JO_24's Xanga

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 12:12:57 GMT

I think I'm done with Xanga, I have a wordpress now. http://www.amandajean.wordpress.com , check it out.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 02:00:04 GMT

Just a few things from a book that I read not too long ago that I really liked. The book was called Naked Fruit and basically it went through all the fruits of the spirit and described them and explained ways they should be shown in our lives.

Fruits of the Spirit

Fruit is the result of growth. It's the evidence that a plant or a vine or a tree has been rooted and established, fed and nurtured, watered and staked and pruned to the point of reproducing. Spiritual fruit is what results in our lives when we root ourselves in a relationship with God. When we live a life connected like this with God, he grows his nature in who we are and fruit results: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (pg. 18)
The fruits of the Spirit are those God-like qualities that make us look like him. They are his nature exhibited in our personalities. When we plant ourselves in a relationship with Jesus, day in and day out, the result of that relationship is the fruit of his characteristics in us. The fruit of the Spirit is what we look like when we're like Jesus. (pg. 19)
By our own efforts, based on our own natures, we'll grow fruit of the flesh. It might be nice, but it won't look like Jesus. It won't be naked fruit. Our best efforts won't grow godliness, because the fruit of the Spirit comes forth only from godly seeds. We can't make ourselves like God. Only God can do that. Only God can reproduce his nature in us. (pg. 46)
The fruit of the Spirit only grows when we are connected with God in a relationship with his Son, Jesus.
We need to remember that it's not about what we can muster and manage. Spiritual fruit grows in our lives by God's initiative as we cooperate with him. it's not up to us to grow all the fruit all at once all the time. But we can cooperate by recognizing where we're missing a fruit that God would like to exhibit in our lives and intentionally asking him to produce it in us. pg 147

Love

Love. Indeed, seemly the easiest of all qualities to model in so very many moments. Love is there . . . in all things. Except when love is hard. And it can be hard, can't it? Let's get real about love. It can be hard to love people. Love means handing over the remote control when we'd rather keep it, getting up just when we're all settled in a comfy spot, speaking in a balanced tone of voice when we'd rather scream, opening our heart to listen to another when we'd rather allow our own feelings tumble out. Yep, it's hard to love people. (pg. 55)
Love is not about being nice for the sake of niceness; it's about being like Jesus. What would Jesus do in the everyday when it's hard to love hard-to-love people. (pg. 56)
Love: a committed choice to be there . . . .in everything.
Love is also a commitment-in everything. God is committed to us, no matter what. Love stays when it wants to go. It accepts when it wants to reject. It does what it doesn't want to do when it doesn't want to do it. It goes above the "can't stand this person" moments and, squinting, forces itself to look at that someone they way God looks at them, seeing them flawed, yes, but filled with potential. Love is a commitment to keep choosing to love . . . .even when you don't feel like it.

Joy

Where happiness is circumstantial, joy is not. Joy is more than happiness. The Old Testament describes joy as a quality of life as well as an emotion. . . . Joy is something deep that celebrates God's character despite the circumstances . . . In the New Testament, joy is often expressed as ecstasy, a feeling of amazement, an uninhibited response to God's grace and presence in our days . . . Joy is also connected to hope, to love, and to a perspective that sees beyond the immediate to the eventual. (pg. 66)
Joy is confidence in God's grace, despite circumstances - despite what happens. Joy is the ability to hold up because we know we are being held up. Joy is the conviction that God is in control of every detail of our lives even when those details appear to be out of control. (pg. 67)
Joy is confidence in God no matter what happens. Because we've watched God working in so many moments of life - good, bad, confusing, sorrowful, challenging, unfathomable - when we are joyful, we are wrapped up by our observations and help in place, knowing clearly that just as God came through before, he will come through again. (pg. 68)
Joy is the experience of holding on because we know we are being held.

