Phil’s Corner

Archive for Juli, 2008

Donnerstag
Jul 31,2008

Last night, while browsing the website of the German railroad company Deutsche Bahn, I discovered a PDF form. As a habit I sometimes look at the properties of the file in Adobe Reader (hit [Ctrl]+[D]), and discovered something quite interesting:

PDF Producer: Scribus 1.3.3.11-1

A commercial company that uses an open source application in a productive Environment. That’s cool, as it hopefully will help to promote and spread the overall use of open source software. If you want to check out the PDF for yourself, here is the link to the file - It is a fillable PDF form for obtaining a railway pass (which gives you unlimited travels for a fixed price and it is quite expensive, so I do not recommend signing the form :-)).

Have I mentioned that I use Scribus extensively for my design projects?

Am-am-am-ma. Babababab…

Donnerstag
Jul 17,2008

Whoever has had a baby sleeping in a bed next to them can easily identify with this… J-P, you’re driving us crazy, sometimes :-)

Freitag
Jul 4,2008

This is not about the video; posted it just for your convenience. The pictures are quite predictable, yet it is not overdone and very illustrative of the content!

Now for the song itself: simply amazing. Everytime I listen to it it kind of hits me right in the heart. An wonderful illustration of Jesus’ love for us and his unconditional grace. Having said this I also have some questions/comments:

  • The story seems a bit cliché to me: Guy that smokes, divorced, regularly drinking? I know, there are probably more of these guys than I can imagine, but still this is only a fraction of the worlds population - what about a different story?
  • Is it just the music that evokes my emotions, especially towards the end? Certainly, the guys know their business.
  • It is a bit long…

And one final thougt about the theology put forward in the song: Doesn’t it serve as an excuse for us middle-class boring christians? We who don’t smoke and who come from functional families? An excuse that goes like this: Look at that guy, he is so bad … blabla… If Jesus can save such a person he can certainly save me; phew! I know, every human is a sinner, and there are no exceptions or gradations, but somehow it seems to me that there are gradations in our perception of the world. At least we tend to think of something like I am better than this or that person - I did not steal, I do not smoke, etc… Which in itself is a sin and results from the sinful nature of us human beings… Anyone still following me?