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More Technical Updates

I reorganized the photos of Nathan so they make more sense.  My old gallery (using the Coppermine software) had this strange structure where it insisted that photos could only exist in albums, and albums could only exist in categories.  It forced me to do things like put miscellaneous photos in a "Miscellaneous" photo.  You know how hard "miscellaneous" is to spell?  There's a reason people only write "misc."

Holy War

3. So
Moses spoke to the people, saying, "Arm from among you men for the
army, that they can be against Midian, and carry out the revenge of the
Lord against Midian.
  ג. וַיְדַבֵּר
מֹשֶׁה אֶל הָעָם לֵאמֹר הֵחָלְצוּ מֵאִתְּכֶם אֲנָשִׁים לַצָּבָא
וְיִהְיוּ עַל מִדְיָן לָתֵת נִקְמַת יְ־הֹוָ־ה בְּמִדְיָן:

I was preparing this week's bible portion for reading at the CW reenactment this weekend.  I was speaking with the chaplain at the last event and he invited me to do a reading at the Sunday church service.  I told him I'd like to do the reading in the original Hebrew and he agreed.  I was reading through the portion when I came across this section, in which God commands the Israelites to wage war against another nation.  This war has explicit religious overtones, and the army is commanded not by Joshua, the secular leader who usually leads the army (and will lead the entire nation after Moses dies), but by Pinhas, a religious leader.

The ethics of warfare is a debate that has raged since well before the Civil War.  The current debate--involving CIA hitmen--hinges on what is ethical during wartime (a question with which this bible portion concerns itself as well), but the bigger question is whether war is ever ethically justified.  The bible's answer is yes.

Convert Blackberry Videos

I have a kid but no camcorder (yet).  That leaves me with my Blackberry when I want to take videos.  Blackberry actually does this very well (considering it's a telephone), but it leaves me with odd .3pg files.  Not sure if anyone else in the world can view them, so I'd like to convert them to a more common format.  But I'm not a video whiz and I want something quick and easy.

The solution: WinFF.  Available for Windows and Linux.

Daddy in the Kitchen