baby got baptism

Submitted by Caleb Brown on Mon, 02/08/2004 - 3:27pm.

A slight delay in the proceedings. I was gonna write a large entry about this site. But after trying to find some background information I decided enough commentary had been given on this site in journals, forums and blogs all over the net and it didn't need any more from me. Not only that but the site appears to be a joke, with only circumstancial connections to anything in meatspace (for example, all but one email address on the site is a freebe).

The only two things I'll say about it though are this:

  1. whether or not the authors of the site intendend for their satire to have any useful impact on people, it did. Because it was so offensive to a lot of people huge numbers of religious conversations sprung up all over the net. Unfortunately they were often misguided, but just having people think about this sort of stuff is good.

  2. There is a very funny entry in the May 6th 2004, Pastor's Corner. Basically a rewrite to the song Baby Got Back by Sir Mixalot called Baby Got Baptism.

The other site I wanted to mention is called Dial-the-Truth Ministries. This site, unlike the previously mention one, appears to be quite serious.

The reason I wanted to mention it is because I found it rather interesting. It happens to be the most conservative fundamentalist website I have ever seen. The people behind the site think the KJV is it when it comes to translations and that pretty much every other translation is evil. They reckon rock music is evil. And despite the fact that they actually believe in hell and the seriousness of being there, they think that hell is located inside the earth.

While a fair bit of the site is solid in its theology, they take it to the literal extreme in most cases. These people are essentially fundamentalists - taken to the most literal extreme.

Now I just fall short of being a Sydney Anglican - a conservative evangelical, which means I am quite frequently labelled a fundamentalist, puritan, or unintellectual. But seriously people there are fundamentalists and there are fundamentalists. It would save everyone a lot of time if the distinction was made more often.

Oh, on the subject of Christianity check out this presentation to find out why I think it is so important.

obese or malnourished?

Submitted by Caleb Brown on Fri, 30/07/2004 - 4:15pm.

<rant>
For the last few weeks I've been thinking on and off about the problem of obesity in the western world (or as my highschool geography teacher wanted us to use: the north). It seems that we are having lots of trouble with fat. There are loads of statistics that show an increase in the number of obese people. A quick google search will turn up many sources. Not only that, but there are so many diets, diet foods and other heavily marketed health foods an outsider could easily be mistaken into thinking we are having a lot of trouble just staying skinny.

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while i'm at it

Submitted by Caleb Brown on Thu, 29/07/2004 - 6:09pm.

Before I say what I'm about to say, I will point out for my uninformed readers - i am a computer geek.

Now that you have placed me into a box based on my personality, let me share with you, for a moment (well technically I have already shared, your just wasting your own time now), the joy of tricking stupid parsers.

A parser is basically a computer program that uses a formal grammar (language rules) to break up some input to get something useful from it.

www.blogger.com uses a parser to dump this blog in a pretty format. It parses a template page and replaces particular keywords with useful content. For example, <$BlogPageTitle$> will be replaced with the title 'inference'.

Every website has a <body> html tag in it, and the parser for this website uses this tag to insert an advert at the top of the page. It does it by placing its banner straight after it sees the <body> tag.

Now, I don't really want to see the ad. So I tricked the parser. What I did was add another <body> tag inside a comment tag before the original one like so:
<!--
<body>
-->
<body>

When the parser got to the first <body> tag it placed the banner ad code straight after it. But because this is inside a comment tag the browser ignores it - blocking the advert.

So now I don't have to cluter my blog with useless ads, and neither do you.

If the powers that be really wanted their advert to be shown they would add their code next to all <body> tags, or even check to make sure the one they are using isn't in a comment.

Weak grammars are fun to exploit. Exploiting weak grandmothers is probably illegal.

one other thing

Submitted by Caleb Brown on Thu, 29/07/2004 - 5:16pm.

Whats up with the blogger.com times on my posts?

They say AM instead of PM.

I swear I set them to PM.

I think they have gremlins.
Or maybe I've been mixing 24 hour time, which is far superior, with their 12 hour format.

In any case the problem has been fixed. And for those who like aggregators try this link.

the joys of blogging

Submitted by Caleb Brown on Thu, 29/07/2004 - 4:30pm.

Well as my day draws to a close, I thought that I would contribute to the sea of blogged opinion that is the internet with a comment on the very thing that I am doing now.

It seems that just about everyone with an internet connection has a web-log these days (yes there is a history behind the word). It took me a while, but I finally surcumed to the trend. I've sold out everyone. I'm sorry to those who now think lesser of me.

Blogs are a funny thing. They're kinda like those personal journals that girls have, that only they ever see. But they're not. Because everyone else can see them.
So with the rise of blogging as a form of expression, people are now revealing their inner most feelings and thoughts on the internet to all who care to read. But this presents a problem for some people. It seems that they want to write down how they are feeling, but not tell everyone - especially in the case of really personal stuff like, oh, BGRs.
So instead of the candid writting they typically use, people switch into a 'poetic' style. They then hide behind all these ambiguous phrases which have very little meaning, except to the author, and leave the reader guessing as to what the heck is going on.

So for this blog here are two things you can not expect to see. The first is this: don't expect any cryptic sentences disguised as poetry - used as a means for me to express my feelings without any circumstancial details. I write in plain english. Secondly, don't expect any sort of deep insight into the emotional life of Caleb Brown. I'm writting this purely for the sake of entertainment. Which, incidentally, I will most likely fail at acheiving.

There you have it folks. My first real contribution to the overpopulated city of subjectivity.

Time to stop now and sleep.

PS - Be sure to buy a beanie from YachtBuoy and support some friends doing the YAA Business Skills Programme and the leukeamia foundation (one day someone can tell me why they picked that name, it sounds funny. I should be really getting some sort of commission too).

new blog

Submitted by Caleb Brown on Wed, 28/07/2004 - 1:33pm.

started a blog.

how exciting.

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