[1]: http://mightyillusions.blogspot.com/2006/04/christopher-walken-illusion.html
[Christopher Walken floating through space.][1]
All posts by Ken Martin
I’m not dead
I’ve just been overwhelmed with the Mambo projects I took on. I wish I could have taken them on in a year, by which time Mambo should be producing non-hideous code. It’s just a bear for a “modern code” guy like me to code through. I spend so much time understanding their content-plus-presentation/nested-table code, I’ve got no brain cells left for design. Ugh.
Here’s a funny little thing I can give you for visiting (since I’m otherwise so uninteresting right now): I needed to do some admin work for a dsl connection via Qwest. I couldn’t find what I was looking for, and since I saw this cheerful little button…
…I thought I’d click it and ask for help.
But alas, I got a page with this…
Look at him. Laughing at me. “I know you wanted help, and I laugh at you for visiting here only to have your hopes dashed! HAAAhahahaha….”
The Simpsons
[1]: http://www.jeepish.com/2006/03/28/simpsons-live/
Hat tip to Jeep who posted on [this][1] today. So funny! :)
Greek 2 – ninth class
Ugh. Second aorist. Sure, I get it, but all those *verbal roots*! I’m having a hard enough time with vocab, and now I find out I should have been memorizing not only the lexical form (1st person singular, present active indicative), but the roots, too! Oh well… I’ll get it.
First aorist looks easier. We’ll see.
Vocab vocab vocab.
Book Recommendations:
– Fee, G. The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT
– Thiselton, A. The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text NIGTC
– Martin, R. 2 Corinthians, WBC
– Thrall, M. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (2 vols), ICC
Preview:
– understand *form* difference between 1st & 2nd
– tense formative
Homework:
– Read: Chap 23
– Vocab: Chap 23
– Wkbk: Parse **all**
– Wkbk: Translate **all**
– yes all… I need it
Cage Match:
– 1 John 3:4-9 Young’s Literal Translation vs New Life Version
Promotion!
[1]: http://www.simplyretailinc.com/
This week I was promoted to Vice President of Production and Technology for [Simply Retail, Inc.][1], and I will be going full time starting in April. (I’ve been four days a week until now.) Very exiting stuff! :)
Co-workers emailed me congratulations, and I replied: “By the time I got home, I was so drunk with power that I fired all the kids.”
Greek 2 – Eighth Class
[1]: http://www.bbcmpls.org/
[2]: http://www.desiringgod.org/
It’s been a while since I blogged on my Greek class. I’ve been too busy to even do a thorough job on the homework let alone blog on it! The travel, the (thankfully now past) illness, and now this month I’m teaching Old Testament book overviews… lots going on.
Mambo
Not the dance; the CMS.
I am setting up some sites using it, and as I dug in, I found some of the generated html code to be – as I described to my client – hideous. (Sorry Mambo guys… just not my style.)
**But,** I hopped online and posted my woes to their forum, and got a really good answer back. What I would change is something core to the system, which would mean everytime my client would update their Mambo installlation, my changes would get wiped out. But they planned ahead, and allowed a way for me to keep such custom files safely tucked away in the template folder. Very cool. Nice work Mambo guys!
The Lord’s Supper – Part 1
It’s time for the long awaited Lord’s Supper post. OK, long awaited by myself and maybe one other guy.
The Lord’s Supper – the wine and bread taken in remembrance of Jesus – is one of only two explicit Christian ordinances, the other being baptism. Jesus said specifically that we are to “do this in remembrance of Me” (Luke 22:19) and Paul tells us that by doing so, we “proclaim the Lord’s death till he come ” (I Corinthians 11:26). It seems to me it’s pretty important. And because it’s my nature, I tend to think we need to be extra careful with the important things.
There are a few observations I’d like to make about different ways I’ve seen the Lord’s Supper done in various places. I’m going to spread them out into separate posts. But I think I’ll start with one that really strikes a nerve with me. And what will probably be the most controversial.
Google bans website? Probably not as evil as it seems.
[1]: http://michellemalkin.com/archives/004754.htm
[2]: http://www.thepeoplescube.com/red/viewtopic.php?t=637
[3]: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-check-your-own-site/
[4]: http://216.109.125.130/search/cache?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thepeoplescube.com%2FTruth.php&ei=UTF-8&u=www.thepeoplescube.com/Truth.php&d=BqFbHG1aMZ7v&icp=1&.intl=us
There’s a little chatter out there concerning a site I’d never heard of called [The People’s Cube][2]. They appear to have been banned by Google. Since they are apparently a politically right-leaning site, conspiracy theories flew and the apparent banning [drew more attention][1]. But it seems most likely they simply got caught doing a sneaky little thing to boost their search engine rankings.
Search engines “read” web pages to see what’s in them. But, in general, they aren’t good readers, and can be fooled by putting words in the page and then “hiding” them using things like CSS. But those words may make the search less effective, so Google sometimes manually removes web sites that do that to help ensure reliable search results.
There’s a good description of what probably happened [here][3]. And a cached version at Yahoo! is [here][4], where my geek friends can look at the source code.
Note to self: No sneaky SEO tricks.
The downfall of Caribou Coffee
[1]: http://www.forbes.com/finance/2005/09/23/cariboucoffee-IPO-equities-cx_sr_0923ipooutlook.html
[2]: http://www.cariboucoffee.com/aboutus/ownership.asp
[3]: http://www.ghirardelli.com/products_hotchoc2.html
I used to be a huge fan of Caribou Coffee mochas. I drank them for years. I shunned the offerings of others and learned where all the Caribous were on my various paths of travel. Fun decor. Usually nice staff. I have two Caribou thermoses (thermosi?) and a Caribou travel mug. I had Caribou gift cards. I drank their mochas frequently.
I think [their IPO][1] wrecked everything.
A few years ago, Helen was chatting it up with a Caribou employee and she got the recipe for their mochas (which it seemed wasn’t treated as any kind of secret). The key was (IMO) the chocolate. [Ghiradelli][3]. Delicious. We now occassionally make them at home.
But a while ago I started to notice their mochas weren’t very good. Seemed weak. Sometimes even bitter. I would always pass it off as maybe an inexperienced employee. But it kept happening. All new Caribous were like that, and slowly the old reliable ones become so, too. Then we found out (through another conversation) that they’d changed the chocolate. And a few weeks later was the IPO.
Why do I link the two? Because I just think it makes a very plausible story.
When a company is going to go IPO, their bigwigs travel all over the country or world speaking to potential investors. They want to impress upon the investors one thing in particular: the value of, and thus profit potential of, their company. So I think that to help the numbers look even better, they switched to a cheaper chocolate. Saving a penny or two per mocha could be very significant. I can just imagine the negotiations with Ghiradelli: “Listen, we need you to lower your price, but when we go IPO, we’re going to expand so much that you’ll make it back in volume.” Obviously, no deal.
Maybe they changed for some other reason. They are sensitive to the special Islamic requirements of their [majority investor][2], so maybe there was something there. But for whatever reason, they changed their mochas. For the worse.
I never go there now – even if I’m craving one – because I will be disappointed. I avoid them.
When I spend $4 for a coffee, I expect it to be tasty and reliably so. Caribou Coffee was once always that. It is now never that.
I usually go to select smaller shops now: Java Drive, Cupcake. Second teir, I’ll go to Starbucks. They are not the tastiest, but they are reliable.
Of course, Caribou Coffee is doing just fine without our $50-ish per month. But it’s kind of disappointing to not be able to do business with a home-grown Minnesota company I used to love.