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Just out of high school, I went to World Harvest Bible College (a two year school) with the intention of going straight into ministry from there.  A lot of things happened while I was in bible college, but when I graduated, the youth Pastor of World Harvest Church asked if I would continue as a volunteer / intern for another year.  I was running a drama team with over twenty kids at the time, which is larger than many entire youth groups and I felt there was a lot I could still learn so I agreed.  Three months later, the youth pastor was no longer with the church and I was working at Safelite Autoglass as a terminal repair man and printer cleaner.

Here we are, ten years later – I’m still not in full time ministry, but I am ten years into an IT career.  Not the path I thought I was destined to take; God’s ways are higher than our ways.  I have been blessed in my career but its always bothered me that I never got a four year degree.  I went to community college in Ohio, taking a few classes, but to be honest, I realized I was taking out student loans, sacrificing time with my family, and taking time away from learning more specific work related material that could have a more immediate affect on my career.  I quit school and focused on IT Certifications.  I obtained several certifications including MSCA and MSCE for Windows 2000.

Then my brother-in-law shared with me the online college he was attending, Western Governors University.  For just under $3000 a semester, you can work on your degree at your own pace.  No traditional classes, no online blackboard classes, no required chat rooms or bulletin boards.  The Informational Technology degree they offer has several classes that only require passing an industry certification, many that I already had.

So I signed up.  I was able to ‘transfer’ my IT pedigree into my program, eliminating over a year from my schooling!  Well, I just finished two more classes in the last two weeks and I hope to finish my four year degree in less than a year.  If you want to get your degree, don’t enroll in a program that will costs you tens of thousands of dollars.  Go Western!

Don’t just take my word for it; WGU was recently featured in a Time Magazine article.  If you think you might go… let me know!

When did we start calling it Turkey Day?  Is it just too much to say Thanksgiving?  Are we just not thankful?  Maybe we feel guilty about not being thankful and call it Turkey Day to avoid the shame…

OK, OK, I’ll tone it down, pull it back a bit and just tell you that I am thankful for Blog Readers, The Internet, A government created to protect my God given right to free speech.  I’m thankful for having a job, having a roof over my head and having a car to get around.  I’m thankful for a lot of MATERIAL THINGS… but Thanksgiving is the one day people want to take the time to be thankful for the really important stuff like, My Wife, My kids – Zander, Lexi, and our lil’ bun in the oven.

Well, I say – we should take the other 364 days a year to appreciate the people in our lives.   For Thanksgiving, lets focus on all the crap we now have like computers, cars, clothes, china plate settings, backyard pools, and other temporal stuff like that.  Start thinking about thinks like cable TV, and Nintendo Wii’s, and all the money you have in the bank to go blow on “Black Friday” for trinkets, junkets, and the like.  You think that’s shallow?  Spending one day a year to look around our glutenous lives and be thankful for all the fat?

You know – I think you are right… It is shallow.  Besides when I think about all my crap I start to feel guilty that I have sooo much when there are people in the world dying of hunger… Nevermind… Happy Turkey Day…

Ok – I just uploaded a new theme and I noticed my comments now post pictures beside your comments – which I thought was a cool feature.  Then I noticed there were pictures on a few of the comments that are much older than the new theme… How’d my new theme know what picture to put on old comments?  Gravatars…

I never knew they existed.  I knew about avatars.  An Avatar is a picture you associate with your comments on a forum or bulletin board like TalkCloth.com.  But a GRAvatar is a Globally Recognized Avatar – geeky but cool.  So, my new theme plugs into the Gravatar system to match your gravatar with your comments using your email address – which is how it was able to put pictures up on old comments.  Awesome!

If you don’t have one — get one – they are free…http://en.gravatar.com/

Quick Disclaimer: if you are one of my readers that would be appalled at a Harry Potter movie - you may not care for this post. For everyone else, there are no plot spoilers...

