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New Anglican Province: 12/03/2008

So this past Saturday I was going to write up a post about the diocese of Fort Worth voting to leave the Episcopal Church (the vote, by the way, was again overwhelming: 73-20 among clergy and 98-28 in the lay order). But then this bombshell arrived in my inbox:

It seems that +Iker wasn’t kidding about the new province being “up and running” by the start of next year. If everything goes according to plan, the Common Cause Partnership “will release to the public on the evening of Dec. 3 the draft constitution of an emerging Anglican Church in North America, formally subscribe to the Jerusalem Declaration of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) and affirm the GAFCON Statement on the Global Anglican Future at an evening worship celebration in suburban Chicago”.

Wow! I thought this day would never come! Bless the good people at Common Cause, GAFCON, and everyone else who made this great day happen!

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Steelers win… bizarrely

So yesterday the Pittsburgh Steelers defeated the San Diego Chargers at Heinz Field by the score of 11-10. The Steelers won by first getting a safety (2 points) and then scoring 3 field goals (9 points). It seems hard to believe, but a final score of 11-10 had never happened in the history of the NFL… until yesterday. That’s 12,837 professional football games, and never once was there a 11-10 score!

I haven’t seen the game yet, but I wonder how it actually happened. Large Benjamin threw for 308 yards (with no interceptions!) and Willie Parker ran for 115 yards… but still, the Steelers were unable to put it in the end zone… until the final play of the game, when Troy Polamalu picked up an errant lateral and returned it 12 yards for a touchdown. Except that the Chargers were called for an illegal forward pass. The officials huddled for several minutes, initially giving Pittsburgh the score, then taking the points off the board. After the game was over, referee Scott Green admitted that the TD should have counted. So… once again, the referees screwed over Troy Polamalu. This is getting old, folks!

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Two Random BBC Stories

The missus was on vacation last week, so I spent a lot of time with her and thus didn’t have time for this blog. So stuff has been piling up on my “virtual desk”. Here are two random stories I found on the BBC’s site that might be of interest to some people:

When you think of sharks, you probably think of lots of teeth, then dying in the worst way possible. After that, however, you probably think of documentaries. After all, “Shark Week” is one of the most popular weeks in the Discovery Channel’s programming schedule. But believe it or not, even with hours upon hours of shark footage in the can, no one had ever filmed a whale shark pooing… until now. Apparently whale shark poo is “as thick as your arm, gungy and smells disgusting”. No surprises there, I suppose. Scientists apparently collected the poo, so as to learn more about the diet of said sharks.

Ever heard of the Cavern Club? It’s a nightclub in Liverpool made famous by the fact that the Beatles played there. It’s still open after all these years – partly as a functioning club, and partly as a tourist attraction. The club apparently has bunch of bricks in the wall with the names of artists that played there over the years chiseled in. Only now, there’s one less brick, as the club has removed the brick bearing Gary Glitter’s name. Glitter, who initially gained infamy for taking a computer containing thousands of images of child pornography to a British computer repair shop, spent three years in a Vietnamese prison for sex crimes against young girls. The club’s owner, Bill Heckle, is a former history teacher, and although he does not condone what Glitter has done, he nevertheless felt so bad about taking the brick down that he put up a plaque describing what happened (record producer Jonathan King, who was also convicted of sex crimes, had his brick removed as well).

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There IS a God: Rooneys Keep Steelers

The four Rooney brothers have agreed to sell their shares in the Pittsburgh Steelers football team to their oldest brother Dan, current chairman of the team. This will give Dan (and his son, Art II, who is team president) an 80% share of the club, which will meet all NFL rules and regulations and keep the team within the Rooney family.

The Steelers began way back in 1933, when Art Rooney Sr. won $2,500 at the Saratoga Race Course in New York. He used his winnings to buy an NFL franchise for the city of Pittsburgh. The team was called the Pittsburgh Pirates, after the local MLB team Art loved as a child. In 1942, the team was renamed the Steelers after the city’s heritage in the steel industry. After decades of losing records, the Steelers finally began to show signs of life in the late 1960s, and later went on to become the “Team of the 1970s” by winning 4 Super Bowls in that decade.

When Art died back in 1988, he left 80% of the team to the each of his 5 sons, so that each one owned 16% of the franchise. This violates an NFL rule which states that one person must own a minimum of 30% of any team. Additionally, some of the Rooney boys owned racetracks and slot machines, which violates NFL rules about team owners having a stake in gambling businesses.

Continue reading “There IS a God: Rooneys Keep Steelers”

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Stand Firm interviews +Iker

Stand Firm has published a great interview with Jack Iker, the bishop of Fort Worth (for now). Iker, known as a cantankerous defender of Anglican orthodoxy, lays down the smack in this interview on a variety of issues, mostly to do with the founding of a new Anglican province in America. Here’s an excerpt:

Stand Firm: But surely Katharine Schori and the powers that be are not going to let the diocese of Fort Worth – which is not just a high-profile diocese, but one that hasn’t been shy about expressing its disagreements with the national church – surely they’re not going to just let you go without exhausting all of their canonical and legal options.

Bishop Iker: I fully expect that I’ll receive notification from the Presiding Bishop’s office, within days of our diocesan convention, that I’ve been inhibited. Of course by then it will be irrelevant, because I won’t be under the authority of the Episcopal Church. But they’ll play that out in the same that they did with Bishops Schofield and Duncan. What the “Remain Episcopal” people here are told by David Booth Beers – they’ve been to New York and met with him – is that I’ll be inhibited right after our convention, then I’ll have sixty days to recant, and if I don’t then I will be deposed at the next meeting of the House of Bishops, which is some time in March. After that, they’re planning on having the new organizing convention here in April, and probably get organized, elect a new standing committee, and a new provisional bishop.

