the singularity of being and nothingness
Archive for January, 2008
stonewallwesleyan.com Launches
Jan 30th
I've been away for a while…that's because I've been consumed with work and LAUNCHING A NEW WEBSITE!!!
Okay, that was a bit dramatic. But I am terribly excited about this one. For one, I worked incredibly hard on this. I built every bit of it from scratch, and in the process of development learned an incredible amount about ColdFusion–which was good!
Stonewallwesleyan.com is the new website for my home church, Stonewall Wesleyan Church. It featuers a fully interactive blog, user interface, podcasting, etc. Additionally, there are fairly robust administrative tools for managing calendar events, worship set-lists and schedules, page images, etc. I am pretty happy with it overall.
Anyway, when you have a chance, check it out here .
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The Day to End All Days
Jan 25th
Well, in case you live in a hole somewhere, the next three weeks are shaping up to be huge. In less than two weeks, God-fearing Americans will celebrate the day-before-Lent (Fat Tuesday) by more or less determining the identities of the Democratic and Repulican presidential nominees. In another week and two days, lovers across the world will commemorate their passions with cheap chocolates and over-priced floral arrangements.
Yet few realize that an even more momentous event will occur between these big days. But this event will be truly earth-shaking, and it will hit February 12th.
No, it's not the most recent Jack Van Impe prediction for the return of Christ, and it is not the release date of what is going to be the incredibly awesome sequel to Batman Begins, The Dark Knight.
Nope. February 12th is none other than the death of Internet Explorer 6.
Okay, that was a bit dramatic, and not entirely accurate. Despite fervent prayers in support of IE6's digicide, IE 6 has proven, historically, to be more difficult to kill than it is to design a website for (and that's saying something!). Rather, February 12th marks the date when Internet Explorer 7–IE 6's better (but still not More >
Inerrancy Revisited
Jan 24th
Nearly two years ago (wow…), I wrote an article questioning the usefulness and/or helpfulness of the concept of biblical inerrancy. In this post, I argued that it seems apparent that the doctrine of inerrancy is actually inevitably harmful to a Christian understanding of the place and role of Scripture within theology for it unnaturally weds the doctrine of Scripture to modernistic conceptions of historicity and textual criticism by way of antithesis. In doing so, I concluded, a theology that affirms the doctrine of biblical inerrancy is qualitatively indistinguishable from that which it seeks to overcome in that by necessarily affirming the starting premises of modernistic notions of historicity, biblical inerrancy unwittingly capitulates the legitimacy of said categories while (illogically) arriving at different conclusions. In my understanding, such an approach is ultimately doomed because its entire attempt at substantiation will be (and is, consequently, being) washed away with the next great philosophical paradigm shift.
In the two years since writing about my thoughts on this perspective, I have engaged several who are opposed to my view and assert–nearly above all other things–the absolute necessity of the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture. While I certainly do not wish to call into question More >
Fun with Flash and ActionScript
Jan 8th
My brother recently approached me with an interesting project: He wanted to make a flash movie that would have enable someone to control the mouth movements of a "bobblehead" with keystrokes.
Although I have not done this before, I was certain it would be something fairly easy to do. ActionScript 3's "Keyboard" class has a plethora of functions and methods that allow one to do just about anything with a keyboard and a flash animation.
So here's the breakdown: The animation needed to have five "states": Default, profile, wobble, "ooh" and talk; and each needed to be assigned to a separate key.
Cake.
The first step was to create the background movie. My brother did this in Motion 3, and we set it inside a Movie Clip on the first frame of the flash movie. Next, we defined another movie clip that contained all of the movements for the head "states".
Beyond that, all that was left to do was to define the keyboard actions. The following is the totality of the code:
function doTheBobble(event:KeyboardEvent):void { if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.SPACE) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(2); } if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.LEFT) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(21); } if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.RIGHT) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(31); } if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.UP) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(41); } if(event.keyCode More > Fun with Flash and ActionScript
Jan 8th
My brother recently approached me with an interesting project: He wanted to make a flash movie that would have enable someone to control the mouth movements of a "bobblehead" with keystrokes.
Although I have not done this before, I was certain it would be something fairly easy to do. ActionScript 3's "Keyboard" class has a plethora of functions and methods that allow one to do just about anything with a keyboard and a flash animation.
So here's the breakdown: The animation needed to have five "states": Default, profile, wobble, "ooh" and talk; and each needed to be assigned to a separate key.
Cake.
The first step was to create the background movie. My brother did this in Motion 3, and we set it inside a Movie Clip on the first frame of the flash movie. Next, we defined another movie clip that contained all of the movements for the head "states".
Beyond that, all that was left to do was to define the keyboard actions. The following is the totality of the code:
function doTheBobble(event:KeyboardEvent):void { if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.SPACE) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(2); } if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.LEFT) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(21); } if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.RIGHT) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(31); } if(event.keyCode == Keyboard.UP) { Mouth.gotoAndPlay(41); } if(event.keyCode More > 
