Sunday, November 26, 2000

Had a very nice morning at The Falls Church (gotta love a church whose website contains multi-year archives of past sermons). Reverend Yates gave a sermon on the authority of Scripture, and how important it is to spend time in it to strengthen one’s personal beliefs. Then, in a class on classic spiritual literature, we talked about Cardinal John Henry Newman, an Anglican in the 1800’s who converted to Catholicism after a lot of intense study. While I can’t necessarily agree with his decisiion, I am forced to respect his deep moral sense — and incredible personal database of things spirtual — which convinced him to change his faith.

Meanwhile, I’ve begun programming a MIDI composer application that I’ve been designing sporadically for the past month. It displays sheet music, and adds notes to the sheet music when the user clicks on it. I used an old Windows 3.1 shareware application which did this, that has since been lost. Hopefully I can work out a good design; I’ve been trying to follow Steve McConnell’s advice, to refrain from coding things “just to see if it works;” I should have designed it well enough to know that it will work.

I’ve also been downloading Christmas mp3’s from Mp3.com‘s Seasonal/Holiday section (which is annoyingly hard to track down).