Here is Where I Carry on about my Daily Life, and usually some stuff about Technology!
Daniel Reum (I forgot to ask about the middle name) was born today around 4:45ish in the pm. He weighed in at a very healthy (healthy for a Reum anyway) 7 pounds 11 ounces. Everything is good with Val and Dirk other than they are both very tired.
I have now fullfilled my best friend duty, and I will only ask for your prayers for continued health and to call them and coo at the baby over the phone in the next few days.
http://business.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/04/05/2046210&from=rss
This is a good article reporting on a conference that was about getting open standards into the government. This is directly related to the legislation I was talking about the other day, that would force MN state government to use open standards-based documents for everything.
It’s a short read, not too bad for the Open Source layman, and it fairly accuratly describes how I think about this topic.
Well, I think lawmakers in Washington are just starting to really grasp some of the true potential of the internet, as are big telco’s finally getting it to. By that I mean that tel-cos are starting to think of stupid Ameri-centric business models from the Cretaceous period to apply to the internet.
And today lawmakers fired their first response back about their thoughts in form of striking down a Democrat introduced piece of legislation to help prevent these business models. You can read about it at this link.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6058223.html?part=rss&tag=6058223&subj=news
( Breaking this situation down into Plain English )
( Some of my thoughts about the politics of this )
( Rant about how I feel about big companies providing services to Americans )
( An open letter to stupid executives who only look at the bottom line )
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20060405064612853
Call your representative and support this bill. It is similar to what is happening in MA only instead of the state CIO mandating a change like this and then having to back it up, our CIO would be forced to carry out this law if it becomes a law.
If you want reasons why open standards are important for information storage, and document creation you will have to pick my brain personally (or maybe if you are lucky you can comment and later today I’ll respond) because right now I’m too tired to launch into my whole speech about why open standards are a good way of promoting social justice.
http://counterpunch.org/jensen03072006.html
Thought this was really odd. Made me feel sad and angry at first then just interested in what could happen next to this person.
What strikes me most, is that I believe the persons goals cannot be accomplished without the aid of Jesus Chist and a belief in his divinity is essential to recieving that aid. What I think people don’t get about Christianity when they approach it from a secular framework is that the transformative power of Gods justification and following sanctification in our lives so radically shift our perspective so that if we were to honestly welcome someone into christian brotherhood who is not actually a christian (by christian believes Jesus is the risen son of God, and decided to live life for God’s glory and not their own) they would not fit in, they wouldn’t understand what made them different, and would ultimately have a hard time doing the good works (or as the author of the article puts it, “to struggle to make religion a force that can help usher into existence a world in which we can imagine living in peace with each other and in sustainable relation to the non-human world”) because their lives are not changed or different than they were before coming to church.
The Church as an agent for social change without primarily striving for the glorification of God is at best the ‘christian right’ and at worst the crusades. Those end caps and everything in between is only self-centered a bandaid for the world. The difference is that having a focus on Christ causes us to loose much of our self-centered ideals about being heros and saving the world, and enable true Christians to truely love without borders. I’m not saying true Christians do not do dumb things, or sometimes forget about the putting God’s glory before their own, I’m just saying on the whole a God-centered focus causes more social change by tranforming within, than people who step out with a focus on doing something good only for the sake of doing something good.
I understand the appeal of wanting to change the world. I do, and I would love to go down in the history books for doing something great that really made a differnce in the world. But if I did that for me, and not for Gods glory, in the end I would still be dead, and gained no benefits from my hard work other that slightly elongating my memory in the minds of those living on this tiny rock, for a small fraction of this universes existance.
