Author: Vince

Spiritual Journey

The New Guy

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A new hire at Apple was announced today.

Given that Apple has over a hundred thousand employees, a new hire there usually doesn’t qualify as news. However, this one did. It wasn’t, of course, Apple who did the announcing, but the various media outlets who make a living from following Apple. Unlike most Apple “news,” which is typically a wild rumor in a very thin “it might be true!” wrapper, this news came straight from the horses mouth, i.e. from the new hire himself.

His name is Jonathan Zdziarski, and, although you can be forgiven for not recognizing (or being able to pronounce) his name, he is justifiably famous in the Apple universe, as he is perhaps the best and most well-known expert in iOS digital forensics and security.

Random

Kiss This Guy

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Long ago1 but still in this galaxy and not very far away at all, I read a humorous article in the Reader’s Digest.2 As our brains are sometimes wont to do, it stuck this article in the “permanent, never forget” section, along with the theme from Gilligan’s Island and the lyrics to all the Beatles songs. In the article, the author had occasional hearing issues which caused him to sometimes interject odd things (“And there’s no ketchup in Australia!”) into a conversation about John Donne’s poetry.

Many of us have a completely different kind of hearing problem. For example, we had a speaker at our church a few month ago.

Spiritual Journey

Losing Weight

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When my wife and I saw Arrival, she thought it was “ok” and I loved it.1 As we were discussing our respective views on the way home, she asked me why I loved it. Now, ordinarily, asking a man why he feels something is an exercise in futility. I, however, am very in touch with my feelings2 and had no trouble coming up with the answer.

Because it was a beautiful story, beautifully filmed, but most importantly, it had weight. Is love worth the pain? Would we make the same decisions if we knew those decisions would lead to tragedy?

Current Events / Spiritual Journey

Perspective

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As you may remember, our daughter and family live in Cambodia. She teaches in a Christian school there, and she recently had occasion to need some rice for a class project. She asked her teaching assistant, a native Khmer woman, to go buy her some rice. “Get the cheapest rice you can, I’m not going to cook it, just use it for class,” she said, as she gave the TA some money to buy it with.

The TA came back with the rice, but almost fell over herself apologizing. “I am so sorry, Mrs. Phifer, I could not get the cheap rice, I looked everywhere, I had to spend 1800 riel to get a kilogram1 of rice.” She was unhappy with having to spend that much of Ashley’s money, and she was expecting Ashley to be unhappy, too.

Movies

I Feel the Way I’ve Always Felt About You

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Let’s do a little experiment. Go read this column. It’ll only take a few minutes, I’ll wait…

What did you think — might that guy be a pretty good writer? Did you notice who wrote it? Dave Barry, the funniest man in America, the guy who put the booger in booger journalism, the man of a thousand names for a rock band (“Fugitive Squirrel and the Clearly Disturbed Beavers”), the man who wrote columns about setting pop-tarts on fire and setting Barbie’s on fire and North Dakota wanting to change its name (he got a sewage lift named after him for that one).

Movies

The Force Is Strong(er) With This One

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This is not a full-fledged review, just a slightly extended endorsement, for people who don’t need either.

Last year’s Force Awakens had anticipation levels higher than any in modern memory, including the ghost movie. That Movie That Shall Not Be Named didn’t have to not only extend the universe but overcome an abysmal trilogy that most Star Wars fans pretend don’t even exist; Force Awakens did. It mostly succeeded, but only by slavishly copying A New Hope to the point that I christened it A Newer Hope. (To all of those who’ve made a long list of excuses for why Abrams did it and how brilliant he is, I refer you to Alias seasons 3-5 or the last episode of Lost.)

Rogue One, on the other hand, is the movie Force Awakens should have been.