Category Archives: General

Books, Books… Reading

January 14, 2010

Well.. School has started back up and the first full week of this semester is drawing to a close. What do I have to say about it? HARD!!! Why do I say it’s hard? Because I have two English classes right after each other, then I have Precalc.

If you go and visit my PhotoBlog, you would have seen a picture of my schedule. The url to that certain post is: http://www.picshere.info/?p=9 and there you will see the picture. As you can tell it isn’t any where near as easy as last semester!! But with God’s help I will survive it and make good grades, so please pray for me haha

But why the title “Books, Books… Reading”? The reasoning is because in those two English classes I’m reading different books in them. The book I’m reading in my “20th Century Literature ” class is title All Quiet on the Western Front. The    book we’re reading in my “Contemporary Literature” class is titled Where Are The Children?. Some of you probably haven’t read any of them, but the book All Quiet on the Western Front is a very graphic novel!! One of the scenes in that book is this:

…The fire lifts a hundred yards and we break forward. Beside me a lance-corporal has his head torn off. He runs a few steps more while the blood spouts from his neck like a fountain.

I have a weak stomach for stuff like that, and whenever I read that part I started to feel light headed (like I am right now after reading that while typing it). This book is getting very good yet at the same time very graphical and that almost makes me want to stop. But since it’s for a grade I’ll keep on reading it. Haha

Well this is all for right now.. I do have some thoughts in my head for a couple of articles I’m thinking of writing. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you would know what one of them is. :) But that’s all I’ve wrote for tonight haha

Good Night and God Bless,
Bradley Hilton

0 Comments

What Will It Take?

January 7, 2010

Before I start getting into writing this article, let me explain something. On Sunday nights we have youth services when the adults are in the sanctuary praying, which starts at 5:30p.m. Well, before we actually start the worship service, we spend some time and pray. After we’ve prayed for a little bit, we sing some songs and have a regular church service. Once it’s over, we go into the sanctuary and have regular church with the adults.

A couple weeks ago (12/13/09), I was lying on a pew face down praying and stopped praying for a minute. All was quiet, but wait! That’s not how it’s supposed to be! I laid there for another minute not praying and heard some adult voices praying, yet I was in a youth service and youth pre-service prayer. A couple of seconds went by and I heard something that wasn’t what I wanted to hear! The noise I heard was ever so loud that I’m surprised I didn’t hear it before, but yet that’s not what I had been listening for. After a little bit I finally recognized what I was hearing, this noise that I heard was people’s feet scraping the floor. You could have mistaken them for robots since they weren’t making any noise out of their mouth.

I thought to myself, “This can’t really be happening. I’m hearing this incorrectly.” And I didn’t want to look up because I feared that it was true. I finally did after a second or two, and my mind and heart was deeply saddened. I thought “My Lord, what is it going to take for all of us youth to bind together and have awesome pre-service prayer?!” I went back to praying and starting asking God what it would take for us to all to be in one mind with one accord, in unity and be on fire for him. While praying, I wondered if it would take us having a visiting young person in a regular church service for us to get on fire. It so happened that we had a visitor that was a young person (with her family), and I’m sad to say that we didn’t get on fire, nor did any of the girls pray with her.

I wrote down the thought “What Will It Take” and let it pass over me. Well, then December 18th, 19th, and 20th, I was talking with someone from Louisiana; somehow,  it was brought up about the youth in that person’s church. This person told me about their church youth group and how they are all bound together and close. I found out that they weren’t like that a while back, but something happened and now they are close. When I heard the story, it worried me because I don’t want this to happen to my church’s youth group, but if it’s God’s will then it’s His will.

This person’s church youth group used to have a good amount of young people, but not all of them were into church. Yeah, they might have been going to church, but if a young person is going to last, they need to be into church. I was told by this young person that they had about half of their church leave this past year (2009) and because of that the young people are all close. This person said to me, “ever since half of our youth group split up, the remainder of us are sticking together like glue and we keep each other up”. When I read that, I was amazed and thought to myself, “Wow!!.. I wonder what it will take for my church’s youth group to become close like that…”

So, I now present you the reader with some questions that I wish you would answer in your mind and then if you want to, email me the answers that you have come up with. What will it take for the youth to be on fire for God? Why did I hear feet scraping the floor, instead of voices lifted up in prayer? What activities can be done to get young people involved in church and love church? Why do young people wait on pastor’s to ask them to do something instead of asking their pastor what they can do?

This article has been heavy on my heart for a while now, and I pray that I was able to express in words what I really wanted to say. It’s been burning in me so much, that I doubt I did a good job of expressing it.

