I guess I could start off by saying that I grew up in a Christian home. My Dad was a minister for a long time in various Pentecostal churches while I was growing up, and later on even pastored a number of churches himself. So, I guess you could say I’m no stranger to the Church. My folks have believed in Jesus since before I was a zygote, and some of my best childhood memories include our time in Papua New Guinea when my father served as a missionary through one of the Four Square Bible colleges there. I was 4 then.
After we returned in ‘85 I was enrolled in a Baptist school in the suburbs of Sydney were I completed the majority of my primary eduction. Christianity was my entire world. What I mean by this is that while I knew there were "heathens" I just assumed the world broke down into those who liked God, and those who preferred Rock’n'roll.
I remember saying a prayer with my Dad when I was about six or seven, asking Jesus to come into my heart. I even asked if I could be baptised that night, and my Dad did so right there in our family bathtub. I think I did this more out of a desire to please my Dad, rather than out of any real awareness of the gravity associated with the commitment. I was pretty good kid, and liked making my parents happy.
eSinner.com has been online now for a year and a half. My original intention for the website was that it be an honest demonstration of a journey through life by a sinner… me. Originally I had put up static pages giving a brief testimony, but through various site redesigns and so forth those pages somehow go lost in the transition, and for a while now I have been meaning to put something similar in it’s place.
I think it’s extremely important to bare witness to what God has done in my life, and so in this post I will do my best to explain my spiritual journey. I’m not real sure how much of a witness my story will be to the wider community, as it’s not exactly dramatic like those you’d hear at some super-spiro rally, but nevertheless I’d like to take the opportunity to share.
I’ve closed the comments on the following testimonial post so that I am able to link from my menu straight to the testimony without it looking like just another average blog post. I guess I don’t want to distract from what I have written in my testimony. Feel free to leave any comments you care to give on this post. My only hope is that my testimony bares witness to the power of God’s grace and salvation through faith in Christ.
That other day I went for an interview for a job with an insurance company as a sales operator. Within hours of being told I had been scheduled for an interview I got a call from my previous employer asking if I’d like to come back and work in my old position in their call center.
It was like God was opening doors for me left, right and center… all I had to do was choose which one was the right door to walk through. I was a bit cautious about attending the interview as the position is generally sales related and I hate the idea of pushing people to buy stuff they don’t need. But in the end insurance is one of the wiser purchases in life that a person could make so it’s not so bad. I prayed to God asking that if I did my best with the interview and if this is where he wanted me to be that he would open the door, however if this job wasn’t in his will for my life that he should make it impossible for me to be successful in my application, showing me that my old job was where he wanted me.
I just took a quick look at my website visitor statistics through my host’s control panel. To my surprise last month alone I had over two thousand visits, by just under one thousand unique visitors… and that’s just the resolvable IP addresses (approximately one third of all traffic). How phenomenal. Not by a lot of other people’s standards I guess, though for a small website like mine I would never have thought I’d have that many people stopping in.
I purposefully don’t put a hit counter on my actual website, as I had one when I first started out but after a while I felt that it was a bit vain to be caring too much about how many people visit. In any case, I feel a lot more comfortable writing when I think of those viewing, whatever you call this, as just being those who leave comments. After all, if what I am writing doesn’t prompt 99 percent of those people who visit to leave some feedback, it’s almost as if they were never here at all. Come to think of it, if 99 percent of those who visit here aren’t commenting, what does that say about my website???
Call me a geek, but the best thing of note in all of this is that 14.9% of my visitors use Linux. How cool is that? What’s even better is that of those who visit my site, more people use Linux than any version of Windows except XP. Rock on 
"… You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Kodan armada!"
On Father’s day of 1985 my Dad got a Sega SC-3000 Personal Computer, our very first PC. A state of the art hybrid computer/game console capable of playing some of the most awesome games of the time. It was very similar to a commodore64, as it could load games from both tape and cartridge… it even had a BASIC interpretor and color screen! My favourite game of all was one called Star Jacker, a cute little top down space shooter where you start out with three little space pods, and work your way through a variety of levels, earning power-ups, speed boosts, and so on.
The nature of the game wasn’t altogether dissimilar to many you would come across in the arcades of the day, yet I loved it, simply because it made me feel like Alex Rogan from "The Last Starfighter"…. well, if you blur your eyes enough it kind does look like a Gunstar…. see here, here, here, and here!
I was bored again tonight, so instead of searching for blogs to read I went looking for items from my childhood. That’s when I cam across a ROM for this game. Seeing how totally awesome Gentoo’s package management system, Portage, is I was also able to dig up an emulator in no time and I was playing the game full screen on my 19 inch monitor.
