digital world

a string of debacles

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Sometimes I wonder if what I do at AGWM Communications is worth what they pay me for. We bought a new barebones computer to build for development here. When I had it all built and tested it, it wouldn’t come up. So after talking to Shuttle tech support, I bought another processor and memory, swapped the old ones out and tested again. Still, no joy. So, we ordered a new barebones and tested it. When it came in, I had another monitor I brought in for Tonny to build the touchscreen with, a nice, widescreen monitor. The new computer fired right up with the original memory and newer processor. Great! So then, the OS had not arrived by that time, so I emailed the seller. They had not shipped it, but did so pronto, and I got it on the cutoff day. I hooked up the new barebones after finishing the build, and hooked it up, started it. No joy. So I thought, maybe the monitor was screwed up, and used another one. Up it came and the build is proceeding properly.

OK, I thought, oh my gosh, all the trouble with the original barebones, and tech support, and finally RMA hash up, no box, etc. Money down the drain? I should have used another monitor in the first place, or at least suspected it. But I didn’t suspect the monitor because I have been using it for a few years on my Mac and it works fine. Something in the generic DVI driver in the Shuttle couldn’t hook up, and so I thought the computer was bad. Shame is washing over me in waves.

I know why AGWM Communications keeps me on the payroll. It is because in general, I keep everything else running, even ten-year-old equipment that in some other shops would have been recycled years ago. Thanks guys and gals for all the love.

whatever

i broke my glasses today

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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.

whatever

question

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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?

family

great nephews

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I now have two great nephews on the east coast on my family’s side. On my wife’s side, I have a huge pile of great nephews and great nieces. But shortly I will upload a couple pics of Owen, the son of my nephew Chris and his wife Bronwyn, and Finley the son of my niece Allison and her husband Dan. Owen is one month younger than Finley.

digital world

hard to believe

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I’m almost relaxing now. Last year in the beginning of January, I realized that my old web host, CIHost was suffering terminal invasion. My own website olena.com had been hacked and was spewing out spam, etc. OK. Stuff happens. So, tired of being in my own dedicated server, and tired of being the last to be updated, and then only if I begged and paid, I moved away from CIHost to JustHost on a shared server. After a year of minimally frustrating activity after the flurry of work from the move, I got tired of their fuzzy administration and screwy tech support and asked them to consolidate all my billing. One record, one administration. I had no idea what kind of a firestorm that would light. They consolidated all my billing alright by (without my permission) putting all my clients inside olena.com as addon domains, all the data which was in the http directory of my own domain.

Then, to add insult to injury, they couldn’t move the databases over without a lot of cajoling tech support and endless waiting on hold. What a mess! Then there were email problems and poorly behaving web sites, etc. It was grinding me to a pulp with worry for my customers even though olena.com seemed not to be suffering too much.

I examined new web hosts and moved my most irate and oldest customer over to Fat Cow. I don’t blame him for being irate. He is happy now. For the rest I finally settled on a cloud server farm called Media Temple. The dedicated servers are virtual. In other words, a number of dedicated virtual (dv) server clients are on the same hardware, but it is as if they are all on separate servers.

I am not one to leave things alone, and I hit the repair button in the virtual server control panel when I couldn’t get the backup utility to do what I wanted. All hell broke loose, or maybe just my stupidity broke loose of its usual moorings. The entire server became invisible from the net, email, web hosting, etc. It was completely off line while it repaired itself. It took an hour before I had the courage to hit the restart button, after I had called tech support and they told me “good luck, you’re on your own, here’s a file that might help.” The server came up happily and it was working 100%. I can hardly believe I dodged that bullet. I am sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop. But 24 hours later, as hard as it is to believe, I think things may be OK. I am not going to hit that repair button again, unless everything is completely broken. I hope I am not stupid enough to break it like that.

rants, student, theology

an old rant

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You may or may not be surprised to know that the insular character of modern conservative church life is one of the chief reasons people reject the gospel. If you are really interested in helping people find Christ you will expand your borders beyond the default comfort zone. As Isaiah said, “Woe to you who are at ease in Zion.” People need saving, and closing ourselves off from them and their ideas is a sure way to get them to ignore us.

We permit football (the modern equivalent of bloody gladiator sports) into our Christian homes, not only because it will get people saved if they realize some of the players are Christians, but because we like it. To shut off science because it somehow sullies our Christian thinking is a bit hypocritical. Some of you may also shun the sports arena. That’s fine. I admire your purity. But Jesus went where the people went. He didn’t sit in the Temple and wait for people to come to him.

family

it’s been over a week

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since my cat died. I tried to get on with my life, but in so many ways I recognized that mourning for him took over my free mind, my social consciousness, my connection to my wife, my celebration of our wedding anniversary. When I prepared to speak on Sunday at a church north of town, I could see the words I wrote on the page, but I was not connected to them. I think that is why I put it off so long, until Saturday, hoping that I would connect. Speaking was OK, and I think it helped me reintegrate, but it didn’t seem natural at first.

I saw my wedding anniversary coming all week long, but I just didn’t do anything about it. It was too distant from my self. All you married boys know how big a problem it is for us if we don’t remember our anniversary. Well, I watched it coming all week long like a drugged person placed on the railroad tracks waiting for the train.

Why is it that a cat commanded such complete connection with me that losing him would disconnect me from my world? I don’t know, but I suspect that it has something to do with euthanizing him instead of just waiting for him to die. I think it took something out of me to do it. I am usually opposed to taking life of any kind, and this has really wrenched me from my self.

