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January 22, 2005

Boston Blizzard Watch

[update 1/23/05 10:00pm PST] Apparently the extreme Boston weather has left me with quite a cold.. that or catching some air-borne virus in those sardine-can seats they call "coach." Either way, glad I'm home.

[update 8:00pm CST]
My flight to DFW was delayed by 45minutes. My connecting flight was going to leave in 15 minutes and I was still in my seat waiting for our terminal to be freed in order for us to deplane. The American Airlines flight attendants were kind enough to let all who had immediate connecting flights leave first. As soon as the plane came to a full-stop, all of us bolted to the door. I rushed to a terminal screen to find my connecting gate, “San Angelo, San Antonio, San Francisco,… San Jose, California DELAYED!”

[update: 2:45pm EST] At the airport at last. According to their terminals my flight, 1581 that departs at 3:45 is still on time. The snow is expected to come down between 3 and 4pm. Oddly enough, I would not mind at all if my flight got cancelled and had to stay until Monday. Boston, despite its current climate is a very interesting city. The people all seem real friendly and very helpful. Getting around the city is becoming easier. Hold your horses. Looking out the window and it seems that the snow is falling at 2:45pm EST. Not sure if it is enough to delay or cancel my flight, but some of the locals are starting to smile at all the worried passengers as if to say, “would you like to stay for dinner?”
[update: 12:30pm] just got back from driving around downtown Boston, walking across some ice, and enjoying the crisp morning -- regretting not bringing my camera!! The downtown area along commonwealth drive near Boston Commons is beautiful. I must say it felt great out there at 12 degrees. My face was not nearly as numb as last night when we went out to walk along the Freedom trail and up to Harvard Square.

Its 9:40am in my cozy hotel room in Woburn, MA compared to the "bone chilling" temperatures outside . My flight out of Boston leaves at 3:45pm hopefully before the Northeasterner Blizzard.

Currently its 1 degree outside, earlier this morning it was in the -2 degree temp without the windchill. According to the local news today's temp is 1 degree below the record of -3 for January. (Its reported that today has been the coldest day of the year for Boston). According to the Boston local weather:


Blizzard warning in effect from 5 PM EST this afternoon to 6 PM

EST Sunday,

Coastal flood warning in effect from 7 AM EST to 2 PM EST

Sunday,

Today: Mostly clear early, then becoming mostly cloudy. A chance of snow showers early this afternoon. Snow likely late. Highs around 17. north Winds around 10 mph, becoming northeast this afternoon. Chance of snow 70 percent.

Tonight: Snow, heavy at times. Blowing and drifting snow causing whiteout conditions at times. Strong winds. Lows around 14. Northeast winds 20 to 30 mph with gusts up to 40 mph, increasing to 40 to 50 mph with gusts up to 60 mph after midnight.

Sunday: Snow, mainly in the morning. Total snow accumulation of 20 to 30 inches. Strong winds with highs around 20. north Winds 40 to 50 mph, decreasing to 30 to 40 mph in the afternoon.

Sunday Night: Mostly cloudy with a chance of snow showers in the evening, then partly cloudy after midnight. Very windy with lows around 10 above. Northwest winds 25 to 35 mph. Chance of snow 50 percent.

Monday: Partly cloudy. Highs in the mid 20s. west Winds 15 to 20 mph.

Monday Night: Mostly cloudy. Not as cold with lows around 20.

Tuesday And Tuesday night: Partly cloudy. Highs around 30. Lows around 20.

Wednesday: Partly cloudy in the morning, then mostly cloudy with a chance of snow in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 30s. Chance of snow 40 percent.

Wednesday Night: Cloudy with a 40 percent chance of snow. Lows around 30.

Thursday: Mostly cloudy with a 40 percent chance of snow. Highs in the mid 30s.

Thursday Night: Partly cloudy with a 30 percent chance of snow. Brisk with lows in the lower 20s.

Friday: Mostly sunny. A chance of snow in the morning. Brisk with highs in the lower 30s. Chance of snow 30 percent.

They're expecting up to 20 to 30 inches of snow by tonight. They're expecting 3 inches per hour of snowfall.
Currently here's a picture of what it looks like outside:

I was planning on doing some gift shopping this morning, but may stay inside my hotel.

Factoid: What makes a Blizzard?


A blizzard is a severe weather condition characterized by low temperatures and strong winds (greater than 35 mph) bearing a great amount of snow, either falling or blowing.

In order to be classified as a blizzard, as opposed to merely a winter storm, the weather must meet several conditions. The storm must decrease visibility to 1/4th of a mile for 3 consecutive hours, include snow or ice as precipitation, as well have wind speeds of at least 32mph (7 or more on the Beaufort Wind Scale).

According to Environment Canada a blizzard must have winds of 40 km/h or more, have snow or blowing snow, visibility less than 1 km and a windchill of less than -25 degrees celsius. All of these conditions must last for 4 hours or more

When these conditions persist after snow has stopped falling, it is called a ground blizzard.


