Journal of the Week

2/6/2025 How to make $1 in 5 years of web making. Funny but interesting. I haven't read it, just put it here for fun.

Came across this Christian (Red Pen Logic) response to The West Wing clip where Martin Sheen's character, the U.S. president giving Bible (or rather anti-Bible) lecturing an allegedly Christian woman for being to conservative on OT topics like selling one's daughter, working on sabbath, touching the unclean, planting different crops together, going linsey-woolsey. And I commented:

This 5 min video was painfully boring to listen to. Let me try, don't even need to be a Christian to solve these, like it's hard.
"I don't say homosexual is an abomination...the Bible does."
Me: Stop blaming the Bible.

"...what would a good price for her be?"
Me: Is this country really that poor?

"...obligated to put him to death for working on sabbath?"
Me: Who's sabbath?

"...can wearing gloves play footballs made of unclean dead pig skin?"
Me: Who's doing the laundry?

"...stone my brother for planting different crops side by side?"
Me: Maybe teach him about crops instead of stoning?

"..burn grandma for wearing two different threads garment"
Me: Maybe show her some compassion for poor fashion?

And about standing, there're tons of viral videos about asking a handicap to spare seat for pregnant ladies, you'll figure that one out, I'm sure you're clever enough.

2/5/2025 Into Ruby? Be a fan of someone like Victor Shepelev could be a good direction. 25 years as a developer had 20 years experience in Ruby. He also shares his experience in a video:

Beej's Guide to Git. I had another link to GIT/GitHub tutorial on my 4/4/2024 Journal entry, so this is a plus.

2/4/2025 Apparently I downloaded this from youtube two years ago (5/23/2023), watched it briefly, intended to re-watch it comprehensively, but didn't until now: Heated Debate on Pornography w/ Dennis Prager @PragerU, by Matt Fradd:

And here's my summary of it:

This is a critique on Dennis Prager on Jordan Peterson's Exodus series, when Prager disagreed with Jesus' statement: if one looks at a woman with lust he's already committed adultery in the heart. That is, Prager doesn't think adultery is a matter of the heart but of an actual organ that has nothing to do with the heart @3:00. [Here lies the Jewish problem, that they believe, like all other religion, that deed is greater than intention. This lack of distinguishing unwilling deed from true deed by accusing lack of deed from true intention is their downfall. True intention will always create true deed, it should be a given, otherwise the intention is problematic, not the deed. Christianity is the only one that speaks of the theology of motives, and not running away from motives with excuses.]

@5:30 Fradd tried to respond to that with Aristotle's 4 level of virtuous to vicious man in Nicomachean Ethics. Summarized from Google AI below:

  • Virtuous: The highest level, representing someone who consistently acts with moral virtue and finds doing good to be natural. 
  • Continent: Someone who knows the right thing to do but must struggle against their desires to do it. 
  • Incontinent: Someone who knows the right thing to do but gives in to their desires and acts immorally. 
  • Vicious: The lowest level, representing someone who has developed bad habits and finds it easy to act immorally. 

@7:00 the distinguishing of lust and sexual desire is mentioned. I think it's semantics here, ἐπιθυμέω epithumeō can be good desire and also bad coveting. For Fradd, lust = porn, desiring the perversion, not just desire. Not what Jesus meant anyway. I think Prager gets points here for not playing that kind of word game between desire and lust. I believe Jesus was referring to sexual desire with ἐπιθυμέω or lust. Only the Lordship focus can cure this. The Catholics find the cure in will power instead.

@19:00 The real elephant in the room that they seemed to miss was is how is the aesthetic of human body porn or not porn. Fradd doesn't seem to understand aesthetic of God, he needs a causality to explain everything. A Catholic thinking.

@25:50 They both erroneously labeled Protestantism as no understanding of gradation of sin. Of course, there are some faction of Christians who fail on this, but this is not Protestantism.

@31:17 Prager's definition of objectification is simply grammatic, while Fradd's is inferiorization. Hence, their confusion with each other.

@32:30 This is interesting when Prager brought up the Jewish philosophy of "It is more virtuous for a person to be tempted and not sin, than a person to not be tempted and thus not sin". This shows the Jewish mind on behavior is better than motive. Christianity turns this around. Thus a mere contract is not enough, because the heart behind the contract matters. If it's just by smart contracts without motives, then no wonder why the Jews are such a popularity in law firms. Fradd definitely touched on motives, as a Christian that he is, unlike Prager the Jew, in calling out a thought as evil or not: @34:00 "You didn't do evil if you thought evil...I won't call a fantasy evil". However, I think Fradd, as a Catholic, would struggle with a form of legalism in judging what is indicated as sinful motives, i.e. a person reading Playboy for lust or for aesthetic, not that I'm saying Playboy is good, just that when it comes to motive of someone dabbling in the nudes, it is complicated from Michelangelo to Hugh Hefner.

