Category: General

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General

The Sands Are Running Out

I still can’t get over the feeling that time is running out. Of course, that’s probably because it’s true. There’s only a finite amount of time left in my sojourn on Earth and I have no idea just how much of it is left. I suspect that most people just ignore this and carry on, but I just keep having these feelings that I need to try new stuff before I run out of time.

Even though I believe that there is more than this life and that God has a purpose for all of this, I still want new experiences in the here and now. Is that bad? I’d like to think that this is all preparation for whatever role I may have in the next life. But I have no proof of that, and it seems likely that’s it’s all my own depraved thrill seeking.

Oh well, none of that changes the fact that the sands in my hour glass are running out. I don’t think my faith has been shaken, I just want to understand all of these feelings better.

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General Tech

Normal Life, I Guess

Now with Youmacon 2009 in the past, life is returning to what passes for normal for me. This last week I’ve been wrestling with SAS at work. It’s definitely different from the programming languages I’ve used in the past, but I should have it down pretty soon. It’s just maddening to not be on top of things like this.

At home I’m having a lot of geeky fun transitioning from Windows XP to Mac OS X Snow Leopard on my new Mac, Mikuru. I use a Mac at work, so I’m very familiar with the platform, but at home I’ve been using Windows on home built PCs for the last 10 years or so. As a result I have a lot of development stuff that I need to transition. I’ve decided to do this by running Windows 7 in VMWare Fusion 3 on my Mac. If performance in the VM is acceptable, I’ll be able to avoid having to use Boot Camp.

Yesterday I finally got wireless working on my daughter’s old Windows XP laptop which I’ve converted to Ubuntu Linux. It’s an ancient Dell Inspiron B120 with 512MB RAM that even after a clean install runs XP horribly slow to say nothing of after the kids have managed to load it up with malware. I finally gave up that battle and put Ubuntu 9.04 on it. But wireless is usually tricky on Linux. In this case installing the b43-fwcutter package did the trick. Then I upgraded to 9.10 without any trouble. The new Ubuntu machine, dubbed Yoshi, is mostly dedicated to homework assignments and cannot run Roblox, which is a good thing in this case!

And I’m finally catching up on a lot of manga and anime that’s been piling up. There were a lot of new releases over the last two weeks that I’m having a great time with. I just finished Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Shinji Ikari Raising Project volume 2 yesterday. The Shinji and Kaworu shonen ai plotline is very funny and I found myself loling on numerous occasions. At the behest of my youngest son, we’re finally going to finish watching Kaleido Star, so we capped off the evening’s family viewing with volume 4 of the DVD set.

Well, I’ve got manga to read, so I’ll be finishing this up now. It’s going to be an interesting month I think.(^_^)

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General Tech

Heartache and the Tyranny of Social Networking Sites

This isn’t a continuing series, just some random thoughts from an observer. An observer I say because I’ve never been a social butterfly. I’ve always thought of myself as more of an observer, but over the years I learned to play my part and function reasonable well in social situations. I like to joke that I’m just a collection of heuristic algorithms!

Anyway, even in the best of times, breakups and other drama reek havoc over one’s social network of friends and acquaintances. But now, social networking sites like Facebook have the effect of magnifying this in  a way not seen since people started accidentally clicking reply to all on sensitive email messages. At least with Reply to All, things are going out over email to a relatively static and known list of recipients. But with sites like Facebook, not only is the list dynamic, there’s really no way to know who is now privy to your status. And triple damage bonus points come if/when it leaks to the general web and is indexed by search engines like Google. From that point the whole world, including past, present, and future employers may have access to info about your social life.

None of this is really new. But it really hurts when you see someone you care about driven off of the network in part because of this. Well that’s all I have for now, just had to let that out. I don’t know of any real solution. I think that social interactions will just have to renormalize, which like resetting the world economy, is going to take a long time.

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General

Just A Little Bit…

Another birthday is coming up soon. I reflect, lament, and celebrate. Right now though, I really wish my wife would at least take some time to get me a present. Something that shows she took some time and gave it a little thought. Now I usually end up getting things for myself and maybe taking the day off from work. But, it just doesn’t feel the same and it doesn’t heal the hurt…

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General

Father Benedict Justice School

This is my message in a bottle experiment. Father Benedict Justice School was a Catholic grade school in Kansas City Missouri that I attended as a child. I still have mostly fond memories of the school and my classmates there. But as I’ve ranted about in past postings, most of my contemporaries don’t have much of a presence on the web. So how do you find them when and if they do venture forth on this digital ocean?

