Hope

Just recently, the hope that things can change has become very important to me. For better or for worse, sometimes it’s just nice when things are different.

Some other things have been suggested to me lately in my talks with others.

God is much bigger and much better than anything we can conceive of. One of my friends really likes telling me that ‘God is bigger than any box we can put him in.’ I think that is really important.
Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, the things we think, however logical, however scientific, are deeply affected by our point of view. Things may look completely different from the other side; things may really be completely different.

I have really been struggling with the idea of suffering. I wonder why people suffer, I wonder why some people suffer more than others but most of all, I wonder how there can be any meaning in all of the suffering. I really doubt that there is any satisfactory answer to that. There are many trite answers, many answers that don’t really mean anything, many ways to blame the victims but very few answers that have any hope for this world (in this world) attached to them. Looking at history, things seem like they have been bad for a very long time, and they don’t really show any signs of getting better.

Someone told me today; very wisely, that we can’t know how someone else feels or see the hope or the hurt that they have – we can only know how we would feel looking at things from our own point of view. It’s easy to say other people’s lives are great or terrible and take some meaning from that … but really, we have no idea of their view of their own life and it’s really not our place to make that call. (I guess in some ways that is dismissing the real issue, but there is some definite truth there.)

So to go back to where I started – for me right now, some things in my life seem very unfair, but I see now that there is hope. That there is always hope: when you feel like you are at the bottom then I suppose there is no where to look except for up. For me, I think a lot of the issue is that I need to stop moping around, stop feeling hurt and get up and change the things that I can.

Finally, a couple extremely pressing questions: Why are the past and present tense forms of ‘read’ spelled the same? But, more importantly, why do we pronounce them differently?

Love

I feel so turned off by your view of love
Love is everything, Love is pain, Love is hope
Love is unsurpassable happiness
God is love, but God isn’t human
And we were made to need human companionship
Human love, But you don’t have enough time for me and God

While the Bible does say that God loves us and made us to commune with him and bring him glory, it also says that God made us social. God never intended that a relationship with him would exclude any relationships with other people.

In fact, according to the Bible, God realized that man needed a companion, someone like him to support and love him (See Genesis 2). He didn’t make Himself man’s only companion. He made another human. The Bible also says that those who are married should love their spouses ‘as Jesus loves the church.’ (Ephesians 5:25) I have to believe that Jesus loves the church perfectly, so ideally marriage should be an extremely tight bond.

Furthermore, Jesus also puts extreme importance on loving one’s neighbors, and loving your friends. For example, in Mark 30:20-21, Jesus says that loving God is very important but we also need to love other people. Additionally, Jesus says that the greatest act of love that any person is capable of is dying for one’s friend (John 15:13).

If you are so embroiled in your spiritual life that you don’t have time for your friends, for love, for kindness, for helping other people out – then I think that maybe you are doing something wrong. Its very offputting when people are so buried and blinded by their religion that they don’t have time for people. That doesn’t make anyone want to be a part of what you believe. While its probably not correct to say that religion shouldn’t run your life, I think that most people would agree that loving God means loving other people. I think that includes romantic love along with friendship, I think that means that instead of just praying for somebody that maybe you need to talk to them and try to help them out. I think that means realizing that right now, we are in this world, and if you are waiting for eternity, thats fine, but while you are here – well, People were put in this world, if we weren’t meant to make something of this life, something in this world that we have, then why are we here?

To quote a song that come to mind:

Hurt – Talking to God
Mother is busy, she won’t even miss me
And so busy praying and wouldn’t see me waiting
[...]
I know every little word
Of all the things that I have heard
So how can you talk to God
When you won’t talk to me?
When he won’t talk to me…

(If you care, maybe look up the rest of the lyrics)

Song

Various things … take it or leave it

__________________________________

Sometimes at night I wonder why

Somtimes I just stare at the sky

I search for meaning in my pain

For sunshine breaking through the rain

Is there a reason I feel this way

Will it ever go away?

