misterevan's Xanga

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 18:18:04 GMT

I just completed my first paid job as a freelance graphic designer. God really blessed the results and it came out amazing. I designed a set of posters to promote my friend's campaign. I took the photos and organized the information, he wrote the paragraphs and posed for the photos. If you're a sophomore at Cedarville University, I highly recommend you vote for Mark Miller.

Check out the campaign website here.

If you like it, please leave me feedback, it's always encouraging to get feedback.

-Evan :D

Monday, November 13, 2006

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 19:10:09 GMT

I'm very pumped right now. The results from the ACM programming contest are in and posted. My team came in 11th out of 110 teams from this region (Eastern Central North America). We solved 5 of the 8 problems. The team unity was really good, we worked well together and didn't get snagged on little stuff. I'm also pleased at the list of teams we beat, including Ohio State and Michigan State.

Praise the Lord! We prayed before the contest started, and I now publicly give the glory for this accomplishment to Him. He really helped us see the hidden boundary conditions and put all the pieces together to have success.

Here's the final scoreboard:
http://acm.ashland.edu/2006/standings.html

Friday, November 03, 2006

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 19:03:32 GMT

So, recently Xanga has fallen off of my priority list.

So I'm going to talk about the one thing that I wanted to

Why the Bible is true.
Have you ever thought about that? Why is the Bible true? What makes it different from any other book? Why do we believe this one and not any others? Well, it's true because God says it's true. Seriously. That's the only way that we can know it is true. Now you should have realized already that this arguement is circular. God says the Bible is true where? In the Bible, of course. So now we have a circular arguement.
So, come again, why do I believe in a book that can only be proven true by a circular arguement? By faith. That's how God always wanted it to be. He wants us to step out and faith and take the Bible as true. He wants us to look through eyes of faith at the circumstances of life and see His providential hands. So the Bible is true now because I believe it is true? Yup.

Can I use some other form of logic?
Nope, you can't. If you try to use logic to prove that the Bible is true, you get into the question of how your logic can be true. If you appeal to logic to be your source of truth, you are stuck with Descartes wondering if you exist. Cognito ero sum. Oh, so you know Latin? I think therefore I am? Nope, you're still circular there. You can't break out of a circular argument to bring something into the sphere of existence or truth using logic.

How about experience?
What are experiences? Think about it. The matrix is the perfect example of trying to use our experiences to prove something. It looks real, feels real, tastes, real, sounds real, and even smells real. But you don't really know if you can trust your senses, do you? What if they're just the electronic inputs of some machine? Far-fetched? maybe. Possible? Yes.

So basically, if you don't believe in God, you don't have any basis for knowing anything. If God exists, we can trust Him to create us with senses that properly convey the reality of the world around us. We can use our senses to discover God by experiencing His creation. The other option is skepticism. The belief that you can't believe in anything. Oh yeah, that's another contradiction.

So what have we learned from reading this?
Any system of belief you chose begins with a contradiction or a logical problem. So how do you choose? That's up to you. God is an easy assumption for me to take, believe, and live by. Do I ever doubt that God exists? Sure I do. Do I ever doubt that any of this exists? Sure I do. Do those doubts change the way I live? Nope. Praise God.

Why aren't you an agnositc?
I prefer the way of faith to the way of doubt. I see my world through faith, and the belief becomes stronger through recognizing God's guiding hand in my life.
Amen.

Friday, September 29, 2006

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 19:21:11 GMT

:::This is not an update:::I know you wish it was:::
My life's really full right now, and xanga's a really low priority because it's kind of impersonal. I mean, I have no idea who's going to be reading this. So I'm going to offer up a list of topics, and let readers vote on what they want to hear about.

Being an RA
Cedarville Culture
The New Statue
Girls
My roommate Jeremy
Being an orphan
My Church
Class
Being the Junior Lab Tech
Not leading a Discipleship Group
Active Extracurricular Projects
Seven Literal Day Creation and the age of the universe
Why the Bible is true
Things I doubt
Thing's I'm afraid of

Pick a few, and I'll hit some of them.

Monday, August 14, 2006

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 04:14:54 GMT

I’ve only been back one day and it’s already been wonderful.

The drive down was really good. Highway 86 in New York was really really empty. For most of the trip (the parts that weren’t construction) I could only see four or five other cars on the road with me. The high gas prices are catching up with people. It made for a really nice drive, though. Pennsylvania and Ohio were pretty much traffic as normal.

Saturday evening, I went to dinner at Colonial’s with Carla and her family. That was definitely good times. Her little siblings are fun. Sometimes I wish I had lots of little siblings, but usually not. Emily’s a good sister, and I’m really happy to have her.

This morning, I went to church at St. John’s. It was very good to be back. Then I organized and unpacked more of my stuff. At 3:00, we met Brock Weston, our new RD. I like him a lot already. He’s 26, newly married, and a huge Cedarville fan. We went to the Polaris area of Northeastern Columbus and drove go-carts, played laser tag, and mini-golf. The go-carting was really cool because they powdered the track so that our cars could drift through the turns.

I’m very excited for this year. I’m proud to serve God as a Rickard RA!

