Archive for the 'whatever' Category

I began my doctorate at Cardiff University with the thought that Michel Foucault was still interesting to read after all these years. I had begun to purchase the lectures when they were translated into English in 2003 or so. They reminded me of the struggle to annunciate thoughts, the difficulty of saying something that changed the way people thought about the world, to say truth, even when it went against the norms of the day.

The latest of the lectures, released just last week, is The Government of the Self and Others from 1982-1983. I am reading the first lecture and receiving the words with a freshness that makes me write of Foucault as if he were still alive, teaching this just now, and I am saddened that he died.

The shame of losing him is another thing. The brisk and incisive scholarship of his mature work is often clouded in the minds of some people with a rejection of the man himself who struggled early in his life with being homosexual. Later he did not struggle, but defended the right of homosexual people to live and experience life without the censure and disapprobation of a conservative culture that had never and has not yet cleaned up its own propensity for violence. It is a shame that knowledge unearthed and constructed in this man cannot find the light of day because people are blocked by their own sense of moral propriety.

It is senseless to speculate what would have happened had he lived, what he would have said. But the records of his life are being unearthed again and again. I am doing this in my dissertation, hoping there is a place in the conservative culture I am embedded in for the exposure of his knowledge irrespective of the person who unearths it.

This is a fun thing, partially, telling conservatives that C.S. Lewis drank quite a bit, saying how great men don’t follow petty moral visions, that for all their authoritative ring, don’t even know what the Bible said, or if they know, have discounted it because it conflicts with their own personal convictions.

Not so Foucault. Never afraid of challenging his own or others notions, he nonetheless managed to work toward a challenging and holistic moral vision around the problems of self construction within the matrices of necessity surrounding all of us.

Thanks Michel. There’s plenty of work to be done. Time for my dissertation.

I clicked the link to my blog hoping to find something new there. I thought, dang it, this is not Twitter where something surprising may turn up. This is my blog. If something new is going to turn up it will have to be me that does it. I’m leaving now.

Complete first draft of my dissertation by September 2010
Followed by Revisions taking you to spring 2011- submit April and then hopefully a viva within two months of submission

The screen I am looking at is fuzzy because I am looking through glasses that were too weak for me four years ago. I rubbed the best and longest lasting glasses on my shirt today and the connecter between the two lenses broke. Tape didn’t help. Where is Hermione when I need “occulous reparo.” It’s ten thirty in the evening Sunday. I just finished watching Stargate Universe. The writing is better later in this season. They’ve met aliens and landed on a planet that was created by aliens. Still a lot of personal drama, but the characters are getting more believable as the show goes along.

I spent some time reading “The Reason For God” by Timothy Keller this last week. I find myself agreeing with him in many ways. As it has become ordinary with every book I read now, there is always the inner critic forcing an evaluation on the material. Obviously Keller is not trying to comprehend all the end results of the arguments. He doesn’t cover everything, he doesn’t intend to do so. Still the book is really clear and easy to read. The arguments are easy to follow and the problems are ones we do face with some regularity.

I am thinking of the theology class in the fall I am teaching. It is the first seated class in a few years. I don’t want to waste this opportunity piling a truck load of crap on the students. What I really want is to provide for them a good reason for making the project of theology their own, for finding a way of integrating concepts of God into their ordinary life.

Is it possible to derive democracy from the Bible? If it is, then it should be easy enough to permit freedom in others that doesn’t impinge either on my freedom, or on the stability of society. If it isn’t possible, then why should Christians move toward its defense? Or, laterally, is every effort to “Christianize” government an attempt to move away from democracy?

On the 14th of August I received notification that my credit line had been reduced to $500. OK, now, I don’t often use that card, but it is important to have it for school, etc. The whole thing started in August last year when I started my checking account with Bank of America. During that transaction, I cancelled three previous BoA credit cards that had accumulated through BoA’s acquisition of previous banks I had credit cards with. None of those cards were in active use. Here’s the trick. They never stop associating those accounts with the original owner of the cards for record-keeping purposes.

So, when I signed on to my online account, two of those cards were showing as active as part of my overall banking portfolio. Now, to make a long story short, I used the current card for overseas travel, and paid it off online. The problem is that I didn’t credit the correct account, which didn’t show up as an option. I figured, if you click a button that says “pay this” it should enable you to pay it. Well it paid one of the “defunct” accounts. I didn’t know anything was wrong until the bank notified me that my payment was delinquent. OK, so in the month between when I paid the wrong account and their credit department squared the deal, I accrued a small amount of interest that was attributed to the correct new card. I didn’t know that because it showed up after the mistake had been corrected. I learned how to stop showing the “defunct” credit accounts from an Online Person.

