Monthly Archives: February 2010

The Christian Meaning of Life – A few thoughts

Posted on by Brad Heap

I just had an awesome Christian friend ask me what the meaning of this life was – as Christians.

This is how I replied (after a few minutes of pausing a thinking about it). And it is a little cliche but so what!

I think our Christian purpose in life is to be light houses, and city on the hills to the world, it is to live our lives as Christians in the world, but not of the world, so we are not isolated into little religious communities but we are interacting with other people on a day to day people, and when we interact those people we share bits of what we believe with them, we don’t force it down their throats, but through us doing good in a very dark and evil world we show what it really means to do god’s work.

Maybe tomorrow night I will expand on it a little more and include the scriptures that I have paraphrased as well.

AA Rewards Discounts on Public Eduction – Its Just Not Right!

Posted on by Brad Heap

I don’t normally bother to look at the spam that the AA sends out once a month but for some reason today I opened it.

A little bit down the page is this ad:

This is completely crazy that a government funded education institute is offering discounts to AA members. It just doesn’t seem right. In my opinion everyone should be paying the same for publicly education not given discounts for driving carbon polluting vehicles.

Now before someone screams that I did not check the fine print, here it is:

* ‘Qualifying Courses’ means each course made available to ‘Domestic Students’ for enrolment by the Polytechnic that is Government (EFTS) funded through the Polytechnic. For clarity, this excludes the ‘full fee’ and ‘trades training’ courses as defined by the Polytechnic and other courses that may already be subject to a special promotion as defined by the Polytechnic and at the Polytechnic’s discretion. For more information about qualifying courses call the Open Polytechnic on toll free 0508 650 200. Open Polytechnic’s $50.00 annual administration fee may apply.

I sure hope someone picks up on this. Most stupid thing I have seen in a long time.

BTW AA in NZ stands for Automobile Association (called AAA elsewhere), Not Alcoholics Anonymous

Save Me From Myself – Korn’s Brian Head Welch

Posted on by Brad Heap

Last night I finished reading one of the best books I have read in a long time. It is called “Save Me From Myself” and is written by Brian Head Welch formerly of the band Korn. The book is an autobiography of his life from childhood, through his drug fuelled years with Korn and his coming to Christ and becoming a Christian. I won’t give too much away about the story as it is a book that any young person should read.

The one bit that really got me from a Christian perspective was towards the end of the book where Welch describes some songs he wrote after coming to Christ:

After I’d been writing for a bit, God gave me another song called “It’s Time To See Religion Die.” To me, this song has a few different meanings. For one, it’s a song that encourages people to get out of this whole “Sunday Christian” mentality and into the world so God can use them to change the world, to help people understand that God does not live in buildings made by men (Acts 7:48). We are God’s building, because he dwells in us (1 Corinthians 3:16).

Upon reading this I grabbed my bible to check the verses mentioned in context. The full context of Acts 7:48 is from verse 48 through to verse 50, from the NIV:

However, the Most High does not live in houses made by men. As the prophet says: “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me? says the Lord. Or where will my resting place be? Has not my hand made all these things?”

The full context of 1 Corinthians 3:16 extends into verse 17 as well:

Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.

This commentary was something that I had always known but had forgotten about. It seems too often that we get caught up in thinking that God is at Church. When God is actually right with us, right now. And church is something made by man to come together as a body of believers to worship God. Church is not God and does not create God, but we can meet God at church, in exactly the same way we can on our owns anywhere else at any other time.

Welch then continues:

That’s not the only meaning to this song though. Also, this song is for all the people that have been hurt by religion. All of the man-made religion crap in this world has to die. Whenever it’s Christian man-made religion crap or some other man-made religion crap, it all has to die. It must grieve God’s heart when he sees Christians fighting about whose doctrine is right; he doesn’t see denominations, he sees one big glorious bride. When Christians argue about doctrinal issues, all he sees is carnal people acting like children. All that prideful, controlling religious crap is what drives young people away from churches, and it has to go. Much of the world’s population is under the age of eighteen, and we have to bring the love of Christ to them without all this controlling crap going on. Because, where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

I found this point quite interesting as well. I think it is important to be able to freely and frankly discuss your differences of points of view on doctrine but many times church groups take it way too far (catholic vs protestant for instance). And it does put people off. If we put as much effort into working with young people as we did discussing the finer points of some minor piece of doctrine how many more people would we save?

You can buy the book on Mighty Ape

Getting USB Browser Mice to work in Vista

Posted on by Brad Heap

I have had this issue with a number of mice and a number of different computers now. Some older USB mice will not work when you plug them into Windows Vista. What happens is a dialog appears saying installing software and then fails saying unknown device.

The fix for this as I just found out this morning is quite simple:

  • Click on start
  • Right click on computer
  • Select properties
  • On the left side of the dialog that comes up select device manager
  • Scroll down the list of devices to the known device
  • Right click and select Update Driver Software
  • Select chose from a list of drivers
  • Select Human Interface Device
  • Select HID compliant mouse
  • Click okay and the mouse should now work

Simple. And Windows had the drivers to make it work all along! Sometimes Windows does some really simple things wrong and as a result is just so frustrating. It is a mouse it should just work!

Little bird big city

Posted on by Brad Heap

I have now been in Sydney for 11 days and every night I have planned to blog about the first few days here and every day I have been too tired or too busy. Tonight I am in the too tired camp but have decided to force myself to give an update and get over and done with it.

