The college and young singles home group last night was great - a whole lot of them came over (I think we had around 16 to 20 or thereabouts). I love those people! They were talkative, open, we ate, sang, studied, discussed, prayed and played games together. It was a good start.

Jill and I were talking last night, and I remarked that we'll have ups and downs in this thing. Last night was an up, but my goal is to be flexible and persevere through the downs.

I spent the last few hours dragging seventeen years of stuff out of our attic. The garage now looks like a landfill, but the attic is completely cleaned out. Now to start rebuilding . . . the great Garage Renovation of 2010 is in progress. Slow progress, albeit.

No soccer this weekend. Which is a good thing.

I'm almost done with Bloo version 1.32. Will be deploying the 1.31 test version very soon (maybe today). In 2010, I'll be doing a lot more (and more frequent) Bloo releases. This first one is more or less a maintenance release, with a few goodies thrown in. More later.

Soon will get my lesson prepared for tomorrow.

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. - John 6:35

Have a great weekend!

My current theme (Texas Sunset) looks messed up in Internet Explorer 6, due to the idiotic 3px Gap bug in that browser. I'll have to do one of those maddening hacks in the CSS to make it work in IE before releasing this theme out into the wild.

If you're still using IE 6, switch to Mozilla. Breathe the free air.

[grumble . . .]

It's probably not, but if it is . . . [Chris Farley voice here] . . . it's TOTALLY AWESOME!



[H/T the Corner]

Our venerable iMac G5 (from the early production run of late 2004) blew its mind two months ago. Since then I've had a crash course in replacing iMac logic boards. I use the plural because I've been through three of them while on this 60 day technological adventure.

Our original board developed a video ram problem. I ordered a replacement from some place in Cali, and the replacement had a . . . video ram problem. I got them to ship me another one. It had bulging capacitors (a common problem with early G5 boards). It worked for awhile but kept losing its mind whenever we put it to sleep, make undue noise, or breathed on it.

After some wrangling, I received a refund after shipping the deranged board back. Then I ordered a third board from another place. I was disappointed to find that it too has a couple of bulging capacitors (a mild case), but at this point, because a) it appears to be working and doesn't lose its mind when we put it to sleep and b) beggars can't be choosers, we're going to try it for awhile.

I really only want another year out of this Mac before replacing it. Hopefully we'll get there.

It's good to have it back. I was getting really tired of using our Wind'ohs machine.

This may be old news, but it was news to me. The Hobbit will be not just one movie, but TWO movies, as reported in this Empire article:

We spoke exclusively to both Del Toro and Jackson for our birthday issue, and they told us the latest, which is…

“We’ve decided to have The Hobbit span the two movies, including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur,” says Del Toro.

“We decided it would be a mistake to try to cram everything into one movie,” adds Jackson. “The essential brief was to do The Hobbit, and it allows us to make The Hobbit in a little more style, if you like, of the [LOTR] trilogy.”

So there you go. The second film will not, as had previously been suggested, a film that will bridge the 60-year gap between The Hobbit and the start of Fellowship Of The Ring.

The one thing that will make me completely flip is if they bring back Ian McKellan as Gandalf (a cameo of Orlando Bloom as the ageless Legolas in the battle of five armies would be cool too).

Sorry for being so absent lately. I'm still alive. I have big ideas for some posts. What I haven't had much of lately is time to post (or at least time to post anything of substance).

On another topic, I'm trying out a new theme called Japan Style. I'll leave it up here for awhile and it will eventually hit the Bloo Themes Blog.

I think I'm going to start posting here in this humble little space again. I guess the next few days will tell.

Also, I upgraded to a pre-release of Bloo version 1.20 (version 1.11). It represents a pretty significant change, structurally, in Bloo, since Bloo now supports community sub-blogs. More on that later. This space always has served as a great guinea pig site for these releases anyway.

God loves you Blogosphere, and so do I.

I'm hoping my good buddy Scott, one of the original Bloo testers, won't mind me testing my trackback send against his blog.

It works find against other Bloo blogs. Now needing to test it against something non-Bloo.

So I'm sending a trackback from here to this post on Scott's blog.

(Also, Scott, I'm putting you on my Bloogroll!)

As I work toward the first full, bona-fide production release of Bloo (no more beta!), I've felt the need for a new and far better logo. Check this out:



Many thanks to farooquebiplit of GetACoder.com for graciously doing this logo for almost nothing. It's like he read my mind, because this is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. He got it on the first try. Suhweet!

