Solomon Was Not An Abstract-Random: Why Proverbs Wanders

Solomon Was Not An Abstract-Random: Why Proverbs Wanders

A friend sent this post over to me and I'd recommend it to you if you're a parent or parent-to-be.

Discipling Your Kids Is More than Family Devotions

Verses [in Proverbs] extolling the diligent man and chiding the sluggard (12:11) are flanked by statements on caring for animals (12:10) and the danger of covetousness (12:12). Why such a meandering method of instruction? Because Solomon knew life rarely comes at us in carefully organized chunks. It's an example of patience right after a your son spills a cup of milk onto the newly mopped floor; it's a reminder to your child how desperately she needs Jesus immediately after throwing her doll at her brother in anger.

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Music Monday: Richard Hawley – Tonight The Streets Are Ours

If you haven’t seen Exit Through The Gift Shop, then you probably won’t know this song. If you have seen it, then you might remember this song that rolls at the closing credits. If you haven’t seen that documentary, do yourself a favor and watch it.

I don’t know exactly what makes me love this song so much, but it’s really a great tune. It has a little big of the Phil Spector vibe1 and just sounds like classic rock music. The Brit’s really do know how to write a good song.

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1. Without all the murder, of course. ↩

Hemingway – An Interesting Web App I Won’t Be Using

I received an email from my brother-in-law the other day telling me about Hemingway, a web app that highlights hard-to-read sentences, adverbs, complex words and sentences, as well as passive voice. It also has some some basic statistics on your text and a readability score.

While the overly-complex-sentence-highlighting features are interesting, they are not enough to entice me to start using Hemingway for a number of reasons.

1. I’m generally uninterested in web apps because typically there is no way to get text in or out aside from copy and paste. I write on my iPad and Mac, primarily, and I if I’m working on something, I want to be able to pull up the file with Alfred. I’m a sucker for the filesystem and this is what I hate about web apps. I understand that Hemingway isn’t trying to be this huge amazing text editor, but I find this to be the number one deal-breaker.
2. Except hard-to-read sentence highlighting, all of the features are already available in my favorite desktop text file reader, Marked 2. Marked 2 also has a great feature called Keyword Highlighting which is much more helpful for writing a blog. I use this all the time when writing.[1]
3. I like to pay for what I use and ensure that key parts of my workflow will stay around. Enter a desktop app. While it may eventually stop being updated or supported, you’re generally going to have more than a few weeks to export your data.

If the dudes who wrote Hemingway read this, I applaud the effort. However, I just won’t be a user.

This blog post displayed in Hemingway.

 

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1. Brett also makes a ton of other amazing things, including SearchLink, many of which are free. SearchLink saves me tons of time while writing my short little blogs.  ↩

Family Dinner

Families are definitely eating faster. According to a 2011 survey of 1,000 teens by the National Center for Substance Abuse at Columbia University, 32% of families spend 20 minutes or less eating dinner. That compares with 26% eating dinner at this pace in 2009, the prior survey year.

via Does It Count as a Family Dinner If It’s Over in Eight Minutes? – WSJ.com.

This strikes me as funny. Now that we have kids we cannot finish dinner in any less than 30 minutes.

A great reminder for parents like me.

Blessings Too Big

God is sovereign, and he has given you children that fuss and quarrel. If your heart is already bent out of shape, and the next kid that walks by is going to be a sinner in the hands of an angry god, then you’re well on your way to forfeiting the blessing God is trying to give you.

Music Monday: Sons of the Sea

Sons of the Sea is a collaboration between Brandon Boyd and Brendan O’Brien. You probably already know Brandon Boyd as the lead singer but you’re probably less familiar with Mr. O’Brien — well, at least by his name. Brendan has engineered and/or produced tons of the best albums of the last 25 years, including Pearl Jam’s Vs. and Vitalogy, Stone Temple Pilot’s Purple and Tiny Music…, and more recently Incubus’s If Not Now, When?. Those are some serious credentials.

What happens when you put those two together? In my opinion, a poppier version of Incubus. For some reason The Mrs. thinks Brandon sings in a different voice on it, but I think he sounds as great as he always does.

Some favorites: Untethered, Great Escape, Lady Black