I just finished the book last night - it's a G.K. Chesterton and somewhat reminiscent of his Father Brown stuff. It's a detective novel, but not a very conventional one. The detective in question is one Basil Grant, a retired judge and unsocial but not antisocial type, who is followed about by his brother Rupert, an ever suspicious amateur detective himself, and the narrator of the book, Swinburne.

As described on the back, there are six chapters, but not a crime in any of them, unless of course, you could consider some of the actions involved in investigation criminal. That is, of course, where the Club of Queer Trades comes in, that mysterious bureau of entirely new occupations. And they really are queer, in that old British sense of the word. I confess that some of them had me until the very end (and they certainly have Rupert and Swinburne to the end every time).

Basil seems insane to his friends, but I found myself rather trusting him even if his ideas seemed absurd. So, to wrap this bit of the post up, it's not too long of a read (my edition is 126 pages) and is worth a read for each chapter, and especially for reading through and discovering the ending (if you don't guess it before, that is).

Dev Update

Now then, the report on the new a broken mold. I'm happy to say that the development, which consists of bending WordPress and CSS to my will, seems to me to be almost over. While I'm here, let me give Firebug a plug; it's a web development add-on for Firefox, and boy is it ever cool. It has JavaScript and DOM tools, which I don't use, but the HTML and CSS tools are handy. The killer feature: you can edit code and see the results in real time (I'm not sure how that works with JavaScript). If you've ever done CSS work, you can probably imagine how handy that is.

I'm also happy to say that I contacted NearlyFreeSpeech.NET last night and was elated to learn that I could pay through the parents' plastic (with me giving them equal cash, of course) since I don't have a checking account yet.

So I'm hoping to get it up within the next half a month, and I suppose a month at the latest.

Time for homework now -- catch you later.

I confess, like Aaron Weiss did, that I want to get famous.

However, I don't want to get too famous. Because that either leads to a bunch of good comments, flame wars, or spammy comments.

I think I would prefer to have a smaller, but still present, audience. I do like to do this kind of informal writing, and I would think it nice if I had a small audience with which to discuss it.

In the blog world, however, you usually get famous for one of two reasons: either you did something that made you really famous, or you provide good fresh content regularly. I hope to do the latter. And I figure the best way to do that, since I'm not that astute of a writer, is to assemble a team of writers, which is, incidentally, what we want to do. Funny how that works, huh?

Anyway, enough down that road. More shall come later on the subject.

For what seems to be to have been a couple weeks, I've been working on getting WordPress all customized to my liking. Right now that mostly means struggling with the theme. PHP and CSS. I hope I can get it sorted out within, say, the next week and a half. Anyway, probably sometime before the end of the year, we're going to be online with our very own website (thanks Google, it's been nice knowing you). I'm still leaning towards abrokenmold.net. I think that's going to be www.abrokenmold.net, even though I like the no WWW look, because it can present some issues. Even if I'm not dealing with those issues at the moment, I do want to be prepared for the future. One might also notice that there is a website at brokenmold.net and that having such a similar domain name is a poor idea. Maybe so, but we already have the name and I want to stick with it. Plus we have a jump in that brokenmold.net seems to be abandoned.

So, anyway, a somewhat quick dump of some thoughts.

Although the final release isn't scheduled until tomorrow at 9am, a sharp-eyed blog contributor sent us a link to what is almost certainly the final version of Matthew's rhetoric essay, probably leaked by inside sources.

Joking aside, this is the rhetoric essay I've been working on, the first of many rhetoric papers to come. I chose to tackle the subject of Christians drinking underage because they don't believe the government should be able to restrict that liberty. Well maybe it shouldn't, but if it *does*, do we have biblical grounds to disobey our civil authorities on that point? I argue not.

Enjoy!

This isn't actually all that much of a post, but I did want to refer you to some reading.

So anyway, this thing is mostly about female modesty, but it is mentioned that guys should be modest too. I believe that. It is a somewhat different affair, but worth remembering.

Anyway, here's the thing. Pastor Tollefson preached on Proverbs 7 a couple of weeks ago and I think that reminded me of seeing this mentioned on Covenant Eyes' blog and going to check it out. It's The Rebelution's Modesty Survey.

The Modesty Survey is an anonymous discussion between Christian guys and girls who care about modesty. Hundreds of Christian girls submitted their questions and over 1,600 Christian guys (of all ages) submitted 150,000+ answers—including over 25,000 text responses.

source

I think sometimes it bugs me when people give these general, Sunday school, perfect summary answers to spiritual questions. Yeah, those are good, and sometimes they are helpful. But sometimes specifics are a lot more helpful and maybe more personable. I like the Modesty Survey because it some of both. Some good general answers about Christian modesty and some very specific questions. I have to admit it was somewhat disturbing how specific some of the questions are and what they might make you think about. But, as Christians, keep your mind out of the gutter.

I think it's a good read / browse-through for guys and girls, I think. It might give some insights to the female side and let guys see what a sampling of other guys think about all this stuff, maybe learn that they might be thinking about the issue wrongly, or see other perspectives on it, or get some good clarification on it, or what you will.

Anyway, I found it interesting. As a technical aside, the questions and answers are loaded up with AJAX, so it's not so easy just to hit up a bunch of links in new tabs for later reading (plus there's often a read more responses link).

