Prayer of Thanksgiving

Lord Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,
    we praise you, and we bless your name;
    we adore you, and we give you thanks for your glory!
This day we come to you with hearts of thanksgiving,
    for you have been gracious and merciful to your people.
For you have not spared your only begotten Son,
    but gave him to us as an atoning sacrifice,
    so that we may even now enjoy the many spiritual blessings
        that you have prepared for us.
Not only so, you have also provided abundantly for our daily lives.
We thank you for granting employment to those who sought work,
    for providing the needs for them and their families.
We thank you for this congregation’s ministry of mercy to those who are in need,
    as you have commanded us to love one another
        not only in word or tongue, but in deed and in truth.
We thank you, for you have extended your kindness and mercy
    even to those who have not yet come to know you and confess you.
For by your common grace you give to all mankind life and breath and everything;
    you give man rains from the heavens and fruitful seasons,
        satisfying his heart with food and gladness;
    you cause the sun to rise on the evil and on the good.
Lord, we pray that you will continue to control us by your love,
    so that we may always rejoice in you and be thankful to you in all circumstances,
    that we may ever humble ourselves before you
        and know that even our daily bread and our breath are your gracious gifts;
    that we may grow in godliness and in being content;
    that we may abound in good works and bear many fruits of righteousness.
We pray that by your mercy and kindness
    you will lead to repentance those who have not yet known you,
    that, in time, they may come to saving faith and together with us confess Christ Jesus.
May this our prayer of thanksgiving be a pleasing sacrifice before you,
    and grant that we may also offer up ourselves as a living sacrifice,
        holy and acceptable to you, for the praise of your glory.
In the name of our Redeemer and Lord Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen.

AMT exemptions raised

What a relief! I was under the impression that the AMT exemption amount would revert to the pre-2004 levels (about $33k for single filers, etc.). But a quick search on the Web yieled two articles (here and here) that seem to indicate that Congress has “acted” and, in fact, raised the levels to $42,500 for the single filing status. But the pernicious phase-out stays, with the same starting income level of $112,500.

I have been using TaxCut for five years; this will be my sixth year of using it. The 2006 version has just been released recently, and I have purchased and downloaded it. It appears, though, that its 6251 form still has the old exemption levels.

Congress should get rid of the AMT. It just makes tax planning impossible.

Captcha and Spamming

Captcha stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” and is a technique commonly used, e.g., on blogs to prevent robots from comment-spamming. Blogspot has an option for “word verification,” which is an implementation of captcha.

It appears, however, existing captchas have been shown to be rather weak (see the “Defeating Captchas” section in the Wikepedia entry), but have been effective in one thing: confusing email readers’ spam filter. There has been an increase of email spams with spam content in embedded images and random words in the main text. The embedded images are “enhanced” with captcha-like techniques in an attempt to thwart OCR-based filters. See, for example, this image:


Again, the spammers are still winning the battles ...