Peace

Peace is the result of resting in God. Peace comes from resting in a relationship that holds us in the midst of life's storms and in the momentary calm of their aftermath.
Peace is the result of resting in a relationship with God.

Patience

Patience is hanging in there with hard-to-love people . . . sometimes to the point of forgiveness but always to the point of love.
Patience doesn't mean slapping on a "nice" face and ignoring the reality of how we feel. pg. 86
Patience is more than a nice face put on in a not-so-nice moment when someone wounds us. It's a supernatural fruit. Patience is a spiritual fruit that grows from the soil of our humanity. As we experience unwelcome wounds from people, God can grow his fruit in our hearts and empower us to respond to such hurt with patience. pg. 86

Kindness

First, kindness is an action . . . second, kindness is an action coupled with compassion. Kindness cares, and because it cares, it acts. Kindness gets involved. pg. 92
Kindness is meeting needs; it's action coupled with compassion.
The naked fruit of kindness is meeting needs. Kindness is acting to meet needs with compassion. Rather than some archaic manner of chivalry or a syrupy-sweet "niceness", kindness is getting up and meeting a need because it's there and we care.

Goodness

Just as God is good to give us what makes us happy, he is happy to give us what makes us good. His actions consistently push us to the point where we will eventually resemble him. Sometimes that means withholding what we think we want in order to provide what he knows we need. He knows that we seem to grow during the lean times than during the full times of life.
Goodness is becoming like God, inside and out, in our beings and in our actions, through good and bad times.
We can't be good on the outside without God first making us good on the inside. Once this process begins, it grows goodness in us, from inside out. Through good times and bad, the fruit of goodness grows us to be like God, inside and out.

Faithfulness

The spiritual fruit of faithfulness is an active response to God's faithfulness. As he keeps his promises to us, we mirror his faithfulness by keeping our to him. pg 116
Faithfulness is being true to God. It's keeping our commitment of him in the way he keeps his commitment to us.
We mirror God's faithfulness by being true to him and true to others.

Gentleness

Gentleness is a tricky fruit to grow because it requires such surrender, and surrender makes us vulnerable.
Gentleness is the fruit of the Spirit that yields. Giant yellow triangle sign obeyed, gentleness pauses, looks both ways, and waits for directions before proceeding. With kids. With work. With friendships. With a mate. With parents. And with what we do to become who we want to be.

Self-control

Most literally, the word self-control comes from two roots: one meaning to rein in or curb and the other meaning to heal, save, or make whole. The roots apply particularly to our sensitive nature, our understanding, and our mind. Thus to be self-controlled is to be "healthy-minded", self-control is a healthy-mindedness that watches for holes in the walls of our lives and keeps them patched.
Part of healthy-mindedness includes the creation of healthy boundaries by which we opt for control over our issues and relinquish efforts toward issues that belong to others.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 03:46:49 GMT

My little brother bought a motorcycle tonight , lets just say he's a little happy. Here's a couple of pictures of him with it.

Not much else is going on, I'm basically working everyday until 7:00, I've had a couple days off but since we're two people short in the office most of us have to work everyday, we lost one girl because she just decided not to show up to work anymore and not call either. I'm also playing softball with a group from church, we've won a couple of games. Yesterday I went over to a couple from the softball teams house and we played sand volleyball for a few hours then I ended up play the wii with Larua and the guys, I beat them in boxing . Hmm, that's all I can think of at the moment, I think I'm going to go practice my guitar.

Monday, April 30, 2007

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:26:44 GMT

Finals week here I come!

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 06:03:18 GMT

Is April over yet . . . this month seems to be dragging on. I'm ready for no classes and warm weather.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 03:29:45 GMT

Hmm, interesting thought . . . but what about my facebook, you can't take that away

Researchers Explore Scrapping Internet

NEW YORK - Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the Internet, some university researchers with the federal government's blessing want to scrap all that and start over.

The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a "clean slate" approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on Sept. 2, 1969.

The Internet "works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions," said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University professor overseeing three clean-slate projects. "It's sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today."

