In the future, one thing is certain.

Someone’s going to drive it.

Someone’s going to collect it.

Someone’s going to lie on it. Sit on it. Sleep on it.

Drink too much German beer on it.

Someone will sit in front row seats, here, here and here.

Someone will land it. Someone will save it. Someone will find it. Then get happily lost in it.

Someone will sleep five stars, someone will sleep under the stars.

Someone will ski down it, fly over it, and scream across it.

Beautiful things will still be made in the future. Someone is going to buy them.

Someone’s going to walk it. Someone is going to ride it.

And at the end of the day, someone’s going to watch it.

And there’s no reason why that someone can’t be you.

Since 1849, AMP has helped more Australians own their tomorrows.

Own tomorrow. AMP.

Emotive as it was, it is also, of course, absolute hogwash — GFC or no!

Someone once told this story:

A rich man once thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’

He decided, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’

But God said to the man, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’

You don’t own your tomorrow. It’s not even yours today. The Bible says there is one good kind of storing up to be done — I can “store up God’s word in my heart, that I might not sin against Him.” (Ps 119:11) — yet I still fail and need to fall upon His mercy.

The man who told that story was Jesus. (Luke 12:16–20) He promises peace and a greater security than all the riches of the world.

Own eternal life. Jesus.

We recently refreshed one of our core product websites, Equip Schools. It hits a fairly complex mix of schools, parents/carers and individual students and we spent a lot of time trying to best articulate how the programme speaks to the varied concerns of each of these groups.

The product has three curriculum-driven strands in the form of workshops, publications and software.

The software strand is certainly the most distinct of the three in terms of conventional expectations of life-skills / personal management programmes that schools already run — and we’re still coming to terms with the best way to articulate that within the website. We’ve developed a brief (16 minute) training DVD that accompanies the product — however, this is obviously too long for initial contact and, while being highly explanatory, doesn’t really articulate the thousands of hours of educational psychology research and student mentoring that inform the product as it stands today.

Distilling that down to a 10 minute package is a tall ask, but it’s also something near on the horizon as we seek to make this available to individuals beyond the school context.

The teachings of Jesus were clearly divisive in the Gospels and continue to be so today. Light illuminates darkness. Christ reveals sin.

He also pays for it. And is worth following. The unsweetened reality of the end of Luke 9 is at once immensely painful and wholly true.

Our speaker, David Ould, faithfully preached Jesus’ words without coating them in false comfort or apologising for their truth and goodness. The hard truth of the gospel is such that, though we find great joy in the King who pays sin’s great price, we wept and prayed for those who do not yet acknowledge Him.

We fail as much as any fallen, sinful people do. Pray for us that we would love like Jesus, which rightly includes declaring the reality of division as sin is exposed by the gospel.

What a realisation!

So often in our tabloid, syndicated-to-the-hilt, visually oriented, and, of course, commercially driven media the objective of “the public’s right to know” is utilised as an overriding justification for publication of content that, simply, is unnecessary for the public and unhelpful for those it concerns.

In the Bible, a king called David writes, “You love all words that devour, O deceitful tongue.” Words can wound, and information can cause pain — and so often our media will “love evil more than good, and lying more than speaking what is right.” (Also David, Psalm 52) The defense that it rates well is inadequate, yet it is enthralling to discover a genuine discussion of journalistic ethics that reflects biblical truth about speech.

God teaches that Christian people are to speak the truth in love, and that, whatever other abilities we may have been given by Him, if we don’t exercise those with love, we have nothing. Oh, that our press would operate on this basis — to do so would serve the “public interest” well!

This video goes some way to dispelling that myth. Some of the statistics appear hyperbolic or dubiously verified, and as with much content on YouTube it avoids any form of rigorous referencing, but enough of it is true that it stands regardless.

Our unverified account has never processed a single payment, and yet with the amount of ID they require for something as simple as a contact name change you could get a passport in some countries.

Business Contact Name Change
To process your name change request, you need to fax in additional information. Please provide a current photo identification and one of the other following documents:

• A copy of a valid photo identification showing your new name.
• Acceptable forms of photo identification are a driver’s license, passport or any other state or government issued photo identification.
• A copy of a recent utility bill showing your new name and address exactly as they appear on your PayPal account.
• A copy of a recent bank statement for the bank account listed on your PayPal account (if applicable).

Please include a letter on company stationery indicating the primary email address, current name, address and telephone number on the PayPal account, the reason for the name change, and the new business contact name.

So that we can process your request efficiently, please ensure that your documents are valid and legible. As always, any personal identification information that you submit to PayPal will remain secure and will never be transmitted to any third party.

PayPal have never had a rep as a particularly customer friendly organisation, but this isn’t even beneficial to them! With no transactions in the past and less documentation than this required for establishing a NEW account it doesn’t pose any credible threat so far as hijacked accounts/money laundering/whatever goes, and they need to spend time reviewing documents sent in a thoroughly nonstandard way. The bank account verification process is pretty good in terms of automation (albeit risky — you’re essentially giving PayPal license to do whatever with all funds in that account) — this is most certainly not.

Anyone have any good, low % fee or cost/transaction way of hooking into CBA’s Evolve system? The application doesn’t warrant us spending heaps setting it up just yet, and PayPal are good at making things way too risky and difficult. Grumble.

Tonight while driving me home, Josh and I stopped at Maccas and bought a chocolate sundae. He asked me whether there are McFlurries in China and I said yes. He was glad, and joked that this isn’t something he’d be willing to give up for Jesus. We laughed, because this isn’t true. We both would give up much more than McDonald’s icecreams for Jesus. I love this boy.