I arrived in Sydney two Saturdays ago at 8.30 in the morning, after leaving Auckland at 7am (which meant a 3am get up time for the flight). We arrived into Sydney at the same time as about 10 other flights which meant it was chaos trying to get our bags and get through customs. In the end it took close to an hour and a half to get out and into the rental car hire queue. The rental car I got was a 2009 Toyota Corolla and by far the smoothest and nicest car I have ever driven.

The first few days in Sydney were spent getting my new flat/apartment set up. It is amazing how much money you can spend in just getting the basics – like food, cooking equipment, and basic furniture. In between all this chaos I also managed to do a few things that got me to see a bit of my new home these included:

  • Going to Opera in the Domain with a friend who I had not seen in 9 years.
  • Going to Hillsong Church
  • Going to Penrith – driving at a speed limit of 110kmh is a new experience.

The second part of my first week here was spent sorting out things like insurance and the like. The most interesting part of this was sorting out Medicare where I had to make a signed legal declaration that I had moved from NZ for good and was living in Australia for the next few years – the guy at the office didn’t seem to believe me even though I had all my uni forms with me! Thought I was some crazy kid on holiday. I also managed to get a cellphone and internet set up. After terrible customer service from Optus I went to Vodafone who set me up with this awesome mobile broadband USB stick which is faster than my old wired broadband in NZ. Although a much smaller data cap so I have to take care about how much data I use.

My second weekend in Sydney was spent having fun in the rain as some of the heaviest rainfall in years hit the city. On Saturday I went out to Bondi Junction shopping mall. Bondi Junction is massive. Imagine the Albany Mall and times it by 2 just for the ground floor, and then make it seven stories high. There is something like 450 shops in the mall. And you know what. I walked through the entire mall and only went into 2 of them! They were nearly all clothes shops – the last thing I need when I am trying to get set up for uni on a budget. On the Sunday I decided to look through town and found this most amazing hobby store in the QVB mall called Hobbyco.

Monday and today was spent at Uni. There is nothing that exciting to report here about my course – Mostly what I was expecting with a few minor hiccups around enrolment. What is amazing though is the size of the campus. Having come from Massey Albany with only around 6000 – 7000 students it is so weird to be on campus with close to 50,000. There is a sign at the front gate that welcomes the 9,000 new first year students! Almost twice the numbers of the entire Massey Albany campus.

The one thing that I will get sick of very quickly, and already am, is having to catch the bus to campus. I have not had to use public transport in years and while the Sydney transport network is far better than Auckland – I love the underground trains, the buses remain as noisy, as crowded, as bumpy, as slow, and as annoying as ever. Given that I have no plans, or money for a car for around a year I guess it is something that I am going to get used to – I just wish there was a train to campus rather than a bus!

P.S. I may have used to complain about the humidity during summer in Auckland but it is nothing compared to heat here. Last night was 25c overnight it makes it so hard to sleep!

Disgusting

Posted on by Brad Heap

The Herald, Frog Blog and others are all talking about the following video of an English Member of the European Parliament criticising Greenpeace.

We currently have the USA and the UK fighting a war on state sponsored terror and here we have a MEP encouraging it!

What the French did was completely wrong and defied international law and is something that no member of Greenpeace or New Zealander will ever forget.

Bipolar flatting

Posted on by Brad Heap

I have now been flatting by myself for a week. It is an interesting experience. So far I am enjoying most of it. The room/flat that I am in is probably close to half the size of my entire old flat that had 3 people living in it. It is so nice to be able to move around!

The one major downside to flatting by yourself though is you are the only one to blame for any mess! It particular I keep on getting grumpy that the toilet seat has been left up and that dishes have been left in the sink. I want someone to blame. I am in denial that I am the cause of the mess. But I can’t escape it. So I get grumpy at myself. It is weird. I swear I am going to create a sign on the toilet that says make sure the seat is put down after use or else… I will just have to work out what the punishment for the or else is… I wonder if the clean me can win over the lazy me.

Intelligence = Bipolar?

Posted on by Brad Heap

Very interesting article in New Scientist this week about a possible link between exam grades and becoming bipolar.

Straight-A students are more likely to develop bipolar disorder than their more mediocre peers, at least in Sweden, according to a new study of more than 700,000 former high-school students.

Within 15 years of sitting their final high-school exams, aged 15 and 16, at least 280 of the students were diagnosed with bipolar disorder. After taking into account their parents’ income and education – factors that are known to affect exam scores – the highest-achieving students were more than three times more likely to suffer from the mental illness than their average peers.

Male overachievers, meanwhile, developed the disease 4.4 times more often than their average male classmates.

The stereotype of the brilliant but tortured artist aside, some aspects of manic episodes could reflect increased intelligence, he says. “People who have a biological predisposition to bipolar disorder have advantages, I suppose you could call them, in that they’re able to think clearly, think fast and concentrate,” MacCabe says.

700,000 is a massive sample size so it should mean that the study is quite a good one. However, it is limited only to Sweden school students it would be interesting to see if these results were reflected elsewhere in both first world and third world countries. Could mental illness be a by-product of technological, sociological and the complexities of the modern world on the human brain?

Auckland with no working traffic lights

Posted on by Brad Heap

I am a few days behind in blogging this as I have around 400 blog posts to work through as I get back up to speed after 4 days with no internet.

The video below shows the intersection of Wellington and Union streets in central Auckland when the power was out a little over a week ago. It is impressive just how much better the traffic flows with no traffic lights:

Hat tip: Auckland Trains

I find this video particularly interesting as it mirrors the results of my honours level research which showed the traffic lights performed poorly compared to Give Way intersections or Roundabouts unless traffic was extremely congested. It is nice to see the results of a simulation also play out in real life.