After having almost completed school (2 weeks, booya!), after taking Project Management in particular, and most importantly having dealt with it personally in the professional world, I’m seeing the necessity of proper planning and foresight on major projects, otherwise the results can be disasterous, and in some cases catastrophic. I mean you can hear that over and over, but when you experience the catastrophe yourself, it takes on a whole new meaning. Within the IT field, end-users become accustomed to using applications, websites, and certain functions on a daily basis. They just want it to work, and they don’t want it to change. It’s hard enough for many end-users that aren’t computer-savvy to begin with to remember where to go and what to do, but then changing the things they do know makes it even worse for them. And when you take the rug out from under them by introducing a new system, upgrade, or “improvement” to a smoothly functioning application or system, it really rocks their world. This is where proper planning comes into play. It’s really a very basic, fundamental concept that should be employed within a professional corporate environment that seems to go overlooked many times. If you get a system that works fine, I say stick with it, unless there are major security holes. But if you do have to upgrade to a newer system or application, try with the best of your ability to make the changeover seamless, otherwise you throw your end-users for a loop. Within a corporate environment, it can mean the difference between gaining or losing net profit. It can also mean the difference in your total operating costs increasing or decreasing for either having to repair all the screw-ups in the system due to improper planning and getting other people involved that shouldn’t be initially, or spending that extra time you might use repairing broken links with planning out your project at the very beginning. That’s my rant for the day …
Month: November 2005 Page 1 of 2
I’m so excited about pumpkin pie.
Update (10:29 pm) – It was everything I thought it could be …
I was just considering what a great and wonderful God we serve (we who believe in Christ that is). Words cannot sum up how wonderful He is. First of all, He secured our eternal destinies by His blood out of pure love, from no other motivation other than to glorify Himself and show His immmense love toward us. By making a sacrifice at great expense to Himself, He secured our salvation so that we could spend eternity with Him, forever enjoying His presense, the way it was designed to be before the fall. I am so amazingly grateful not so much for material blessings (though I am greatly thankful for that), but more, I am so grateful that Christ purchased me on the cross with His blood. I would be totally lost, a ship without a rudder had it not been for His eternal sacrifice paid for by Christ bearing the wrath of God in Himself. He is so wonderful, majestic, creative, beautiful, glorious, powerful, sovereign, loving, kind, just, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omnivorous (jk), patient, kind; He is everything I am not. Jesus Christ is what makes me whole. I praise God that He chose to save sinful, loathsome me from an eternity without Him. He is my all in all, my great Comforter. He is pure and holy, beyond expression. Praise God that Jesus Christ didn’t simply die but that He also rose from the grave by the power of God! With this wonderful hope in Christ, we will be raised to kingship to reign with Him for all eternity, forever glorifying the God of grace. And not only do we receive all of these eternal blessings (many not yet experienced to their fullest), but we get to experience them now (to a degree)! That is just wonderful and drives me to the cross to constantly experience His forgiveness and pardon based upon His finished work. Thank You, Father, that You did not abandon me to my sin, allowing me to pursue the desires of my heart to their fullest, thus hardening me to a life of sin and eternal damnation. Praise You God that You sought me and changed me when I was not seeking You. Praise You that You are the almighty King that for whatever reason (pure love) You decided to rescue me from my sin, myself, and the result of that life, hell. Jesus You are everything to me, and I pray You would pour out Your Holy Spirit in me that I may show you to all I come into contact with, that all may see and know that You are Lord, the Sovereign King, through which the whole world came into being. I love You. God is so amazingly gracious …
