Only a few days left of this semester….

From Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 4.

How all occasions do inform against me
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event—
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward—I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do,’
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me.
Witness this army, of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

Here’s the result.

Final Fantasy IV: The Prelude

I’m also very excited about HTML5 and what it will mean for the future of the web.

However, this little bit gave me pause:

When Flash is gone, this overly aggressive marketing will simply be foisted upon you using more “open” technologies like HTML5. And guess what? It’ll be harder to block because it looks more like content than Flash does.

via A good problem to have | Mike Industries.

Uh-oh…

Songs that you purchase from iTunes and Amazon come in a high-quality, close-to-CD-sounding bit rate: 256kbps. That’s roughly 32KB per second, or 2MB per minute. An album of 60 minutes, therefore, would be around 120MB.

However, my iPhone, even at 32GB, still cannot hold my entire music library. One solution I tried was re-encoding some of my higher bit rate albums at 128kbps, which to my ears sounds great for the majority of my music. The problem is that I now have two versions of the albums floating around in my iTunes library, doubling the space on my hard drive.

What this new feature does is encodes a 128kbps version to your iPhone/iPod directly instead of keeping both the higher bit rate versions as well as the lower bit rate versions in iTunes. In other words, keep your 256kbps in your iTunes library, and only have 128kbps versions on your iPhone/iPod.

After selecting this little checkbox, I managed to squeeze out around 2GB of space, and it cost me nothing but a long wait. Be prepared: if you have a lot of music at higher bit rates, this can take some time. It took me nearly three hours to convert 850 songs on my 2GHz MacBook.

Anyway. Nerdery done. Try it out if you wanna free up some space.

I’m not sure whether there has ever been a charge for this, but it’s free right now.

Our people do not so much need to have their heads stored, as to have their hearts touched.

~ Jonathan Edwards on revivals: containing a … – Google Books.

This is why I love my Edwards’ “Zeal for God’s Glory” class.

For the diary, we used an app called Lose It!, which is currently free for the iPhone/iPod touch. To make sure our diary was accurate, we used a food scale (the Salter 1450 Digital Nutritional Scale), and weighed ourselves using Wii Fit.

Following Jared’s (of Subway fame) advice from his book, we finally found something we enjoyed doing that was also good for us. To sum up Jared’s advice, he didn’t recommend everyone do the Subway diet (though it doesn’t hurt his livelihood to keep representing Subway); rather, he tried and failed at several diets before he found one he enjoyed enough to stick with. Thus far, Rosanna and I have tried and failed at several diet/workout plans, but currently this setup is something that we have treated more like a game than a duty. For example, I quickly figured out how many calories I needed for my breakfast, and explored what my options were to fill those calories. Lose It! and the food scale made it fun.

So, controlling my diet was the first step towards taking more control of other areas in my life. We started using Lose It! at the beginning of February. I anticipated that I wouldn’t always use it as heavily as I did at the start, because it taught me how to measure proper portions, how to make wise trade-offs (“Should I eat 20 mini-pretzels, or trade in 10 of them for half an apple?”), and forced me out of the “I’m hungry, I’ll find something to eat” mentality that’s easy for me to fall into. I viewed Lose It! and the food scale as a kind of “training wheels” to get me thinking right about food, but I never intended to keep doing it forever. Now, Lose It! and the food scale are more reference tools than a strict daily diary I diligently keep.

Granted, I don’t have a lot of weight to lose, but at 29, I’m noticing my metabolism has definitely started to wane in the past year or so, and it has started to show. I don’t want to wait until the weight is a problem (or causes other problems). I’m investing in my “Health 401k” right now.

Without even intentionally exercising (at all!), I have dropped 12-15lbs. since the beginning of February, and the best thing of all is that I don’t feel like I’ve ever really deprived myself of much. Rosanna has helped tremendously in giving me a desire and hunger for foods to eat on a daily basis that are good for me, and yet we still enjoy our guilty pleasure: splitting a Saturday night after-church Little Caesars’ $5 pepperoni pizza.

What’s amazing to me is how big a difference can be caused by such small — yet consistent — changes.