Read the whole thing here.

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Cocteaus on OGWT

Here’s an awesome performance of the Cocteau Twins’ song “Lorelei” from the British show Old Grey Whistle Test:

Interesting fact: Old Grey Whistle Test’s budget was so tiny that the show couldn’t afford a proper set. So in many early episodes, show staff simply painted the back of an existing set black – a set that was used earlier that day, mind you – and hung an “Old Grey Whistle Test” sign on the wall!

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Time to Bench LB?

NFL head coaches hate benching starting quarterbacks. Starting quarterbacks usually have the most overall talent in their position on a team. And they say something about the head coach and his philosophy and decision-making skills. Benching a quarterback for reasons other than health means that you might not have made the “correct” decision the first time… or that “panic time” has set in. Neither option is good for a football team.

But so it is that the Steelers face this question this very week. Large Benjamin is not only not living up to his gigantic paycheck, he’s directly costing his team games. His 4 interceptions against the Giants cost the Steelers the game. The Colts rolled up 14 points off his interceptions.

But perhaps the best example comes from the Redskins game. The Steelers offense, which struggled mightily against the Redskins, roared instantly to life when an injury to Rothlisberger forced seasoned veteran Byron Leftwich to enter the game. Once Leftwich came in, the offense, which could barely get a first down in three quarters with Big Ben, suddenly “clicked”, and the Steelers almost instantly ran up 2 touchdowns.

So the word in the blogosphere is that fans (and certain sports writers) think that Ben should be benched for this week’s game against the Chargers. And you know what? I think they might be right. Maybe Ben’s shoulder is hurt much worse than we had been led to believe. Maybe he’s just in a slump. I don’t know. What I do know is that the Steelers defense has been playing their hearts out, only to have Large Benjamin throw the games away with stupid plays. So why not give Byron a chance? With the way he’s playing, there’s even talk of him looking for a starting job next year… so why not use him while we have him?

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Accessing this site in Chrome

If you attempt to surf to jimcofer.com with Google Chrome, you will probably get the following error message:

This webpage is not available.

The webpage at http://www.jimcofer.com/personal/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.

Error 320 (net::ERR_INVALID_RESPONSE): Unknown error.

This is caused by a known bug in Chrome.

Continue reading “Accessing this site in Chrome”

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Fixing Poor Flash Video Performance in Firefox

Just when I thought I had fixed my problem with Firefox, another one rears its ugly head!

I have a client that wants a Flash-based slideshow on their home page, so I downloaded and installed the demo of Adobe’s Flash CS4 to create it. The only problem was that Flash upgraded the web browser plug-ins on my system from Flash 9 to Flash 10 without telling me. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but Flash 10 breaks the “image upload tool” in WordPress (read all about it here), so upgrading to 10 is a no-go. And, as it turns out, Flash 10 (the program, not the plug-in) is way overkill for the simple slideshow thing I want to do, so I uninstalled Flash, then the Flash plug-ins, and rebooted my computer.

I was good to go… or so I thought. I reinstalled Flash 9 and everything was OK for a couple of days. But then anything to do with Flash ground to a complete halt on my box. For example, a YouTube video would drop frames like crazy. Remember the early days of Internet video, when everyone had RealPlayer installed so they could watch postage stamp-size videos that often “froze up” on slow dial-up connections? That’s exactly what a YouTube video looked like on my system: the audio was fine, but the video would play fine for the first few seconds, then freeze up, then slow down to about 1 frame every 5 seconds, then freeze, then continue on slowly again.

Another example: the audio player on this very site. If you click this link, you’ll be taken to a “SONGS I LOVE” post, which contains a small audio player embedded inside. If you click on the “play” button, the player should smoothly expand to reveal a progress bar for the song. On my system, clicking that button in Firefox would cause the bar to move to the right a few pixels and freeze, then move a few move pixels and freeze and so on, until the player finally opened all the way (the audio would sound just fine, however). If I opened the same post in Internet Explorer or Safari on this very same system, the player would expand smoothly as expected – only Firefox had a problem.

Continue reading “Fixing Poor Flash Video Performance in Firefox”

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Making Your Own Kubrick Header

I’ve been using WordPress for around 18 months now, and I really like it. Unlike old-school “manual” solutions like FrontPage and Dreamweaver, the WordPress platform makes it easy for me to simply publish the stories and information I want to get out.

I’ve toyed with several WordPress themes during this time. I’ve downloaded and played with them late at night when few people go to my site. I’ve even liked a few well enough that I’ve used them for a few days here and there. But the fact of the matter is that I’ve never found a theme I like more than Kubrick, the default WordPress theme. It’s simple and elegant, and unlike many third-party themes, everything in it “just works”.

That doesn’t mean, however, that I’ve stuck with the original kubrickheader.jpg file. By default, Kubrick uses a boring blue box at the top the screen. Early on I replaced it with the cover of Madonna’s Ray of Light album. After a while, I changed it to a picture of Ian Curtis. And just in the past few days I changed it again to an awesome picture of Don Draper (from a Mad Men wallpaper I found on AMC’s site).

You can easily make your own Kubrick header files. All you need is Adobe Photoshop and a copy of the default kubrickheader.jpg file. Although I could easily type up a quick list of instructions, I think it just might be easier to show you. Here is a link to my very first screencast. I’ve never made one before (at least, not in the past 10 years), so please be gentle:

http://www.jimcofer.com/personal/screencasts/kubrick/kubrick.htm