No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes.

Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was "generally healthy" because the current technology "does not satisfy all needs."

One challenge in any reconstruction, though, will be balancing the interests of various constituencies. The first time around, researchers were able to toil away in their labs quietly. Industry is playing a bigger role this time, and law enforcement is bound to make its needs for wiretapping known.

There's no evidence they are meddling yet, but once any research looks promising, "a number of people (will) want to be in the drawing room," said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor affiliated with Oxford and Harvard universities. "They'll be wearing coats and ties and spilling out of the venue."

The National Science Foundation wants to build an experimental research network known as the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI, and is funding several projects at universities and elsewhere through Future Internet Network Design, or FIND.

Rutgers, Stanford, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the universities pursuing individual projects. Other government agencies, including the Defense Department, have also been exploring the concept.

The as Future Internet Research and Experimentation, or FIRE. Government officials and researchers met last month in Zurich to discuss early findings and goals.

A new network could run parallel with the current Internet and eventually replace it, or perhaps aspects of the research could go into a major overhaul of the existing architecture.

These clean-slate efforts are still in their early stages, though, and aren't expected to bear fruit for another 10 or 15 years — assuming Congress comes through with funding.

Guru Parulkar, who will become executive director of Stanford's initiative after heading NSF's clean-slate programs, estimated that GENI alone could cost $350 million, while government, university and industry spending on the individual projects could collectively reach $300 million. Spending so far has been in the tens of millions of dollars.

And it could take billions of dollars to replace all the software and hardware deep in the legacy systems.

Clean-slate advocates say the cozy world of researchers in the 1970s and 1980s doesn't necessarily mesh with the realities and needs of the commercial Internet.

"The network is now mission critical for too many people, when in the (early days) it was just experimental," Zittrain said.

The Internet's early architects built the system on the principle of trust. Researchers largely knew one another, so they kept the shared network open and flexible — qualities that proved key to its rapid growth.

But spammers and hackers arrived as the network expanded and could roam freely because the Internet doesn't have built-in mechanisms for knowing with certainty who sent what.

The network's designers also assumed that computers are in fixed locations and always connected. That's no longer the case with the proliferation of laptops, personal digital assistants and other mobile devices, all hopping from one wireless access point to another, losing their signals here and there.

Engineers tacked on improvements to support mobility and improved security, but researchers say all that adds complexity, reduces performance and, in the case of security, amounts at most to bandages in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse.

Workarounds for mobile devices "can work quite well if a small fraction of the traffic is of that type," but could overwhelm computer processors and create security holes when 90 percent or more of the traffic is mobile, said Nick McKeown, co-director of Stanford's clean-slate program.

The Internet will continue to face new challenges as applications require guaranteed transmissions — not the "best effort" approach that works better for e-mail and other tasks with less time sensitivity.

Think of a doctor using teleconferencing to perform a surgery remotely, or a customer of an Internet-based phone service needing to make an emergency call. In such cases, even small delays in relaying data can be deadly.

And one day, sensors of all sorts will likely be Internet capable.

Rather than create workarounds each time, clean-slate researchers want to redesign the system to easily accommodate any future technologies, said Larry Peterson, chairman of computer science at Princeton and head of the planning group for the NSF's GENI.

Even if the original designers had the benefit of hindsight, they might not have been able to incorporate these features from the get-go. Computers, for instance, were much slower then, possibly too weak for the computations needed for robust authentication.

"We made decisions based on a very different technical landscape," said Bruce Davie, a fellow with network-equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc., which stands to gain from selling new products and incorporating research findings into its existing line.

"Now, we have the ability to do all sorts of things at very high speeds," he said. "Why don't we start thinking about how we take advantage of those things and not be constrained by the current legacy we have?"

Of course, a key question is how to make any transition — and researchers are largely punting for now.

