1. Give up a few drinks a month and spend $38 a month to sponsor a child in a foreign country.
2. Make your voice heard: write a letter to Congress. You’d be surprised how few they get and how much each one matters.
3. When you go to the supermarket, get your cart from the cart return in the parking lot. That’s one less cart the attendant will have to push back into the building. And always return the cart to either the cart return or the building.
4. Adopt a child.
5. If you’re married or otherwise attached, throw a Valentine’s Day party for all of your single friends.
6. Volunteer to teach some sessions at a job training center in a poorer part of town.
7. If a phone service rep for your cable company or something similar is helpful or does a good job, tell them. They never hear positive feedback.
8. Buy flowers or a gift for a loved one for no special occasion.
9. Keep a jar of candy stocked at your desk at work for anyone who wants it. You’ll make a lot of friends in the process.
10. If you want a pet, do a search of rescue shelters before going to a breeder.
11. Tip well, and be nice to the wait staff when you go out to eat. They get blamed for everything that goes wrong in the restaurant.
12. Take up a cause, educate yourself, and see what changes you can make in your life to further this cause. Here are some ideas, if you can’t think of any: world hunger, illiteracy, human trafficking, animal rights, racial reconciliation, and women’s rights (especially if you’re a man).
13. Furnish a room in your living space for whoever needs it. Be willing to take in friends, family, or recent college grads who are trying to get on their feet.
14. Before you go on a mission trip to build a house or a church, see if there are any trips where you’d get to utilize your unique and/or professional skills rather than your probably mediocre construction skills. (If you’re good at construction, see if you can help manage a local project.)
15. Be careful with your words. Once you say something, you can never completely take it back.
16. If you’re not a vegetarian, give up meat one or two nights a week. If nothing else, you’ll save money, since legumes cost a lot less than meat.
17. Buy an acre of rainforest in a foreign country to save it from deforestation.
18. Wash your clothes in cold water unless they’re absolutely filthy. This saves a ton of energy.
19. Buy a surge protector that cuts energy to electronic devices when not in use. Without this, things like televisions and even cell phone chargers continue to suck up energy when they’re turned off.
20. Smile at strangers.

What are some additional ideas that you guys have?

Janelle and I actually love the red beans and rice out of the box. Being the curious cook that I am, I wondered if I could create something like that from scratch. My first attempt… well, we don’t talk about my first attempt. But my second attempt was a resounding success! Here’s the recipe:

• One cup rice
• Two cans black beans, undrained
• Three or four cloves of garlic, chopped finely
• Two jalapeños, seeds and veins removed, chopped finely
• Three or four green onions, chopped
• One to one and a half pounds lean ham, cubed (optional)
• Some olive oil, for sauteeing (vegetable or canola oils will work, but olive is a bit healthier)
• One small can tomato paste
• One teaspoon cumin
• One tablespoon chili powder
• One bay leaf

Despite having two jalapeños, this is not a spicy dish. The seeds and veins contain most of the heat of the jalapeños, so leave some of that in if you want a spicy dish.

Prepare the rice according to the instructions. (For white rice, it’s usually two parts water, one part rice, on medium low for 30 minutes, but check on this.) While that’s cooking, put some oil in a large skillet (just enough to cover the bottom) and throw the garlic in there. Sautee for a few minutes, until it just starts to brown. Then, throw everything else but the beans and tomato paste in and sautee for five to ten minutes. Then, add the tomato paste, black beans with liquid, and an additional cup of water. It will look pretty soupy, but the rice will soak most of that up. Mix well and sautee for another few minutes, then mix in the rice and serve.

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed
- Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H., Canto 56

With the debate raging about whether to teach intelligent design in the classroom, some in the science community have also suggested that stupid design be taught right alongside it. Why can’t all the nutrients needed for animals to live be found in pond water? Why does nature revolve around a cycle of killing?

Darwin wrote about the Ichneumon spider, who paralyzes its victims, keeps them alive, and lays eggs in them. The victim is still alive when the eggs hatch and the baby spiders eat the live flesh as their first meal. Many in the science community, such as Dawkins and Pinker, point to this as evidence that the natural world was not designed, or, at least, not by a loving God.

Read the rest of this entry »

Alright, I’m not sure how many people are going to find this as amazing as I did, but I have to put it up here, if only so I can find it again later.