Totally awesome! The best thing I love about memories is coming across things from your past and then finding that they were in fact better in real life then how you remember them. Tonight, for a sec, I felt like I was 5 again, and that’s something that made me feel more alive than I have felt in a long time.
3:53am - Horny cats are very frustrating. Especially when they happen to be meowing like someone is torturing them not 20 feet from your bedroom window in the wee hours of the morning. Really, It’s scary the thoughts that race through you mind when your body is subject to sleep deprivation. I guess I can thank my neighbours, they are truely fantastic people. So considerate infact, that they leave their undesexed cat outside at night and set a bunch of wind chimes on their porch, which also happens to be in earshot of our bedroom. As I said, wonderful people they are 
Toowoomba also happens to be the windiest place in the whole of Queensland, a truely fantastic place to live if you like wind chimes.
To add insult to injury our own cat decides that 3:53am is as good a time as any to jump on our bed and start cleaning himself. After giving the cat a light smack signaling you’re disapproval of his choice bathing time, he runs away down the hall. To your luck, the horny cat decides to give the harmonics a rest, and the wind settles quietening the chimes. Right, now that the frustration is gone, I might be able to get back to sleep says I.
Last night I was having one of those moments of intense boredom, where you’ll go searching for almost anything to catch your interest. I’d been working on Dan’s new blog most of the evening and I was curious to see what other blogs there are out there, especially those located in my local area. I was thinking mainly that it would be interesting to see what others around me write about and think of the place. What a great idea I thought!
After a bit of googlising I found an Australian bloggers web-ring that let you search by location. After narrowing the search down to my local area I found a list of about 20 blogs to peruse. For a second I got excited, thinking that perhaps I might find something inspiring, something to lose myself in, or at very least something that looked nice.
Hi everyone. After a little under a year of being out of the blogging scene, I am pleased to announce the return of the one and only Dan (formerly of Antithetics) . Dan had his blog taken off the net when his free server closed down in May last year, and unfortunately it’s taken me this long to code up another site for him to use.
Luckily for Dan, an influx of inspiration came along that coinsided with my recent reintroduction to the unemployment scene, meaning that I have had the time to make something pretty reasonable. Enter Windsor Calm, the newest subdomain of eSinner.com. I’ll let Dan explain the direction of his new website, but you’ll see pretty soon that the feel of the site is aimed at taking a more relaxed and gentle approach than his former look.
For those of you who weren’t lucky enough to witness Dan in action while he ran Antithetics, I can tell you that he is a very real person who has an invovled mind, providing a great variety of interesting content. I can’t ever remember experiencing a dull moment on Antithetics, and I’m sure Dan’s commenting community will resume to it’s former glory now on Windsor Calm.
Please take the time to check out the site and, to get a feel for the man, have a read of his archives. Take the time to leave some comments and put your full support behind a guy I know a lot of you who frequent eSinner.com have grown to love.
Melly sent me this link to a Bulletin article detailing how a now married man in his 30’s, working as a teacher, has had to resign from his job due to new zero tolerance laws on child abuse.
This bloke’s offence occured when he was 20 years old, with a girl who was 2 months shy of her 16th birthday. Forget the fact that they were in a conscentual relationship, or how he may not of known her real age, this guy had an indecent assult charge recorded agaisnt him. He had also been told to plead guilty being assured that no conviction would be recorded against him.
10 or more years down the track, this new law is brought it, and now the guy looses his job. To me this wreaks of a complete lack of common sense. Formerly this indescretion did not hinder him from getting a job as a teacher, yet further down the track the law has changed and now he will probably not be able to get any future work in teaching, his whole career pretty much down the tubes..
A friend of a friend is currently awaiting the outcome of a South Korean High Court decision for a murder of which she has been accused. Read the gripping details here.
I don’t personally know what to believe, as the whole investigation seems to have been botched from the start. I am more inclined to believe she is innocent based on the evidence, though she has confessed to the murder. Kenzi has claimed that she gave this confession under duress by the FBI, and has since recanted her statement.
Talk about six degrees of separation, I have a friend which some of you know, Melissa, who lives in the UK. Some of you may have met her at my wedding reception. Melissa knows Kenzi personally. As a side issue, it’s amazing how frequently this observation rings true.
Anyway, reading the details of the trial through this website, I fail to see why she would have been so willing to help investigators if she was in fact the offender, though it really is a hard one to weigh up. On the other hand, who admits to a crime they didn’t commit? I encourage you all to read the story, it may take you a while, but it’s very interesting. I would be interested in hearing what each of you think of this.