Lots of people have Attention Deficit Disorder, or so they claim. Yes, I agree that some people have a true chemical imbalance which creates this disorder, but far too many people claim they have it, when, most likely, they've just developed something akin to it. Among the people I know, I would be one of them.
A blog at Christ the Victor.
Looking back on the recent ordination - only three weeks ago to be exact - I'm only now beginning to realize the enormity of the task that has been entrusted to me.
My friend Joshua and I have seen several ordinations, and the last one, the ordination of our friend Dave to the priesthood, and then his immediate installation as Archdeacon caused us to reexamine what it would mean to us to be ordained. Specifically, our thoughts were directed to the Examination of the Ordinand.
Well, actually, every day, but that's beside the point. What's up today is that I finally went to use the handy dandy program that I'd written that allows me to scan the bar codes of books, and which then pulls the book information from the Library of Congress and sticks it into a database on my computer (you know, so I can check out books to people, check them back in, and generally keep extremely anal track of these things). Turns out, though, that as I'm scanning in a chunk of my books, I'm finding that the LOC doesn't have the information for most of the books I'm entering, so I'm having to do it by hand. Not so friendly after all. But then again, I probably have too many of the books that are not in their 12 million book collection.
Update: Apparently, the books are there, but the LOC has primarily all the Hardcover books, while I have a lot of the softcover ones, and the ISBN's differ based on the binding.... hmm...
So, I've been doing a lot of contemplation on "ministry" lately, particularly in the area of "What is mine?"
Now, being an ordained Deacon in the CEC, I suppose I could safely assume what my ministry is. However, I believe there is a distinction between my "office" of Deacon and my personal "ministry."
So I just recently started taking guitar lessons from All Saints' very own Guitarzan. I signed up for the electric guitar, and went to my first lesson yesterday. Glen tells me I didn't do half bad.
So anyway, now I'm playing along to the beginner CD, and every now and again, I hear myself saying things like, "Dang, missed a beat," or "Dang, missed the string," or "Dang, wrong note." The worst is when I've got the timing right, the note right, and my pick plucks air because I thought my hand was in a different spot. Still, it's fun.
For me, most things come fairly easily. This doesn't. Instead it frustrates me. But it frustrates me in a good way: it frustrates me to try harder. I actually practiced a full 30 minutes today. And I enjoyed every last "Dang."
Today I got upgraded.
To a bigger cubicle.
I feel powerful, like I've just been given all the passwords to the company websites.
... oh wait. I guess I already had all of those.
Actually, for those of you who've had to endure life in CubeVille, you know the concept that "the smaller your cubicle, the bigger your personal hell." Well, let me tell you, my last one was pretty small. I could move my chair around a bit, but if I wanted to get out of the cube, I had to do a 180 so that I had room to get up out of my chair.
My new cube? I've got room to swing dance... as long as I use small steps.
No. Not me. But my friends Jeff & Sara are. I happen to be a groomsman.
Interestingly enough, this is only one week after my friends Michael & Joy get married, in which I am also a groomsman.
Two weekends. Two weddings. Twice groomsman.
It'll be a busy month.
So, I had fully intended to write a blog entry today about something in particular. In fact, I remember I was even working on some of the wording in my head. Then I got distracted by a Linguistics Game, and now the blog entry has completely slipped my mind. I mean gone. Like it never existed. At this very moment I'm trying hard to remember what it was I was going to enlighten the world with, but... I got nothing.
Enjoy the game. Question #17 is the last one, in case you're wondering. Ask me for clues if you want them.
Thank you, Lord.
That could've been a doozy.
So there's a new little dealio on the website. Nothing so incredibly special, you may think, but it's a bit more than the two images than it appears.
It started out with me having a bad day in which I was extremely irritable. I speak with someone who asks me why I'm irritated beyond reason about something and asks what else in my life is irritating me. I start to think about it, and realized that <overly dramatic>EVERYTHING</overly dramatic> was irritating me. Nothing was going right, and therefore my life was clearly over. Fast forward to the next day. I spent a good portion of my lunch time walking to Target, contemplating the end of my existence as I knew it. Then, when I'm back, I have a conversation with a coworker about how they had seen me walking on Lake Ave during lunch, and how I looked - not intense, or in deep thought - but homicidal.
