This happened last Monday in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Fay 1-Kitesurfer 0 and glad to make it to hospital.
Letting go can be the hardest thing…
This post (<a href=”http://blogs.msdn.com/nickmalik/archive/2008/08/21/malik-s-laws-of-service-oriented-architecture.aspx”>Malik’s Laws of Service Oriented Architecture</a>) is short, to the point and a no-nonsense comment on how Service Oriented Archictecure will (or will not) come of age in the enterprise. I’ve been thinking for a while that SOA evangelists are the enterprise counterpart of OO evangelists; both have reusability high on their articles of faith, but the reality of how its achieved (beyond technology, that is) has been pretty elusive.
Well done Nick on repeating that reuse does not just happen by declaratively expressing it at the start of a new project or technology adoption. It takes interest from others, a value proposition and guarantees of payoffs for all involved. Perhaps the ‘hard work’ that’s going into SOA now is the driver behind triple-or-double digit growth that IT is spending on ‘integration’ lately. 
… if you’re lying upside down on the bar counter getting body shots, that is… it’s all a matter of perspective, really. 
Stumbled upon this Slate.com article discussing Isaac Hayes’ afterlife as a devoted Scientologist. He died on Sunday (yup, slipped past me as well). Related Slate articles (from the same one): Mark Oppenheimer explained why Scientology is not a cult, and Bonnie Goldstein revealed the contract Scientologists have to sign. Juliet Lapidos picked out the juicy bits of the recent unauthorized Tom Cruise biography, while Michael Crowley assessed Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Michelle Tsai explained why Germans hate Scientology, and Daniel Engber reported on Scientology’s beef with psychiatry. Amanda Schaffer called Scientology’s 9/11 worker detox program a sham, and Dana Stevens got creeped out by Scientology’s preference for “silent birth.”
I had a passing interest in Scientology over the years, but since they became a regular presence at my local shopping centre I’m trying my “thetan” best to understand more of it but it appears to be a subject that you must sit down and make an efffort to understand. Maybe I’m just cheap or principled not to buy Dienetics.
A handful of sites, mine included, suffers from a PHP error that comes from the Recaptcha’s plugin for Wordpress:
Warning: pack() [function.pack]: Type H: illegal hex digit L in /home/.grotton/wvcw/wvcw.org/wp-content/plugins/wp-recaptcha/recaptchalib.php on line 245.
I have disabled Recapcha for now until I get it fixed.
Update:
This error is caused by your private or public keys being incorrect. Check that there’s no spaces trailing or preceding the text that came from the recaptcha site, and make sure you have mailhide keys for the mailhide function, they are different from your normal site settings (or so it seems — give it a try). Good luck!
Joburg’s eservices site isn’t dishing out accounts online any more. A message reads on the account-by-email page:
IMPORTANT NOTICE TO CUSTOMERS WHO RECEIVE THEIR ACCOUNT BY EMAIL: We are in the process of enhancing the viewing of accounts online. Please note that your online account from March 2008 until further notice will not be available online to view. This however will not affect the monthly email distribution of accounts. If you stopped receiving your account by email, contact our Statement Distribution Department: stat...@joburg.org.za
I do get my account emailed in PDF format though, so to conveniently pay my account by mail, I:-
- log into Gmail with my Gmail client on my phone. My client’s firewall blocks Gmail (and proxies. Behave!).
- Oops, phone’s connection is broken. Reboot phone.
Keep clicking “Yes, I want to continue my internet banking session” pop-up while I wait for it to come to its senses.- Use Pocket Internet Explorer to go to gmail.com, should be the quickest, yes? Search for account, try to download. Can’t download PDF. In fact, couldn’t download anything of mobile Gmail since its inception.
- Fire up Esmertec Java and load Gmail client again.
- Find email and click on PDF link.
- Gmail client dishes up plain-text PDF which is spectacularly useless. And I still cannot download the PDF.
- I have one last shot at this. Fire up Opera Mini, and go to Gmail.com. Login, find email, download PDF, open in Acrobat Reader LE, see amount of R1470.98, pay.
Total time wasted by blind corporate proxy? 40 minutes. Of course, I could just tether my cellphone and use its Internet Sharing but that’s not allowed either. Sometimes the most basic tasks make you feel like a complete clown.
Garfield strip created here (via The Generator Blog: January 2006)
- is packing. Packed breakfast (tried Mugg & Bean’s Deli stuff, nice), now packing for weekend. Kaapsehoop, wild horses, Julius, here we come! #
- pigged out on Nando’s and is listlessly working on a tool to convert print reports to XtraReports. Life is perske in the zone. #
Wow, this is going to be tough. I want to tell you guys that I love you, yes you know, but still, and that I have friends who are flowing strongly in God’s prophetic gifts and gifts of discernment, deliverance and healing, and that you mustn’t worry about all these weird phrases, but that I’ll explain them in due course but give me a minute and I’ll tell you more about what it is and how we can help you and people you know whose in a spot-o-bother, to put it mildly.
There! That was easier than I thought! Now, onto the details. For the past five years I am involved in a deliverance ministry. A deliverance ministry is a group of Christians brought together to be God’s mouthpiece and agents in setting people free from spiritual bondage, physical disease and curses and to help them regain the relationship with God that they lost through sins, curses, intellectual strongholds in the mind and demonic oppression. This definition will be refined as we go along. The primary goal when we sit with someone whose visiting us is to bring them closer to the Father heart of God. The process for this is, and here things get interesting, is that there is no process. No forms, no steps, no methods, no golden keys and certainly no hoops to jump through. But I do find that the following is common to almost all sessions: a humble pursuit of the knowledge of God and the seeking of His presence, an attenuated attentive listening to the guidance of His spirit, and the anointing of and laying on of hands for the person we minister to.
I have invited Peta, Michael and Dunay to explain more about what they do, and in the coming days they will be guest-blogging for me here. So bookmark this page — http://lohan.me/deliverance-ministry — or better yet, click on the friendly orange button at the top to subscribe to updates. There’s a ton of information out there on the net — and we’ll definitely cover some of it — but we’re going to have a special South African perspective on issues affecting us uniquely. Issues such as Freemasonry, Jezebellic behaviour, drug abuse and witchcraft (this one’s a biggie!) will be covered. We may even start a Wiki in the not-too-distant future to cover everything!
Until then, off the top of my head we’re writing away on schizophrenia, drug addiciton, possession, hearing from God, freedom from Law, religious spirits, Mammon, homosexuality, love, Osiris and Isis, the third eye, power spirits, DODADS (demons of death and destruction), suicide, fear, rejection, rebellion, witchcraft, control and manipulation, speaking in tongues, astral projection, visions, dreams, warrior spirits, callings, link curses, chain curses, time curses, the left-hand path, the Knights Templars, the church, the Holy Spirit, Satan, and… and… and…
gifts, fruit of the spirit, soul ties, astrology, Ba’hai, Buddhism, Islam, Hindu spirits, strongholds, pride, the cross of Christ, life and death, and… and… well, that should be a good start.
In the mean time, feel free to leave comments on what you want to know about deliverance and please pray on our behalf today while we’re putting everything together.
