The MonT-SteR REPORT

Free music loops

I’m using some nice, free loops from these folks in the relaunch of my podcast (stay tuned!). In exchange for a link on your site, they’ll give you $50 of free sound effects. So:

Royalty Free Music and Sound Effects Download the music and sound effects you need for your multimedia project today at Partners In Rhyme.

Spammers, don’t bother

I’m using Akismet, and it’s catching all your rotgut, uninvited links. You are wasting your time by registering here and posting junk. And your “Ooh, nice site. This is so informative!” posts serve only to 1) insult my intelligence, and 2) indicate your lack thereof.

So…

I will be posting this once a week, hoping to ward off would-be spammers.

Again, you are wasting your time and mine. Stop. Go away. Find another blog to pollute. Because you will not succeed here. Ever.

Your old men will dream dreams

I don’t really consider myself an old man, but I do find that God speaks to me through dreams quite a bit.

I haven’t written about it here, but my grandfather passed away near the end of May. As I wrote in my journal, it was “a moment I’ve been dreading most of my adult life. But it’s here, and so is God, and because of that, it’s okay. Granddad is not suffering anymore. He’s with the Lord. And I will see him again.”

The night after he died, I had the following dream. I have always known Granddad to be a believer, so as his health declined I never fretted about his eternal estate. After sharing this dream with my parents, they told me that as Granddad breathed his last in this world (after having suffering for so long), he had a smile on his face.

Here’s the dream:

I saw a sprawling property with multiple buildings and fields. It was very pleasant—the sun was shining brightly, the trees were green and swaying in the breeze, and the day was comfortably warm. The sky was a blazing, rich blue, full of bright white puffy clouds. Granddad was outside tending the property, preparing one area for some sort of race that he was hosting (I had the sense that it was a children’s event – the track he was creating was small). He was clearing debris from the field. He was not a young man – he looked older. Not as old as he did as of late, but the way I remember him in his 60′s. But he was hale, and spry as a man in his prime. He strode briskly around the property, shirt off, gloves on his hands, work boots on his feet. At one point, there was a stump in the ground he needed to clear. With incredible, superhuman strength, he grabbed it with both hands, effortlessly snapped the trunk way from the roots, and hurled it aside. As I observed this, I thought, “I’m in my 30′s and there’s no way I could do that!” I was concerned for his heart condition as I watched him work so hard, but nobody around me was worried. I looked at his face, and he looked back at me briefly – he was not smiling, but he seemed intent on his work. And deeply content.

Tags: dreams, heaven, The MonT-SteR

Daniel as a model for Christian political involvement

I’m sure you all are aware that political discourse in our country has become increasingly acrimonious and vapid. Both sides of the political spectrum hurl invective at one another. Demagoguery abounds. Politicians deal in platitudes, and the citizenry is both polarized and distrustful of the authorities like never before.

As a Christian man, I may disagree vehemently with a given political party or an individual candidate. But, biblically, that does not give me license to behave hatefully toward them, or to default to believing the worst about them. Rather, I’m called to honor them, to pray for them, to regard them as stewards who are ultimately chosen by God to faithfully discharge the office they hold. And I believe I’m called to do what I can to help them steward that position faithfully. Sometimes that involves the prophetic responsibility of calling them to account, as the OT prophets often did with the kings, but I won’t get into that here.

I think Daniel’s example is particularly instructive. Think about his situation:

1. He was forcibly taken into exile. He had suffered injustice at the hands of Babylon.
2. Babylon was a pagan culture that did not recognize the Living God or follow His ways.
3. Nebuchadnezzar was a pompous man with a bad temper and a lust for power, and yet Daniel, a man of God, had been involuntarily pressed into his service.

Daniel was betwixt and between, to be sure. And he had every reason to disparage the Babylonians and their king, to wish for their downfall. But I see in Daniel a man who never compromised his faith in God while distinguishing himself in faithful, loyal service to an unholy culture. Even though the king didn’t govern rightly, you never see one ounce of disdain or disrespect coming from Daniel. Rather, you hear phrases like, “O King, may you live forever.” Daniel lived a no compromise life, but he had the honor and respect of those who didn’t know God. And God used his righteous tenacity to reveal Himself to Nebuchadnezzar, who transitioned from glorifying himself to recognizing that God is sovereign over the nations.