I think to myself, "Hmmm.... You must die."
I swear, my feet are continuing to grow. They just keep getting bigger and bigger. At least that's what it seems like. Today I put on a pair of shoes I've had for a while - made of leather no less, so they should stretch out - and when I put them on and started walking, my toes felt like they were curling up against the front of the shoes. This has never happened before, and I can only make the logical assumption that my are growing.
I've heard that your ears never stop growing (which is why several old men look like they've got satellite dishes strapped to their heads), so maybe it's not so unlikely that my feet would keep growing. If my feet only grow a little every decade, I think I should be alright before I die; I don't believe a Bozo look is in my future.
So, I spent a week in Seattle. I got a chance to run around in the cold, wet snowy weather, and see all the changes that have gone on in Seattle since the last time I was there.
One of the first things I realized I should do was go up in the Space Needle despite the skyrocketing price of that little venture ($14.00 "Airfare"). It was good, because being that high up, I was able to see the amazing differences in the downtown area. There's a been a ton of changes to the Belltown area, which was always a hip, with-it kind of place. What they've done here is similar to what has been happening to Pasadena: retail space covered over with condominiums. It's nice looking, but it's making everything more expensive, and moving out the old unique, one of a kind (how's that for redundancy?) quirky shops from the area.
So, yesterday, I received an odd email through one of my various email forms. Unfortunately, the person used a fake email address, and a fake name, so I couldn't really get a glimpse into where on earth this email had come from. So I decided to add something to the mail script to make it a bit more user-friendly. User-friendly for me. Not others.
So yes, I finally got the entire Book of Common Prayer online. I've tried to link up everything that can possibly be linked. If there's a Bible reference, it's linked. If there's a link to a set of prayers, a collect, or something in another liturgy elsewhere in the book, I've tried to link those as well. Hopefully, it becomes an easy thing to use. Still, there's stuff I most likely missed, so if you find yourself perusing the site, get back to me with updates and fixes. it'd be a big help.
Part of the reason for slacking off, I think, was more than the busy holiday schedule, but the apparent need to produce some kind of blog entry that had serious meaning to it. You know, something deep, insightful, and moving.
When half your thoughts revolve around eating cheese and crackers, watching movies, and scratching your belly (and the other half around programming tactics), those types of entries are hard to come by.
Continue reading "so after a long break, I decide to write again" »
Actually, quite a bit to report, but I've had some other large projects on my plate at the moment, so I can't say much about my Christmas weekend. Hopefully I'll have something to report as soon as I get the time to write a bit more.
So on Sunday I got ordained to the sacred order of the diaconate, at which point "His Wormliness" became "The Reverend Deacon." I'm not sure it's entirely sunk in, but there were several interesting things that happened in the immediate aftermath.
His Wormliness?
At the reception, I was talking to several people and found my hand slipping up to my collar - where I searched for the black electrical tape to signify my wormliness - and when I didn't feel it, my first thought was, "Dang, it moved around under the collar." And then, "Oh. Right..... Whoa."
Etiquette
The second interesting thing was learning the proper table etiquette of the pectoral cross wearing crowd. I sat at a well-decorated, well-spread table, diggining in to the fantastic food the people from church had prepared, and someone asked for something. I raised up slightly out of my chair to hand this person something across the table, and my pectoral cross does a 10 point swan dive into the turkey gravy, then swims halfway across the puddle before I get a chance to pull it out. Fr. Rich and Dcn. Joshua, both turn to me and say, "Pocket," while showing me that they had performed the brilliant move of putting the cross into the pocket of the clergy shirt. I learned my lesson.
Yesterday as I started to walk to work, I realized that I had left my cell phone on all night, because it started beeping at me to tell me that the battery was low. Fifteen minutes into my hike, it died. Since I had planned a trip to my chiropracter and other stops on the way to work, I'd be without my phone for almost three hours.
