Yes, I will definitely miss some of the extreme customizability and pluggability I enjoyed using my beloved WordPress.

Yes, I will still be using WordPress for everything else, including most sites I create for other people.

However, for my personal blog, this is a thousand times easier and, I think, better. The very RoR concept of sensible defaults instead of configuration was too much of a draw, and the sheer awesomeness of how Posterous handles media, links, gists, and every other awkward content type makes my losses very bearable. So please update your links and subscriptions, my friends, ’cause I’m gonna be there for a while.

As of now I am no longer updating testingPoint.org. Soon I will take it down completely. I have moved to a new domain as well as new blogware. Please delete your old subscriptions to my blog, go to the new one, and re-subscribe. Here’s the new link: http://danielpcox.org

When you first load up items/index, the html responder just loads the index view via the _items partial. If you click any of the ajax_will_paginate buttons, the link href will get sent via ajax, the index action will return just the _items partial, and ajax_will_paginate will update the contents of the my_items_list div. If javascript is disabled then clicking on the will_paginate links will work normally.

I pulled my voice-recorder out of my bag today, because I was thinking about how typing things requires enough of my brain to chase the thoughts out of my head.

I need some system for keeping track of things in my head and sorting things out, for serializing and prioritizing and scheduling. At the moment I’ll think of one important thing and maybe it’ll make it onto my hand, but more likely it’ll be chased out of my head by another thought that seems equally urgent in just a few minutes. Worse, I know this is going to happen, and it taints exciting new ideas with fear and frustration.

Just this morning I thought to ask Tyler if there’s anything in the Bible that you couldn’t possibly figure out unless you knew some elusive culture fact. Remembering that I had thought of that question in the shower and then feared that I would forget it prompted this blog post. As soon as I thought the question, I feared I would lose it, so I repeated it to myself a couple of times, and then suddenly thought of something else which chased it out of my head until now. I’m full of these. What should I do with them? Tyler has been out of the office for hours, and I won’t remember to ask him this tomorrow.

Perhaps if I scheduled a time to read my TODO list, and whenever I thought of a new TODO I’d say it in the voice recorder and have another time to fill in the list… I’ve tried all sorts of things, though, and none of them have ever taken root in my life. Events get scheduled in my Google Calendar, which texts me when things are about to happen. I still miss some of those notifications because I’m so used to them that I ignore them, or because they come an hour before the event and I forget to set a more proximal alarm.

Problems with that: It’s hard to have a set time to do anything as seemingly trivial as a time to read and act upon my TODO list. It also doesn’t contain any method of prioritizing or pruning entries that require more than a couple of minutes to do, like replying to some email or writing a blog post…

How do I know how to prioritize things? I actually have a TODO list (I always do – it’s just not very useful), and it looks like this, copied verbatim:

——————————

TODO:

URGENT TASK: Play level 18 of Portal so Katie can beat it

wordpress theme for crusade and ccfl

on my own time, learn:

everything about rspec, remarkable, pickle and cucumber

vim scripting, specifically how to run quick bash commands with strings from the document from a hotkey (I want a grep -r “<string>” *) http://bit.ly/aWZdq2

how to make gems

how to use  Nokogiri

pray for WALT for guidance during his exit from compacency

pay stu $25 for the shaver

pay ben $35 for the bike

———————————-

There isn’t actually any urgency in my playing Portal, but making the ccfl and crusade websites is extremely important and will take weeks of hard work. There really should be a better place for non-daily prayers, but I don’t have one so it gets dumped here. I owe ben and stu money, and mentioning that to myself here doesn’t really ever help them to get paid, but it does keep track of the amount I still owe them, assuming I remember to update it every time I buy stu a sandwich… Who knows what should be in here?

This causes me a lot of stress, and I hope I figure it out. I’m sortof open to your suggestions, but I have tried a lot of things, and just getting the trivial organizational schemes that work for you just because you’re better endowed for this sortof thing may not feel that welcome. Writing about it has been helpful, though, so I guess writing does impose some order on the chaos.

Anyway, here ends the first of many rambly blog posts. The new philosophy is to prioritize the creation of blog posts over blog post quality.

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

sudo a2enmod      // (and then select the "userdir" module)

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

I wonder what it would be like to get it in my head that I work hard all week and then there’s one day where I only rest.

Currently, I either work really really hard for hours with no breaks, get a lot done and feel really destroyed and dangerously disconnected from reality afterwards, or I fight the need to do work, get nothing done, sinfully waste tons of time and feel awful afterwards.

I’ve got one more year to go at Cornell, and I don’t feel emotionally, physically or spiritually prepared. It’s just too much work, and next year Katie won’t be right here by my side to support me. Intentionally (I do it sporadically and unintentionally all the time) taking a Sabbath day out of my week on which I only rest seems pretty stressful, but maybe it could help a lot.

This is a non-trivial question to me. I’m at Cornell. I am not a genius. I feel like I need every day I can get. What if taking a Sabbath one week means getting a zero on a homework assignment?

Your thoughts?

(It’s more powerful to hear him say it.)

“What else is there to think about? Ok, so you understand what lukewarm is? So you’re gonna be spit out of the mouth of God, and you just go ‘OK’. I go, Man… You shouldn’t do ANYTHING until you figure out how to be on fire for God. You should be down on your face – You shouldn’t eat again until you come before God and just fast and pray, ‘God get me on fire, I’m not on fire, you’ve gotta get me on fire for you. I want to be in love with you. I’ve gotta see how valuable you are compared to all this other junk. Get me here!’ That should be all you care about. Don’t go to work tomorrow if you’re lukewarm. Man, sell your house, just move, live in the- Do whatever it takes! You can’t end your life lukewarm. You get that? I mean, why are Jesus’ words so strong? He says in the next verse, verse 19, why does he say it so harshly? Verse 19: ‘Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline, so be ernest and repent.’”

I’ve also decided to just skip the month or so that I got behind in some of the bookmarks of my Bible reading plan. The fact that I was so far behind in difficult books (Revelation, Job, Psalms) actually made it less likely that I would read my Bible, so I hope this sets things back on track again.

That and the change in atmosphere might keep me sane, and I may even get some rest before school starts up again in about three weeks.

I’ve always wondered at the many many many verses in the Bible that seem to be saying to some of us true Christians/Israelites are unable to communicate with God (because he hides himself) because of our many many sins. The Bible explicitly says elsewhere that God hears the prayers of his saints, and yet there are so many passages that also seem to be shouting at his elect for their sins, and discussing how he won’t save them or even hear them because of their many iniquities.

It just occurred to me that these passages, at the very least, make clear how much God hates our sin, and also that there are grave consequences for our sins in this life even for Christians.

ELABORATE

This is what John the Baptist was preaching in the wilderness – repentance leading to forgiveness – an early gospel.

Look how beautiful it is, with God’s plea for us to forsake eating dirt and come to him for real, satisfying food.

Look at his plea for us to seek him while there’s still time.

“Let the wicked forsake his way, … FOR my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. Interesting.

His word will be like rain scattered on the earth that brings up plants!

Some really weird and awesome stuff will be happening when we’re led out by Jesus – mountains and hills and trees singing and clapping…