The Ramblings

This article feels well intentioned, but I have some fundamental issues with it. It starts off well, but falls off the rails pretty quickly for me.

Sin is indeed a rebellion against God.

The Bible does say in Romans, "for all have fallen short of the glory of God."

The Old Testament is full of examples of people who fell short of God.

God did introduce many rules to show that people can never measure up to God's standards.

I think it's true that some sin's do have more serious consequences than others.

And it's true, as sin born human beings, none of us will ever be good enough, yet God does love us.

Where his thoughts start to break down, for me, is here, "But let’s imagine for a minute that I am wrong. That homosexuality is in fact a bigger ‘no no’ than anything else. That God does care more. The truth is that it is still none of our business. People can lead their lives in anyway they like."

He goes on to say, "...stop judging others when you are just as bad or even worse. [...] where does any Christian get off criticising anybody’s life? Can any christian or indeed any person call themselves good enough to judge another?"

This is an incorrect assumption of what Christianity should look like.

We are called over and over again to look after one another.

"And let us be concerned about one another in order to promote love and good works, not staying away from our worship meetings, as some habitually do, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day drawing near." - Hebrews 10:24-25

"Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another." - Proverbs 27:17

"Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God." - Colossians 3:16

To admonish is to warn or reprimand someone firmly.

So if we're supposed to let people lead their lives in anyway they like, I wonder how does he justify that we're supposed to adomonish each other? There are verses, like in Romans 6:15, that specify, "Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!"

Christians are supposed to tell each other when they sin. Christians are supposed to be involved in each others lives to a point to where when you are knowingly, or unknowingly, choosing to rebel against God you are free to tell each other that they're wrong. They should gladly accept those comments and you should be able to discuss about ways to rectify that situation.

The picture that is painted in this article is such a shallow look at what Christianity is. Countless books written in the New Testament were letters that were written to the church in different regions to bring to light things that they were doing right, and wrong. If we're supposed to ignore each other, and just love, and just let each other lead their lives in anyway they like, then we're going directly against the very things that we're told to do in the Bible.

Which brings me to an even bigger issue.

"Ultimately none of us have a clue what God thinks about homosexuality and we should stop pretending we do or trying to guess. Instead we should be doing what God told us to do and love one another."

So, if we take this as true, then how do we make any judgement calls about anything in Christianity? You can indeed argue over and over again about what different verses dealing with homosexuality mean, but you can't argue about the theme of the family that is strewn throughout the Bible.

Also, we do have a limited view about what God thinks. This is in the Bible. We have a good portion of Jesus' life here on earth chronicled, we have the beginning life of the early church, and we have numerous accounts of God and his interactions with the Jews in the Old Testament.

So to say, we have no clue what God thinks, that's just plain false. We can't sit down and have a conversation like I can with my wife, or a friend, but we have some fairly clear examples given in what is God's Word, breathed by Him.

So while this article is probably well intentioned to try and stem some of the angst on both sides, I don't think arguing falsely helps at all.

Sin is sin, we have all sinned. We are continually sinning. God loves us enough to offer us a way out. That way out is by trusting in Jesus as our Lord, and Savior. Which means that we are giving our lives to him, and we are trusting that His sacrifice is sufficient to pay the debts against God that sin has created in our lives.

But God is a disruptive God. He doesn't come into our lives, offer us salvation and then leave us alone. He doesn't look at our lives, and say, "Oh that's a sin, but you're covered, just live however you want." Jesus constantly told people he encountered that to follow Him they needed to change. I don't see that that has changed today. Maybe our sins include homosexuality, adultery, drunkenness, gossip, or other more nuanced sins that distance us from God. The bottom line is that that sin doesn't prevent you from being saved, but God does want you to strive for change with His help.

So, I'm really enjoying the M10. It's a great camera. The photos look great, and the size is just amazing. But Aperture still doesn't support it's RAW format natively. My workflow has been (up until today):

Import RAW+JPEG into Aperture.

Use JPEG as the Master.

If I want to do a good bit of editing on exposure and recovery, then I will export the photo's RAW file into Lightroom.

I'll do some selective editing in Lightroom and then export the JPEG back into Aperture.

It's been less than ideal, and really frustrating at times.

Well, I just came upon this post on MacRumors forum.

This solution is actually working wonderfully. It adds a small step up front and might present issues in the future, but at the moment I can edit my RAWs in Aperture again. Hooray!

So to outline what I now do.

Dump photos to a folder on my HDD.

Open Terminal and run the following command.

exiftool -CameraType2='E-M1' *.ORF

Import into Aperture.

So an issue I kept running into with OS X and deploying to a Linux server is that case matters in Linux, but it doesn’t in OS X. So I would unfortunately run into the issue where a file is not cased properly, and it would error on the server but not locally in Vagrant.

So, I searched a bit, and the best way to handle this was to create a Sparse Disk Image Bundle and store all of my code in there. Then point Vagrant to that image, and voila!

So I wanted to run through the basic steps here in case anyone else is looking to employ this method.

Open Disk Utility.

Select New Image.

Name the image, both in the Save As field and the Name field.

Select the maximum size. As a Sparse Disk Image, this is an expanding image, so you set the size that you don’t want it to exceed, but it will only use the amount of space that the files take up.

Format should be “Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled).

Encryption: you can leave it on or off, your call.

Partitions: I left it as a Single Partition - GUID.

Image Format: sparse disk image.

And now you’re done! Simply migrate over your Vagrant paths to this new volume.

Optional Steps

Enable Indexing

If you want Spotlight / Alfred to have the ability to see the files in this image, you need to enable indexing on it.

Open Terminal, and enter the following:

Symlink ~/Sites to this new image

Open Terminal, and enter the following in order:

This should allow you to leave the paths you previously had in place, so you can convert to the new image as time allows, but things that were previously working shouldn’t break.

Blame it on what you've been through Blame it on what you're into Blame it on your religions Blame it on politicians

We've been blowing up We're the issue It's our condition

We've been blowing up We're the issue We're ammunition We're ammunition We're ammunition We are the fuse and ammunition

I have no generation Show me my motivation One world one desperation One hope and one salvation

A little poppy-er of a song than I typically listen to, but the lyrics ring very true.

Whatever you do, just don't look back. Oh somebody needs the light you have. Whatever you do, just don't lose heart. Keep on pushing back the dark, Keep on pushing back the dark.

Who knew that Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel written by George Orwell (published in 1949), would be such an accurate example of what it's like to have Internet discussions?

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

Instead of prefixes it will use flags: if you want to enable an experimental feature, set the appropriate flag in about:flags. (Incidentally, this means that experimental CSS features that would be prefixed are not available to the average user, who won’t set any flags.)

This section strikes me as wrong. One of the great things about vendor prefixes was that the average user would get these "upgrades" without realizing it. If a new CSS property was available then developers could target it and the end-user had to do nothing on their side to see the improvement. Now it's hidden in about:flags?

To answer this question let’s think about how our brains estimate things. There are some things that are easy for someone with no experience to estimate and some things that aren’t.

So you might ask, what's the appropriate financial penalty for a bank in HSBC's position?

How about all of it? How about every last dollar the bank has made since it started its illegal activity? How about you dive into every bank account of every single executive involved in this mess and take every last bonus dollar they've ever earned? Then take their houses, their cars, the paintings they bought at Sotheby's auctions, the clothes in their closets, the loose change in the jars on their kitchen counters, every last freaking thing. Take it all and don't think twice. And then throw them in jail.

Something like this would normally only warrant a minor bullet point on an app's list of features on their website. However 1Password goes into precise detail about the ins and outs and why they chose to go this route. They're a company that's passionate about security.