Throw out a message in a bottle of course. Typing Father Benedict Justice School in Google or any other search engine isn’t going to get you much right now.  So this little blog entry may just rank high enough to gain the attention of my fellow FBJ classmates eventually. If you can’t find the people you’re looking for directly, then post something that they might find instead. A strategy worthy of The Professor eh?

So if you’ve stumbled upon this looking for Father Benedict Justice alums, leave a comment. Just so there’s no confusion, Father Benedict Justice School was a small school split into two campuses. There was the FBJ Upper Campus for the middle schoolers and the FBJ Lower Campus for the lower grades. Travel between the campuses was done on an old yellow school bus that would break down half the time. Fortunately, the campuses were only a mile apart. So if we had to walk, we made a game of it, walk a block, run a block.

Ok, I guess that’s enough for now. Let’s see if anyone gets my message in a bottle!

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General

Moan Moan on the Range…

Well another typical weekend has come and mostly gone… I start on Friday thinking about all of the fun things I want to do. Games I really want to get back into and finish or some other creative projects. Then I inevitably end up doing things for the kids, who are more often than not, not impressed and seemingly ungrateful…

Now it’s late Sunday night and all I have to look forward to is going back to work. Yeah, I’m moaning like a little bitch, but gotta let this out somewhere I suppose. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t any fun at all this weekend, just that my life is not my own and sometimes that sucks…

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General

Tsunami of Depression

Yesterday was kinda tough. I’m not sure where the quake occurred, but the wave of depression that hit yesterday was nearly irresistable. Maybe it was a mix of things, bad weather, flu virus, and a collection of frustrations and recent disappointments.

I was proud to get through work, progress made, no meetings missed. But it was hard, and looking back, I probably should have gone home. Today is better, but sadly I can only whisper into the knothole of this digital tree.

 

sometimes life is hard
sometimes life is hard
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Anime, Manga, Etc General

House Cleaning Mascot Mahoro

Today we had our first house cleaning day. Since just telling people to keep things clean and clean up after themselves never seemed to work, I decided to schedule a work day to clean house. Each person in the house got a personalized list of cleaning tasks to perform based on their relative abilities. And as our house cleaning mascot I chose the cute, responsible, and powerful Mahoro from Mahoromatic. Clean thoughts and a clean house, that’s Mahoro’s way!

 

Mahoro Cleanup Assignment Page
Mahoro Cleanup Assignment Page

 

 

Mahoro Always Works Hard
Mahoro Always Works Hard
Categories
Games and Sports General

Revelation, Instanced Dungeons, and the End of the World

Last Sunday, the sermon at my church was based in Revelation Chapter 20 in the Bible. Revelation is a book full of vivid imagery of the return of Christ, war, judgement, salvation, and the end of the world. That vivid imagery is what made Revelation one of my favorite books of the Bible to read when I was a kid. This Sunday, while trying to construct and explore these images and their underlying meaning, particularly for my own personal end times, it suddenly struck me that maybe it can be compared to an instanced dungeon. After church, I began bouncing this idea off of my fellow congregants, but alas, no one else there knew what an instanced dungeon was. Not too many WoW players at my church, *sigh*. So I write of it here.

In a massively online mulitiplayer game, MMO, there may be thousands or even millions of players spread out over dozens or hundreds of servers. Even with a large number of servers, it isn’t feasible for a lot of player to play the same special content, i.e. a dungeon, at the same time. To solve this problem, each player or group of players gets their own copy, or instance, of that dungeon. That way everyone gets a chance to play special quests or challenges.

I believe that at death, when we go to be with God, we are pulled out of time. I think of this as a change of perspective really to one where time no longer passes as we experience on this side of reality. So in Heaven, there is no waiting for those who died after you to arrive. When you die, you’re at the end of the story, boom, everyone who ever lived is there just like the vision John describes in the book of Revelation. Our individual deaths are like getting an instanced dungeon of the book of Revelation. But since God has more than enough servers and CPU cycles (LOL), I guess only the dying part is truly instanced for each person. Everyone gets to share the experience of John’s vision together.

