![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
9 = blocks between my old house and my new house.
8 = hours it took to move everything.
7 = miles we put on the u-haul truck during the move.
6 = days I owned the house before we moved in.
5 = punk kids I found walking through my yard.
4 = guys who moved my piano.
3 = truckloads of stuff I apparently have.
2 = cups of coffee I had this morning
1 = gallons of coffee I felt like drinking this morning.
0 = times I want to move ever again.
--cheers
- Location:my office
- Mood:
exhausted
I spent this week in Michigan. I started the week wondering why my parents up and moved to Cadillac, MI on a whim last year. There is a feeling of abandonment I've felt about not having them in Searcy with us. After this week, I think I understand. The lakes are beautiful, the weather is almost perfect consistently, and there are people here who genuinely accept them for who they are. Who can argue with that?
I learned quickly to love the water this week. There is peace in watching the birds coast over the surface of the water while the sun melts into the horizon. The sound of children laughing on the playground and the wind massaging the leaves in the trees; this moment is transcendent. As I grasp a handful of sand and let it slip through my fingers, I can let go of everything else just for a moment... and relax. This week was a good week. All things considered it was nothing too spectacular on the surface, but it constituted a minor spiritual journey for me as well.
I've been searching this week for what makes me valuable. Now, I realize that this last statement puts me dangerously close to the genre of women's christian self-help literature; however, bear with me for a bit. Everyone has the need to experience a sense of their own intrinsic value. It then follows that you also have the need to find and experience what makes you intrinsically worthwhile. This is one of those things that is just true whether you realize it or not. Here's another: you unwaveringly believe deep down one or more lies about yourself.
Accept it.
Once you do, you're free. Well, more free anyway. Free to stop wasting yours and everyone else's time chasing a bunch of nonsense. This includes but is not limited to defining your intrinsic worth in terms of: money, status, generosity, piety, discipline, body fat percentage, intelligence, who you're dating, who you're banging, square footage, carats on your finger, carats in your teeth, what your drive, where you live, where you work, what you're kids can do, what you're kids can't do, what you're kids are doing, anything having to do with your kids. These are all variables you spend your life defining. Some things you can change, and some things will always be out of your control. However, none of these will ever define... you.
I think we still see success as an out of control house party in a rap video. You know, the one where its all money, booze, gold, and sex. This stuff still drives us. It appeals to us and drives us on, because without it we don't have anything else. Without all the clothes and cars, out of control sexual encounters, the finest food, the biggest house. Without all this to pull us forward, we are lost. We are addicts. We were never shown our own worth. We were abandoned and forced to find our own way, and we found something or someone that made us feel important or valuable when we were unable to give ourselves respect or love. Even if our definition of success were not flawed, we are unable to deem ourselves worthy of pursuing a sense of dignity or purpose.
And yet...
We still have value. Despite what we have done to ourselves and others. Despite how we continue to hurt the innocent, and sabotage our own efforts.
We still have value.
I've felt for some time that surely there has got to be something else. I've looked for it in drugs, alcohol, sex, money, a rewarding job, religion, marriage, parenthood. Everything has eventually fallen short. I've tried so many ways of proving to others that I'm worth a damn, but I never once believed it myself. It turns out, liking myself is a choice. It's not a formula, or a program, or a book I just have to read. Every morning when I wake up I decide to like myself today or not. Every time I sit down to eat, I decide to like myself... or not. Every time I feel something I don't want to feel, I choose. Every time circumstances outside my control totally screw me with my pants on, I choose.
There have periods of my life where I was really trying to find myself and sometimes when I was too exhausted or too scared to keep looking. But its not like that.
The "myself" I've been trying to find is something I create, and re-create, and shape, and refine, and the cycle keeps going. I suppose I just assumed there was this perfect self wandering the earth aimlessly that I just needed to meet up with and it would all be gravy from there on out. Much like in Kung Fu Panda, there is no secret ingredient but there are still a ton of plain old regular every day ingredients that come together to make me the lovable mess that I am.
Lest I come off sounding too humanistic for some, I should inject here that this line of reasoning has not steered me further away from the sovereignty of God. Actually, its helped me appreciate God as the designer of me. I've had some problems accepting that I'm valuable aside from my ability to perform, particularly where the comeback was "you have value because God made you valuable! yippee!!" I think I'm starting to get it though. God has given us all the gift of life and the gift of choice. The question then becomes "what the hell do we do with it today?"
I choose to start being honest.
I choose to own every moment.
Today, I choose to like myself.
