Tuesday, April 29, 2003

The Purpose Driven Life: Seeing Life from Gods View Google Search It In this chapter, Rick Warren asks you to consider what your life picture or life metaphor is.  Examples include a party, race, marathon and battle.  What your life metaphor is reflects you view on life.  If you see your life as a race then speed is probably important to you and you will likely find yourself often in a hurry. For me my life metaphor is probably adventure.  This aligns closely with my recent discussion on being all I can be.  As in that discussion, I need to watch that the adventure is Christ focused. I disagree with Rick somewhat on hit identification that the Bible offers essentially three metaphors: "Life is a test, life is a trust, and life is a temporary assignment."  Sure each of these are true to some extent I believe there are a lot more just as significant Biblical life metaphors (in fact race happens to be one of them).  I am especially skeptical of Rick's emphasis on life being a test from God such as when he says, "God continually test people's character, faith, obedience, love, integrity and loyalty."  Are these tests really all from God?  Rick goes on to write, "You are always being tested.  God constantly watches your response to people, problems, success, conflict, illness, disappointment, and even the weather."  It is not that I disagree that God sometimes tests us, I simply wonder if he "continually", "always" tests us.  Sure, God cares and watches our responses to everyday life but is each event we encounter a specific "test" from him.  I am not convinced. Other notes: "...everything you do, even simply daily chores, has eternal implications." 10:18:17 PM   []    comment []

The Purpose Driven Life: Made to Last Forever Google Search It When you start living in light of eternity, "suddenly many activities, goals and even problems... appear trivial, petty and unworthy of your attention.  The closer you live to God the smaller everything else appears.  When you live in light of eternity your values change."  (page 37-38) "Death is not your termination, but your transition." (page 38)  "Only a fool would go through life unprepared for what we all know will eventually happen.  (page 39) 9:57:04 PM   []    comment []

More on Dave's Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar Google Search It I am even more impressed with Dave's Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar.  which I discussed a few days ago.  This tool is amazing!  One regular reader (probably my only reader) mentioned that it was too bad it didn't support various locals other than the US.  In actual fact it does.  Just add a /uk, for example, and you will search the UK version of google.  In fact, I believe you can make this the default via the local preferences file. One of my favorite features is the ability to use an accelerator key (defaults to WIN+S) to jump into the text box.  I have been wanting this feature for the Address bar that can be displayed on the Task bar for years and except for Intelli-sense, this search bar blows away the Address bar.  It turns out that through Windows Shell extensions it is relatively trivial to intercept what the run dialog does.  As a result, it would be reasonable simple to add all this functionality to the Run dialog (since the Quick Search Taskbar is open source that is).  Hmmm.... Not a bad idea!  Now if only I could figure out how to provide an accelerator key to place the cursor into a Task bar docked Address bar.  Any insight on how to do this would be most appreciated. 9:41:15 PM   []    comment []

Command Prompt's Ambiguous Treatment of Long File Extensions Google Search It Now this is kinda silly but it turns out that by default the command prompt doesn't distinguish between files with extensions whose first three characters are the same, at least when using wild cards.  For example, if you have two files in the current directory: temp.tem and temp.temp then entering the command del *.tem at the command prompt will delete both files.  Yikes!!! The kb article describes the registry setting required to avoid this behavior and to make it easier to make this change (when setting up a new machine), I have created a reg file to change the setting.  (Note that a reboot is required for the setting to take effect.) 12:32:56 AM   []    comment []

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