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I've not seen anyone's response to this. I don't want to add to my reading any more than I have to at this point, but it looks like something I'll want to deploy at BIG. I'm slightly familiar with Isaacs's work on The Dialogue Project but I've never read any of his work. The Amazon reviews seem pretty high — categorically avoid any book recommended by all Amazon reviewers — but I've not done any reading on it.
I have a feeling that it dovetails with Argyris's and Cooperrider's ideas but don't want to bother unless it's worthwhile.
I'm even considering getting a Cliff's Notes -type business reader's summary. What have I been reduced to?
L and I decided that we would hae some folks over for brunch after services on Easter. We figured that most people could not attend. Unfortunately, everyone wanted to come. We're going to have at least eight adults and a few kids. And we're not done yet.
Makes brunch a bit harder. A whole lot more interesting, of course.
Regarding my last post, "Christians Suck": it was a very bad end to a very long week. Mac Swift has a pretty accurate response to it (or, in Lumpy's old phrase "a boot to the head") that's worth reading.
And it's better than d0g0wa5's emailed comments:
You're an asshole. None of us want to be your damn missionary project so lay off. You are just as bad as the rest, pal.
Since d0g0wa5 is a confirmed atheist and long-time friend, he probably is on to something there.
[ Continue reading ""You're an a--hole"" ]
I've gotten an invitation, at the behest of an old friend with whom I am sorely out of touch and who runs a film studies department out east, to attend a meeting of the minds of various conservative Christians (read: can say the basic creeds without laughing or crossing their fingers or making words mean things that they really have no business meaning). I'm actually intrigued.
There are some interesting things that are being done across my world in bringing Arts and Humanities and Sciences and Social Sciences together. I sit astride them all — L has laughingly said that I am all things to all geeks, recollecting my vast geek cultures knowledge, from computer hardware to alternative OSes, comics to band desinee, social theory to physics, mathematics to medieval art. The only things that I truly have a problem doing is gaming. And reading "literary" novels, although I count Richard Powers's Three Men on Their Way to a Dance a favourite book.
Mixing both pleasure and business, in no particular order, this is what I've got stacked right now:
It's a big list, but the complexity books will be spun through in a couple of weeks. (Really.) I tend to read fast for work, and some of them have already been torn apart in Complexity and Management, which although thickly written provides a great deal of insight into the topic. I lucked out finding it, since it retails for a gazillion dollars if you can get it stateside and I scored it for US$12. In your face, Powell's!
Sometimes I wonder why people bother doing the things that they do. For example, this site says that it helps you see if you are a good person. And then makes sure that you know you are damned. I'll admit that I got there from Russell Mann's blog.
Look, God is not against sin: he is for life eternal. It may result in him being against sin, but that's a result not a cause.
The first day in Spring where we had no snow fall! I'm so excited!
L is out seeing the pastor of that PowerPoint church. She and I met some new folks on Sunday, all Law School students but not necessarily 23 years old. Still younger than us, of course. We had a good time. One of the couples served in the Peace Corps in Thailand. Impressive stories. They will return there for the summer: he has an internship with a human rights organization, helping document child abduction/slavery cases against the sex traders in Bangkok. She teaches, so she decided to come with and brush up on her Thai. The other couple are goofy like us: she has a degree in medieval history and he knows Warhammer. We went to lunch with all these folks and sat around talking for about forty minutes after we ate.
Later that day, we went to the "center" (they have a leased building but no church, using a Boys Club building instead) for the new members class. Odd that we would suddenly just show up at that, seeing as we never went to one with the Lutherans even though we went there, on and off again, for several months. I cofirmed my suspicions: they are 4Christian Reformed, all right. He had quoted the Westminster Confession a couple of weeks ago on a PowerPoint slide setting up the sermon, and he covered Infant Baptism and praised John Calvin in the membership class. I always did prefer the Belgic Confession. I don't have a problem with the some of the things that have killed their relationship with other reformed churches, and I can live with the PowerPoint and "praise songs" as long as there is Christ.
We just felt welcomed the whole day.
Then on Monday, lots of things happened and I have a contract with BIG to help them think about their retraining / transformation of mainframers. It is just part-time but I think that it will be fabulous.
