It’s the game that holds a special place in every Canadian’s heart, a sure sign that Spring is on the way, and one of my favourite indulgences. I won’t lie, Tim Hortons sure knows how to pack a lot of entertainment into their coffee cup, with anticipation at every purchase – the great suspense as each rim is rolled, the joys of seeing a prize revealed, and of course wry amusement as the infamous Please Play Again mocks and teases. If you’ve ever rolled up the rim, you know what I’m talking about.

Last year was pretty good actually, I did quite well in the gratuitous coffees and donuts department. No car, but that was merely a setback. I return again this year with renewed high hopes and my sights on the Toyota Camry. Yeah, come to Poppa.

And how has the season been as yet? So far it’s Jon: 0 Timmies: 2, but I’ll permit this minor headstart They don’t know yet that I’m the coffee king. Lets do this! I will be keeping a running tally of beverages purchased and prizes won. And who knows – will it be 5 coffees? 50 coffees? It’s just a matter of time before I’m holding the winning cup in my hands!

Do you like Pad Sew? Follow the easy steps steps in Lina’s homemade recipe and you’ll be cooking with tang!

Congrats to Phoenix Big Band on their first album release! I won’t lie, The Atomic Rooster was bumping on Sunday night past with their Food Bank fundraiser and CD launch double whammy! And just who is Phoenix Big Band?

“We are a semi-professional big band in the Ottawa area. We play blues, jazz-blues fusion, old time R & B, and original music.”  –Facebook band page

One of the band members, Mark Fryars, has put together a CD sampler – here check it out. If you like what you hear, don’t be bashful; the band would be delighted to hook you up with a CD.

So, the scam starts off like this: You receive a direct Tweet from one of your Twitter buddies; they’re letting you know that somebody is talking smack about you.

Alright, it’s a tiny url link, so you can’t really see anything fishy at this point. It may be improbable but heck, who isn’t curious about gossip? Particularly gossip about oneself! So you take the bait and it brings you to this page.

Seems legit at first glance (the shams always do) the layout looks familiar, the Twitter logo is up there but oh, you’ve got to log in. Look closely at the address. This is NOT Twitter.com, this is itvviter.com – slick eh. Anybody who logs in is in fact supplying their twitter credentials to people with malicious intent, and they will certainly attempt the phishing attack on YOUR twitter friends now.

Rule of thumb before logging in to ANY site – unless you typed in the website’s address yourself, take a close look at the URL of the site you’re at. Don’t assume that it’s the real thing because it looks right; that’s playing right into the scammers’ hands. However, If you ever do feel that you’ve been compromised, make sure to change your password immediately from a trusted location such as a home PC or laptop.

***Update***

Twitter is now reporting that malicious link as potentially dangerous. It’s nice to see that they are on top of their service, but that’s just one ant. Stay vigilant!

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree,
How steadfast are your branches!
Your boughs are green in summer’s clime
And through the snows of wintertime.
O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree,
How steadfast are your branches!

And for everyone who hasn’t finished their shopping yet, it’s turbo time

I found myself wondering how I might explain this in a way that makes sense and my thoughts drifted towards mathematics. It seemed a good place to look – counter-intuitive constructs with rational explanations are not strangers in this domain.

So God is infinite, maybe like the set (collection) of positive integers. Thinking of a father and son relation in this sense it instinctive feels that a son is in part the father. In terms of sets, perhaps a subset (part of a set). So lets say that Jesus is the set of positive even integers. Now you might be thinking that this can’t work; I’ve just downsized Jesus. It seems that the Jesus set has only half the numbers that the God set has. With finite sets it would indeed be a downsizing but with infinite sets, magic happens.

Counter-intuitively, the set of all positive integers and the set of all positive even integers actually have the same cardinality, or size if you will. Keeping it simple, imagine that you have a ticker for each set. Now we will count both sets in parallel. The first number in the God set is 1 and the first number in the Jesus set is 2. Both sets have a number at the first position so we can safely increment both tickers. The second number in the God set is 2 and the second number in the Jesus set is 4. Both sets have a number at the second position so we can safely increment both tickers again. Continuing, we can do this for the third position, the fourth position, and so on. In fact, there is no reason why we can’t keep this up indefinitely, infinitely. Logically, both sets seem to contain the same amount of numbers!

Effectively and rationally, the Jesus set is a proper subset of the God set and yet is still as great in cardinality as the God set – a father and his son a part of him, both infinite. Surely this analogue provides some clarity to understanding the relation between God and Jesus. It’s paradox-free and makes sense; I’m comfortable with the God/Jesus relation presented this way. However I can’t help but grin at the irony in that the analogue borrows from infinity and infinite sets, historically considered taboo by the Church and firmly opposed.

I would like to end this with another perspective on the relation between God and Jesus, the relation of the Trinity in fact, gleaned from the commentary of said video.

We believe in one God who intervenes through Three Persons, each having different roles. God the Father is the Creator, God the Son is the Savior and God the Holy Spirit is the Consoler.

My first impressions: the user interface felt more responsive than before and has been tweaked for improved efficiency. From what I understand, this update delves below the dated interface, polishing some rust off the underlying platform to improve general performance, notably in processing permalinks and slugs.

Yeah WordPress has been powering a significant demographic of the blogging world for some time but the platform has really been improving nicely since the big 3.0 and version 3.3 is carrying this trend forward. Watch the video below for an overview of the new goodies, or check out the more detailed list of changes.

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