- Location:Detroit Hotel
- Mood:
pensive
I was recently working on a site for work, and I decided to tackle the sleeping giant. At first, progress was nonexistent. I made sure I had a handy emacs cheatsheet just a few keystrokes away, and I found myself playing window tennis with it and the editor window for the first hour or so of use. Gradually, I began catch on and only had to occasionally check the guide, but it took some time before the fear of accidentally reformatting the local disk and the disks of all machines on the local network with a single keystroke subsided. This is because I realized immediately the absolute power eminating from the terminal window while using emacs. I didn't realize this was the source of my fear until now, but the early experience with emacs is roughly equivalent to how it feels to drive a manual transmission for the first time. I suppose a more apt analogy would be: its like the first time you drive a car with a manual transmission. Then once you get the hang of driving it, you realize that the speedometer tops out at about 240 mph. Then once you get up to 140 mph, the car automatically sprouts wings, a couple of jet engines, some missles and a couple of .50 cal turrets. I've never tried it, but I'm pretty sure you can mail-order some bolt on parts to enable it for space travel as well.
You get the point. This is the type of software that transcends being a product or even an application. Software this powerful is a skill unto itself, and it comprises a give/take relationship between machine and operator. My eyes have been opened to why emacs is treated with legendary reverance and appreciation. While it might be a little pretentious to say that emacs is the last editor you'll ever need, it doesn't seem that far-fetched. To be fair, I have spent hardly any time learning the feature set of vi/vim. However, if maintaining orderly indentation in vi doesn't seem that bad, then I suspect you haven't tried it in emacs. Now, I will say that after I had spent several hours hacking together PHP/HTML in emacs for the first time, I had a outrageous headache from concentrating so hard. Its the same flavor of headache you get from trying to author SQL embedded in PHP embedded in HTML embedded in C++ for the first time. There are a lot of spinning plates to maintain, but after a while you can keep them going without actively maintaining concentration.
This is becoming a theme as I cross over into using CLI programs to replace functions usually provided by GUI-based applications. In the absence of a pretty windows chalked full of metaphors for what is really going on, the metaphors in command-line apps are fewer and much more crude. This forces me to think about what I'm trying to accomplish in abstract terms instead of simply manipulating what seems to be flattened material controls. When you start replacing core functions such as email and text editing with more powerful CLI tools like mutt and emacs, you have to maintain a level of focus in the background of your mind that simply didn't exist before.
This may all turn out to be just a bunch of honeymoon-stage fluff, but I feel like I'm just now showing up to a party that's been going on for over thirty years.
- Location:My Apartment
- Mood:excited
This is about the dilemma that I had about needing to play my music files on my kinda' shiny new linux installation. On the one hand, every scrap of audio I own is in the mpeg3 format. On the other hand, I know that the Ogg Vorbis format is supremely superior in pretty much every way to MP3. The problem is, there really isn't a lossless method for creating ogg files from my mp3 files. Also, since I, like many, obtained only the mp3 format of my music, I don't have any originals on disk to burn from.
This wouldn't be an issue if mp3 was very well supported on Fedora 10 out of the box and was an open format like, say... ogg. This is somewhat of a throwback to the whole Windows-Linux debate. Its the story how something that is really clunky, fundamentally inferior, proprietary, and crippling to its users can spread like wildfire while a freely available alternative with higher performance and versatility still loses out because it isn't as widely supported/adopted. To be fair, I don't know how widespread Linux is on a world scale, but its much more pervasive now than it has been to be sure, and through man centuries of hard work, there are all sorts of virtualization tech out there freely available. That said, I really want to hop on board with Stallman on this one and go the total free software route. However, this is still a hard sell in our current software environment. Some time ago, someone got it in their heads that knowledge was not only power, but it was also a product. This wouldn't be so far fetched if we were still monkeying about with floppy disks, but the fact is that terabytes of bandwidth are used by many computer users every year (month maybe?). So the obstacles to simply going online and finding the information you need to accomplish a given task are much less than they were before these wonderful tubes existed.
Heck many users don't trust software unless they paid a hefty price tag for it. The fact is that we don't want to be responsible. When something doesn't work or I don't use my software in a way that was planned for by the developers, I want to be able to raise hell somewhere and have a team "experts" repair my problem while I sleep.(well not me really, but I guess most people). I suppose this isn't a bad thing in and of itself. I mean, if us crazy digital fundamentalists want to hack together a rope and hang ourselves with it, its our prerogative, right? Well, that would be true except it turns out that the rope that was created isn't a rope at all but a magic wand. In a very Harry Potter way, as you learn the spells, the magic wand of Linux is able to produce pretty much any desired result. Perhaps assigning the magic wand to Linux is a little short-sighted; maybe the free software/open source paradigm is really where the magic is. By the way, this isn't movie magic we're talking about here. You actually have to put in the work to learn your stuff, but it just so happens that you get an almost impossible amount of return for you investment. This can't be said for ANY bought software I have ever seen.
