A fabulous fantasy adventure

By Darkness Hid by Jill Williamson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Jill Williamson has crafted a deeply interesting storyworld with a rich culture. The kingdom of Er'Rets is fraught with internal conflicts, as nobles jockey for positions of power. Achan, a mistreated slave, is drawn into the country's power struggles when he's enlisted as a squire. Meanwhile, Vrell, the daughter of a duchess, masquerades as a slave to evade an unwelcome royal suitor.

The characters in this story are engaging and well-drawn. Williamson understands young people, and wonderfully captures the fickleness of young attractions, as Achan's heart wavers between his childhood sweetheart and a lovely young noblewoman. I found myself rooting for them in their struggles as the fabric of their culture shifts around them.

I'm sorry I didn't read this book sooner. But at least I was able to get Books 2 and 3 of this series even while I was still working on Book 1. I finished Book 1 while sitting in the Memphis airport waiting for my connecting flight home from the ACFW conference. I wrote this review. Then I started Book 2, which the author kindly signed for me during the conference. I love this story, and look forward to spending more time with Achan and Vrell and their knightly comrades.

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Trade Center cross is not about religion

Photo by Samuel Li

When this story first appeared on Facebook, my debunker's alarm went off. The story is so outrageous, it defies belief. Atheists had sued to prevent an I-beam cross from the World Trade Center site from being displayed at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

Outrageous, but true.

An ABC news story quotes Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, as saying: "It just so happens that the WTC was made out of T-joints and they found a T-joint. They put it in the church, kept in the church for years, prayed over it, blessed it. You don't get to do that just in the coincidence that your icon looks like a T-joint."

Why not?

Silverman described what actually happened. The cross was found at the site on Sept. 13 by Frank Silecchia, a New York City Fire Department worker. He found comfort in the sight of that T-joint, as did many others.

Silverman and his comrades seem to believe that freedom of religion, which includes the freedom to abstain from religion, requires the removal of all signs of religion from public life. This is patently foolish. In a country where we are guaranteed not only the freedom of religion but also the freedom of expression, those who find comfort in the shape of a T-joint have the right to express their faith and the right to have the evidence of that expression entered in the nations' historical record.

Ultimately, then, the fight over this T-joint isn't about freedom of religion, or even freedom of speech. It's about history.

Jan Ramirez is the museum's chief curator. It is her responsibility -- and no one else's -- to decide which artifacts belong there and which don't. Silverman has no business telling her how to do her job. Ramirez must make her decisions based on the historical record.

A museum's purpose is to preserve memories and tell stories. Ramirez and her staff are tasked with ensuring that the museum records what happened on Sept. 11 and in the days that followed. That Silecchia found a T-joint, and that he and others found it meaningful, is part of the World Trade Center story and deserves to be told.

Print to PDF provides Instapaper to GoodReader link

Instapaper's clean display

I love Instapaper. It's a simple service that makes reading websites much easier.

You know how junky some websites are -- I'm sorry to say my employer's is among them -- with multiple columns and ads and gadgets blinking for your attention. Add the propensity of web designers to use gray text, and it means a lot of web pages are hard to read.

Instapaper solves this problem, along with that of "this looks like a great article, but I don't have time to read it right now." Install the Instapaper bookmarklet on your browser's toolbar, and you can send those articles to your Instapaper account for reading later. You get just the article, in an easy-to read font with no surrounding distractions. I use the iPad app to read articles on my lunch break.

It's hard to complain about a simple service that does one thing really well. But the feature I long for in Instapaper is the ability to annotate. I like to highlight articles and write marginal notes.

Print to PDF is prepared
to export to other apps;
even its competition.

Figuring I couldn't be the only one who felt this way, I searched for an Instapaper annotation solution. I was 2.5 hours on the hunt before I found this thread, which offered two solutions. Then I had to pick.

Unfortunately, the only way to try most apps is to buy them. So, given the multiple accolades for Save2PDF for iPad, I bought that one. It's got more features, and got a good review from MacWorld.

I was disappointed. The PDFs it rendered were not attractive. For example, an article that appeared in Arial rendered in Courier once Save2PDF was done with it. Its user interface is nonintuitive, with inscrutable icons. And getting the PDFs out of the app and into GoodReader so I could annotate them? I can't figure out how to do that, other than e-mailing them to my desktop Mac and then syncing to GoodReader. Not an elegant solution.

So then I bought the newer, cheaper app that had fewer referrals. It does what I need it to much better. Print to PDF is a simple app that that does one thing really well. And it has a "Share" button that includes an "Open in…" command, and GoodReader appears in that list, along with iBooks, Dropbox, and Evernote. Perfect.

In GoodReader, I can
highlight all I want.

You might well ask why I don't just send the articles from Instapaper to Evernote and mark them up there. Well, sometimes I do. But Evernote, so far, lacks a highlight feature. So I use Evernote when I'm adding a lot of notes, and the PDF method when I'm making a lot of highlights.

The Internet offers a flood of information, and an increasing number of ways to manage the flood. How do you manage your flood?

US debt to income ratio is 667%

Freeze Frame Studio, Inc. — iStockphoto

I've seen this quote, supposedly from Dave Ramsey, making the rounds on Facebook:

If the US Government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year. They spend $75,000 a year, and are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing "big" spending cuts to reduce their spending to "only" $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget & debt, reduced to a level that we can understand. What I want to know is how they are somehow still AA+.

I've been unable to verify whether Ramsey actually said this: I looked on his website and could not find it. All the references I find online are out-of-context quotes. So the claxon on the the File 13-O-Meter sounded, and I started checking the numbers. Here's what I found:

The 2012 budget forecasts federal receipts of $2.174 trillion and outlays of $3.729 trillion. This is the proposed budget: The bipartisan commission formed as a result of last week's debt ceiling deal will presumably figure out how to close the $1.101 trillion deficit.

