When you’re a kid, you learn a lot of songs in Sunday School. I’m thinking of classics such as “Grin again Gang,” which for some reason was stuck in my head today. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s how it goes:

Grin again gang get gung ho about Jesus (Shoo-be-dooby-doo)
Smile sweetly Sally so you send Satan sadly away
Buck up brother Bill because a bunch of bitter boys became a bunch of better boys beneath a big big smile
Grin again gang get gung ho about Jesus

Again–it was stuck in my head today, 20-some years after I learned it, and I got to thinking…is this helpful, or shoddy theology that needs to be “undone” later on in life? My problem is that the underlying idea ties together happiness (as opposed to joy) with being a Christian. Smiling sends satan sadly away? For real? Bitter boys become better when they smile?

At some time, “real life” hits. You lose your job, or a loved one. You get sick or someone betrays you. Will smiling fix it? The reality of the matter is that being a believer doesn’t mean life becomes all roses, and just smiling doesn’t make you a better person (and certainly doesn’t send satan away!) If you live your life according to grin-again-gang theology, you’re going to have a significant crisis when life just gets ugly, and it will: we live in a fallen world.

It’s for this reason that I absolutely LOVE Faith and Doubt, a song that fits life a little better when things are tough. If you haven’t heard Aaron Espe before and you have even a tolerance for Folk music, you’ve got to check it out. It’s spoken to me countless times before, including some of those long days, weeks, months (and daresay I years?) in seminary. It lives on this side of reality. It reminds me of lament Psalms. It’s awesome during tough moments:

———–

I read that Jesus walked the stormy sea and he pulled Peter up
Said, Man you gotta believe me
And he shared with his disciples
Said, Here’s how to be free
If you asked me I’d say most days
I totally agree
But right now I can’t pray, I don’t feel like talking to God
I need somebody out there with a little skin on them

When I read that story I heard thunder everywhere
I could feel that boat crashing on the waves
The bow is in the air
And I have respect for Peter who had faith enough to dare
Step out onto the water
While all the others stared
And when hell is on your back,
Sometimes you think you got strength and you say,
Hey Lord, save me, I’m drownin’ out here!

But I’m caught somewhere between Faith and Doubt
And I feel like I’ll never find my way outta here.

Last night I felt free just like I was a kid
So I laid in the grass and thought of all the things I did
When I didn’t know of pressure it was easy to forgive
You didn’t have to be perfect
Not in my neighborhood
I don’t know what year things became so unclear
but I’m still here

caught somewhere between Faith and Doubt
And I feel like I’ll never find my way outta here.

————

I highly recommend you check out the song, or even pick up his albums: they’re super solid all the way through.

Usually, I like to save money on stuff. I visit slickdeals about every day, just in case something I need (or will need soon) shows up on sale. Every once in a while though, I find myself spending too much money on something just because it’s awesome.

Case in point: my Vibram FiveFingers Bikilas. Normally, $100 for a pair of running shoes is NOT out of the question. When you consider that the actual materials in this shoe are pretty dang close to just a pair of rubber socks, $100 seems overpriced. Nevertheless, I love these shoes.

My dad has run quite a few 10k races in his day, and done well with them. My brother runs marathons. My legs are the same as theirs, with one small difference: I have a bent bone or two in my foot that collapses my arch and severely overpronates. This means if I run very often or very far, my knees start killing me. Ankle braces and knee braces help a bit, but are such a pain to put on that they keep me from running. (seriously!)

Then one day I saw a friend of mine in toe shoes. I asked him about them, and ended up ordering a pair myself. They’re awesome.

I don’t have the time or desire to spell it all out here, except to say this: these shoes have almost nothing to them, and are designed to let your foot act as if it were barefoot, just without all the sharp pokey things in your sole. You know, the way God intended your feet to work. Wear them for a bit and you discover parts of your feet that you never knew could be sore before. Then your muscles and joints and things strengthen up a bit, and finally you end up running on the balls of your feet rather than your heels. The end result is less impact, less joint pain, and the pleasure of feeling like you’re running barefoot (minus, of course, the pokeys). For me, it means my first run in these suckers was met with no knee pain. Beautiful!

The good and the bad: All the attention your feet get in toe shoes could be good or bad depending on how you look at it. The only real problem I found is this: if you wear them barefoot, they stink. A lot. Solution: when they start to smell (and they will!), drop a effervescent denture cleaner in each one, soak in warm water overnight, and then toss them in your washing machine and air dry (hint, don’t get the mint-smelling ones. Mint feet are gross). I hear wearing toe socks can help too, but that gives you less of the barefoot feel. Your call.

Bottom line is: yes, they cost more than Sketchers. But they may save you a ton of joint pain, your feet will gradually start working the way God intended again, and people will think you’re cool, unless you live in an area where they’re already all the rave (in which case you’ll just look like a trendy jerk. But a trendy jerk with healthy feet at least!) My recommendation to you is get some, but make sure you read about the dangers of having too much fun in them too quickly! (see the link below)

For more on barefoot-style running and minimalist footwear, feel free to check out birthdayshoes.com. Caution: the info is great, but advertising abounds!