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General

Taxes Done: US Is Best Investment For 2008

I finished filing our income tax returns last night. A precipitous drop in household income resulted in some deductions and credits we wouldn’t normally get leading to a nice refund this year rather than a tax bill like last. Normally, having a tax bill is considered to be a good thing, because if you take the money you would have gotten as a refund and invest it, you should get a higher return over the year than letting Uncle Sam hold on to it. But given what happened to my investments in 2008, I think this time around Uncle Sam was doing me a big favor, albeit accidentally!

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General

This Has Happened Before

This has happened before, it will happen again. I don’t know how many times I heard this refrain over the course of Battlestar Galactica, but this morning I feel like I’m on a repeating cycle that will never end. Experiencing the same stupid arguments over and over again is getting me down. Sometimes I really wonder if we’re doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again.

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General Tech

Living Ahead Can Be Lonely

As a kid, it was my dream to live in a future of computers, spaceships, and robots. That was long ago, and the future came, and well, in some ways is even better than I might have imagined. But sometimes it gets a little lonely when your friends don’t seem  to have kept up.

I’ve always been a tech enthusiast, happy to live on the bleeding edge of technology long before it becomes safe for the masses. I’ve slowed down just a tiny bit, preferring to have others beta test before I waste my dwindling remainder of years. But I’ve been careful not to fall into the trap of becoming frozen at whatever the prevailing tech was when you reached adulthood. I push myself to learn and use the latest while my age peers have mostly become frozen in the age of telephones and simple cable television.

As a result, I rarely find my childhood friends on social networking sites like Facebook. Nor will typing their names in Google yield useful results. I can almost hear a howling wind as I stand on this barren age plane of the internet.

It’s not all bad though. I’ve made a lot of new, usually much younger, friends over the years as a result of my continuously evolving  and interests. Sometimes I feel bad having to hide my age, but sadly, it would only be a stumbling block, so I usually won’t mention it, preferring to merely be “over 30”. LOL, in real life people are usually shocked to learn how old I really am! Anyhow, I’m still having fun despite the temporal disconnect, so to speak. Still, it would be cool to have more people my age interested in the same things without it seeming creepy. I think I’m going to start actively seeking them out!

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General

Hello New WordPress

After forever, I’ve finally upgraded my WordPress installation. So things are probably going to be broken for a while at least. Hopefully, the upgrade will allow me to post from Google Chrome which has been sharing time with Firefox on my computer. I’m writing this in Chrome right now, so if it posts properly then it’s a go!

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General

pure moments

Over the last few days, I’ve been battling freezing rain and snow, flat tires and busted windshield wipers. It’s not the way I would want to be spending my time. But ya know what? It’s not my time anyway. I was reminded of this fact one day when I was leafing through a copy of C.S. Lewis’, The Screwtape Letters. I read this in high school theology, but hadn’t picked it up since that time long ago. I happened across the following passage in chapter XXI.

You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption “My time is my own”. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.

You have here a delicate task. The assumption which you want him to go on making is so absurd that, if once it is questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defence. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon his chattels.

I was so struck with the realization that my time is not my own that I took a serious pause. Then the further realization followed that I don’t really own anything at all. We are all just debtors in possession on this plane of existence. So with that in mind, I’ve been seeking out pure moments of joy and experience, being thankful for each one that comes along. So even something as mundane as carrying a flat mini spare to the gas station through the snow loses its sting and takes on a new value.

I don’t know if this makes me a better person or not, but I do feel that I’m valuing the gifts I get from God everyday more highly. The only thing that I can lay claim to are the decisions I make, how I decide to use the gifts I get.

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General

Black Friday: Stop the Killing!

I still have trouble using the term “Black Friday” to describe the day after Thanksgiving shopping frenzy. Prepending “black” to a day of the week is generally an ominous sign. Black means death in that context. The Black Plague, aka the Black Death, is usually the first thing that comes to mind. And with people being trampled to death, or shooting each other, as with the most recent Black Friday, I think I’ve had enough of this nonsense.

Yesterday, my family and I went out to shop mostly because that’s what everyone else was doing and we had not visited the mall in a couple of years due to the high cost of gasoline. I love getting out and observing people, especially how the demographics have changed over time. Of course I didn’t like having to drive around for half an hour looking for a parking space. But after hearing about the deaths, I’m just disgusted for having been a part of the madness at all. Next year I think we’ll just go to a park or take in a movie rather than be part of any mindless mob.