humblethorn

Lori is at a women's retreat in Chiang Mai for the weekend. While I am enjoying this time to myself, my major concern with her absence revolves around food. I've been married six years to a great cook who is much more health conscious than I am. This has resulted in a helpless husband when it comes to feeding myself.

So, what do I do? I begin dreaming of all the food I can't get in Thailand, and stumble across some interesting news...

McDonald's might start offering breakfast all day. Oh... I love the McDonald's breakfast burrito. If they had made this switch when I was living in America I might have skipped my Chipotle burrito every once in a while to replace it with four or five of the tasty little McDonalds burritos. On that note, I also found a recipe for the McDonald's breakfast burrito online, to bad we can't get good tortillas here.

Ben & Jerry's is adding a new ice cream flavor. From Ritz crackers to rum there are five finalists for the Do us a Flavor contest being run by the Ice Cream tycoons. None of the new flavors really appeal to me, but I'm a creature of habit. I would stick with my Ben & Jerry's hippie favorites: Phish Food and Cherry Garcia.

All this talk of food is making me hungry. I'm off to eat some of Lori's famous Texas Rice and Bean Skillet. She was worried about me last night so she cooked it for me to eat this weekend (seriously, is she the greatest wife in the world or what? I don't deserve her).

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I was reading some of the great Christian blogs today (my English church online) and found this article from Adrian's Blog about Apostles in the modern church.

Now, I'm a Foursquare Missionary with a Reformed (Calvinist) leaning - so I can be all over the map with this kind of stuff, but I really enjoyed what Adrian wrote here and agree with most of what he says (I also agree with some of the comments added at the end).

All in all, it's a good read. Check it out if you have the time:

Adrian's Blog: Apostles are meant for today- Challies wheels out the big guns in the charismatic debate

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church

Sunset over Mae Salong Mountains, Chiang Rai, Thailand

Historically, when I say I am in a season of battle it means I'm getting beat up, bloody and dirty as I struggle to hold the ground on my salvation path. My battles have always been seasons of weakness and dependence, but this season is different. There are victories and though the field is bloody it feels like I'm moving on to new battles, having seen victories in those previous combat zones.

It is a new season, like the Christmas that came to Narnia. A welcome relief after agonizing ages of winter and darkness.

God has taught me so much through this time about His love.
His love does note spoil the child.
His love is not always gentle.
But, His love is always good, and never feels like hate.

God has taken me to an amazing verse that shows His love towards His children. Children who must battle, who must endure warfare. The Israelites were wading through the battles that claimed the holy land. They were tired and stained. Later, in Joshua, it says that the earth itself was weary from the wars, and the land received its rest. Yet even through battle our God shows his mercy to his children:

Numbers 31:23 (NKJV)
²³everything that can endure fire, you shall put through the fire, and it shall be clean; and it shall be purified with the water of purification. But all that cannot endure fire you shall put through water.

This is how God cares for his children. This is how He causes us to grow. We are made whole, and yet somehow incomplete. When we begin our journey, our armor is cloth and wood. We get beat up and can't endure the fire that cleanses to completion, so we are cleansed with water.
Over time, however, that changes. We grow, we mature, we are strengthened, we are delivered and then one day we enter a battle that is like nothing we have ever seen.

We feel safer.
We feel stronger.
Our armor is Steel and Gold, and it can endure the fire.

The battles are harder, but the victories gain ground.
The cleansing is hotter, but there are no stains that last.

That is what I feel like today, I'm fighting battles to gain ground. These are battles by fire, they are hard, and they stretch my faith. But here's the promise: He has given me the faith, He has equipped me to go through this cleansing by fire.

Victory in the spiritual journey is not peace, it is reaching the battles "that can endure fire".

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devotional

Despite the fact that we share a last name, Todd Vernon is not related to me, but I do trust him. Actually, to be more accurate, Andy Stanberry trusted me, I trusted Stan James and Stan trusts Todd.

Todd and Stan, respectively CEO and CTO of Lijit Networks, Inc., are hoping that more people will trust them too. Not their opinion of what websites are good, but their idea that it is easier to navigate the web when we know what sites are recommended by our friends. Lijit is hoping that trust will change the way the world searches the web, and the tagline from the lijit.com splashscreen tells it all (including the generation these guys are from):

There are over eight billion web pages.
Most of them suck.
Lijit helps you find relevant information on the Internet by leveraging connections with your friends and trusted sources to separate the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff, the gold from the ore...well, you get it.

Currently, most of us trust one of two major authorities for our web searches: Google or Yahoo. Occasionally, however, some slimy website will sneak up the rankings of these search giants and we end up wasting a day fighting viruses, spyware, malware or paying for something we shouldn't. It's times like those we need a friend. We need people we trust to help us along as we walk down the information superhighway.

Well, it's coming. Our friends, our community, people we really know, who can search with us without having to be in the same room as us.

Lijit adds ratings to pages within our search results which show us what sites our friends like, thus allowing us to navigate the millions of results every web search returns by highlighting the results that our friends recommend.

A recent article on lijit from the Daily Camera reported:

The company hopes to reorganize Internet search results so users are not at the mercy of page rank, said Todd Vernon, chief executive officer of Lijit. The software is able to accomplish this by sending the reports, or "trust assessments," generated by users' friends and sources through RSS feeds and other means. By doing this, the company hopes to stop people from stumbling onto spyware sites and get people to the Web sites they want to see in a more productive manner.

The idea is analogous to walking around town with friends and receiving feedback from them about the shops and restaurants passed by, Vernon said.

If you had a chance to go with what your best friends think or what the world thinks, you're going to go with your friends," he said.

The project is still in Beta, so it's not ready for general public consumption, but this small, community-driven extention seems to be exactly what we have been looking for as we search the web and even stay up-to-date with our friends. Already, I've found a great real-estate pricing site, a friend's wandering website and a rss feed of the best prices on the internet (even better than woot or pricegrabber). Isn't community fun?

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web2.0
tech

Sometimes do you wonder what goes on at the other side of the e-mail communication lines? You know what I mean, the moment we send off an e-mail we begin to wonder: "When will I get a response? Why haven't I received a response yet? Have they even read my e-mail yet? Don't they want to talk to me any more? Why do they hate me?"

Personally, I am usually the one who makes people wonder these things. Lori, on the other hand, tends to respond immediately (or as quickly as she can) to emails. Well it was only a matter of time before some psychological study was performed to observe this digital/emotional phenomenon, and here it is.

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