I wonder if that might not be a desirable paradigm for our present political culture. You may be happy about who’s in power right now. It may drive you crazy at the moment. But how would Daniel handle it?

Daniel 11:32 states that those who know their God shall be strong and do great exploits in His name. Perhaps that captures the secret of the remarkable life Daniel lived. For my own part, I’m both convicted and inspired by his example. And I pray that our culture is flooded with Daniels in this crucial, desperate hour.

I intend to be one of them.

Thoughts on idolatry

I just read the account of Jehu’s purging of Ahab’s dynasty and every last trace of Baal worship in 2 Kings. It’s interesting to me that Jehu touts his zeal for the Lord, and at one point God Himself commends Jehu for faithfully carrying out His instructions vis-a-vis Ahab’s descendents. And yet, in 2 Kings 10:31, we find the following words:

Jehu did not obey the Law of the Lord, the God of Israel, with all his heart. He refused to turn from the sins that Jeroboam had led Israel to commit.

Apparently, Jehu chose not to destroy the golden calves that Jeroboam had originally erected for the purpose of securing his own kingship and keeping the people from making pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem.

Jeroboam’s idolatry was a stumbling block to the northern kingdom of Israel from the moment he rebelled against the Davidic line and first rose to power. I wonder at Jehu’s failure to completely reverse idolatry in the land. Was it because he shared Jeroboam’s fear that the people would lose their allegiance to his crown in favor of Judah’s king? Or was it because (as Tolkien might put it) “lore waned” in Israel, and the very notion of what it truly meant to follow God’s Law had been lost? If the former, was Jehu aware of Jeroboam’s reasoning? If he was, it suggests to me that sufficient archival work had been done in Israel to (at minimum) ensure that a copy of the Law of God was available to the king, for heaven’s sake—making Jehu’s failure all the more damnable. Or, perhaps Jeroboam’s sin had set Israel on a trajectory that so diverged from God’s blueprint by Jehu’s time that it caused Israel to lose touch with the very oracles of God, royal archives notwithstanding.

In any case, it’s amazing how Jeroboam’s sin remains a bloodstain on the fabric of Israel’s existence from his time forward, and manages to survive even of the likes of Jehu. It seems that part of the insidious nature of idolatry, whatever its genesis, is a stubborn ability to self-propagate across generations.

Keep it up, Dems

I don’t know about you, but the spectacle of our elected representatives (Dems in particular) standing to cheer Mexican President Calderon as he lectured the American people on the injustice of Arizona’s new immigration law was infuriating. And a bit nauseating.

That’s just the sort of behavior that’s going to garner them some serious comeuppance come November. I can’t wait to vote.

Anyway, I fired off a missive to Senators Warner and Webb here in VA to register my disgust with both Calderon and the Democrats’ behavior. It will be interesting to see if/how they respond. Here’s what I wrote:

The Honorable Senator Jim Webb
248 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator:

It is difficult for me to convey the utter disdain I have for Mexican President Calderon’s comments from the House floor today. He has neither the right nor the place to lecture United States citizens on immigration law enforcement — particularly when Mexico’s own immigration laws are so stringent and, I daresay, merciless.

The only thing more contemptible than President Calderon’s odious comments was the standing ovation Democrats gave him in response.

I would like to ask, Senator, if you were among those who stood to cheer. I hope not. But the courtesy of a reply to that specific question would be appreciated.

Sincerely,

Robert R. Monti
Virginia Beach, VA

Hey, Robert, It’s Your Birthday!

Happy Birthday, buddy! I can hardly believe you’re 6 already. You are an amazing boy and a gift from God, and I’m so glad I get to be your dad.

