Don’t fool yourself that obnoxious behavior is strength. Consistent kindness, responsibility, consideration, and hard work are traits of strength.

via The Lost Art of Self-Preservation (for Women).

One of the traditions within the kirk is the ritual of the service. This is worthy. The writers of the two big English language texts — the book of common prayer and the (Presbyterian) book of order were scholars and poets. The language flows. The hymns have been filtered over some 500 years so that the good ones remain.

But we can lose the focus of what we are about in the ritual.

42″But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God; it is these you ought to have practiced, without neglecting the others.

via Daily Lectionary Readings — Devotions and Readings — Ministries & Programs — GAMC.

Please note that Jesus is not arguing for imprecision. he appreciates that the Pharasees are so careful that they give a tenth of their kitchen herbs away. But… the have lost their first love.

We need to engage our head and our heart. Ratzinger has made this point repeatedly — that the Church of the West is strong becasue there is careful and correct theology and there is passion. (He is afraid that both the theology and the passion have been lost).

Schaeefer would argue that passion follows and flows from correct thinking — and CS Lewis and Sayers both said the best devotional material were theological treatises, carefully thought through.

The irony is that the Pharasees formulated the law as love God and love your fellow man as yourself. Which is what they have been accused of forgetting.

This last weekend the lads went to spend time with their mother.

And I played the viola, did some gardening, read a few books, fixed a computer and went to kirk. I also visited a cool resturant a mate runs.

I am not holding a candle out for anyone…  nor do I want to be a monk. But the idea of interacting with someone else and dealing with their problems is at the moment way, way down my priority list. I have enough issues with being a Dad to two teenage boys. The Friday night pickup scene repels me. Internet dating… has a smell of desperation.

And, four years after the split, the ex still has me caught up in court — a catch I am not.

Dalrock has commented wisely on the lies women are fed about being able to find a new partner after a divorce.  I think that many, many women and men have other things they need to do… and abandoning those responsbilities for some kind of romance is a regression to the extended adolescence of university.

We are older, wrinklier and wider. But we may be no more wise than   we were in our 20s. And this is not as it ought to be. The experience we have had — often of 10 — 20 years of marraige shoud have given us wisdom.

But we are being sold foolishness.

Ovet the last weekend I was alone. The boys were with their mother, for a long weekend.

I did not contact any prospective people for a date. I did not go to a bar. Not because I have any thoughts of guilt, but because I did not want any complications.

Raising two teenage boys. Have a busy set of interests. I spent three days recovering.

Dalrock has noted that many women who divorce end up, not having a whirlwind romance, but living in defacto spinsterhood. THis all makes me wonder if there is a male equivelent — a secular monastory where men go and acheive their goals.

In peace.

The cost is loneliness. And disavowing the part of you that says you are desirable, and your life is your “romantic relationship”. For it is interesting that Hollywood does not film the everyday kindnesses and comprimises that make a good marraige work.

This is simply good advice. To live the good life, as the Stoics and the Buddhists (who are the modern Stoics) would say,  is to remove yourself  and disavow your ambition.

Ambition is a drug that can destroy you. You start to be precious about your own talents. You hold the needy and depressed and hurting in contempt, when but for the mercy of theAlmighty, that person would be you.

Micah 3

Do not seek from the Lord high office,or the seat of honor from the king.5Do not assert your righteousness before the Lord,or display your wisdom before the king.6Do not seek to become a judge,or you may be unable to root out injustice;you may be partial to the powerful,and so mar your integrity.7Commit no offence against the public,and do not disgrace yourself among the people.

10Do not grow weary when you pray;do not neglect to give alms.11Do not ridicule a person who is embittered in spirit,for there is One who humbles and exalts.

via Daily Lectionary Readings — Devotions and Readings — Ministries & Programs — GAMC.

Arch Linux has moved gnome 2.32 into stable, so the window manager got upgraded. Seamlessly. Love rolling releases. However, there are challenges ahead: the video is a mockup of Gnome shell, which is coming in version 3.0 — which is moving into feature freeze this month.

via Shell Yes! motion design mockup on Vimeo.

We get a sense of the need to tell others about the gospel in these texts. Firstly, there will be a great multitude saved. But that is behind the scenes. In this world, the workers are few, and we need to pray for the evangelists.

Revelation 7

9After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. 10They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!

Luke 10:

¹After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. ²He said to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest

via Daily Lectionary Readings — Devotions and Readings — Ministries & Programs — GAMC.

Many clinical trials have to be done in developing countries. The most ethical reason for this is that these are common disorders in developing countries. The authors have written some field notes for data collectors on consent.

As a matter of routine practice, investigators often delegate to other study team members research activities involving direct contact with human participants. We propose the term data collector to designate a distinct role on the study team for field workers who seek informed consent or collect data through direct contact with individuals. When investigators delegate such activities to data collectors, the investigators’ ultimate responsibility for human subject protection and scientific integrity is in no way diminished and requires them to train these personnel in the principles and practice of research ethics. Due to a lack of standard training guidelines specific to field workers in low-resource settings, training may vary between sites and principal investigators. Consequently, the effective implementation of research ethics principles may also vary widely and arbitrarily across settings.

via PLoS Medicine: A Field Training Guide for Human Subjects Research Ethics.

Thre field guide itself is copyrignt, so I won’t quote it here. however, the language in it… is about as difficult to read as this. Which worries me.

The reality in the developing world is that many workers have primary school edcuation only. Of variable quality. I suggest you need to rewrite the guides (a) into the local languate and 9b) aiming at end of primary reading level.

The field guide, however, ie excellant, as is, for workers in the dveloped or recovering world. Where many invstigations are occuring because USA patients no longer want to enroll in studies.

I spend about half my working life writing. Research proposals, grant applications, systematic reviews… peer reviews.

And I use Open Office. I have since 1999, when I managed to Bork a dissertation using Word.

Now. to get Word to the point where I can use it, I would need

• a bibliography manager — generally end note
• a means of making structured outlines — I do “paint by numbers.
• compatability

Open office needs…

• A bibilography system
• That’s it.

I use Bibus (I have just switched from Zotero, mainly because if is not playing nicely with firefox). Which is free: the windows alternative (Endnote) is also “free” because I could get it on a university licence.

Open office imports docx, and doc, well enough for me. But word — I lost data when word 5 went to word 6, and don’t start me on the latest versions.

The reality is that North American and Western European companies are already using Microsoft Office, with employees possessing Microsoft Office skills, so they face several barriers to leaving the Microsoft Office ecosystem. The cost of migration, training, and interoperability often counterbalance the costs savings of using a Microsoft Office alternative. In essence, Microsoft is betting that existing customers will, by in large, remain customers and that the real competitive environment is the set of new enterprises in emerging markets.

IT decision-makers in both the West and in emerging markets should understand a vendor’s business strategy before evaluating the vendor’s marketing and product offerings. This recommendation couldn’t hold truer than when evaluating marketing materials from the Microsoft Office division.

via Microsoft’s fake validation of OpenOffice.org | Open Source – InfoWorld.

Microsoft will have to give the software away in the third world. Because the linuxes and the BSDs are free, and fairly easy (thanks to Canonical and Fedora) to implement. Microsoft reminds me of the IBM adds warning that Compaq clones were no good — it led to people finding that the clones worked well, and eventually to the rise of lenovo.