My mom sends me an email every now and again called "Weekend Ponder," which she gets from someone else and forwards to me. Normally, the email is a quick quote, a story, or something to make you go "Hmm..." I thought this latest one was pretty good, as I get ready to take on some more serious responsibilities:
Good leaders have a vision
Better leaders share a vision
The best leaders invite others to join them in spreading this vision1
It's better that way. I just vote a straight party ticket, voting what my party leaders tell me to vote for. Takes less brainpower. Straight down the line, I look for "Republican" and vote for that person. I mean why think for myself, really, when I know the Republicans are always in the right? Or was that on the right? Hmm...
In any case, read the manual, then go vote. It's not only your right, it's your duty.
[an Australian view on duty, and, of course, a contra view most appropriately named an "I don't want to cause someone inner conflict by telling them it's their duty to vote" paper]
So, after having interspersed Star Trek: Voyager with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, I finally got back to the crew of this starship lost in the Delta Quadrant.
Now, I don't really want to give away the ending, but...
So my glasses broke. I tried to fix them with super-glue, but they fell apart again. And they're only about 5 months old. Thankfully, because they're so young, these glasses are getting a new lease on life, and the lenses are being swapped out with Frames Version 2.0. A free upgrade. But in the meantime, I'm wearing my prescription sunglasses with blue lenses, which is garnering me quite a few jokes at work.
Shameless, I say.
In order to understand, I'll have to give you a bit of background, and warn you Seneca haters that this is a resurrection of sorts. Ok. So the backstory is this: yesterday I decide that rather than laying on my couch, finishing the final episodes of Star Trek Voyager, I would go to the book store, and "mingle." Interestingly enough, my eyes found a fun little book entitled "On the Shortness of Life," by one Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Naturally, I gave in to temptation, and headed off to the cafe to read. Then, as I read, things got dubious and introspective, and I ended up journaling to what I'd read. That's the backdrop; now, on with the show.
So, after a recent entry, I told you all that this fantastic telemarketing program I'm working on was 24 pages total. It has since burgeoned to 34, with more in the works (at least another 15 for an administrative tool). Of the 34, 28 interact with the database.
Continue reading "Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an entomologist." »
So, my sister left for Africa on Saturday, which leaves me as the sole family reprepresentative on the North American continent. My parents are currently in Nigeria, and my sister is now in Zambia. They'll all be home by the end of the month, but for now... it's all me.
Feeling much better now - 5:55pm - than yesterday. Thanks.
Part of it had to do with this statement:
"You cannot have God for your Father unless you have the church for your Mother."
~ Cyprian, 3rd century A.D.
How does this compute?
I'm not entirely sure. I'll fill you in when I know more.
Yesterday I walked the 4.5 miles to work, and in those one and a half hours, I realized that I had more fun in that short time than I did in the rest of the hours I spent at work. This morning, in fact, I contemplated walking again, and actually looked forward to it, but then remembered that this walking would eventually bring me to my job, and that was kind of a downer. I'd say that this is an indication that something is not exactly hunky and dory.
So, there's a wedding happening today, which just happens to be the feast day of St. Michael. And, better yet, it's happening at St. Michael's Cathedral Church in San Clemente. So - Naomi & Jess - I ask you, "Was I such a complete nerd?" Somebody else is doing it, and if his name is Michael too, then we've got a real winner, because dang if that isn't a great idea: Michael gets married on the Feast of St. Michael and all Angels in St. Michael's Cathedral. I suppose if they made their own wedding invitations and other things with supplies from Michael's, they'd be doing even better. And finally, they could hire the Michaels Wedding Group to do the photography and videography. Seriously, where's the nerdiness in that, I ask you? ;o)
The trip to my sister's house in Tucson was a success. We got a lot accomplished, with the help of a lot of friendly people. I drove out Thursday afternoon around 3pm, and got to Tucson around midnight. Then on Friday, after my sister got off of work, we went to Loew's and Home Depot to find all the things the volunteers would need in the morning.
So, after some work, I've got two more sites to display.
The first is one for my friend Zachary, who builds custom laptops and desktops through his company MyPCBiz.
The second is for myself, as I go into the business of selling online wares and other goodies. You can find it at binary-monk.com.
Yesterday. I speak with the padre, and he tells me I sound like I'm getting sick.
