Once again I encountered an attitude that always surprises me. I was accused of attacking the Bible when I said that it contains events that, from my external point of view, can only be described as deity approved horrors. Yet this same individual did not consider it an attack when they said that someday I would be forced to kneel before God and would go to hell or when they said that loving, committed, same-sex relationships are an affront on morality.

To some degree, all humans fall prey to the bias of their own perspective. Both of us considered ourselves to be making statements which, from our own point of view, fall under the category of painful truths, not attacks.

Yet I have found that some Christians (not all) quickly jump to the conclusion that atheists are on the offensive when they say anything less than complimentary about religion. They assume that a very specific comment has a very general meaning. Often, these same Christians then go on to say things as bad or worse than what was said to them, but they do not see themselves as attacking and claim innocence if their statements are pointed out.

An much smaller subset turns this into a persecution complex. These are people who really believe there is a war on Christmas. They truly believe that they are like the early Christians and society is trying to crush them out of existence. When you point out that Christians are the vast majority in this nation, they claim that most of those people are not "real Christians" (I always imagine that followed by a trademark symbol). Fortunately, these people, despite their prevalence on the internet, are a small group.

In the end, this biased perspective no longer makes me feel angry or hurt or insulted. But it has become tiresome.

Game day is next Saturday, November 14! Please let us know if you think you might make it.

Within the next couple weeks we'll start organizing Thanksmas. Mark your calendars!

You know you've forgotten high school/early college when you are reading a resume and see reference to a scholarship and think, "That looks kind of familiar. Did I get that scholarship?"

Health insurance claim summary:

Amount billed: $34.00
Amount we paid: $4.72
Patient responsibility: $0.52

I wonder if this claim cost more to administrate than the actual amount charged.

Note to self, in retrospect these two ways of phrasing a TODO item do not mean the same thing:

• Buy 2 D batteries.


• Buy 2D batteries.

I keep trying to add Joel on Software to my RSS queue, partially because I disagree with him a lot of the time. However, it seems like every time I subscribe to the blog, I see another article on how standard university CS education is useless. I then unsubscribe, not because his views are not worth discussing, but because it makes him seem so repetitive that I just assume he has nothing new to say.

So I ask the rest of you, have I just had an unlucky set of samples or is Joel On Software really just the type of blog that keeps repeating the same few topics over and over again?

I just have to reshare this link from iris_of_ether

What happens when two gamer anime fans get married? Awesomeness!

More details.

The heater in my hotel room seems to be unable to actually, you know, heat my room. Pity.

Don't forget that next Saturday, Oct 17 is Game Day!

Finished test-driven development: A Practical Guide by David Astels. The book contains three parts. Part 1 introduces the reader to test-driven development. Part 2 discusses various tools and techniques for doing TDD. Part 3 presents an extended example by going through the test-driven development of a movie rating application.

Test-driven development builds on the principle that developers should write tests before they write code. The tests determine the code that needs to be written. As a side effect, this results in a suite of programmer tests. However, the book stresses that TDD primarily exists as a development methodology, not a testing methodology. The test suite produced by this methodology should not be considered a replacement for through testing by those who have testing as their primary goal.

My detailed impressions of the book and test-driven development.

test-driven development: A Practical Guide provides a good introduction to test-driven development. It contains many useful insights and practical tips. However, I suspect that you can find more focused, up-to-date introductions to the topic than the one found in this book.

Game day is NOT next week. Instead, we are delaying Game Day until Saturday 17 October at 2:00pm.

I have learned from Bad Machinery that puberty causes girls' hair to acquire volume.

Does anyone collect word magnets and want some? We acquired some we will just be throwing away if no one else claims them.

A year ago today, we brought Kageneko from the home of his temporary owners to our home. He resented the change at first, but he quickly adapted to his position as the most important kitty in the world (as far as he can tell).



Kage limited his initial explorations to the upstairs. He spent many of his hours on our bed and my sister's bed. My sister's bed was an especial favorite because it got the daytime sun.

