John Ratcliff's Weblog

My daughter and her friends 'Google Idol' style video parody is now online and available for your viewing pleasure. They were bored this Saturday night and instead of just sitting down and watching a movie, they made one instead. This video is a parody of the already extremely funny music video from 'Tenacious D' called 'Jesus Ranch' .

Masonry teaches and fosters in the man the qualities of self-respect and self-help --- the qualities that make a man fit to stand by himself --- and yet it must foster in everyone who appreciates it as it should be appreciated the most beautiful and solemn ritual --- it must foster in him a genuine feeling for the rights of others and for the feelings of others; and as Masons who help one another help in a way that is free from the curse of help, patronizing and condescension. Theodore Roosevelt ~ Brother Theodore Roosevelt received his second degree on this day in 1901.

Well, my daughter Lauren decided last night they would make their own lip-sync video parody to send into Google Idol. However, after they finished it they read the rules and found out the video submission couldn't have any bad words in it. Since they lip-synced to a Tenacious D song this presented a small problem. I think she plans to edit it and remove the few bad words, but she also wanted me to upload it for her friends. Here is the link . She also submitted it to 'Google Video' and I will revise this post when it becomes available.

If you liked the last one, you will love this! And, if you need a 'Thought for the Day' here is one: It isn't the money we get for a job That makes us happy, content--- It's the joy we find in doing the thing That pays for the effort we've spent. It isn't the glory that follows the deed That counts for the utmost, my friend--- It's the satisfaction we find in the act That pays the real dividend. It isn't the amount of material things That make us rich let me say--- It's the service we give to our fellowmen That pays highest returns every day. Lloyd Risne

Sheesh, what the heck has been up with this blog lately? I think the 'Masonic Thought for the Day Thing' gives the blog a bit of a funky vibe. I figured, well, if I have nothing else to post why not post that? Regarding the link above, well I have a feeling my daughter's little high-school video project won't make the Google Video hall of fame. At least not when it is competing with little gems like the one I just posted here. Make sure you have your audio turned on to get the full effect. In other news... Tomorrow I am going to take a PTO day to spend with my father. I will be driving down to Jefferson City in the morning and then take him to the VA hospital. In the evening I might attend a lodge meeting, or I might just stay home. I'm not sure yet. On Saturday morning the Moolah Shrine is sponsoring a craft fair, so I might go by there. On Sunday my son's DeMolay chapter is going to recognize their 'Day of Devotion' by having the entire chap...

THE WORD OF GOD ENDURETH FOREVER The Word of God is eternal. It spoke to man before he had learned to write; it will still speak when all books are faded and forgotten. Heaven and earth may pass away, but the Word of God will not fail of fulfillment. "All flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of the grass. The grass withereth and the flower thereof falleth away, but the Word of God endureth forever." What God has to say to man, and what at least He actually did say, is something too great, too wonderful for any human words, even the most eloquent or searching or patient, ever to tell. It is a Living Word, not known by pronunciation, but only by incarnation. As it has been written: "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in times past unto our fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son. The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we hold His glory full of grace and truth." Joseph Fort Newton

I KNOW SOMETHING GOOD ABOUT YOU Wouldn't this old world be better If folks we met would say, "I know something good about you!" And then treat us just that way? Wouldn't it just be fine and dandy If each handclasp warm and true Carried with it this assurance "I know something good about you!" Wouldn't things be more pleasant, If the good that's in us all Were the only thing about us That folks bothers to recall? Wouldn't life be a lots more happy If we praised the good we see? For there's such a lot of goodness In the worst of you and me. Wouldn't it be nice to practice That fine way of thinking , too? You know something good about me? I know something good about you! Hiram

