Blog Jones

“There’s absolutely no question that it’s unethical for parents to bring up their children as strict vegans”

-Professor Lindsay Allen, US Agricultural Research Service

Via a new site I found called Gongol.com

The internet, and blogging in particular, offers the ultimate form of word-of-mouth advertising. A new product can be released, friends tell friends from all over the world, and the product can be a big hit.

Of course, the downside is that if your product or service stinks, then those same friends will be influenced not to buy from you, and the internet is full of great examples like this one from the The Patriette about Northwest Airlines and its customer service department.

Indeed, it seems that the vast majority of complaints that I read are the result of incompetent, lazy, or undertrained customer service departments. Another couple of examples: The widely read Gizmodo’s take-down of T-Mobile has convinced me to never, ever purchase a T-Mobile product, and Joe Peacock’s epic 7-part customer service torture session with Dell has made me skittish about buying from them. (Fair warning about Peacock’s post: He does swear on occasion; use a profanity filter.)

So, business leaders, here’s my message to you: Quit treating the customer service like an expense. Quit trying to cut costs by minimizing training budgets and outsourcing overseas. Remember that A) It’s much easier–and cheaper–to keep the customer you have than to get a new one and that B) that customer you offend or irritate can and probably will tell as many people as he or she can.

I was on the IT Forums yesterday (a private, heavily moderated forum accessible only to BJU students) and I discovered a list of BJU bloggers, including several I hadn’t seen before. Some appear to be students, others appear to be grads, and a couple look like they’re missionaries. The new ones have been added to my BJU Bloggers list on the sidebar.

I got an email today from Barge, the university hospital.

The pharmacy is closed today because the pharmacist is sick.

Uh-oh.

Here’s something interesting: Some guy named “broomfield_jay” at democrats.com has his shorts in a wad over the fact that BJU Press puts Christian doctrine in its textbooks. Specifically, this article refers to a pre-calculus text, describing it as “sick” and as a “KKK handbook.”

Here’s one of the examples he cites:

“Carl Friedrich Gauss first proved the fundamental theorem of algebra. There are many fundamental theorems: of arithmetic, calculus, and so on. These are so ‘fundamental’ that many other theorems are derived from them. In the Bible, there are also fundamentals, without which Christianity would not exist—the deity of Christ, His substitutionary atonement, and the inspiration of the Bible, to name a few.”

And here’s his take on the book as a whole:

An objective review of this “text” would warn that it not only wastes students time, but will also leave them behind studenst [SIC] using more competent texts. Modern texts are concise and have real-world math applications involving economics, biology, and physics. Leave the Bible to the department that teaches sociology or better yet, mythology.

Will a text that drops Christian doctrine in at every opportunity leave its students behind the students of secular textbooks? I somehow doubt it.

Of course, my Christian high school used the secular Saxon math curriculum, if that’s any indicator of text quality.

In any case, broomfield_jay is over-reacting. As long as the book teaches the fundamentals of pre-calculus to its students, there’s no problem with it dropping in Christian doctrine, especially when you consider that the book is written specifically for Christian schools. And unless the story problems involve getting the dimensions of a burning cross, the KKK comment was out of line.

I’ve got a theme switcher dropdown on the sidebar now. The default themes need some tweaking, but I’ve got to go to work now. See y’all later!

UPDATE: I’ve tweaked the sidebar on default WordPress pages to match my default sidebar. Some of the plugins, such as the collapsing/expanding extended entries and comments, which require me to tweak the index file, have not been added yet. Maybe tomorrow.

Although I’ve got vespers tomorrow afternoon. Rats.

Anyways, in case you were wondering, I found the theme switching plug-in via Google here. Despite being an early beta, I find that it works perfectly. (Although I did have to tweak it just a little to get the dropdown box to center properly.)

WordPress is really some awesome software. I love it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: OK, all the plug-ins except for the spell checker and the comment previews are working in all 3 themes. Those’ll take longer to fix, and I’ve got to be up early tomorrow. Will probably fix tomorrow afternoon.

Well, several hours later, I think I’ve got it mostly working.

What’s the difference you ask?