Well, I’ve finally changed up my website architecture using Apache 2.0.55 to where it essentially looks like this: client browser connects to HTTP port 80 (or HTTPS port 443) through the internet to the outside of my firewall > the firewall NATs the connection to the web proxy ports (undisclosed) > the web proxy connects to one of several internal web servers I’ve specified it to connect to > the queried web server then renders the page back through the web proxy and then back to the client through the internet. Basically, with this new design in place, I can offload SSL processes to the web proxy (separate server) and it will take the encryption load off of my web servers (thus making it much more efficient on processing). I can also proxy any internal network appliance web interface (such as SHOUTCast servers, webcam servers, wireless access point servers, etc.) through the web proxy, and on top of that I can encrypt it all using AES-256 (when using Firefox), as well as password out specific sites at the Apache web server level. Some really sweet technology …
;)
“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
I just love going back to the Old Testament and seeing Christ spoken of so clearly. This is the very Gospel in the Old Testament, that our Messiah would suffer so greatly on our behalf. I find it interesting to see how the writer talks about how He carried (past-tense) our sorrows, how he was stricken, smitten, and afflicted. Christ’s sacrificial death spans and pierces through time. When He died, He died with supreme, sovereign intentionality, to purchase those those the Father had chosen in eternity past, before the foundation of the world, His children (John 17). Christ’s atonement was to bring glory to God and to purchase salvation for the children of God, Jew and Gentile. The Holy Spirit then applies this work of redemption to the children of God in time. One of the cool things though is that the work of Christ was clearly perceived by the prophets several hundred years before Christ was born, this piece of scripture being a clear picture of this. How cool is that? They saw the work of redemption that was coming, not necessarily knowing all the particulars, but nevertheless seeing the Work of works. Thank God for Jesus, that He would put on human flesh, live a perfect life unto God, die on the cross for our sins, and rise from the grave, that any who would believe in Him would be saved. It’s just simply amazing, the very thing that brings life, and meaning to life. If you’re depressed, look to the cross of Christ; if you think more highly of yourself than you ought, look to the cross of Christ; if you have huge decisions to make, look to the cross of Christ and base them upon and as a result of His work. Are you worried or anxious? Look to the cross of Christ. There is nothing better than personal communion with the God of all time, the Sovereign King, the LORD of lords. Go to Him and look to Calvary where He was “crushed for our iniquities” and that “with His stripes we are healed.” Sin has ruined everything, Christ and His work can fix anything.
I haven’t posted in a few days mainly because I’ve been swamped with school work, work work, and other various things. Will post something soon …
‘An Islamist threat like the Nazis’
If you know anything about history, you know that we must learn from it or else face the same consequences in different circumstances. I found the article above particularly interesting and important because it has to do with our future generations, if not our own.
The author links the rise of radical Islam in Europe to the rise of the Nazi’s in Europe in the 1930’s. Although many would suppose that the recent riots in France are simply due to racial oppression, there is something much deeper at work here. Though that may well be part of it, there is huge opportunity here for radicalism to envelop an entire generation of young Muslisms (if it hasn’t begun already), just as Nazism enveloped the German people.
I’m finishing up Ethics in Management today and man am I glad. This class was a good exercise though in not only defending absolute truth (as it pertains to scripture and such), but also taking down the whole system of relativism which much of ethical theory is based on.
Post-modernity has infiltrated every facet of the West, and it seems people are slowly discovering it’s a dead-end philosophy. However, many within the academic community seem to still be holding on to this thought (not sure why, they’re supposed to be the smart ones). So, taking some of the apologetic arguments from one of my favorite books, Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air, by Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl, I was successfully able to take down this system which is what a majority of the theory behind ethics in our day comes from.
Well, I’m experimenting with a new radio channel, “westerfunk.net >>> radio.” Check it out on westerfunk.net/radio. I don’t have it listed on any Shoutcast servers, mainly because I don’t want a ton of traffic (or RIAA and/or the FCC to come beat down my door). I mainly wanted to set it up to play with Shoutcast and learn how to setup this amazing free audio/video streaming server. I have most of my favorite bands, DJ mixes, and other various stuff playing on there now, so feel free to check it out from the links above. It’s broadcasting on TCP ports 8000 and 8002 (Lo-Fi and Hi-Fi, respectively) so you may not be able to get to it through certain firewall setups (such as a work environment), but give it a shot anyway and shoot me an email and tell me what you think.