Right Worshipful Brother Russ Tinker, 33rd degree Scottish Rite and Master Mason Charles Ratcliff Here is a photograph of my nephew Charlie standing with Right Worshipful Brother Russ Tinker in the foyer of the New Masonic Temple . Right Worshipful Brother Russ Tinker is about 70 years old, was in DeMolay , has been a Past Master of Troy Lodge #34 , served in a number of senior Masonic positions, and was given the high honor of being elected to the 33rd degree of the Scottish Rite . Meanwhile, Brother Charles John Ratcliff is only 20 years old and was raised a Master Mason in Wentzville Lodge #46 last summer. Brother Charlie is a 'widows son' having lost his father a number of years ago. As his Uncle I enjoy the fellowship we have attending lodge together since it is always special to be involved in Masonry with your family. Charlie has found his Masonic experience to be a positive one and is welcomed with open arms by the elder brethren in the area lodges. He attends meetings ...

The final table, Danielle the champion on the right. Serious Poker Rachel and Dennis Dilip and John My friend Adam Moravanszky emailed me a frew more photographs from the poker party so I am going to include them here. Over the weekend I received several additional donations for my fundraising website ' A Million Pixels US ' which now makes it a grand total of $289 raised to date! In the past week two major Freemason themed weblogs have posted stories about my site, which has helped draw fresh traffic and attention to our worthy cause. First the Masonic Traveler and now the Burning Taper have been kind enough to showcase our effort. You might need to scroll down a bit to get at the stories but they should be easy enough to find. It is interesting to me that both sites have been posting commentary critical of their experiences with Freemasonry in the southern states. I have spoken to the authors of each site via private email and it seems their experiences are quite a bit dif...

The Beer Menu My friends Adam Moravanszky and Dennis Gustafsson were in town this past weekend and I took it upon myself to be their personal Saint Louis tour guide. This is the first time Adam has visited in two years and I wanted to make sure that he had a memorable visit. On my last trip to Zurich, this past Fall, Adam took me to Mount Pilatus and Lucern and my friend Simon threw me a big party. I felt obligated to do my best to return their hospitality. I have a bit of an inferiority complex about St. Louis. I’m afraid people think it is a backwards and culturally dead city with nothing of consequence besides a giant stainless steel horseshoe embedded in the ground. I am especially defensive if my visitors are from Europe since I expect them to be used to seeing great architecture and having ready access to significant cultural attractions on a regular basis. While Saint Louis is certainly no match for Paris, it does have a lot more going for it than most people realize. On Th...

"pink tutu freemasonry" Holy crap! I am the number one hit on the internet for the phrase 'pink tutu freemasonry' . Worse than that is the realization that someone intentionally typed this in as a search request on Google to get to my site. What's even stranger is that there are 361 hits for that search phrase. How weird is that? I am the number one hit because I wrote a review of the horrific piece of trash called " Cremaster ". In my review for that film I pointed out how the imagary included a Freemason in a tutu; or something like that at least. As you can see I changed the layout of this blog. I also added a bunch of links. I did this for two reasons. First, I cannot raise the 'valuation' of my blog on 'Blogshares' unless I 'exchange links' with other participating blogs. Now, since I have a long list of 'favorites' anyway, it is convenient for me to just post them on my blog as well. Tomorrow evening I will be atten...

How strange. There is a Fantasy site that allows its users to buy, sell, and trade 'shares of stock' in weblogs. I found out that my own personal web log has a current valuation of $3,652.71. I have already had fun tracking hits to the site, so this could be neat too. I am trying to spread some memes lately, what with launching my fundraising and coding website, so I will probably register all of them. It will be fun to watch my weblog portfolio grow. Speaking of hits to this site. I have had some interesting search requests in the past day or so. Here are a couple of the curious ones: "suppository picture" "freemasons scottish rite cult shriners" "John Miles software developer seattle" "the last starfighter star" "child molester" website sting "chat rooms" "DRESSING IDEAS FOR TRIVIA NIGHT WITH PHTOGRAPHS" "organized use the disorganized freemasonry" "google images faiths boobs" "divi...