I say, "Yes, I feel not entirely up to Snuffy, and I think my big-time cold might be making a comeback."
He says, "You should stay home tomorrow and heal up. You don't want to be sick when you go to help your sister this weekend."
I say, "That's probably a good idea." And I knew it was.
So what did I do? I stayed in the office until 9:30pm, then came in today around 9:30am.
I'm sure I'll pay for it later. How's that saying go? Father knows best.
Yes, my little red Honda Civic DX (1990). My "new" old car. I owned it several years ago, before I owned the silver Hyundai. At the time I bought the Hyundai, I sold my parents the little red Honda for a buck. Now they've returned the favor, and I'm driving it once again.
Why do I love it so?
Miles in the trip meter: 405
Gallons filled up at the station: 10.6
Miles per gallon: 38
And that's with mixed city/highway driving. I remember once getting 450 miles on one tank on purely highway driving. Yeah. I love the little red honda.
5. When entering your house, you're greeted with the pleasant odor of unusual flora and fauna.
4. Both sinks are full of dishes, and filling up a cup with drinking water requires stacking dishes in one sink in the most precarious of fashions.
3. Piling all the dishes into one sink lets you discover a new form of lubricant gracing the enamel.
2. You notice a level of heat rising from the dish pile - possibly life signs.
1. You find a form of fungus unlike anything you've ever seen before growing on the inside of one of your plastic containers. A quick lab test reveals you've discovered a new form of life.
0. You're sweating like you just ran a 5K after decontaminating your dishes.
So, the latest tally on the telemarketing thing is 22 pages, 18 of which need to interact with the database. Two more pages to go, though I'm told that these two can wait until Monday. After the last entry, several more pages were added. Several as in 10. Thankfully, four pages were taken out of the requirements list, so that left just a nice round 6 pages to build. The beautiful thing about it was that the pages the boss wanted removed were going to be the most difficult to do, and the extra ones added on, though more in number, were much simpler to do.
So where's that leave me?
Add in the User Manual I just completed, and I'm done for the weekend.
Ok. Here's a blog entry, but not on butt dust (that's still forthcoming). It's just a quick update on life in general:
The crazy telemarketing bruhaha continues. I've got several pages to build before the weekend, so that our esteemed volunteers can go and try and break the system to tiny little pieces over the weekend, and then tell me what needs to change when I come back from Labor Day. Unfortunately, as is normally the case, the project is blossoming - and not in a good way. It's called feature creep, and it happens quite consistently.
So, I got a little goofy one day and decided to modify my screensaver. Now, whenever I lock my computer and walk away, the following message displays on my screen:
So I haven't blogged in a while, due to the fact that we have large project going on at work right now, which may take me into the end of next week. The project is to put a web-interface on our alumni database, so that our alumni volunteers can solicit our other volunteers for donations to keep our school ticking and at the top of the scientific food chain. In other words, I'm building a telemarketing tool, minus the auto-phoning portion.
I know. I know. I should be shot.
But they pay the bills.
So, if you don't see anything here for a while, you'll know it's not because I've lost interest, or have blown a creative blood vessel, it's just that I actually have work to do.... Strange but true.
"Do, or do not. There is no try."
This has long been my favorite Yoda quote from Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back. It happens shortly after Yoda asks Luke to pull his X-Wing fighter out of the swamp that it has sunk into. Luke responds that he will "try," to which Yoda gets mad, and says that infamous quote. And so Luke does try, only to fail. At this point Luke sits down dejected, and says, "You ask the impossible." And Yoda quietly says, "That is why you fail."
So this morning I find myself singing a certain song I heard ages ago, while visiting family in Germany. It was by the comedian Jürgen von der Lippe (rough translation: Jürgen from the Lip), who was born as Hans-Jürgen Dohrenkamp, and later changed his name - because that's what people do, apparently, especially if they're entertainers.
perhaps it would be best to describe myself as a "dog-in-small-doses-enjoyer"
In fact, it might be a stretch to call me a dog liker.
I'm more of a dog tolerator.
