Well, the last three months have been very busy in my life with everything from client work to my girlfriend and my anniversary (3 years). And some new technology has come into my life in the last week. I am in my Portfolio class this quarter, and as far as I can tell, should be graduating in December from the Illinois Institute of Art in Schaumburg. I have a big job opportunity on the horizon, and am loving freelance more than ever.

So on July 17th, Nicole and I celebrated our three year anniversary (of dating), and went to Lake Geneva the following weekend for a day at the beach, away from life, responsibilities, and all stress. It was really nice, and we had a ball. I want to go back as soon as possible, because the hometown atmosphere reminded me of home.

Of course, we have been working heavily on programming, including the Christian Life Church website, among other things. My coding has been pretty non-stop for the last three or four weeks, on all things from my portfolio to random, nonsensical applications and expressions of genius. Fun stuff, all in all.

And technology-wise, I refreshed my mobile line this week. I got a new phone on Tuesday (enV2 from LG), which is a nice little phone with a full QWERTY keyboard for text messaging, and today I purchased a new laptop and iPod touch (32 gb). The new laptop is the long awaited (for me, anyway) MacBook Air. I am actually typing on it right now. It is really a nice little portable computer, and is unbelievably lightweight. I bought the 64gb SSD (flash memory) version, and lemme just say that it is weird hearing nothing move inside this li’l machine. lol

I want to try and blog more, so we’ll see. Oh, if you haven’t see Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, go to Hulu and watch it! lol Later!

“22 years old? Wow, where has the time gone? Serious, I lost the time. Anyone have a watch?”

Yeah, that’s what I posted on my Facebook status today. Does anyone read my Facebook statuses? They can be rather entertaining, if I do say so myself. The other day I posted a lot of penguin related stuff. Anyone?

Silly people. lol Gosh, it’s my birthday, everyone! It’s a non-important, in-between birthday, though. Last you was my 21st, which meant that if I wasn’t a Christian, I could have gone out and forgotten it was my birthday by drinking everyone under the table. But I didn’t do that. Three years before that was my 18th, which meant that I could officially by cigarettes for myself and my friends, but I don’t smoke, never will, and will never support other people doing so. And two years before that I could get my license, but I didn’t get that until I out of high school.

However, 22 is a nothing birthday. It is just another tick-mark on my walking stick with some odd stories about penguins destroying the world in between. I mean, I do have a twin, so it is two’s 22’s, but that would only be really cool if it was our golden birthday, but we were born on the 25th, so it isn’t cool. My next important birthday is in three years, which is my quarter of a century mark, and my golden birthday. Until then, I choose not to age. Yup. No more b-days. :P

Okay, all! Last night showed me that I need to make a few changes around this site, and start using some more of the power stuff in Ministry(Starter). One thing you will now notice on the Blog/Theology and Home pages is shorter entry lengths. This was very easy to implement, and now three articles are displayed on the Home page, and twenty on the Blog/Theology pages.

I will be implementing some other things which will be relatively easy, and a few things that will be larger. A new layout is coming, but it will be version 4.5, not 5. I am simply updating the currently layout to more flexibly support what I want to accomplish with this blog. More will be coming over the following days and weeks.

Update

(Finally) [S]tyled the comment forms, and made some visual changes for the comments.

What is going on in America is becoming more and more clear to me, and I am feeling it quite heavily at my school. What is it that I speak of, you ask? The removal of Christ from our schools, government, and everything else. But, Jay, doesn’t the Bill of Rights declare separation of church and state? Isn’t the Constitution written to make sure that no religion is endorsed? No and yes. Follow me, and realize what I have realized. Stop now if you don’t want to find some major facts out about our nation and it’s faith-based foundation.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

We all know this line. But what does it mean? Self-evident means that the truth coming after is absolute, and validates itself. It is not in question. Pretty big statement for men to make.

“[T]hat all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” (emphasis added)

Did you catch that? It was pretty big. This is, of course, from the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. Did the Declaration make these rights and freedoms for the men under it? No, it simply insures that these “certain unalienable Rights” that are “endowed by [our] Creator” are preserved under this new government.

