Larry Norman, THE PIONEER of Christian rock music (a tag he hated) passed away this morning in his home in Salem, Oregon.

Norman became a Christian at the age of five and was raised in a black Pentecostal church. In 1956 he heard Elvis Presley’s music and would later say that he felt Elvis had stolen rock’n'roll from the church and he was determined to steal it back. The roots of the idea of marrying a spiritual message with rock’n'roll music began there and then in his childhood even though it would be more than a decade before he would have the opportunity to begin fulfilling that vision.

I’d be lying if I said I knew all of his music, but growing up in a very legalistic church (where even drums were considered evil) kinda automatically makes Larry Norman your hero, as far a music goes.

“I ain’t knockin’ the hymns, just give me a song that has a beat
I ain’t knockin’ the hymns but give me a song that moves my feet
I don’t like any of ‘em funeral marches, I ain’t dead yet

All I wanna, I wanna, I wanna say
Why should the devil have all the good music?”

While I’m dreaming about new speakers for my desk, I might as well dream about this Han Solo Carbonite desk (click the link for more photos) created for Mark Hall, lead singer of the Grammy Award-winning group Casting Crowns. This is freakin’ awesome!!!

I’m tired of people asking what my Creatures are. I need to get a set of these.

Right or wrong… it’s pretty clever. I can hear my wife screaming right now. Check out this ad for an extermination company placed inside a Mamma Mia pizza box. Keep in mind, you wouldn’t actually see this until all the pizza was gone! 

Check this Flash site out… so nicely done. I love the various angle effect. I love the music. Very cool.Ikea and Bedrooms

I hope this is as good as I (and everyone else) want it to be!

So here goes… I saw this on openswitch and thought it might be cool.

The 123 meme.

Basically, the meme requires me to grab the book closest to me and punch out an excerpt based on a few rules. The rules of this meme are as follows:

1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!

2. Find page 123.

3. Find the first 5 sentences.

4. Post the next 3 sentences.

5. Tag 5 people.

Sadly, I’m sitting at the office and the nearest book is on CSS. Oh well, here’s mine:

Unfortunately, the attribute selector is only supported on more modern browsers and does not work in IE 6 and below. Until the attribute selector is more widely supported; the best way to distinguish between input elements is to give them a call.

So for instance, in this example you could give radio buttons a class name of radio:

From

CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions by Andy Budd, Simon Collison, and Cameron Moll

That sucked.

I’m tagging Chris, Nate, Mooney, uuhhh… s’all the blogging friends I have

Chris Johnston has announced the availability of a public WordPress 2.5 demo site. I went in and played around within the admin panel and it looks sooooo nice. I’m hoping for the ability to upload any media for a post, not just images. We’ll see! Can’t wait for March!

What!?!?

After a discussion with Autumn about love being an “action, not words” Sunday morning before church, followed by a great message by Chuck on love, it seems to be the theme of the week. Hey, it is Valentine’s Day right! Check out these awesome posters by the crew at “The Plow“!

“It’s Valentine’s Day… Everyone loves those who love them. So love your husband or your wife.

But realize that the freedom in Christ is so profound it allows you to love the worst, most vile people ever… Because He first loved you, and nothing else matters.”

Can you love your enemies?

Jack Johnson: Sleep Through The Static.

Pros: Recorded with 100% solar energy… cool!

Cons: First listen through, and nothing stood out. I love Jack Johnson, but this all just kinda flows into one long song to me. I’ll give it another listen and see what happens. Maybe “Sleep Through…” wasn’t a good choice for CD title.