And now, straight from outer space…

Bloomberg spews venom and vapidity on CBS News

Oops. I was so furious over this that when I heard Katie Couric, I thought Today show. And I fired off a missive to Bloomberg’s office with that error in it. A quick-tempered man…

Oh, well. Below is the letter with corrections. I suppose Bloomberg’s office will write me off as an idiot. Another testament to the necessity of proofing.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
City of New York
253 Broadway
New York, NY 10007

Mayor Bloomberg:

Your recent comments on the CBS Evening News implicating foes of Obamacare in the attempted bombing on Times Square were contemptible in the extreme. It is most regrettable that you have chosen to equate those who ascribe to the values of our Founders with Islamic militants. It seems to me that one of those two groups has a clear track record of terrorist acts. Who, I ask, is more likely to detonate a car bomb in New York?

Your gratuitous and unwarranted slander of patriotic Americans was as fatuous as it was specious. Congratulations.

Sincerely,

Robert R. Monti
Virginia Beach, VA

Big changes

Well, I found out a short time ago that Blogger no longer supports FTP published blogs as of, well, today. This precipitated a hasty migration to WordPress. I have plans to redesign my blog, but I have no idea when this will occur. So you get to look at the stock WordPress template for a little while.

Stay tuned…

Web design excursus

I have given a name to my pain, and it is Internet Explorer (IE).

More specifically, it’s versions predating IE 8, which (IMHO) is Microsoft’s first really solid Web browser and gives me little to no trouble. IE 7 and IE 6, on the other hand, are what Napoleon Dynamite would refer to as decroted pieces of crap.

Here’s my most recent study in IE pain. I’m making a Web page that uses a variation on an accordion menu. Said accordion menu needs to allow users to open more than one pane at a time, so I can’t use the handy little .accordion() method in the jQuery UI plug-in to create it. After a little digging around on teh interwebs (Did you see that subtle, humorous allusion to internet culture there? Did I mention that it was subtle?), I opted to write a little click handler that would apply slideToggle to create the modified accordion effect, like so:

BTW, for all you self-appointed code police (SACP) out there, I’m fully aware that the guts of this function can be chained. For me, this looks cleaner and is clearer. There. Are we okay now?

Anyway, this accomplishes the following:

1. When each accordion item is clicked, it sets the variable currentAccPane to the next sibling element, which happens to be the div containing the content associated with the clicked heading.
2. It changes the on/off state of the clicked heading by toggling the class ui-state-default.
3. Then, it slides the pane of associated content down (on) or up (off).

Everything was just ducky in Firefox, IE 8, and Safari, but IE 7 choked on it. Hours of arduous Googling revealed that IE 7 and slideToggle don’t like each other when you’re slideToggling positioned elements (which I was). In this instance, IE 7 simply ignored the height of the parent element and stretched absolutely positioned child elements vertically to the height of the viewport.

Holy MonT-SteR Consternation™, Batman!

After trying every CSS trick I could find, as a last resort I tried resolving my issue with jQuery in a separate JavaScript file targeting IE 7 and older. All I can say is, “I heart jQuery.”

Here’s what worked:

The fix occurs in the last two lines:

1. After getting the content block associated with the heading, it calculates its pixel height based on the content it contains (which is the same whether open or closed — when the latter, it’s simply hidden) and stores it in the variable divH
2. Then it uses divH to assign a hard pixel height to the content’s parent element via inline CSS on the fly (minus the top and bottom padding in the element, which in this case added up to 24px)

Voila! jQuery to the rescue! IE 7 now happily constrains the absolutely positioned blocks that were being inordinately stretched to the size of the containing block in the accordion.

Now, let me preempt the SACP by acknowledging that there may be a more savvy, efficient way to do this. And I admit that this may break the rule of keeping style and behavior separate in Web design. I suppose one could argue that my use of the .css() method here in my script is actually addressing a behavior — albeit a bad one — and so everything’s kosher.

In any case, I’m just getting my feet wet with jQuery, so I’m open to suggestions. But this works without any deleterious effects on other browsers (except IE 6, but that’s a animal beast monster form of torture horse of a different color). And, it solved my IE pain. For a jQuery noob, I think that’s a pretty good day’s work.

Blessings,

Rob
aka The MonT-SteR