Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

I like lots of different kinds of music. This is sometimes hard for people to grasp when I first tell them, because I usually go on to clarify that I do not like most rap, hip-hop, pop, country or heavy metal; but I like nearly everything else, and contrary to popular opinion, there is a lot "else".

All this to say that I was in the car today listening to KVNO - I always listen to KVNO in my car because my cd player doesn't work and that's the station that generally plays the best music - when I realized something; Mormons make wonderful music. Seriously, do you ever listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? They are amazing! Anways, as I was driving home from work today, they started to play a song called Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Probably most of you know already, but Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is a short poem by Robert Frost, Randall Thompson (a "Quasi-Romantic" Composer) wrote a beautiful choral piece for it about 35 years later in 1959, and sometime after that, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed it to perfection. My advice to you is, find this somewhere and enjoy it...either that or let me play it for you next time you're over. To conclude, I'll include Frosts' poem here.

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Not long now...

Alright, it's been a while since I last posted here, I deleted my last one because I grew embarrassed of it after a couple days and took the lack of comments (only natural in a blog with six followers :P ) to mean that I was justified in that feeling. Anyways, a thought has formed in my mind over these past few weeks, and so I thought I would share it; that is, after all, what this blog is for.

How many of you have seen Iron Man 2? If you haven't, well, it's not a great movie by my standards, decent, but not great. However, the plot and the acting have nothing to do with what I am taking from the movie, though. I want to make the observation that the computer used by Tony Stark in the movie is not a thing of the future, or at least, not the distant future.

In the movie, Stark had various means of interfacing with the computer, but the two foremost were his voice, and his movements. The computer often displayed holograms of those things he was working on, and he manipulated them with his hands. It all had a bit of a 'futuristic' feel to it; but it wasn't.

Voice recognition software has a ways to go before it is as useful as it is portrayed in the movie, but I firmly believe that within ten years, most electronic devices will recognize and respond to even quite complex voice commands. In example of today's voice recognition technology, the Ford SYNC (a feature in many Ford, Lincoln and Mercury vehicles since 2008), has voice activated hands-free calling and voice activated music. You can TELL your phone to call someone from your contact list, and you can browse your music by genre, album, artist, and song title, using simple voice commands. Now of course there are many advances to be made in this technology before it will become a regular mode of interface, but those advances are happening; quickly.

As for interfacing with a system via movements and gestures, look at the Kinect! In case you don't know, the Kinect is a gaming system from XBox, that will ship on November 4th of this year, but unlike all XBox systems before it, this one requires no controller. The Kinect will use a device similar to a webcam to monitor movements made by the user and it is programmed to respond in various ways to a variety of gestures. This technology also has a ways to go before it will be very useful for more than gaming, but it is also moving forward rapidly.

As a side note, the Kinect will also respond to certain voice commands, but I don't think they will be very complex.

Finally, we come to the topic of holograms. This, I know next to nothing about. There have been great advances in the realm of 3D graphics lately, but that's a different thing than holograms. I do remember, however, that during the 2008 election coverage by CNN, that Wolf Blitzer had a reporter appear in studio via hologram. She had to be pretty stationary, and it wasn't at all perfect, but it was quite cool. This (along with research I did into the matter a couple years ago) leads me to believe that the technology is there as well, and it just needs to be advanced. This, I believe, will come more slowly than the others, due to the fact that people are pursuing 3D imaging right now, rather than actual holography, but I do see the use of holograms not too many years down the road. Say about 15 before they're used widely.

Oh, before I finish, I just have to add one more thing. In the movie, the AI seemed almost to have a personality. That will come before too long as well. This technology is still in very early stages, and I'm unsure how quickly it will advance, but it will. Look at chatterbots like the popular Cleverbot (cleverbot.com). True, sometimes it really doesn't make much sense, but at other times it can seem strangely lucid. As I said, needs work. Also, before I leave the topic of the AI, in the movie, it communicated with Stark via speech. This is coming too, we already have it in simple form in devices like GPS units, and it's only a matter of time before it becomes more widely used as an Output interface, and eventually used in conjunction with what comes of the technology now used to make chatterbots.

Anyways, I know that all of these technologies have been used in numerous books and movies for decades, but this time...oh so believable, oh so near.

A book that caught my eye

So at the Borders where I work, we have a "Religion" display table right now. Most of the books featured on this display are "Christian" books due to that being the most common religion claimed by Americans. I was walking by that table today when I saw a book that just made me stop and think. Of course, I didn't actually stop, I kept on about my business, but I did think, and thus, I write.

In the above paragraph, I put the word Christian in quotation marks, because many of the books displayed on this display certainly claim to be Christian, but seem to draw the reader's attention to something other than God. For instance, there is The Green Bible. Let me say that again, The GREEN Bible! This is basically a study Bible that includes essays by "Christian" environmentalists and prints all the verses that speak about the environment in green. I like what Richard Land said on the issue:

"Sure it's important, but when they asked Jesus what was most important, he said, 'Love your God, and love your neighbor as yourself.' He didn't say anything about creation."