I finished Gene Wolf's The Urth of the New Sun. So that's what the Torturer Saga was all about. I hope that I never write a four-book story that is so obtuse that it requires a "coda" so it will make sense. That's just lousy writing and it explains why his silly Arthurian novel set in Illinois (for goodness sake!) left me simply wondering why I had bothered reading it. Okay, this was my last Gene Wolf novel because although I enjoy the process of reading them, they all seem to suck in retrospect. So far, all the stuff that I've read of his involves becoming God. More or less. Yawn.
Onto Metropolitan and Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Funny that I would have read Applied Cryptography and his essays but not any novel.
Russell Mann had a pretty interesting reply to my much belated discussion of his invitation to imagine church differently. Yeah, I knew that they were off-the-cuff remarks but that doesn't make them not worth looking at. (But not Off the Kuff, whose column many remember fondly. But M Bartok Wolfe still had him beat with his one about hitting the steer coming back from Brownsville...)
My real point is that we don't really imagine church. If USAA can have as one of their trademark phrases "Imagine a workplace??", then the Church Eternal can, too. One of the issues that the Emerging folks are addressing is this problem of having imagined church in one way for so long, we seem to not be able to reimagine it differently.
The American church is stuck, as the emerging church has observed. Deconstruction is not as useful as reimagining. Reimagining is powerful. Einstein reimagined physics when he did his "thought experiments" in the Swiss patent office where he clerked. We can revolutionize our own experience of the Church (the Church itself, I think, stands Eternal as the Body of Christ) in a similar way by reimagining it. Take these off-the-cuff, almost offhand, comments we all make about the church and start letting them go in our minds. By letting things run for awhile, by role-playing with others even, we can see what the result will be of any proposition we make. Some of our ideas seem wacky now but will be easy later as cultural expectations change.
I think that reimagining church is probably the most powerful act that we can do to Revival. We will not go where we cannot imagine. At least we usually don't. We tend to see only what we can see. Thus Christ says "Him who has hears to hear, let him hear".
Let's start playing around with it. Let's start reimagining things. We'll be no worse off and we'll be using a Godly part of our imageness. Don't say that someone has it wrong or someone has it right: start playing around with the ideas and see where they go. Maybe they go someplace that we don't want to get to: maybe we don't have any choice in getting there and need to confront the reality of it happening in our communities.
My suggestion: let's start imagining what community really looks like. Now take it a step further and see what happens. What are you required to do? Where would you then live? What constraints or liberties are there on you? What does your week look like? I think that if we imagine what the Church would look like if we got what we say we wanted, we'd be scared shitless.
I'm sitting here, listening to the wind try to blow over my neighbour's trees into my garage again, hoping that it will only drop the 40F that AccuWeather predicts, trying to avoid something I will inevitably face and soon. Perhaps the cold has gotten to me or my own fear of these things has taken hold. I know them well, of course; I have always known my demons. Yet this knowledge does not give me power to verbalise them.
Perhaps, though, I can blame it on seeing Gibson's The Passion of the Christ this afternoon with some folks from the PowerPoint church.
I know that I'm supposed to be obsessing over my site stats, but since this is a shared host (thank you, O Great ex Boss!), the stats are mixed.
One thing I did learn from reading my stats is that someone came here looking for a How to Ask Someone to Sadie Hawkins Dance. Which is so sweet it makes my heart break. Maybe, just maybe, I'll post my take on how a girl should ask a boy to the Sadie Hawkins dance. And it won't involve too many specific references to Al Capp. Okay, so there will be at least one reference to Shmoos. Mmmmm.... fried shmoo....
I'm still not going to check my stats except when I have to, to make sure that the limits haven't been exceeded.
I should say, "snowing again". March 18 and snows flies down upon the NWI coastline. Who'd have thunk it? And I gotta drive into Illinois...
