Verse 1:
Creation’s groaning, lost their hope and feel they always closed in
Lots to cope with, on the ropes, wish they was in the open
This broken world is so dim, our souls are searching, groping
For one with hope to hold us close, and set goodness in motion
I remember growing up in Dallas, I thought me and my close kin
Was more than straight, our folks was great, not broke that paper flowed in
Not boasting man, just saying in my brain I didn’t know then
That all went wrong, and it just can’t go right like a broke pen
My mind was blind and cloaked in, but then that foolishness departed
I saw this thing’s an ocean, and we just tryna swim real far but
But can’t nobody float when we ain’t got boats or no fins
We need a hero to go in, cause our solutions don’t win
Education can’t fix it, more dough just leads to more sin
Medicine is temporary, government seems so thin
With all these weighty problems, that ain’t shrinking they just growing
Who’s adequate to save us, how about He knew no sin?

Hook:
Like a G5 yeah you rushed to rescue me
Took a cross in exchange for a throne to save me
You began the work and I know you’ll finish
And make all things right when you come back
Cause you’re my hero, you already saved the day
Cause you’re my hero, and I know you’re coming back for me

Verse 2:
Follow the steps bro, Adam sinned now we all dead so
We gotta sentence on our head like death row, everything is wrecked
All creation is a mess bro,
In the fullness of time, in steps the hero no red cloak, He’s Jesus
No flashing lights, glitz n glam, and no cameras
He came to serve needy folks, and point them to the answer
You see Him healing, feeding folks, and telling them the standard
Our most basic need is to be ransomed by Jesus
It has first place, yeah we separated in the worst ways
Even physically peep how the earth quakes
Separated socially, murder and the worst rapes
Even separated from ourselves, we in the worst state
It’s so major, that’s the reason that we need a Savior
Cause the root of needs is separation from Creator
Jesus came humbly to restore us to our maker
And later He’ll restore all that He made bruh, He’s Jesus

Verse 3:
God is not pleased man, it’s clear that His standards missed
The world is running rampant with, sin it’s an abandonment
Man is feeling stranded, feeling hopeless since his banishment
God is angry at the distortion and the mismanagement
Evil is at work, but don’t be thinking He can’t handle it
He promised He would do away with all of it, dismantle it
He’s put up with this damage in His world, but He’s promised us
That He’ll destroy all His enemies and then He’ll walk with us
New Heaven, new Earth that’s where all His sheep dwell
Cause Jesus succeeded in every part of life that we failed
Died the death we couldn’t die, paid our price with 3 nails
Began the work He promised, in the end we all will be well
Already beat our enemies and when His Kingdom’s realized
All those who oppose Him will see Jesus with some real eyes
Deliverance is offered us, the hero He is urging us
Salvation is exclusive to His people who have turned to trust

However! This blog still has a place in my heart. It’s been, I think, ten years since I first started it up; in those days I don’t think the word ‘blog’ had really caught on yet. I don’t even know if it was invented. I just called it the ‘updates’ section of my website. It was all hard-coded HTML in static files. Many people do still have blogs. It seems they typically post longer things to them, like essays or in-depth technical content. I would love to do that here, but we shall see. In the meantime, I have decided that once again I would like to start putting things on this site. I just finished upgrading WordPress from 2.1 to 2.9, which is rather a hefty jump, but one that went surprisingly smoothly. It seems to have lost all of my categories but… well, I think I can do without those.

Welcome back, me. It’s good to see you again.

This introduced a new problem. In the office we have a tunneled connection to one of our partner’s networks. You just spoof a few addresses in your hosts file and you can hop onto their servers. Neat, but it turns out that when I’m at home, I can’t get to those servers because our network admin has our VPN pretty well segregated from the rest of the network. But I did have access to a server inside the network which had access to everything else. Along comes the command:

ssh -D 8080 -N remote_hostname

This will set up a local SOCKS proxy on port 8080 connected through remote_hostname. Then you can configure your machine to use your local proxy and it will forward traffic through to the remote machine. Ingenious.

Anyway, so I’m running Windows in a virtual machine. It is NAT’d to my local machine. I have an SSH SOCKS proxy over a VPN connection to the network at work. Work has a VPN tunnel to the partner’s network. With a little hosts file mangling and binding the above proxy command to the NAT address of my local machine, I was able to browse websites on our partner’s network with surprising speed. I can’t really believe it worked. Talk about many layers of indirection.

