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Insightful Emails I Receive

“Subject: Ever Think About a Different Domain Name?

Message: You know that David Westerfield is also the name of a convicted child raping murderer on death row at San Quentin? It was a huge case 6 or 7 years ago. Just a little ‘Fun-fact’ for you to chew on. Keep on keepin’ on.”

With all due respect … nooooo, really? It’s not as if I haven’t done a Google search on my name before 🙂

My response:

“Trust me, I’m very well aware of it 🙂 thanks for letting me know though … and no, I’m not changing my site name, haha :)”

I get quite a bit of traffic just from people searching that name and stumbling across my site actually … it’s a traffic driver. Why would I change it? 🙂

The Unviewed Viewer

Or so he thought.

Last night I had one of the more terrifying experiences in my life. It was about 10:15 pm and my wife went into our master bathroom. I was at the desk in our bedroom (connected to the bathroom) reading on my computer. As she went in she looked over to the textured, translucent window in the bathroom thinking she saw something move and noticed someone looking in, or attempting to at least. She yelled out one of those volume-controlled, startled, terrified yells, and said, “There’s a man in the window!” but didn’t say it loud enough that he heard her, because he stuck around.

It had not quite registered in my mind what she yelled initially. I just thought it was a bug, maybe a scorpion or tarantula or something a little worse than the normal roach, but not some guy in the window. Sitting at the desk, with my back turned away from the window, I quickly turned around and saw the guy. Because the glass is textured you can’t see people clearly looking from the outside-in, but you can see colors, shapes, etc. So he really couldn’t see a lot. But the closer to the window you are, the better you can see people. And so we clearly saw him standing there trying to do some peepin’.

And Here Come the WordPress Spam Bots

POST /wp-comments-post.php 302

It sure doesn’t take long for the automated comment spam sentinels to get their tentacles out there and start prodding a new system to see where they can post their annoying overseas mail-order Viagra/Cialis ads. Good thing I have the ModSecurity web app firewall running and captcha protection. Otherwise, there would already be a lot of these things. Doesn’t mean I’m fool-proof, but it certainly does help with a majority of the junk data out there from landing on my site.

The Annoyance of WordPress Revisions – And the Fix

After getting this new blog up and running, I noticed one of the features that was added in version 2.5 of WordPress: revisions. It got me to thinking about how the database was impacted after moving all of those entries over. After running a query in the DB, the result came back with 1723 rows, yet I only have 684 entries. The rest (minus pages and attachments) were all revisions of blog posts and pages. Each revision is a full blog entry. Over time, that could add up to a lot of data, depending on how often you post entries and how many revisions you create in the process of each post.

Welcome to the New Blog!

After hours of tedious work moving blogs over from the old platform and customizing the look and feel, here’s the new blog. Hope you enjoy it. The search function works way better than the last one as well, so check it out!

For those of you who connected via the RSS feed on the old site, you will need to use the new one instead, located here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DavidWesterfield?format=xml

If you linked to my site from another page, the article still exists in the archive here, but you will need to search for it and then update the link with the new permalink URL.

Happy New Year!

Wow, 2008 went by fast with a lot of dramatic events. I pray this year is productive for the church in ministering the Gospel to a dying world, that the Lord would continue to prod us all toward holiness and, that by His grace, we would find the final freedom and acceptance in the promises of the Gospel that would make us productive for His glory. Have a great year!

For everyone’s information, I am currently in the process of converting over this current blog to a new blogging platform that will make writing on here much more versatile and simplistic. This is going to take some time as I have some design considerations to mull over and I have to convert over 682 entries (164 of which are already done). All that to say, I may not write anything for a little while until I get that done and get the new site up and running.

A Honest Criticism of My Own Life

(Original): http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/art … l?id=69230
(Archived): http://www.westerfunk.net/archives/theo … 0Humility/

After reading this article by Keller, and reading more in The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges, I feel like too many times, what I write on here fits the mold of what Keller and Bridges describe, and this is deeply convicting to me. After reading Keller’s article, I feel like for a second I had an outside perspective of the way others may be perceiving how I come across as well as the way I truly am sometimes.