This morning, one of the guys at work sent around a link to the Citroen C4 commercial (or here), that has a dancing transformer car, and another one with the Citroen as an Ice Skater. Now, this is of course, pretty darn cool, for the geeky minded, but apparently before Citroen did this, Mini Cooper did an ad with a Mini Cooper transformer robot, which at first got passed of as real, but was just a great marketing ploy. In any case, Mini Cooper lets you build your own transformer robot on their website, which is where my St. George Mini comes from.
Abba Doulos, the disciple of Abba Bessarion, said: When we were walking along the sea one day, I was thirsty, so I said to Abba Bessarion, Abba, I am very thirsty. The old man prayed, and said to me, Drink from the sea. The water was sweet when I drank it. And I poured it into a flask, so that I would not be thirsty later. Seeing this the old man asked me, Why are you doing that? I answered, Excuse me, but it's so that I won't be thirsty later on. The old man said, God is here, and God is everywhere.
(Desert Wisdom)
This morning, following Morning Prayer on the Padre's patio (which, by the way, he does every weekday morning at 5:30am), I went to breakfast with Naomi at Tommy's Diner, where she filled me in on various and sundry tidbits, because, well, she "knows things." In any case, just before we walked into the diner, I noticed that I was getting a migraine, and this didn't make me so happy, since I don't like headaches. I figured it would be good to order a tall glass of water to get rid of this headache, but Tommy's water tastes like old, dingy house. The tea doesn't cover up the water flavor either, so after a short deliberation I figured, "Hey, I've got a headache already, why not get a coffee?" So I got coffee.
I spit on my allergy.
While Stacia and I were visiting in Vernon, TX, we decided to take a hop, skip, and a jump over the Red River, and visit my friend Twilla in Olkahoma. As it turned out, Vernon is only about 45 minutes from Altus, Oklahoma, so it was a foregone conclusion that we'd go and say "Hey" to Twilla.
Continue reading "So, there's definitely lot's to see in Oklahoma [photos]" »
So, the long awaited photos are here. At least part one of them anyway. The part where we drive from Los Angeles, CA to Vernon, TX in two days, and cover almost 1400 miles in a little silver Hyundai.
The first day we only drove about 450 miles to Tucson, where we spent the night with my sister. When we got there, we went to a nice Mexican restaurant and got some good food, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Day two began bright and early - again - and set us up for a long day: I think the total drive time the second day was 15 hours, and about 945 miles. Weee! The thing that made it really exciting was stopping off at Cracker Barrel for lunch. If you're on a road trip, don't pass up good eats like this.
Anyway, since there's not much to say, other than "Yes, I-10 is long," let's get on to the photos.
So I just finished the last season of Deep Space Nine, which I started after I finished Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or, actually, I started it after season 3 of Star Trek: Voyager, because I decided that I wanted to save a spaceship series for last, over a series set on a space station. But now, I think I should have watched Voyager first.
So, this trip to Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma went rather well, but I was terribly exhausted from all the driving - 945 miles in one day, from Texas to Tucson.
In any case, the trip was fun, I've got about a hundred photos I could potentially put up, but I'll just give you the 85 good ones...
So tomorrow, Stacia and I will be heading out of town for a while. Specifically, we're going to Texas, where I will get a chance to meet the grandparents. This'll be a good thing, since I need to get my approval rating. On the way there, we'll stop off at my sister's house and spend time with her for a night before beginning the 900 mile jaunt from Tucson to Vernon. While there, we'll also visit my friend Twilla, who lives just over the border in Oklahoma, so that Stacia can meet her. On the way home, we'll spend a whole day in Tucson with my sister before coming back to Los Angeles.
What this means to you, of course, is that there will be no blog entries for the next week. And since we know that I update every single day this could be a problem for some of you.
Right.
Anyway, I promise to have lots of photos to put up here soon.
So today I went to Kelly Blue Book and looked up the trade-in, private party sales, and suggested retail values of my little Hyundai. I did this because I needed to find ways to save money. I've been carrying comprehensive coverage on my car, which means I have been paying about $1225/yr just to keep this car safe from the elements.
"The faithful expect only one thing from priests: that they be specialists in promoting the encounter between man and God."
-- Benedict XVI to a group of priests in Poland.
