Recently a lot of things have been swirling around in my head from things I’ve been reading, things God’s told me to do or stop doing, and sermons I’ve been listening too.
Specifically there has been a lot of talk in my house about creativity and art the last few weeks thanks to a sermon Jeff preached on it (sermon page here), as well as one preached early this year by Dave Schmelzer (sermon page here). More precisely, how art is viewed and created within Christian circles in the US.
And if you hang out with Jeff or Brent much you hear (or read in their blogs) a lot about anti-intellect trends and attitudes in the evangelical church.
( You have to promise to guess where I'm going with this before you click here )
So, was that what you thought it would be hiding behind that LJ-Cut tag? Come on, be honest now.
Current Mood: 
nostalgic
I like the McRib. I don’t care if is an over-processed meat-like product.
This sandwich etched a permanent place in my heart in the summer of 2000, and has stayed there every since.
The summer of 2000 was my first apartment, the first time I’ve been dumped (by a girl I had dated for nearly 4 years), my first summer at college, and the first time I bought something stupid while drunk.
My priorities were pretty different, mostly I wanted to have sex with anyone female and wanted to drink much much more than I do know primarily for the purposes of being inebriated. I was pretty constantly confused, or searching diligently to figure out who I was.
But the McRib, which lies squarely in the middle of the Five Star Day, will always be a part of that wonderful growing-up experience. That day still stands out in my mind as one of the great days where nothing particularly important happened, and it was great anyway. And that is why every time I see the McRib back on the menu at McDonalds I feel compelled to eat one.
If you are feeling adventurous and curious about the pre-Vineyard and pre-Lauren Ben, go ahead and check out the link that I wrote about my “Five Star Day”, and browse through some of the other posts from my “Old Website” category. I curse more frequently and more creatively in those posts than I do now, but some of it is fun to go back over for me, so maybe you will like it too.
I just got back from a conference in Baltimore and I have a few fun things I learned while there.
1) Being a conference as a customer, not a sales guy or exhibitor, is a lot more fun.
2) You would be amazed at what a vendor is willing to do for customers. I ate 2 breakfasts, 2 lunches and a dinner all on Rockwell or our motor vendors dime. Rockwell also provided free juice and pop throughout the whole conference
3) I could make robots that would blow your mind given a little time and a lot of money, and I didn’t really realize it until now.
4) Most hotel restaurants suck at making steak. If you are going to put peppercorns on there, you should call it “peppercorn steak” not just steak. The meat stands alone if you do it right people. Seasoning meat is an art not limited to peppercorns. I wish I liked seafood better cuz that seemed to be more prevalent there.
5) The Town Hall Brewery really is the best micro-brewery I have visited, and I can now add two more to my list.
6) Airport food mostly sucks. I never ate airport food until the company was paying for it, cuz I thought it was too expensive. Now I KNOW it is too expensive.
7) Camden Yards looks cool from the outside.
It only takes about an hour to get from Washington Dulles Airport to downtown Balitmore….I was afraid the traffic was going to be much worse.
9) The chapters in Hearing God by Dallas Willard are too long. It took me much longer than I would have liked to finish one on the plane. But, maybe I’m just a slow reader.
10) Electrical safety standards are a lot like the government. A group of companies and people appointed to committees get together and write the standard, and then consultants come in and interpret the standards so companies like mine can figure how to make our stuff “compliant” so that when the FCC, or customs people enforce the policies we know we aren’t breaking any rules. I just haven’t figured out who signs the standards into Law yet. 
I got two t-shirts, two notebook sized wireless mouses, and found out about some software that could potentially save me and the rest of our electrical team hours of work each week. I also almost won an ipod Nano on this trip, but lost the last couple of questions to a Japanese guy…I was winning the game until then.
It was a pretty good trip, but I’m tired now. Traveling always wears me out.
Interesting question posed today on Slashdot.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/10/16/172251.shtml
I realized I get up in arms sometimes about privacy, and how the government is taking it away (it deeply angers my inner libertarian….but I try to keep him on a leash during non-presidential election years), but I noticed a lot of people are ambivalent when I talk about it.
So I pose these questions to you my friends.
1) How do you define privacy, as in your personal privacy in relationship to governments/buisness?
2) Do you feel like you have less privacy now as compared to 5 or even 10 years ago?
3) Do you care about the above question. I.E. Would you if you knew how, or have you taken steps to protect your privacy. Or, on the flip side, would you or have you taken steps to be more public with your life? (think blogging for example [.....OH SELF REFERENTIAL, I get a piece of candy])
Current Mood: geeky
Livejournal just released a new service called LJ Talk. Similar to Google Talk they are using the jabber protocol (an open source based IM protocol), and they have a bunch of goodies about this up at http://www.livejournal.com/chat/
I kinda like this idea, mostly because you can post to your LJ by IMing Fank the Goat, and because Trillian and GAIM already support Jabber-based stuff, so I can talk to all of you from my computer. (if you check out GAIM, download the 2.0 beta 3, it is pretty stable and it supports more good features)
Next it would be great to see a web-based interface for this, similar to Gmail’s built-in web-based IM, right on your LJ page, or friends page.
Anyway, that is a little announcement, check it out if you get the chance.
Current Mood: 
tired
I’ve been working a lot lately, and my head has been so full at night from work and church and everything else that it has been hard to sleep. Also, we are going to try to move daily prayer meetings to the morning soon.
Yesterday while driving to work, I almost fell asleep in the middle lane. I sorta started awake and saw that I had slowed down to 50mph, and was drifting to the right.
Then, at work, I felt achy, and my head was fuzzy and felt like it was being squeezed. I didn’t think I would be much use to the company, so I left, and went home and hit the pillow for 4 hours. I don’t think I’ve ever taken a nap that long w/o staying up all or most of the night just prior. I got less dizzy as the day went on and by the evening I was able to get some work done that I had brought home. I’m still a little weak and very tired. I don’t think I’ve ever been blasted with some 12 hr kind of thing like that before. Usually when I’m sick enough to go home from work (or stay home from work) I’m out for a few days.
Some days I think it isn’t fair that I know all these people that do OK w/ 5 or 6 hours of sleep. Cuz if I don’t get 7 to 8 I’m gonna be pretty tired, and 5 to 6 more than one day in a row makes me almost worthless. I really do wish I could get by with less sleep.
The winter in MN is starting to creep in this week. Might snow tomorrow or Thursday. I hate the winter, and the cold darkness it brings. Makes me wish I were a bear and could sleep through the whole thing.
http://www.bencatlin.com/gallery2/v/BigCat_0/
Hot Dog Giveaway pictures.
Check out www.jesusdogs.com for more information on why our church does this.
My youngest brother got engaged to his long-time girlfriend Krysta. They are getting married July 14th of next year.
Exciting!!!!
She has been around for years, and we like her tons, so we are really pumped.