I can't wait to get back to balmy 60 degree Bay Area temparatures.

Posted by patrick at 06:39 AM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2005

Spam conference update

From developers, to government officials from France, to Internet Lawyers -- this spam conference is definitely one of the more interesting conferences I've attended. As an example, the last presentation given by John Praed, entitled "You've got Jail," walked us through the investigation and prosecution of Jeremy Jaynes. Jeremy Jaynes was prosecuted as a spammer and given the maximum sentence found in Virginia Law - 9 years in prison, 3 years for each count and a fine of $2100. The technology and sophistication of spammers are amazing as they try to falsify and acquire email addresses from spam harvesting bots. Mr. Jaynes had 21 locations across the US and Europe with each spam harvester moving from one IP address to another inbetween continents.

Another interesting presentation was given by an Attorney Matthew Prince who introduce Project Honeypot. This is an interesting project that attempts at "stopping the cycle" of spammers. According to the FAQ on their site:


Project Honey Pot is a distributed system of decoy email addresses website administrators can include on their sites in order to gather information about the robots and spiders spammers use. We collate data on how addresses are harvested, distributed, and eventually spammed in order to understand the entire spam cycle.

More later...

Posted by patrick at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2005

God in the speeches

With the presidential inauguration hours away, analysts are wondering what tone will President Bush's speech contain. Particularly, how much God talk will be involved in his speech. According to one Seattle-PI OpEd, they predict the president may tone down his God talk in order to unify our nation. As an interesting excercise, the article goes through past presidents and lists the frequency of God talk in presidential speeches:


* Lyndon Johnson at 1.50 references per Inaugurals and State of the Unions.
* Franklin D. Roosevelt at 1.69 per Inaugural
* Jimmy Carter, considered as pious as they come among U.S. presidents, had only two mentions of God in four addresses
* Ronald Reagan, who averaged 4.75 in his comparable speeches
* President George W Bush 10 times in his first Inaugural, 14 times in his three state of the union addresses.


The article continues to state that the way our current president's reference to God is very different than past presidents. It seems that past presidents have been more humble in their request for divine guidance, whereas our current president has "declared divine wishes."



Contrast these statements, in which presidents spoke as petitioners humbly asking for divine guidance, with Bush's claim in 2003 that "Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity." This is not a request for divine favor; it is a declaration of divine wishes.


Declaration of divine wishes?? I don't agree that when Bush made that statement he was making a divine wish, rather what he was saying was a statement of fact. Critical articles like these reveal society's postmodern thinking. Our society would like to embrace God as an ongoing mysterious spirit, that cannot be known, so we must humbly make our requests lest we be too boastful for claiming to know God. For one to say that they know God well enough to declare truths of His goodness, realities of His grace, accuracies of His judgements -- is to be arrogant, unloving, and boastful. If we are to be accepted and liked, we should speak of God mysteriously, generically, and as ambiguously as possible so as to keep God like a wax deity easily shaped and accepted by our listening audience.

I understand humility is required of people in high offices, but when it comes to a person's claim of their God, the bible speaks clearly of how one is to speak on His behalf:


Thus says the LORD, "Let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, and let not the mighty man boast of his might, let not a rich man boast of his riches; but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the LORD who exercises lovingkindness, justice and righteousness on earth; for I delight in these things," declares the LORD. (Jer 9:23-24)

God wants to be clearly proclaimed not mysteriously whispered.

Posted by patrick at 12:43 AM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2005

Spam Conference

My work is sending me off to a SPAM Conference this Thur/Friday/Sat in Cambridge, MA. I'm actually excited to visit the Boston area.. one of the cities I've always wanted to visit.

I'll try to post as much as I can about the conference here... it should be a good break from all the Tsunami coverage.

Posted by patrick at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)

World Vision Update

World Vision recently sent me some videos of how they are helping the Tsunami relief effort.


World Vision is currently committed in helping the Asian countries get back on their feet over the course of 3 years. Here's an excerpt from their latest email of where donations are being spent:

* Provided nearly 400,000 people with life-saving aid such as Family Survival Kits, which include things like food, water, medicine, sleeping mats, and clothing.
* Established children's centers to care for and protect children who are orphaned, homeless, or traumatized in Indonesia.
* Provided food and other emergency aid to tens of thousands of families in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Indonesia.
* Begun building schools, shelters, water tanks, and latrines in Thailand.
* And much more!

Our staff have been working around the clock to save lives during these first few weeks following the disaster. But our work is far from finished. A tragedy of this magnitude requires years of rebuilding and restoration.

That's why World Vision has made a three-year commitment that includes rebuilding homes, schools, and clinics, protecting children, providing small business loans, and much more.