In this debate, I think it's a win for Prager, though I disagree with him. The winner I judged here upon the level of understanding and IQ in the matter. Fradd couldn't respond to Prager's challenges on multiple occasions and had to somehow switch topics to get away from the defeat (i.e. @36:00 when challenged with Prager's case of a man masturbating (a no no for Catholics apparently) because of his handicapped wife, Fradd would switch topic to women being sexually abused in the world - probably intending to show that had the industry of porn be abolished, that man wouldn't need to masturbate - if that is what Fradd was doing, then it's a very bad logical train of thought. Another example @39:18 Is a lingerie model losing her dignity? Fradd obvious just answered yes but instead of debating why yes and Prager obviously would object, Fradd quickly side tracked again to let's talk about gradations of sin, which again Prager had to play along and say he had no issues on those off topic subjects Fradd kept wasting time on).

@37:30 I think Fradd also confuses evil with curse. i.e. "A man born blind is natural evil", I would call it curse. Evil is something actively against God's glory. Curse is the condition of the victim from the sovereignty of the agent.

Fradd cut the last part to get viewer subscription when he asked "Why isn't the Rabbi who said a husband and wife can do absolutely anything sexually in a bedroom, oppose to pornography?" I think I could answer for Prager easily: Because porn is not made/done in a marriage much less in a marriage bed. This shows that Fradd couldn't really follow the genius of Prager well enough, so he kept diverging. While Prager was able to pin things down with Fradd better. In the end, it's a win for Prager in the debate, but I obviously lean closer to Fradd's camp rather than Prager's, because everyone would essentially agree that motive matters, but Prager just doesn't want to really care about it.

2/3/2025 A good way to look into how GPS location is collected from apps.

2/1/2025 Flat tire again. This time right after I picked up Nadia from work at 12:26AM. I believe the metal shrapnel (rather huge) was located at the traffic light junction of Bordentown Ave. & S. Pine Ave. as that's when I started hearing rocking sound from the tire. It's the back tire behind the driver (Rear Left tire). I'll have to either do a spare tire replacement tomorrow morning or perhaps I could even attempt replacing it with used tire on the rim. I think we have at least one used tire stored in the shed. I'll find out in the morning.

I noticed that pastor Chris has a remarkable resemblance to American actor Charlie Day.

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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) Myth and Legend

Certainly a great Russian Romantic Period composer with piano (3 Piano Concertos), violin (1 Violin Concerto), 6 symphonies, 4 orchestral suites and ballets (1. Nutcracker, 2. Swan Lake, 3. Sleeping Beauty). His famous operas were: Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin and Queen of Spades.

Also one whom many like to label as homosexual without much concrete evidence: All they have were his depression, failed marriage (with Antonina Miliukova, his student, threatening suicide for his love) and how Russian was against LGBTQ+. His letters to his brother, Modest, about how beautiful (angelic, tempting delightful young creature, attractive bait, stunning beauty, etc.) some men were. None of these are enough to prove anything. They would probably call King David gay for his relationship with Jonathan, son of King Saul.

Starting piano lessons at 5. Went into law school (Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg) because of parents. Peter studied under Anton Rubinstein in St. Petersburg Conservatory.

Married Antonina Miliukova in 1877, who was 9 years younger than he. Never divorced but lots of drama. 14 years financed by wealthy, older widow, Nadezhda von Meck whom he never met in person as she insisted to keep relationship strictly through letters.

Died Nov 6 1893 in St. Petersburg.

Source of this summary from Classical Archives.

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NVIDIA Programming in CUDA

Here's a start: Free Tutorial from NVIDIA

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South Amboy Home Water Pressure Test in P.S.I.

Months ago I did this with the Roastove Water pressure measuring device. But I guess I failed to record it.

Here it is, for outdoor faucet water pressure:

Driveway side (South Side): 45 PSI

Backyard Garden side (North side): 40 PSI

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Accent Reduction

On this topic, it is not enough to recognize the accent one wishes to imitate/learn, but also recognize the obstacle in learning it from one's own native tongue. Thus, the teacher of accent reduction must also recognize the characteristics of both languages, that are the target language as well as the student's native language.