As I posted recently on here, my blog compromises only a small fraction of my life. But regardless, how I come across may be exactly how some people view me all the time: arrogant, frustrated, self-righteous, etc. I don’t feel like this most of the time, but in all honesty before people reading this, I am that sometimes. This is sin and I deeply need the grace and mercy of Christ provided in His cross and resurrection to cleanse me.

The Downside to Blogging

One thing I have increasingly observed and noticed among people who comment or send me messages is that they perceive my blog to be my entire summed up thinking. In all reality, this site is like 1/10 (perhaps an even higher ratio, like 1/15) of my total summed up spiritual life. That is to say, my blog is simply a sounding board for whatever the subject is I happen to be thinking through at the moment. I could honestly care less if anyone reads it, it’s just more of a public diary of thoughts. Yet this does not mean this is the only thing I’m thinking about concerning my life in Christ. I’m just writing on whatever the particular subject is I happen to find important. It seems some people perceive bloggers as sitting behind a keyboard, brows furroughed, gritting their teeth, sweating in angst. Many are, but I don’t think I’m one of them. I’m supremely happy in Christ and joyful in the Lord and what He’s accomplished for me. It’s what drives the things I do. Do I struggle with anger, my own misery? Surely.

Top Webcam Email Alerts

I’m a nerd. I’m not afraid to hide it, clearly. As a nerd, I love technology. I have a webcam setup at home for security reasons, pointed across my front yard to catch possible intruders that wish to invade my property or cause other harm. I have a threshold setup on the software I run along with my webcam that, when hit, sends an email attached with a picture (or series of pictures) to an offsite email account.

Most of the time, I just get cars passing by, lightning during a storm, really any kind of movement or light change that causes enough of a fluctuation to trigger a webcam picture alert. Sorting through the emails on partly cloudy days is not always fun and many times, I just delete them all because it is too many to sort through. However, there are some rare occasions that I actually get something good, funny, or odd. Here is a sample of some of the best shots from the past two years that I have kept:
This guy thought he might try and get into my garage and steal some junk in the middle of the night last year in June.

Apparently, it proved to be too much of a risk for him with the flood lights along with neighbors who are not afraid to use a gun. Good, please leave. Whew.

I’m pretty sure this jumping spider knew he would send off an email alert and intentionally walked across the viewing range of the webcam.

It really isn’t that uncommon to see people walking across the yard. You would be quite surprised to know how many neighbors do this during the middle of the day 🙂 Anyway, this guy caught my attention only because he looks exactly like my wife’s brother. It was just the electric meter guy though.

I thought this was a fascinating photo study in the custodial/lawn service arts.

Finally, these are two shots from last nights’ thunderstorm that I thought were pretty awesome.

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Updated at 2:00pm on 08/02/2008:

I almost forgot … though we live in the city, we apparently are still on a rural mail route (can’t figure that one out). As such, we receive our mail (I would guess) about every other day on average, from a guy in a jerry-rigged minivan. He drives the thing from the passenger seat. Yet the wheel still resides on the drivers side … and I assume he has pedals on the passenger side as well. I’m still trying to figure out how he drives the thing without easily running into stuff. Very interesting to say the least.

Haven’t Been Blogging as Much Lately

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I haven’t been doing as many posts. Part of this has to do with a sort of writers block. I feel as if I’ve exhausted many of the things I normally talk about. So I’m taking a step back and reassessing why it is I’m doing this to start with. Another part has been the demands of work recently. I’ve started working on our Sharepoint environments more and this has drained me to a great degree. And still yet, sometimes, I just don’t know what to say. I guess that would fall into the writers block category still. My brother has been in town, back from fighting in Iraq, so I’ve been spending time with him as well.

There are several pet topics that I like to write on, as you may have noticed. But I don’t know what else I can say about those things other than reiterating the same ideas, maybe with new thoughts, but more innovating instead of inventing (so to speak, not that I have anything original to say really, just repeating ideas I’ve heard mostly).

So I’m trying to reassess what other areas of theology (in particular) I should move into talking about. But that requires taking a step back and thinking through some things before lobbing ideas out there. Anyway, all that to say, I have kind of been taking a sabbatical from writing as much because I feel a little burned out I guess. I’ve also been reading more which takes away from writing time. So I’ll be back, I just don’t know what direction I want to take this site now.

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