Monthly Archives: August 2009

What Can Our Economy Teach Us About Faith?

Posted on August 31, 2009

I’ve recently just gotten my finances in order in the last month or two, honestly for the first time in several years. Much to my wife’s dismay, I’ve taken a very “set it and forget it” and “oh well” approach to finances for the last few years. Now that I have my finances in order, it’s become more and more obvious how little control I have over the monetary side of my life, especially under our current economic state. I’ve been trying to come up with a decent plan for saving for the future recently, but I’ve run into a bit of a dilemma:

  • I can’t invest my savings because the markets can’t be trusted to not go under.
  • I can’t let the money just sit because inflation will rapidly decrease its value.
  • I can’t simply spend the money because then I’ll have no savings, and since it’s an IRA account, I’d be severely penalized for withdrawing it.

Posted in Culture, Economy, Faith, Finances | 17 Comments

Reese at the Rockford AirFest 2009

Posted on August 23, 2009

My Dad took some cool pictures of Reese on Saturday at the Rockford AirFest. You don’t get to see much of the AirFest, but Reese is much more interesting. ;)

I got burned to a crisp, and I’m paying for it now. But it was worth it for these pictures…

Posted in Family | Leave a comment

Did Jesus Not Call Us to Give Everything?

Posted on August 19, 2009

An interesting topic came up at the Bible study I attended tonight and challenged a long-standing belief of mine. Though I thought this was a fairly common belief, I was apparently the only one at the Bible study who believed it. For that reason I’ve pondered it quite a bit this evening, and though I don’t necessarily plan on changing my views, I’m wondering what perspectives other people might have.

Posted in Culture, Faith | 44 Comments

5 Often Overlooked Caveats of Managing a Digital Music Collection

Posted on August 14, 2009

If you’re like me, you slave over your music collection on a regular basis making sure every song is properly tagged, free of any audible flaws, and overall as perfect as possible. Okay, well, you’re probably not like me. But still, having your music skip because you used a crappy ripping application or hiccup between songs because of a non-gapless codec is exceedingly annoying. Here we’ll go through five commonly-made mistakes by music enthusiasts when managing their music collection.

Posted in DRM, Management, Music, Technology | 7 Comments

Centering a Message Box on the Active Window in C#

Posted on August 7, 2009

One of the annoying caveats of using the built in .NET message box is that it provides no functionality to center a message box on the currently active window. Oddly, even when you specify the parent window using the proper overloaded version of the Show() method, the window still insists on centering itself on the desktop, instead of on the active window. This is annoying and confusing to the end user because it breaks the ability to set aside particular “screen real estate” for an application. Fortunately, there is a way to fix this, although it does involve the Win32 API.

Posted in C#, Technology, Visual Studio 2008 | 19 Comments