No functionality changes, but I spent an hour on the Clipper yesterday figuring out how to make WP-Cats work with WP 2.2.2.

Admittedly, WP-Cats is a more sophisticated plugin than some in the degree to which it interacts with core code, but my first experience contributing to a major open-source project has been a little mixed. My attempt to interact with the team received no response, and I can tell by checking out the trunk that the next point release of WP is going to—again—break the basic interface upon which WP-Cats relies.

Despite this, I think the plugin provides useful and worthwhile functionality in an elegant little package, and I’ve had dozens of thank-you emails about it over the past year; that’s motivation enough to carry on. So enjoy!

A passage this morning at Community was from the letter of James, about looking to our futures:

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.

I always feel kind of conflicted about these kind of messages. Waterloo charges me a ridiculously high tuition, but I also make a lot of money working on co-op. Even though I’m basically a pretty typical broke 21-year-old student, I have a larger cash flow and less debt than many my age.

But in saving during work terms and spending during school, where’s the line between attentiveness and worry? What constitutes reasonable planning for the future, and what is man’s folly in making his own plans? King David, in Psalm 33 says:

The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations.

Read on…