And many thanks to Thunder Geek for hipping me to GetACoder.

Watch me for the changes . . .

I've switched to yet another new theme. It's called Daleri Dark and it is another rip-off port to Bloo of a WordPress theme. This one is by the talented Andreas Viklund.

This theme similar to a few others done recently in that it will only work under the full production 1.00 release of Bloo, which is in pre-release here and on a few other blogs.

This one will hit the Themes blog soon.

I've rolled out a new theme called "Pure" - what do you think?. This is yet another cannibalized WordPress theme. I kind of dig it (for now anyway).

This theme was created over at Celestial Star. I still need to contact them regarding this port to Bloo, although they allow free downloads of the WordPress version so I'm hopeful they won't mind me using the ported Bloo version here.

Once I have their permission, I'll roll it out on the Bloo Themes blog (although I may delay a bit because to work well this theme requires some theme fixes coming out in Bloo version 1.00).

Update - They gave me permission.

Sorry for the long absence. Everything's been very good, just busy.

A few quick notes:

What do you think of the new theme? It is a port of a WordPress theme called Red Train. I've been working on new Bloo themes lately. If you're a Bloo blogger interested in spicing up your blog (or if you're just interested in seeing the available themes), you should check out the Bloo Themes site.

Also - happy birthday Andrew!

And, finally, Jared suggests 11 church innovations:

1. Sing hymns.

2. Preach through a book of the Bible.

3. Talk about sin.

4. Celebrate the Lord's Supper more frequently.

5. Have a Scripture reading in the service.

6. Transition creative content from aping popular commercials and other media to creating your own, wholly original content.

7. Read, study, and teach theology.

8. Put as much effort and resources into men's ministry as you do women's. On the flipside, pair up younger women with wise, older women in mentoring relationships with the same conviction you have about men being in accountability and mentoring partnerships.

9. Hire from within.

10. In promotional material, use actual photos of actual people in your community.

11. Preach the Gospel.

I've upgraded the blog to a newer release candidate 2 of the first full production version of Bloo.

There are a number of cool things in this one, not the least of which is a newly revamped Theme Selector - check it out in the navbar and have fun changing your own personal view of this blog to any of a number of my favorite themes.

Man, I'm punchy.

Watch me for the changes . . .

Tonight I upgraded to Bloo version 1.00, release candidate 2. I'm testing it out here before making it available everywhere.

There are several nice changes in this release; the most prominent is the addition of multiple categories per post.

Watch me for the changes . . . :-)

Breaking the silence here for a moment . . .

I've upgraded the blog to Bloo version 1.00 release candidate 1. Plus put in the BlooQuote patch and the IP Blacklist patch.

Suhweeet!

I upgraded the blog to Bloo Beta 2 tonight. So far (sort of) so good. This is a pre-release build and I've only found one problem at this point: the Bloogroll Posts aren't rendering quite right.

I've turned them off for now while I dope this out.

Watch me for the changes . . .

Update: Fixed!

The beta version of Bloo is about to be released. I was originally just going to do some tweaks, but ended up adding quite a few new features and really concentrating on spam protection (since many of the Bloo alpha testers are being overrun by trackback spam now. Spammers are evil).

I have added some layers of protection here - including a new SnapOn spam filter that I'm trying out tonight. It's already nabbed some trackbacks (trackback spammers are the evil gnats on the backsides of the evil comment spammers.)

I hope to get back to regular posting too. This has just sort of consumed me.

Bloo is shaping up into a decent little blog software (if I do say so myself). Miles to go still, but the functionality is expanding.

I'll leave you with a great quote from Jared at BCC Is Broken:

The life of discipleship is not a perfectly upward trajectory. It's messy. It's bumpy. It's confusing. There's times of joy and times of pain. There are times we feel close to God and times we feel very far away from Him. There's times we are sure of our salvation and times we wonder how God could ever be interested in scumbags like us.

You can't lose your salvation, because you didn't win it in the first place. Jesus won it for you, and once you are in His hand, nothing can snatch you out (including yourself). The Bible says nothing can separate us from the love of God; not height nor depth nor angels nor demons nor the present nor the future, etc. When it says "nothing" can separate us, I assume it means nothing can separate us.

One reason for my absence here recently: I've been working on the beta version of Bloo. Just adding some much-needed features and spam controls. Some I will be trying out in this space in the next few days.

I love writing software. It's one creative outlet I have where I actually have some skill (if I may be so immodest). I've got some great alpha-testers too, who took a risk on using a brand-new and not quite ready for prime-time blogging tool.

