My site is finally up! After more than a week of changing DNS and IP settings, it's finally up and running. Here's my final setup: I registered a domain name through 1and1, got a gig of space from FreeWebTown, and used ZoneEdit to point the domain name to the hosting space. The whole process cost $5.99, which was just the price of registering a .net domain name for a year. I'm pleased. #technology

I probably shouldn't complain, and I usually don't.  But I need to say a few things about a few groups of people that I have problems with.  For one, there's the ACLU.  What I can't stand about this group is that they are just a bunch of lawyers who take the side of the "victim" and bring about judgments that are just totally stupid.  There was that whole 10 Commandments thing at a court in Alabama (I think), there's the thing about taking "under God" out of the pledge of allegiance (it was actually added in the 1950s, read here), and there's all that stuff about gay marriage and making it constitutional.  I think the ACLU will lead to the downfall of this nation.

Another group I don't like is feminists.  I agree with the whole idea of equality and non-discrimination, but I think it's just gone too far.  In fact, it's gone so far that things today are the opposite of what they were 50 years ago.  But feminists are especially bad because they boycott the typical male:  macho, chauvinist, aggressive, abusive, inconsiderate, etc.  I agree with them on this.  These types of people should be boycotted.  The problem is that I'm grouped into this category because all males are grouped into this category.  See, I don't fit into this category.  I'm not macho; I'm not aggressive.  So I just think it sucks that a typical feminist would hate me just because I'm male, when there's really much more to me than just being a male.

This leads me to my final point which is an idea that I've been thinking about for several years now.  I want to start a group that fights for the rights of straight, white, Christian males.  Right now, we've got nothing.  We're the most discriminated-against, hated group of people in the world.  We're heterosexual, so all the gays and gay-supporters hate us.  We're white, so that means all the blacks and Hispanics hate us for taking their jobs.  We're Christians, so that means all lefty liberal atheists and other -ists hate us.  And we're male, so that means all females hate us.  You see why we need to start this group? #sociology

One thing I realized on Friday night after the HALO Bible study (part of Bethlehem Church) is that I feel strongly about several things, and I'm thinking there's a reason why I feel strongly about these things.  For example:  I encouraged Mare to be more consistent with her devotions by devoting a certain time each day or by changing up what she reads.  This made me realize that I feel strongly about encouraging/helping believers have a regular and meaningful quiet time.  I realized just a few weeks ago that I feel very strongly about confronting obvious sin among believers.  I don't think a person can be part a discipleship group and be blatantly involved in sin and have no desire to change.  This was partially brought on by my subteam's study of Revelation, which condemned some churches for allowing sin to exist among their members.  Toleration is terrible.  I also feel strongly about teaching believers an easy way to share the gospel.  A lot of people think it's really difficult and you need several hours to explain everything.  Other people think you need to bring people to an evangelist or an outreach to have the gospel explained properly.  I believe every Christian should know how to explain the gospel to any other person.  It can be as simple as what's on my gospel page.  Another thing I feel strongly about is dating with marriage in mind (courtship) as opposed to dating for fun or "to see where things go."  I hate hearing about people who are just trying dating to see where it leads them.  I can tell you this from experience:  it only leads to bad things.  People are naturally sexual beings; that's how God made us.  You can't put a hungry wolf in a room and expect it not to eat a juicy steak.  I think we just need to be honest with ourselves and realize where things are going before it's too late and we weakly give in.

I think I feel strongly about these things because I've experienced all of them.  I've had trouble with having a consistent quiet time with God; I've been engaged in sin while in a discipleship group only to be confronted about it; I've been afraid of sharing the gospel because I just didn't know it well enough to share; and I've dating for fun only to realize how stupid it is.  I guess this is all part of the Christian walk.  We experience things and stumble for a reason:  to grow. #religion

Here's a random thing about Christianity that just came to me today (from God most likely) while in church (I always realize the coolest things in church): The Jews around Jesus' time were expecting a political and/or military leader to release them from Roman rule. Jesus came as a conqueror, but as a spiritual conqueror -- to conquer death, not people. So once again, people didn't realize what God was doing because they were expecting him to act in a certain way. This kind of thing happens all the time. When we pray about something and "our wish doesn't come true," we immediately think God didn't answer us. We're expecting him to act in such a way as to answer our prayer in a positive way. But God can answer with a "no." #religion

