Awed Manor

A new blog - on WordPress

2007-11-14T09:12:00.000-05:00

Folks,

I am maintaining my blog over on WordPress, so I can see it from work.

http://awedmanor.wordpress.com/

Daily updates, pure geeky goodness, and that same sense of humor.

What goes around, comes around

2006-02-07T23:17:00.000-05:00

When I was in Hyderabad, I had to buy dental floss. I found some Oral B floss, made in Ireland, in a nifty round container. As of this date, over two months after returning from India, I am still using the same package of dental floss. It's a little thing, but it brings me joy. I like the round package, and I like the fact that it's something useful I got "over there" that I'm still using (daily, thank you) "over here". I also like the round yogurt container I picked up on the Air France flight (toward the back center of the tray). I'm using it for storage of squashable pennies.

Pictures of the dental floss container at a later time.

I told me so!

2006-01-24T13:25:00.000-05:00

I hereby promise to update my blog at least one per year (and more often, if applicable).

This is that blog entry. Updates in the past year: Bettie and I are married (again), this time with God as the head of our lives and our marriage. We joined our church. I went to India for a month (and lived to tell about it!). The sun rose and set, once each per day. It got warm over the summer, and cool over the winter. I'm a little older and balder (and, unfortunately, fatter). 2006 will be a good year.

More cheese!

2005-01-24T20:11:00.000-05:00

When Goethe lay dying, he called for "more light!". In the fictionalized version of my life, as I lay dying of some unknown disease, the writer might have me call for "more cheese!". Not because I'm such a fan of the pizza topping, but because it would go so well with my other excess: whine.

I'm a whiner. A perfectionist and a nit-picker, sure, but I don't keep my mouth shut about it. I share with the world (my wife) where the current event missed perfection. "Great meteor shower, sure, but there were only one or two a minute. If there could have been five or six a minute, that would have been fantastic!" "Yeah, I got the latest Supertones album for less than five dollars delivered, but I should have been able to get it months ago!"

"Six days? I don't know why God couldn't have done it in one day, giving me a six-day weekend."

No matter the level of perfection, I can see a way it could have been better. Yes, God had His reasons for taking six days to create the world, and I shouldn't take it personally that he didn't take my weekends into account (except that He probably did - six days of "rest" are not necessary for a day of work).

So last week I was sick -- sicker than I've been for a while. I took a day off work, and barely left the house for two days. I was trying all sorts of variations of cough/sneeze/blow. My head hurt, my muscles were weak, I wore out easily, and I was just generally yucky. I was truly sick.

But I didn't count my blessings. I still had a job I could call in sick to, and they would take me back when I got well. I had a warm house to recuperate in. I had a wife who was well and could help take care of me. I had a Great Physician who would heal me in His time. No fever, no delerium, no sleepless nights.

What I want is to have a little less whine, and to call for "more light!" while I can still share it with the world.

So help me God.

Tone deaf

2005-01-16T14:25:00.000-05:00

2004 was the year I got interested in the Orange County Supertones. It was also the year they announced that they were disbanding. They'll be around for most of 2005, but they are on their way out.

I'd like to catch one of their concerts before they're gone. The energy they have and the Godly direction of their lyrics combine to make them my favorite group.

I have most of their albums, and their music is all that's loaded on my MP3 player. And when I have them cranked, I get the mowing done significantly faster. These boys rock!

I was just hoping for a little more Perseverance of the Saints. Sigh.

BitTorrent's my buddy!

2004-12-30T16:40:00.000-05:00

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".

White Christmas

2004-12-23T03:07:00.000-05:00

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.

Hunger

2004-12-21T01:00:00.000-05:00

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.

A humble beginning

2004-12-20T20:14:00.000-05:00

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.