Anxiously Awaiting

I want to thank all of the people who came out to the show in Athens tonight!  We had a blast and we got some cool footage of the show.  I will be editing some of it into a little nugget of coolness and posting on my main site sometime soon.  Thanks to everyone who supported us for this gig.  It was awesome!

There are alot of people who think that Science is the antithesis of faith. For this reason many uninformed Christians often criticize and cut down the scientific advances that this interesting little creature called man has conjured. Whether they be scared of it, or simply have been taught to hate scientific reasoning, I really believe that an attitude like that hurts our cause as Believers in a couple of key areas.

For one point, hating science definately falls into the Jesus-Freak stereotype. It’s really hard to have to answer for what some of the forefathers (crusades..cough) and other believers in the church have done and this particular anti-gnositic attitude turns off 100% of the scientific nonbelievers that I know.

Going to a school where the majority (though not by much) of the student body are liberal and virtually all of them are scientists presents one’s faith with some interesting challenges. I have been called everything from a crazy man to nothing but a sheep who doesn’t know how to think for himself. Nevertheless, I really believe being educated in the sciences of man has a major advantage on the witness field and has allowed God to work in areas of my life that are otherwise untouched.

Most of the hardcore nonbelievers tend to be very logical people, and these are the toughest nuts to crack. But, Praise God, the Holy Spirit can crack any nut. Still, it’s interesting to me to discuss theories of the creation of the universe with non-believers. It’s also interesting how Christians have turned certain buzzwords into negative “sinful” terms. Two good examples of this are “Big Bang” and “Evolution.” Try this: The next time you are at your home church, go find an elder or just anyone that you don’t know too well and ask them their views on these two words. I know that in my home church I would most likely be flooded by well-meant but often overzealous comments about how neither are viable or even scientifically sound.

Ironically, both the theory of evolution (mostly microevolution and some aspects of darwinism) and the big bang are pretty viable. Before you start hate mailing me and praying for my soul to be truely saved, ponder for a moment this what if: What if God build the universe for potential? What if the Almighty Creator spun this world into existance by science? Would that in any way degrade God?

I don’t think so. In the same way that man has figured out how his insides work (and we obviously like Doctors) it’s possible that modern science has shed some light on how the Almighty breathed our little rock into existance. We are, after all, ingenius little creatures; beings built in God’s image. God did create the universe. Shouldn’t we have a little creativity in us too?

In the end, I realize that this argument doesn’t particularly matter to most people. But I have a heart for the overly educated and those that some churches deem unsavable. I have a heart for people like Paul.

Since there is so much discussion about this topic in the .NET development community I figure I should give my two cents.

Microsoft’s .NET framework has evolved into a complicated but elegant beast. It allows for the same solution to be written in two different languages by compiling everything down to a Common Language Runtime. This has its major advantages. For instance, one of the developers I am working on a project with tends towards VB.NET, whereas I am a staunch C# programmer. Using .NET and the CLR, we can get along.

So what are the differences between C# and VB on the .NET framework? Truthfully there aren’t many other than syntax. But, the differences I have noticed are significant in two crucial areas.

The biggest area where VB comes up short is shear speed of the application. Several sites have mentioned benchmarks of C# vs. VB code where C# marginally comes out the winner in the speed test (I plan to test this one myself). I don’t think this should be a surprise to anyone. C# also allows the use of “unsafe” code, which is basically C style pointers, and compiles a lot faster than VB.

In the end your choice will boil down to preference, but here are my reasons to use C# over VB. If you have worked with Java or C++, stick with C#. It will look remarkably familiar, and it has some nifty language attributes that are extremely useful. Though not as powerful as Java or as fast as C++, C# is still a strong and solid language. It forces programmers to adopt good safe style (Properties), and if you are using VS2005 it has the super cool UI builder that made VB famous.

Looks like my next semester at Gatech has been decided. I’m currently looking at 18 hours worth of yummy CS goodness:

Graduate classes in Lemon . If you think my schedule looks scary now, add an additional 3 hour research assistanceship. I like pain.

If you haven’t seen nor heard of it yet, head over to calendar.google.com and check out quite possibly the best application that google has designed yet! I have always shied away from calendar applications like Outlook and Thunderbird’s Lightning mainly because I knew I would never keep them up to date. But as my life gets more and more complicated the need for a scheduling mechanism has grown. In walks Google Calendar. Perfect.

I can now keep up with my day to day in addition to a band practice schedule, show dates, contract work deadlines, and a house church schedule (all on separate, shared calendars). The ability to share all of my calendars to other people (like sharing the band practice calendar to bandmates) is super convenient, and Google has finally filled the gap that Outlook and Thunderbird couldn’t. Since both are actualy client applications, there is no way to share calendars without being on the same exchange server. Toss in a beautiful Web 2.0 (AJAX) UI and bingo. Instant hit.

In short, at least favor google calendar a glance. Even if you are a hardcore outlook user, I garentee that you will be impressed. In addition, any calendar made in Google Calendar can be exported to iCal format. Which means, you can import them to Outlook or Lightning.

I want to work for Google.