Is nothing sacred any more???  I saw a preview for Twilight (2008) and thought to myself, “Cool – A new vampire movie is coming out!”  I NEVER would have imaged it to be a CHICK FLICK!  Some of you may not know that I enjoy this particular type of movie, but vampire movies are at the top of my list of “types of movies I enjoy despite my being religious”.  Most recently, I enjoyed I Am Legend (2007) – the book was vampire, the movie, not so much – Underworld (2003) and Underworld: Evolution (2006); I’ve seen all three of the Blade movies (1998, 2002, 2004) with Wesley Snipes although they weren’t very good; My all time favorite is The Lost Boys (1987) – they just don’t make classics like that anymore.  I even sat through Vampire’s Kiss (1989) with Nicolas Cage which was one of the worse movies ever.  Interview with a Vampire,  Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel (TV Series), I could go on an on, but back to Twilight…

You can image how I would be excited about a new vampire movie.  So, I went to see it.  I was a bit suprised to see so many girls in the theater – I mean, this is a vampire movie, right?  What I didn’t know was that the movie is based on a young adult novel by Stephenie Meyers (Twilight).  The entire movie was filled with awkward teenage “saved by the bell” moments, which wouldn’t have bothered me if it weren’t for the constant giggling all around me.  I felt like I was crashing a slumber party with a bunch of school girls (I’m a dad, there is nothing exciting about that idea for me).

As with every vampire movie, the were several twists to the traditional vampire legend – no garlic, I don’t remember seeing a single fang, and sunlight didn’t have quite the same affect as expected.  They did elude to the tension with werewolves – which is traditionally the Hatfields verses the McCoys for vampires stories, but there were no actual werewolves in the film.  I did have a favorite line in the movie:

Chick: I want answers

Dude: Yes… No… To get to the other side… 1.77245…

Chick: I don’t want to know the square root of PI!

Dude: You knew that was the square root of pi???

The movie itself, 2 1/2 out of 4 stars, the overall experince, 1 out of 4 stars…

You may remember several year ago, Al Gore stating that he took the initiative to invent the internet.  He took a lot of heat for this statement, however as a member of congress, he really was part of making the internet possible (which in turn caused a greater demand on computers, increasing the greenhouse gasses of Dell, HP, IBM, and Apple, not to mention the cars on the road driving back and forth to the store to buy these environmental killers… But I digress)

Technology is great, but without application, its just shinny objects.  The ability to connect to people around the world, to gather data from around the world, to balance your checkbook, pay your bills, buy tickets to a concert you wanted to go to, play hours of mindless games — all made possible by the internet.

Today I got an email from a high school friend that lives on the other side of the country, thousands of miles away.  Amazing!  There is so much talk right now about how bad the economy is and people are losing their jobs – you might be tighten the belt around your house too, but answer me this – did you think about canceling your internet?  I’ll bet not.  How else would you look for a job if you lost yours?

Looking for something to buy?  Craigslist, Ebay, and Amazon – all right there at your finger tips! Want to know what’s going on in the world, CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, again right there.  Want to know the latest going on in the Sackrider Family??? You’re reading this aren’t you?  Awesome!

BTW – speaking of searching Google for Sackrider (linked above) there is a website called urban dictionary where people put definitions up regarding slag words… Sackrider has three listed last time I checked, two degroitory and the one I posted regarding the true definition of a pickpocket or thief.  If you get a chance, swing by there and vote up my definition and down the other two (which by the way are vulgar.)

Imagine you open a small business to sell flowers and your business takes off – you are selling flowers all over your state and in no time at all, you are even selling flowers all over the country.  Then imagine a person wants to buy chocolate from you even through you don’t sell chocolate – and you have decided you don’t want to sell chocolate.  So that person sues you…  Does that sound crazy?

Lets continue this thought and image you settle with this demanding would be patron… In your settlement, you agree to give this person $5000, and since the Law Firms in Niagara Falls NY offices agreed with that person, you have to pay them $50,000 and to make sure you don’t leave any chocolate eaters out in the future, you also have to open new stores beside your flower shops that sells chocolates.  This sounds like a really bad deal for you if you ask me, but you take it anyway… Then shortly after you settle, you are sued by all of the chocolate eaters for not having chocolate shops before and only selling flowers.

Ok – I know, it sounds crazy, uh?  Tell that to eHarmony for not catering to homosexuals!  Let me connect the dots for my slower readers (not you…), eHarmony was started by a Christian man to allow people to find long lasting meaningful relationships (flowers) but a New Jersey homosexual complained to the government that they don’t allow him to find his homosexual soulmate (chocolate).  The New Jersey government agreed and the rest is history.  Unbelievable…

When I was in high school, one of my history teachers was covering the Revolutionary War, the birth of our Nation, and specifically the difficulty our founding fathers had in agreeing on the Constitution.  He taught us about the delima surrounding the protection of our rights.  James Madison introduced the Bill of Rights as a solution.  Alexander Hamilton opposed the entire idea that such protections needed to be included saying “Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?” since the Constitution granted no ability to restrict rights.

