Student Hunger Drive Kickoff 2014

Tonight was the official kickoff of the Quad Cities Student Hunger Drive. The Student Hunger Drive is an organization founded quite a few years ago in which students help feed the hungry in our area, gain a sense of volunteerism and leadership, and manage the collection of canned foods from their school.

The kickoff ceremony officially starts the six-week drive. Each participating school gets to present a one-minute skit, which is judged by various prominent members of the community. The winning school of the skit contest receives a 2,000-pound head start, donated by Hy-Vee.

My school, Rivermont Collegiate, won the skit contest! Despite technical details at the beginning, our performance was very well received by the audience and apparently the judges too.

Spanish UI Challenge

I have been taking Spanish for over four years now, and I think it's time to make a real effort to increase my vocabulary. I have quite a handle on grammar, but I simply can't remember all the words from classroom exercises. This severely limits my capabilities in using the language.

So I'm going to force myself to learn more words.

I have decided to change my Windows display language to Spanish for at least a week. Webpages will still be in English, but Microsoft application text (e.g. Explorer special folder names, Office captions, Control Panel items) and the text of other applications that notice and respect the system language (e.g. Chrome) will appear in Spanish.

I was planning on using the Spanish keyboard so that I could type in Spanish, but my physical keyboard is not marked for Spanish, so all the non-alphanumeric keys produce the wrong symbols. I had to change the keyboard layout back to US English, but the Language Bar makes it easy to switch if I ever need to.

So far, I have been challenged by the different sort orders created by the different names of icons. In Control Panel (el Panel de control) especially, everything is in a totally different place than I expected. I find myself relying a lot on icons.

Also, some applications (e.g. Paint) change their shortcuts depending on your language. For example, it seems the standard "save" shortcut in Spanish is Ctrl+G, for "guardar." Unfortunately, some applications forget to localize all their shortcuts and therefore end up with conflicts. Paint, for one, actually displays the grid when I press Ctrl+G instead of saving like the ToolTip says.

This entire experience should improve my Spanish abilities, especially technical vocabulary. (It might also decrease the spelling quality on my blogs - I had to disable Chrome spellcheck because it checks everything as Spanish!)

Neither Shall There Anymore Be a Flood to Destroy the Earth

Time for some more partially-researched theological speculations!

With all the talk about global warming happening nowadays, a particular Bible verse caught my attention as I skimmed it.

Genesis 9:11 ERV "And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of the flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth."

This verse appears to guarantee that the earth will not be subjected to a water-induced catastrophe as projected by global warming activists. Of course, global warming is a very real thing, and the oceans are so far rising. So, what can one say about this apparent contradiction?

The Rapture and ensuing end times will occur before humans manage to mess everything up.

It makes some sense if you think about it. The earth has finite resources, but the human population is multiplying alarmingly fast and consuming resources even faster. The only way to not wreck everything is to revert to a sustainable agrarian society - but nobody wants to do that. Natural resources are a clock ticking towards the end of humanity's stay on this little speck in the universe.

It's the human nature to invent and progress upwards with technology. I can understand why God might choose to give us a fixed time to do all our stuff instead of letting us experience the pinnacle of civilization and then being forced back down to the Bronze Age. When our time is up here, it's onto the next segment of eternity.

Disclaimer: I am not a theologian; I have no training and no credentials. Take with all the salt.

Manitowish 2014

Starting tomorrow and extending into Saturday, I will be away up at Camp Manitowish. Manitowish is a teamwork/leadership training and outdoor activity camp for high schoolers, which my high school (Rivermont Collegiate) sends us on once every year.

I will be away from all electronic communications, so blog articles have been pre-written and scheduled. Issues of Abiathar Confidential, the column-like publication explaining historical details of Abiathar, will appear each day on Fleex's Lab.