New Schrute Video

Schrute’s breeders posted a new video of Schrute and his brothers and sisters near Christmas.

Enjoy!

Can’t Make this Stuff Up

You simply can’t make this stuff up.

Apparently Caroline Kennedy, in the running for the Senate seat that Hillary Clintion will most likely vacate next year, has not voted in several elections in New York since registering in 1988. One of the election includes the Senate seat she hopes to fill.

Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.

Be careful what you wish for New Yorkers. If “change we can believe in” led to a boatload of new taxes (I know, Obama had nothing to do with the changes, but Democrats do control New York), I’m not sure what having another Kennedy family member in the U.S. Senate means.

Writing a Facebook App

A while ago, I wrote a Facebook App called “Simple Friends” that would display a list of your friends, where you could click their name to view their profile. It was simple enough, but I recently wanted to create a somewhat more sophisticated app.

I won’t bother going through the whole process, because there are great tutorials out there. I just wanted to share one piece of the puzzle that had me stuck for quite some time.

There is a function called setFBML which allows you to set the content’s of different sections of the user’s profile (i.e. get things to show up on their profile page. This was great, because I wanted to make a drop down list of friends to go on the user’s profile. Selecting a friend from the drop down would take you directly to their page.

I kept getting a message on my profile saying that there was no content available, and the content wouldn’t be available until my application created the content. I couldn’t figure this message out for the life of me. After lots of Google searches, I finally found someone who had the solution.

In PHP, the function profile_setFBML() was actually missing a parameter. I tried to update the function with the new parameter, but I couldn’t get that to work. I was finally able to call the function directly, and it looked something like this….

$facebook->api_client->call_method('facebook.profile.setFBML', array(
'uid' => $user_id,
'profile' => $markup,
'profile_main' => $markup));

$user_id is the id of the user who has the application installed. profile specifies what will show up if the user adds the application to their “Boxes” tab. The real kicker was profile_main, which specifies what should be displayed if the user adds your application to their actual profile page.

Check out my app, Lazy Friends, at http://apps.facebook.com/lazyfriends/

Buying a Pet in the 21st Century

The last month or so, we’ve experience what I like to call, “Buying a Pet in the 21st Century.”

Danielle and I have always said that if we were going to buy a dog, we wanted a BIG dog. Our friend Mary has a Great Dane named Chai. We got to see him while she was taking him for a walk downtown, and we instantly fell in love with him. Not only was he HUGE, but he was so friendly and well-behaved.

Thus we began our search for Great Dane puppies. I imagine years ago this was done by phone or through newspapers, etc. However, Danielle found our puppy online at www.puppyfind.com . We contacted the breeders via email, asking whether or not the puppy (Moose) was still available. They got back to us within a couple days, and let us know that Moose was still available. Within days we contacted the breeders and let them know not only that we were interested but we were also sending the down payment.

Danielle and I love the TV show The Office. One of my favorite characters is Dwight Schrute. I instantly thought that Schrute sounded like a strong, big dog name, so Moose became Schrute. Most people look at us like we have two heads when we tell them the puppy’s name, but everyone who knows The Office thinks it’s great.

What has been really great in this whole experience is that the breeders (bigpineydanes.weebly.com) have been sending us pictures of Schrute over the last few weeks. They’ve also started posting videos on YouTube, which have also been a treat for us.

It’s just amazing to me how the process of purchasing this puppy has been so different than the process that even my parents went through when they purchased our dog, Shadow.

We love Schrute so much already, and we can’t wait to bring him home on January 24!

Today is the Tomorrow We Worried About Yesterday

After recent trip to the Dumpling House, my favorite Chinese restaurant, I opened a fortune cookie with the following saying…

Today is the Tomorrow We Worried About Yesterday

I thought this was a simple but profound statement. Over the last few months I’ve dealt with a lot of worry, anxiety, etc. – mostly over things I can’t control. It’s been quite frustrating, to say the least, especially when you know that there is no reason to worry about those things. It gets even more frustrating when you read things like, “cast your cares on the Lord, for HE cares for you.”
Or, “do not worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition, present your requests to God, and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, shall guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” I could go on and on.

My anxiety has gotten much MUCH better lately, and I thank God for that. I think it’s probably due to a combination of things, but it’s almost kind of strange to not have a perpetual feeling of worry/anxiety, as bizarre as that might sound.

Anyway, sometimes we waste so much energy TODAY worrying about what we can’t control that’s just around the bend TOMORROW, and 9 times out of 10, when TOMORROW rolls around, it’s not nearly as bad as we thought it would be.

Hopefully this helps someone out there who stumbles on this post.

Saint & Sinner

Over the last few weeks I read Ted Dekker’s Sinner and Saint. Both were great reads, as is typical with Dekker books.

The books are a continuation from an older book, Showdown. In a nutshell, some monks come across some “magic” books that have the power to turn whatever is written in them into reality. The start Project Showdown as a well-meaning attempt to raise completely innocent children – free from evil.

However, the project goes horribly wrong when one of the students discovers the books and creates a man who embodies pure evil. This man goes on to wreak havoc on a small town in a struggle of good versus evil. But I digress.

The premise in Sinner reminds me an awful lot of the world we live in today. Tolerance is the buzz word of the day in the book. People have to be tolerant of anything and everything, except that is, of Christianity. Eventually a woman with supernatural powers of persuasion convinces the US government to make a change to the First Amendment to the Constitution in order to make it illegal to defame someone’s race, religion, etc.

The catch comes when it’s discovered that claiming Jesus is the only way to Heaven is actually a crime, because you would be saying that all other religions are wrong. A very interesting concept to say the least. Just as in Showdown, the struggle between good and evil comes to a tension-filled end.

It’s funny how many people who preach “tolerance” today are not tolerant of people who feel or believe differently than they do. Christians are many times labeled as “narrow-minded” and “judgmental.” So, we end up tolerating everything except Christianity, because it’s not “tolerant” because it chooses to call a spade a spade – to call sin sin.

Jesus taught His followers to love others, but loving and tolerating are not the same thing in my mind. It’s been said a million times that God, “loves the sinner, but hates the sin.” I think that’s a good way to describe the difference between loving and tolerating. I’m called to love people I don’t agree with, but that doesn’t mean I have to tolerate the choices they make.

I know it sounds confusing, but it makes sense if you take the time to think about it.