Lord of the Ring

Shannon and I are engaged to be married!

Some of you are thinking "it's about time". But rather, it was only a matter of time.

I proposed last Monday, and since then have been running around sharing the exciting news with our families.

How I proposed:

The ring came in on Monday morning, so I hurriedly got ready and headed out of the house to prepare everything. First I had to swing by Courtney's work (Shannon's roommate) to pick up her house keys.

Racing down to the St-Laurent mall, I got the ring and some other items, and went over to her house. With about 1.5 hours before Shannon got off of work, I cleaned up a bit around the house, and looked after her puppy so she wouldn't have to worry about it when she got home.

When Shannon came home, she was surprised to find me standing there, with a dozen roses in hand. Getting down on one knee, I proposed then and there. And yes, we were both crying (even Shannon).

Over the next hour or two, we prayed for our engagement, and I gave her a long foot-massage with peppermint foot-massage oil.

Next, off to a delicious steak dinner at Montana's.

Then to see Orpheus Theater's Beauty and the Beast.

And ended the evening with a long chat at Tim Hortons over coffee.

It was a perfect romantic evening.

We're both extremely excited and happy with the start of this new stage in life. I'm really looking forward to marrying and spending the rest of my life with such a wonderful and beautiful sweetheart as Shannon.

Please keep us in your prayers as we embark on this marvelous journey of marriage!

The One Ring

Church Alternative?

With Podcasts readily available from nearly every major church, we now have access to the most current teachings from the greatest teachers out there.

But even with podcasts, books, CDs, and online community groups... is it really a replacement for church?

Boundless.org covers this exact issue.

Because, even with ready access to all this material, it's really only a supplement. And while I'd suggest you take part in all those things, it's not a replacement for getting involved with a church. There, you have something far more precious: a family... that look after you, and get involved in your life.

And while I do listen to great sermon podcasts, I would never give up a church family like at Sequoia.

Includes

Many of you web developers/designers are probably familiar with Includes. It's a process of literally including one file into another on your website.

For example, you could use the process to include a menu into your page. That way, you can have the same menu across many pages... and if you want to change the menu, you will only have to fix it once.

I know, this is pretty basic stuff. But bear with me for a moment here. So, Includes generally require some sort of server scripting... whether it be PHP, ASP, or similar, to perform the operation without the user knowing this is happening.

But what if you're running off of an older server, that doesn't have any of these functions? I recently ran into that problem with a contract I'm working on.

That's where those wonderful people at Dynamic Drive come in. They run a great site with all sorts of useful web scripts. Many of which you can implement with some simple cut-and-paste.

And now we bring AJAX into the picture. Or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. And specifically, DD's technique that requires no server-scripting whatsoever.