For those who don’t know, Super Mario World was a great game for the Super Nintendo system. It brought the Mario series to a whole new level just because there were so many things you could do and so many ways to interact with the environments of each level. It wasn’t long before people copied the game over to the computer and started messing with the code to make their own modifications.

In 2007, some guy with the user name sonomamario created a whole new Mario level that was fully automated. (This was for a different game—one with a level builder—but more on that later.) Basically, the level could be loaded up and the contraptions in the level would move Mario from start to finish without the user having to touch any of the controls.

Since people had already been hacking Super Mario World for years, the trend took off with that game as well. It was a little harder, since gamers now had to manipulate hexadecimal values rather than use a nice graphical level editor, but people started making more and more complex levels that were fully automated and posting videos of the levels to YouTube.

It wasn’t long before simple automated levels just weren’t enough. People aspired to more. The next development was building automated levels and manipulating the objects within those levels that make sounds. Once gamers could orchestrate the sounds produced by the Mario levels, they started setting the automated levels to music. There are a number of these videos on YouTube, but I’m going to skip straight to the most impressive one. (It’s long, but the whole thing is pretty amazing, considering they built it from scratch.)

So, you know those articles I’m proofreading at work? One of them contained a fact that looked questionable, so I decided to fact-check it really quick. I went to Google, typed in the subject, and just pulled up the first page. The good news is, the fact was correct. The bad news is, large parts of the article were word-for-word the same as the article I fact-checked against. (For the sake of the company that wrote the content, I’m not going to disclose anything.)

The best part? The article is on trademark law.

Now, bear in mind, it’s not like there’s a ton of original content and they just plagiarized two paragraphs. Well, there might be. The point is that I just don’t know. This is the first piece I’ve found without even looking for it. So now, I’ve got to stop proofing the articles and start checking them for plagiarism.

Did I mention that all of the articles deal with patents, copyrights, and trademarks?

My current task at work involves proofing a large number of articles that were written by an outside group. These were not written by professional writers, and they’ve never been proofed. Here’s some of what I’m finding:

• “a-lot” (The correct spelling is two words, and I’ve seen the incorrect one-word version, but never hyphenated.)
• “Others may be things that yow old never have thought of in your wildest dreams.” (What?)
• “Basically, society owes bucket loads to inventors because they have shaped the very ground we walk on.” (Let’s see… Redundant words, check; unprofessional colloquialisms, check; ridiculous overstatement, check.)
• “The Performing Arts, how we love and appreciate them!” (That’s the opening statement to a rather lackluster article on the performing arts.)
• “Inventing usually starts at a young age, and children usually start to become better and better investors as they grow older with time. One young inventor, Mathew Wood, said ‘I love inventing; it gives me something to do and is loads of fun.’ ” (That quote is one hell of a non sequitur.)
• “Intellectual property is defined by online dictionaries as…” (“Online dictionaries?” Bear in mind that this is an article about intellectual property that’s not giving credit to other intellectual property.)
• Hyphens in place of dashes, I can understand, but dashes in place of hyphens? Really? If they don’t know how to make dashes when they need them, how do they end up with them in the middle of words?

And all those are only from the first third of the articles. Fun times ahead!

I’ve finally made some headway on my professional portfolio. (This is mostly for street cred, although I may use it to pick up the occasional freelance job.) Well, my second design, anyway. My first design never got very far. Here’s take two.

That’s basically a rough sketch, anyway. It’s not at all done.

Which do you guys like better? Any thoughts?

I’ve had some requests for what I do with kale, so here it goes…

What you’ll need:

• One or two bunches of kale
• 100% extra virgin olive oil
• A sea salt grinder (we actually got a sea salt/dried garlic grinder)

That’s it. Since there are so few ingredients, each one really stands out, which means the quality of the ingredients is very noticeable. So use sea salt instead of regular salt and make sure the olive oil says 100% pure (otherwise it’s probably a blend).

You’ll need to separate the leaves from the stem running up the middle. The stem is edible, but it’s very, very tough—too tough for this method of cooking to soften. Put the leaves in a large bowl and toss lightly with some olive oil. Not a ton—just enough to lightly coat each piece. Place on a baking sheet and bake at 400 degrees. If the baking sheet is large enough for all the pieces to lay flat without touching, bake for six minutes, flip all pieces, and bake for another six minutes. If the pieces are all jammed together, just bake for thirteen to fifteen minutes. They won’t be cooked as evenly, but it works. Salt them when you take them out.