P.S. Not to be immodest myself, but…

This is our 100th post.

They weren't all big, intellectual, meaty posts; some were actually a bit trivial. But hey… two people, 100 blog posts, 1 year and 17 days. Not that bad, is it?

And…

…hopefully sometime in the soonish future, there will be a post up about us seeking some new bloggers. Also hopefully in the next few months, I can get a sweet WordPress setup all made and get a proper domain for a broken mold… either abrokenmold.com or abrokenmold.net, I would think. I'm just not digging .org for the name. I'm thinking we can get hosted with the awesome NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. It should be rather affordable with the low traffic I'm expecting (at least at first… if it ever picks up, I'll probably be able to afford some decent fixed price hosting by then).

Two common maxims are: "Familiarity breeds contempt," and "Absence makes the heart grow fonder."

While there is latent truth to be found in these statements, one might conceive of a scenario where proximity to an object brings one under some some degree of influence of that object, causing one to take a more favorable view of said object. In this case, distance from the object in question and the resulting objectivity could in fact engender contempt. In this way, the proverbial dynamic may be shown to not always hold true.

Just by way of sharing one of my more interesting trains of thought...

I got a business doing websites
When my friends need some code, who do they call?
I do HTML for ‘em all
Even made a homepage for my dog

-Weird Al Yankovic, "White and Nerdy"

Wednesday was a kind of milestone, or climax, or finish, for a project of mine. And that project was Matt Barley's website.

It started as a idea in Matt's head at some time or another, and he eventually conveyed to me at the New Year's 2008-2009 party at the RimRock Inn that he had been procrastinating on the project for some time and didn't get it done in 2008 and so wanted to get it done this year. I said I could help him, and so, on January 9, the domain name was registered, and a web page converted from a Word document made on Matt's MacBook was thrown up, slightly hand edited.

The first thing I did after that was to recode the page cleanly, with the help of KompoZer. Matt wanted a menu on the side, so it went table based. Yep. I just said that. It wasn't the best of designs, and later on I changed that to a menu positioned left with CSS. Praise God for CSS. Eventually it went back to plain HTML structure with a text menu below the header. Also, somewhere along the line, Matthew of abm fame gave a couple design suggestions and some code for one of them.

And then there was the photo galleries. First I did them with Web Album Generator and tried to embed them in a page, and then tried a page per album, using in iframe. That was a pain, and eventually I gave up and put them on separate pages and edited the CSS in each album folder to make those pages appear look like the rest of the site. And then Matt didn't like so many pictures on a certain album, or something like that. So, we ended up switching to Picasa Web Albums and linking to Matt's public page from his website. That worked out pretty well, since Matt can now manage the pictures all himself, which is great for both of us.

Eventually, I wanted to set up some sort of solution so Matt could edit the site on his own. I thought of a content management system first, and looked up one I recalled seeing linked from BugMeNot called CushyCMS. So I went and checked it out. It turned out to be, as one reviewer put it, more like a remote content editor. You put the proper class on div elements you wanted editable by Cushy and give it an FTP account to work with, and that's how it works. As another reviewer said, most of the time he'd probably forget to download the version from the site if he wanted to edit with something else (e.g., by hand with a text editor). So, that idea ended up being quashed before I even tested it.

I checked out three systems after that, really: Joomla, WordPress, and CMS Made Simple. XAMPP running on Windows on my laptop was my testbed of choice. Joomla was easy enough to set up, but seemed kind of complicated. WordPress looked like it might work well for blogging, but that's not what I was gunning for (although abm may be gunning for it in the future). CMS Made Simple ended up being it. The template/stylesheet system was easy enough to understand, and the use of the Smarty template system seemed nice. Not that I had heard of it before, but inserting Smarty tags seems to me a good way to insert special content into pages.

The first day of development gladdened the heart, because it seemed like it would work out great, and there was a pretty sweet little Picasa Web Albums module I found. There were some frustrations after that. A lot of aggravation dealing with CSS. In fact, that's been a thing all through the development of the website. Eventually things got ironed out and the site was finally ready for launch. The launch however, was terrible. I tried several times to upload and correctly configure the site for being on the server, and made a clean version of the site a couple times while at it. This process was highly frustrating, the least of reasons not being that I still have dial-up! Anyway, I finally got it nailed down and done correctly.

After after putting it in a test directory and then getting the go ahead from Matt, it went root, and now sits there beautifully. It's not much, but I have to admit I'm rather proud of it and am thinking that I may even redo our church website with CMSms if given stewardship of it. So, go check it out.

Let me just say up front, if the version of HR 3200 under consideration in the House is passed, we will take a huge step towards utter destruction. The clauses of this bill would make the federal government twice the monster it is now. This is the ugly, ugly version of socialism.

Here, take a look at this: Liberty Counsel's summary of HR 3200. It's ten pages long, a much easier read than the full text (PDF) of the bill. By the way, if you don't want to bother with a PDF, here is the full text at OpenCongress. Also, keep a general eye on the bill over at its main page on OpenCongress.

I know this isn't a very formal post, but this bill is just insanity. Please, take some time out of your day to read the summary of the bill and then have a good hard think about contacting your Congressmen (representatives info here, senators here).