I've been learning a bit more about Christianity recently. This is the first of a set of posts on and around the topic.

I killed a little more time browsing through random bash quotes, and couldn't resist posting a few more of the funniest ones.

National Geographic does a series of surveys of 18-24 year olds in America to test their geographical knowledge. I don't think any of us would be shocked to learn that its pretty abysmal.

I was doing a little procrastinating by reading the quotes on bash.org today (I blame Marshmallow :-p). I'm sure most of you have read them at some time or other, but here are some of my favourites.

Oh no! The Rapture is approaching! The Rapture Index is currently 156. This is slightly down from its all time high of 182 just after the September 11 bombings.

I've sat through a lot of presentations in my time. Literally hundreds of hours of lectures, dozens of hours of student presentation, both as a student, and as a lecturer. I've listened to fellow PhD students and masters students present, and I've listened through several conferences.

Mr. Cranky has the best movie reviews on the web. Movies are rated from one bomb (almost tolerable) to four bombs (as good as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick). For the really crappy movies, there's dynamite (so godawful that it ruptured the very fabric of space and time with the sheer overpowering force of its mediocrity) and a nuke (proof that Jesus died in vain).

Missionaries.

A couple of minor things I have asked my students to do are to read and write Word documents using office automation, and to make use of the Microsoft Agent control. In one lab I combined these, by asking the students to read the contents of a Word document into their application, and then having the Microsoft agent read the file aloud.

My students are currently working on their final assignment. All four assignments in this course are based on a single application. In the first assignment, they wrote business objects, they developed a UI in the second and a data access layer in the third. In all three, I supplied the other two layers, and so they could be counted on to be reasonably bug free. The students had only to figure out and debug one layer at a time.