__________________________________

Parades of fools, walking by

Wonder what and how and why

Who they are behind the grin

What they want, where they've been

Why are you going this way

Is there much left to save

Wipe that smirk off your face

As you fall into place

I have to wonder what you thought

If these ideals are what you bought

I have to wonder who you'll be

Not too much from what I see

All these things that you believe

All the lies that you've conceived

You throw away what must be real

And try so hard not to feel

Garbage and waste is all you see

In what is everything to me

I hope some day you'll have seen

What these words really mean

I say them all for selfish gain

To try to clear away this rain

I want to show you what I see

Show you what you really need

__________________________________

Do you think your different somehow?

Because you dress strangely now?

Just 'cause you're some trendy whore

Doesn't mean you're not a bore

Millions of people all the same

Playing these mindless fashion games

Stuff about politics

Tonight, I am feeling like a blog post is in order … I am not quite sure what to write about (hopefully I’ll figure that out prior to the end of this post …), but I feel like i should write about something.

Possible topics that have come to mind: how I am doing really poorly in school, how Russia is testing strategic ballistic missiles, how I am almost done with a new corollary to the key moves compendium (check out saysthings) or maybe how sad it is that Brittany Spear’s new song is the top song on Itunes. But really, I think I want to talk about politicians and being yourself.

I think that perhaps the biggest problem in American politics today is that politicians are dishonest … not only are politicians known for failing to tell the truth (‘Read my lips, no new taxes’) but they are also intellectually dishonest and extremely insincere. I feel the latter two are an even greater problem than simple lying. Why should we vote for someone who intentionally and repeatedly exploits the limited knowledge of the general public, is a different person from day to day, who can’t get along with the people who know them best but are the most charming people ever when on the campaign trail?

These people are brilliant actors, but I don’t think that any of them deserve to have any power at all over anyone. If they are willing to say or do anything to get elected, I am forced to think that they’re only seeking office for personal gain and care nothing for the country.

I think that the two presidential candidates this year have both consistently failed to be at all truthful or sincere, especially in the past month as the campaigns heated up. Honestly, I feel like it is almost impossible to choose between Obama and McCain. Its almost guaranteed that neither one of them follows through on a SINGLE campaign promise once elected, and even if they do, i disagree with both of them on most issues.

I must say that I have never particularly liked McCain, he is certainly a Maverick … but I don’t feel like that is a good thing. His record is back and forth on almost every issue, what he says and what he has done in the past are contradictory and his running mate is extremely inexperienced and comes off as a barely halfway intelligent middle aged mother with many family (and other … ahem ‘troopergate’) issues. The poor quality of his running mate is brought to the forefront by his advanced age … and not particularly good health.

Obama, on the other hand, is extremely inexperienced, has little voting record to go on and completely changed what he was saying once he received the Democratic nomination. His position before the nomination on almost every issue seems nearly untenable, now he is toeing the party line. He kind of comes off like JFK to me, and while JFK is one of the most loved presidents in recent history, policy wise, he was a terrible president who almost allowed the Cold War to turn very hot very quick (Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crisis ect.). I think history shows that his youth and inexperience, coupled with a poor understanding of foriegn policy, hindered him for leading the country effectively. Finally, Obama’s running mate is one of the most condescending, elitist pricks in the senate.

As a side note, I do have to congratulate Obama on being significantly less negative than McCain in terms of campaign ads (at least as far as I can tell … and probably only for the moment)

So… to wrap it all up. New key moves coming soon… and both candidates suck.

The atom of a molecule ?

Well apparently my last post was a tad depressing for some folks. In an attempt to remedy the situation, and because it was stuck in my head for 3.5 minutes prior to me listening to something that could be describe as ‘music’ (as opposed to rhythmic babbling with trumpet), I want to review the so-called ’song’ ‘Handlebars’ by the so-called band ‘Flobots’ (aka ‘Linkin Park – Musical Quality – meaningful lyrics – good taste + annoying trumpet’).

This amalgamation of 2 crappy mc’s, some out of work violist (really, a violist ? Not even a violinist…) and some ridiculously out of place ‘jazz’ trumpet player sounds exactly as bad as it sounds (that makes sense… trust me)

Anyway, they have this song, if you have had the radio on for more than 2 minutes in the past 4 months, you have probably heard it more than once, possibly more than more than once… maybe every four seconds. It may even be getting old. Its called ‘Handlebars’.

Now this may sound like an inane, happy-go-lucky song about mustaches. But alas, these untalented musicians couldn’t stop at being terrible in their craft, they had to invade the realm of politics. Now by invade I mean they charged the castle and drown in the moat. Anyway, the song sucks. There is really no nice things I could think of to say about it so I am just gonna tell you how I feel.

