Hungary is on my mind

September 22, 2006

I took this picture last March while visiting Budapest, Hungary . It is a memorial to the 1956 revolution against the Soviets in Hungary. This October marks the 50th anniversary of that failed revolution. I did a paper on the revolution when I was in college.

I find it ironic that as we approach the 50th anniversary of that event, Budapest is experiencing riots and protests. As I read the reports of what happened earlier this week, it reminded me of the accounts that I read about the first days of the 1956 revolution.

This week, people began demostrating after a tape was leaked in which the prime minister admitted to lying to the public in order to win the election last April. On Tuesday night, the protests became violent as uglier elements of the crowd stormed the state run television station and looted it. Cars were set on fire. There was also a protest in front of the socialist’s headquarters. Today the protesters are not met with tanks and bullets, as in 1956, but by water cannons and tear gas.

The current prime minister made comments at his socialists’ party retreat in May, just after being re-elected. He admitted that the party had not done anything in the government for the previous 4 years and that they had lied about the state of the economy and planned reforms. One of his comments was that, “We lied in the morning, we lied in the evening…” Supposely he made the comments as part of a speech to wake up the party to the economic situation that has been lied about for at least the past four years. A tape of this speech was leaked to the public on Sunday. The prime minister is claiming that his comments did not only include his party but the previous governments of the last 10-15 years.

From what I read, the demonstrations last night were peaceful but there are fears that they could turn violent again over the weekend. I think this current situation highlights the moral crisis in this country. It is a moral crisis with its roots in the communist system and the atheistic philosophies which provide no basis for morality.

One of the reasons that I continue to go back to Hungary is to address this issue with individuals as I explain how the God who created them wants to have a personal relationship with them. Only Christ can transform our corrupt hearts and lives. I just pray that Hungarians will find Christ in the midst of the current turmoil.

A Match.com for Families?

September 18, 2006

So your family does not have any close friends? Well now there is a solution for you. A new social networking website called Friends for Families is here. It is sort of a Match .com for families. All you have to do is pay a yearly fee, fill out a profile and begin looking for friends.

No, I am not being paid to plug this site. To be honest, all of what I said above is not meant to be taken seriously. I came across this site while I perused my RSS subscriptions. I found out about this site through TechCrunch. I just went to the homepage of the Friends of Family site. I have no intentions of trying this service.

I do find this interesting. I think most families are pretty cocooned in this day and age. I am not sure how most people my age find community. My community revolves around my church family. But at times I do not feel as connected as I would like to. The daily grind of just managing life with 2 now 3 kids does not leave me a lot of energy to be proactive about setting up time with other families. My wife and I have been a part of a small group with some other couples with small kids. That could be a challenge finding a babysitter from week to week. And now the group is splitting up because several of the families are relocating.

Interesting where this post went. I started out just mentioning a new social networking site and now I am pondering being involved in community. I think there is more I could say. But I will save that for another time.

GodSquad Reboot – Take 2

September 5, 2006

Last month I was working on a CSS Reboot of one of my sites, GodSquad.com. It is the only one of my sites that is still using tables for layout. A CSS Reboot is taking a HTML table based design and converting it into XHTML and CSS. Using CSS separates the content from the presentation. Using CSS has many advantages and I have long wanted to convert GodSquad over. The one sticking point is that one of the elements of my GodSquad design has presented some real challenges in converting in over to CSS. The has navigational elements that follow the shape of it. (See image on the left).

Today, I decided to try again using a different CSS strategy. I decided to try to do some absolute positioning to solve some of the problems I was having with my first try. IE6 was giving too much margin or padding to the design and was messing up the curve on the navigational elements. As I tried the absolute positioning today, I was able to solve that problem. I have one other problem of difference in rendering in browsers that I need to solve but I am optimistic. I had “thrown in the towel” but now I am picking it up and giving it another try.