The posts below were my most popular posts on my blog in March. If you missed one, please check it out (and maybe tell your friends? )

Too Gay

My friend Brian Ammons wrote a chapter for the Baptimergent book that was rejected for being “too gay”. Here is that chapter!

How Much Things Cost – Or My Coat of Many Colors

A personal memory from my childhood, which involves my wearing women’s clothing.

The Cost

I think a lot of people misunderstood this post. They thought it was my advocating lying for Jesus. If anything, I was saying I was sorry I had ever lied for Jesus.

Reverend Hollowell

My announcing my Ministerial credentials with the Mennonite Church USA.

The Word is Gay

Me educating denominational leaders on why ‘homosexual’ is a bad word.

I really do appreciate all the comments, all the links and the conversations this past month. You guys make blogging fun!

One of my favorite blogs I read is West of Mayberry, by Tony¹. I don’t miss a post.

I don’t know Tony. He and I don’t have much in common. Most of the stuff he writes about is personal stuff about his life – his relationship, his elderly grandmother, his work. None of this interests me. I only read his posts for one reason.

He can write like the angels sing.

He has this incredible ability to make the most ordinary things – caring for his Grannie, a picnic, a night at home alone – sound beautiful. I hope to be able to write like that one day.

The other day he wrote about trust. Since then, I can’t seem to get the idea out of my head.

How do we build trust?

I think that the way we build trust is we make promises. And then we keep them.

Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

Do that over and over. Eventually, what you have is trust.

Your partner is supposed to be home at 5PM, and it is now 7PM and you have no idea where they are. Whether your first thought is of car trouble or an affair depends largely on their past record of keeping promises, both implicit and explicit.

Sort of like a bank account. Making and keeping promises are the deposits. Trust is the balance.

Note:

1. If occasional frank, but generally tasteful, talk about a gay man’s sex life is offensive to you, please do not click through. Instead, go here.

Some people have noticed my love for white space. A friend referred to the design of this site as “sparse”.

Here is something I came across in my archives. It is from an email I sent a client back when I used to design and build websites. He wanted more images on the site.

Nothing wrong with images, per se… Just not a sight built around them. In the early days of the web, it was not uncommon to see animated .gifs on a sight. Flames that moved, smily faces that smiled and squirrels that danced. Thankfully, those days are largely past us, only to be replaced with ads, badges to get us to join this tribe or that social network. The dingus that tells me how many subscribers you have, the huge RSS icon, the huge amazon banner – these are all, in my head, dancing squirrels.

If I want people to know about Pride and Prejudice, I should write a post about it and link to it in the post. This beats to all hell having a technicolor dancing squ, errr, badge from amazon in the sidebar. It adds to the conversation and furthers the world. The badge just makes noise.

Less noise. Better conversations.

That is what I am thinking.

I love hot cocoa. It is a comfort food (err, comfort drink?) for me in a big way. And it is so easy to make.

No, I don’t mean open one of those little packets. Get thee behind me, Satan! Seriously, it is almost as easy to make from scratch, and it tastes somewhere around ten times better, at least.

Hugh’s Never Fail, Simply Awesome Homemade Hot Cocoa

Hardware:
Range or hotplate
Small saucepan
Measuring spoons
Good sized drinking mug

Software:
Milk
Cocoa
Sugar
Salt (I like Kosher)
Vanilla Extract
Goodies – marshmallows, whipped cream, etc.

1. Pour cold milk into the mug you will be drinking out of, filling it to the level you want the finished drink to be. Then, pour the milk into your pan and turn the range to medium heat.

2. While your milk is heating up, measure 1 tablespoon of cocoa and 1 tablespoon of sugar into the bottom of the mug. This is the basis for all truly great Hot Cocoa – equal parts cocoa and sugar.

3. On top of this, add a small pinch of salt and 2 drops of vanilla.

4. The next step requires hot water – the hotter the better, but I usually just run the tap until it gets really hot. Measure 1 teaspoon of hot water and pour it atop the mixture in the bottom of the mug. Take a spoon and stir, making a thick, rich chocolate slurry.

5. Return your attention to the milk in the pan. You do NOT want it to boil – rather you want it to want to boil. When it starts to shimmer and tiny bubbles are forming around the edge, that is just about perfect. If you are the perfectionist, you are looking for about 170 degrees. Just don’t let it boil.

6. When milk is ready, add about a fourth of the milk to the cup, and stir. Then half the remaining milk, and stir, then the balance and stir.

7. Then add whatever goodies you like (This is the personal part – I like mine naked, Renee prefers whipped cream.)

Your turn: What do you like in your hot cocoa?

If you can get past the language, What the F*ck Is My Social Media Strategy? is just too funny. If you are not a Social Media nerd, you may like What the F*ck Should I Make for Dinner? instead. (The key to each of those is to hit refresh after reading…) Via Kottke.

The Mullis’ attend Visio Dei church here in Raleigh, which is where I met them. Right now, their newborn son Ethan is living on a ventilator and a pacemaker.  If you are the praying kind, I would appreciate it if you would say some prayers for little Ethan, as well as his parents. You can follow along or drop them well wishes on his mom’s blog at Signs of Life.

If you are a nerd (or just work in an office environment), there are some awesome, mostly easy to accomplish pranks in this list. For example:

10. The Wrath of Rotation
A simple but quick and always amusing prank is putting the screen rotation hotkeys to uses Microsoft never intended. Just run by a co-worker’s desk, reach over and hit Ctrl-Alt-up or down to rotate their monitor orientation. If you have some alone time, you can one-up it by also going into the Control Panel and setting their mouse to left-handed. They’ll spend 10 minutes with their head tilted sideways trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Find the whole list here: The 25 Best High-Tech Pranks.

Perhaps one of the most used quotes out there is “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing“, by Edmund Burke. Or is it?

In an effort to track down the source of this oft attributed line, Martin Porter, back in the winter of 2002, tracked down hundreds of variants and linked to hundreds of sites, but could never reach the source. His conclusion?  Burke never said it.  It is a “pseudo-quote”.

It is generally believed to be an adaptation from Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents (1770): “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.“

On Twitter you only have 140 characters to work with, so every one of them counts. If posting a url in a tweet, best practice is to use a url shortening service. But which one?

Laura Lee Dooley has anticipated your question and done an exhaustive comparison, with a chart and everything, of most of the major URL shortening services, such as tinyurl and so on.  I am a fan of tr.im myself, which came in a strong third.