First off, the song makes no sense. The majority of the song is about being able to do stupid stuff like ride a bike with no handlebars and keep rhythm with no metronome (omg you’re in a band…). Then, in the middle, following some ridiculous trumpet solo that seems so out of place I thought my radio was broken, they go for Bush’s throat. And fall 10 miles short. Into a pit of poor diction, terrible science and a complete lack of understanding of World Issues. We split atoms to create atomic/nuclear/nucular explosions, molecules have very little to do with it. They don’t understand this. Assassination specifically applies to political figures… you can’t assassinate the common folk. Additionally, lacerations are generally minor. You don’t die from them. The song makes no sense. Its ridiculous. Its off-topic, It rhymes words with themselves and nothing else. It has unfitting trumpet solos…. I could go on.

In conclusion: Flobots are not my favorite band.

A New Leaf

I am moving away from a technology saturated (read geeky) summer and am now back at school and around my friends and all the social pressures that come with college. I have much less technical things to write about currently, however, there are some things that have been on my mind and that I would like to explore.

Its such a strange feeling going from being in a full time work mode to a relaxed, social college mode. In some ways its a lot more fun to be back at school, its awesome to get to hang out with all my friends, to be able to sleep in, and not really having to many demands on my time. In other ways its kind of difficult to deal with the social pressures that come along with being back at school.

Its disappointing when you don’t have anyone to hang out with, or when no one is calling or IMing you.

Its very confusing being around a bunch of women again and all the feelings that can go with that lead to many problems (I think probably for all guys, especially for single guys).

Summary – things are very confusing for me right now.

Anyway, moving on, I think there are many things that I am learning in school and from everyone around me that maybe deserve some more exploration… things like evolution, which we are discussing in my Astronomy class, God, life…. that sort of thing. I kind of wanted to put love into that list, it seems like it would fit so naturally after ‘life’ but really I am not at all qualified to talk about that subject, so I’ll do my best to avoid it.

No doubt there will be some humorous/sarcastic posts. So you can go ahead and assume my review of ‘Twilight’ isn’t serious. Well, it might be… that Edward… so susceptible to the werewolves…

Main thing – stay tuned.

Redirecting using php

I was looking around today for ways to redirect the browser window, and I found a few interesting ones that may come in handy.

There is the standard way of sending the Header with a new location. This will immediately redirect the browser, meaning the redirect page is never seen. This can be a useful way for preventing unauthorized users from getting to a page you don’t want them to view (you should definately use die() or exit() to kill the script though, in case the redirect fails, and so that no data will be changed).
Header('Location:');

Note that Headers MUST be sent before any other data. Meaning that if you want to send headers it needs to be before any html or output (echo, printf ect).

The different, and more interesting, way that I discovered today is using Header to do a delayed redirect.
Header('refresh: 5, url="page.php"');

The number is the number of seconds before the refresh, and the url is the page you want to redirect to. This method will allow people view the content of the page before they are automatically redirected (to a download, away from a ‘Submission complete’ page ect).

More SQL

This is a quick addendum to the previous post about using LIKE in a WHERE clause.

LIKE is treated in different ways depending on what database you are using, case sensitivity is a particular area where the differences can be seen and can become important.  MySQL for example, treats like as case-insensitive (you can set it to be case sensitive, but by default it ignores case – see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/case-sensitivity.html for more information).  But in many other database servers, for example Oracle, LIKE is case-sensitive by default.

While this may seem semi trivial (as I found out today) people often assume searches are case-insensitive and thus having a case sensitive query can be a big problem.

One way to get around this is to use the keyword UPPER to use an all uppercase version of the field to compare with the search string (which you should ensure is also all uppercase.  (LOWER may also be used to compare with all lowercase strings).

It should be noted this is not a great method if you are searching a large database as it will perform a full-text search instead of utilizing indexes, thus increasing the time each query takes.

An example:
SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE UPPER(lastname) LIKE '%SMITH%';
or
DELETE FROM tablename WHERE LOWER(firstname) LIKE '%john%';

Googling UPPER, sql will give you some other methods for case-insensitive searching that utilizes indexes and speeds things up. This is just a base level fix that is useful for smaller databases/tables.