I would go so far as to call this corruption of the Word of God, sacrilege. At any rate, that book is not the one that caught my eye today, though it has in the past, it is just an example of the kind of literature that is on the table. Although there may be one or two decent books, the majority are not things that would be helpful for "the edification of the saints".

The book that caught my eye was the Busy Dad's Bible, which advertised itself as having "Daily Inspiration Even If You Only Have One Minute". I've been thinking about this off and on throughout the day, and wondering what my life would be like if I only gave the Lord one minute each day to read his word. Now I know that I'm not the busiest man alive, far from it, it may be easier for me to find time to give God than it is for some others, but I know some super busy Dad's who still give time to the Lord and encourage their families to do so as well and are much better for it.

The first example to come to my mind, is my Dad. There have been times when he has been slammed with stuff to do, whether it be meetings with various committees every day (minus Sunday) for two weeks, often stretching from early to quite late; or all the numerous responsibilities of a Regional Chairman with NTM PNG, so much so that some days I barely saw him; or now as he has been even busier than ever over the passed few months, he has made a point of taking time to be alone with the Lord each morning for approximately half an hour and encouraging us (sometimes 'strongly encouraging') to do so as well. Also, each weekday morning, we would have family devotions whenever it was possible (missing it even one time in a month was rare). This is one of the reasons I respect my Dad and one of the ways that he has been such a great example to me.

Back to the question I have been thinking about all day, "What would my life be like if I only gave God one minute each day?" This is a quote from the back of the book:

"It fits right into my schedule."

And that's what it would be, that's what I would be doing, fitting God into my schedule. Yet this gets me thinking, how often do I end up doing just that? Fitting God into my preconceived plans. Fitting time with him into a day that should be centered on him. Far more than I should.

This probably wasn't as coherent as it is in my mind, when I write or speak, it seldom is, but hopefully you get the point.

Don't mind me, I'm just being happy

Are you happy today? I'm happy. Among other things, I have as next to no money as it's possible to have, I had to postpone college until the fall, and I'm starting to hope that I can go then rather than being sure as I was before. I need to work on my "study ethic", because basically I don't have to study so for the most part it ends up that I don't, even though I should because I want to get my A+ Certification renewed and learn Perl before I start college in the fall. But I'm happy.

I wasn't happy earlier today, I was getting all anxious and stuff, something which has been trying to creep in for a fair while; not anymore. It could be that two great friends were just over for dinner and we had a really nice barbecue and a fun evening. It could be that I'm just that cool. It could be that Flogging Molly just has a great sound and you can't help being happy when you listen to them. However, I'm inclined to think that it's because I believe that God works all things together for good for those that love the Lord; and I do love the Lord. He's already started to work things out for me through the last couple weeks.

First, I was given a car by my friend David Hanson who lives in Wisconsin after my last one died horribly. Second, even though my last two checks from my former employer (The Melting Pot) have bounced, I have gotten in contact with the office of Senator Mike Johanns and a woman from there has told me that they will be able to help me recover the funds owed me. I didn't even know that my Senator (or anyone at his office) would be able to do anything like this until a friend mentioned it to me a week ago. Coincidence? I don't think so. Thirdly, I have been given another part time job to go along with my job at Borders and replace the one at the Melting Pot (which closed). Fourthly, well..no, this isn't everything, but it's everything I feel like sharing right now, and I think it's plenty to prove that God is good (as if that needed proving). Ok, there actually willy be a fourth thing that the Lord has done for me recently, he has given me chances to trust him!

Oh, also, if you want to pray for my "study ethic" as I termed it earlier..well, I would appreciate it, because I really do need to be working more on those things that I claim to be studying.

I came, I saw, I...?

So I was reading Jingo by Terry Pratchett the other day - well ok, to be quite honest, I was listening to it on the way to and from Wisconsin this last weekend - and I came across a little observation of Caesar's famous words "Veni, vidi, vici". I thought that it was too good not to share.

"It [Veni, vidi, vici] wasn't the sort of thing you came up with on the spur of the moment, was it? It sounded as if he had worked it out. He'd probably spent long evenings in his tent, looking up in the dictionary short words beginning with V and trying them out... Veni, vermini, vomui, I came, I got ratted, I threw up? Visi, veneri, vamoosi, I visited, I caught an embarrassing disease, I ran away? It must have been a big relief to come up with three short acceptable words. He probably made them up first, and then went off to see somewhere and conquer it."

And later on in the book, engraved on the plinth of an old statue:

"Ab hoc possum videre Domum Tuum"

Well... 'domum tuum' was 'your house,' wasn't it?...and 'videre' was 'I see'...

"What?" he said aloud. "'I can see your house from up here?' What kind of a noble sentiment is that?"