For dinner, we went to bd’s Mongolian Barbecue. It was excellent. It’s not like any other restaurant. You go down what looks like a normal buffet, but instead of ready food it’s got raw meat and vegetables and sauces. You fill your bowl with these things thing bring it to the guys at the grill who throw it on a hot round iron and cook it while you wait. Then you take it back and enjoy it fresh and hot with rice or in tortillas. It was one of the best meals ever.

Brock Weston, the new Rickard RD

Jon Lawson, Brock, Drew Brown, and Rob Stahl at bd's

Monday, July 31, 2006

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 14:56:53 GMT

Curious how old you are?

I was 20 years, 3 months, 2 days, 23 hours, 38 minutes old at the time of this post

Monday, July 24, 2006

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 12:34:04 GMT

This last week has been wonderful.

Last Saturday, the 15th, we drove down to Wilkesboro, North Carolina to visit my relatives. My Uncle Rich and Aunt Cindy have a nice house on several acres of land down there. My Aunt Liz and Uncle Greg were already there when we arrived, as well as my grandmother (Graybe) and my Great Aunt Judy. My little cousin, Elisha's gotten a lot bigger since we visted them at Christmas, and is starting to talk. We met the baby cousin, Corin, for the first time. The final cousin, Tristan, was his usual high-energy self ready to play all the time.

We played a game of Cranium Turbo, a couple games of Scattergories, and had a good time hanging out. Tristan and I played several rounds of Extreme G III. Even at the end he still had more pure skill at the game than I did (i.e. running into walls less times), but I beat him by playing smarter (saving the turbo, buying the speed rather than weapon upgrades). He was way better than I expected for eleven years old. But now that I think about it, my eleven-year-old-self was way better at Star Fox 64 than I am or will ever be again. Rich had a four wheeler that we got to drive all over the woodland trails on his property, that was fun times.

I posted pictures of the action on my website. Thursday, I spent seven hours writing the JavaScript to make boxes pop up around people's heads when you put your mouse over their name or their face. So please check it out, I'm dying for some positive feedback. If anyone thinks I copied facebook, they're right. Those facebook guys are really skilled.

Friday, I relaxed and caught up on some video game time with Final Fantasy Seven. I went over to Zack's house that evening and we discussed our plans for making a new, cool game to play online. I'm really pumped about it. It requires me to learn significant PHP, but that's good. I don't know why I've been so hesitant to learn it. I bought PHP in a Nutshell on Saturday, and it looks like it's got great Object Oriented support and libraries.

Saturday morning, Mommy, Daddy, and I went out and covered up a dead deer with dirt that was causing a stink in the wooded area behind our house. Later that day my dad picked up his new car! Daddy got a new Camry Hybrid 2007. It's gold to match Mommy's van, and it's really cool. It's a nice smooth ride. I got to drive it for a little bit, too.

Today, Sunday, July 23, 2006, Church was good. Pastor Brandon spoke from I Corinthians 13. Love is patient. After church, Emily and I went out to lunch at China buffet with Pastor Dan and some of her friends. It was good. This afternoon, I went to Staples and bought a new 19 inch monitor and a 1 gig flash drive. The sales rep there was a former Bible Clubber and he recognized me, and helped me open up the monitor and plug it in to test for dead pixels or other problems. That was cool.

This evening, we had a meeting for the plans for the Spiedie Fest (a local celebration drawing people from all over the region). Our church sets up a booth and gives away fun prizes, paints faces, and my specialty, balloon animals.

Tomorrow, I go back to work, and I'm not very excited about it. The project I'm on has been delayed because of their meetings. All the main engineers were in France the week before last meeting with the French to pin down all the details. Then last week I was gone. So I have about two and half weeks left, and I'm afraid that I won't be able to finish or even wrap up the project that I'm on. If I leave it unfinished, I will be very upset and disappointed in myself, and I will not want to back to school. I didn't want to go back last year either, because I didn't get to finish the time with my swim kids. Oh well. I suppose I'll be ready when it comes time to leave.

Friday, July 14, 2006

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 15:51:12 GMT

Now, this is a cool piece of software.
Visual Thesaurus

Friday, June 30, 2006

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 13:20:22 GMT

So yeah, I don't know if you've heard it on the news or not, but if you've heard anything about Binghamton, NY being underwater, that's my hometown. We've had severe, record-setting flooding for the last two days. Wednesday, they sent us home from work early, it took me about five times as long to get home because I was on windy backroads up in the hills. Thursday, the Lockheed facility was closed. And now Friday, I'm back at work.

My new website, version 3 is released and posted, but I'm afraid it doesn't look too good in Internet Explorer. That dissappoints me because I know there are still plenty of people not on firefox. Oh well. I posted some pictures of the flooding that I took.

links!

Press Connects.com - My local newspaper - flood coverage + pictures
Evan's Website New and updated - The pegs applet is up, and new info includes pictures from freshman year, and pictures of the flood.
Get Firefox! It will make 90% of the web look better (but some 2% or so won't work)

So it seems like things are pretty crazy in most place from this storm. But God protects and my family is okay. Remember, He didn't make this world to last forever

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 21:57:03 GMT

I don't know... Ian's right, she's dissappeared from xanga and facebook...