A little SQL

Recently I have been learning how very powerful SQL (structured query language) can actually be.  In this post, I would like to focus on the LIKE keyword which allows you to search a database for a pattern or string.

But first, a small amount of introduction.

SQL is a language used (generally) to ‘query’ databases and edit, delete or retrieve information from these databases.  It can be used with a great majority of existing (structured, relational) databases – anything from MySQL to Microsoft Access to Oracle.  It uses keywords in conjunction with ‘field’ names  (fields are represented (generally) by columns inside of a graphical view) and table names (tables are groups of fields somehow related to each other – for example a ‘person’ table might have a first name, a last name, a date of birth, a height ect.).  With these keywords you can do anything from count the number of entries in a table to find everyone (in the person example) whose last name contains an ‘N’.

A more in depth look at all the SQL keywords, what they do, and how they should be used can be found at http://www.w3schools.com/Sql/default.asp.

Some Common Examples: (this is a very minimal list, check the above link for more)

(* is a wildcard representing ‘all’)

SELECT – retrieves rows containing the specified fields from the given table(s). Used when you are trying to get information out of a database.
This will select all the fields and all the rows (it will retrieve ALL the information in a table) named ‘table’
SELECT * FROM table;

INSERT INTO – allows you to insert values into a new row in a table.
INSERT INTO table (field1, field2, field3) VALUES (value1, value2, value3);

UPDATE – allows you to change the values in (a) row(s) that already exist in a table. (the following statement would set ALL field1’s = value1 and ALL field2’s = value2)
UPDATE table SET field1='value1', field2='value2';

WHERE – begins a ‘WHERE clause’ which specifies which rows you want to effect with your query.
SELECT * FROM table WHERE field1='value1';
UPDATE table SET field1='value1', field2='value2' WHERE field3='value3';

Now, the WHERE clause is the place that it gets interesting (at least in terms of using LIKE).

When creating a ‘WHERE clause’ LIKE can be used to search for entries that match a pattern instead of looking for a specific value. This can be done in the following ways:

Using % as a wildcard
WHERE field1 LIKE '%s' – look for entries that have a field1 that ENDS in s – for example: would find ‘words’, ‘values’… would NOT find ’soon’.
WHERE field1 LIKE 's%' – would find entries with field1 starting with s (like ’soon’)
WHERE field1 LIKE '%s%' – would find entries that have a field1 which contains s anywhere in it

Using _ to represent an unknown character
WHERE field1 LIKE 's_op' – would find things like slop and stop

Anyway, LIKE can be an extremely useful and effective way to implement a search. An example would be an users admin page which allowed the admin to search for the name/email of the person they wanted to edit. They may not know the persons full name, or they may not want to/know to type it exactly as it is in the database. Adding a LIKE clause to your WHERE clause is an easy and efficient way to provide this capability.

Microsoft Silverlight

Recently, Microsoft has released its answer for Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash called Silverlight. It, very much like flash, allows for ‘Rich Internet Applications’ – basically interactive, ‘pretty’ web applications, movies and other media.

Silverlight is, in some ways, superior to Flash because it contains textual content that can be searched from your browser… making it easier to interact with. However, this text is in XAML format (visit Wikipedia for an explanation) which is Microsoft’s own proprietary XML based markup language. It is, in some ways, very useful for creating web applications. XAML no doubt will be familiar to people who have worked with asp.

The problem with both Silverlight and XAML is that if these technologies become popular, Microsoft would be able to deny compatibility/accessibility to people who didn’t use windows, or charge for compatible browsers. As far fetched as this may seem, Microsoft did not include support for Opera thus alienating Linux users in current versions of Silverlight…

Both Flash and Silverlight seem rather inaccessible to the general public (or at least to me) in terms of development because of the high cost of development studios for both languages. (Currently you can get a pre-release version of Silverlight’s studio – Microsoft Expressions – for free. The full studio costs $699 though.) While there are free options (such as CoffeeCup for flash) these tend to be… not very useful.

Proprietary languages/technologies seem to be the wrong way to be heading, especially with Microsoft holding the cards. I do think that web designers/developers will shy away from Silverlight if there is any hint that Microsoft intends to deny support to other browsers/operating systems.