The national debt, meanwhile, is $14.5 trillion. But there's a number left out of the "Ramsey" equation: the gross domestic product, which is $15.81.

By comparison, in 2009, the most recent year for which I could find complete statistics, the U.S. median household income before taxes was $62,857, and average annual expenditures were $49,067.

An Associated Press analysis of a Federal Reserve report from about the same period shows average household debt of $114,434 and average household net worth of $455,173.

So let's see how this stacks up:

	Federal Government	"Ramsey" example	Average US Household
Income	$2.17 trillion	$58,000	$62,857
Expenses	$3.73 trillion	$75,000	$49,067
Expense/ Income ratio	171.5%	129.3%	78.1%
Debt	$14.5 trillion	$327,000	$114,434
Debt/Income ratio	667%	564%	182%
Net worth	$15.81 trillion	--	$455,173
Debt/Worth ratio	91.7%	--	25.1%

What surprised me about these numbers is that the average household net worth was as high as that. Remember these numbers are from 2009: Two years into the recession, after the housing market collapse destroyed a lot of value by pushing home prices down.

So yes, American families are doing a better job of managing our money than the federal government is. But remember this is a democracy, and the people in Washington are only there because enough citizens voted for them. The only way to see real change is to contact your senators and representatives and tell them what you expect from them. And then, when they are up for re-election, hold them accountable for the job they have done. Or failed to do.

As Silver Refined: Learning to Embrace Life's Disappointments by Kay Arthur
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is one of those books I filled with Post-It notes and highlight marks. I filled a legal pad with notes. The insightful wisdom in this book helped me through a difficult time by getting my eyes off of me and my petty problems and onto God. Kay Arthur's teaching is firmly based in scripture and has been a major contributor to my maturity as a Christian.

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Letting the Spirit foster change

Paola Murias — stock.xchng

How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb?

What do you mean, change? We’ve always had those light bulbs!

Despite our willingness to joke about being the “Frozen Chosen,” we Presbyterians are stuck in our ways, and we don’t like change. But when you look back at the 2,000-year history of the church, it has been nothing but change.

The first Christians were Jews who followed Jesus’ way. Then the church changed as more Gentiles joined, and you can read in the New Testament how Peter and Paul led the church through those changes.

In the first century, women were leaders in the church: Priscilla, Junia, Phoebe. Then that changed, and it was a millennia and a half before we had female church leaders again.

The Gospel is given to us as an inheritance, and as such, it must be passed on. But not in a dead, petrified way. The word of the lord is living and active, as is the Holy Spirit.

In the parable of the talents, the one who buries his talent, preserving it but not investing or earning interest on it, is scorned by his master.

In the same way, to pass down the faith unaltered and stagnant dishonors it. Faith directed by the Spirit should be re-thought, re-minted in each generation. The church reformed, always reforming.

Just don’t put in those spiral-ly fluorescent bulbs, and we’ll be fine.

SunRail off the shelf and on the way

After being shelved for a time while the governor decided whether it was worthy of his blessing, our local commuter train, SunRail, has finally been given permission to proceed. It was a bit iffy for a while there, despite lots of local support, because of course the governor already axed one local rail project. I was surprised to see a story about our little commuter train in the New York Times.

Comments on the article, though, reveal a common misconception about Orlando. Even the author of the article notes about SunRail, "It will not link to the Orlando airport or Disney World, among the region’s biggest traffic generators." A number of commenters (from everywhere, it seems, but Orlando) proclaim their shock that SunRail doesn't connect to the airport or Disney, and declare it therefore useless. Such comments reveal a lack of understanding of our geography and of the purpose of SunRail.

Tourists visit "Orlando" by flying into the airport (which is as far south and east as you can go and still be in the city limits) and then leaving the city limits and going waaaaaay south and west to WDW. They rarely come downtown. SunRail was never meant to serve them. A rail line serving tourists would run from the airport to International Drive, the convention center, Universal Studios, and then waaaaaay the heck down to WDW. And it would be of little use to most people who live here.

Most locals seldom visit WDW. But we commute to work five times a week. Many are stuck on the Interstate 4 parking lot at the beginning and end of every workday. They are the people SunRail is meant to serve. SunRail is meant to alleviate that I-4 traffic, most of which is caused by people driving from the suburbs in the north (Winter Park, Seminole and Volusia counties) to downtown. That's why plans call for building the northern part of the line first -- that's where most of the bedroom communities are.

One local commenter notes that right now, Central Floridians can't leave their cars home. There are no other options. It's true. I once looked into talking the bus to work, and found multiple problems:

Inconvenience: The bus route in my neighborhood was eliminated because of budget cuts, so I'd have to walk 1.8 miles to the closest stop, take the bus downtown, and walk 0.3 miles from the bus stop to the office. Walking more than 2 miles? In Florida? In the summer? By the time I got to work, I'd need a shower.

Cost: Bus fare is $2, one way. I drive an economical car and get about 29 miles to the gallon in the city. The trip from home to office is 9 miles. So even if gas were $6 a gallon, I'd still save money driving.

Time: This was the deal-killer for me. The walk to the bus stop would take about forty minutes. I'd spend half an hour on the bus. Then it's about a five-minute walk to the office. An hour and fifteen minutes for a commute that usually takes me 20-25 minutes by car.

I will ride SunRail, since it won't waste as much of my time as the bus. A station is planned for five minutes from my house, and another a short walk from my office.

Low projected ridership is a problem for SunRail. I don't know what the solution to the ridership problem is. But adding more lanes to I-4 -- on the false supposition that Central Floridians won't ever use a train -- is not a viable solution to the traffic problem.