Eventually, he started exploring downstairs. At first, he would only visit briefly, but overtime he has come to the point where he prefers to be where we are, wherever that may be. Lately, he has been so bold as to come down stairs during anime night, when there are lots of people around.

The price to pay for having an unbelievably soft kitty is that we end up with nice soft kitty fur all over. We keep things reasonable with frequent vacuuming and not quite frequent enough brushing. Things have been better since Kage shed his long winter coat for a slightly less long summer coat. He shed his winter coat while we visited Greece; there was so much fur on the furniture that we could have made a sweater!

He is an indoor cat, but he retains his hunter's instincts. He plays frequently with his favorite toys, the feather stick and the catnip mouse, and play, for Kage, means destruction. We recently had to retire the mouse because it was too holey to hold catnip anymore. His feather stick (actually, his second feather stick) is nearly down to a plastic nub and will have to be replaced soon too. Kage takes his play seriously.

Happy homecoming day Kage!

Finished The Separation of Church and State: Writings on a Fundamental Freedom by America's Founders edited by Forrest Church. This short book contains extracts of revolutionary era writings about the separation of church and and state. Favorites such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington make an appearance as do less well known writers such as Isaac Backus and Oliver Ellsworth.

"Separation of church and state" is a phrase that is bandied around without knowledge of its historical origins. First, as I hope we all know, the phrase itself does not appear in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. Instead, it first appeared in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson (Ch. 14 in the book):

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature would "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

One common disagreement in modern discussion is whether we should aim for freedom from religion or freedom for religion. Both threads find expression in the writings in the book. As the author says in the introduction:

As was true of the broader American struggle for freedom, the revolution that led to religious liberty was powered by two very different engines: one driven by eighteenth-century Enlightenment values, the other guided by Christian imperatives that grew out of the Great Awakening, a spiritual movement that spread like wildfire across the American colonies throughout the middle decades of that same century. The former movement, emphasizing freedom of conscience as both a political and a philosophical virtue, stressed freedom from the dictates of organized religion. The later, stemming from a devout reading of the gospels (especially their proclamation of spiritual liberty from bondage to the world's principalities and powers), demanded freedom for religion.

I feel that freedom of conscience suffers from poor health in modern America. Not just with respect to religion but, in general, Americans are quick to judge someone based only on what they believe, not on their actions. I see this, of course, in debates about religion and its proper role in a secular society. But I also see it more widely. I see it in the fact that some said Larry Summers should not be an economic advisor to the President because of what he had said about gender at Harvard (how is that relevant to being an economic advisor?). I see this in the very current debates about race in this country where we are obsessed with whether or not people think racist thoughts, not whether or not they act on them.

I do not want to imply that people's opinions are irrelevant, but we have come to a place in American society where beliefs are often considered more important than actions. That is sad and destructive. Reading books like this remind us about the fundamental debates that define our country have, at their core, something much deeper than superficial displays of religiousity.

Public domain books printed on demand. As a reader of obscure books, I as super excited about this.

List of locations, including an upcoming location at Third Place Books!

Finished Google Web Toolkit Applications by Ryan Dewsbury. We read this book as part of a reading group at work. In this book Dewsbury goes over the basics of using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and discusses a number of sample applications that show how GWT can be used in projects that are slightly larger than your standard example project.

Like most books on a specific technology, this book is not destined to be a classic. When this book was written the current version of GWT was 1.4. Since then there have been some major changes to GWT. That said, Google Web Toolkit Applications does a fine job of introducing developers to the basics of GWT, and if a newer version existed, I would recommend it to anyone wanting to learn GWT. Given only the current version, I still recommend the book to anyone willing to read through the release notes of all the versions since 1.4. I would also caution that this book introduces you to writing GWT applications. It does not necessarily introduce you to the art of writing high performance GWT applications.

The full summary which goes into detail about the contents of the book.

This book provides a good introduction to GWT, but, despite the author's claims to greater generality, it really is an introduction to GWT and web development for Java desktop developers rather than an introduction to GWT for developers already familiar with web development and who, therefore, really want an in depth explanation of GWT with respect to the many well known pitfalls of web apps.