Ed Stoffel

Why go to a Christian college? What are the reasons parents and students alike seek Christian education at the college level?

The Idea of a Christian College (ISBN# 0802802583) is a book I was told to read when I was accepted at Covenant College in the 1970s, and a revision of the book is still in circulation today. Author Arthur Holmes reviews the many reasons people have in mind, usually failing to grasp a Christian College's primary raison d'etre:

The educated Christian exercises critical judgment and manifests the ability to interpret and to evaluate information, particularly in the light of the Christian revelation. In a word, if [he] is to act creatively and to speak with cogency and clarity to the minds of her fellows, the educated Christian must be at home in the world of ideas and people.

It's all about having a Christian worldview while living in the real world.

I couldn't help noticing that so many blogs are displaying lots of 80 x 15 buttons for services that seem to send visitors. While some are essentially blog directories, a number of them are blog promotion tools where you can either visit blogs in exchange for receiving visits to yours, or pay for them to bring you visitors. So over the weekend, I signed up for four of these and tried them out... using the method of visiting other sites to earn credits which should result in having my blogs visited. During the sign up process, you list your own blog(s) address(es). Each of the services requires that you visit their site to begin your blog surfing, and do so inside of a timed frame, which requires that you stay on each visited site for a minimum time period, usually about 30 seconds.

Blog Explosion has the best interface, complete with the ability to bookmark favorite sites, voting sites good or bad, and reporting problem sites. I did quite a bit of blog surfing with their service, but when I checked my stats, I saw that they weren't sending any traffic to my blogs, and my blog list said they were all 'Waiting for Admin Approval'. With a little digging, I found news that Blog Explosion was sold, and that "site administration may be delayed." Blog Clicker credits pile up fast, and their site indicates they've sent me a lot of traffic in return, confirmed by my own server's traffic stats. Their interface has a way to 'Report a Site', but doesn't allow you to indicate why you're doing so. Blog Soldier seems to have a number of problems including lots of downed sites, junk financial sites and bugs on their own site. It doesn't take long surfing before they're feeding you their own blogs, too. When I clicked their 'Support' tab, I got "Error: Invalid License Key (Time Period Expired)" which I assume refers to some of the software they're using to run the site. I couldn't confirm any traffic sent specifically from them, though I have received mysterious traffic from "stumbleupon.com" which might be them. Blog Mad gave me the most surfing credits and quickly sent matching traffic to my blogs, according to their stats and confirmed by my own. I like that Blog Mad doesn't block my browser's task bar url display when I point to site links.

In the end, I spent hours surfing other blogs and received back very brief visits from other blog surfers, none of which stayed for over a minute. So besides driving up my webcounters, what good are they? As I reflect on the amount of time it took to setup and experiment with these four services, I believe there is a better way to create web traffic... a way I found to bring lasting visitors to all of my sites. By examining all of my blog traffic statistics, the visitors who come and stay are those who read the content. So it would be better for me to spend less time with these gimmicks that produce shallow results, and more time writing thoughtful content that visitors find of value.

Dennis Prager gets to the heart of the matter on why liberals are so worked up about global warming:

The Left is far more likely to revere, even worship, nature. A threat to the environment is regarded by many on the Left as a threat to what is most sacred to them, and therefore deemed to be the greatest threat humanity faces. -- Conservatives, more concerned with human evil, hold the very opposite view: Islamic terror is a far graver threat than global warming. -- One day, our grandchildren may ask us what we did when Islamic fascism threatened the free world. Some of us will say we were preoccupied with fighting that threat wherever possible; others will be able to say they fought carbon dioxide emissions. One of us will look bad.

 Source: Why liberals fear global warming far more..., Dennis Prager

When science gets in the way, people will now ignore it, or make it say what they want:

At the extreme, we end up with the idea that there are no facts and nothing is verifiable. "Customs and conventions are seen as the creations of human agents, actively negotiated and actively sustained, under the collective control of those who initially negotiate them.... Scientific knowledge is seen as customarily accepted belief." -- Most of the recent history of science theory is a series of attempts by one camp after another to demolish the basic principles of science and install a new order based on political and sociological collectivism. While early hard-core Marxist views on science were too crazy to gain support, various "New Marxists" came along with more subtle forms of subversion.

 Source: Climate consensus and the end of science, Terence Corcoran, Financial Post

An Emmy-seeking ad has appeared for Comedy Central that pokes fun at Katie Couric at CBS. Funny thing is that both Comedy Central and CBS are owned by Viacom. So they're joking in-house about Katie Couric, and now they're letting us in on it.

I called Embarq (Sprint became Embarq a week ago) to finally cancel my DSL service. Whadda ya know, they did the same thing Adelphia did a year ago... offered a "new lower price", which I didn't take because I've already got the cable internet reinstalled. When I called in April, they didn't mention any of this, but now, they're offering 3Mbps DSL for $34.95/mo., and 5Mbps for $44.95/mo. I cancelled anyway, and that required adjusting my phone service plan, which dropped from $60.95/mo. to $44.95/mo. I've noticed a trend. Whenever there are price increases, they slap them onto my bill immediately, but when there are price drops, they don't seem to remember to tell me about them unless I ask, especially when I talk to them about dropping service. Now why is that?

Congratulations to Brian and Rachel on their marriage Saturday. Rachel is my niece, the daughter of my sister Lisa.

I've gone back to Adelphia for high-speed internet service after a year of Sprint DSL. I had switched to Sprint for a better price and presumable better service, hoping that the speed wouldn't seem much slower. Unfortunately, none of my assumptions held true. It turns out that Adelphia has lowered their price for 4Mbps service to $42.95/mo. here, and have a special where it's cheaper for the first 3 months. As for better service, I found that Sprint DSL drops about as often as cable internet. As for speed, Sprint's 1.5Mbps was too painful, and I upgraded to 3Mbps almost immediately. I had to stay with Sprint DSL for a year to avoid a termination fee of $100, but I couldn't stand waiting till June 15th to switch back. So the DSL modem will just sit there until June 15th, when Sprint will get the bad news.

Jim Bublitz says he's reformed his iPod, using it to catch edifying podcasts and mp3 files from the web:

Ok, so maybe the Reformers didn't really own iPods... Pod Casting is a technology which automatically downloads your favorite radio programs or sermons, and deposits them onto your iPod for you. It saves you the step of going out on the internet to download your favorite programs on a regular basis. Just to give you an example of how this works, every day my computer downloads the latest John MacArthur MP3 for me. Then the next time I plug my iPod into my computer, it moves any new MacArthur MP3's out to my iPod for me. The only catch is, the website that you get your MP3's from has to support Pod Casting. More and more pastors, churches, and radio programs are starting to offer this however.

Jim has a list of the things on his iPod... similiar to my own list that's been on the right-column of my top page.

 Source: How To Buy and Reform Your MP3 Player, Old Truth