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Below is the prayer I wrote for my Dad’s wedding this past weekend:

Heavenly Father;
Thrice Holy Lord of the universe enthroned in splendor;
most righteous, most gracious, most merciful, most loving God:

We lift up our voices to you to give you praise and thanks. We thank you foremost for the love that you have shown the world in the work of Christ on the cross for those who place their faith in him. Your name be praised above all others throughout all the Earth.

We also have occasion to thank you today as we celebrate the love between my Dad—Roger—and Sherry—this wonderful woman you have brought into his life according to your good providence.

We ask your blessing upon this marriage. When they laugh in times of joy, may they give you praise. When they cry in times of distress, may they seek comfort from you. When they labor in the work that you have given them, may they find their hope and strength in you. When they hurt each other, may they have the courage to recognize and confess their fault, and may they have the grace to offer forgiveness just as you offer it to us.

Challenge and enable them to grow together in grace and godliness—to grow in love for each other, for you, and for others. May they help each other more fully develop the gifts that you have given them.

As they make vows today to love, cherish, and care for one another, and as they seek to fulfill those vows in the years to come, remind them that it is only in the power of Christ that they have hope to overcome sin and remain faithful to such promises.

Keep them forever in your love and care. We pray these things in the glorious name of your faithful son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Snow and ice have been falling. Schools are closed. It’s a snow day! Since I didn’t have to go into work, I felt it was a good opportunity to spend a little time working on a programming project for work that I’ve had on the back burner.

One of the things I have to do at work it post the Library’s monthly new acquisitions list. I used to just forward the Excel file produced by the Tech. Services department to the webmaster who would convert it to HTML and post it to the web site. Since the Seminary’s website transitioned to a Content Management System that gives me editing access, I got to take over the HTML conversion process. Much to my chagrin, however, I found out that the conversion process involves a lot of manual copying and pasting in Excel, using a formula to concatenate the various fields into the final product, and then a series of search-and-replaces to clean up special characters and blank lines. I had hoped that there was just a program that I could run the file through to format the data with the necessary HTML tags, so that’s what I set out to do.

I’ve long wanted an excuse to start learning PHP, and this seemed like a good problem to solve via a simple PHP web app, so I started Googling for example PHP code for processing tab-delimited text files, handling special characters, and receiving web form input. I also dusted off my copy of the very handy PHP Function Index application, which provides an interface for viewing, searching, and browsing PHP’s documentation. After a few false starts, struggling to understand some new functions, and debugging a few errors, my first PHP application, HTMLified Acquisitions List Generator, was done.

Now I have a simple web app where I can select a tab-delimited text file containing the acquisitions data in the proper order, and the application will spit out HTML code that I can simply paste into the “Recent Acquisitions” page.

Today I got another t-shirt from shirt.woot: “Say No To Scurvy”.

T-shirt design by fablefire, produced by Woot!

Yesterday I wore my new shirt from shirt.woot: “M.C. Escher: Space Planner for Hire”.

T-shirt design by tgentry, produced by Woot!

Cool, eh?

Tonight, prime-time broadcast TV was dominated by the presidential debate. The exception was the one channel that was running WWE Friday Night Smackdown. My question: Is there really any difference?

I’ll let you be the judge.