So, enough ranting I have to go to work now. :)
- Location:My Apartment
- Music:Wobble (Stump Up Mix) by Aphrodite
Licensing
First off, I've decided to start orienting this journal to more regular and technical content. Something new I'm trying is the Creative Commons licensing you should see here to the left <----. Its totally presumptuous, I know. You kinda' have to assume that sooner or later there is going to be something posted here that is going be worth reading, let alone reusing. This is a HUGE assumption. Its kinda' funny that something as trivial as this has legal binding. For that matter, its interesting how flimsy the law actually is. What is a law anyway? Is it just something that an elected/appointed official decides based on any number of factors? For that matter what is it that lawyers do other than predict how a judge would rule on something if it were to go to court? I suppose going through years of law school and taking the Bar examination does allow them to speak with some authority.
Consequently, speaking with authority is precisely what one would have to do in order to produce something useful enough to necessitate proper licensing, which in turn might requires lawyers and judges... hey, wait a minute. This is all just one big conspiracy to keep lawyers in business. Look out legal system! I'm onto your little game. Don't think I don't see you spinning your web of lies and deceit. Because, I do, in fact, see you. Spinning is what you're doing. Anyway.
I wanted a cool badge on my page, and this way you guys can reap the benefits if I do happen to come up with something brilliant to say. (not holding my breath.) On the other hand, it means I can sue the pants off of you if you dare to quote anything from this blog without it being non-profit and being marked with the same licensing. (not really) How do you like them apples, hmmmm?
- Location:My Apartment
- Mood:
hopeful
Free As In Willy
Issues
I did the unthinkable and installed Fedora 10 on my first generation macbook last Wednesday. It took some tweaking for sure, but everything is almost as it should be. The major, hands down, burr in my saddle right now is dual monitor support. No matter what I do, I can't get the screen to stop being mirrored without breaking my xorg.conf (/etc/X11/xorg.conf for the kids following along at home). I found out that you have to enable the surround sound in volume control in order for the headphone jack to work. Also, NetworkManager was giving me fits at first. After googling around for a bit, I was able to install the apple firmware updates and modprobe everything into place for the wireless and the iSight camera. I'm still a little disappointed in the performance of the iSight within Linux as it tends to be much darker than in OSX.
Look and Feel
I'm absolutely addicted to the eye-candy compiz has to offer out of the box. After I coupled it with emerald, its downright splendiferous. So far, I still have to run `nohup emerald --replace &` in a terminal each time I login, but only because I'm too lazy to figure how to have it run on login automatically. The ability to customize the visuals within gnome are downright sick in comparison to either windows or OSX.
Sure beats MacPorts
After running with a mac for so long, the amount of software available via yum is just staggering. Its got solid VPN connectivity via NetworkManager out of the box as well as the ability to mount ftp, samba, and WebDav shares. I also have been introduced to gnotime and openproj, which I live out of these days. Gnotime is absolutely perfect for keep tabs on the time I spend during my normal workflow. I also find that when I know the timer is going, I don't drag my feet as much (I'm salaried).
Thunderbird?!?
Normally the thought of managing my mail through a desktop application would cause me to throw up a little in my mouth. However, there is a glowing aura around thunderbird which periodically entices unwary gmail users into its clutches. This time around I fell for it, and I'm giving thunderbird a shot. I keep telling myself that one of these days I'm going to need to take my email offline. I downloaded an extension which makes archiving a cinch which helped out alot. There is still a gaping hole in functionality where conversation view used to be. My hat is off to thunderbird when it comes to managing multiple email accounts though. While Gmail has fantastic support for handling any email account topology, it proves difficult to do so without forwarding to one main account. With Thunderbird, I can keep all my email accounts separate, yet keep them in close proximity to each other. I'm also loving the extensibility of thunderbird, and the fact that it is separate from the browser. I actually don't miss the in-browser as much as I thought I might because I like Pidgin so much for a IM client. All around, its a shift that will take some time to get used to, but has its advantages.
The OS for Grownups
Last but certainly not least on the list of features that makes Linux far more powerful and fun than other OSs I've used: the console. That's right, the linux console (bash shell to be fair). The bash shell literally makes a dos prompt look like a toy. And, we're not talking the cool new toys that American kids get at Christmas and their birthdays. We're talking the toys that get donated to goodwill and homeless ministries for third-world countries. I have no doubt this is because of the cascading mountains of utilities freely and easily accessible for the linux terminal, but still it makes me laugh to use the dos prompt inside of windows. Well it also makes me want to throw things, but fortunately I don't spend that much time messing with dos.
