the singularity of being and nothingness
Archive for September, 2007
A New Communion Experience
Sep 26th
Growing up in the Wesleyan Church, I've not had tremendously moving experiences with the celebration of communion. In the Wesleyan Church–as in many others–communion is served (by Discipline requirements) once a quarter. The logic of this, I suppose, is to avoid the celebration of communion becoming a dead, lifeless ritual that is performed every week simply because "that is what we do" (makes you wonder about worship music and preaching, if routinization is the criterion for "lifeless ritual"…). My experience has been pretty standard: the pastor rises, speaks a few words (perhaps from the Discipline) concerning the supper, and then ushers distribute the elements to the parishoners. Generally, this happens at the immediate end of the service, and the rush is on to get the elements to everyone, imbibe them, and get everyone on the road.
While I have grown accustomed to this "routine" (funny how that happens anyway…), I have not been seriously impacted by the actual ritual on very many occasions. In my own critique, I think the lack of impact stems mainly from the fact that the practice of communion–though done in a corporate setting–is mostly structured to be an individual response to God's grace in Christ. I More >
CD Review – Rascal Flatt's "Still Feels Good"
Sep 26th
Since their self-titled debut in 2000, Rascal Flatts has consistently and with ever-growing force become a presence within the country-pop crossover music scene to be reckoned with. Boasting such awards as two-time CMT Vocal Group of the Year, CMT Group/Duo of the Year, and an Emmy for the unforgettable phenomenon of “Bless the Broken Road,” this trio continues to assert itself on the charts and in the musical consciousness of America.
If gross reductionism will be forgiven, the success of Rascal Flatts is incontrovertibly linked to front man Gary LeVox’s enthralling and ever-soaring tenor vocals. While the band’s songs show all too infrequent flashes of artistic innovation, the sheer force, intensity and beauty of LeVox’s performances—both live and recorded—rescue and imbue with vigor songs that would otherwise be resigned to the purgatory of the “country formulae.”
In their newest release, Still Feels Good, this unfortunate tension between overall unimaginative songwriting and LeVox’s breathtaking performance virtuosity is thankfully and significantly more subdued than in their previous release, Me and My Gang. This time around, the band jettisons nearly every remnant of hardcore country that may have clung on in their transition to the world of crossover. While the steel guitars, mandolins and fiddles More >
CD Review – Pat Monahan's "Last of Seven"
Sep 19th
If you've listened to the radio in the last 10 years, you know about Train. With mega hits such as the frantically original "Meet Virginia", the year-long chart-occupying "Drops of Jupiter" and the funky feel-good anthem "Get to Me," Train has made an indelible and enduring mark on popular music. While every album is ultimately a band effort, it cannot be denied that the band’s success is intrinsically rooted in the compelling originality of frontman Pat Monahan's voice.
Yesterday, Monahan released his first solo album, Last of Seven. Lest the listener fear that this is yet another failed attempt of a successful lead vocalist to fly alone, Last of Seven merges the very best of Train's sound with a clear attempt to explore the range and styling of Monahan's voice.
Musically, Monahan does not depart dramatically from the genre in which Train is firmly entrenched. While a few songs attempt a significant deviation (like the gospel-inspired "Raise Your Hands" and the dirty-blues infused duet "Pirate on the Run"), the vast majority pursue the same Southern countrified moods of Train's earlier work.
Despite the musical unoriginality, Monahan's vocals are as good as ever. Whether bellowing the soaring choruses of "Two Ways to More >
Webservices in ColdFusion
Sep 18th
Today, for work, my boss asked for me to create a bit of functionality that would allow users to return lists of people from a database who live within [x] miles of an entered zip code. I've never created something like this before, but I've been around long enough to know that this kind of functionality requires gigantic databases of zip codes, trigonometric calculations, etc. simply to return the distance between two zip codes.
Fortunately, others have created such things and have kindly sydicated them as webservices. Webservices are very simple–they are a collection of functions that are remotely accessible to developers. So, if you want to create a search for Amazon books on your website, you hook up to Amazon's book-syndication service, call the appropriate method (like "getBooks()" or something) and use whichever programming language you is using to parse out the information in a usable fashion. Here's the one I'm using:
http://webservices.imacination.com/distance/Distance.jws?wsdl
ColdFusion makes stuff like this ridiculously easy within its "cfinvoke" tag. In about 4 lines of code, you call the method, pass in the method's require arguments, and create a variable for usage later on.
<cfinvoke webservice="http://webservices.imacination.com/distance/Distance.jws?wsdl" method="getDistance" returnvariable="distance">The zip code webservice required two arguments, "fromZip" and More >
Adobe's Spry Framework, Part Second
Sep 17th
A couple days ago, I posted an example of how Adobe's Spry Framework allows one to easily and quickly incorporate XML datasets into an application, allowing for a great alternative to page-to-page navigation and data mining.
One of the limitations I pointed out was the initial amount of coding involved. Well, that was because I'm an idiot.
While I've used Spry's Spry.Data.XMLDataSet() many times before, I literally had no idea how powerful it is, nor that it could interact with dynamically generated XML files, such as I was doing with ColdFusion components in my last example. However, such is not the case. Not only does this method allow me to do everything I was doing before, it involves a heck of lot less code. The entire invoke for the datasets here is:
var dsCities = new Spry.Data.XMLDataSet("getlocations.cfc method=getCities", "cities/city");var dsLocations = new Spry.Data.XMLDataSet("getlocations.cfc?method=getLocations&cityID={dsCities::@id}", "locations/location");
Two lines of javascript! Now of course, there is more to handle some of the behaviors…but I have effectively cut out about 100 lines from what I was doing before. Pretty cool!
