Daily Archives: March 15, 2006

One Year Bible Blog: March 15th readings

Posted on by
1

One Year Bible Blog: March 15th readings

I have to admit that the Numbers reading for today strikes me as, well, odd. In yesterday’s reading, God grants permission for Balaam to go talk to Balak. Today He’s planning ambushes. That just doesn’t make sense. And then there’s the whole “talking donkey” thing. I half expect to see Shrek pop up tomorrow. ;)

To me, this whole story derives it’s meaning not as factual events, but as allegory. While I think it’s certainly possible that Balaam’s donkey literally spoke, it’s completely unimportant to me. I know this will upset my more literal-minded compatriots, but I think treating the Bible, especially the first five books, as history does it a disservice. More important to me is the message behind the story. And the message I’m taking away from this story is the danger of false pride. For all Balaam’s alleged power, insight, and influence, he was saved from a danger he didn’t even see by the lowliest of servants. Taking him off his “high horse” (or talking donkey, as the case may be)

Balaam thought he knew exactly what God wanted and didn’t want. It took a beast of burden to show him the error of his ways.

Of course, it would be the height of irony for me to say all of that, and then not be open to the very real possibility that I may be guilty of the exactly same thing. After all, I’m posting here, saying what I think God meant here. And I may be completely off base. I just hope my eyes will be open to my own ‘donkeys’ pointing out  my errors.

Share

BlogWatcher performance problems

Posted on by
Reply

Some of you may have noticed some rather severe performance problems with BlogWatcher over the past few days. Sorry about that.

I’ve put in some temporary measures that I think will help in the short term. A bit longer term, I’m looking into upgrading some of the software on the server, to see if that will help. And, of course, if the thing really catches on, such that my virtual host environment can’t handle the load any more, I may have to look at moving it to a new machine. But I couldn’t do that unless I were able to get revenue from it, some how. So that’s a long way down the road.

I have added one minor new feature, but I doubt that anyone reading this will be able to make much use of it. In most news readers (this one included) the various news sources need to be polled every once in a while to see if there are any new posts. In order to be “friendly” to those remote sites, it’s considered to be impolite to check more often than once or twice an hour. So that’s what I do, which means that it can be up to an hour before you see a new post show up in your list.

The new feature I’ve added is support for something called a “ping.” What that means is that, if your blog software supports it, you can have it send a special message to BlogWatcher whenever a post is updated. BW will then check almost immediately (within 5 minutes) instead of waiting for the next scheduled update. So anybody who uses BW to read your posts will see it much sooner.

So if your blog software supports pings, I’d appreciate it if you could add http://blogwatcher.thebaileys.name/ping.php to your list of ping servers. I’ve already configured the varous blogs that I host to perform this function.

If you have no idea what the above paragraphs are trying to say, then don’t worry about it. ;)

Share