Jan 13 Not everyone watches television. And even more than that, not everyone watches the commercials. But recently there has been a commercial that contains the quote:
I finish things. That’s what I do.
-Clint Eastwood (from the movie Gran Torino)
While I initially started this post last week, I unfortunately didn’t finish it before Gran Torino actually released nation wide on 1/12/09. (How apropos!) The quote is still interesting, and Clint Eastwood is still going strong as he nears the cusp of 80 years.
I see it all of the time: a carton of milk with a little bit left, a football player getting his arms on a runner but unsuccessfully bringing him down, books on reading lists that never get crossed off, leftover food that eventually rots, a job abandoned before its time. All of these things are a task unfinished.
Everyday we perform tasks, and everyday we make choices. The finish line was made not only to be reached for, it was made to be crossed. Do I sprint, walk, or limp at the end? Or worse yet, do I not even get to see the end?
Not that I’m there, but oh that I would live so that when I look back I can see that I made choices for completion in the form of empty plates, finished projects, read books, and tackled runners. Especially tackled runners.
Jan 5 I do enjoy myself some National Basketball Association. The Los Angeles Lakers have been doing fairly well, and I must say that I’m happy about that. If you’re wondering, I’m not a band wagon fan unlike many other people in southern California!
Sometimes, though, I stop and think about the marketing for the NBA. “I love this game”?? Yeah, I’m sure that they love it so much. But what if they weren’t getting paid millions of dollars to play it? What if they only made the average salary of an American in 2007, which is $50,233? Okay let’s be generous and just go with an even $100,000. I doubt that we would get the talent that we have now because people wouldn’t devote their entire lives to getting better at the sport. Parents would force their kids to go through endless numbers of camps and drills in order to just get that perfect arc on their shot. They definitely wouldn’t spend every moment of the day in a gym. Well at least not the majority of them. I’m sure that some of them would still work just as hard because they really do love the game. But I’m sure that some of them would have to pursue other more lucrative careers that they could be successful at (such as rapping or investment banking).
Love the game? Yeah, not so much.
How is it that we live in a world where the player of a game (which I admittedly enjoy watching and participating in) can make many many times the amount of money of someone who is saving lives as a fireman? Or putting their lives on the line as policemen. Or helping the downtrodden. Money sure isn’t a direct correlation to importance in the grand scheme of things, is it?
How inequitable! But what else can I expect from a world tainted by sin? *[NBA]: National Basketball Association, I thought that I already said that!
Jan 2 As many are apt to do, I feel like thinking about time as the new year is changing over. It’s interesting how time passes. In some ways it passes so quickly and things are so different now compared to a year ago. And in others, it was only a year.
It’s not just a year that changes things. Even a moment has the power to affect a life. Maybe if I remember that each moment has that much power, the passage of years will be orders of magnitude easier.
Dec 17 When I’m driving around, I definitely notice when someone has Christian paraphernalia on their vehicle. This can range anywhere from a fish emblem to the more clever slogans to mysterious symbols that are a little more difficult to deduce. While I probably like seeing their proclamations of faith more than other things, it can still lead to pretty interesting results.
A little while back I saw a van in and around Los Angeles, CA with the slogan: God’s way is the best way
The van was for a company that cleaned carpets named Best Way Carpet Clean. In addition to the above slogan, they also had some fish stickers on their van. Oh and there was a website listed on the van, but it seemed to be out of commission when I tried to access it.
In any case, what is the real motivation for them to put that on their van? Seems to me that it is either because they hope:
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It will get them business because people are Christian and they’ll trust another Christian
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Non-Christians will think that Christians are more trustworthy so they’ll be hired
Whatever the reason, it seems to me that unless they made a special deal with God to miraculously clean carpets for them, it doesn’t have too much of a place in that environment. Not on their work van. As it is, it just seems like a ploy to get more business and hence make more money.
Lesson is: be a Christian anywhere (even as a rapper), but don’t do it out of incorrect motives. Even if we can’t figure it out, someone already knows when you have false intentions (where that someone is God).
Dec 12 So I think that now I’m okay after upgrading my version of Wordpress (via subversion) to 2.7. Let me say that the new Dashboard (the part that the site owner looks at) is pretty darn nice now. You can drag and drop things, and it has all kinds of AJAX goodness.
But I also had some difficulties while upgrading. Namely, I had to fiddle a bit to get everything working alright. I’d been using Brian’s Threaded Comments, and the move from that to the new baked-in threaded comments wasn’t too hard. I just needed to update my theme, which is thankfully a custom one that I wrote so I know the ins and outs of it. So I made a new comments page that looks fairly similar to what it looked like before. The threading was maintained on old posts, and I definitely count it a success.
Then I realized today that my commenting isn’t working! While using Brian’s Threaded Comments, I had been using a custom comment posting page to hinder spam. However that meant that I wasn’t using the normal page. So when I switched to the normal page (wp-comment-post.php), it wasn’t working! I had to realize that the “Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by …” error was because I had some extra lines in the aforementioned comment posting page. Removed those, and all is well.
So if you tried to comment recently and that didn’t work for you, I apologize.
But now that I think that I’m all good, I can enjoy how nice this new version is. You won’t be able to tell because it looks the same to you, but if you’re thinking about blogging then consider Wordpress.com (if you don’t have a server) and Wordpress.org (if you do have your own server).
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then good day to you, and I hope that you’re doing well. Cheer up, at least gas is approaching $1.50 per gallon (it was $1.66 at Costco when I got it this morning).