There is a quote on the wall of the Jefferson Memorial that reads, “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” This is actually paraphrased from the original quote, which reads:

“And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of people that these liberties are the gift of God?” (Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII , 1794)

We are getting dangerously close to that question in today’s America. People think that they have the freedom from religion (I’ve heard it time and time again, including in a few comments here), and that this is their right under the constitution of this nation. Is that true? I’ve heard it cited time and time again that the First Amendment declares separation of church and state. Does it? Let’s look:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof[...]”

This means that the government cannot establishing religion (the “Establishment Clause”) or prohibit free exercise (the “Free Exercise Clause”). Where does it say separation? It doesn’t, but it implies a separation of state and church. The difference is that the state cannot influence the church, prohibit the freedoms of the church, etc. Now I am not saying that the church can, therefore, influence the state, however, the state was founded under God.

The men that created the government, and these documents, founded our very nation under the God of the Bible, and under that ensured that each person under the government had the freedoms that God gave us. Now if that meant that Muslims would practice their faith here in America, fine. The founding fathers had no quarrel with that, so long as Christians had equal freedom.

What is happening today? The idea of a “moment of silence” has been basically banished from our school system and our businesses because of it’s religious nature, some states have tried to remove the name of God from the Pledge of Allegiance, people are hardly allowed to pray in schools today (especially the teachers), and these rights that were for everyone are starting to be removed from some. You see, we (people of faith) are not allowed to have a “moment of silence”, yet the homosexual community is allowed to have a whole “Day of Silence” in the name of their humanistic “religion”, and we cannot contest that. Evolution is allowed to be taught as absolute fact in the schools today, but Creation science and Intelligent Design (which I do not back) is not allowed to be mentioned in the curriculum. We are being told to shut up, and allow a state endorsed religion of humanism and atheism to be told.

When Jefferson pondered the security of our liberties when the Authority of God is removed, I believe he was right. Without the firm foundation of the Authority and Absolute Truth of the Most High, we are left in a relative pit of something other than truth and morality. Today, in a nation “under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all ,” Christianity is quickly becoming outlawed with the same laws that were put into place to protect us and the people using it against us. I will not be silent, will you?

When I thought that life was getting crazy, more freelance has come my way. Believe me, I am certainly not complaining, because more freelance means more money, but it does mean that my blogging has suffered due to my workload.

So what is coming from James Finley and 3onesix? Well, I am working on a brand new version of the popular iPhone Bible application from 3onesix. This new version is finally bringing Notes, and features a really great highlighting setup. No launch time has been determined as of yet.

Also, my personal freelance portfolio site is finally moving in the right direction and has a name (which anyone that knows me knows how important names are to me). The name is one Crimson Splash . A pre-launch site is being made to hold the eyes of people until I get the whole site done. This will be my first site that will be made completely in Flash, or at least the first that the world will see (quite a few have been made for classes.)

As for Ministry(Starter)? It is almost here. We have been making fixes to any bug we can find, adding small (but powerful) new functionality here and there, and getting all the core functionality done for the entire application. Needless to say, we are extremely busy with it.

I will try to get around here more to post updates, and certainly to announce anything big with my new Bible app, portfolio, and M(S). Have a nice day everyone!

So I have surprisingly got into interface design over the course of the last year. Sure, I was designing interfaces for small CMS stuff, and for websites before that, but I have found that I have a knack for designing web application interfaces. This is of course thanks to the Ministry(Starter) project that I am heading all the design for. I cannot wait to show off more of the interface and tools over the next couple months and discuss all the stuff that went into it all. There are so many little UI widgets, subtle graphical accents, and CSS tweaks that make for a great user experience! Up until the end of last year, only Tom and I have been able to actually use it, and even then it was just for testing and not actual websites. Now we have three or four sites running it, and are running it for our own websites (including this one). As a blogger, it is everything that I want and need. I will be hopefully posting more extensive interface design articles soon here and on 3onesix.com.

Update at 5:00pm Comments are now alive and working. Thank you, Tom!

Well, I have spent the last twenty minutes trying to get comments back up and running after a couple months of them being turned off, and have been unsuccessful. Hopefully I will have that back up and running tonight after talking to Tom to see how it is done with the new Ministry(Starter) build. lol

So I bought my iPod touch back in October, and hacked it a month or so later to get Notes, Maps, Email, and a few other apps that the iPhone had. Since I got it, it has become a big part of my daily routine. I jot down random notes and thoughts that come to my mind throughout the day, including programming, new theories about time and space, theology, and story concepts. I mark down all my events in my iPod to keep me on track with appointments, meetings, homework, and everything else. I check my email from my iPod, check my favorites sites from my iPod, and just about do anything from it that I would normally do from my laptop.

