just got a new theme for my blog Roar of the WEB I plan on really getting with it. All things web design develop http://tinyurl.com/28umnyk
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I attended a family funeral the other day and was touched by the sorrow and grief expressed by the immediate family. This lady a Christian, widow, mother, grandmother, great grand mother and beloved church member had touched many lives. And seeing the emotions that her death had generated made me ask the age old question of why the God of love would allow so much sorrow in our lives. And the only answer I could come up with was, because He loves us. Love is a bitter sweet emotion that has a high price of extreme grief when that object of that love is removed from our lives. As we look at our lives and remember moments of joy, the birth of a child, the first words or steps, those kitchen table moments where a parent and child connect and so many more examples that I could write pages on. All of these moments are etched in our hearts so that when the realization that this particular person will not make any more memories with us, we grieve. But it is that grief that reminds us just how much we have loved and in this world we live in we almost miss the fact that it is our nature to love. God him self I believe knows what it is like to grieve. In Genesis 6 it says that it grieved him at his heart the direction that his most precious and loved creation mankind had taken.
So if you have occasion to feel grief ask yourself just why you are grieving. And I would imagine that soon your grief will be intermingled with joy as you remember the love that is the foundation of grief at your loss. I believe God made it that way that we might realize just what love can cost us sometimes just as it cost Him to love us all. He sacrificed His only Son that we might know that joy and sorrow of life here. And that we would have the opportunity to know eternal joy in a sorrow less eternal heaven.
Bitter Sweet
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Acceptable? or Just Routine?
This week had many news stories that caught national media attention. Especially of note was the “Balloon Boy” that really was nothing more than a not so well thought out hoax be parents whose maturity did not match that of their six year old.
Another story that happened in my hometown also involved a child a little seven year old girl named Somer Thompson. Her story did not make national news she was only snatched off of the street walking home from school, murdered and thrown in a landfill in another state. Not really newsworthy on a national level. At least not to compete with the Balloon Boy. There is much speculation already in the media as to what criminal felony charges may be filed against the infantile parents of the Baloon Boy. Mean while Somers killers are as yet unknown and as far as the punishment they will receive the only good news is that Florida does have a death penalty even though the unknown subject will receive every benefit of the law and most likely live the equivalent of two or three of Somer Thompson’s life times before “justice” is carried out. Not to mention that the guilty party may never experience the horrific, violent fear that little Somer experienced during the last day of her short sojourn on the planet.
I have a few problems with the events of this past week. One what message is the media sending to our children when a hoax perpetrated by some immature people takes the media scene for days (they are still on national news) and the tragic death of a innocent seven year old child does not get mentioned on a national newscast. Has society desensitized itself to the point that the tragic death of a child is so routine as not to be worth a mention of national media? Would it not be able to attract the target audience or market share for advertisers? Or do we not want to acknowledge the monsters that freely roan our streets like hungry wolves randomly attacking the most vulnerable prey? How many of these crimes against children occur in America in a given time frame?
The terrible truth is evident to those that may have studied sociology and note that over time societies tend to become more or less tolerant of certain behaviors. And while certain behaviors remain taboo the increased tolerance of individual lifestyles and personal freedoms effect the manner in which certain taboo behaviors are seen and dealt with. I would no doubt suspect that in the not so distant past that some one that perpetrated such a crime as the Somer Thompson case would have been dealt with on a local level with a quick and possibly public display of vigilante justice. However in our societies domestication we have started to show more of a legalistic and humane treatment of those accused of crimes. I do not want to be misunderstood and be understood as saying we show throw the bill of rights out the window. However we as a society need to show our children that they are valued and protected. Those who perpetrate these crimes against children should not be looked at as candidates for rehabilitation. A first offense (non homicide) should be a sentence to a minimum of ten times the child’s age at the time of the offense with no early release and without protective custody. After release the offender should be placed in a reservation set aside for those that have committed crimes against children. If the offense results in the death of a child then the minimum sentence should be death. The sentence to be carried out before the victims next birthday. (the child will not have anymore birthdays why should the person who created that condition). Those who have been convicted of any crimes against children should have a tattoo placed on their forehead to denote their status.