(You can skip the prologue if you’re not interested in the customer service story!)

For Christmas 2008 I received an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid TV tuner from my wife. Getting it set up properly was a nightmare, but I finally did it. Tech support wasn’t a help, and my own computer geekiness and a little extra free time over Christmas break was all I had to rely on. Turns out that it might have just been a defective tuner.

So when I recently moved and found more problems tuning channels, I had enough. I contact EyeTV’s support for a possible RMA (despite being out of warranty) and referenced the original support ticket I had created over a year and a half ago. I braced myself for a long fight….and got a huge surprise.

They sent me a cordial apology and a promise to replace my tuner. Just like that! Talk about stellar customer service.

 
If that weren’t good enough…here’s what I think about the tuner:

It tunes channels well. With QAM support since 2008, you can pull in free HD signals over just about any cable connection, or free HD channels from over-the-air sources. If you’ve got ultra-cheap basic analog cable still, it will pull that in too. Perhaps where it most shines is the integration with the EyeTV software.

EyeTV since version 3 has been awesome. It’s simple to pause, rewind, record, convert, and burn TV shows and movies. You can also grab an app and extend support to your iPhone or iPod Touch. Get yourself the free comskipper plugin and it will automatically remove commercials from your recordings. Download cyTV and you can stream your live TV to another computer on your network, or even across the web! (Think of it as a poor man’s slingbox)

I won’t run through all the features, but retailing at $80, EyeTV 3 is a tremendous value-add to buying the EyeTV Hybrid. Consider the great customer service mentioned above, and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed!

I set up a new blog today over at eustaceclarence.com to provide easy updates on my first kid, and it got me thinking: thankfully, the personal blogging craze has largely died.

To wit: of the 5 links in my blogroll as of the time of this writing, the last updates were written:

1. October 31, 2007
2. March 29, 2010 (Previous before that was Jan 2, 2009)
3. September 27, 2009
4. July 22, 2009
5. …and one blog is no longer available on the internet

All of these blogs were written by guys involved with technology at a higher-than-average level: they could all probably tell you what AJAX is, and why IE6 is the bane of all that is internet. Yet, like 99.9% of people who started blogging in the last 5 years, none of them blog anymore.

Why? Because no one has time to write (much less write well), and for those that do…nobody cares. The only posts on this blog than anyone reads are the ones written on how to fix annoying computer problems, not the ones about my thoughts on the latest political whatnot. The only personal blog I read anymore is my sister-in-law’s, because she puts up great pictures of her kids all the time. (Ideally, Eustace will get similar treatment from me).

What it really boils down to though is that no one has enough time for all of that. Myspace died when everyone realized that the cacaphony of colors, spam, ads, and random musings available there was an utter waste of time. Twitter’s in vogue, but I’m pretty sure most people use it for a month or two before they realize that, too, is a completely ridiculous way to waste every spare minute of peace and quiet you might stumble upon during your day. I’m moving on.

I think Facebook is the big thing with the best chance, but I’m hearing a lot of people who are sick of it and despise the time they waste on it (me included)–it’s an addiction though, like a crackberry, and will likely last a few years before the next big thing comes along. It’s darn handy for planning class reunions or the like, but for doing anything else worthwhile? Not so much.

Sooner or later we’ll all melt down from the stress and insanity that comes from being plugged into too many people, too many streams of info, and too many responsibilities 24/7. As for me, I’m just hoping that a move back to the Dakotas/Minnesota might bring a few more years of sanity…

For an actually well-thought perspective on this over-saturation phenomena, you could read the paper I wrote on it for a class I took (Like Butter Spread Over Too Much Bread: Multiphrenia in America 10 pages, .pdf)…or you could just ADHD your way back to your Twitter feed and forget I mentioned it (though, kudos for lasting this long if you made it to the end of my post!)

Compression

• Compression typically looks for patterns and stores references to them. So, imagine you’re storing the following text which is 151 characters long:
  

  He went to the store.  She bought a car.  He went to the bank.  She bought a plane.  He bought a turtle.

• To compress that, you might replace repeating patterns with a number. Our new text can be stored with references and a “key”, and now it’s 135 characters long:
  

  \1 store. Sh\2 car. \1 bank. Sh\2 plane. H\2 turtle.[1=He went to the, 2=e bought a]

• When uncompressing the data, you replace the numbers with those patterns again:
  

  He went to the store. She bought a car. He went to thebank. She bought a plane. He bought a turtle.

• Every time a repeating chunk of data shows up, you just store a reference to the original definition, which is shorter and thus saves space. (In this case, it saves you a total of 16 characters, or 10%.) Compression is actually a bit more mathematically complex than this, but that’s the basic concept. What’s important to know is that the more repeated strings you find, the more savings you get.

Lossy Compression

• .jpg files use something called “lossy” compression, which means that in order to find more repeated strings it will smooth out some of the data. (For music, .mp3 files also use “lossy” compression)
• Imagine the string 123456123456123456124456 If you used our old method, you’d only save 2 characters, or 8%:
  \1\1\1124456[1=123456]

• If you could afford to change one number in the last set (4>3) you would then have the same pattern repeated four times, making compression more efficient (6 characters, 25%). However, you would lose 4% of the data (1 character out of 24.)
  

