2025 Christmas Eve Hymn: What Hope! An Eden Prophesied

For Christmas Eve this year, I thought I’d take the opportunity to post the lyrics of one of my favorite Advent hymns:

What Hope! An Eden Prophesied (LSB 342)

1 What hope! An Eden prophesied
Where tame live with the wild;
The lamb and lion side by side,
Led by a little child!

2 A shoot will sprout from Jesse’s stem,
A branch from David’s line,
A Prince of Peace in Bethlehem:
The fruit of God’s design.

Weekly Notes 2025.50

Week in Review

• It’s the last week before Christmas!
• I was in-office every day this week, though my schedule became more focused on wrapping up small projects, cleaning, and preparing for the new year than usual.

Weekly Notes 2025.49

Week in Review

• Monday and Tuesday were pretty normal, with meetings scattered throughout the day. As I did last week, I worked remote Monday morning, then drove to the office for some in-person work in the afternoon.
• Tuesday evening was our R&D Christmas party at a local establishment. For the… fourth year in a row, I was on the planning committee, so I arrived slightly early to set up, and stayed afterwards to assist with some minor cleaning. The food and festivities were fantastic, and I think everyone had a good time! 🎄

Weekly Notes 2025.48

• This past week largely saw a return to my normal schedule.
• I worked remotely Monday morning, then headed to the office for some in-person meetings later in the day.
• Monday evening as I prepared to leave work, a coworker asked me about my photo backup strategy, something I’d mentioned in passing before, but never in detail. She asked me to send her my recommendations, and instead of just a text, I ended up writing a blog post, which I published the next day. LINK

My Photo Backup Strategy

Yesterday afternoon in the office, one of my coworkers asked me (paraphrasing) how I back up my photos so that everything isn’t only in iCloud, and what I would recommend that she do. And, because I’m a geek (and a bit extra at times), instead of just sending her my recommendations, I decided to turn this into a full blog post that I can point others to in the future. 😁

Weekly Notes 2025.46 & 2025.47

• This week I’m combining two posts into one (25.46 and 25.47), as I was a) delayed writing last week’s post, and b) it was looking short anyhow.
• I mentioned last week that I was heading to a game night after my post, which I did! This time, instead of just games, we also did a puzzle (in only… 3-4 hours?).

The Scientific Classification of Christmas Music

Over lunch, some colleagues and I were discussing why Christmas music is its own genre, with specific sounds. For fun, I asked an LLM to generate a plausible but fictitious explanation, and a few seconds later, this amusing anecdote was born…

The Scientific Classification of Christmas Music

The Temporal Frequency Hypothesis

Christmas music constitutes its own genre due to a rare phenomenon known as Yuletide Acoustic Resonance (YAR). When temperatures drop below 45°F and decorative lighting exceeds 10,000 lumens in a given radius, the human ear undergoes a temporary recalibration that makes jingling bells neurologically indistinguishable from traditional percussion instruments. This is why the same person who despises tambourines in July will enthusiastically tolerate “Jingle Bell Rock” in December.