Seems very harsh doesn’t it? Well ask Somer Thompson or Christopher Diasz, oh wait we can’t there are DEAD. We need to let those that are predisposed to commit such crimes that if they do and get caught they will only commit one. And that their inhuman actions can and will cause them the loss of human rights. No more hand holding no more rehabilitation no more opportunities to reoffend. No more children abducted and murdered because these offenders won’t be there to do it.
Are we as a society going to adopt anything near my suggestions? NO WAY IN HELL!
But just sleep on this WE are responsible for any child that is harmed by a convicted sex offender. If we do not put them back on the street they cannot reoffend.
I do not expect everyone or maybe not even the majority of people to agree with me. But this is how I see it.
Mike
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Peace it is what we all hope for yet something so few of us ever find. As I awoke this moring to hear that President Obama had received the Nobel Peace Prize I must admit that I was not sure what I had heard. I thought maybe he was nominated possibbly but he won it. What makes a Nobel Peaace Prize winner? In President Obama’s case it is being reported that he was rewarded more for his intentions and his possibblites in the areana of world peace than for his present day accomplishments. If this is the case then it places Mr. Obama in a position of public expectation to live up to the prize. A tall order in the bitterly embattled world we live in. As if our nations leader did not have enough on his agenda with issues on the home front such as the ecconomy and health care. Now he is in a sense elected by the Nobel committee to be the negotiator of world peace. Well with Iran, North Korea, Irag and the Taliban of Afghanistan just to name a few it would seem an insurmountable task.
The main problem is that these other countries or organizations do not want peace. They want things done their way period. The only peaceful resolution that they consider is either a dead enemy or a world that bows down and accepts whatever they do. Human rights be dammed they are not interested in getting along with us or in the case of many Arab nations each other for that matter. They see us as what’s wrong with their world and their commission is to fix it not make nice.
Our solders fight every day in a violent encounter in which they are the only ones that are required to obey the rules. Do you think that the terrosist that we are opposeing care anything about rules? We can look back to the French and Indian War to see that fighting war by the rules has not been a popular means of victory. Instead of lining up in dignified manner as the British troops were so proud of a fighting duing the day and partying at night. The indians taught the French to hide behind trees and imagine this attack the enemy at nihgt while they were asleep. Now how uncouth is that?
My point is this. If President Obama or anyone else thinks they are going to find a way to get these mainiacs to get along I think they are delusional. And I do not mean any disrespect to our nations leader. Mr Obama is my president and I respect him and his positon. You cannot not talk peace with a group of people that practice violence and intolerance against their fellow man as a religion.
The bible talks of a man who will be that end all to end all. They will all love him. But he w3ill be far from the prince of peace. The bible says he will be the Anti-Christ. Who else could pull off such a decepton better the the king of deception himself?
Mr. Obama I congratulate you on your award and the honor you nd it have brought to our nation.
MIke
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Greetings,
My last post was on learning and what would leaning be without reading? My read for today is Simple Java Script . It is published by a the folks over at Site Point and has truned out to be a very good read so far. By a good read I mean that it is written in a way that my 55 year old brain can understand the first time through. I really like the approach they use to explain the relationship between HTML, CSS and Java Script. They also provides some very useful resources that interact between the book and their site.
Also they are having a 5 for 1 book sale right now that looks to really be a good deal (as a disclaimer I paid for my book and am posting this to be a service to those that may read my blog and no other reason).
Again for those interested in things Java Script I reccomend this book.
Mike
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Hello Everyone,
I am just stopping in today to give some well deserved profs to the folks over at Expressions Web Forum especially to Cheryl D. Weir for some great advice for traing in things webdesign. The resource that has me so excited is lynda.com . Now the first thing I will tell you is it is NOT free. Most of the time we will go to “a good resource” and see that it cost and then just disregard it because there is supposedly so mucn free stuff out here in the ether (albiet free is not always synonymous with value). But do not move on from lynda.com untill you see what you are offered for your hard earned cash. I am currently taking a JavsScript basics course and another course for MS EW Design. Both these subjects are finally being presented to me in a fashion that I can follow and retian. Video instructors with screen shots and optional yet useful excersise files give the lessons a good flow. Well worth the cost. There are several options for a subscription and their are almost 7oo subjects availible. I would tell how much they cost but you need to go see what they are worth.