Yep, 'twas cold and snowy day, and the Captain said to Cedric, "Cedric, arise and tell us one of your many tales of suspense and adventure." And Cedric arose and said, "'Twas a cold and snowy day, and the Captain aid to Cedric, 'Cedric, arise and tell us one of your many tales of suspense and adventure.' And Cedric arose and said, ''Twas a cold and snowy day, and the Captain said to Cedric, "Cedric, arise and tell us one of your many tales of suspense and adventure." And Cedric arose and said, "'Twas a cold and snowy day, and the Captain said to Cedric, 'Cedric, arise and tell us one of your many tales of suspense and aventure.' And Cedric arose and said.... "'"
At least, that's how my Scotch-Irish grandfather told it. My Irish grandfather had it different, of course.
On the feast day of the greatest Englishman who ever lived, a week before spring, snow falls and covers the brown grass and empty trees of NW Indiana. Saddest par of this is that I'm actually enjoying it and will probably take a walk out in it today.
"It doesn't matter how you get there if you don't know where you're going." ? Paul Magrid of The Flying Karamazov Brothers
I'm not sure why I even care about the number. But this means that I have as much useless garbage as The Simpsons, but without the sudden decline around season six. It's not even a year since I started doing this. This entry is about whatever. You know me. Never a dull moment because I CAN"T STAY ON TOPIC! I meander in conversation. I don't normally have a topic. The conversation is the goal for me. I once went to a Men's Night back in Chicago. I got there early and for awhile it was me, Joel an Joel's pal. We were just shooting the breeze, just enjoying talking and some fine ales. One of the traders from church finally came in and we could tell that he was frustrated. Even though I kept throwing him softballs he just couldn't seem to stay in our conversation. He finally in exasperation asked "What is it that we're talking about?" Then it hit me: we're not talking about anything at all, we're just talking. For us, this is a good time. For him, the content was what was important. For us, it was the act of communicating. Maybe we were more complex! We were more post-modern, certainly, because we'd be more hypertextual. So if I leave you somewhere, just go back to earning massive amounts of money at trading. I can't do anything for you. Just be glad you aren't one of us.
L and I went back to the Church of the PowerPoint, at my request (she's not fond of the services). It was an interesting service and we got invited to a small group meeting tonight (Sunday). Actually, we got invited to three small groups, all tonight. We went to the one in town, which is a group of 30-something marrieds. We're in NW IN after all. Most people who are single are in their early twenties, if they last that long. Unless you are attached to the university or homosexual, you get married whether you want to or not. The divorce rate is pretty healthy around here, of course.
Anyway, L and I went to the small group meeting. It was definitely lackluster in most of the respects that most of the folks that L and I hang with care about: bad exegesis, went way off topic, unfocused, topical. And I had a blast. I haven't felt so good about a church event in several years.
It helps that one of their founders told me that their mission was to reach people who were unchurched because they had been hurt in some way. If you recall my comment about 9 months ago about the Emerging Church people, you'll know that this fits right in with where I've had my heart. Cool.
I think I'll stick around with these folks.
I've gotten The Brick in a state where the dell diagnostics and my own little set of magic pixies all say that the hard drive is in good shape. I've gotten the win98 partition redeployed from backup (finally -- I had to reinstall everything at least once on this rebuild because I kept on using the wrong licenses; who'd have thunk it?) and will run a virus scan over the network from the hopefully now working desktop. It, too, passed all my various tests but only after I moved them from the 133 card I had installed a few months back when i put in the 80 GB hard disk. I suppose that it may be going bad, and come to think of it, since it was an 80 GB drive, it was probably a 66 card and more like two years ago. Sometimes I forget things in my old age.
Mucking around on the floor as I have been has given me opportunity to reopen the old Compaq Prosignia P-166. It has a couple of nice 4GB barracudas but like a moron I just threw out my Compaq server apps disk. Just means that I'm never going to have those nice Compaq SCSI partitioning tools or the reboot clean apps. So it goes. I'm putting Win2K on it, just to see if it will work. If things go smoothly, I'll move it over to Red Hat 9 or Suse. Right now I'm happy when anything goes well. I did have an issue with one of the drives causing problems on the daisy chain. I'll try it in the desktop and see if it works there; I dropped in a HP Kayak SCSI/100Mb Ethernet card in it in 2000 so I have Ultra-wide in it with nothing but the Agfa stuff currently attached.