Posted by patrick at 08:58 AM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2005

More Tsunami Pictures

Sent in from my good friend Jason on the latest Tsunami pictures..









World Vision Relief Fund

Red Cross via Amazon Donation system

Posted by patrick at 10:50 AM | Comments (2)

January 13, 2005

Retreat Messages

As I type this, I'm listening to SCC's The Mountain... not surprisingly that's how I feel after such a refreshing retreat in Lucerne. A part of me does want to stay up there and just enjoy the fellowship with fellow believers, but as SCC said,


I used to think that the "mountain-high" or "retreat-high" should be supressed as something that is bad or some side-effect.. well through the years I've come to see it really as an act of God's grace. Why? Personally for me it is such a reminder of how I ought to feel about God. Emotions were created by God and shouldn't be something we as Christians should fear as having.. yes we should be concerned about using it as a gauge for our walk with God, but to have them is not intrinsically bad. Emotions you feel from retreats, I think are a good thing, they remind you of how your pleasures ought to rest on God and on His goodness. Emotions that come from retreats are an amazing reminder of how we should feel towards people and towards God.

For the hungry, here's the messages I recorded from this past retreat at Lucerne. The speaker is Doug Thompson from Middletown Bible Church. God used this servant this past weekend mightily.

Question and Answer
Seek to see yourself a Sinner
The biblical strategy for sanctification
The deady delusion of legalism
The "exposive" power of affections

Posted by patrick at 07:37 AM | Comments (0)

January 07, 2005

2005 - start a new way to get the news

Still reading newspapers and watching the alphabet channels? Ever talk to people that seem to know what's going on in the world even before your local paper and station? Chances are they are getting their news from the Internet.

Today the Net offers a plethora of news sites and blogs that offer instant news updates to all that is going on. The problem however with all this information is, how can one view all these news reports without becoming overwhelmed? RSS and RSS news agregation offers a simple solution to that problem.

What is RSS you may ask. It stands for Rich Site Syndication or Really Simple Syndication, depends on who you talk to. RSS will provide a "snapshot" of the site's contents in the form of headlines, allowing you to get a glimpse of all the news provided by the site for the past week, month, etc..

Why would you want this feature? If you're like most you get your news from a variety of sources, news.yahoo.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, bbc, cnn, etc.. If your news site provides RSS feeds, than you can use what's called an RSS aggregator to give you a snapshot view of your site's headlines. If you're a yahoo user, you may already be using RSS without even knowing it! For example, in the http://my.yahoo.com (assuming you have an yahoo account), you'll see all your preferred news sites given to you all at once. What yahoo is doing is aggregating all the various news sites into one location, giving you the reader the headline reports from each RSS-enabled site.

There are many RSS aggregators available out there, but one that I find very helpful is Sage. It's an RSS aggregator that fits as a nice plugin extension for your Firefox browser. Here's a quick description per the sage.mozdev.org website:

Mozilla Firefox has the native ability to detect which sites provide RSS feeds by giving you a little speaker icon on the bottom right-hand corner of your browser. By clicking on that icon, you'll automatically bookmark that RSS feed into your bookmarks folder. But, how can you view all those bookmarked feeds in a nice formatted page?

This is where Sage really shines. After installing the Sage extension for Firefox, you can hit Alt-S on your firefox browser and see all your bookmarked RSS feeds in the default "Sage Feeds" folder. Keep that left pane open and and everytime you visit a site look for the XML/RSS/Atom links and drag those links on the left pane. Sage will automatically subscribe you to that RSS feed. Now every time you click on those Sage bookmakrs, you'll be presented with all the headlines of a given site you've subscribed to.

Note: Subscription is a pull-subscription, meaning you control when you get your news. Nothing is sent to you like an email subscription - no spam to worry about!

As the Internet grows, RSS aggregation becomes all the more required in sifting through all the news sites you encounter. So in '05, try this new way of getting the news. Get started, download Firefox if you haven't already and install the sage plugin!

Resources:
http://mozilla.org
http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/intro/
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html

Posted by patrick at 09:09 AM | Comments (0)

World Vision -- in it for the long haul

In case you're still wondering of which relief organization to donate, prayerfully consider World Vision. Here's an article that mentions how they've received more donation in one day then they've received all of 2003. They've also set a $50 Million goal for the South Asia disaster. WorldVision International President, Dean R. Hirsch said the following regarding the relief effort:


I commend World Vision's ministry to these people and their commitment to be in it for the long haul.

Posted by patrick at 08:20 AM | Comments (0)

Off to Lucerne

It's that time again! We're off to our annual retreat in Lucerne. I've been pretty busy these past several days with work and just preparation for the retreat that I haven't had much time to blog. We are also on staff break for the college ministry so I've been spending a lot of time just hanging out with Lis. I'll hopefully be able to post more once we get back from the retreat.

Posted by patrick at 07:34 AM | Comments (0)