Because you can observe a lot just by watching.
I needed something fun to do, so I disassembled an old hard drive. Maybe not too old of a hard drive since the Maxtor 5T040H4 is a 40GB capacity drive and is still for sale.
WARNING: If you are not interested in seeing pictures of a dissected drive, please move along.
I started this post ages ago, but I had just left it in the drafts area. Have you seen the Native American with ear buds?
Next thing you know, people will start theorizing that it was built as a sign to let aliens know there is intelligent life on this planet. But then they may debate it if they discover what an iPod is.
If you zoom in on the map you can see that it was a well positioned hole sunk at the end of a long road in the middle of nowhere. Considering the name of one road is “Range Rd” I am guessing there is regular military activity out there. Last time I drove on a “Range Rd” it was near Eglin Air Force base and we missed the sign denoting that we had crossed into military territory. A large black truck pulled up behind us and we spent some time talking with a nice guy with a big gun. I showed him my clergy ID for the base and he asked if I would be interested in handling his wedding.
Imagine that conversation. “Honey, I found a preacher for the wedding. I caught him trespassing near the artillery range.”
“But the man who has doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin.” Romans 14:23
I was a stickler for accuracy when I was a preacher. One of my pet peeves was people using scripture out of context and with a little twist to get it to match their point. Even if the verse was good and the point was good, I could not bring myself to bend a verse in this manner. So, it is with a bit of trepidation that I bring up this verse in this context.
The problem is not doing what you know you should do. You know you should be doing something a little better, but you cannot. You know you should take the work a little further, but you are being hindered. You know something needs to be done, but you know that you cannot do it.
This is one of the worst forms of mental anguish I typically experience. I consider myself a “Near Perfectionist.” I will push myself to get something done as perfectly as possible, but I can accept it when things don’t work out just right. However, being unable to do what I know to be best for what seems to be arbitrary reasons, lack of communication or involvement, or a lack of vision make me want to bite off my lower lip.
Yep, I have had some teeth marks lately. I know it is just frustration, but sometimes it feels like sin to be doing something I know is not what should really be getting done.
I found one of the strongest proofs of macro evolution ever.
Dogs evolved from cats. This explains a lot.
I was searching for something in a previous blog post (it really does serve as a memory extention), and I saw my post about Rick Warren’s Blog about 4 months ago. I’m not sure when this happened, but http://www.rickwarren.com/ is now just a press release published by A. Larry Ross & Friends.
Kigali, Rwanda, November 16 – Dr. Rick Warren, best-selling author of The Purpose Driven Life and founding pastor of Southern California’s Saddleback Church, concluded a four-day pastoral visit to Syria earlier this week as part of a three-nation pastoral training and PEACE Plan tour. The trip began last week in Germany, where more than 5,000 church leaders gathered to hear Dr. Warren give an overview of a plan to mobilize local churches to attack the global problems of poverty, disease, illiteracy, corruption and spiritual emptiness. Similar training with church leaders in Rwanda continues this week.
I looked in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and found they stopped paying attention to it in April so I cannt see when it left. It was dificult to navigate since the site was done using nothing but imagemaps that don’t appear anymore. The Google cache (which will probably change again soon) has a copy of his “Facing the world’s five giants!” article, and then the only other page on the domain known to Google is “About“.
What happened to Dr. Warren? I was hoping he could stick with it.
Now, for the part of the post where we get to conjecture (cue theme song). Why did he stop?
This, I believe, is going to be the primary deterrent to blogging by ministers. Ministers don’t like to be vulnerable and open. They are sometimes afraid to be truly human in the eyes of the people around them. This self-centered pride has led to the sinful downfall of many Godly servants. He can now go back to hiding behind the marketing rather than opening his heart.
I was just notified by Windows Genuine Advantage that I may have a pirated copy of Windows. Now, this is enough to make most people feel a bit nervous, but it really worried me. The reason is because it was on a system using our church volume license.