(Yes, I know that a SCSI/NIC sounds like Chinese-Mexican food -- something they used to have on San Pedro when I lived in SATX; mmmm, those sweet and sour pork fajitas...)
I've taken a long time to respond to Russell Mann's comments to my talk about there not being a Luther in the Emerging Church movement. (It's OK: you don't have to know what that means to understand what I'm talking about here.) He says at the end of his post:
Imagine a church where people are truly important, where they mean more than what you can get out of their wallets.
Imagine a church where people really really listen to you instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.
It's great advice that I've resisted looking at for all this time. No, let's be honest: I've resisted imagining what the church could be like for many years. Maybe I couldn't imagine it before. Maybe I wasn't ready in oh so many ways.
What I'd like to do is take his invitation seriously. I want to invite a discussion about imagining what the Body of Christ might look like if this were true, or that were true.
While it can be very helpful to imagine a church in a fantasy way, what I'm inviting is a more engaged conversation about this. Let's take a point that we think needs reimagining and imagine what the church would be like if what we say we want were true, and then follow it out to all its consequences. One of the problems with my thinking is that I usually stop short of any meaningful consequence that might interfere with my particular beliefs. I think that this will be a really interesting and helpful spiritual exercise for me, helping me see where I keep little fantasies about what others should be doing rather than taking responsibility for my own actions, rather than seeing my own desperate need for the Trinity.
I'd like to start with Mann's first invitation:
Imagine a church where people are truly important, where they mean more than what you can get out of their wallets.
Let's operationalize this a bit. If we don't, we will simply be arguing about ideas that we may actually agree on when they are implemented, a kind of splitting hairs. I suggest the following:
I finally got the Dell part from the only vendor that I could find: Notebooks 'R' Us. They have a good selection of Dell Inspiron parts. I needed the connector so I had to buy an entire HD caddy. It came today (free shipping!) and now I am attempting to reinstall my software on the laptop. That'll take some time. I need to figure out what was going on. It may have simply been a problem but it may have been all the crap that I was doing or it may have been a partition table virus (which I really doubt).
I'll be babysitting the laptop all night, I reckon.
L got a temp contract at a grocery distributer. Yes, temp work is the salvation of the over-qualified and the over-educated. It allows us to get into a position and show what we can do.
We can buy groceries!
A friend has suggested, upon talking with me, that what I'm really talking about when I say "project manager" is Change Management. Well, duh.
Most project mangers are apparently not people who get things working, simply get things done that are on a premade project plan. They're not managing, really, at least not in the sense that Elliott Jaques, Steven Clement and Kathyrn Cason describe (the Requisite Organization people). They really simply check things off a project schedule and do the most basic risk management.
Of course, my chances at doing this are pretty slim, as they are with anyone's with a CV. I'd say resume but I can't figure out how to get those darn accented "e"s on this mac. i'm sure that it's easy and i'm a moron -- thank God i'm finally a computing moron.
Good news is that as I was writing this, I got a contract. It's about 8 hours of work and that's it but that's more money than I've made all year so I'm pretty psyched. Wow. Psyched about eight hours of work. the good news is that I'll make a lot of days of minimum wage at that. It's through INFOSEC and they are pretty good about the rate. At least they have been. I'll be able to pay for my health insurance! But not groceries... And only health insurance for a month. Well, something's better than nothing and maybe it will lead to something more. I seem to be the king of doing a great job that leads nowhere nowadays. I can even get them to provide references but my clients won't bite on extra work. Yes, I ask for the business.
there have been a lot of articles lately about the dangers of outsourcing. BusinessWeek has one about the company that went under partly because all their business knowledge went overseas. There's some stuff on CNN's site, too, which is pretty interesting.
BIG has been offshoring IT for some time now. I think that they will end up sending the entire operation to India in a couple of years. And when you think about it, why not? In fact, why not send the entire insurance company overseas, having only those parts that are required to be here by federal and state law, and salespeople, of course. Your insurance adjusters would have to be local but the actuaries could be in India. As could your programmers and IT support staff. In fact, it makes very good sense to have one's IT staff in India if that's where all the people are.
