I’ve been reading A.W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. I found this passage to be so relevant to our current economic situation.

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Matt. 5:3

Before the Lord God made man upon the earth He first prepared for him by creating a world of useful and pleasant things for his sustenance and delight. In the Genesis account of the creation these are called simply “things.” They were made for man’s uses, but they were meant always to be external to the man and subservient to him. In the deep heart of the man was a shrine where none but God was worthy to come. Within him was God; without, a thousand gifts which God had showered upon him.

But sin has introduced complications and has made those very gifts of God a potential source of ruin to the soul.

Our woes began when God was forced out of His central shrine and “things” were allowed to enter. Within the human heart “things” have taken over. Men have now by nature no peace within their hearts, for God is crowned there no longer, but there in the moral dusk stubborn and aggressive usurpers fight among themselves for first place on the throne.

I banged through the new O'Reilly book by Douglas Crockford titled JavaScript: The Good Parts

Crockford is a very eminent programmer in the javascript community and I was excited to see a book come out by him. However, after reading it, I have to say it wasn't what I expected. I thought it was going to be a very detailed description of Javascript objects, and particularly JSON of which he developed and popularized. But what I found it to be was a description of what is good, bad and ugly about the language. Quite interesting for anyone who has used the language for any length of time, and would consider themselves adept in the language. At times I think I am adept, but I find when I begin to think that I get challenged to the point that I really don't know much at all.

I've been deeply involved in a web site rollout. At The University of Akron we are building out a new website after an architectural review and site re-design. The myriad of detail and planning that goes into a site rollout for a large University website is amazing. At the same time it is frustratingly slow going. We are moving to a new content management system on top of everything else. That both helps and hurts the process. It hurts because it is another level of discovery and testing that needs to take place while we are adding content to the site.

The are plenty of tutorials on the web doing this very same thing. But I thought I would put up my basic method for creating a glassy reflective button. It is a simple method and works for quickly creating small buttons for the web. This is done in Illustrator CS2 but any vector application could be used with this method

Little faith will save a man, but little faith cannot do great things.

Charles Spurgeon

Ajaxian had an interesting post. O'Reilly has released the Adobe Air Pocket Guide as a free download. You can get it here.