So, although it's not perfect yet, I've enjoyed fedora 10 so much. I suppose if worst comes to worst I can always boot it into OSX again just for old time sake. I hope it never comes to that. ;)
-jared
- Location:My Apartment
- Mood: grateful
Happy Holidays,
-Jared
- Location:My kitchen table
- Mood: thankful
I'm no doubt infantile when it comes to writing in general, but from everything I've read on the NaNoWriMo site, that doesn't really matter too much.
Cheers to craptologistical prose!
- Location:My Apartment
- Mood: tired
Last night I was as the homecoming GATA reunion with Trische and the kids. After getting doped up on punch and cake, I was pretty miserable having to watch two 4-year-old boys and make sure they didn't cause any damage of biblical proportions (which they are very capable of doing btw). All went pretty well, and I found an out when I got invited to worship with a group of guys later that night.
Today was pretty typical of most Sundays. Woke up late, threw the kids in the stroller and walked to church. Class was fun and interesting as usual. There weren't enough seats for late worship, so we opted for the creation service**. After lunch, we all took a nap. I woke up surprisingly groggy, but Liam always does a good job of getting me up and at 'em.
We skyped my folks for the first time this week, which was really cool for the kids to get to see my folks for the first time since they flew the coop. Today we discussed the possibility of Trische and the kids going to my parents house for Christmas early. While I usually get pretty down when I'm away from her and the kids, I'm excited about the possibility of being free to pour myself into to work and tie up all the loose ends before break. We'll see what happens.
**code for going outside and enjoying God's creation as an alternative to traditional forms of worship service.
- Location:My Apartment
- Mood:
rushed
Saturday, we slept in (thank God) and went downtown for an industrial-strength dose of Americana extract. It was kinda' like a state fair but with more vendor booths and no rides (except for the blow-up obstacle course which my son took full advantage of). There were a couple of bands playing. On one stage they had the obligatory mixture of acappella groups and really bad soft-metal. On the other was pretty sweet old-timey bluegrass. Oh, and no alcohol since we are in one of the 42 dry counties in Arkansas.
We went to see Wall-e at the theatre downtown after lunch. It is one of the best movies I have ever seen. period. Its a kid's movie in that it is very kid friendly, but there are some interesting and important takeaways for people of all ages as well as a fun and engaging plot line. Oh, and the cast is made up almost entirely of robots, so I was sold before I even walked into the building.
That night, my wife and I sat down to watch a movie on Netflix (instant watch), but we ended up watching the first Presidential debate. There isn't very much room for me to be less impressed with the McCain/Palin ticket, and the debate pretty much lived up to those expectations.
Sunday we did not sleep in (argh) and scrambled together the kids and ourselves in time to hit up ealry service at church. It sucked having to get up so early and hoof it to church, but it was worth the effort. It is always good to be around people you can be yourself around.
We popped over to the second story of the Harding cafeteria on our way home for lunch, and we all took a nap for a couple of hours after lunch. Well, I watched the daily show and colbert report from last thursday before napping.
I got a chance to catch up with my really good friend Howard tonight. I'm realizing more and more that my inability to keep in touch with friends who live in different locales is cancerous to my friend base which is become surprisingly critical since my folks took off to Michigan a couple of weeks ago.
Its been a great weekend. I'm not particularly looking forward to another week on the economic hamster wheel, but I'm enjoying the cooler weather we've been having.
- Location:My couch
- Mood: mellow
My first impression is that designing a language is going to be hard if we try to tailor it to the application. We'll probably throw together some C-like syntax and call it a day, but it will interesting to see what machine-specific features make it into the language.
I think we could have picked a more applicable target language/application for this class since we'll probably spend 40% of the class just playing around with the sensors and motors. However, I definitely don't regret getting to program a lego bot for college credit. :D
- Location:My Office
- Mood: cheerful
Yesterday was the first really cool weather we've had in 6-7 months here.
I had a minor breakdown yesterday. Two facts converged in my side yard at the precise time that I was sitting there. The first was a realization that my job is almost completely but not quite entirely different from the work that I would like to do. The second was the first time in a long while when I took an entire evening to play with my kids without working, studying, etc. These two realities stirred up a mental/emotional cocktail in me which I can only describe as a personal renaissance.
You see, there was a time when my wife and I were poor (American poor, not globally poor). We're not exactly shopping around for our own private island in our current state, but back then we were college-student poor. But, we were happier. This was a time in my life when I had so much hope for the future. I was learning, growing, moving forward. We didn't have a lot, but it didn't matter because we were engaging life; even a life in small-town Arkansas.
