Listened to this sermon recently, and while like every talk I wouldn’t agree with everything about it, still I thought it was pretty good and made me think.

Things I realiesd, I’m a creatue or habbit to some degree, I like ordering the same food from the places I eat, I normally work out the most efficient root to somewhere and take it most of the time. Still if I go one way, I almost always go back a different way, I always run up stairs, because when I run (up stairs) I feel his pleaseure, and I will go out of my way to step on the crunchy looking leaf. Most of that won’t make sense as to creativity until you listen to the talk.

I also realised I do get a lot of ideas, and I keep lists of them everywhere, because I realised I forget them a lot too (I thought it was early onset of old age before this talk :-P).

To end, I believe that YOU are a creative person.

I randomly came across this blog the other day. Kind of the antithesis of my blog, mine being minimalist (apple inspired) white, compared to the explosion of colour that presents itself at bealivebelievebeyou.com, and if I scanned in my handwritten journal entries for you to read, all that would be on my blog is a big mess. Still I like the style of that blog a lot.

Haha, two ‘work’ posts in a row!

As some of you may know, wordpress 2.6 broke podpress, the great podcasting plugin for wordpress. There were several ‘fixes’ that people found after, but basically all of them involved disabling revisions in the new version of wordpress. I then discovered this forum topic that showed how wordpress called the ’save_post’ hook in the new revisioning system. The solution I came up with allows you to keep the revisioning system turned on, but still allow podpress to work.

Instructions (Podpress 8.8)
1) Download this file.
2) Rename to podpress_admin_class.php and copy it to your /wp-content/plugins/podpress directory, replacing the existing file.
3) Create a post and check it works

Instructions (Other versions)
The above file might work with other versions of podpress, but it might not. It would be better to edit your own podpress_admin_class.php file to ensure things work.
1) Edit /wp-content/plugins/podpress/podpress_admin_class.php
2) Replace the line function post_edit($post_id) with the following:

function post_edit($post_id) {
if(wp_is_post_revision($post_id) || wp_is_post_autosave($post_id)) {
return $post_id;
} else {

3) Scroll down to just above the function edit_category_form($input) {
4) Insert another } above it to close off the condition statement.

Things that should be noted:

I use wordpress 2.6 on all of the blogs I maintain now. I love it, I love the new file uploads that were introduced in 2.5, and the post revisions from 2.6. I use wordpress on some intranet pages along with allow categries and private files to control access to sensitive information. The new revisions work great because in a world of non-techsavy users, if we need to go back and fix something that someone broke we can, or for writing online documentation, it means you get a complete version history.

Ok, if you subscribe to my blog for personal reasons, this isn’t very relevant to you, but for those of you here for the programming, on a recent project I had some problems getting the BIT field in MySQL to be interpreted as a boolean in PHP. There are a couple of discussions on the net about it here and here, but I couldn’t find any simply stated solutions on the net. So here’s what I ended up doing. You can also download the file here, rename the file .php to use it.


function mysql_bit($bit) {
return ord($bit) == 1;
}


When I quit my full time job so that I could do livewire, I wrote a post outlining some goals now that I had more time to do things. As it turns out 2007 was one of the best years of my life, and I learnt far more about life and about myself than I ever would have imagined. I highly recommend a year out for any of you, and that you don’t have to believe the lie that you need a career or conventional job to be happy. Still here’s a quick review of last years goals:

I’m still wondering where my life is heading, and it looks like for at least another year I’ll be limited to doing one thing full time. While I don’t want a repeat of the last 6 months of trying to do EVERYTHING I possibly can, and feeling very exhausted and under appreciated in the process, there are a few things I want to make sure I do do:

I know I’m obsessed with Apple products but the iPhone is seriously cool. So far I’m loving having email where ever I am and the facebook app is cool too.

I’ve just installed the new wordpress app, and I’m blogging to you from my iPhone. The picture is taken with it as well. It’s us gate crashing a dance reversal at Sha Tin town hall. Very random!

I’ve also started to use twitterific to update my facebook and adium status using http://apps.facebook.com/twitter and http://adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=3484

Gave a talk at SR about Love, how it should be with no preconditions or agendas, partly inspired by Donald Miller BLJ and this interview from Anberlin’s Steven Christian. I’m not like this, but we all should be.

I’ve realised I need to finally make a stand on this: No I will not fix your computer. I especially won’t fix it over the phone. This to me is the most frustrating thing in the universe, and it is not good for me, or good for our friendship. There are worse things I could say, but if you really do want to ask me a question or fix your computer, I will do it for $200 an hour and that’s only if I know you. If you really want a computer that just works get a mac, SERIOUSLY!

I was actually pretty close to burning out this year, and dropping everything and shouting at someone very loud. It was only that I was pretty drastic and was pretty decisive about stopping a lot of the things that were in my weekly schedule in order to spend time with friends and relax that I didn’t. Finally as things got really bad I got back to spending time with God, and taking Fridays off.

The bible says to remember the sabbath and keep it holy, but so many Christians, especially those in ministry rush about making themselves so busy, there excuse being that there is all this good work to do, with maybe even people’s very souls at stake. But this in my opinion is a wrong view of Christian faith. What I see is that we’re supposed to be bringing the gospel, bring rescue to a broken world, and we can’t do that at the expense of causing brokenness in our own lives, or being so busy we don’t spend time time with God, making ourselves poor, sick or exhausted. Yes we should self sacrificial, but maybe dying to ourselves means we say everything doesn’t depend on me.

I also recently watched Rob Bell’s latest Nooma, Shells. In it he talks about how busy we make ourselves, saying yes to everything and everybody. He finally makes the point that we need to learn to say no to things, not because they’re not good things, but because we’ve said yes to the one or few best things that we are meant to do.

Why then does someone paying me make a difference? Its not because I want to get rich, its not because money drives me, it’s that if you do pay me, it means I can really work less at everything else I do just to support myself so I can do the things I feel I’m really supposed to do.

Sorry that was written out of some frustration, but to end on a more light hearted note, I’m glad I don’t work here:

Words that You didn’t say were haunting these pages
Faces You didn’t make were all I was seeing
The way that they painted You wasn’t a picture
of one in control - and I don’t think they know who you are

Mainstay

In a small private press conference in Fo Tan, HK, political heavyweights James Low, Lillian Li and James Lewis added their name to the growing list of Obama endorsements.

There were some fears that such a close political alignment could cause division in the Sunday Lunch Bunch special interest group, but the trio assured the public that there would be no conflict of interest and that Lewis and Low would not be changing their stance on Politico.

And whatever you think of that you have to watch this: