For those who don’t know, SOA (often pronounced soh’-uh) stands for Service-oriented Architecture and is a current fad in enterprise information systems. This conference was a buzzword-fest of the highest magnitude. There were more Powerpoint slides with corporate-speak and technology catchphrases than you could garbage-collect with a Cray.

While the breakout sessions proved to be enlightening, the general sessions in the main ballroom were definite snoozers. Almost all of the general sessions were given by “sponsor representatives” who used the time to hock their products and services with an advertising pitch cleverly disguised as a SOA lecture. Normally I would have skipped these sessions to mingle on the expo floor and get vendor demos of SOA software solutions, but they deliberately closed the vendor expo area during these sessions so that attendees had nothing else to do. To further frustrate things, the multiple general sessions pushed the conference schedule past 7pm all three days!

However, not all was lost, and the breakout sessions were really worthwhile. Once you got a corporate lecturer out of the main ballroom and into a breakout room, it was like someone lifted off their managerial sales hat and gave them a developer’s cap… because these smaller venues boasted some brutally honest lectures. Some key principles that were thematic in these more down-to-Earth presentations were:

• Don’t try to boil the ocean.
• If you’re implementing SOA because your boss heard about it from some executive on the golf course, then you WILL fail.
• SOA success stories come from BIG companies with a BIG IT staff and BIG budgets.
• If your business processes aren’t yet aligned across your enterprise, then what good is a SOA?

If SOA is a forest, then web services are the trees. I will be creating a presentation soon on the basics of web services and SOA, and I’ll post it on Negative99 when I do.

I feel like we’re natives living in wood huts on a primitive desert isle. One day a steel I-beam washes ashore, and already people want to start talking about what the skyline’s going to look like.
~ Steve Mooradian

Thankfully, the resurgence of microbrewing in the United States is helping to overcome the great loss and to resurrect the art of brewing. I personally long for the return to the glory days of Christian pubs where God’s men gather to drink beer and talk theology.
- Mark Driscoll, The Radical Reformission

Now, many Protestant Christian churches in America have been near-continually lying to their congregations for almost a century about what the Bible says on wine and alcohol. They deny that Christ both made and drank wine with his apostles despite overwhelming scriptural evidence. Not until fairly recently in US history has the newer church generation been mature and powerful enough to start casting out the feminism-driven romance with prohibitionism (alcohol is sin) and abstentionism (it’s not a sin but Christians should abstain) that has been perpetuated by “nearly-false” prophets. To be fair, not EVERYONE preaching such blasphemy does so from a Satanic heart… some are merely ignorant or mentally blocked by their legalistic upbringing… but never-the-less it is a sin to declare a sin something that is not.

Diligently do everything I command you, the way I command you: don’t add to it; don’t subtract from it.
- Deuteronomy 12:32 (The Message Bible)

It never ceases to amaze me how anyone (even people trying to pass off as Christ-followers) will re-write and re-interpret history and scripture to suit their own purposes. I’ve expanded on such in my previous post Chardonnay and Lean Pockets. Here’s a link regarding what the Bible says about alcohol [LINK] and a link that even specifically addresses Jesus drinking beer [LINK]. And yet another link on the history of beer in the Christian-influenced world [LINK].

If self-righteousness were an art form, many Protestants’ work would be in the Guggenheim!
- Brad Stine

Here is a little history refresher (taken from The Radical Reformission by Mark Driscoll) that I like to bring up every now and then:

• Saint Gall was a missionary to the Celts and a renowned brewer
• After Charlemagne’s reign, the church became Europe’s exclusive brewer
• When a young woman was preparing for marriage, her church brewed a special bridal ale, from which we derive the word bridal
• Pastor John Calvin’s annual salary included upwards of 250 gallons of wine to be enjoyed by him and his guests
• Martin Luther once wrote of the Reformation, “While I sat still and drank beer with Philip and Amsdorf, God dealt the papacy a mighty blow.”
• Luther’s wife Catherine was a skilled brewer, and his love letters to her when they were apart lamented his inability to drink her beer
• When the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock, the first permanent structure they erected was a brewery

It is a striking truth how scarce the above facts are within Protestant sermons in the US. And as if our myopic faith had no limit to its hypocrisy… our “teachers” often neglect the fellow brothers and sisters in Christ across the ocean who live in cultures not plagued by relics of abstentionism and having no temptation to re-write the Bible. They regularly drink beer and wine with such Christ-given freedom that American visitors from legalistic backgrounds often express great shock and discomfort, a testament to the false doctrine they were force fed from birth.

Some Methodist minister by the name of Welch invents grape juice in 1869 to replace communion wine and we’ve been suckling it ever since.
- Steve Mooradian

I’m no liberal Christian… I’m a politically conservative, theologically fundamental Christ-follower who happens to drink beer and worship in blue jeans playing electric guitar. And now I will brew… but with so many choices of fine ales and lagers I am left to ask myself… what would Jesus brew?