He doesn't want them to get distracted by political, or economic concerns, but to dedicate their time to prayer, and not consider that time wasted, because, as he says, "it is precisely then that the most wonderful fruits of pastoral service comes to birth." Hmm... prayer, a thing so often forgotten in the daily crunches of life, and yet I would think that any pastor should be more focused on this than on any other concerns, since he has been entrusted with tending to the those people God has put in his path.
"'We grow in affective maturity when our hearts adhere to God,' the pope said, adding that 'Christ needs priests who are mature, virile, capable of cultivating an authentic spiritual paternity.'" Spiritual paternity. They're called Fathers for a reason.
Good article on the Pope's priority on restoring Unity among all Christians.
"A marriage between Christians of different denominations can be 'a practical laboratory of unity' if the husband and wife are guided and supported by both their churches, Pope Benedict XVI said."
I can't seem to stop tinkering with the BCP site. Since adding the Holy Days and such, I've added in a function to check a Sunday for a Holy Day - because Holy Days take precedence over normal Sundays - and a function to calculate the observance of Foundation Day. For example, this year, Proper 7 is Foundation Day Sunday, even though Foundation Day is technically on Monday. And, Proper 13, August 6th, is also the "Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord," and is celebrated with different readings than Proper 13. When a person wants readings for Sunday, August 6th, the script checks to see if its a Feast Day, then inserts the Feast Day readings instead.
And, even more exciting - at least I think so - is that I've added liturgical colors into the reading headers. Blue everywhere got boring...
The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, has sparked a lot of controversy - and rightly so - as it attempts to pass off fiction as fact. Fiction that, if taken as fact, discredits the Roman Catholic Church specifically, and Christianity in general.
Unfortunately, many people are taking this fictitious work as fact, partly because of the packaging of the book. On the first page, under the bold-faced word "FACT" comes the following sentence: “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” As a friend of mine pointed out, this made him wonder at first, until he read it again, and realized something: all the descriptions of these documents could easily be accurate, even though the conclusions drawn from them could be completely false. Still, for those not as astute as my friend, this simply translates as "This stuff is all true." What's worse, however, is that apparently not even this statement lives up to its claim of truth. Scholars who have studied the same documents as Dan Brown, point out that even his descriptions are flawed, and his data wrong (the most simple of which is giving the wrong date for the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls). [For more, view these articles: 1,2,3,4]
So where does that leave us? Sitting with a runaway best-seller that many people are taking as truth, and it is affecting their beliefs about Jesus, the Church, and Christianity. A recent poll in England shows that people are "now twice as likely to believe Jesus Christ fathered children ... and four times as likely to think the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei is a murderous sect." (Reuters)
I've begun a monthly Prayer Letter. You can subscribe to it in the right hand column, under "Links," should you feel led to pray for me.
... the Michael needs a new place to live.
Yesterday, after much to-do, I finally got down to attempting to put the first stitches into this dalmatic that I will eventually wear (not the one in the picture, which costs $525.00 and is therefore a no-go for me).
The fancy ribboning that runs down the front and across the chest is called Orphrey Braid, and I happened to have picked up a rather nice bunch of stuff from a company in England called Turley Textiles. It's called the St. Patrick/Trinity weave, and is braided with gold thread.
Continue reading ""Sew, Michael, are you frustrated yet?"" »
Yesterday, I stayed at home to recover from my bout with afternoon migraine on Sunday, and just get back up to speed. Then, as my day slowly got going, I put together a to-do list to accomplish all those things that really needed doing - like getting tires replaced on my car after the Sunday afternoon blow-out. Now, I still had just as much to do as always, but I was fully in control of scheduling the day, something that doesn't quite happen as often as you'd like to think.
Tonight The Stacia is coming over and cooking dinner for me, and then we're going to study. Or rather, I'm going to study, while she reads for fun.
She's cooking dinner because a) she knows she's loving on me when she does that, and b) she's trying to prove to me that she can cook.