Today, I find myself in a place where many programmers end up: the skill-set that got you hired slowly dwindles to nothing, you are doing more tech support tasks, you are possibly being groomed to be a project manager. Slowly and steadily you make the transition from the technical to the functional to the managerial at which point you either jump on the business school bandwagon or bounce back and forth between entry-level positions where at least you will be doing work you were trained to do.
There is little doubt in my mind that the major barrier to me being more productive in my current position is because I simply loathe tech-support work, and I have no interest in being a manager. So, I hopped on Topcoder.com last night and did some practice problems. This turned out to be a great outlet for me, and it will only help me be a better programmer in the future. On top of that, accepting that my job is an IT position and not a programming position makes it much more bearable and even fun at times.
On the whole, I'm seeing a return to simpler times in my life. My future entries probably won't be so epic as this one, but I'd like to make it a point to post more regularly so we'll see how it goes.
-Jared
- Location:My Office
- Mood: thoughtful
As you might be able to guess, we made several wrong turns on the way to each or our destinations (while walking as well) thanks to yours truly. It was a Christmas miracle that we only made it back into town an hour late, but it was quite an experience.
This morning we went to an Asian market in Memphis where I saw all kinds of strange vegetables and fruit, most whose names I either didn't know or I couldn't pronounce or both. in the back corner was the largest bags of rice I have ever witnessed. (I'm talking industrial size dog food bags here!). Then we proceeded to make a few wrong turns, ask for directions and almost kill ourselves a couple of times on the way to Beale Street where we ate at Silky O'Sullivan's. My friend Joseph had never had onion rings before (go figure) so that was interesting. The most entertaining moment of the day had to be watching my two Chinese friends try to order off of a Beale street bar menu.
All in all, it was a pretty fun day and I learned a couple of new Chinese words, but now I am thoroughly exhausted .... in a good way.
- Location:Parent's house
- Mood: exhausted
I am finding that I am wound so tight that it is virtually impossible for me to relax regardless of the amount of free time that I have. I have always thought that is about the amount of time that I have to relax that would help me not stress out. The real issue is that no amount of "me time" will be helpful if I don't know how to start to relax. So, I'm going to take the next couple of days to try to figure out how to cope with it all. I'll report my findings :D
- Location:My apartment
- Mood:
anxious
The new baby is doing great! She was born on July 30th and she has been alot of fun so far. Also, Liam has started the long arduous journey to potty-training ninja mastery. So far he still poops his pants almost daily (good times!) but he pretty much has the pee-pee thing down. Yes, "pee-pee thing" is a technical term.
Work has really picked up with the advent of a few new projects and responsibilities I have been given lately, but I'm trying to keep everything as compartmentalized as possible. I had been taking a Mandarin Chinese class that Harding decided to offer this semester, but work kinda' got in the way of that. Also, its pretty much impossible to learn a foreign language when you don't have anyone to speak it with. So, now I'm informally attempting to learn Spanish since I have recently met several friends who are fluent. Spanish is also easier for me to pick up because I took a couple of Spanish classes in high school, and when I go to the trouble to learn something it usually makes its way to my long term memory pretty easily.
Well, who knows what will be going on in my life when I post next? I am learning to just embrace the entropy that comes with being a chronic dabbler.
Until next time,
- Location:my office
- Mood: mellow
So this is how it all starts. Some guy in the middle of nowhere who just happens to have an internet connection decides, against his better judgment, that he has something worth displaying for all the world to see.
This is the point at which I would normally start reeling off my personal history. Since that generally doesn't ever seem to be worth the effort (and definitely not worth reliving your past long enough to transcribe it), that is not about to happen. What is about to happen then? Well, in the long term... who knows? In the short term, I am approximately 23 days away from beginning the arduous task of parenting a second child to greatness. This time it is a girl, so I'm not really sure what to do about that yet (other than the whole "only wipe down" thing).
In other news, I am on the third day a recent trend I have started for myself of running a mile every evening. This has proven much much harder than it should be for a typical guy my age. But, considering the history that I promised not to go into, this is a much needed trend in my life. I also have recently made up my mind to learn the humble art of skateboarding. This has also proven to be very challenging, although it is coming to me more naturally than I thought it might. I'm pretty pumped b/c my new deck gets here on friday. :)
Anyway, thats pretty much it for now. Peace.
- Location:my office
- Mood:
lazy - Music:Leetradio (www.leetradio.com)
Variations on a Meme by Jared Stilwell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.