First things first: I did my first postcard. It includes a new logo I'm contemplating using.
This afternoon I went with my friend S to Laguna Beach to spend the day working on stuff near the beach. We were talking about human rights and somehow got onto the topic of the affect of Christianity on western civilization. Yeah, the sort of situations one can expect never to distill. As we talked however, I kept throwing in names like Locke and Hobbes but upon reflection realized that I was quite removed from a real understanding of what these men thought. Just the vague notions from school about all men being equal and the avail of the individual. So this evening I googled a bit and found an interesting letter by Locke about tolerance in the church.
"The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light."
Of course, this is but a snippet - I'd encourage a perusal of the whole thing.
Was Western Civilization's growth and flourishment as related to religion as the confluence of fortuitous events and circumstances? I believe that no civilization develops in isolation and Christianity, while playing a roll, should not be attributed too much - Greek and Roman civilization were able to organize themselves around similar principles without it and it is upon these civilizations that much of what we have is derived. That is an opinion from a layperson and a non-historian, I acknowledge. You can shout at me if you like at sophtwarez <at> hotmail <dot> com.
Regardless of the above, I find it quite useless to assume one civilaztion is "better" than another, unless one is seeking false esteem.
Ah, to much more simpler things: .NET. Today I spent a lot of time examining the database APIs provided with the new framework. ADO.NET does not support server-side cursors. Francesco Balena, whose "Programming Visual Basic .NET" tome is like a bible for me, saw this is in part a shortcoming and that server-side cursors are planned for the future.
Another thing about these client side objects that the API provides is that they are quite involving when one is involved in straightforward, single database interactions. Even with the old ADO I found it easier to use an object to simply pass SQL statements directly to the database engine rather than get too involved in the API. How much more so with ADO.NET - especially with the amount of wading one has to do through Data Adapters, Data Sets, Data Tables, Data Views and Data Rows amongst others!
2:06:38 AM 
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