It’s 6:00 AM, and I
probably have to be up for D&D around 9:30.
I can’t sleep.

Noel floods in the past, while the present seems especially poignant. A reliable source tells me that in England,
they hate him more then Satan.

For those who do not see me every day, or who I do not discuss my
digital bias with, I have forsaken Microsoft for greener pastures. That
is right, I am now a Linux user, and decided advocate of the Open
Source movement.

My dislike for Bill and his software came and
grew with my knowledge of computers. As I delved into Web Development,
and learned about Web Standards, I
soon realised that Microsoft's merciless pursuit of market monopoly was
by far the largest stumbling block not only to Joe Developer making
clean code, but also to the general progress of the Internet in
general, and the smooth running of the various protocols located within
it.

Allow me to explain. I'm sure not many of you know this,
but there is a single Internet standards committee in existence, who
dictates all the standards for Internet protocol and programming. They
are known as the World Wide Web Consortium.
Their existence is completely necessary for the existence of the
Internet, because of how the Internet works. There are millions of
people out there, who simply allow you to access the files on their
computers: this is the Internet. Everything from how you get data from
these various sources, to the concept of Web Browsing itself, is
reliant on the standards this group of people sets up. If we didn't
agree on the standards, it would be chaos.

  As I'm sure
you are all aware, 95% of all Internet users view the Internet through
the lens of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Microsoft designed this
browser so that it was almost
compliant with the W3C. The idea is that if there are a few critical
problems in the way IE understands code, ones that are easily solved by
designing your code with IE in mind, most people will in fact design
with IE in mind. The trick worked, of course, because everyone with a
Windows OS has IE as their default browser, and most don't bother to
get anything else.

The problem with this, and the aim of
Microsoft's design, is that in browsers other then IE, browsers that
follow the W3C, pages will look funny. This is to make people want to
use IE over all other browsers. Of course, developers caught on to
this, and have gone to great lengths to put hacks
in their code in order to make it work cross-browser. This,
unfortunately, makes for less efficient code and much more haste. As
well as forcing some things into the range in infeasibility.

Allow me for a moment to plug Firefox.
This browser is completely W3C compliant, offers more stability then
Internet Explorer (read: will not crash as much), and maintains a
similar feel and user friendly nature. It also boasts the ability to
use Themes, as well as Tabed Browsing, and a myriad of other plug-ins
for everything from checking your Gmail, to searching for for file
downloads. These are plug-ins, not independent programs which
infiltrate your browser and provide you with continuous access to
pop-up adds. This is the browser of choice for the future of the
Internet.

Of course, this is not the only area Microsoft
manipulates. Basically every time a new language begins to show that it
can be easily implemented on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux without much
changes (such as Java) Microsoft introduces Parsing errors that must be
worked around by developers, though many times the programmes will just
come out on Windows, because it's too hard and costly to make them
cross-platform.

It is true that Microsoft Windows is the most
complete and user-friendly OS on the market right now, suited to do
anything you would like a computer to do with the most ease, and
supported by almost every developer. However, it is all ill-gotten.

http://bs.brokensaints.com/

Watch this, it is excellent.

In an effort to keep my friends from thinking I've fallen off the face fo the planet... I'm headding home for the night...

Changed the skin a little if you're interested in checking it out.

I other day I was leaving Coker’s house, and I decided I wanted to
write on the way home. Unfortunately, as he didn’t really have any
paper, I had to use a scrap, torn out of someone’s notebook to write
down a phone number in a hurry.

So I sat on the bus, and began scribbling my latest philosophical
ponderings - and it was scribbling, as I didn’t have anything to write
on but my knee. I can only imagine how I looked, warring my jacket,
with the beard, and my hair shoddily hidden under my hat.

Just then a girl (quite attractive) sat down beside me, and pulled out
her bible for some bus-ride reading. I couldn’t help but think of the
comparison: this girl, trendy and attractive, reading her bible,
sitting beside me, dressed like a communist skateboarder who is to old
to skateboard, writing madly about God and time.

The dichotomy made me think. We were both Christian, and this meant we
were connected. All of the apparent differences were not really all
that much compared to this. I hadn’t felt this way on a long time. It
was nice.

The idea's in this post were first brought to my attention by Tim, but
I didn't like them at that point, it somehow seemed incongruous. Left
one to many of those things that, though they aren't contradictions,
they don't seem to fit the puzzle.

It was Coker (to give credit where credit is due) who solved it. He had
no idea about my previous discussion with Tim, and yet presented the
solution to me.

Time is nothing but the measure of change. It is the future becoming
the past. When nothing changes, you are in infinity, and there is no
longer time. One may propose (and believe me, I did): 'There must still
be a duration passing while nothing changes.' However this isn't so.
Take the current as an example. Think, for a moment, how long the
current instant is, and every time you get close, divide it by two. It
regresses into infinity. The current then, is nothing. No change, no
duration. We could try to say that perhaps there is a duration, that we
simply cannot perceive because there is no change, but this would not
work either. As soon as the duration of an event gets longer, there is
a change, one moment to the next. It is still change, even though it is
very little change.

I guess the next question is: 'how does God work into this?' because
one cannot talk about time without explaining God, the one who is
unaffected by time.
*As an aside, some say God is within time (like Open Theists). However
this would mean that God began existing when time began existing, and
thus he was not around to create it; begging the question: how did time
come into being? This would only be answerable by something else
creating it, but then we have another God on our hands, and must
discuss how this one could be outside of time.*
Back to the issue at hand. This is where we start getting sketchy, but
bear with me. Time, as the measure of change, is relative. If it was
possible for a change to happen that does not effect me, then it would
make time pass for it's effective range, and not for me. In this way
time (conceivably) could pass differently for different places (not
just seem to pass differently, but actually pass differently).

God then, is like this: all-knowing, all-powerful, and unchanging. If
the power and knowledge of God make it so that his effect on the world
does not take any change on his part, then time could be infinite for
God. No future, no past. Nothing changes, and so no time passes. His
whole existence is in one infinite moment, and his effect works from
there.

This can go many places, but I will leave it there. Any counter-examples are welcome.

I think it's time for me to learn another programming language. My question is, which one? I want something practical, usable professionally. VB is all I know in the software world, so maybe I will go stay away from internet based languages for now. I think I want something that isn't based on a specific visual interface like that though; something I can code with notepad.

What do you think?