To my wife, I am sorry for being such a klutz. I am not using the cat as an excuse for neglecting us, it is just that I have been broken from my normal self by this event.

family, philosophy

my cat died today

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Strictly, I took Gilbert to the Vet to put him out of his misery, even though today was a good day for him. I’m tearing up as I write, sitting in Borders using their new free wi-fi. Most days in the last three or four months have been hard for him. But today he took the time to lick his coat, sit in the sunshine, play with the other cats. Over the last few months they had begun to ignore him for the most part since he was so nearly lifeless sitting in his chair or lying still on the floor, but today they noticed him a little more.

Lois treated him with special kindness this morning. I came home from seeing my friends at Panera at 9:15 a.m. to find him walking around the house, happy. She let him out of his room when she left for work knowing it was his last day in the light. I don’t want to rehearse the whole story of his kidney failure here, but suffice it to say that he was incontinent and lost his training for using the cat box persistently. I remember reading of a book once that described the moral characters of our pets. The author said that they reflect the moral character of their owners. He would act guilty when he peed on the carpet, but he also couldn’t square away what he should have been doing. He was miserable that he couldn’t fix this problem.

I am a little angry that I became angry with him, but I used a little negative reinforcement to retrain him. His kidney failure assured that his bloodstream was swimming with his own poison, and he just couldn’t remember what to do. We put him in the laundry room at night and during the day when we left the house. He usually remembered while we were home to confine his potty to the box. But he began to forget even when we were home. We couldn’t keep him locked up in that room forever. He would cry pitifully. So we let him out and he would usually find his way to the middle of the floor or to his chair where he would stay most of the time.

On his happy days he would rub up against us or even get on our laps, visit us when we took a shower or do any of his usual happy things like pawing my book bag or any new backpack or luggage.

Today, he walked over to the laundry room stood inside the door and meowed to let me know he knew I wanted him to use the potty there, to let me know what a good cat he was. I petted him then cried a bit, making sure he had enough food and water, his last nibble. He didn’t eat anything then but followed me out into the living room. I cuddled him a bit and when I put him down he went to the window and sat in the sunshine. Eden arrived at about twenty minutes till ten. She cuddled him and held him, and after taking care of some business, she followed me out of the house with him.

In the car, he cried as he normally does, but we let him walk around. He gravitated to my lap, but Eden helped me drive safely. We arrived at the Gentle Care Animal place in Nixa. We had been crying all the way, and telling stories about Gilbert. When we walked in the door, somebody at the front counter chuckled because Gilbert had his front paws around Eden’s neck, and was holding her tight. He was comforting himself. They saw then that Eden was crying and acted more respectfully. I gave them my name and paid the fee. In a moment we were ushered into a quiet clean room and were shortly visited by an attendant who told us what was going to happen. The doctor would anesthetize him. Gilbert would fall asleep in about five minutes. Then they would administer the barbiturate OD that would shut him down.

We touched him and held him while the Vet gave him the anesthesia near his spine just forward of the hip. Though he was usually scared at the Vet’s, he trusted us and was a good patient. The Vet and her assistant left for the five minutes and Eden and I took turns holding him while he slowly relaxed. His eyes dilated. He fell asleep. The Vet came in and administered the barbiturate in the femoral artery, he bled a little, but within seconds, he was gone. We wrapped him in the hot-air balloon beach towel I bought in the early 1980s, and took him to the car. Needless to say we were weeping.

His final dignity was that he didn’t release his bodily fluids until I handed him to Eden after she got out of the car. We wiped him off a bit then took him downstairs and placed him in the middle of the carpet. Jake, our youngest cat came by and licked Gilbert. Licked his head and his coat behind the head and the rear leg. He even tried to rouse Gilbert to play and wrestle. Jake gave up and went to sit in the sunshine. Jody came by and sniffed Gilbert and then walked over to me on the couch.

Lois came home and we sat, sighed, and cried. Jake tried to rouse Gilbert again, and gave up again. We talked to each other for a while, then as Gilbert became increasingly cold, I went to get the shovel. I began to dig a hole on the east of our young tree in the back yard. Eden finished. I wrapped Gilbert snugly in the towel and placed him in the hole. I took pictures. Eden read something she wrote, and Lois and I prayed. We started to fill the hole with dirt, then I got one of the stuffed mice all the cats played with and put it in the hole with him, you know, for the afterlife. We filled the hole in and went inside.

We sat and talked about him and thought that someone should bring a casserole. We all ate together. Eden and I ate grilled cheese and tomato soup. A little while later our friend Melanie brought over flowers and a lasagna. It was good to see her. Thanks Melanie. Melanie left and shortly after that, Eden left for school, I for Borders. Lois was still at home. I have been weeping in this public place until a short while ago. Maybe my mourning is over for the moment.

I am a patternist.

This is a view of what the soul is. It is not a substance, but rather, roughly data written on structured media. Humans are the structured media, while our experiences of people and the world we all live in is the data. I mention this because the pattern of my cat has been written for the last ten years or so on my body. I will remember him. What I am, what my soul has become is partly due to his little animal character. His little intelligence impressing itself on my greater intelligence and mine on his. We form together. We experience the world through each other’s eyes, through each other’s experience.

What I learned.

I have learned that rescuing a poor and terrorized animal from its former owners was a noble deed that came with a price. It cost me something of my natural self to learn patience with an animal whose only look at the universe was through the violence of his former environment. I have become less violent with the universe. I have learned some small measure of peace. I have learned to treat others with less violence than I had before. I have not, unfortunately, learned this lesson fully. I am hoping Gilbert’s pattern continues the work of pacifying me. I thank God for this gift of grace. Even though I am imperfect, I know Gilbert trusted me, and in his way made me part of his life. I hope I can learn to trust God at least as much as my cat trusted me. I hope I can save others at least as much as my cat saved me.