Another great insight from CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity.
We must not think Pride is something God forbids because He is offended at it, or that Humility is something He demands as due to His own dignity — as if God Himself was proud. He is not in the least worried about His dignity. The point is, He wants you to know Him: wants to give you Himself. And He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble — delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.
Continue reading ‘A Humble Man Wouldn’t Say He’s Nobody’
Here’s how to make a database backup with phpMyAdmin. The guide is for WordPress, but can be generally applied to other PHP/MySQL apps. Note that you have to use settings that aren’t the default.
I was reading Phil Vischer’s account of what killed Big Idea, and found something that reminds me of exactly what Cybiko Inc. did in 2000-2003. Come to think of it, 2001 was a pivotal year for me. I visited China and Hong Kong, I bought a Cybiko and started programming, I bought my first domain name and started doing web development, and I was baptized– all in the same year (if my memory serves). I also suddenly became aware that the world was bigger than California, and I realized the existence of such things as the Pentagon, World Trade Center, White House, politcs, etc. In many ways, it’s like the year my life began. But I digress. I’ll have to write more about that later.
Continue reading ‘Don’t Spend Money on Bad Marketing’
With Windows XP Pro, the “Language Bar” always appears in your taskbar on startup. To disable it, go to the Control Panel -> Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options -> Regional and Language Options -> Languages tab -> Details… -> Language Bar… -> Uncheck the box that says “Show the Language bar on the desktop”.
This afternoon I looked at Kristen’s computer. Its main problem is high CPU usage, often near 100%. It’s not just Explorer using the resources, either, but whatever application is trying to run: Firefox, wmplayer, etc. I’ve seen max CPU usage problems before. Last time, they were caused by an incomplete AVI file. This problem appears to be a bit different, so I looked up some information online. Here are some things that one could try, depending on the particular situation.
Continue reading ‘100% CPU Usage’
More amazing insights from CS Lewis, pages 98-99.
But what, it may be asked, is the use of keeping two people together if they are no longer in love? There are several sound, social reasons; to provide a home for their children, to protect the woman (who has probably sacrificed or damaged her own career by getting married) from being dropped whenever the man is tired of her. But there is also another reason of which I am very sure, though I find it a little hard to explain.
Continue reading ‘Reasons more complex than they appear’
From Mere Christianity by CS Lewis (88).
Remember that, as I said, the right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge. When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.
Continue reading ‘The problem with being bad’
I’m about halfway through this book now, and it’s simply amazing. I love his writing style, but even more, I love his ideas. The illustrations he uses takes my thoughts and makes them much more clear. Here’s an excerpt from page 85, one that I really like. Continue reading ‘Mere Christianity by CS Lewis’
Yesterday I went to EVK for dinner, my first time for this school year. It’s exactly as I remember. The food tastes exactly the same, right down to the tomato sauce on the pizzas, which tastes like it came straight out of the can. They did have one interesting dish: soy chicken stir fry. I decided to try it. It was pretty good. I remember that at some point last year, they had a soy meats survey where we tried lots of different “meats” made of soy. Now they’ve decided to serve soy chicken stir fry. I had it with rice (noodles also available). Reasonably good. During dinner, I talked with someone named Neil who lives in New/North. He tried the marching band, but decided to drop out due to the huge time commitment.
This school year is different, but still the same. The freshmen are amazingly cool, and many of them are super-interested in the free In-N-Out event that TCF is hosting tomorrow. Many people have never had In-N-Out yet. There’s an amazing variety of experiences. One might think that “most” people have heard of In-N-Out. Nope– it feels more like 50%. One might think that hardly anyone has heard of InterVarsity. Nope– I talked to someone who actually told me he wanted to get involved with IV, even before I mentioned it. Others think I meant “Intramural” as in sports. Every person is totally different. Almost every possible personality I can think of exists here at USC– at both ends of any spectrum.
Continue reading ‘Soy Chicken Stir Fry’
From the Top 10 Ways to Motivate Geeks. JPL’s biggest mistake has been giving me this 4-year-old Compaq with just 504 MB RAM. So all I can really do is post on blog 
Continue reading ‘Give Geeks Better Tools Than Necessary’
Recent Comments