That is the slogan for U.S. Patent Certificates, Inc. I know this because I recently received my first patent and they were the first to congratulate me...with an offer to buy a certificate or plaque from them. Not just any plaque either, but one that is “prestigious and will unquestionably satisfy the most regal taste.” I cannot imagine hanging something like that on a wall. What do you say when someone asks who gave it to you. “Ah, well, I did.” Then again, I still have my graduate school diploma in the mailer it came in. I wonder how many other offers of congratulations I will receive from people wanting to sell me a personalized mug, ceramic mug, or a special certificate so that I can congratulate myself.

I just came across a great (horrible?) example of what I was talking about last month. My main premise in that post was that we need to be careful about what we call biblical due to the weight of that statement. We also need to be judicious in our use of Scripture to support a theory or idea. For example, teaching that the biblical way to find a wife is by going to the local drinking hole using Rebekah as the basis is not a good use of Scripture.

Well, Maker's Diet is a doozy. It comes with claims like

Biblically based and scientifically proven.

When you follow The Maker's Diet, you'll be adhering to God's original eating plan!

Our Creator specifically designed us to function best on The Maker's Diet.

On their website I saw grand, unsubstantiated claims, little knowledge of history, and a strange understanding of what it would mean to go back to our original diet (London Broil anyone?).

“Providence withdrew its protection and our people fell... And in this hour we sink to our knees and beseech our almighty God that He may bless us, that He may give us the strength to carry on the struggle for the freedom, the future, the honor, and the peace of our people. So help us God.”

Sounds like something a pastor or politician might have said after September 11th. Click on the comments link to see who said this.

The publishing software that I use to produce this site is called Movable Type. It has some nice features. I really like their template tags. I find with WordPress that I have to hack the php source or make significant changes to the templates to make it do what I want. I haven't had to do that with Movable Type. Another great feature (that WordPress did not have) is the ability to preview an entry before publishing it. It always bothered me though that the entry was not rendered in the style of my website. To really see what an entry would look like I would have to publish it. This was a pain if I were adding photos or had some tight formating constraints. This is an example of an entry I had to publish and tweak several times before I got the floating images in reasonable locations. I was always willing to go through this because I didn't see another other blog packages offering this capability. My wife did not even have a preview capability on her site. Well, I just upgraded her to WordPress 2.0.1. It not only has a preview capability, but it has an excellent one where you can view a preview at the bottom of the editing page exactly like it will look when it is published.

This was too much. I did the usual looking around for a plugin, but the best I could find was a WYSIWYG plugin called FCKeditor. I wasn't too interested in WYSIWYG (I need control!) and I was not too keen on installing something with that moniker (It's written by a guy by the name of Frederico Caldeira Knabben). I decided to see if I could figure out a simple hack to give me a decent preview. I wanted at least the same font style, font size, page size, and spacing so that I could check the formatting of entries. It did not need to render the sidebar, the banner, or anything like that. It turned out that this is amazingly easy and here is how you do it:

“truth is gained by patient study, by calm reflection, silently as the dew falls”

Usually when you hear the term ‘small groups’ you probably think of the church growth movement and megachurches. You might be surprised to learn that they existed in some form during the Reformation in Strasbourg. They were called ‘Christlichen Gemeinschaften’ (literally, Christian communities). Modern small groups often seek to provide a sense of community inside of a much larger institution especially since community cannot be found in the mobile, individualistic American society. In comparison, the motivation behind the ‘Gemeinschaften’ was holiness. They consisted of people inside the church who would model the disciplined life of the Christian faith to the rest of the church. This is quite different from the ecclesiology of the other reformation churches and did not last more than a few years in Strasbourg.