Posts By: William Johnston

What could have been: Pre-copyright extension

Duke university has published their annual list of things that would be public domain on January 1, 2015 under the US copyright act which was in force until 1978. TechDirt has pulled out some especially interesting items in the list. Some Dr. Suess, Vertigo, and South Pacific are on there…

This blog as aggregation location

I’m trying to figure out ways to get off of Facebook, and one of the things I use it for is to share stuff I find interesting. I doubt anyone else finds it interesting, so this blog is a much better location anyway. I’ll try to post links, sometimes with commentary. Content will be far ranging… Read more »

Implicit Contracts in User Expectations

I’ve been wondering lately about change and how to better manage it. Particularly in the computer world, change is frequently accompanied by howls of rage by some people and tacit approval by others. In trying to understand this, I realized that people are frustrated by change when it violates an understood contract. This contract may… Read more »

Worship is not about time, it is about Time

Gottesdienst Online has some commentary about an article regarding a church who is introducing a worship service sans ceremony in order to fit it into 30 minutes to make it more palatable to the culture. This kind of thing is a capitulation to our facebook-twitter immediate-gratification drive-thru-window entertain-me-and-quick-or-I-will-be-bored culture. Worship is seen as, at best,… Read more »

Ends Justifying Means

I just saw a Gottesdienst blog post raising awareness of the capitulation of Lutheran Child and Family Services of Illinois. Sad situation, and I’m sure the first of many, but one sentence caught my attention: This is not really a tough decision ethically, because the bending or compromising of principles is never a good thing… Read more »

Worship is Preaching

Below is an email I sent to the WELS Hymnal Committee: Thank you for your patient work on the new hymnal. You have one of those impossible tasks wherein you will displease perhaps the bulk of people regardless of the result. Yet, it is a good work, and God will bless faithful work. I wanted… Read more »

Weird Rails behavior with has_many through

I spent the better part of today struggling with Rails while upgrading some old code. Documenting this here in order to hopefully save others the time. In a case where you have three tables, e.g. Wizard, Dungeon, and DungeonWizard, where DungeonWizard is the join table, you cannot make the foreign keys in DungeonWizard constrained to… Read more »

A reason for the new WELS hymnal project

I’ve been looking for a stated reason why we are making a new hymnal. I’ve been afraid that the primary reason was simply to create something new, a generally bad reason for almost anything, but especially bad applied to the public worship of God’s people. However, in the March 2014 WELS Connection Close-up, there is… Read more »