Well, it is now well into April, all the school bills had been paid, and I threw the bank’s cards and checkbook into the drawer for the summer. In August, I am notified that my credit limit has been reduced and that the account is delinquent. OK, so I mope for 9 days then pay the small sum due. But dang it, it went into the “defunct” account again. So, I call the bank and they tell me to show up at the store. I show up and I am told that they cannot fix the problem, that I must call the Online Banking department. So, the count starts: first call, first person. Visit to the bank, second person (who can’t help me), second person calls Online Banking for me; talk to third person who cannot help me because I am not in front of my computer, and the second person is no longer able to sign in to online banking as a customer any more because of security issues. Third person says good bye. I go home and call fourth person in Online Banking, who starts to analyze my problem. I get disconnected. I call again, and talk to the fifth person who can’t help me, but says I have to talk to Online Bill Pay person. I talk to Online Bill Pay person, person six, who helps me configure the account correctly to delete the remaining vestiges of the “defunct” credit account and add the correct account. Funny that the wrong account is there automatically and the right account has to be added on. The Online Bill Pay person, person six, says she cannot fix the thing that started this problem and directs me to the Credit Card person, number seven. The credit card person patiently listens to my story, and it is with her that I learn the credit accounts never are and cannot be deleted. No one has yet answered me why the ‘defunct, cancelled” accounts automatically show up in Online Banking. But person seven still cannot fix my problem. She points me to the Credit department. Person eight is a “credit analyst.” He actually understands the problem as all the previous individuals did, but can actually do something about it. He fixed the interest accrued in April-August and reset my account to the correct credit line. All is forgiven, all is forgotten. All is well, I am done.

I will make a copy of this and give it to the bank guy, person two, so he can understand how frustrating this is for the customer. I don’t blame any of the persons in the above list. The system is built that way. I’ve spent a total of about 4 hours on this. Enough!

UPDATE!! October 8, 2009

The bank now says that I owe this account $11.51. They’ve screwed it up again. I think I’ll just call in and say this card has been stolen.

I had every intention of working on my dissertation this week, but while, not precisely distracted, found it difficult to actually take the steps required to make it that far. I did work on a paper for SPS (Society for Pentecostal Studies) that was requested just last week because of a dropout of one presentation. And I did read a few pages of Foucault, but in general, I didn’t move forward on my “real” work. That’s OK. I met an interesting person (see i met a rainbow), had a ~good few days at work, and spent some time with my wife. I did read some, but for the most part I was on low-productivity.

I did this on Feb 20 2009. Seems right now. bye, into the ether…

I have just moved away from the linux server and the company CIHost that my websites and the websites of my customers were on since 2001. At that time, for $99 a month, I had the independence and enough kung fu to manage multiple web sites with a new and fairly secure technology. At times I even made enough money to break even and even profit from it. After enduring one upgrade with that company and because of my ignorance, suffering from their benign neglect, I found that my own web site, olena.com had been cracked and was being used as a platform to send spam. Shortly before that, I had recognized that some spammer was watching over my shoulder. One of my sites, was getting a lot of spam from an email address that was not used publicly. The email that was forwarding to that address was the public one. So I changed it to something else. Within an hour I was receiving spam from that changed internal address. So I worried, but set my worries aside.

Here was my problem. I just didn’t want to spend a lot of time managing or learning more in order to keep that cash flow going. I have loyal customers, and I could still serve their needs without going much further with managing the server. But I got tired of receiving over 1000 spam emails a day.

So I went hunting, and decided to move all the web sites to a single host though not to another dedicated server. This blog is now on that server. The technology is better (newer), and the support is OK, even though there are some rules the host doesn’t mention for people who buy multiple sites. That’s OK. The server is faster, the controls are more powerful, the possibilities for developing interesting sites is really pretty good.

I am listening to Mae, emo rock. I saw that a young friend on Facebook liked it. I previewed it, and bought it. It certainly fits my mood at the moment. I have found myself worried about lots of things lately, and subsequently I have found confidence in God and my reality that it is all going to work out even if it means that things will crash. I don’t really care whether they crash or not, or whether my plans work out or not, but it is a matter of trust that I’m not going to hurt myself on that account. I am in the middle of my doctoral research, there are very few adjunct jobs for me to teach and the economy is still souring more every day as we speak.

It seems the quick reaction of the public is to draw back and ignore the world, but I think this is a mistake. In this era of uncertainty, we should try to know more about our world. We should read more broadly, experiment with our lives in a way that permits the possibility of substantial growth. This will require unsettling the certainties and stabilities and force real work on our own selves. We should not doubt our intuitions but try them out at every moment to see if they prove true. We will need to be creative to catch up with the chaotic shifts of dramatically growing pools of knowledge. We can’t afford to be still long enough to become stagnant.

Hatefully, this means we will only have little time to refresh and renew, recreate. If we make it part of our practice to renew by learning, then the exhaustion we feel will go toward increased capacity and competence, where we will be able to rest a bit.

This is my new wordpress blog. Since I moved the old one, I can’t edit it anymore. There’s something wrong with the data. I think it is my fault that the data is corrupt, but then it’s OK. I’ll survive.