*ahem*

Well, that feels better. But I still need to write about it :(

Sydney’s covered in a dust storm this morning and everyone’s talking about it. It’s pretty funky coloured and unprecedented in recorded history. Tori says Thank God in her new blog (at least, that’s the blog’s focus :)) — others say more amusing things. Here’s a sample.

““UFO?” — my brother, “no, dust storm” — me. He looked upset.”

“[name] proudly welcomes you to Sydney Ranga Day. You can’t see us, but you know we’re out there.”

“[name] would hate to be holding a climate change deniers press conference in Sydney today.”

“Apparently you shouldnt go outside if u have asthma” [sic] — stating the obvious award

“[name] wonders if, due to global warming, jesus will return on a cloud of orange dust?”

“[name] is wondering how he got inside a sepia photo?!”

“[name] wants it to rain so she can make a mud pie on her car”

“Hey guys i had this big bag of red dust that i left outside, but how [sic] can’t find it. Would anyone know where it is?”

The blue in the image above is actually a deep red!

Accordingly, while the colours are totally out of whack, there are no other artifacts in the image. Normally this just looks weird — sometimes, in the case of logo variants, it looks plausible but utterly incorrect! My guess is they’re using an older version of PIL (we all know how much Google loves Python) prior to this March 2009 patch. Sounds like the same phenomenon.

Still, those people emailing CMYK JPGs has to be a little bit niche, so I’m not heaps hopeful of this getting fixed too soon! The main reason I care is because web interfaces are so much faster than retrieving large attachments from IMAP stores.

It’s only going to run for 24 hours, so realistically that particular activity would max out at $86,400 — but that’s pure profit, because there’s already a profit built into book sales. That’s assuming relatively modest sales of 8640 units — for a website with a reach peaking at just over 0.1% of the Internet’s daily users, I’m not sure if this is realistic or not. Still, Alexa reckons it’s the 1735th most popular website on the planet, so that’s got to count for something.

Oh, and remember it’s independantly published with royalties split between Munroe and the philanthropic backer — so, guessing it’s ~200 pages, and an initial run of 10,000, even an unCorporation like breadpig ought to be able to make, if you’ll pardon the pun, some dough (groan) from the $18 list price.

At any rate, Munroe stands to make dramatically more from the mundane activity of book signing than possibly any other cartoonist in history. The moral of the story is do something you love, so long as it’s got tremendous merchandising potential ;-)

I wish this weren’t just Vista being special!

In Sydney, there is security in so many things. I trust in family, in friends, in personal and professional networks, in job security and my own abilities. I trust in credit cards, Internet providers, newspapers and mobile phones. All of these things come to nothing, dissolving in the face of studying a language so radically different from my own first language. Yet, were I to achieve any degree of comfortableness in this language, at least some of the things in which I falsely find security would, without sound reason, assume that position of trust in my life once more.

The one true thing to trust in is common to all languages, all people, and every place on earth. There’s just one sure and certain hope that is unfailing. When every thing and person on earth gives way, Jesus alone is our hope and stay. (So thankful to God for Tori’s reminder of that in the midst of my freaking out about all of this tonight — you are a wise and godly woman Tori!)

Business strategy, internet development, and the exciting insanity of startup work in an amazing industry with the best colleagues will transform into, near-exclusively, the well-trodden path of laborious language study, learning through humbling failure and the necessity of constant correction by even the closest of friends. Yet language learning opens doors, communicates truths, and, similarly to the insanity of startups, is spurred along by necessity and an urgent need for improvement.

For my part, I’m learning to trust God more and having the false objects of my hope called out in front of me by even the suggestion of having to leave them behind. It’s funny, because I thought I’d thought about this — I guess as things become concrete problems get harder to ignore! Strangely, the things I had thought will be difficult to let go and live without — a car, a great IT setup, books, purchasing power due to constrained exchange budget, etc. — hadn’t even come up in my mind yet (though they may later).

Perhaps the issue for me is less materialism, as I had thought, and more pride and an overdependence on the things that don’t satisfy and give life to the full! The absurdity of this situation is perhaps best encapsulated in the observation that I am torn at the spectacular breadth, depth and width of opportunities provided. It is ridiculous to think that I, such a mediocre student, should be given the chance to study at a top-5 university as well as the remarkably well-regarded University of Sydney. The ridiculousness of this is, perhaps, only surpassed by the fact that I then proceed to complain about it!

And both these privileges are like rubbish compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing the Lord Jesus Christ — this is the most absurd opportunity of all. To be loved by the Creator, whose creation (of which I am part) destroyed Him, though death could not hold Him down, such that death promises eternal life through Christ’s victory: it is beyond comprehension! 感谢主！

Here’s something that probably falls outside the bounds of what you’d think to run due diligence on: checking the venue an event is being hosted in has completed construction and is actually operational! Thankfully, the Darwin Convention Centre does, and Google is just a few months behind on the imaging.

It opened on July 1st and is part of a broader reinvigoration master plan for Darwin’s waterfront precinct. If you’ll be in Darwin between September 26–28 this year, check out the ACEL conference “Tipping Points” or get in touch.

Bizarre experience yesterday afternoon just before the sun went down at Sydney Uni — the photo above was one of a bunch I snapped with my phone, and it really doesn’t do it any justice.

As I paused to take a few photos, I realised that no fewer than 15 people were doing exactly the same thing!

I was reminded of the truth of Romans 1, which explains how God reveals himself to everyone in creation but how so many have turned to serve creation, not the creator. This doesn’t detract from the beauty or experience of creation at all — instead, it frames everything within the beauty of a God who is intimately involved with and deeply cares for the world He created and sustains. Thank God for sunsets.