Another blogger has posted an essay that was published last year by Eerdman’s and Real Live Preacher. Very beautiful, poignant and moving. You can find it here.

Steve

David Wayne over at the Jolly Blogger is selling “I think therefore I blog” tee shirts to subsidize his blogging habit. David is a voice of reason and balance in the reformed Christian blogosphere. So buy a tee shirt. It’s for a good cause! And all your friends and family will think you are cool!

Tucker Carlson debated the attorney that represented New London in the Kelo case here. I appreciate any exposure the media offers to this issue which will very soon be off the MSM, and most peoples, radar. It wasn’t much of a debate really. For Mr. Carlson, it just descended into an “ain’t it awful for those poor folks” and let ‘em know you feel their pain addressed towards the attorney. No real attempt to distinguish between the use of eminent domain for true public use and its use for private development. Really lame.

Steve

Warren Myers of the Coyote Blog has posted an egregious example of a government taking following the Kelo decision. We will see more shamelessly emboldened municipal governments seizing private property and handing it over to developers following this disastrous decision. We need to support the Institute for Justice as they seek to oppose these takings in the courts.

Steve

In an astonishing ruling that has the blogosphere all abuzz, the Supreme Court has ruled that government can use eminent domain to compel small business and home owners to sell their properties at “market value” and then turn those properties to over to private developers. This is an outrageous and appalling decision. Here is a round-up of some of the better posts on the topic starting off with:

Here is Stephen Greydanus, of Decent Films, review of Batman Begins. As usual, Greydanus does an excellent job of deconstructing the mythos that is the inspiration for this comic hero perona. Roger Ebert gives it 4 out of 4 stars in this review I intend to see it tomorrow.

Steve

Woot! is a website that sells one retail item a day at a deeply discounted price. The item goes on sale at midnight Monday through Friday until the item sells out or until the end of the day, whichever comes first. I just discovered this site today so I have no idea what type of stuff they sell or how big the discount is. Really interesting concept though. And for a Woot! hoot, read the FAQ. It’s a gas.

Steve

This essay on the career of Brad Pitt is terribly amusing. And I think hits the mark pretty well. In particular, I like his insights about Pitt in the movieTroy which I thought missed the whole point of its mythology. Of course, its point was to de-mythologize so there you have it.

Steve

Meg informed me today that she is a dessertivore (a category originally discovered by her brother David). Emily, of the chips and pretzel set, is a carbivore.

As the husband of a stay-at-home mom, in fact of a homeschooling stay-at-home, and an avocational student of economics I have understood that the the opportunity cost of the decision to stay at home is high. This article about a study done by Salary.com helps quantify that cost. Based on this study the lifetime gross opportunity cost of being a stay at home mom from birth to graduation from high school for a single child would be approximately $2,300,000! Of course, women do not make the decision to stay at home because of the economics but because of the intrinsic value found in motherhood and a commitment to producing a top-notch product in the form of happy, productive and well-adjusted kids. And of course, many stay-at-home moms choose that role only during the childs early formative years. I doubt the validity of some of the assumptions of this study, particularly as it pertains to equating the roles of motherhood to jobs in the marketplace. It also does not take into account the costs of working outside the home. But at least I have a ready answer the next time my kids start whining for something with the cry, “You never do anything for us”. I can ask them to cough up the $2.3 M!

Steve

I discovered Lauren Winner after she wrote the lead article in Christianity Today a month or so ago. The article was on Christian sexuality and I was impressed by the quality of the writing and the lucidity of its arguments. So I looked her up on the web, discovered her blog and added her to the FT Blogroll. I loved the poem that she included in this post. Beautiful.

Steve

I have thought recently about how so many of the important milestones of my life revolve around software. I have a career today because 15 years ago I took the time to learn DOS. And then Windows 3.0. And then I began to gain a mastery of Microsoft Access that has spawned my current career and self-employment. (To see the company web site go to www.AccessWizards.com. Please keep in mind that it is an old and poorly done website and we are currently considering a re-write.)

Which leads me to the present day and why I so often am frustrated because of the MASSIVE amounts of information in my brain related to my job, my career, my aspirations, my church life etc. Honestly, I have so many thoughts in my head that I find myself often paralyzed and ineffectual because I simply DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO NEXT. (For more insight into how my brain works - I could REALLY relate to this post and this post at JollyBlogger.)

Enter stage left - Microsoft OneNote. Almost on a whim I installed Microsoft OneNote last week and this week I really dove into learning the program and (to my amazement) organizing my brain using this powerful and wonderful tool. At the end of the day (literally) I felt liberated. Like I finally had a handle on what’s in my brain. Like I walked into that cluttered room of my brain and began to put things in their place and organize and arrange and discard and VOILA. Clean brain.

I won’t really attempt to describe the program or how it works. Just suffice it to say that Microsoft OneNote is like a giant tabbed notepad (that gives me a place to put my thoughts) only a LOT better organized.

I won’t EVEN go over the cool feature set it has. I will tell you only about one that I thought was SO COOL (and could really help me solve some business problems). Using Microsoft OneNote, you can conduct audio interviews. As you conduct the interviews you jot down little notes into OneNote that annotate your place in the interview. Like (meeting begin, business problem, current solution, current inadequacies, etc). And then you conclude the audio meeting. And then (and this is the cool part) you can INSTANTLY go back to certain points in the audio interviews by clicking on the little notes you made. This has enormous potential uses. For more information about this feature read this blog by Chris Pratley who is one of the tools designers. In fact, to get a really good bead on the feature set and really cool features read all of the blogs. There are only 1 or two a month.

Now for my disclaimer. This blog post is a setup for my next one which will be called “Why I don’t Use A Mac?” I simply MUST join into the fray. But for now I will give you the nickel version of what I am going to say. If you will think hard about it maybe you can ignore my next one. Here it is in a nutshell: The reason we use computers is because of the applications they run. In this regard the PC platform gives me a LOT more choices. Microsoft OneNote is not available for the Mac.

Seth