Back of the Envelope

I've been thinking about the first seven chapters of Eyes in the Shadow, with its dangerous encounters and narrow escapes. And more dangerous encounters with narrow escapes. And another... Well, you get the picture. I think things are getting dangerously close to becoming repetitive. It's time for a change. Now, I have an idea as to what that change will be, but I'm not entirely certain how to pull it off. It may be that I won't have it done in time for the next Storyblogging Carnival. If that's the case, I'll come up with something else as a substitute.

The blog Pseudo-Polymath paid me a visit the other day, so I've returned the favor. Mark Olson is a programmer and a Christian, and a member of the Church Directory. He's also a serious cyclist and a really cool blogger. He issued a challenge to non-believers, asking them to read N.T. Wright's The Challenge of Jesus, while he reads books of their choosing, and each of them writes an essay about the book. Here is the Mark's first essay. He also considers biological ethics on a much grander scale than most people have, arguing that we need to "consider as possible everything we can imagine, then what from that larger list of possibilities do we consider ethical. After one comes up with a consistent theory in that 'larger' space of what might be done, then when new technology appears, we have some context in which to frame our arguments." These days, this is something only Science Fiction writers do. Finally, he's considering the question of charity, whether done by individuals, the Church, organizations, or the State, and forming a framework to consider this topic.

All in all, it's a fascinating blog, and there's a good chance I'll be adding it to the main blogroll soon.

Evangelical Underground is accepting nominations for the first annual Evanglical Blogging Awards. Go ahead and nominate your favorites. Unfortunately, there aren't any categories where I'd be competitive. If only there were a category for best Quantum Computation blogging!

The latest Christian Carnival is up at Digitus, Finger, and Inc. Surprisingly enough, I remembered to post about it even when I'm not in it.

I was going to revise and post the next chapter of Eyes in the Shadow, but I got distracted. Maybe I'll talk about why I was distracted later.

Anyway, due to my easy distraction, there won't be a lot of blogging today. (This is due to the fact that I can't blog at work, so I write my posts at home and schedule them for posting during the day.) But I promise, I'll get the next chapter done by tomorrow--I have to if I want to get it in in time for the next Storyblogging Carnival--and there are a couple of things I very much intend to blog about. Maybe one or two will go up tonight.

Doc managed to get himself quoted on Instapundit. What, you don't see him? That's because he used on of his aliases. Having done a full investigation of this Doc character, consisting mostly of reading his bio on his webpage, I happen to know he uses the alias Dave Gudeman from time to time. It puzzled me that he got a mention without getting a link, though, thereby receiving an Instalanche and incidentally giving me a few spillover hits, so I checked with my sources (I e-mailed Doc). It turns out that his Instalanche-less e-mail was all part of a clever plot to *bzzt* to ooto toto

...

Ugh! I forgot about the implant! It's Doc's idea of a Non-disclosure Agreement and it *bzzzzt* ittididit

No, can't talk about that either. I better end this post before *bzzzzzzzzt*

You'll notice a new blogroll in the side bar. It's something Joe Carter came up with. He's calling it the Church Directory, but I'll admit I'm not a huge fan of the name. It's a collection of evangelical blogs, so I'm just calling it Evangelical Blogs. There are a lot of blogs on it, including quite a few I'd never heard of before. For example, check out Blogcorner Preacher. He is much more focused than my own blog on Christianity and Biblical teaching, and he's not always gentle about it. It's worth checking out. I'll highlight more blogs on this new blogroll as I have a chance to check them out.

I'm going to have to update some sections of this website now that I've moved, especially the About Me page and the autobiography. I've gotten started on it, but I don't know how long it will be before I finish. I'll let you know.

Cool, Lileks is doing some storyblogging. I wonder if I can convince him to participate in the Carnival.

I'm not planning to do much blogging today, but I am planning on doing a couple of other things. First, I need to do some more unpacking and setting up of furniture. That's what I've been doing for most of the day today, and I still haven't gotten much done. Moving takes forever! If I could only figure out where the screwdriver was packed, I could start putting together the rest of the furniture. Second, I want to work some more on the next chapter of Ryan's and Emily's story, so I have it ready for the next storyblogging carnival. I also need to jog. (Thank God for treadmills, as it's kind of snowing outside.) Then, I'm planning on doing some blogging, but I think the decent sized tech posts I intend to write won't be going up until next week. I've even been pondering doing a quantum computation post on Shor's algorithm, but I think I need to do a few posts on quantum algorithms in general first, and I'm not really sure where to begin. Also, I think I need to explain RSA encryption before I tell you how to break it. So I haven't really forgotten the blog, I just have a lot of other stuff to do.

The Christian Carnival is now online at Sidesspot. My post on the Old Testament Law is in there.