Mike
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Today is the day for just stopping in and putting down a quick few lines.
I have been neglescting my blogger duties as I have been distracted lately by matters of a more domesticated theme. As a disabled (man I hate that phrease) person I find that I miss the normal day to day interatction that I once had with people in th world. Not neccesarily those I know but theose with which you make random contact. The person in line at the conveinence stroe, the mysteriously attractive woman in the car next to you at the traffic lite who very subtly lets you know she is aware of your visaul inquiry. People! We are everywhere.
Unless you are more or less a prisoner of your inabilities. Day after day we sit in homes comfortably furnished and secure. We have the family pets whom you are sure see you as their parent. You find things to do the computer is a very distracting means of keeping yourself busy. It even provides for some contact with the outsideworld. But it comes with a cost. The most alluring concept of the internet to most people is its anonymity. You do not have to be who you are. You can go to great length to propigate assumption that you are a very knowledgalble provider of advice in any forum while in truth your main skell is the art of copy and paste. You can seem sincere while being very mean spirited to those whom you would cross the street to avoid if you met them face to face.
Today is the day that I will make an effort to interact with a real person. Notperhaps have a conversation, but sense the presence of another human being. To breath the same air of being there, to smell, taste and feel the air that surrounds us. To sense joy, saddness and the somtimes mundanenes of life. Today if not today then when?………………………. Today
Mike
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The term hypocrite is derived from the Greek as an actor, one who puts on a false front, as in the actors of the Greek theatre that wore mask and the person behind the mask was nothing like the character being portrayed. In the days of the Internet and the anonymity that it provides the question is always raised just who is this person. It was not long ago that I had to ask myself the same quesiton.
If you are a gardener or a landscaper and you had a webpage for you business, you could do a Google search and you might get depending on the parameters you set get 100,000 results. If you are a web designer and do the same search you will get 30,000,000 results. One could assume from those numbers that alot more people want to be web designers that want to be gardners. But I would venture to say that everyone of those gardeners had at some time actually had dirt under their finger nails, not all of those web designers had ever published a cross browser compliant, web standards based web site. I know because I am one.
With the price of $200.oo and a computer you can purchase web design software that even the thickest of gene pool can get something on the web they can look at and say I did that I must be a web designer. About 5 years ago I wanted to create a website for my church. I was told by a very well meaning friend that I could do it easy enough and cheaply enough. I could even use the personal home page space from my phone company to put it on. What could be better? Well we proceeded to show me how in the design mode (do note worry about all the code stuff that’s for the professionals) we could place cells in rows and columns fill in backgrounds, place text, word art, graphics even video ( but not just yet because you had to go into the code). If you had ever done a Word document or Publisher doc this was a piece of cake. You can make a mistake just delete it and redo it or what ever. Doing this you begin to swell as you tell others of you creation. But then you start hearing troubling rumors. “Mike I looked at the website you told me about and things are kinda crazy, they don’t line up. I can’t read it.” I immedaitley switch from the e-mail program to my browser and check out the page. Why there is nothing wrong. I takes years to find out that not everyone uses Internet Explorer 6. They use IE 7,8 Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome and others. And guess what unless you know what your doing it is very unlikely that you website will function properly in all or even the majority of these browsers. I know you know this but we are strolling down memory lane, this is called cross browser compatibiblity. And Web Standarsd Compliace “SHUT UP!”
Just like the Greek actor behind the mask my website was telling me thurough my design view on my editor and the browser I used solely during its creation that you are a web designer my friend look what you’ve done. But behind the the facade back to the real world of html tags and css and things making sense in that world there was a horror story going on. For the life of me at this very infantile stage of my training can bearly believe what I see when I look at the mark up of that first page. Errors, typos, no style sheet, no style classes that I had intentionally made, and no real reason why it should have been viewable in any browser.