This has led to other things, like restarting my PushupFu journey, and I’ve added CrunchFu to the mix. I’m not rushing into anything drastic, just a small ten-minute exercise session every day. I’m aiming to refine my core muscles, because once you clean the windows, you gotta show off your product. ;o)

Up to this point, I’ve intentionally kept these details to myself because I wanted to see if I could and would stick with it. I have! So, it feels right to talk about my plans and goals because I’m seeing results. I’m looking forward to reaching my weight-loss goal of 20lbs., and it should happen within the next three weeks. And yes, I’ll blog about it.

I’m just amazed at how changing your diet — or just paying attention to your diet — can have a profound effect on your overall health and vitality. And I’m even more glad that it’s been a road that I could travel on without feeling like I was living an alternative lifestyle on a “diet” that I’ll “get off of” once I meet my goals. And we all know where that can lead us… right back to where we started (and then some)!

So here’s to making little, measured, consistent, and intentional changes.

Six years ago, my life was saved by Piper’s exposition of Micah 7:8-9 in his book When I Don’t Desire God where he devoted an entire chapter to those two verses. Title?

How to Fight for Joy Like a Justified Sinner: Learning the Secret of Gutsy Guilt

At that time, I was under the tremendous guilt of my sin that drove me to a suicidal depression. The guilt was heavy on me of how I knew I fell short of God. I was told by someone very near to me that no one would be able to bear living with me due to the extent of my sin.

It was in these two verses that God faithfully shone light into my soul so that I could taste the beauty of what He promised me in His Word.

Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord will be a light to me.

I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned against him, until he pleads my cause and executes judgment for me. He will bring me out to the light; I shall look upon his vindication.

The guilt part is that he feels INDIGNATION and sits in DARKNESS. And he blames no one but himself. Yet, when he looks to judgment, instead of saying “He will pay me back,” he says “He will bring me out to the light; I will look on his vindication.” That’s gutsy.

To feel what you know you deserve, and then to claim forgiveness is gutsy. It’s gutsy guilt. Real guilt, real boldness. Beautiful to see them so paired together.

So it was with that verse that God reminded me that as long as I’m in Christ, the judgment my sin deserves has already been served by Jesus, and when God looks at me, He can justly and with no offense to anyone say, “Not guilty!”

That truth went from being a theological truth I understood with my mind to the sweetest morsel of goodness to my soul. It broke me and freed me and gave me such a joy that though I was so sorrowful then, I was always rejoicing.

At a time in my life where I was living in Oklahoma and had decided to die there (by my own hand, SO selfishly!), I thought I’d never get married, move to Minnesota, and experience the goodness of God in the land of the living.

And so it was last night that I felt the tremendous weight of the gracious gift that landed me 1) still alive, 2) married to a woman who has borne all the sin I was told no woman could ever bear, 3) living in Minnesota as an 4) apprentice in Bethelehem College and Seminary at 5) Bethlehem Baptist Church, reading 6) the same Scrupture passage before the sermon given by 7) the same man whose exposition of the passage was used by the Holy Spirit to save my life.

I just wept. It was a lot of Providence for my emotional constitution to handle. I’m surprised I managed to finish the passage, weeping as I did.

The more I live, the more I’m seeing that my life is a story with a beginning and end point, with lots of plot twists. Even the bad in my life, the kind of bad that brought me to the brink of ending my life, is another brush stroke on the canvas of a masterpiece, on which I make up a tiny speck. But taken as a whole, it is beautiful.

As my pastor has written:

Behold the mercy of our King
Who takes from death its bitter sting
And by His blood, and often ours
Brings triumph out of hostile powers.
When He is finished with His art:
The quiet worship of our hearts.
When God creates a humble hush
And makes Leviathan His brush
It won’t be long before the rod
Becomes the tender kiss of God.

For its part, Adobe would like to portray Flash as some noble gift that it has graciously bestowed upon the world, leading to a utopia of ubiquitous porn clips, time-wasting tower defense games, and artsy “web sites” where you can’t link to anything specific.

What was the 10 billionth song downloaded? “Guess Things Happen That Way” by Johnny Cash.

Ironic.