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Teaching Children, and Myself, About Service and Truthfulness

· 5 min read

I've done my alloted time now: taught a Bahá'í children's class at a St. Paul public housing community center two weeks running, with around 10 children each time. None of whom are Bahá'ís, and neither are their parents. We learned about service and truthfulness. Well, I learned, and I hope they did too. And they taught me about karma. Perhaps I'll go back and help out some more.

Waiting for the Return: Option 4

· 2 min read

A Pew Forum poll a few years ago included the following analysis: "Finally, while an overwhelming percentage of Christians (79%) say they believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ, far fewer see Christ's return as imminent. Overall just 20% of all Christians expect Christ to return to earth in their lifetime; even among those who say that the Bible is the literal word of God, just 37% expect Christ to return to earth in their lifetime."

Never Say Goodbye... Without Recycling

· One min read

I've been a recycling fool since I was in elementary school, when my best friend and I would walk around house construction sites and collect all of the aluminum cans (we weren't the least bit bothered if there were workers actually there, though typically we were out on Saturdays and that wasn't an issue). For years now I've been meaning to send my old floppy disks to Green Disk, and tonight we finally boxed them up for shipping tomorrow: floppy and zip disks, DSL modems, an ancient dubbed-from-broadcast Spaceballs on VHS (and a few other VHS).

The coup de grâce: Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet. I had to open the liner notes and read/semi-sing the, shall we just leave it at trite, lyrics to Never Say Goodbye. But I was forced to give up half way through. That was about the last audio cassette tape. I think I still have The Cure's Faith/Carnage Visors, and REM's Carnival of Sorts, because those were rather rare even in their time.

Next on the recycling list: my old soccer, debate, and science competition trophies (about a dozen).

Diagnosing Production Problems: First Law

· One min read

Stephen's first law of diagnosing problems in production: try to replicate in test. (Assumptions: you have a test environment, you use it regularly, and it is reasonably close to production). Sometimes you just can't replicate the problem — for instance, it might be due to an oddity in a customer data file that you're not allowed to run outside of production. In those cases, see if you can use a proxy. For instance, try copying the file and masking the sensitive data, then running it in the test environment (of course, the masking process might cover up the error that is causing all the problems).

Production needs to stay clean, and as developers we need to keep our hands out of it as much as possible. This is particularly true in a highly secure environment with strong separation of duties, wherein you might have to drag a sys admin into the picture just to get to obscure log files, for instance. Replicate the issue, solve it, document it, and make sure everyone else in the company is able to share in the lessons learned.

Mississippi River Bird Monitoring - Statistics Now Posted!

· One min read

I've just uploaded some statistics for the Mississippi River Twin Cities Landbird Monitoring Project. Go into an individual species and you can see a color-coded table of results, histogram showing species presence over time, and a Google maps display with the count of birds at each exact point count location within the various sites monitored. Interestingly, Gold Finchs are the most common bird across these parks. Its definitely fun to pour through this data. Later in the summer, data from previous years will be loaded into the site as well. Check out the Great-Crested Flycatcher — at 8 of 9 sites, they showed up all at the same time (week of 5/9). I can't wait to compare that to previous years' migration results.

Baby barred owls!

· One min read

This morning at Battle Creek West, where we saw an adult Barred Owl drying itself after a bath two weeks ago, we found two fledged babies. They were adorable. If human babies looked like this, we might have a few already. Someone else's great photo (dead link removed; SF 2025).

Also seen, in another part of the park: small milkweed plant with a monarch egg and 2nd molt monarch caterpillar, and flying nearby was an adult monarch. Seeing three stages of monarch within a minute was quite gratifying. Next time we're out there (two weeks) we'll have to check in on their progress. (T. is now associated with the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project.)

URI, You've Grown Up

· One min read

This year is the tenth anniversary of the charter signing of the United Religions Initiative. To mark the occasion, the URI has launched a brand-new, gorgeously-professional website. If you have interest in the world of interfaith action and cooperation that is "bound for peace", then I invite you to stop by the site. I've not been so involved with the URI's work in the past few years, but I am still proud to call myself a supporter of this dynamic, idealistic-yet-grounded organization.

A Prayer for the Friends in Iran

· 2 min read

This month, the "Friends" (Yaran), a group of informal national Bahá'í leaders in Iran, began their third year in prison. The charges against them are specious, e.g. "corruption on earth", and the Iranian government will not even give them the dignity of holding a trial. I know that the Iranian people are better than this. I pray that their government will come to recognize their duty to respect the freedom to worship, and release this group. Last weekend I attend a devotional gathering in honor of this group, and others, who are imprisoned in Iran. I opened a particular Bahá'í prayer book with which I am not familiar, and this was the first prayer I encountered:

I beseech Thee, O Thou Who art the Lord of all names, to guard Thy loved ones against Thine enemies, and to strengthen them in their love for Thee and in fulfilling Thy pleasure. Do Thou protect them, that their footsteps may slip not, that their hearts may not be shut out as by a veil from Thee, and that their eyes may be restrained from beholding anything that is not of Thee. Cause them to be so enraptured by the sweetness of Thy divine melodies that they will rid themselves of all attachment to any one except Thee, and will turn wholly towards Thee, and extol Thee under all conditions, saying: “Praised be Thou, O Lord our God, inasmuch as Thou hast enabled us to recognize Thy most exalted and all-glorious Self. We will, by Thy mercy, cleave to Thee, and will detach ourselves from any one but Thee. We have realized that Thou art the Beloved of the worlds and the Creator of earth and heaven!”

Glorified be God, the Lord of all creation!

~ Bahá'u'lláh, Prayers and Meditations, LXI

Change HostType["Pex"] to HostType["Moles"]

· One min read

Once again I've learned the hard way that it pays to read the release notes. After installing Pex v0.91.x, suddenly I was having trouble running my tests in a particular solution. It has been driving me nuts - Visual Studio was throwing "object reference not set to an instance of an object" errors every time I tried to run tests, and the Test View was refusing to load any test names.

Finally, I noticed that I had a few tests that were still instrumented with HostType "pex" instead of "moles". I changed these around, and still got the error. Closed Visual Studio, restarted, and voìla, the tests can run, and Test View is populated again.

Pex and Moles - Release Notes

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