Naples Daily News

I am currently in Naples Florida interviewing for a job at the Naples Daily News. Naples is what I would call a tropical paradise. It’s a bummer that there are no mountains for skiing or hiking, but it has its own beauty. Walking on the beach in shorts in March is pretty cool.

Sheepology Updates

I just finished updating the Sheepology demo with the latest code. New features include:

• fully function visual group tree editor
• email

The visual editor turned out to be a very good exercise in learning Flex. The editor is now fully functional. You can drag and drop groups onto each other to create parent/child relationships. Click on a connection to delete it. Click on the X in the upper right to delete a group. There is a button for creating new groups and a way to get back to the list view. Positioning is persistent. Changes made are immediately saved to the database. It is fully interactive.

After some thought, I concluded that this might be a useful tool for managing pages in a content management system as well and I may generalize it at some future point for that purpose.

The email system is rudimentary. You can send email to one or more individuals or to a group or a group and its subgroups. It uses TinyMCE for rich-text editing. It stores a history of any email sent. And automatically BCC’s the sender. I made a short detour from the visual group editor to make this happen because I thought it would be a necessity for any church wanting to use Sheepology in production.

The next thing I will be working on is some sort of reporting system as I think that will be critical. Other items on my list of future features are:

• inventory system
• a more sophisticated contact management system
• accounting
• integrated web content management
• on-line donations
• volunteer scheduling

I’m willing to takes suggestions at this point on what people would find most useful or necessary.

Sola Scriptura

I get in trouble in cycles. About 7 or 8 years ago I, through study, exited the Seventh-day Adventist church and entered the mainstream of protestant Christianity. This caused a major crisis in the Glass family. My spiritual steps go in cycles. I take a step and then settle into it for a while.

Over the last year or so I have been contemplating how to explain my thoughts on Sola Scriptura. It is not easy to explain. It is akin to trying to explain something in English to a person who only speaks Spanish. To a protestant it is as fundamental as gravity. It is so foundational to most protestant thought that protestant thought does not exist without it. It is the dividing line between protestantism and traditional Christianity.

The simple truth is that Sola Scriptura is a newfangled teaching. It was unknown to the Christians of the first century. It has only been around since Luther. It is not even supported by the scripture itself (a fatal flaw). So I was pleased to read a recent post by my favorite blogger Father Stephan. This post explains it better than I ever could.

What does this mean? It means that I can no longer in good conscience call myself protestant. What remains? The Roman Catholic West or the Orthodox East. That choice still lies ahead.

Upheaval

Having recently become unemployed, life is full of excitement. Thank God for the WARN act, which requires companies to pay employees for a full 2 months after announcing a company closure.

It looks very much like we will be relocating regardless of what job I take. For Sheepology that means development will be on hold for a couple months while we re-pack and relocate. Things are going to be very crazy around here for a while.