So I've known about a website that we needed to build at work for a few months now, but didn't get to work on things because I didn't have any information - or content. But suddenly, I'm told it's a priority, and I need to get it up asap. So from Monday until today, I've been furiously pulling together the details of logo, type styles, and what data we need to collect, as well as piecing together some of the content in order to design, code, and program this little site (I'm told the content is still in flux - and I hope so, because most of it is stuff I pulled out of my nose).
You may have noticed that I haven't posted in a while. This isn't just because I haven't really had the time, but also because when I upgraded to the new server, it meant that my blog software program got warped - specifically, I couldn't log in any more. It didn't recognize me, and certainly didn't want to play nice.
Today, though, I found all the necessary details for fixing it, and my helpful server people helped with the details of adjusting things in the MySQL server. So, back up and running.
But I'm still pretty busy. Here at Caltech we just put up one remodeled site yesterday, and I'm supposed to have another new one up by the end of the week. I can't say that I'm all that excited about this green giant going up, but I had to keep the look and feel identical to what it was before. The only difference is that we have put everything into a content management sysetm called ZOPE - again, something I can't say I'm excited about.
Anyhoo, off to work. Details, details, details....
My reading task for the day at work. What does it mean?
For you, dear readers, absolutely nothing - unless you use some of my programming schtuff, in which case it means faster programs and less bugs - but if you don't, then well, end of story.
For me, it means a rewrite of all my existing programs. I'm excited.
Wheeeee!
Remember the duplicate of me who lived in South Central L.A. and ordered cable service? Well, after mailing two sets of documents to ComCast, they have officially decided that the account was "opened inappropriately." That means that they will discontinue trying to collect, and that my credit report will take a turn for the better.
Thanks for your prayers.
So today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, the season in which we remember the Suffering of Christ, and his subsequent death and resurrection. And we do this by entering into our own forms of suffering and sacrifice, in the hopes that we, through our own suffering, might begin to rely on God for all things.
And that should bring you joy.
Yesterday, later in the evening, The Stacia came over and hung out for a while before we drove down to LAX to pick up my friend Jeff and his girlfriend Sara. After being there for a while, she asked for a piece of paper, and a pencil, then wrote her name on it 3 times real big like, so that it took up the whole paper:
STACIA
STACIA
STACIA
Then she made some comments about whether or not I wanted to see the view from her room.
I'm not sure what it all means.
You know, blogger world, where you have this strange sensation like you absolutely must post. But in reality, you don't have any creative thing to say, and you're feeling rather humdrum, so anything you say would come out more like dental floss threading a chain of alphabet soup.
And yet...
There's this undying need to post something. Anything.
Must be graphomania.
Interesting post about writing at this blog (go ahead, be one of the unknown readers...)
I didn't sleep so well last night, and today I was extremely tired, so I decided to run to the coffee shop on campus to get some goodies as a pick me up. But I didn't have any cash, so I stopped by the ATM to get some, and then went off to get the goods. Turns out I left my ATM card in the machine, so it got sucked in, and I needed to call my bank to get a new one. Trouble is, this also meant that I wasn't able to log into my online account, since that's linked to my ATM card. So, now I have a few dollars to my name until I get the new card in the mail. If I ever needed an excuse not to spend money, here it is.
There is a sermon by George MacDonald called "The New Name," (DOC) in which he draws upon the reference in Revelation 2.17 where God gives the man that overcomes a white stone with a name written on it.
I first read this sermon because of my former roommate Wall, who had read a quote from this sermon in a book. The quote itself moved me, and so I went searching for the rest of the sermon, wanting to take down the whole thing. After reading it, this particular sermon sparked for me a quest to discover what my name - or white stone - was.
That would be Remodeling and Retrofitting.
As it turns out, my sister and I were staying at a hotel in Puerto Peñasco that was undergoing some remodeling. This meant that the industrious people from this nation called Mexico began their work at 8am, and continued until 8pm. It also meant that peace and quiet were in short supply, what with the jackhammer in the wall in the room directly above us.
So yesterday I sent out all the information I could find to try and get ComCast to understand that it wasn't me who ordered cable in South Central in the fall of 2002. Pray they accept all my info, and count it as fraud.
Last night I awoke and lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Since I've been questioning God on several things, I decided that I would take this "awake" time to pray.