I've added a new blog to the blogroll. Faith*in*fiction is a blog by a Christian acquisitions editor at Bethany House Publishers. If you're looking for advice on writing, or looking for someone interested in buying fiction with Christian themes, this is where you should look.

The Evangelical Outpost has chosen the winners for its blog symposium on Americanism and Puritanism. I didn't win, but then my entry was just a quick personal note, so I'm not surprised I wasn't in the running. I did notice that some of my blogging friends, including Imago Dei and Letters from Babylon, got honorable mentions, though. Check out all the entries.

I was going to put up a post saying that blogging will be light today, but as none of the posts I scheduled for yesterday went up, if I can reschedule them for today, there should be plenty of posts--although nothing important, I'll admit. If it doesn't work, then you won't see this post anyway.

Anyway, the reason blogging was going to be light is because I went to the RMV right after work yesterday to convert my New York license to a Massachusetts one. Surprisingly, this only took 45 minutes (30 of which were waiting). Since I was out anyway, I ate at Friendly's, a place better known for its ice cream than its meals. It was good, but this means I didn't get home until 8 pm, and I've been trying to get to sleep by 10 pm so I can get into work at 8 am (while having enough time beforehand to do some blogging and webcomic reading). Even so, I usually haven't gotten to bed before 11 pm nor gotten to work before 8:30 am (it's okay, my hours are flexible enough that as long as my hours include 9 am - 4 pm, I'm good). Anyway, if I start by 7 I can do a bit of blogging before bed, but by starting at 8, or really, 8:30 by the time I get settled, there's just not that much time to blog. Besides, I was inspired to do some writing yesterday. I mean, really inspired, using spare pieces of paper while waiting at the RMV or for my meal to write out more of the next chapter of Eyes in the Shadow. Once I got home, I had to transcribe that to the computer, and hence didn't have much time to blog. So that's why there wasn't going to be much blogging today. Although, if the posts I scheduled for yesterday and rescheduled for today actually go up, there will be plenty of posts.

This is a test.

Update: The fact that this post went up means the post-scheduler is working again, so I think I'll just leave it up rather than write a new post informing you of that fact.

I've had a lot of traffic the last couple of days, over 200 yesterday. Sure, that's not much for the big-time bloggers, but I don't think I've ever had this much traffic in a single day except for my three -lanches (from the Corner, Instapundit, and Best of the Web). Some of that is due to the Storyblogging Carnival, but not all. In fact, the majority of it is due to people doing Internet seaches. One of the searches where I come up high in Google is "Ars Gratia Artis" (I'm #2 for the full phrase, and #1 for the abbreviated "Gratia Artis"). This is a Latin phrase meaning "Art for the Sake of Art," and also the motto of MGM Studios. I turn up because of this little writing experiment, so I felt compelled to add a tidbit at the beginning explaining what the phrase means. It makes me wish I had a better sample of my writing on that page.

The other search result that's bringing a lot of traffic is this post on the murder of a Coptic family in New Jersey. I'm surprised I'm so high on the web searches, but I seem to be turning up in a lot of them (by some curious coincidence involving my Storyblogging Carnival post I'm number one for the Google search of "Armanious tragedy"). I've added an update to the post in question with some more current news, since it's getting a lot of attention. And because I believe that this incident needs more attention.

For some reason, none of the posts I scheduled to go up today have appeared. I don't know why. Yes, some people may call this cheating, but I've been pretty open that I use post scheduling, and since I can't blog at work, it's the only way I can get some posts up during the day.

I'll try scheduling another post for tonight and seeing if it goes up. If not, then I'll at least know the problem is consistent. Sorry about that--usually the post scheduling works fine.

Update: Okay, it's definitely not working. For the record, I didn't lose any data: the posts were still there, they just hadn't gone up as scheduled. I e-mailed Chris at Powerblogs and he got back to me right away (within 15 minutes), and he's trying to fix it right now. Wow, that was quick! Thanks, Chris! And you bloggers out there, I'm serious, if you're looking for a new host, check out Powerblogs. It may seem an odd recommendation in a post complaining about a bug, but occasional quirk or no, you can't beat the customer service.

...and the blogroll. My good friend, Cynthia Lo, has finally started a blog. Read it and enjoy it. She thought I wouldn't want to link to it since it's not political. I guess she didn't notice that I've had way more posts about personal stuff than politics since the election.

I am kind of disappointed she didn't take my advice and call it Crouching Cook, Hidden Chemist, though.

I haven't had as much time for blogging as I had hoped. I neither blog nor read blogs at work--all the posts that go up during work hours were written the night before and scheduled for posting. So all the blogging I do is done the night before, and if I have something else scheduled for that night, not a whole lot of blogging gets done. Still, with a fast connection, even a couple of hours blogging gets more accomplished than I was doing with dial-up.