My daughter and youngest son were in the kitchen this evening dying eggs, and my daughter was explaining the story of the Red Egg to her brother, so I decided to go online and research the legend a little. In Eastern Orthodox iconography, Mary Magdelene is normally pictured holding a red egg. In the simplest (and most plausible) version of the legend, Mary Magdalene left Jerusalem to preach the gospel of the Risen Saviour. Legend says that she was a Roman citizen, and as such was granted an audience with the Emperor Tiberius. At her audience, she presented him with a red egg and greeted him with the words: ‘Christ has risen.’ She then told the Emperor about Jesus, His preaching and miracles, and the meaning of His resurrection. The red egg symbolized life arising from a sealed chamber and was a symbol that would have been very meaningful and understandable to the Romans.

A more miraculous version of the legend says that when Mary was admitted to the audience with Tiberius,

“she protested Pilate's poor administration of justice at Jesus' trial and then announced that Jesus had risen from the dead. She picked up an egg from the table, an instinctive move to explain the Resurrection with new life breaking out. Caesar scoffed, claiming a man could no more rise from the dead than that egg turn red.

The egg did!

That's why Orthodox Christians dye their eggs red. And why an Easter greeting between believers calls for each to have a red egg in hand.

‘Christ is risen!’ says the first, knocking egg against egg.

‘He is risen, indeed!’ answers the other. ”^[1]

Another legend says that each drop of Jesus' blood became a red egg as it hit the ground beneath the cross. His mother Mary gathered them up in her apron and as she cried each teardrop falling on an egg became a spot of brilliant color; this is one explanation given for the elaborate dye schemes used in Ukrainian easter eggs.

In any case the Easter Egg clearly predates any ‘bunny delivery’ stories and can be a useful tool to explain the miracle of the Resurrection and the concept of new life springing from our redemption by Jesus' sacrifice. Happy Easter! Christ is Risen Indeed!

Well, I admit it, I ditched my online office hours last night to go to the annual Naperville North High School Forties Dance. Every year the five jazz bands and four to six vocal jazz ensembles at the school present an evening of Jazz, primarily big band swing and vocal jazz from before 1950. If it were not for the dedication and committment of the band and choral directors at North and schools like it all over the U.S., jazz would be a dying art form in our nation. I know some might argue that jazz is dead, but you sure wouldn't know it from the verve and eagerness thase young people bring to what is now an old and sometimes even considered by some to be a “stodgy” art form. And this is a big event for the kids as well as parents. Swing dancing is still cool in some camps among the kids, and they were here swing dancing in force. A nice evening, great sounds, and jazz staying alive. What could be better?

Since I had such a nice picture yesterday of the Marine Band Drum Major, I decided to see what resources were online for Drum Majors. Real Drum Majors, the ones one who use a MACE and not a sissy stick/baton or (shudder) just their hands. Turns out there's a great one, focusing on Scottish Drum Majors but encompassing all military Drum Majors: The Regimental Drum Major Association. They not only have their own very complete Drum Major's manual online, they also have all of the applicable U.S. Army, Marine Corps, and Air Force manuals in PDF format. This is a treasure trove for any current or would-be military-style Drum Majors.

One of the problems that perennially plagues the senior junior officers in the U.S. armed forces is having the right music for a Dining In. (“senior” junior officers? Yes Virginia, there is ONE time there is seniority among Ensigns/Second Lieutenants—and this is when it's time to plan and execute the Dining In.) If you screw this up, it will be as though the ceiling had opened up and all the O-4s in your unit were up there equipped with excrement-loaded SuperSoakers ensuring you are in the brown stuff up to your eyeballs. But hark, fear not, for I bring you good tidings of great military joy! The United States Marine Band (The President's Own®) has solved this dilemma by providing every bugle call, every march, every drumroll you might possibly need to ensure the audio success of your Dining In. It's all there on the Marine Band Ceremonial CD; all you have to do is download it and burn it to a CD. Hey, you are a JO aren't you? You know how to burn a CD! Now if you had to rely on that Major or LCDR to do it...

“The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School” by Michael McDonough. A good read.
[Via WhatDoIKnow]

English computer scientist Sean B. Palmer was given an early Gmail account and was told to “...use it, break it in, love it, report bugs, and talk about it all you like”; in his blog he does exactly that in two entries: Testing Gmail and More Gmail Beta Testing. Nice review with good screen shots.
[Via the Internet Scout Weblog]

OK, I've been teaching folks how to create Web pages on Linux and UNIX servers since 1994, with a strong emphasis on editing bare HTML directly on the server, using telnet (early on) and SSH (now). One of the serious problems I've encountered from the outset is folks who never learned to do command-line computing—I realize not everyone learned computers when you had to write all your own programs in Dartmouth Time-Sharing Basic like I did, but I have had many people in classes who did not even know there WAS a command line, let alone how to use it. A while back I discovered the existance of eLinks, an open source, mouse-enabled text-based Web browser with support for frames. Then tonight, despite years of peripheral awareness of its existance, I really played with the venerable old program Midnight Commander (mc) for the first time in an SSH session to a Linux server. Midnight Commander is a two-column, psuedo-GUI file manager with a broad range of tools and capabilities. I had seen it before because my Dad ran it on his Amiga (or a near-exact clone), but I had not used either the text editor or the FTP functionality in the program. If you're a Linux or Solaris user who accesses your system via telnet (you should stop that and use SSH) or SSH, and you've not seen mc on your system, you should give it a try. Every installation of Linux and Solaris that I checked had this installed. I'm certainly going to use for teaching in the future.

eLinks screenshot

Midnight Commander screenshot

Midnight Commander in text-edit mode

The mouse functionality works in both Secure CRT and PuTTY. I wonder if there are other mouse-enabled text apps for Linux out there that I'm not aware of?

Finally, a simple way to save Flash content from all those cool, fun Web pages: UnH Solutions Flash Saving Plug-In. And not only that, it's free! Very nice, and it will also let you cull Flash content from your Web cache, in case you decide later that “Darn, I should have saved that one!”. Couple that with the freeware tool Free Pic Grabber, which lets you save all of the pictures on a Web page, or even all of the photos that a page of thumbnails lead to, and you've got the start of a very robust multimedia element collection toolbox.