Let's think about all the different roles and whether they can be offshored:
Like I needed more of them. I just brought my desktop to its knees. And it has all my important data. I know that I have most of backed up but what are the chances of ruining multiple machines one right after another. I know; pretty good if I have a trojan running within my trusted zone destroying my partitions. i just don't get where this is coming from but that's looking more and more obvious. I've got some type of virus running through my machines. Maybe Norton will be able to get the root of this problem because I surely can't. I'm at wits end.
Anyway, can you think of any more appropriate omen for closing my IT career (or that I should just go join the Army as a security officer) than to have all my machines go under at once. This is getting old fast. I would just go back to an old backup, but it's something wrong with my drive. All my big drives are going bad at once? Power roblems? I'm not using a line conditioner and who knows what the power is actually like here at the house. I run a minor line conditioner in the surge protector (which is why they set me back so much). And none of them have tripped and I know that they do, since one tripped back in chicago after a storm. I got a big spike.
Yep, say goodbye to my career as a specialist. I'm moving into something more interesting. Maybe the Army would take me now. they wouldn't take me for ROTC because I'm color blind. I couldn't even get into the Navy (not that I was wanting to: my kin are all mountain bred and we look on water with suspicion).
I just can't believe that the desktop has failed like this. I shouldn't have done anything. I exposed the desktop drive to the failed notebook drive. There's the problem. But I needed to see the NTFS partitions! Woe is me! Woe! Woe!
This really sucks. I'll take some good news, if anyone has any. I can't even do my taxes since that's the machine with the data. Crap. What am I doing to myself? Time to find that job at Taco Bell. I've been putting that off thinking that any of these leads would come through. it's obvious that they are not. I tried reaching the BIG folks but the voicemail didn't pick up. Which may mean that our exchange is bad here in NW Indiana. Unlikely but more probable than when I lived in Chicago, simply because I live in an old, working class neighborhood. Of course, all of them seem to have jobs right now so they're doing much better than I am. I could go drinking Old Milwaukee down at the local hole and see if anyone needs a handyman. Not that I actually know that much about that type of stuff but I know more than most of the people that I run into. It's amazing how little some homeowners know about these old homes. they treat the plaster walls like sheetrock. They don't take care of the basement properly and put the wrong things down the pipes. You have to get the eye for seeing where the addons are and where the original pieces still exist. Sometimes, you have to look behind the wall with you imagination and see what's back there.
I'll give this read/verify test another hour to complete. The drive has already failed the butterfly and random seek tests. I should just pull it off and see if I can hook it to another cable. Yeah, it's the cable. I bet that I simply ruined the drive over the past week. Which would be great. Simply great. It has the backup of hte information from the other drive. Ha!
I have no idea what the real Emerson quote is. i remember this from my high school, I think freshman, english class. Of course, I drew a giant eyeball on the head of a man from 1850 and put it on my assignment. Because i was me and not, say, John Stacey, I got away with it. I got away with lots of stuff. mostly because I knew when to stop. I have a very good grasp on the idea of quitting when the going is good. My pals did not. i would get them going and then stop before I'd get into trouble but they would just keep at it and get demerits or whatever the punishment was.
I was a terrible student if you weren't a decent teacher. I remember going from an F to an A- in my seventh grade math class in one week at the end of the semester. I did all the extra credit. I had an older brother who taught me how to manipulate the system to my advantage. I also learned how to play up the teacher's own pet beliefs. Never badmouth Carl Sagan's COSMOS in Dr. S's class. Never badmouth in Mr. W's class because he was a straight up great teacher and he'd be disappointed, something I couldn't bear. We all wanted to make him happy. I wonder if he knows that of Mr. W's 12 Disciples in calc that year that only two of us have dropped out of society because of drugs. At least two professors, a couple of programmers, an ambulance chasing attorney of note, an artist. And probably an engineer or two.
I of course worked my way away from engineering and into sociology, only to return to technically-oriented fields. Like a dog to its vomit, as the proverb goes. Don't you love the fact that the Holy Scriptures have all these really offensive sayings that you can quote and get away with it, simply because it is the Bible? I'm thinking of making some KJV-style remark, really offensive, and then following it with "Hezekiah 4:7b" and seeing if I get away with it. I bet I could. i think that you should try it first. And then let me know.