I speak in many tongues to many men;
Argue with angels and I always win,
But I don’t know the first thing about love.
I prophesy and know all mysteries;
All hidden things are opened up to me,
But I don’t know the first thing about love.
I have the keys to open any door;
I give all of my possessions to the poor,
But I don’t know the first thing about love.
And moving mountains ain’t no thing to me;
I’ve faith enough to cast them to the sea,
But I don’t know the first thing about love.
But all other things shall fade away;
While love stands alone and still holds sway.
All other things shall fade away;
Into the ground into the grey.
I give my body up unto the flames;
And never once have I denied your name,
But I don’t know the first thing about love.
I don’t know the first thing about love.

My boy Cary mentioned Thrice to me the other day, and seeing as how I had a gift card to Best Buy, I picked up the second half of The Alchemy Index. Four CDs, each a different element, and each a different musical style. From what Cary says, Thrice used to be pretty much NTACs, but with this project they stepped it up. CD 3 is “Air”, and was strongly mediocre for the first two listens. However, CD 4, “Earth”, is quite good; there is a song called Moving Mountains, the lyrics to which are above. If it seems familiar, it should; it’s from 1 Corinthians 13. At the start of chapter 13, Paul has just finished berating the Corinthians for being concerned about the wrong things. They were at odds with each other because people had different talents and roles, and some were seen as better than others. But in chapter 13, Paul says, “Hey, okay, let me tell you about something that’s better than any gift or talent you can find. You can do all this great stuff, but if you don’t have love, it just doesn’t mean anything; you have no value if you don’t have love. And besides, love is the only thing that will outlast everything else.”

If you can’t stomach the highly produced sounds of rap, you might try hip-hop, which has a grittier, less polished sound. More snare drums and live instruments and fewer electronic beats.

• Storiez – Shai Linne (hip hop)
• 20/20 – Trip Lee (rap)
• Rebel – Lecrae (rap)
• Gulag Orkester – Beirut (polka-influenced brit pop? I have no idea)
• Thunder, Lightning, Strike – The Go! Team (cheer-influenced rock? Again, no idea)
• The Altar and the Door – Casting Crowns (alt rock – even three years ago I would have refused to listen to this band. crazy.)
• Better Late Than Never – Lange (classic techno, I guess. A compilation of a lot of artists)
• You Are Beautiful At All Times – Yppah (electronic breaks)

It is true that I do not often get to fill my pipe that full. But Apple has always had incredibly fast servers and they are often the only ones who can actually drive my download speed to its limit. I suspect they are using Akamai.

Really? Wow! That’s pretty crazy. Well, you know how life is, eh? Me? I’m great, thanks for asking. Same ol’ same ol’, you know that jazz. I guess my company launched a few weeks ago. Turns out we’re providing destination content on your print-at-home boarding pass. Tomorrow I’m going to meet with another airline to begin on-boarding them. Exciting!

As it turns out this is possible, however, it is not really documented in a convenient location. By UTSL, you can find that serializing an ActiveRecord object (either to_xml or to_json) can actually go to an arbitrary depth.

Let’s say you’ve got a model, Employee. This employee has_one :address, and also has_many :managers, Office Space-style. To dump these first level associations, you’ll use :include, like so:


employee.to_xml(:include => [:address, :managers])


Nifty. But the client you’re trying to write is actually an address list, and you’d like to include all of the managers’ addresses as well. The :include option can actually take a hash instead of an array, and this hash is full of all the same options you’d pass to to_xml at the top level.


employee.to_xml(:include => {:address, :managers => {:include => [:address]}})


Awesome, now the managers’ addresses will be serialized along with everything else. Just to demonstrate a few other options, let’s say that though the managers are all pointy-haired, the company has relabeled them as “friends” in an attempt to improve morale. So instead of the list containing a managers group, you want it to contain a friends group. The model is the same though, the managers aren’t really friends, they’re still managers. We’re just relabeling them:


employee.to_xml(:include => {:address => {}, :managers => {:root => 'friends', :include => [:address]}})


It’s worth noting that Rails is smart enough to singularize the root for each of the collection’s elements. So even though we’ve specified “friends” above, each element will be “friend”. This works for odd pluralizations, like “categories” to “category”. Thanks Rails!

There are a ton of other options for serialization, and they’re all pretty neat! This ability to specify options to sub-elements isn’t documented in an easily-accessible location (I couldn’t find it, anyway), and it’s pretty useful. So have fun.