Finally, the best part about this is it allows me to take full advantage of the framework's "spry:state". With this, one can set different "states" that will fire in relation More >
CD Review – Sarah Blasko's "What The Sea Wants The Sea Will Have"
Sep 13th
The perrenial liability of pop music is the tendancy of over-produced, singles'-charts-minded arrangements to betray lyrical meaning, as the value of words is sacrificed on the alter of commercial viability. Such a depraved environment craves seriousness, originality and a disavowal of the all-too-great temptation to jettison thought, form and artistry for air-play.
In many ways, Sarah Blasko's What The Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have is a strong beacon admist the stormy, churning seas of the burned-over homogeneity of pop music. Hailing from Austraila, Blasko offers a mature and sobering collection of songs in her second album. The beauty of What The Sea Wants finds its terminus in its utter simplicity in exceptional diversity. Although the arrangements extend from complete orchestral sections on songs like "[explain]" to the innovative usage of steel drums on "Planet New Year," they are incorporated seamlessly into the thoughtful melancholy of Blasko's artistry without pretension and without ever feeling as if the production is trying too hard. Deep and brooding, what this produces, musically, is the perfect backdrop for Blasko's penetrating songwriting which is matched only by her hauntingly beautiful and intoxicatingly melodic arrangements. Here, joy, pain, love, loss and hope are fused with a realism that embraces, More >
Web 2.0 Goodness – Adobe's Spry Framework
Sep 12th
Ok, so as everyone who reads this blog knows (or should know…), I am a web designer/web developer. On the development side, I am best at ColdFusion , one of the under-appreciated programming langugages out there. While ColdFusion is awesome, one of the drawbacks of it (as well as of PHP, .NET, etc.) is that it is a server-side technology, meaning (surprise, surprise) that all of the code processing done is accomplished on the server. So, any of the cool Web 2.0 stuff out there, like asynchronous form submission, has to use Javascript.
While ColdFusion 8 has some seriously cool AJAX features built into it that handle alot of this kind of thing with ease, it is not free and wonderful hosting companies (like GoDaddy) are slow to upgrade their servers to the newest version. Therefore, the onus is upon the developer to utilize the various work-arounds until ColdFusion 8 is firmly entrenched.
One tool that makes life significantly easier is Adobe's Spry Framework . While Spry includes a lot of the cool effects of other Javascript frameworks, one of the best parts of it is the easy way in which it allows Spry to make server-side calls to allow applications to harness More >
Peacocke Wednesday – Interconnected
Sep 12th
In the first chapter, "What is There," Peacocke examines the shift in metaphorical language about the nature of reality that has been necessitated by advances in understanding of the physical universe, most particularly the insights gleaned from quantum mechanics. While humans tend to think of space and time as isolated, irreducible "things" (e.g., this "lamp" and "my childhood"), the quantum world reveals not only an incessant fluxuation in the nature of space/time, but even more importantly a reducibility of all "things" as metaphors to their irreducible constituent elements. Rather than viewing ourselves and our actions as something that exists "in" space/time or "over-and-against" space/time, the quantum world reveals that who and what we are–in terms of reducibility–are themselves partakers of the fabric of space/time as opposed to alient substances existing therein.
One obvious conclusion of these observations is that it remains no longer possible to speak of reality (people, events, weather, solar systems, etc.) as a series of potentially related, yet closed "systems." No matter how small or seemingly significant something may be, its existence comes to bear on the whole of all else that exists–the butterfly in Cuba disturbing the air effects change in the weather patters in Los More >
Peacocke Monday – The Start of Something New
Sep 10th
Over the next few weeks (hopefully not too many of them!), I will be making my way through Arthur Peacocke's Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming — Natural, Diving and Human. During this time, I hope to leave some brief thoughts on Peacocke's conclusions, commenting about the significance which his writings have for many of the discussions that are currently engaging the hearts and minds of the Church.
I have long been fascinated by the relationship between theology and science, and over the course of my past research into these issues, Peacocke's writings have factored heavily in the development of my tentative conclusions. While many of Peacocke's writings focus on exploring the meaningfulness of theology and science on specific levels (e.g., evolutionary theory), this work seeks to establish a more fundamental link between the two. In a nutshell, Peacocke argues that as both the sciences and theology engage many of the same properties of the human search for significance, knowledge and meaning, so too are they inextricably related to one another. To the chagrin of many antagonists, Peacocke argues that the notion that each pursuit operates within easily bifurcated realms of discussion is the height of naivety and More >
CD Review – Suzy Bogguss' "Sweet Danger"
Sep 5th
In the mid-90's, Suzy Bogguss was a powerhouse name in country music, garnering a half-dozen top-ten singles, numerous awards, and even the coveted Academy of Country Music's award for Top New Female Vocalist. However, as with all things, time and age took their toll. After a brief hiatus from the music scene to raise her family, Bogguss returned to an ambivalent audience of listeners who had seemingly moved on from her tender style of song writing.
For those who may have moved on, however, Sweet Danger represents a modest redefinition of Bogguss as a singer, songwriter and musician. To begin, it is difficult to classify this album as "country." While there are certainly discernible country roots underlying the melodies, tracks like "The Bus Ride" and "It's Not Gonna Happen" are delightfully steeped in soft washes of jazz, transforming Bogguss' voice from country-twanger to smoky-club crooner. Yet on songs such as "Sweet Danger" and "Chain Lover", the subdued jazz tones are seamlessly exchanged for intoxicatingly gritty and indefatigable blues' themes. However, lest this album be seen as a manufactured attempt at personal redefinition, the transformation is short of total–the listener is quickly reminded of Bogguss' country roots on cuts like the melodically mesmerizing More >
