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It's that time of year again, when our thoughts turn to upgrades or porting. I'm upgrading an old eMac I picked for Lisa to Tiger, and then to iLIfe '06, since '08 is a step backwards. Hopefully this will keep her moving for the next few months.
It's odd that we've become a Mac-centric household. I'm not crazy about working on the Apple Monolith (frankly, Wintel is much, much more open) but I grew really tired of trying to keep up with Windows. Which is why we became a Linux Desktop-centric household a couple of years ago.
The problem with Linux on the desktop — well, one of many complaints — is the wretched support for wireless. Yes, I know all about the problems of the chips in the cards. I even went out and bought a new Belkin G PC-card because they supposedly worked well, and it did. I'm not upset about having to purchase particular hardware. The Mac has the same problem. What bothered me was the amount of "Oh, wait, let me walk you through doing that" that I had to do whenever she wanted to do the simplest things. Perhaps the problem was that we had the wrong distribution. (Mepis was my third.) Perhaps my wife needed to learn more about the underlying systems of her computer. Perhaps I shouldn't have installed Mepis onto a c. 2000 laptop from Dell.
I've been reading Dean Keith Simonton lately. (Kudos to the state of Indiana for making the Insight databases of webfeat available to residents.) He has an extensive publications list, but what I'm interested in here is a point he probably makes best in a book: acknowledged geniuses are people who produced a lot.
My career as the world's most successful unsuccessful person continues to grow. Next week, I've got a free trip to London to discuss a project with a major consultant. A values consultant. Really.
I'm not exactly sure if this is going to turn into work or not. But a trip to the UK isn't too bad. The tickets are ridiculously inexpensive, compared to what I thought that they would be. I figured it would end up costing US$2400 or so but I can get over there for about $1600. $800 if I travel with restrictions.
Of course, perhaps I should just accept the results of doing the talk at church on Sunday. I had forgotten that the reason that I started thinking about this was that I figured we would need to put the past behind us in order to move forward to whatever it is that God has for us. Part of that is reconciling, or attempting reconciling, with people from the previous incarnation of our congregation. By the time I got to actually putting it together, though, it was weeks and a baby later and I had forgotten some of that. The actual content was too relevant to my own life. Blast it. I would prefer it to be relevant to other people, not me. I think that God has given me these opportunities to force me to grow.
Which I would prefer happened to other people, of course.
I have to do the sermon tomorrow. I never really know what is going to happen until I get done, but I spend a lot of time preparing. The guy that they had lined up for our preacher-less startup church couldn't come, so on Thursday I got a call to see if I would "step up to the plate". (Bad metaphor for someone in a church.) I've been thinking that we needed to talk about forgiving each other. The problem with preaching is that it does a number on you. I know that I never get as much out of the scriptures as when I prepare to speak them to others.
Jesus speaks about forgiveness in many places. Most of the statements he makes have the same theme as the line from the Lord's Prayer:
Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us
[Luke 11:5, NIV]
Or debts and debtors [Mat. 6:12].
In this phrase, it seems like God will only forgive us if we first forgive others. It's pretty clear from other scriptures that this isn't so: we love because he first loved us, we forgive because we have been forgiven. So let's look at this.