This is a great verse from the Bible: "See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!" (Galatians 6:11). I just think it's funny. I wonder if the original manuscript was written with big letters. I also like the context: Paul's letters are mostly (I think) written by other people as he dictated to them what to write. Towards the end of Galatians, he writes some of it himself to emphasize its importance and to make it more personal. But apparently he wrote larger than his scribe; large enough to mention it. #religion

This is not for the geek-faint-of-heart: for (my) future reference, here's what I just learned about iframes: The problem with putting an iframe on each page at the top to act as a menubar is that the links you click on open up in the iframe itself, instead of in the main page. The problem with making a main page that consists of a menubar, and then opening all the links in an iframe below the menubar is that the addressbar at the top of the screen always says it's on the same page. That's the whole reason I didn't want to use frames in the first place. #technology

Do you want to see God? Doesn't everybody? Wouldn't that make it so much easier to believe everything about Christianity? Here's why I think we can't see God: Hebrews 11:1 says, "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." If we saw God, we would no longer have any use for faith. The problem with this is that "...everything that does not come from faith is sin." (Romans 14:23) So in other words, if we saw God and continued to live, we couldn't not be living in sin because seeing God eliminates faith, which is required in order to not sin. (Did I just unravel the universe? Probably not -- it's probably a mistranslation) #religion

Dude 1: Hey how's it going?
Dude 2: Same s***, different day.


Me: Hey how's it going?
Gina: Not much, not much.


"It's tough trying to keep your feet on the ground, your head above the clouds, your nose to the grindstone, your shoulder to the wheel, your finger on the pulse, your eye on the ball and your ear to the ground." (reference) #language

One thing that I really don't like about some people is their overly negative attitude. Some people feel like their lives are just continually bad, and they have nothing to be thankful for. Just like in Office Space, when Peter was at the occupational hypnotherapist, and he said, "So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized: ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that's on the worst day of my life." A similar thing happened on my first day of work. Here I am, just out of college. I graduated about a week ago, and I'm signing some papers with some other new employees. One of the guys says, "Well, this is the first day of the rest of my life," implying that he'll be working until he dies and his work will define, or be the center of, his life. I think it's funny to joke about these things, hence my reference to Office Space. But to actually believe these things is just sad. Working isn't the central focus of my life. It's what I do to make money so that I can do the things that make up the central focus of my life. #psychology

I finally registered a domain name today from 1&1 for $5.99: daveinc.net. I also got some free hosting (50 MB) from Atspace. Now it's time to make my own website for real. Maybe I can even post to a blog without editing html. That would be amazing. I'm so computer-dumb when it comes to some of this stuff. Sure I can calculate how fast a bullet will hit a target at a certain distance when firing uphill and with a tailwind, but I can't figure out some of this web nonsense.

I've added a few more programs to the "programs" section. Check them out. Most notably, I'm hosting all Commander Keen games. I'm not sure if this is legal or not, but I think it is. Hailing from the early 90s and mentioning things like VGA, 256-color display, and 386, these games are epic.

I'm having some problems linking up my domain name to my host site. I'm not an official computer geek, so I don't fully understand DNS settings and PHP. I'm trying...

Let me recommend this site/service: StatCounter. This is the first good hit counter I've come across, and I've tried quite a few stupid ones. It's simple and free and shows stats for any page you put it on. And it's not big and ugly. It just fits right in.

Ooh I forgot to mention: forget Atspace.com. Look no further for huge amounts of free web space: FreeWebTown. This site is amazing. They give you 1GB of space for free. Plus they have host name and IP address settings so that you can point your domain to this space. That's what I'm in the process of figuring out. Ooh and one more thing: there are no ads or anything. Just free beautiful space. Good-bye Geocities. Good-bye everyone. Oh yeah and there's FTP access. What more could you want? (Ouch my geekiness hurts)

I found this other cool website: ChangeNotes. It emails you when certain webpages change. I use it to let me know when McAfee AntiVirus virus definition files are out of date. #technology