I would like to tell you that I had learned my lesson that early on. No I would continue in my natvateuntil about 3 months ago after purchasing a red hot copy of Expressions Web2 that I really thought I was a web designer I thought I could impress my friends with the 3 or 4 terms I had heard mention of in forums and blogs. I was using terms that I did not know what they meant. One of my favoorites was “Search Engine Optimization” which I am coming to believe may not be all that it is cracked up to be.
But thien one day being ever so proud of myself created a website called EberWeb Design. I had taken the fantasy to a new level. If you can fool some of the people some of the time, you can fool most people most of the time right? Well that would have been true but you have to understand I had through the use of these editors convinced myself that I was capable. Then I ran into some difficulty and went to the local Expressions Web 2 forum. Really nice folk in there honestly. As a matter of fact there is a fellow in there who writes with a noticeably British accent of whom I have become rather fond of. However they knew what was going on behind the mask; and they told me.
I mean they had seen folks like me before, “hello I am a newbie can you show me how to build a site like amazon.com”. So they gave me the usual pleasantries and basically told me that my site needed more help than they had time to give (they are volunteers) and that I could not understand the least bit about html or css and produce such a document.
I was crushed. They took no heed to the cute little flashing jump out at you menu bar it took me three weeks to figure out. As a matter of fact some said it was annoying. They gave no coach like advice like “well you got a pretty good start but you could….” And they would have been lying if they hey had. But I would not be deterred and I fuddled a bit more and came back with another issue. Again I was met with not exactly brutal but far from sugar coated reality. Go and learn the basics and you will be answering your own questions. They also gave me some very good resources the favorite of mine is http://www.w3schools.com. I went I learned, I am learning and I am coming out from behind the mask. I am as I said before still in the infantile stages of my training but I am now able to build on something besides an misperception of what I am doing and thus who I am. I have changed my website http://www.eberwebdesign.com to reflect the changes in my position relative to the mask. I still drop in to the forum with issues from time to time and I can tell most of the time if I should be answering them myself when I am ignored. But that is okay I earned that treatment and I respect these folks for acknowledging me at all. So Scott, Cheryl, Kathy, Steve, Ben and all the others THANKS!
“Cheers”Mike
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I am relativily new to blogging however I do see its worth in the pssibblity that your words may be read by someone who may find them of value or may share a simlar point of view. To that point I would hopet that some at least of my writings would be usdful and some pssibby entertaining. But first one must get the blog published.
To that end I have once again been effected by my server who I will no longer give anonimity. Softsyshosting is a windows server. I have never met a nicer group of people. Always polite always letting you know that they are there for you. The only problem is that I have gotten to know the customer service departmant all to well. I cnnot seem to do a thing to my website or blog that I do not have to contact them. Their file system has created such a mumbo jombo of files that my own filing systim is screwed up trying to match theirs. The thing that gets me the most is this permissions thing. When I went to insall wrdpress on my site cound not do it. Did not have the proer permissions. When I went to install a plug-in installled incompletly but installled just wont work because did not have the proper permissions. I am 55 years old my days of asking permission are over. I am always assured that they have reset the permissions. Until the next time I want to install or mnove something. The cost of this windows server is alot more than a linux with at lot less features and space and wasy less hassles. I am definitly ending my business relationship with softsys the question is when. I have paid for 2 years but I am considering just letting it go and cutting my losses. Now do not you feel better knowing that?
Mike
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This is my first Blog of this website. I have had a time getting the site up and running on my new host server. It was like they were speaking a different language. The interfaace was very difficult to navigate and the ftp was hidden in there some where. While I wont mention my current server my previous server was hostmonster .com. I still have several websites that I manage on that server . The only reason I moved to this one is that I was experimenting with .aspx (bad idea for rookie like me) and I just had to have a windows server to make that cute little menu work. Well now I pay alot more for a lot less space and fewr services and options but I do have lots more hassles with this not working this error theat error and permissions permissions permisssions. I have not felt this persecuted since the windows 98 illeagal operation police were beating my door down. Well I madeit let the games begin. I am going to bed. Good Night John Boy
Mike