Among the more active testers are our pregnant friend, Jen, my good bud AJ the excellent Brandywine Books, a pair of missionaries dearly loved by us and, of course, my better half. I have other alpha testers who don't blog quite so much but who I still really appreciated.

Good stuff. Read these blogs.

The beta of Bloo is coming!

Besides this, I've been in a pretty long and involved conversation with an atheist over on Thinklings, along with some other people. It's been tiring, but illuminating too. It all starts at comment 210 or thereabouts. I don't think I've gotten through to him at all. But we've been good and civil and that's cool.

Finally, some randimosity: I don't know what you think, or thought, of the band Lynyrd Skynyrd. They were big back in the 1970s, but their success was cut short by a tragic plane crash in 1977:

Lynyrd Skynyrd's legend is grounded in a plane crash that occurred on October 20, 1977, three days after the release of Street Survivors. A chartered Convair 240 carrying the band between shows from Greenville, South Carolina to LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana crashed near a forest in McComb, Mississippi. A damaged magneto in the right engine resulted in the plane literally running out of fuel. The resulting crash killed singer/songwriter Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist/vocalist Steve Gaines, vocalist Cassie Gaines, assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, pilot Walter McCreary and co-pilot William Gray. Other band members were injured, some very seriously. Drummer Artimus Pyle crawled out of the plane wreckage with several broken ribs, yet ran nearly a mile to a farmhouse to try to get help. The farmer Johnny Mote, on first seeing the wild-haired blood- and mud-encrusted drummer babbling incoherently, greeted him with a (non-fatal) shotgun blast to his shoulder. Only when Mote realized that this person was connected with the plane crash he had just heard did he call for help. Allen Collins suffered two cracked vertebrae in his neck, and both Collins and Leon Wilkeson nearly had arms amputated as a result of crash injuries. Wilkeson suffered severe internal injuries and a punctured lung and had most of his teeth knocked out. Gary Rossington broke both of his arms and both of his legs in the crash, and took many months to recuperate. Leslie Hawkins sustained a concussion, broke her neck in three places and had severe facial lacerations.

Only pianist Billy Powell was relatively unhurt, but he nearly had his nose torn off and suffered severe facial lacerations.

The thing about the shotgun blast just blows me away (no pun intended). That and the "relatively unhurt, but he nearly had his nose torn off" line about Billy Powell. That's nuts.

Lynyrd Skynyrd was a band of good ol' southern boys (who named their band after their old gym teacher), and I like their music. They actually put out anti-drug and anti-gun songs back then, which was pretty unusual (especially the anti-drug ones).

If you've never heard the song Freebird, you might take a look at the youtube video below. Freebird is a poignant song, and it ends on one of the best electric guitar arrangements ever. Here they are live in Oakland in 1977.

I'm testing this now here on Out of the Bloo - will be releasing this as well to all my loyal alpha testers soon, after I've kicked the tires a bit.

The part you can't see: I'm composing this post in a Rich Text editor, rather than posting in html. I'm using the new RichTextPostEditor SnapOn that I've created, which is a wrapper to the excellent TinyMCE rich text editor.

The part you can see: You can get a taste of it yourself by commenting on this post (since I've also implemented it in the comments). So, if HTML isn't your bag, you can get those nifty editing features you're used to in your fav word processing software, right here on lil ol' Bloo!

Both the Post Rich Text editor and the Comments Rich Text editor are SnapOns (of course), so I can enable them or disable them at will.

Something else that I've added (this is for Phil at Brandywine Books) is the "More" functionality on posts, so that long posts can be shortened with a "Read the rest of this entry link", like so:

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Tonight I created a new theme; one that looks suspiciously like a blog-friend's theme, but hopefully she doesn't mind and won't get her marine-husband to come over here and snap me like a twig for pilfering her excellent site's look and feel.

I was getting tired of the old look.

I figure this one will scare most of my three readers away, as it features a picture of my homely mug in the banner.

In the meantime, I continue to work on a major refactoring of Bloo in advance of the beta release, continue to do my day job, continue to delay the writing of Molly's birthday poem (sorry sweetie! It's coming!), continue - at the moment - to listen to my daughter Bethany's loud and raucous slumber party - why do they call them slumber parties? There's very little slumbering going on I tells ye!

I also continuously wonder why God blesses me so much.

I'm going to eat a bowl of cereal. G'night blogosphere. God loves you!