I have heard of several people who had Windows XP Pro installed by a computer shop who said they had a license to install on as many systems as they needed to. This is another way of saying they are pirating. Sure you can use the volume license on lots of machines, but you can bet that Microsoft does not mean that you can just stick it on any and every machine you come across. One of the things Windows Genuine Advantage does is look at your computer and see if it has one of the many codes that has been carried along by pirates.
So, I am looking at a system running the church volume license and my first thought was “Oh, [mild expletive]!” (Would you believe that I actually thought [mild expletive], square brackets and all? Didn’t think so.) I thought that maybe someone has pirated on our license and we are going to have to go through the sausage grinder to fix this all.
Now for the special details. The new system wasn’t actually new and wasn’t actually a real system. It was a VirtualPC set up in July and forgotten about. I went back in to test something out and after an upgrade the warnings popped up. I hoped it had something to do with the Virtual Hard Drive having actually been started on a very different system and now it is coming back to life with 700MB of RAM rather than the 256 allocated before.
The good news is that it was all just a botched confirmation, and after using the tips on this page:Windows Genuine Advantage Error, everything went back to normal.
Today I was checking out some distances on between cities on Google Maps and decided to check in on Niceville, FL where I used to live. I was excited to see that they had updated the pictures since I was able to now see the results of some of the construction that was happening near our house. I scrolled up to my old house and noticed there was a lot of junk in the front yard. The new owners must be rednecks. Then I noticed the car in the front yard and remembered that was where I parked it for our yard sales just before we moved. That must mean that Google was taking a picture of us during one of our Yard Sales. That means I need to figure out the date.
I was occasionally called upon for handling computer prank “tech support” in college. Echoing odd messages in autoexec.bat; setting up entire songs as system sounds; creating a bmp of a desktop and the setting it as the wallpaper then hiding all the icons; you know, the basics.
I had a few fun programs too. One that would occasionally flip the image upside down on the screen, another one that had random messages pop up while using DOS, and the like. Today, however, I found the Blue Screen Of Death Screen Saver. It pops up realistic blue screens and then appears to be restarting Windows over and over.
Amazingly enough, this little gem was created by SysInternals, a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft itself. I guess that protects them from copyright charges from Microsoft, although Microsoft handles jabs like this better than Apple.
Speaking of Apple, that is one of the best uses for this. I wouldn’t typically be cruel enough to do this to someone’s livelihood computer, but if you have a Mac lover around using an Intel Mac running Windows on the side then slip this into their Windows installation and I know they would love to see Windows Blue Screening on them, it is a validation of sorts. Fun for you, fun for them.
We need a solution to workflow issues on some of our forms. We have a form used for getting things on the schedule. It is big, cumbersome, and a pain in the neck to get to all the steps it needs to reach.
Someone wants to set up an event so the grab the .doc from the network and start writing in the details. It gets printed up and handed to the person in charge of them. Copies are then sent to each department affected by the event and they approve their portion. It makes it to the final decider and then it get put on the schedule.
This process takes longer than it takes to do all other preparations for some events, and it has trouble routing to the proper locations.
We have Sharepoint Server, but have not learned to use it yet. There are some applications that piggyback with Sharepoint to do this, but the one we have looked at costs $6,000. Someone recommended a module for DotNetNuke, but I have not heard its name and I am not comfortable with dotnetnuke (We would host it externally at first to shrink the learning curve involved with setting up all the server software, especially since there is Windows hosting out there for $5 per month.)
How do you do manage project planning workflow?
Reports have come in from a local Jacksonville, FL precinct that voting went very smoothly. Poll workers were courteous, and in spite of sticker shortages the experience was just fine.
Bob Brown, a web geek and blogger said, “We arrived at the polling station pretty late in the evening and stood in line outside for a few minutes before being allowed in.” There weren’t any issues with grumpy poll workers, “they were very courteous in spite of working a very long day,” said Mr. Brown.
I just wanted to read something good about voting experiences today instead of the articles that were probably written in advance and were just waiting for some minor details to be filled in on election day. Nothing ever goes smoothly, especially when dealing with millions of people. I would expect that these complaints are the last puffs of animosity for the 2006 election, but I doubt it.
They ran out of “I Voted” stickers just before we arrived, should I feel disenfranchised by that?