God Bless,
Bradley Hilton

Also posted in Personal Life Stuff – 1 Comment

Divs, Divs, Divs

December 18, 2009

You’re probably thinking what I weird title this post is, but the the more unique you make them the more interested a reader is. But this article isn’t going to be long like the rest of mine are, it’s going to be short because I’ve got a church dinner to go to here in a couple of minutes. And I’ve got to set up a little sound system there, so I’ve gotta be there early than normal.

A ton of divs!!! Lol

But what I am really posting about is this picture. This is part of the code for ApostolicBook. If you click the picture you’ll see a bigger image, and then see how many “divs” there are. Looks confusing? Yeah it probably is to you if you don’t know anything about code and if you haven’t seen the whole code of the website (which is almost all of my readers) then it is confusing. :p But that’s a ton of “divs”, why so many? Because ApostolicBook is going to be a table-less website design, it does require a bunch of “divs” that are styled by CSS. I enjoy doing it because it’s challenging to me and my mind! What you think of this many “divs”?

God Bless,
Bradley Hilton

P.S: Aaron Ogle is another person working on ApostolicBook and Jared Hilton is helping us out.

0 Comments

Created But Not Made

November 17, 2009

I was at lunch last Monday (November 2nd) listening to some people sitting beside me. I got disturbed because they were talking about this certain person that we all know who is not only a pot head BUT also big into going to church. He is not apostolic.

They were talking about how this certain person smokes pot, does acid, and other things like that. Then someone spoke up and asked, “Isn’t he big into going to church?”

The original person talking answered, “Yes, he does, but he says ‘God created it, so why not use it and do it?’.”

Another person spoke up, who also does drugs, and said, “Exactly!”

My mind immediately started going 100mph thinking! Here is what I was thinking, and what I have to say to that.

The first thing that came to my mind was Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. In Genesis 2:9, the Bible says,

“And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”

God created the ground to make plants and trees which then produced fruit and food. Then in verses 16 and 17 of chapter 2 it says,

“And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest there of thou shalt surely die.”

You see, from the beginning of the human race, we’ve always had rules to obey and follow.

God created everything that was in the garden of Eden, but did he make everything for Adam and Eve to eat? Obviously from scripture the answer is no. God created the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but it wasn’t made to be eaten by the human race. Then what was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil created for? That’s a question I’ll leave open for pondering since I don’t know the answer (even though after talking with some people, I have something in my head of what I think it might have been made for, but it’s probably not the true answer since we’ll never know until heaven!).

Now back to my original thoughts. Since weed, pot, and drugs were created, does that give mankind the right to smoke, chew, or do anything of that sort with it? I feel the answer is no for three reasons.

One reason is because of the garden of Eden example. The second reason is because our body is God’s temple. Second Corinthians 6:19-20 says,

“19What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? 20For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.”

If our bodies are the temple for the Lord God to dwell in, then why would we want to destroy or alter our minds or modify our body to our liking by doing drugs? The third reason is because everything was created for a purpose.

So, here are some questions that I present to you. If God created it, then was it made to be used by mankind? Or did He create it for a different purpose? Did God put something in us so that we know what we can and cannot do of the things that are on this Earth?

God Bless,
Bradley Hilton

1 Comment

Recent Activity Update

November 12, 2009

It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted something to my blog and that’s due to a couple of things. One is church and school have been keeping me busy. School’s going pretty good, except for the fact that tonight we have a Pre-Calc take home test and this section is pretty hard in my opinion (and a couple of other people)! What’s keeping me busy with church you’re probably asking yourself?! Well, I’ve been doing a lot of research on how to get us to be able to record better and more professionally. After a ton of research and going to Guitar Center, I’ve found out that what we are wanting is a PreSonus FireStudio (Interface Only). You can go ahead and research it yourself, since I’m posting this while I wait… Basically it allows us to have multiple channels (or inputs) going to our computer, so then when we record it’s not just one channel but how every many we have set up. That way we can record and then later go and make it sound more professional than before.

Another thing that has been keeping me busy is work, which if you’ve read my blog that’s working for my school district. Well, I just got my check in the mail today and it’s way more than I expected! :) I’m excited about that, but I think half of it is going to be gone cause of paying my mom and dad off.

lhs01

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time working on getting new features for my school’s websites. There are two main features that I’ve added, and you can see them from the picture on the left. The main feature is what I call “highlighted articles”. This is a scrollable list of articles that have been posted to the website, and it also can have pictures of the subject. I’ve ran into a ton of problems with this! I’ve over came a couple of them, but I’m still running into a couple of them. Another feature is the search bar at the top right of the menu. The positioning of this took more work than I had originally thought it would have, but hey I love a good coding challenge every so often! I also had to edit one of the Joomla! files to make the search appear in a different page than the front page. I’ve made a good amount more of changes to the site, but those are all little details that a majority of people will never know… Haha

I hopefully will be posting an article this week or weekend that has some good meaning behind it, and might get you thinking.. Who knows.