Absolutely nothing happended today. I didn't get my part so my laptop is still dead. I did look for a new one (I'm a private consultant and I need it whenever I will start working again.) I found a great buy on a lightweight Gateway 200 over at Tiger Direct and if I need to I'll finance it on a card so I can get the contract.
I've got three outstanding and right now any of them would be great. I worked about 9 weeks from May to now and that's not a lot of cash. It doesn't help that when i send my resume out to engineers they all come back with "It's not serious enough -- I have no idea what you did!" Of course, they don't want what I have to offer anyway so it's no matter. I was just trying to get an informational interview with a CIO.
Not that an interview would have helped. If you need someone to see something that everyone else is missing, call me. It's not that I think outside of the box, it's just that my box is a the one that the fridge came in and I made it into a spaceship fort. I'm not particularly smart just not constrained in the same way. I am constrained in other ways.
One of the easiest ways to see things differently is to imagine that something that isn't true is. For example, when Bohr came up with his brilliant but entirely wrong model of the atom, he did it by saying that although the electrons orbited the nucleus, they didn't radiate. Something everyone knew had to be true but when you say that it isn't, you can move on. Bohr's atom is wrong but it's brilliantly wrong.
Most of what I do is wrong and hopefully some of it is brilliantly wrong. If i was to apply this creative principle to my own life right now, what would I think was true that i presently don't believe is? For starters, I'd probably imagine that I can actually do something that energizes me and doesn't make me want to drive into the cement pillons on the Indiana Turnpike. (Damn them for putting those trash cans of sand in front of them!) Or simply drive through Gary telling people about their mothers. So, let's play a game. You'd like to play a game, wouldn't you? Why don't you go over there and sit down while i get my sweater on. Go on, I'll be there in just a moment. Maybe we can sing a song while we get ready. Would you like to sing a song with me? It's not a hard song.
Bay Wolf has a great site dedicated to the Dell inspiron and Latitude repair. Some great stuff for those of us who have to do this type of thing. he hasn't gotten the Inspiron 5000 (my current bane) up but he has some great information about caddies, media bays, etc.
I like the pictorial lesson on how to shove a hard disk into your media bay thingy. I'm not sure that I want to try it -- I'm going to replace the dell with an ultralight as soon as I can -- but I'd like to be able to swap out hard drives for different OSes. Yeah, I'd love to have two OSes residing together but like that's ever going to work for me....
Or does one capitalize the R in "'rents"? I can never remember. Besides, this is english , the language where you can do whatever you want to. Thank goodness we are returning to the good old days of the middle ages, where we spelled words any which way we wanted.
L and I went over to the 'rents' house a few hours away to celebrate their birthday. my folks turned 65 on Saturday and we decided that we would go over and bring a cake to help them celebrate. If we hadn't, I doubt that they would have done anything. Lots of people called, at least for my folks, which they enjoyed.
I started reading Connie Willis's Passages, which currently has me so spooked that I can't write about it. I mean really spooked. Maybe I needed to contemplate my death, alone and unmourned, at the end of the world. Oh, wait: that's Dave Sims's CEREBUS. I haven't gotten this spooked by a book in long time.
The catastrophic failure of my laptop was caused mostly by me, it now seems. I've moved over to the old iMac (it's the blueberry I picked up from that internet company that was going under, or is it Bondi?) and I am trying to use the keyboard. Which responds differently from my trusty old logitech deluxe. For years I used an old, heavy IBM keyboard from a 286 we got off my father-in-law. That keyboard was great: you really knew that you were hitting a key. It had tactile pleasure. I enjoyed typing on it because you always knew if you had hit the key far enough or not. And it had a nice clickity sound. This iMac keyboard has the sound but feels like someone has sat things on it. Oh, yeah, that would probably be me and the object would be my comics from November.
