iTunes will go back and play that song.

What is it going to do (hopefully soon)?

• Save text files of what you are listening to (with user adjustable templates) for uploading to your website.
• Add images to the Growl notifications, and maybe even have it upload image artwork for display on your website.

With the warning that this is very rough software, you are welcome to download it and play with it. Bug reports would be appreciated, but I’m not really ready for feature requests yet. When I get done with the list of things I want it to do, then I’ll start adding other folks’ ideas.

Suggestions to make the preferences more clear (labeling, layout, etc.) are certainly welcome. If anyone wants to draw an icon (the one I’m using now is just taken out of some library I downloaded) that would also be appreciated.

Download BlogTunes.zip, 68K. (Requires OS X 10.2 or greater)

UPDATE I have a newer version that now displays the album artwork in the Growl notifications. The menu itself is much more organized and attractive, and there is now a third preferences panel where you can specify the name of the text files that get written (for uploading to your website). (Another update while on a plane to Tampa) It’s now writing those text files out to the drive as formatted HTML, as soon as I can get it uploading (and a prefs panel done so you can specify where to upload) I’ll make a new copy available.

But first this morning, I had to deal with over 60 spam comments that I received in under an hour.

This is a real problem. I have installed a blacklist which I think no one will ever notice (the possible exception being Turek, who refuses to supply a real e-mail, and EVERY one of his gets tagged as spam until I approve it)

I think they have all been deleted, and I believe that, at the moment, the blacklist is functioning… the attack is continuing, but now none of the comments are making it to the site.

I have a (very raw) application that I wrote that some who have a blog might be interested in to post soon, and some other random junk. But I needed to get this taken care of first.

If anyone notices any differences in the comments, please let me know. As always, it will be easiest if you register for a TypeKey account, and then all your comments go right through, and I can globally “site approve” you.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

(Ugh. I received another 6 spam comments in the time it took me to post this.)

UPDATE: I have verified that Turek can post and the spam filter is 13 for 13 on spurious posts today. Just don’t post about viagra, cialis, online gambling, porn or rolexes, and you should have no problem posting to my site. (I know, I know, I just ruled out all the fun subjects. If you have need of those terms, contact me. )