Kevin Basil

Share with your friends and followers:

OCA – News Releases: Statement on Financial Accountability from the Lesser Synod

The Lesser Synod has released a statement regarding the concerns raised in an earlier post. Let us pray that humble and appropriate actions are undertaken by everyone involved so that healing can begin.

Share with your friends and followers:

Share with your friends and followers:

I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.0. There was some fiddling around that I still have to do to make it work, but things look relatively stable now. Also, the links to kevinbasil.com over in the sidebar should start working properly over in the sidebar, for the first time since the IP address of the old server was changed without notice several months ago.

The new dashboard interface seems very nice, except that I must agree with DrBacchus: The new writing interface, which imitates Blogger by hiding the HTML from the user, leaves a lot to be desired. I understand simplifying, but multiply pop-ups when all I want is to add a bloody link is OUT OF CONTROL.

Share with your friends and followers:

Share with your friends and followers:

[link removed]

A site was posted as a comment for one of my articles bewailing the manifold sins of the botched redesign of the OCA website. Apparently unusable websites are the least of our problems. Lord, have mercy.

Update: While not specifically instructed to do so, I believe it to be within the spirit of my spiritual father’s rebuke to remove the above link. I do this with a heavy heart; I do not ordinarily “unpublish” something once I’ve published it.

As I wrote to my spiritual father on the matter: Regardless of what the future holds, the Orthodox Church in America is my home, and her bishops are my fathers.

Share with your friends and followers:

Share with your friends and followers:

I’ve always thought it cool to broadcast my current song selections to anyone and everyone, so the MiniStore controversy meme currently raging in the blogosphere rates less than a 0.1 on my GAS-o-meter, especially since the broadcast can be disabled easily. What does bother me is a fundamental borking of the user interface.

iTunes’ UI is designed to look like a music player, whether CD, DAT, or cassette tape. Up until 6.0.2, the controls acted like music players, too. The reverse control, when operated once, reset the current track to its beginning; operated twice, it reset the current track to the beginning of the previous track. With 6.0.2, this simple, intuitive behavior is degraded if you’re listening to a podcast. Reverse changes the current track to the previous track. Forward or double-click on the track you were listening to takes you to the position last played in that track/podcast, unless the track is marked as unplayed, in which case it starts at the beginning.

Unclear? Reverse — the back, the two triangles pointing to the left, or your left arrow key — used to take you back to the start of the current podcast. Now, it takes you back to the start of the previous podcast.

This is an improvement, I suppose, if you’re a moron. For the rest of us, this breaks a consistent and intuitive expectation of music player user interfaces — one that is met by nearly every other software music player on the market.

If I were the guy who suggested this UI change, I’d be embarassed that someone took my suggestion seriously, when I thought it was clear that I’d had one too many shots of Jaegermeister. If I were the superior who took this suggestion seriously, I’d be making sure my résumé were in order.

On the other hand, this has the stink of Jobs all over it.

Share with your friends and followers:

Share with your friends and followers:

Are you a heretic?
created with QuizFarm.com

Sorry, Jim. After you take the quiz, read below for my take on why some Orthodox Christians might score as Pelagians.

Read the rest of “Are You a Heretic?”

Share with your friends and followers:

Share with your friends and followers:

Create an e-annoyance, go to jail | Perspectives | CNET News.com

Yet another reason why I voted for someone else.

Hat tip: DrBacchus

Share with your friends and followers:

Share with your friends and followers:

Ancient Church » Merry Christmas!

One of the things I’ve had trouble with as an Orthodox Christian is explaining my faith to people who are of some other religious persuasion. I think the most difficult has been the look of suspicion — the narrowed eyes, the furrowed brows, the smirks, the almost spoken, “You’re not really Orthodox like you claim, are you?” — when I correct those who do know a little about Orthodoxy regarding the date for Christmas.

Frankly, I’d much rather have been able to take leave starting today, old Christmas Eve, and enjoyed Christmas Liturgy tomorrow with my church in Lexington.

Merry Christmas to all my brothers and sisters on the other Orthodox calendar.

Share with your friends and followers:

Share with your friends and followers:

CNN.com – Collectors go bananas for flawed $20 bill – Jan 6, 2006

“I’ve collected for probably seven years now and nothing comes close to the way people react to it — their eyes pop out,” said Daniel Wishnatsky, a Phoenix currency collector who bought the bill in 2003 on the eBay auction Web site for $10,100.

Share with your friends and followers:

Share with your friends and followers:

Grammy-Winning Singer Lou Rawls Dies on Yahoo! News

Memory eternal.

Share with your friends and followers:

Share with your friends and followers:

Why I’m Happy I Evolved – New York Times

This is a beautiful op-ed piece on the “tapestry” of evolution and its explanatory power within biology. I disagree with her extra-scientific beliefs, of course, since I see the wonderful tapestry and the sophisticated mechanism of evolution as a sign of God’s design rather than of its absence. But her description of the tapestry produced by this sophisticated mechanism is beautiful and inspiring.

Share with your friends and followers:

Share with your friends and followers:

Well, I don’t have time to do the entire meme, so I’ll just do the last question: 39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

“I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name.”

Share with your friends and followers: