QUARANTINE BLOG # 476

July 19, 2021

Partners in Ministry International, Barnstaple, England forwarded a letter to me yesterday from Myanmar, and the news is not good.  The situation has no signs on the outside of getting any better, and in the meantime, people are hurting because the military seized control in February, following a landslide election win by Aung San Suu Kyi, and the house arrest of Ms Suu Kyi and her supporters.  The armed forces backed the opposition and cried “Fraud.”  Pastor Philip Thang says, “[The children at the orphanage] are suffering from serious flu, high fever, headache, body pain, coughing, and vomiting.  The doctor said that it is serious flu that is spreading in most of the places in Myanmar.”  Please continue to pray for Myanmar, for Pastor Philip and the children of the orphanage he serves, and that PIMI will be able to continue getting help through to the children.

👉  Tomorrow morning, the 52nd anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon, Blue Origin will launch New Shepard on its 16th flight to space, and its first with astronauts on board.  The launch will be broadcast live on BlueOrigin.com beginning at 7:30 am here in Augusta.  Liftoff is currently targeted for 9:00 am.

👉  Google wasn’t always the king.  There were search engines which paved the way and some of them are still running.  Though the web became publicly available in 1990, the first web search engine didn’t arrive until 1993, and Google showed up in 1998.  During that five-year gap, a number of other search engines had their chance at glory, and most of them failed.

WebCrawler is the oldest surviving search engine on the web today.  Brian Pinkerton first started working on WebCrawler on January 27, 1994 at the University of Washington.  In it’s lifetime it has been purchased by AOL, Excite, InfoSpace, and System 1.  WebCrawler was highly successful – at one point, it was unusable during peak times due to server overload.  It was the second most visited website on the internet as of February 1996.

Lycos still has a functioning site.  It was born out of Carnegie Mellon University in May 1994.  Venture capitalists were quick to see the benefits; the site went live with more than $2 million in funding.  It’s a drop in the ocean when compared to the valuations of tech companies that we see today, but back then it was a phenomenal amount of cash.

AltaVista went live in December 1995 and quickly became one of the most popular search engines in the 1990s.  On the day of its launch, the site amassed more than 300,000 visitors.  Within two years, it was seeing daily traffic of 80 million.  Famed for its no-frills interface, it was the 11th most visited site on the web in both 1998 and 2000 (it was my favorite search engine for many years).  It was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, but on July 8, 2013, the service was shut down by Yahoo! and since then the domain has redirected to Yahoo!’s own search site.

Founded in 1994, Excite was one of the first search engines that provided more than just search.  It also offered portals for news and weather, an email service, an instant messaging service, stock quotes, and a fully customizable homepage.  Excite was famously offered the entire Google business for just $750,000 in 1999 after Sergey Brin and Larry Page decided it was taking up too much of their study time.  The then-CEO, George Bell, decided it was too expensive and pulled the plug on the deal.  Today, Google is worth $900 billion, making Excite’s decision one of the most expensive business mistakes of all time.

👉  A 132-night “world cruise” sold out in under three hours, despite pandemic worries that have hobbled the cruise industry and steep prices that start at $73,499 per guest – and range up to $199,999 per person for a master suite (the “cheap suite,” the $73,000 offering is shown in the accompanying photo).  Regent Seven Seas Cruises released the fares for sale at 8:30 a.m. ET Thursday.  By 11 a.m., all the spots had been snapped up by people eager to spend more than four months on a cruise ship.  The voyage, which will span 34,500 nautical miles, includes 66 ports of call, as the Seven Seas Mariner will visit 31 countries and four continents.  Passengers will also see 61 UNESCO World Heritage Sites.  No word yet if they need a guest lecturer who has been land-locked for 16 months.

The living room of a master suite aboard the Seven Seas Mariner.

👉  This is the last selection of puns currently in my inventory (now stop that applauding):

• When you get a bladder infection, urine trouble. 

• When chemists die, they barium. 

• I stayed up all night to see where the sun went, and then it dawned on me.

• I’m reading a book about anti-gravity.  I just can’t put it down.

• Those who get too big for their pants will be totally exposed in the end.

**  Some thoughts from Family Circus:

👉  Some thoughts from different places:

👉  Today’s sermon from the Crawfordville UMC Pulpit is “Fresh Grace.”  The text is Exodus 16:11-15, and 17:8-13.

👉  Today’s close continues from Psalm 119 and Praying with the Psalms, by Eugene H. Peterson.

“Before I was humbled I went astray; but now I keep your word” (Psalm 119:67).

The people of God are grateful for setbacks that call them from wayward paths and bring them into more intimate dependence on his will.  The ancient Greeks had a saying that reinforces the psalmist’s experience: “Suffered things are learned things.”

Prayer: If suffering comes my way, O God, may I receive it as a means of being drawn closer to you, of learning your love, of discovering your mercy, of trusting your will, even as so many of your children have learned your ways through the school of humility.  Amen.

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