Bearfruit

“Share What You Wear” is a program organized through my church that distributes countless thousands of clothing and basic houseware items free to needy people in Des Moines. Semi-trucks full of items are being unloaded at Grace Church now and starting Thursday, scads of people, hundreds at least, maybe thousands (I have no clue how many) will come through the building and get good quality used clothes for themselves and their kids.

In an effort to save money I decided to shave my cat rather than take him to the groomer to be shaved.

I don’t think I’ll do that again. Some things are worth paying for. Fortunately he’s very forgiving. Sorry Snickers. :-)

On ebay, a “snipe” is when someone bids on an auction at the very last second. Maybe you’ve experienced this when you bid on something and thought it was in the bag and then refreshed the auction page expecting to see a “Congratulations, you won” message but instead saw, “This auction has ended, sorry, you didn’t win.” It’s frustrating and disappointing and your first response is, “I hate it when that happens!” But really, snipping isn’t a bad thing.

If I spoke every language but did not love others, my words would be like noisy clanging. If I saw the future, memorized all of wikipedia and had an inner resolve strong enough to move mountains but did not love others my gains would be worthless. If I gave everything I had to the poor and even died for a good cause I might have something to boast about, but without love I would be nothing.

What is love? It is patient and kind, never bragging or jealous or rude. It never demands its own way nor keeps track of the times it has been let down. It does not enjoy getting away with what is wrong - it celebrates when justice prevails. Love never gives up, always has hope and can last through every circumstance.

Everything else known to mankind will become useless in time except love - it is precious forever. As an adult, we remember the actions of our youth and understand that we saw life as if we were looking through a foggy mirror. Right now our understanding of the universe is similarly incomplete, but when we achieve full understanding we’ll look back and be ashamed of how we’ve behaved.

Three things will last forever - faith, hope and love. The greatest of these is love.

- a paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13

Last week, around May 2nd or 3rd, my daughter learned to crawl. It’s been a week so now she’s officially at that stage referred to as, “no really, don’t take your eyes off of her!”

So now I’ve got this challenge that so many people before me have faced. How to get her to be stationary for a little bit. This is my brief and whimsical diary of a few experiments.

Cats and Toilets

I think I’ve figured out why cats drink from the toilet. You see, when you feed a dog, he’ll clean the dish. Therefore you must feed him proper portions. Cats tend to be thrifty by nature. If you feed a cat, he’ll eat when he wants to, and just enough to satisfy himself. Therefore I’ve surmised that cats, being thrifty, drink from the toilet because they see it as a bountiful supply of water and are merely rationing their water bowl for that day that the toilet runs out. Quite brilliant.

OK, so I’ve been walking often, not every day, but most. When I walk its at least 1 mile, but I’ve been walking some days 2.5. Plus, I went to the Iowa State Fair twice, each day involving quite a bit more than 2 miles of walking. Unfortunately, the healthy walking was offset significantly by the unhealthy fair food. :-(

The cool thing about baby shoes is that they only have to look nice, they don’t have to be functional, since the babies can’t walk, nor do they have to be durable, since they out grow them in 4 weeks or less (and shoes that you don’t walk in take far longer than 4 weeks to wear out).

Oh crud, I think I forgot to blog about my new baby!

The Dr. says I should loose 30lbs. I actually told her I felt I was putting on some weight and asked her about dieting. She looked up my BMI and said my target weight was something like 125-169. On her scale I weighed 196lbs.

Microsoft has squarely positioned .Net (C# primarily, but other flavors such as VB, J#, Iron Python, Jscript, etc) as the programming language for Windows. I realize its not a language, but pretend it is for a minute.

The Linux community really loves C and Python. Lets just focus on high-level languages (if you think C is a high level language, you’re too old) so we’ll say that Python is the language of choice for Linux.

Mac users are increasingly rallying behind Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Note that a lot of influential people in the Web development community use Macs, and since they know that they’ll never have enough market share to attract big desktop application vendors, they’re a driving force behind the movement to make all major productivity apps go web 2.0, which is a place where Ruby sparkles.