"Let's try to define where we think we should end up, what we think the Internet should look like in 15 years' time, and only then would we decide the path," McKeown said. "We acknowledge it's going to be really hard but I think it will be a mistake to be deterred by that."

Kleinrock, the Internet pioneer at UCLA, questioned the need for a transition at all, but said such efforts are useful for their out-of-the-box thinking.

"A thing called GENI will almost surely not become the Internet, but pieces of it might fold into the Internet as it advances," he said.

Think evolution, not revolution.

Princeton already runs a smaller experimental network called PlanetLab, while Carnegie Mellon has a clean-slate project called 100 x 100.

These days, Carnegie Mellon professor Hui Zhang said he no longer feels like "the outcast of the community" as a champion of clean-slate designs.

Construction on GENI could start by 2010 and take about five years to complete. Once operational, it should have a decade-long lifespan.

FIND, meanwhile, funded about two dozen projects last year and is evaluating a second round of grants for research that could ultimately be tested on GENI.

These go beyond projects like Internet2 and National LambdaRail, both of which focus on next-generation needs for speed.

Any redesign may incorporate mechanisms, known as virtualization, for multiple networks to operate over the same pipes, making further transitions much easier. Also possible are new structures for data packets and a replacement of Cerf's TCP/IP communications protocols.

"Almost every assumption going into the current design of the Internet is open to reconsideration and challenge," said Parulkar, the NSF official heading to Stanford. "Researchers may come up with wild ideas and very innovative ideas that may not have a lot to do with the current Internet."

Friday, April 13, 2007

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 04:56:44 GMT

Every single word I say
You know before I speak
You know every thought
The deepest part of me

You draw me closer, then I see
Your presence is every thing I need
To be the child that you've created me to be
I'm ready now to see it your way

Lay down my pride,
My desires, my demise
I'm ready now to see it your way
I'm done, I'm through, ignoring you, now it's true
I'm kneeling at the cross of your grace
Lay down my pride

I was faced with passing time
But I new the choice was mine
To finally come to you
And give you all control
I've wandered miles to find my way
And then you revealed this simple faith
I know that you can see the secrets of my sould

Lay down my pride
My desires, my demise
I'm ready now to see it your way
I'm done, I'm through, ignoring you, now it's true
I'm kneeling at the cross of your grace

Lay down my pride
My desires, my demise
I'm ready now to see it your way
I'm done, I'm through, ignoring you, now it's true
I'm kneeling at the cross of your grace
Lay down my pride

The cross, the blood, you shed for me
Your back was ripped and bruised
So I can know your love

I kneel, I bow to you my king

Lay down my pride
My desires, my demise
I'm ready now to see it your way
I'm done, I'm through, ignoring you, now it's true
I'm kneeling at the cross of your grace
Lay down my pride
My desires, my demise
I'm ready now to see it your way
I'm done, I'm through, ignoring you, now it's true
I'm kneeling at the cross of your grace
Lay down my pride

Jeremy Camp ~ Lay Down My Pride

Monday, April 09, 2007

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 01:07:18 GMT

Low in the grave He lay, Jesus my Savior,
Waiting the coming day, Jesus my Lord!

Up from the grave He arose,
With a mighty triumph o’er His foes,
He arose a Victor from the dark domain,
And He lives forever, with His saints to reign.
He arose! He arose!
Hallelujah! Christ arose!

Vainly they watch His bed, Jesus my Savior;
Vainly they seal the dead, Jesus my Lord!

Death cannot keep its Prey, Jesus my Savior;
He tore the bars away, Jesus my Lord!

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Sat, 07 Apr 2007 13:16:42 GMT

There's snow on the ground and it's April . . . this is so wrong.

Friday, April 06, 2007

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 05:03:07 GMT

random post . . . get ready.

so it's a little before 1a.m. and I'm sitting at my computer and I hear something outside that sounds like someone hit a sign. I look outside and see a guy running carrying a Speed Hump sign. So tomorrow if you look on University St. there is probably a sign missing.