Still, it's nice to get some use out of the bondi. I'm running OS 9.x on this box, mostly because I am too cheap to upgrade my apps, plus OS X barely runs on this machine. Not enough horses under the hood. But Mac is a fairly secure OS because no one really ever bothers to hack it. I have it behind a NAT and a firewall, which provide more than sufficient protection. I keep the other information encrypted with a strong key on the big box. I use a few ciphers -- the Euros i worked with preferred IDEA 128, i think because it came from Switzerland and therefore not tainted by USA governmental prying. I've used PGP and rijndael (AES) and 3DES in the past. I like PGP for simplicity, and use it over the windows XP encryption. Somehow, I don't trust MS either. i do use the b asic encryption for the OS files that shouild be hidden. So no need to upgrade any further on this iMac.
It's kind of cute. My mom got one at the same time and I bought the software for her. Of course, they ended up leaving Photoshop and Pagemaker on it and now my mom wants to know how to use Photoshop. I want her just to learn how to use the Internet. I think that she would enjoy chatting with the grandkids and emailing her niece. (She has three sons: we aren't the writing or chatting type.)
Maybe you didn't grow up with parents with the same birthday and same age. It was odd at first, since I thought that I had to marry a girl who had my birthday. and since Happy was the only one I had ever met, I figured I was doomed to marry her, which always got me down. She had cooties, you see, girl cooties. So, yes, both my parents turned 65 Saturday. And they will probably both retire sometime in their late 70s. My dad is already retired once, and if he stays at this next job until he is 76 he can get another pension. Which is necessary since his old pension got raided and collapsed. That guy isn't going to jail for it, either. Crime does pay, my friends. For the super-rich. Here's to Bernie getting his!
I see that I have no topics at all for the last few days. Maybe I got tired of the controversy of all the comments about my church posts. Or my organization posts. My knowledge posts were safe.
[ Continue reading "Celebrating the 'rents' Brithday" ]I had an entry going that described the hell I have created for myself with this laptop. I need to take the Dell out back and shoot it. Not that I have the cash to do that any more. I still have the job at INFOSEC that may come through. The headhunter who called about the contract at Big Investment Bank called back today. It fell through. I was over qualified. I'm not even 40 and I'm already overqualified and underqualified. He wants to submit me for a contract at Private Bank which would be pretty cool. It's a good operation and maybe I could get into to see someone from there.
If nothing goes through, I'll have to start tearing apart a variety of things that I haven't yet. There may be a position at Wal-Mart but they are pretty hard to get. I think that I could do retail even but those are tight jobs in this very down economy out here. The IT jobs are going oversees: even the technical writing jobs, which I had previously thought would require natives. The Indians speak perfectly good english, albeit at bit too Queen's style. I'm not sure what will be left here. The jobs that we thought would be good careers aren't. I guess that's the problem of not being a capitalist. The real trick, as my brother tells me, is to be an owner. Not a business owner but a shareholder. If you own your own business, you still only make money when you work. What you want is for your money to make money for you. There's risk to that, too, I suppose.
I've tried sleeping tonight and that didn't work so I'm trying wasting time. It appears that a change is on the horizon for me. God is at work. Stomping out the grapes of wrath or the grapewraiths which I suppose is like the ringwraiths only where the grapes are the one fruit that in the darkness binds them. I've got a lot not working all over and it strikes me, as I am in the throes of the rebuild process that I am horribly unhappy. Some of that is the result of the rebuild, that's true. Nothing puts the kabosh on a good time like desperately trying to save a piece of hardware. The good news is that I have successfully saved all of my data files, except for a very few which were locked by the OS, and those will be on the backup from pre-Swiss.
But a lot of it is coming from the nasty nature of my existence right now. Part of this is a result of Sunday going to meeting and the resulting conversation that L and I had on Sunday. I am very ready to toss my ticket in with these folks, the powerpoint church people who meet in a gymnasium. L more reticent: I think that she would prefer to never go back. She's looking for people from the university, which she was totally against when she taught there. I am not so fond of academics: they tend to be boring people. I am searching for someone who is interested in the types of things that I am and since the comics shop guys are weird even by my standards I don't have any great thoughts about finding them. Maybe I feel intimidated by academics or maybe I am just pissed off still at having thrown away my life and moved out here to the desert for no good reason. But maybe staying in the big city wouldn't have been so great. Since we have been out here, only two couples and two singles have been out from the City to see us. A couple of missionaries come back to raise money and they come out all the time. (We really like them.) A guy we barely know from Romania comes over to see them and insists on coming to our house. But the people from the City? Nope. And we have a guest bedroom and everything. Maybe our life there wasn't that great after all. But it was a life. I had a job, contacts, movement. Living out here is stagnation somehow.