Well, right now, to you… not a whole lot. Most of the updates do cool things for me. For example, changing and creating templates (now called “themes”) is much easier. The program also handles static pages better now; for an example, click the “Let Me Introduce Myself” link on the sidebar. Also, the spam controls are better.

It’s all pretty cool. But, here’s where I need some help: If you see anything that’s broken, please, please e-mail me so I can fix it.

Anyway’s it somehow got to be almost three in the morning, so I’ll see y’all later.

Hey, there’s a new version of WordPress out. I’m gonna try to install it. The site may go down for a while. Sorry.

In a recent post, I linked to a blog called Libertarian Girl, mainly to quote a commenter named austroblogger. I don’t plan on linking to her much more, because I found out via InstaPundit that she is a he.

That ticks me off. A lot. I hate liars.

I mean, imagine if one day I revealed that I was a 60-year-old Russian that had never even been to America, much less the BJU campus? Pseudonyms are one thing, but to lie about your identity is another.

He’s re-titled his blog as “Libertarian Loser Guy.”

Yeah, that’s about the politest term I can think of for you.

::right click:: ::unsubscribe::

I’ve been talking about such heavy issues lately… maybe it’s time for a break. How about a light lunch? Maybe a healthy… HAMDOG!?

DECATUR, Ga. (AP) - When Becky Cleaveland is out with her girlfriends, they all pick at salads except for the petite Atlanta woman. She tackles “The Hamdog.”

The dish, a specialty of Mulligan’s, a suburban bar, is a hot dog wrapped by a beef patty that’s deep fried, covered with chili, cheese and onions and served on a hoagie bun. Oh yeah, it’s also topped with a fried egg and two fistfuls of fries.

“The owner says I’m the only girl who can eat a whole one without flinching,” Cleaveland said proudly.

Blog Jones, bringing you the best of gluttony since 2003.

Well, since I was up, I decided to add a couple of features to the comments section. First, you now have a separate preview and post buttons, for those times you feel hasty. OTOH, when you’re not feeling hasty, use the spell-checker to keep from looking dumb.

Lastly, I’ve thrown on some formatting buttons, which should make things easier for my less HTML literate readers.

Anyways, I really need to go to bed now. G’night.

Well, today, I had the dubious joy of getting my very first WordPress comment spam. Seven minutes later, I destroyed it, but I’ve been forced to activate some anti-spam measures.

Measure One: Any comment with more than two links in it will be sent to moderation. I’ll be notified of it by e-mail, and, after I approve it as non-spam, it’ll show up on the blog.

Measure Two: Also, any comment containing certain commonly-used spam words, like viagra and casino, will be moderated.

Measure Three: I’ve installed the No-Follow plug-in. Comment spam isn’t designed to get people to click on it; it’s designed to move the target page up in the Google rankings. The no-follow plug-in makes Google ignore the spammer’s links.

Hopefully, that’ll be enough. I’ve still got a few plug-ins I can try if that isn’t enough.

But if those fail, I’m going to have to resort to some well-placed hacks.

And I don’t mean the programming kind.

Wow! This cool. Wired News reports that UCLA scientists have modified HIV to fight cancer in mice. Yay for gene therapy!

(Via SlashDot.)

One of the things that frustrates me about my Bible Doctrines textbook is its lengthy assault against evolution. Apart from some serious disagreements that I have with him over his reasoning (for example, his argument that the second law of thermodynamics invalidates evolution^*), my biggest frustration is his sources. It seems that he hasn’t updated the chapter–or his sources–significantly in over 30 years. Don’t you think that in 30 years the evolutionists would have come up with an answer to your concerns?

Well, they have. John Derbyshire over at the National Review online has answers to some of the recurring arguments of Creationism. Definitely worth reading. An example:

(5) “There is no such thing as half an eye/wing/lung etc.” Yes there is, all over the place, as biologists have been pointing out till they are blue in the face. The common scallop has little light-sensitive patches all round its mouth, for instance. An entire menagerie of animals — frogs, squirrels, even snakes — has rudimentary gliding webs of various levels of sophistication — half wings.

They say that in the realm of the blind the one-eyed man is king. A better way to say “survival of the fittest” is “survival of the least unfit,” a phrase I have to credit to austroblogger, a commenter on Libertarian Girl.