Bradley

Also posted in Joomla!, School, Website Design – 3 Comments

Ohhh GOOD

October 29, 2009

My food/lunch for today. Jealous? Lol – it’s a Chipotle burrito!!!

2 Comments

My Pastor’s Newly Designed Website

October 21, 2009

Late night equals a lot done! And that’s the truth for tonight. I’m excited about getting my hands on a website project that is a challenge for me and that brings my pastor’s website an awesome redesign. I am redoing my pastor’s website because the one he has right now is honestly kind of lame, way too bright and hard on the eyes, and horribly done! All that comes down and the blame is on me.

Pastor's new website design

This new website design looks a whole lot nicer and it’s way easier on the eyes!!! It looks more Web 2.0 style and it also looks more fresh and “cool” than the one he has right now. As of right now I’m currently getting the home page styled and laid out correctly. It hasn’t been that much of a challenge, but it has made me think about what would be used to make it look like it was designed to be.

My pastor told me earlier this month that he would like to have a blog on his website, so I told him I would look at that and see what I could do. Well with his current website layout I couldn’t really do it, so I decided to talk with a friend of mine about getting a design from him. In one week (I think) from when I first contacted him about this to when he sent me the files, he had it done and created. I was honestly impressed about it and excited because I knew my pastor would like it and so would everyone else. When I contacted him, I told him I wanted a WordPress style of a page so that I could easily make a theme for WordPress and then just show my pastor how to create post.

I’ve got a good amount of work set out for me to do, but I believe that by Saturday I’ll have all the pages up and going except for the WordPress part. If you want a link to follow what I’ve currently got, feel free to contact me and I’ll give you the link.

Good night everyone and God Bless!
Bradley Hilton

0 Comments

October 17, 2009
0 Comments

October 17, 2009
0 Comments

ApostolicBook

October 11, 2009

I’m sure that all my readers are well aware of the fact me and Aaron are currently working on a social networking site for Apostolic’s only. A while back I got a script that was a base for building a social networking site, but the problem I faced was it wasn’t very customizable and I didn’t have much control. So, I talked with Aaron and we finally decided that we would build our own social networking site up from nothing except our knowledge. Well, here’s my timeline of what has transpired and what I think might happen. I also will quote the introductory statement that we have stated on our Design Document.

First off, I got the idea to create a social networking site just for Apostolic young people around a year ago this month. I searched around a while for a script that made it easy to set up a social networking site that looked good and was easy for people to navigate around. Another thing that I wanted, was a script that took a person’s age and if they were under a certain age it wouldn’t let them join. After searching for a while, I finally found a pretty good script that did almost everything I wanted it to do, except I couldn’t figure out how to not allow people to join if they were younger than the certain age.

I found that script about four or five months after my first thoughts of a social networking site for Apostolic youth only. I had originally called the site “Apostolic Youth Connected” (a.k.a. AYC). Well, since I couldn’t restrict people who put in a date that stated they were under the certain age, I decided to stop messing around with the script for a while (it was also the end of my sophomore year and finals were taking place). So, since that didn’t work out and my school studies were requiring too much of my time, I decided to stop working on it for the time being. But before I stopped me and Aaron had already bought a domain name and set up a Twitter account, we also had decided to change the name to “ApostolicBook”.

Summer came and so did some major decisions. Aaron and I decided that since we had spend the money on the domain, we would try to get this going again, but this time we decided that we would build our own script up from nothing but our ideas and knowledge. It was decided that Aaron would do the main PHP, MySQL, and other server coding, while I would help him with that a little but mainly do the main CSS and styling of the website. As the summer went on we really didn’t get much finished, expect Aaron got some things here and there on the back-end done.

Recently there has been some major work being done on ApostolicBook. On September 29th, 2009 Aaron and I talked about what we wanted to do and how we want things done. After much talk and some research we decided that we would have a document online that was shared between the two of us (if you’re wondering, it is stored on Google Docs). We then set a couple of dates to get things done by a certain time because I knew we probably wouldn’t get stuff done if we didn’t set dates.

The first two dates we set was on October 6th and October 13th. On October 6th we set that we would have the Initial Design Document completed, which included the basic features, first version of our color scheme made up, and the first sketch of the user profile layout. For October 13th, we have set that we will have the “First layout draft complete”. This includes a first draft of every page that we have come up with right now in our Initial Design Document.

Small amount of the acutal 1st draft color scheme

The first draft of the color scheme has been chosen and the picture to the left are a few of the colors chosen. I’ve only included a few of the colors, cause if I did show you all of them, what would be the point of having a first launch date? Ha-ha

As ApostolicBook is under development, is there something that you as a user would like to see? If so, then please speak up and leave a comment on here or send us a direct message on Twitter.

God Bless,
Bradley Hilton

Also posted in ApostolicBook, Personal Life Stuff – 0 Comments
« Older posts