My daughter's high-school homework video project is now on 'Google Video' . It will be interesting to track the popularity of the video as is bounds across the net. Cool, I just figured out how to embed the video directly inside the weblog. This is very cool! If you don't have time to watch the whole video just fast forward to 6 minutes and 30 seconds into it to see Lauren interviewing one of her teachers at high school (just use the slider).

Today I finally got a complete tour of the New Masonic Temple building where my lodge Naphtali #25 meets. I went with my nephew Charlie Ratcliff and Right Worshipful Brother Chris Newbold. What an absolutely amazing experience! I won't go on about it here, since I presented it already on my website dedicated to the facility . Here is the photo-gallery of images I took today. On Thursday afternoon I received a phone call from my sister to let me know my father was in the VA hospital. It seems he started bleeding out and was told to come to the hospital right away. Upon examination they discovered that he had colon cancer and scheduled emergency surgery on Friday. I got up early Friday morning to drive to Columbia, Missouri to see him before he went into surgery. I told him to be positive in his attitude and not worry about negative outcomes. I stayed around until his surgery was complete and it was seemingly very successful. He is progressing well and there is every reason to belie...

My daughter Lauren is insanely talented. She can draw, paint, play the piano, french horn, guitar, perform and excels academically. For the past week she (and her partner Chris) have been working incredibly hard on a school project. Her class read the classic Ray Bradbury short-story Farenheit 451 and had to do either a written report or produce a video segment. And, not just any video, a twenty-five minute long production! Lauren and a number of her friends are in an improv group and enjoy performing (in fact they were in a competition this past weekend) so they all really got into the idea of producing their videos. Since I have a video editing setup on my home computer she did all the production here. She worked late each night and taught herself how to use the software. Finally, last evening, she came down to the wire trying to finish it up. I stayed up with her until 2am to make sure she had a working copy to turn in. Meanwhile I don't think she went to bed until 4am herself. ...

Well, I had fun with the first day of my fundraising website . I raised about $75 in the first day, which was a lot more fun and a lot easier than selling candy bars. Of course, most of this money came from pimping my friends for a dime, but they seemed to enjoy it too. None of my Online Freemason friends have donated yet but I am hopeful they will demonstrate some of that brotherly love and throw a few bucks to support a DeMolay chapter. The most fun I have had with the site so far is adding a post to the blog each time someone makes a donation. Other than that things are just crazy wicked busy at work. My new code snippets website got about 400 hits in the first day, which was nice to see. I posted a new snippet this evening and will try to upload quite a few over the coming weeks until I run out of them. Then, I suppose, I will actually have to write some new code! I convinced one my co-workers to join Naphtali lodge with me. His father and grandfather were both Masons. He is also...

A Million Pixels US : Fundraiser for Masonic Youth Groups This blog post is to announce that I am launching a new website and blog . I know this may seem all of the sudden, but this is something I have been working on for a while. I won't say too much about this site in this post because it is pretty well covered in the other blog entry. I am going to ask, nay beg, my Masonic friends to donate. Just click on the page and donate anywhere from $4 to $100 to buy some advertising on the site. Email me an image, description, and hyperlink to your site and I will add it into the page. This is a great way for the online Masonic community to make a small donation and get a little acknowledgement in return. My son's DeMolay chapter has been struggling with fund-raisers this past year. Recently we held a spaghetti dinner fund-raiser which was an enormous amount of work for a fairly modest return. Conventional fundraisers involve shaking somebody down by selling them some candy or magazin...

I have previously posted on this blog on the topic of maintaining different 'personas' on the internet. I have also been very shy about talking about my 'job'. The thing is, even though I write software for a living I still, from time to time, like to write software for fun. I used to publish extensively in Dr. Dobbs Journal, contribute to developer websites like 'Flipcode' and chapters for books like "Game Gems". I enjoy that sort of thing and there is no reason I shouldn't talk about it. Just not *here*. So, today, I set up a new blog devoted just to code related stuff. I won't update it very often (probably more at first as I put up some of my old code resources). You can find the new incarnation of John Ratcliff's Code Suppository here.