Posted in Art, Vocabularies | Leave a comment

Journal of the Week

1/24/2025 So it came a time for me to need to do a mailmerge again using MS Word. This time, I really had to try finding a means to do dynamic subject line in the emails. Adding a variable field in the subject line with each recipient's name respectively. Apparently, to have field(s) in mail merge subject line, along with other features such as adding respective attachments, CC, BCC, are not native to Microsoft Word MailMerge. For that, one needs to install some sort of addin and they aren't usually free. I follow this youtuber's suggestion and downloaded MergeTools:

This Merge Tools Add-in is not really free. It gives a 20 use trial. It's basically a dotm file to be saved to MS Word's startup folder, which allow you to have a new addon tool in the Word ribbon. Then one must make sure to save the Mailmerge (Important: Start MailMerge as Letters, not as Email Messages) by going to FILE>Save As, as a docx file before going to his Merge Tool addin.

I tried looking into its Macro VBA code but it's password protected. There are ways to hack it, which I'll have another private entry "How to Hack dotm VBA Password Protection" on (Why is he-author Doug Robbins, using Indonesian terms in his coding?!). He's certainly put a lot of work in it, but I think $30 is a bit steep for me. I would gladly pay no more than $5 :). The programmer also suggested an alternative way (using Power Automate) of doing this on his FAQ page with folks on Mac:

1/23/2025 7 well known papers in Computer Science history.

For the first time, I went to the city hall townhall meeting of South Amboy, because we received a letter notifying us for a chance to object to the construction of a 2-story house on 407 Prospect Street. It's interesting that they are open to the change of the house address to Hillcrest instead of Prospect. There's about 10 members of the committee and 15 in the audience.

01/22/2025 Javascript terminologies to be familiarized with in 2025

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Classic Debates on my Watch List

Michael Horton vs. Crystal Cathedral's Robert Schuller on Schuller: "The first Reformation erred in that it was God-centered, rather than man-centered"

Charles Hodge vs. James Thornwell on Thornwell: Mission Boards not to be prioritized.

Posted in Projects, Theologization | Leave a comment

Journal of the Week

1/17/2025 3 uses of the law. Learned from this Reformed Forum Live (1/17/2025) Youtube recording:

3 uses of the law is not to be confused (The Tree Uses of the Law by Keith A. Mathison) with the threefold division of the law: Moral, Civil and the ceremonial. The 3 uses are: political [lowest - civil harmony], pedagogical [to know we are sinners and points to the Gospel] and normative [highest - right relationship with God].

1/12/2025 Finally looking into this: Garage sales bought 50 cent. The tactile switch must have fallen out after purchase of a bendable reading LED light with possibly USB recharge capability, requiring 3x AAA batteries, because it was working fine when we bought it around last year from a yard sale. When i noticed the cover was loose that's when i also realized that must be a switch fallen off. This video demonstrates that this is still repairable if i found the right switch. So I'll need to somehow fashion/purchase a simple tactile switch/mechanism that can behave as the video below:

Interesting Group Texting with Eleni on church music again:
Eleni: Hi dear Nadia! It would have been so good to see you there! We missed our GCC family this today. sermon was excellent. I think you both would have gotten a lot out of it. Large congregation! Not sure you and Tim would have liked the music though although we thought it was great. They use music from sovereign Grace also but theirs is quite a bit louder than ours with more electronic equipment. Lord willing, we’ll see you at our church next Sunday.
Me: If they can stand for our broken English I'm sure i can also tolerate their low-quality pentecostal music.
Eleni: Quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
Me: Namaste
Eleni: Love you both! Have a blessed day!

This is the typical start of the promotion of Post-Modernism, that everything is relative. Relativism. When Eleni equate Quality with Beauty, that shows her ignorance to be taught, but rather subscribe to something someone like her should well know to stay away from, relativism.

Here's why I used these terms:

Pentecostal music: Many contemporary Christian music are based on Charismatic church music theology: Ya gotta find a music that appeal to the pop culture! That's how you get numbers! These churches don't usually last long if they were to maintain faithfulness to God, usually they die off a generation or two, because of qualitative mutation.

low quality: I purposely used a objective word. So this is a gotcha for Eleni, as she basically said: Quality to be a subjective thing. A clear exhibition of relativism. Even Nadia said that Quality is not like beauty. Not only so, the pop culture quote: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder is unbiblical, against verses such as Proverbs 15:3. Of course, with people like Eleni, I should dumb it down to using "good vs. bad" instead of low vs. high quality. So "bad music" instead of "low quality" music. Then she would really have to say "good and bad is in the eye of the beholder" if she was to stay consistent in her belief. That good can be bad, bad can be good. This would certainly be unlike her, of all people, to hold this woke belief, but because of her ignorance to be corrected, she fell to her own folly, and the ignorance opens the gateway for her to relativism, as much as she would deny it. But that is precisely the making of such heresy and foolishness/low IQ-ness.

