“Our friend and my wonderful brother Larry passed away at 2:45 Sunday morning. My wife Kristin and I were with him, holding his hands and sitting in bed with him when his heart finally slowed toa stop. We spent this past week laughing, singing, and praying with him, and all the while he had us taking notes on new song ideas and instructions on how to continue his ministry and art.

Several of his friends got to come and visit with him in the last couple of weeks and were a great source of help and friendship to Larry. Ray Sievers, Derek Robertson, Mike Makinster, Jerry Albertini, Charles Thompson, Tim and Christine Gilman, Matt and Becki Simmons, Kerry Hopkins, and a few more. Thank you, guys. Larry appreciated your visits very much. And he greatly appreciated the thoughts, wishes, support and prayers that came from all of you Solid Rock friends on a daily basis. Thank you for being part of his small circle of friends over the years. Saturday afternoon he knew he was going to go home to God very soon and he dictated the following message to you while his friend Allen Fleming typed these words into Larry’s computer:”

I feel like a prize in a box of cracker jacks with God’s hand reaching down to pick me up. I have been under medical care for months. My wounds are getting bigger. I have trouble breathing. I am ready to fly home.

My brother Charles is right, I won’t be here much longer. I can’t do anything about it. My heart is too weak. I want to say goodbye to everyone. In the past you have generously supported me with prayer and finance and we will probably still need financial help.

My plan is to be buried in a simple pine box with some flowers inside. But still it will be costly because of funeral arrangement, transportation to the gravesite, entombment, coordination, legal papers etc. However money is not really what I need, I want to say I love you.

I’d like to push back the darkness with my bravest effort. There will be a funeral posted here on the website, in case some of you want to attend. We are not sure of the date when I will die. Goodbye, farewell, we will meet again.

Goodbye, farewell, we’ll meet again
Somewhere beyond the sky.
I pray that you will stay with God
Goodbye, my friends, goodbye.

Larry

http://www.larrynorman.com/

note: I found out from my Uncle’s site and Phil Cooke has also started a thread here.

Anybody who has seen this site before (and isn’t using an RSS reader) has already noticed the redesign, but I thought I’d mention it anyway. To the right, you can see the old design, and you can of course see the new design by just looking at the page in front of you. If you’re using an RSS reader (I always use NetNewsWire), please take this moment to actually load my page.

I’ll wait.

Okay, I’ll assume you’ve seen the new design at this point. I’m not actually pointing this out to toot my own horn… even though letting other people toot my horn sounds so very creepy. I actually just wanted to acknowledge that I had in fact re-designed the site after spending a lot of time looking at more muted, clean sites like rands in repose, shawnblanc.net, and Wil Shipley’s blog. Technically, I look at probably hundreds of blogs that are more skillfully designed than mine every week, but those are the ones that were most similar already in architecture so they were the ones that I really stared at while getting “into the zone.” Anyway, I just wanted to give an acknowledgement for my inspiration from them and let you know that, yes, the last time you saw this site it might have been tri-color and I might not have discovered the joy of Pixelmator effects just yet. If you like the new look, you can leave me a comment; if you don’t, then you can just use NetNewsWire or Google Reader and never look at the actual site again.

The other major change that happened the past week was that we switched over to mediatemple for our hosting needs. I don’t really feel like ranting about the last host we had, suffice to say we’re all “a little bit happier now.” Now that I’ve switched hosts and brought over my friends and my wife with me, we will be starting a new group blog soon. I don’t want to give away the domain yet, because I’d hate for you to go there just to see the default WordPress Kubrick theme and “hello world” post right now. We do have the domain, though, and it’s going to at least include my friends Neil, John, and a few other soon-to-be bloggers sounding off about God, politics, theology, sandwiches, Dutch sayings, and anything else that needs to be discussed.

I’ll officially be at SXSW for the first time this year to learn everything I can for the coolest ministry ever. I know it’s at the same time as NRB this year, so any other ministry web developers out there might not be able to make it. If you’re going to be there, though, drop me an email, add a comment, or look me up on the registrant directory. Anybody who knows me personally knows I’m not the most outgoing, but I’d love to meet some other people out there with similar interests!

This morning turned unexpectedly exciting for me when I was glancing through my newsfeeds and saw the announcement that FLOW3, the new PHP framework from the TYPO3 5.0 development team, is now “public.” Now why is this that exciting? Do I always get this excited about seemingly obscure and nerdy development tools? Actually, yes, I do… I explain the intricacies of Textmate, MVC, and CakePHP to anyone who mistakenly asks me what I do for a living. That’s besides the point, though. I am even more excited about this announcement than normal.

What makes so me excited about FLOW3? First, I believe in the TYPO3 developers working on it and it really does look like a first-rate project (no hands-on with it, yet, but I have faith). I also just really love any elegant framework solution because I don’t have time or patience to invent a new wheel every three months and I really don’t need developers I’m working with to make their own octagonal, undocumented wheels in the middle of a project. Most importantly, though, I just like the idea of a common framework between my CMS (TYPO3), my CMS extensions (hopefully), and my external web applications (sometimes you can’t shoehorn an entire webapp into a TYPO3 extension, after all).

If my dreams are true, they should all be talking the same language with the same APIs and have the same basic architecture in the future. Even better than that, they will have the same “flow.” Every developer has had to do the “mash-up” before. Heck, that’s a big part of the job: make this piece of software share a database with that CMS and then dump the data into the charts for the marketing department. The biggest problem I run into isn’t the language issues (if the API doesn’t suck), but the fact that coding in one framework asks you to think one way and coding for the extension engine wants you to think a completely different way. You have to “change paradigms” at every step in the development, and it’s mostly needless. One of the goals of FLOW3 is to get developers learning the “TYPO3 5.0 way,” and that’s what I care about the most: a consistent “way” for my CMS, it’s extensions, and my external webapps.

Editor’s note: I got linked to by Robert Lemke on the TYPO3 news page here. I’m positively blushing.

I’ve just really discovered ShawnBlanc’s blog and found out that beyond being another Mac user, he is at IHOP and involved with the onething conferences, which means we probably know some of the same people without even knowing it. Anyway, I’ve been thinking more about having two separate blogs like Shawn has, one for Christianity/ministry and one for technology/freelance stuff. I do miss writing the great theological debates of my past, after all. So, in the coming weeks, as I transition our sites to MediaTemple, I am planning to either post my own blog or start a group blog with some friends. I’m still just working on names… I’ll let you all know how that goes.