the tindog coffeehouse

I’m exactly six months in to my year-long commitment to read through the Bible (well, six months plus a week). A couple of months ago, I posted a spreadsheet showing my progress. Below is the latest update. Since January, I’ve finished 1 Samuel and read more in Psalms. I’ve also completed 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, Hosea, Joel, Obadiah, Micah, and Malachi (I like that guy!). I’m currently making my way through 1 Chronicles and Isaiah. I haven’t made any more progress in the New Testament. According to the schedule, I won’t be back in the New Testament until late June.

I’m glad I’ve kept up, but to be honest, it isn’t always the funnest thing to do. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I don’t like reading the Old Testament (it is God’s Word after all). But the historical books can be a little, um, dry, and the prophetic books can be both confusing and rather grim. Unlike the New Testament, it’s hard to see how much of it really applies to our daily lives.

Continue reading…

Source.

Previously:
It’s the end of the Internet as we know it (and I feel fine)
Welcome to the future
Can you hear me now?
Vanity Fair’s history of the Internet

The Squirrel Liberation Front has apparently struck the Green Mountains of Vermont, “stalking” the residents of the sleepy shire of Bennington.

“This wasn’t an accident, this was an attack,” said Kevin McDonald of Bennington.

McDonald describes it as something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, except instead of birds…

“It kind of startled me and I whirled around to look and saw this furry thing on my back and it was a gray squirrel,” McDonald said.

While McDonald cleared snow from his front yard a gray squirrel jumped onto his back three separate times.

“It jumped at me again and got on my upper arm and started to claw and scratch and I threw it off again and it jumped at me again,” he said with a laugh.

No word yet on whether Ben & Jerry’s will name a new flavor of ice cream after the squirrel, but “Rabid Rodent Rum Raisin” does have a nice ring to it.

Previously:
Squirrel Uprising: The hunters become the hunted
Squirrel Uprising: Spies among us!
Squirrel Uprising: The latest updates

AT&T announced a few days ago that beginning May 2, it’ll be instituting Internet usage caps to all its broadband customers: 150 GB/month for DSL users and 250 GB/month for U-verse folks. Go over that, and you’ll be charged an extra 10 bucks per 50 GB of excess usage.

The evil empire claims that this change will only affect 2 percent of its users. Maybe so. Doing a quick estimate, I don’t think our household will be in danger of hitting the cap, at least not in the foreseeable future. I use about 80-90 GB from my computer, but that’s the bulk of our usage. We also stream Netflix movies a lot, but at about 1.5-2 GB per movie (SD, through the Wii), we would have to watch a ton of movies to put us in danger.

But that’s not the point, is it?

Continue reading…

Alright, boys and girls. It’s time once again to dust off your NCAA Tournament brackets and pretend to know who will win every single one of the next 67 college basketball games. Odds that you’ll get them all right? About 1 in, well, a lot.

But here’s what I came up with. As always, I highly recommend not taking any of my advice, as I’m almost certainly wrong about 90% of these games. Consider yourself warned.

Continue reading…

If it seems like just a few years ago that the Texas economy was booming, you’d be right. In fact, in 2006 Texas had a budget surplus of over $8 billion. So how is it that just five years later, we’re facing down the barrel of a $27 billion deficit?

Fort Worth Weekly explains that there are a few reasons. First came major changes to the state’s franchise tax in 2006 along with other taxes that were supposed to save local school districts about $7 billion in maintenance and operations taxes. However, the franchise tax didn’t bring in the revenue legislators expected it to.

Continue reading…