  \1\1\1\1[1=123456]

• As you can see, the more data you’re willing to lose, the more you can artificially create repeating patterns, and the more space you can save.

How much compression to use?

• When you’re saving a .jpg, you set the compression level to tell the computer how much of the file you’re willing to “lose” in order to get smaller file sizes. The lower the number, the more data you lose. If you look at highly-compressed .jpg images you’ll see blotchy places called “compression artifacts” that are the result of the computer changing data in the file to make it match patterns better.
• For most web design, I typically set compression at 79 or 80. For smaller thumbnails where compression artifacts are less visible, I’ll often drop down to 75 to save more space. Any higher than 80 and your images get really big really fast for little quality difference. Any lower than 75 and images start to look really bad.
• Important: Recompressing images might amplify the effect. Let’s say you compress an image at 80, and lose 20% of the data in the file. If you open the image again, make a small change, and recompress it again at 80, you might lose up to 20% again, leaving you with 64% of your original file. Ouch! When editing images, you should always start from an uncompressed, high-resolution image file if at all possible.

Other file formats

• Sometimes, different types of compression save more space with less quality loss.
  • JPEG: best for images with lots of complexity and colors. Usually photos are best compressed as .jpg files.
  • PNG 8: images with text, straight lines, and few different colors. Graphic design elements are often best compressed as PNG 8 files.
  • GIF: similar to PNG 8, except not as efficient in most cases. Usually, unless .png files are not supported, you should save images as PNG 8 instead of .gif
  • There are other image formats, but these are the most common. .gif files support simple transparencies, and PNG 8 and PNG 32 can handle more complex transparencies.

How to do in Fireworks

• In Fireworks, use the “Optimize” panel to set the compression TYPE and Settings (screenshot). For .jpg files, usually all you want to adjust is the “Quality” setting: again, for web you will usually set it at around 75 for thumbnails and 79 for other site images.
• When you have this set, use the File > Export command. This will save the file with your selected compression setting AND it will use minimal metadata, which can also bloat the size of your files. If you use “Save As…” it will save all your meta data and might mess up your compression settings.

Using 4-Up

• Also in Fireworks, click the 4-Up button near the top of your editor. This will show you how the image will actually look once it’s been exported.
• Click on each box and set different compression settings in each one. This was you can compare what each setting would look like as well as what the final image size will be. You can often make a better decision based on this. (screenshot)

It’s a bit disturbing to me that NBC’s solution to Heroes’ rapidly falling ratings was to introduce a lesbian love story. Why?

First off, it’s an indicator that we’ve reached such a level of political correctness that “tolerance” has become one of our society’s greatest virtue. By this I do not mean that tolerance (in itself) is a bad thing, but I do mean that what we now term tolerance goes far beyond that. Tolerance means “I will not prohibit you from doing something,” and typically understands the action/belief in question to be one that contradicts what the tolerating person believes. Tolerance does not equate to agreement or support, nor does it entail unilateral pluralistic license.

I will tolerate it if the neighbors’ music is a little too loud up until a certain time of night. If asked, I would prefer that they keep the noise to a reasonable level, and I will even state that it is disrespectful, selfish, and unkind for them to violate my need for restful sleep. Nevertheless, I might tolerate it up to certain levels in order to maintain a more amicable relationship with my neighbors. However, there is a point at which tolerance is no longer a virtue: if I cannot sleep at 3AM because of the noise next door, or have chronic headaches from their chronic partying, I will demand that they stop and involve the police if necessary. You wouldn’t call me intolerant for that, you’d say I was standing up for my rights, my beliefs that I need sleep to function properly at school, work, etc.

So, I will tolerate homosexual couples and beliefs to a certain degree. Homosexual activity (as opposed to temptation) is a sin per God’s judgement as revealed in Scripture, but I also recognize that humans have free will and there is only one Lawgiver and Judge, and that said Lawgiver is not me. However, when Heroes (or anyone else, for that matter) attempts to equate homosexual relationships with heterosexual ones, they are preaching a morality against Scripture that unfortunately has deceived many. Wrapping it in the attractive context of trust and love makes the moral precepts being pitched that much more dangerous. Satan masquerades as an angel of light. For the sake of current and future believers, I must resist this wholeheartedly.

Lest you miss it, I am also highly disgusted by how Hollywood does this with heterosexual relationships as well: takes extramarital sexual relationships, couches them in “devoted love,” and portrays them as a good, desirable thing. This too is opposed to Scripture and deserves our censure. Why the “double standard?” It’s partially due to the compounding nature of homosexual activity (not only is it illicit in it’s nature, but it is also further sinful in its typical extra-marital context), and partially due to the fact that the extramarital relationships battle has been largely lost in our culture and avoiding all references to such activity would likely shut us out from the media entirely. The homosexual topic still has enough of a taboo and minority status attached to it that prevention of its popularization may still be feasible.

So, here we are. Heroes was starting to be lame, but I was still hooked. I just won’t support a homosexual agenda in my viewing habits.