Textual editing applications - and the problem with Christian radio

Ever notice that Christian radio stations (OK, how exactly a radio station becomes a follower of Christ I'm not quite sure... but that's what they're generally called, I think) is that they don't fit any particular genre of music other than (vaguely) Christian.  For instance, in four back-to-back songs you might run the gamut of hard rock, pop, country, and R&B/Hip-hop/rap (yeah, I may be grouping those last incorrectly).  What other radio station ever would play such a mix?  I dare say on a secular station you're not going to hear country, hip-hop, and hard rock in consecutive - or even well-spaced-out - blocks.  Yet we do it on our single "contemporary Christian music" station.

Weird.  And I don't really like most "country Christian music" (I'm not talking gospel or southern gospel - that's a different thing altogether).  Like, for instance, Natalie Grant... I have to say I'm not very fond of most things I've heard of hers.  It's all so depressing... and that's not quite what the Jesus I know wanted for us ("My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life" - Jesus, in John 10:10, NLT).  To me the song "Held" ... wait, I'm not going there.  I know that song means different things to different people, and I don't want to mess it up for you if you like it.  (If you want to know what I think about it, please ask me personally - my e-mail's around here somewhere.)  Anyway, in short, I'm not a Natalie Grant fan.  I'm also generally not a Christian Rap or hip-hop fan, although I do like Toby Mac and (the former) DC Talk.  And I did have a tape of the Rap-Sures once upon a time ("OT Rap" ... "Joseph's Coat of Many Colors" ... etc.).  But my point is this: why don't we have categorized Christian Radio?  (I think I can hear someone vaguely whispering "satellite radio... satellite radio...")

Now for the other portion of the title of this post.  I was regaling a coworker today of my distaste for Microsoft's Visual Studio's code editor's design which does NOT reposition the cursor to the point of undo/redo when CTRL+Z or CTRL+SHIFT+Z is pressed.  I mentioned how much I like to use that feature in other textual editing applications to restore my position to where I last was editing (by undoing and then re-doing whatever my last edit was in order to reposition the cursor... and Visual Studio's code editor doesn't do that - it does the undo/redo, but doesn't even bother to scroll you to where the undo/redo is taking place so you can see what's going on! and when you have hundreds or thousands of lines of code and have jumped to another place in the file in order to see what subroutine abc() does and then want to get back to where you were editing... well, it would be nice if the undo/redo trick worked).  He said, "textual editing application? really?"

Yes, really.  I explained myself: I wasn't talking about a simple text editor (such as Notepad), which is a textual editing application.  I typically was referring to something like Microsoft Word, which is a textual editing application, but it isn't a text editor.  In fact, the documents you are editing - while editing text - are usually not text documents, but Word documents.  And, in fact, if you ever took a look at the file in a real text editor, you'll see that it's not really text that you're editing.  Thus, the moniker "textual editing application" was, in fact, more accurate than "text editor" - even though it does sound a bit strange.  But I like it.  One of my favorite textual editing applications is the open-source Notepad++; it's a significant improvement over standard Notepad (although I do still use that often for quick things, usually stuff like copy/paste where I want to remove formatting from a web site before pasting into a blog post or for things like keeping track of something that I need to do - like a post-it note for my computer, it's much quicker (for me) than trying to get to the sticky notes included in Outlook - the Windows key + R opens the "run" dialog and then I type "notepad" and press enter... wala, it's there!).  Notepad++ is a great, extensible (means "you can extend it") editor that can handle formatting for a variety of languages/files (XML, various programming languages, SQL, HTML, etc.; it evens handles text files!).  But a "text editor" it isn't - it's so much more.

...

So, I guess I've caved on the American Idol thing.  It's in its 8th season, so it's about time that I started liking the show.  I rarely like anything when it first comes out, instead waiting usually until it's only in reruns before I start watching it (like I did with Star Trek: The Next Generation).  I doubt AI will resurface in reruns (well, on mainstream channels... with the advent of quadruple-digit numbers of channels in cable/satellite land, it's bound to end up in reruns somewhere, but what's the point?), so I'll have to start watching it now.  Sort of like Survivor - I skipped the first few seasons, but I like the show now.  On the other hand, Heroes is one I've liked since it premiered (Noah Bennet is my favorite character; Hiro Nakamura is second; Daphne is probably third, or possibly Sylar; my least favorite? Peter Petrelli, Claire Bennet, and probably Matt Parkman).

Ah, well, guess that's enough for this post.  Until later... a topato!