In the end, the Bill of Rights was needed in order for the states to ratify the Constitution, and it is those rights that America has woven in its very fiber… so it was interesting when our teacher asked us to brake out into teams and were given this assignment:

If you had to give up half of the rights granted to you in the Bill of Rights, which half would you give up and which half would you keep?

We spent the entire class debating the rights, the importance of those rights, which ones were required in order to still consider ourselves free men and women.  It was a wonderful way to teach us what is in the Bill of Rights, why they were included, and what they meant to our daily lives.  In the end, each break out group had their lists and we came back together to share our lists and our reasons with the class.

Many of us had very similar lists, some had very different ones.  Most of us believed free speech and the right to bare arms were among the most important rights protected by the Bill.  We argued most of the others.  Then with a single comment, our teacher taught us more than we had learned in the entire exercise:

Why would you be willing to give any of them up at all?

WOW… I realized a great deal with that single statement.  I learned that we were far too willing to give up our rights because a person of authority simply asked us to.  Our nation was birthed out of rebellion against anything or anyone that seeks to remove rights granted by our “Creator”.  We embroidered the words on our hearts when we penned them in our Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

I came across this earlier today and thought it made for an entertaining read… Don’t email me about how he can’t do that – or that its illegal – I don’t care… I just thought it was funny…

As the CFO of this business that employees 140 people, I have resigned myself to the fact that Barrack Obama will be our next President, and that our taxes and government fees will increase in a BIG way.

To compensate for these increases, I figure that the Clients will have to see an increase in our fees to them of about 8% but since we cannot increase our fees right now due to the dismal state of our economy, we will have to lay off six of our employees instead. This has really been eating at me for a while, as we believe we are family here and I didn’t know how to choose who will have to go. So, this is what I did. I strolled thru our parking lot and found 8 Obama bumper stickers on our employees’ cars and have decided these

To secret just and max raabe viagra ran. Goes product – viagra treatment for pe and people doctor viagra jokes this skin is creams herbal cialis soft alternative review and estimate?

folks will be the first to be laid off.

I can’t think of a more fair way to approach this problem. These folks wanted change; I gave it to them. If you have a better idea, let me know. Sincerely

I just got an email from a family member warning me of a “HUGE VIRUS COMMING”.  This particular email includes a link to snopes.com (one of the popular email debunking websites – my favorite is truthorfiction.com).  The email claims that “this is for real” and you can read it for yourself at “snopes.com”.  I’ve also gotten emails claiming that Bill Gates is testing a new email tracking program and if I forward the email to all of my friends, I will receive a huge check.  We’ve all gotten the occasional joke email with the note at the bottom, “forward to 10 friends in 10 mins or ELSE…” – cue ominous music, DUN DUN DUUUUNNNN.

I alway find these email to be funny (in the strange funny not the haha funny way).  A few years ago there was an email virus called the “I love you” virus – I was working in IT when it hit the company I worked for because the CEO double clicked a script in his email and sent the entire company directory a note saying “I love you”.  Within about 10 mins our entire email infrastructure was taken down from the mass emails running through the company!  “I love you” was a real virus that did real damage – it didn’t delete files or erase hard drives – it just emailed everyone in your contact list.  It cost our company thousands of dollars in clean up efforts and downtime.  Since then, email clients like Microsoft’s Outlook block those type of attachments and antivirus programs look for those type of patterns in email – but what has happened since then cannot be blocked by outlook or fixed by antivirus programs… (more…)

We are 5 weeks pregnant!  Our due date is 7/8/9, Lexi’s due date was 9/8/7.  Lexi was born on 9/4/7, so if her unborn sibling follows suit and comes four days early, he or she will be born on the 4th of July, very cool!  We went through invetro (thanks to great health insurance) for Lexi and we used invetro again with a process called frozen embryo transfer (we had 11 on ice left over from when we got pregnant with Lexi, now we have 9 left).

Its amazing what doctors can do – technically, I think this makes the new little one and Lexi twins… :o)  —- Don’t miss read that, the ultrasound picture only shows one little baby in the oven…

We are very excited about the newest edition to the Sackrider Family!

BTW – if you want to see pictures of Lexi – here.  If you want to order any of those pictures, you have to do it through Target – send me an email and I will get the information you need to you.

We are still working on a family picture, just haven’t had the time or money – as soon as we do, I will post them to the website as well.

Keep us in your prayers.