This I think is the future of PDA’s and mobile computing. The iPod touch is not just another MP3 player from Apple. It is a full-fledged mobile internet device. Now that they officially released Notes, Maps, Email (and two other apps that are escaping my mind right now) for iPod touch users, thousands of teenagers and 20-somethings are able to access the full, 100% real web from the palm of their hand. They are able to manage their lives from the coolest mobile computing device in years. They have the web, they have YouTube, they have their email, and much much more. Of course all of this is true for the iPhone too, but the iPod touch is for the audience that either doesn’t need a new phone, or cannot afford the extra monthly bills.

So now as a web developer, we have a new platform to hit, and as a Christian developer, I think that this is a very important platform for us to hit. Providing the Bible to these thousands of mobile users is at the forefront of my mind lately (along with millions of other thoughts and ideas), and I have been working on a few Javascript-based web apps for the Safari browser, but that isn’t enough. You see, for iPod touch users, there is plenty of time that we don’t have an internet connection. When we don’t, we obviously cannot access these web apps. So we need native applications for these things.

Well, next month, Apple is coming out with the official SDK (Software Developer’s Kit) to allow for just this, and I will be teaching myself Objective-C to be able to develop a full Bible app for the iPod touch/iPhone. I already have one going with the runtime (for hacked iPod’s/iPhones) called Jiggy, but I realize that once the official SDK comes, we need to use that to be official and to reach a wider audience. I have a copy of the whole New Testament from the ESV (using their API , I wrote a script to download it) and have a great little interface for it, but am just waiting for the official SDK to start the real app development.

This is the future of mobile technology, and with an audience so big (iPod touch and iPhone users), the Christian development community as a whole needs to make sure that we do not fall behind on yet another platform. Spread the Word throughout the world!

Okay, so today I have been programming all day on what I was designing last night. I have the foundations of a really awesome database management tool underway. Think phpMyAdmin, but 200% prettier and easier. I have been programming it all in PHP 5, and have been having a ball! Maybe two balls! No, I’ll take the second one back for later. lol

So I have two major sub-projects going now. I have a portfolio manager and a database manager. The portfolio manager is to allow me to very easily build a portfolio website, and manage the projects/pages with great ease. I needed something that could handle the info, and tried Ministry(Starter). To my disappointment, this was not a good option for my needs. I wasn’t making a blog, so why use a blog to create the site So, this is when creating a custom system comes in and, hence, *P*ortfolio *M*anagement *S*ystem.

So tomorrow will be much the same. A mix of design, development, programming, and experimentation. Also, Nathan Freeman and I will soon be starting his photography site. So lots of and lots of work. Later!

Ephesians 5:20: “Always give thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

So yesterday was Thanksgiving here in the United States, and every blogger has to post what they are thankful for. I guess that it is tradition or something. Out of all the blessing of this world, my first and foremost thanks goes to my Adonai , Jesus Christ, for not only loving me through all the bad moments of my life, but going to the cross and taking up my sins, forgiving me. Out of what I have here on the Earth, I would place them like this:

1. Family and friends, including my wonderful girlfriend that is always by my side. How can the people that I love most not be at the top of my list.

2. The gifts that our Creator gave me when it comes to computers, the Web, and programming. He has given me a mission and the tools to accomplish it. I cannot help but praise Him in all his glory for these gifts.

3. The blessing to have access to the technology that I do. So many don’t have the access that I do, and I am so thankful that I am blessed with this. This is not in gloating, but rather in praising. I wish to eventually be able to help those that are less fortunate, especially technologically.

4. The knowledge to strive for more knowledge when it comes to the Word and all that comes with it. God has shown me his knowledge through the Holy Spirit within the last two-ish years, and I have continued my hunger for more.

There are likely a million more things that I could easily list, but these are the biggest I can think of at the moment. As we transition out of November, we move into the Christmas season. This is my favorite season of all, so prepare for more articles and more fun around here. lol