This actually went really well with a vegan dish I found online. Here’s the recipe for that:

What you’ll need:

• Two medium sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed
• One red bell pepper, diced
• One medium yellow or white onion, diced
• One can dark red kidney beans, drained
• One can small red beans, drained
• Three or four cloves of garlic, minced or diced finely
• Rosemary (1 teaspoon dried)
• Thyme (1 teaspoon dried)
• Paprika (1 teaspoon)
• One tablespoon butter
• Some olive oil

Put the butter and a touch of olive oil in a large skillet. (Use enough oil to coat however much of the pan that the butter doesn’t.) Sautee the garlic for a minute or two, but don’t brown it. Drop in all ingredients but the beans and sautee over medium heat until cooked (maybe ten minutes). Once cooked, drop in the beans and cook until warm.

This breaks the vegan rule, but a fried egg on top is really good.

JavaScript is my favorite development language, although I fully realize that it has a lot of limitations. I just discovered one today that I hadn’t thought about since college: passing a variable by reference rather than making a copy of it. Here’s the gist of it, for those who don’t know what I’m talking about.

Take this code, in which we declare and populate a small array:

var lines = [];
lines.push("line 1");
lines.push("line 2");

That works fine, but if you try to pass the lines array to another function, it will make a copy of the array rather than allowing the other function to edit the original array directly. You can set up this other function to return a different array and re-set the original array, but there are times when it would be much easier if you just pass a reference to the original array rather than make a copy of it.

In C, these are called pointers. I don’t know what they’re called in other languages because I haven’t done them in other languages.

Anyway, there are no pointers in JavaScript. So how do we get around this? Well, we could do it the hard way and declare global variables. If you leave the “var” off when referencing a variable for the first time in JavaScript, the variable is global and is accessible from any code on the page. Using global variables can quickly get messy, though, and is generally considered sloppy coding—especially if you’re going back and adding new code and functions all the time like I am with most of my projects.

There is a better solution. JavaScript objects, by default, behave like pointers. The best part is, you can make a variable an object without changing how you reference that variable syntactically. Check it out:

var lines = Object([]);
lines.push("line 1");
lines.push("line 2");

All we’ve changed is that first line, but the variable will now be passed to other functions as a reference to the original array. The variable is invisible outside of the original function and any functions we pass it to.

Let me tell you a little story about a man named George P. Burdell. George was born in 1910 and lived a pretty normal life. He went to college. He was a bomber crew member in the army. He sat on the board of directors for MAD magazine from 1969 to 1981.

But there’s just one problem: George is not a real person.

The whole thing started back in 1927. An applicant to Georgia Tech by the name of William Edgar Smith was accidentally sent two copies of the school’s enrollment form. Rather than throw it away, William filled it out with the fictitious name George P. Burdell. When George was accepted, William signed him up for all the same classes as him.

For William’s entire college career, he did twice the classwork and took tests in half the time, because he kept up the facade of George P. Burdell. He used different wording on assignments and even altered his handwriting to cover for him.

By the end of his fourth year, William was getting pretty tired of doing twice the work, so he decided to retire George. But not before he earned his Bachelor’s degree. That’s right—Georgia Tech actually awarded a four-year degree to a fictitious person.

So that’s the end of William’s story. But it’s not the end of George’s. By the time he earned his Bachelor’s, George was legendary at Georgia Tech. Other students kept turning in work for him and he eventually earned his Master’s as well.

George had officially graduated twice, but he remained on the active student roll for years. In 1969, Georgia Tech switched out their paper enrollment system for a computerized one, hoping that would stop other students from enrolling him in classes. Hackers worked their way into the new system and registered George for every single class offered at the college that semester—over 3,000 credit hours.

Word of the gag spread far and wide, and fast. And people just wouldn’t let him die. During WWII, the military listed him as a crew member on one of their B-17 bombers. He flew twelve missions over Europe as part of the 8th Air Force in England. In 1958, his engagement to another fictitious student, Ramona Cartwright from Agnes Scott College, was announced in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 2000, he was declared the alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention from Georgia. He’s been credited as a musician on a number of albums, and a good number of checks from Kraft Foods are signed by him.

In 2001, he was actually set to win the online poll for Time magazine’s Person of the Year, holding at least 57% of the votes, before they pulled him from the running.

This kind of makes my elevator-rewiring stunt look pretty, well, pathetic. I’m going to have to take it up a few notches. Any ideas?