Anyways, read Derbyshire’s whole post.

I got an email earlier this week asking me how to use Proxomitron as a profanity filter. (Seems I mentioned it in an earlier post. Hooray for the miracle that is Google.) Here’s how to do it:

Google, my all-time favorite company, has a new service: Google Maps. I absolutely love it.

A fairly graphics intensive walkthrough follows in the extended entry

It’s baack.

Here’s your first look at the “new” Ingalls - the family at the heart “Little House on the Prairie.”

ABC is bringing the famous 1970s series back in a special, short-form series that begins next month.

Seriously, ABC: Think of something *new* next time. You can make something old-timey if you want to, but do you have to copy the ’70’s? Again? My mom has an entire shelf of books by Janette Oke set in the Old West, and you couldn’t buy one of them?

Other networks have fairly new ideas: Lost, 24, even American Idol. Where’s yours?

A little pet peeve: Can we quit using the suffix -gate to refer to every little political spat we have? Rathergate, now Easongate… It used to be clever, now it’s cliché.

Yes, Hugh Hewitt and Michelle Malkin and the entire cast of Little Green Footballs: I’m talking to you.

Of course, now I can hear all the keyboards a’clickin’ telling me that “Eason-gate” isn’t just a little political spat. It’s a big deal! The chief news executive at CNN slandered our entire military by claiming we deliberately targeted journalists during combat in Iraq!

Long term, is that important? Are the slanderous words of one newsman going to be more than just an obscure footnote in the history books? I don’t think so. Like virtually every other political scandal, I predict that this one will be fought over for a couple of months and forgotten.

I mean, it says a lot about CNN, but nothing we didn’t already know.

See, this is why I could never be a politician. I couldn’t fight the day to day battles over Eason Jordan and Social Security and all that. I’d get sick of it. I like big-picture politics and debates over policy, but not the down-in-the-mud fighting, saying the same things again, and again, and again, and again….

Anyway.

Even if “Eason-gate” were to become a big historical deal, leading to, say, the collapse of the big cable news networks, don’t you think we could come up with a better moniker? Our children will be very disappointed in us when they find out that we weren’t original enough to come up with a good name.

How about… The Davos Scandal, after the city in which he made the remarks. Dull, boring, but informative and unique. After all, what else happens in Davos?

Or the “Eason Jordan Slanders Our Military” scandal?

Our just the Jordan scandal?

OK, I’m not feeling creative. That’s probably because I’m up late typing instead of sleeping. But… uh… don’t use -gate. Any more. It should be Banished from the Queen’s English.

I promised you something insightful; I hope this fits the bill. Sorry it took so long. Here we go:

Let’s say that a man kills his neighbor and is later convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Let’s also say that the man has a ten-year-old son who was at school at the time of the murder.

Now, does that son bear any responsibility for the man’s crime? Should he be executed too, since he descended from so monstrous a man?

Of course not. Surely it’s plain to see that the sins of the father have no bearing on the status of the son. The Bible backs this up in Ezekiel 18:20:

The soul that sinneth, it shall die . The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.

So then, by our own law and by the law of God, people are responsible for their own actions, not their ancestors’ actions.

Now, here’s a problem:

My Bible Doctrines class, in studying anthropology (the study of man) and hamartiology (the study of sin), took an in-depth look at the story of Adam & Eve.

In this story, humanity’s parents committed the only sin available to them, eating from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Because of that action, all of humanity is cursed, in sin, and condemned to hell apart from the help of Christ, according to the book of Romans, especially verses 5:12-14. (The following is from the NASB, which I selected for ease of readability.)

Rom 5:12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned–
Rom 5:13 for until the Law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law.
Rom 5:14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come.

So, because of the sins of our ancestors, we are declared guilty. Adam’s sin is imputed unto us. We bear the iniquity of the father of all men; “the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

Is this not a contradiction in God’s law?

OK, I promise to write something witty or insightful sometime soon. For now though, I’ve been putting more cool plug-ins into my blog. One of them makes extended entries much, much better, and to demonstrate, I’ll put the rest of this post in an extended entry. Don’t be shy, go ahead and click on the link.