Thursday, December 30, 2004

BitTorrent's my buddy!

Back in the day (waaaay back in the day), when Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh took over the town of Antelope, OR, I was going to start a fan club. Bhagwan had a fleet of Rolls Royces - more than ninety of them - and I figured that maybe Bhagwan would want to share the "wealth" with me. I'd look pretty good, tooling around in a Rolls.

I had even come up with a slogan for the fan club - "Bhagwan's my buddy!" The logo would be a pair of interlocked Bs (for Bhagwan and Buddy), reminiscent of the pair of Rs that Rolls Royce uses.

Well, the Bhagwan died, Antelope belongs to its rightful owners, the cars have been sold, and the fan club never made it to member number 1. So what's a guy to do?

BitTorrent, of course! BitTorrent's my buddy!

I wanted to download the Open Community Edition of Xandros, but if you want it for free, you have to use BitTorrent. The concepts behind BitTorrent have been explained in other places, but it's essentially distributed file sharing. I downloaded the client last night, kicked off the download, and woke up to a completed download. Even better, I kept the client open today and have now uploaded about fifty percent more than I have downloaded. That means that I am officially not a leech.

But now what? I'm a kid in a candy store, a download junkie with a big pipe into my PC, so I -- I do nothing. I don't want stolen merchandise. I don't want what the sites coyly call "pr0n", and I don't want CDs full of "ambient house music". What I do is leave my client running, providing others with a place to grab the Linux distribution.

I have found some good sites, like Legal Torrents, File Soup, and a place to download some good books (torrent links at the bottom), but nothing else compelling.

At the end of the day, though, BitTorrent is just another way to grab files. What you grab is up to you. Whether you stick around and leave the client running, providing a better pipe for somebody else's download, or whether you leech and run, it's up to you.

Just like a lot of other stuff in life. The biggest reason for people leaving churches? "Because they want to".


Thursday, December 23, 2004

White Christmas

I always need to get closer to God.

Right now, I feel a closeness to Bing Crosby - or at least I should.

I wish I was dreaming of a white Christmas, instead of being up writing about it. The practice needs to be closer to the theory. The head needs to be closer to the pillow.

Good night.

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Hunger

You know how you shouldn´t go grocery shopping when you´re hungry? The same thing applies to going to WalMart. It´s way too easy to end up with a lot of stuff - not bad stuff, but not necessary stuff - without meaning to or even realizing.

And it´s even worse when it happens multiple times in an evening.

Monday, December 20, 2004

A humble beginning

It´s not all about me. It´s my blog, and my creation, and my voice, but even I get tired of hearing about me all the time.

If it´s about me, the big news is that I am at the beginning of a couple weeks off work, and I enjoying it very much. I managed to get through the stack of newspapers that had been piling up since before the prior holiday. There are some very old magazines left to get through, but thereś always tomorrow.

If it´s about my computer, Xandros is working very well, although imperfectly, and a new (well, newly picked from the dupes pile) keyboard seems to be in order.

If it´s about the car, I hope that a new starter will solve the non-starting problem.

If it´s about babies, they´re everywhere. This year has seen new arrivals in the families of my brother, my nephew, my friend, and my favorite missionary. What´s going on here? They´re too geographically dispersed for it to be something in the water. Although if everybody drinks water, and babies are being born everywhere, then the only logical conclusion is that . . .

If it´s about God (and it all is, or at least it all can be), we´re coming up on His Son´s birthday in a few days. All I have for a present is myself. I´m higher quality than I was a year ago, and the packaging is puffier. The contents are more pure. The gift is freely and completely offered, an upgrade over last year´s present.

It´s kind of funny - as I reflect on my life and say ¨It took me forty-five years to learn that??¨, I can see myself in twenty years saying much the same thing. Perfection is a process, not a goal. I will have achieved it once I stop breathing for the final time. Until then, there´s not a circle on a road map where I can say ¨Yep - I made it!¨ There are definitely rest areas along the way (I´m in one now), and most definitely directions, and endless metaphors.

It´s a trip.

Oh, the blog name? It´s almost thirty years old, inspired by Jerry Pournelle´s Chaos Manor. And a double pun.