So I'm ready to join a church. This new one is better for me because there are no set cliques or "pillars". You can make your own church there, which appeals to me. I can jump right in and do things. Their theology is relatively consistent with mine (I'm generally an adherent to the Westminster Confession, just like my hero Chuck Spurgeon except with an acceptance of infant baptism) and I have come out of there each time feeling like God was sitting beside me saying, "That's the stuff! Listen to this!" It seems to be the whole package. They want youth leaders (!) and actors for an Easter drama. I am really excited. I just want to get involved.
Since we never talk about this stuff any more, here's what I am reading. You will be very pleased to note that I am reading a novel! I wanted to try out Winslop's Kung Pao Chicken scifi series but the library here had every book but the first one. I am not going to read from book two! I refuse! Sure, I'll buy issues 1, 2 and 4 of a miniseries but I have limits with novel sets.
Reading currently:
I've learned some valuable lessons in all of this. One is to never do anything to this machine. The other is that the Windows 2000 disc has some pretty interesting tools. Another has to do with how my Dell laptop sounds like an airplane taking off when it runs the CD. I've rebooted from that blasted CD enough times to get a medal. Of course, any installation of a MS OS requires multiple reboots.
I've been reading several other folks blogs recently and I have to admit that I really don't have much more to say that is all that interesting. I'm about to start hitting some major debt soon -- I'll be selling the bassoon whenever I can get down to ISU to see Mike again -- and that clarifies a lot. I've also succeeded in reducing my community to an almost null set. Hosing this laptop is simply the last straw in a long line of haybales I've been pitching out the loft and onto the camel. I have a very strong camel, which has allowed it to maintain such an intense balance.
When I started this, I figured that it would be fun to see what it was like and it would give me a place to put all my notes. Normally they simply clutter up a variety of notebooks. I'm partial to a mid-size writing notebook and have a stack of them that should never be read by anyone other than me. I've mentioned this before. They fill up with outlines for novels I'll never write (remind me to bore you with the 10 book series of fantasy novels I'll never finish) and articles I will never bother publishing. And the endless amounts of random wordplay.
Years ago, as an oppressed miniature person in southern Louisiana, I dreamed of having my own comic strip. Not comic book, mind you: strip. Daily with Sundays. A more ridiculous career one could not imagine. At least so thought my dad. As the token smartest kid in the school, I had a reputation for weirdness and seriousness to keep up. While I could continue to enjoy stripart, and even collect massive amounts of comics from the 1950s, I couldn't actually pursue it as a career. This explains why you stop seeing any comic strip stuff in my notebooks after about freshman year in college. You stop seeing lots of stuff midway through sophomore year, when I became a hopeless basket case who spent most of his time in the women's dorm. They had food cards and lots of stuff, and apparently considered me some type of lost puppy. I spent one of my junior years in John and Scott's room, when I wasn't loungin around in L's watching her study. About the only book I remember reading that was assigned was Jane Jacobs's Death and Life. But that led to me reading her other stuff which meant I didn't read the stuff the teachers assigned. I didn't even finish Gareth Morgan's Imagining Organization. I had to finally polish off all the parts I had missed later.
Sure, I have backup. But it's too many days old and I need the data that's on it.
It all started when I tried to install Linux. Instead of trusting the old standby (Redhat 9) I trusted a friend's suggestion for using another distribution. That and a new release of my old standby, System Commander, led to my Windows 2000 partition no longer booting. The Win2K repair facility ended up failing on me.
I've now got to install Win2K on the partition I had intended to install Linux to. I've had to boot from my Win98 partition (thank goodness for small mercies of old OSes!) and run the install program.