If you are in the geek industry like me (as a computer programmer), you probably heard about AMD suing Intel for antitrust practices. This article contained a hilarious quote about Intel’s monopolistic practices:

According to Gateway executives, their company has paid a
high price for even its limited AMD dealings. They claim
that Intel has “beaten them into ‘guacamole’” in
retaliation.

How’s that for vivid imagery!

This is one of my favorite lines from the Star Wars movies, said by the emperor.

(image removed due to other sites linking to it excessively)

I wrote an account of my first Catholic courtship on my personal site. I think that some of the lessons God taught me from it will benefit you, especially if you are in a courtship currently or hope to be one day.

Excerpt:

In light of the difficulty both of us had had in our pasts with being pure in relationships, we decided that:

1. We would not kiss each other on the lips until we loved each other.
2. “Loving each other” meant we were willing to spend the rest of our lives with each other.
3. We would not have any physical intimacy beyond kissing each other until we were married.

Never in my life was I more excited or more full of hope than I was when I began courting Mary. I woke up each morning and felt so joyful. I prayed for Mary everyday, and spent all the time I could with her. God had great things in store for us in the following months.

“When you wake there’s a new day dawning
When you wake there’s a cold wind blowing
When day breaks there’s a light shines through”

I’ve been a fan of Simple Minds’ music for many years, but I still discover old songs of theirs that I “hear for the first time” and suddenly enjoy. One of those hit me today with “Let It All Come Down“. I bought a DVD set that included a live performance of theirs in Verona, Italy, and I especially liked the first verse which I transcribed above.

Here is a picture of my good friend Nathan and I. Nathan and I have known each other since around 8th or 9th grade. Last year I was honored to be the best man in his wedding.

This picture is neat because we both have one where our poses are almost exactly the same, but we were about ten years younger then! Nathan framed this older picture and gave it to me a while back. Thanks be to God for good friends!

Today I went to adoration at my usual hour. The man who normally has the hour before me could not make it today, so another faithful adorer was filling in, and she brought her young sons, which was neat. I was amazed that these boys, probably ranging in age from 9 to 14, made it through an entire hour of adoration and looked quite peaceful at the end of it when I arrived!

I thanked her for coming in at a different hour than her regular one, and then when they had left said a little prayer for them. Then I did my usual adoration routine, which consists of:

• Short prayer thanking God for waiting for me and being there for me to come and adore him; then I ask him to teach me during the hour.
• Read the day’s lesson out of My Daily Bread.
• Read the daily Mass reading and about the saint of the day in my Magnificat
• Read from Through the Eyes of Jesus (today was an awesome one where Jesus remembers his family life with Mary and Joseph)
• Read other book I have, currently Good Families Don’t Just Happen
• Work on something for my future wife (it’s a secret to everyone but her, God willing, one day)
• Pray before leaving adoration

Before I left the house that morning, I had taken with me a very special prayer card, called “A Girl Sweetheart’s Daily Prayer”, and put it in my pocket. It has a nice picture of our Blessed Mother on the front with a prayer for helping the girl find her future husband. I took some pictures with my digital camera of the front and back, though it’s a bit hard to see:

I showed my good friends this blog today: Nicky and Alex who are brothers and sisters of little Jane (see my earlier post). Nicky thought the blog was cool, especially the pictures of Jane and his parents. Alex was less impresssed. When she saw the video the G took of me juggling on my personal site, she politely informed me: “You have way too much time on your hands.”

I asked if I could put her picture up on the site, but she was being difficult and denied my request. However, Nicky was cool with it:

My website manager has stats on what search strings people type in to find my page (like on google). Some of them are quite interesting (like last month someone searched for “pope benedict darth sidious”):

1 4 4.60% danielle bean
2 4 4.60% elliot segal
3 4 4.60% life of st. joseph
4 4 4.60% life story of st. joseph
5 3 3.45% anakin mutilated
6 3 3.45% canisius ifa
7 3 3.45% catholic courtship
8 3 3.45% danielle bean catholic
9 2 2.30% canisius college ifa diocese
10 2 2.30% hayden christenson
11 2 2.30% joseph’s children sitting on the knees
12 2 2.30% our lady exterminatrix
13 2 2.30% palpatine mutilated
14 2 2.30% st joseph graphic prayer cards
15 2 2.30% st. joseph statue home depot
16 1 1.15% anthony paone s.j.
17 1 1.15% autobiography elizabeth shue
18 1 1.15% batik statute of pope john paul ii
19 1 1.15% becoming catholic for girlfriend
20 1 1.15% bishop kmiec/ canisius college

Some of these I searched for and didn’t find my site on (maybe they didn’t use google for all these searches), but others the Vanguard comes out quite high on. May God be praised!

I go to Jimmy Akin’s blog a lot, who works for Catholic Answers, but I could never listen to the radio call-in shows that he would put up on his site because they were in Real Media (.rm) format, and I refuse to use Real Media player due to its annoying adware-like behavior and cpu-sucking processes that sit in my taskbar. Fortunately, they are now trying out the mp3 format for their radio shows, which just about any music player can play (itunes, Windows Media Player, etc.).

My cousin is going to have surgery to remove an ovarian cyst in a few days, so please pray it will be successful. My friend Will’s dad fell off a 16-foot high ladder yesterday and broke his neck, collarbone, arm, ribs, and suffered a bad concussion. For all that, he is doing pretty well, but still I ask for you to pray for him.