I'm rarely shaken by a movie, but Requiem for a Dream was unforgettable. A window into the life of four junkies, it gave me a new appreciation for how much Hell can exist on earth.
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Random thought about Dwight's sermon today:
As he discussed Ephesian's 3:25-32, Dwight interjected something interesting. It seems Europe is being overrun by Muslims.
This brings-up the defining conflict of the early 21st century: Fundamentalist Islam versus the Secularist Europe and America.
What is the endgame here? Western civilization wants to assimilate the rest of the world (minus the Chinese/S.E. Asian block), but what's the Muslim game here? Western (especially European) thought is secular, and so can co-exist with Muslim nations. Muslim thought is more fundamentalist, so co-existence seems impossible.
I'm reminded of Frank Herbert's book, Dune , where the fundamentalist Fremen can overtake the empire because they control the essential resource--the Spice. This situation seems similar
I suppose the greatest juxaposition here is the Muslims, who refuse to assimilate, versus the Secularist Europeans, who stand for precisely nothing. Chr...
I'm struggling with this latest technical book I'm reading, J2EE Development without EJB
Basically, it's hard to digest, with lots of high-level enterprise construction pieces, but not much to hang it on. I've never built applications the way the author has for the past 5 years, so things he finds as a matter of course, I don't intuitively understand.
I'm blogging about it, basically so I can try to synthesize what I've read in the book so far.
Enterprise applications usually have three layers (or "tiers"):
At the bottom, there's the data, usually stored in high-performance relational databases like Oracle, SQL Server, or several open-source alternatives. More often than not, these systems can be legacy datastores that the business has used for years or decades. For instance, imagine the reservation system for an airline
At the top level, there's the interface to the user. Often, this is a website accessed via a regul...
Josh, take note: I finished a Dave Barry book, Boogers are my Beat
It's a bit of fluff, but militantly so: Barry sets us straight at the beginning that he sometimes does journalism, sometimes does reality, but most often prefers the hilariously mundane. His columns about his Miami-fried hide landing in Grank Lakes, North Dakota during January had me laughing for minutes at a time.
Still he can be serious: His essay about Flight 93 was worth the price of the book alone.
Looks like a long string of technical books for me from now on. :-(