Recently the Presbyterian church of New Zealand had their biannual general assembly. Their keynote speaker was a Rev Randall Prior. He spoke on "Reformed and Reforming" http://www.presbyterian.org.nz/4955.0.html. The MP3's of his presentations are available for download. We have recently had a couple of sermons on the topic "Is the Church Dieing?". The consensus was that no the church is not dieing, but the form of church is. Era's: * Apostolic period: <4th Century "Go into the world, baptise all nations" * Christendom period: started with the conversion of Constantine.

NZUSA and some of the guys at MUSA made these fantastic videos about student debt.

Memories of my days at the Massey University Students Association & New Zealand Students Association.

This is the next installment of things I've learned while doing the Theology Program.

Categories of Theology:

There a a number of cateogries of theology. Each category has its strengths, and it own way at looking at theology. Its helpful to come at a theological question through the lenses of severale categories. Each way of looking at things sheds a different light on the question.
Here are the categories:

1. Systematic

2. Biblical

3. Historical

4. Philosophical

One of the hallmarks of a Lovemark is Mystery. Chapter 8 deal with this.

"Most businesses are obsessed with downplaying mystery. They are determined to frame the world so it fits their own system and processes." No wonder they find it hard to communicate! Where is the mystery, the interest, in diagrams and specifications? "As long as people have aspirations and goals and dreams, they will always crave Mystery. Who heard of anyone craving... Statistics?". The great thing about Mystery is that it is beyond rationality, beyond calculation.

Mystery high five:

I've recently had the challange of installing Ubuntu on my Laptop.  The main issue was that the kernal on the install CD does not recognise the ethernet adapter, and subsequently dies on running modprobe.

 

After googleing around, I eventually found the solution on a Russian web page (http://planeta.rambler.ru/users/crowfish/45208465.html).

 

Here are the instructions in English:

1. Boot up Ubuntu off the install disk

Recently someone mentioned to me that you can run PHP on Java using a package called Quarcus. Its supposed to help performance. There are specific examples of this making a huge difference to Drupal.

I installed Resin and followed the instructions to get Drupal running. Painless.
http://wiki.caucho.com/Quercus:_Drupal
https://wiki.terracotta.org/confluence/display/wiki/Drupal

Now to play with it...

I've had a go at getting ahah forms working with my fusioncharts module this weekend. I've found that its easy enough to define the ahah form, but the callback... thats another story!

Heres a post I came across today that helps lots. I think this should be in core!
http://www.nicklewis.org/node/967

Chapter 5 is about respect. One of the main quotes is that "Respect is love in plain clothes". The chapter goes on to name 15 respect criteria then states: "Don't even think about Lovemark status unless you can tick off each and every item on this list."
The following chapter is an introduction to where the lovemark concept came from. Here's a summary of the differences between brands and Lovemarks:

Brand --> Lovemark
Information --> Relationship
Recognised by consumers --> Loved by people
Generic --> Personal
Presents a narrative --> Creates a love story