Broken English comparison: Nadia loved this example. It was a spontaneous response on my part. This aptly analogized low quality music. Eleni should know better because she does correct my English from time to time and I am always grateful for that, not sure if she's aware of it, perhaps I should encourage her to continue. Broken English is a bad quality and it's not in the eye of the beholder that it can be a good, beautiful, high quality thing. One should not want to remain using broken English. But can bad English be used for art? I don't doubt that, but we would certainly call for precaution when using double negatives, imitating village grammars such as "We was here", etc. After all, that's how we sometimes get slangs. But proper English is still needed, just like proper music is required for worship, such that objective beauty exists, without discounting the subjectivity of arts. Objective beauty can be in proportion, balance, tonality, motive, etc. One key problem with CCM is that it cannot tell apart entertainment from giving praise. It conflates glorifying God with getting high on ecstasy trance. Eleni agreed with me that we must give God the best, the best quality. Which Christian wouldn't? However, now I can see that she confused and not able to see the difference of Giving God the Best from Giving God one's all. This also is unbiblical: Loving God with just heart and soul, but not mind (because they redefined mind to be just heart and soul).

Namaste: This is originally of Hindu culture/religion. Thus it carries pantheistic origin. It means bowing to your divinity. However, because of relativism, it can just simply mean "respecting the divine beauty in you" and thus, it can be stretched to become a Christian value from common grace. I'm not sure how much Eleni know of this word, but since she refused to be confronted by it, I think I have accomplished my point, in agreeing to disagree as there is no need to continue as she has clearly reached the capacity of her mentality on this issue. At least she didn't or was prevented by the logic I presented to rebut it like many Christian fundamentalists who would never allow such word to be passed around by Christians simply because it's Hinduism, it's relativism. But Eleni could not do so without jeopardizing her own "relativism" ideology which she used to defend herself. So would I use Namaste in public? Only against Christians who know better but contradict themselves with relativism because they don't wish to lose to an argument. It's a way to end it with nice sarcasm because they would never yield and admit their fault in this case, the more you push it, the worse they will become, and it's not right to cause them to deteriorate further.

Last but not least, is that not all CCM are bad. Just like not always my English is broken/bad. So the challenge I presented to Eleni is one on humility and she failed it. At least I admit my English is broken. If Eleni had wanted to say that Beauty is not always subjective, then she certainly had tried very hard in speaking against it.

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Free SSL (https) certificate via ZeroSSL

Since Nadia's https://solotempehnj.com/ website creation, I've been using ZeroSSL's free SSL certificate. They provide easy instruction for implementing their 90-day free certificate on GoDaddy. I am just not sure if their limit for 3 free certificates has unlimited renewals or not.

It's as easy as:

  1. Sign up free account on ZeroSSL, where you are allowed 3 such free 90-day certificates.
  2. Use one of the 3 methods to implement your domain, I chose DNS CNAME method: copy/paste data from your new ZeroSSL certification creation site to Godaddy's DNS record.
  3. Download The Certificate from ZeroSSL generated site, and unzip the zipped file.
  4. Follow ZeroSSL provided instruction for GoDaddy users to install (video instruction) the certificate on GoDaddy via its CPanel-> Security-> SSL/TLS. Upload certificate.crt file, copy/paste content of private.key, accordingly.
  5. ZeroSSL has a button to check if everything is installed properly. Once done, the browser will no longer gives that "not secure" warning for users upon site visit.
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Journal of the Week

1/11/2025 SIPBULETIN is the site and the free bulletin book that is distributed in the popular Indonesia Grocery Food store/shop in Philadelphia, Pendawa. One way for me to learn Indonesian and some local Indonesian news in my area.

1/10/2025 Salaries of Web Designers around the world as of today. Interesting are the lowest ones vs. highest: India $2k vs. US/Norway $40k & Switzerland $50k annual salaries for beginners in web design.

Today I finally got a chance to stop by the Apple store at the Menlo Park Mall, with the sole intention to schedule a Apple Vision Pro demo. 256GB for $3,500 is indeed a steep price (+$200 for doubling storage to 512GB, 1TB). However, for the price, the resolution is indeed superb, crystal clarity, for comparison, per eye resolutions:
Apple Vision Pro (micro-OLED): 3660 x 3200
Meta Quest 3 (LCD): 2064 x 2208
Meta Quest 2 (LCD): 1832 x 1920

Another two advanced features only Vision Pro has today is its spatial Computing and eye movement tracking. Spatial computing allows it to take 3D images and videos.

1/6/2025 Stephen Tong considers these as great reformed thinkers: Baptist's Augustus Hopkins Strong (in his systematic theology), Baptist's Bernard Ramm, Evangelical's Carl Henry.

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