I haven’t done a friday five in a long time, but I ran across this set of questions today, and wanted to post my answers. So here goes:
What was the last song you heard? “Hurts to Hear” by Stephanie Quayle
What were the last two movies you saw? At home: Open Range and Secondhand Lions In the theater: Lord of The Rings: Return of the King, and Matrix Revolutions
What were the last three things you purchased? Tootsie Pops, Xerox Multi-purpose paper, frozen chicken strips (gotta love Sam’s Club.)
What four things do you need to do this weekend? Visit Sam’s club (done). Install SuSE Linux on old PC to use a ssh server (in progress). Travel to brother’s house for niece’s 3rd birthday party (later today). And last, but not least, make chilli and a chocolate frosted yellow cake (on tap tomorrow.)
Who are the last five people you talked to? My wife Michele, my nephew AJ, a coworker, Dave, another coworker Bob, and my boss, Tony.
This evening my wife and I watched an episode of “Now” on PBS that we had previously recorded on our TiVo. The bulk of the show was an interview with the Reverend William Sloane Coffin. During the free-wheeling interview Reverend Coffin made the following statement about faith:
“Faith is not believing without proof. Faith is trusting without reservation.'
For most of my adult life I have vigorously resisted the idea of faith because I defined it as belief without proof. I have always been moved by empirical data; and living my life based in something I couldn’t point to, something I couldn’t prove seemed impossible to me.
However, re-framing the idea of faith as trust works for me. I know I can’t point to trust anymore than I can point to belief, but I live every day with trust. I trust my wife completely. I trust my friends and family. Driving the car to work each day requires a level of trust in the other drivers on the road. Without trust life as I understand it would be impossible.
Perhaps I’m splitting hairs saying that I can trust when I can’t believe. But for me the language used to talk about an idea is vitally important. Saying belief without proof leaves me intractable and unwilling be open and accepting. Saying trust without reservation gives me a pathway to openness and accepting. I can start without trusting at all, and over time identify and address my reservations. Ultimately I could reach trust without reservation. Belief without proof is always without proof, it’s all or nothing.
In the past few years I have been questing for spirituality, for a pathway to understanding. I’ve always felt that without faith I couldn’t achieve this goal. Thanks to the Reverend Coffin I now have a working definition of faith that works for me.
I’ve been tinkering around with my other site, Partition Software. New colors, new overall layout, same old content. Two out of three ain’t bad.
You should go check it out.
The behavior of the Chapera tribe last night on Survivor All Stars was disgraceful. Violence against women, whether sexual, emotional, or physical is epidemic in the world today. The words and actions of the Chapera tribe clearly show why this problem is so prevalent and why it won’t go away until men stand up and speak out against the kind of shunning and dismissal that Susan experienced.
The point that all the people there seemed to miss, is that abuse is in the eye of the abused. Susan felt abused and attacked, what anyone else felt is immaterial to the discussion. Based on the footage of Susan from the first season of Survivor, and from earlier episodes of this season, it is plain to me that Susan is tough, thick skinned, and not given to altering her behavior to please or appease others. And yet her personality and presentation were radically, profoundly altered after Richard Hatch rubbed himself against her during a competition. Her emotional affect was inward and subdued, she stopped eating or sleeping. Clearly the impact of his actions left her shattered and ultimately unable to continue the game.
The members of Chapera all displayed a shocking lack of sympathy or caring for her plight. Big Tom, who has repeatedly been dismissive to women on this show both in Panama and in Africa, had the affront to dance a jig singing “the witch is dead.” His abuse of Susan is just as egregious as Richard Hatch’s. Perhaps worse because he is cowardly attacking someone who is already down. Boston Rob is a misogynist troglodyte asshole who thinks that just because he’s tough he is also intelligent. I am ashamed to share my gender with examples of machismo such as these two.
I am most disappointed in Rupert. Tom and Rob have displayed their colors openly and consistently throughout their first seasons on Survivor, and continued to do so on Survivor All Stars. For Rupert to jump on the “blame the victim” bandwagon was a major shift in how I perceived him. As a male in this society I know first hand how difficult it is to stand up to the gutter think that happens when two or more buffoons like Tom and Rob get together. I had hoped that Rupert, who openly talked about being on the receiving end of abuse growing up as the odd kid out, would have spoken out against the smearing of Susan. Instead he enabled the continuation of women as victims by participating in the abuse from Tom and Rob.
As for the women on Chapera, they let down their gender by not speaking out. The fact that Kathy said Susan should just get a hold of her emotions tells me that Kathy was abused sexual in her past. And further that she never confronted her attacker, or brought to light the incident. Susan did bring to light the attack, and did indirectly confront Richard. In my opinion Kathy’s vehemence towards Susan is really anger directed at herself for never having the courage to stand up and speak out about her own abuse.
The other women just meekly went along with the antics of the “men”; no matter how downcast their eyes were they still voted to support the second attack against Susan through their silence and inaction.
As an adult male in this society I take on the responsibility to speak out against violence against anyone. I will not stand idly by while trash talking, or “boys will be boys” behavior is displayed. I will not abrogate my membership in the human race to a group of hurt and angry people who just want to hurt others to mask their own pain.
Shame on you Richard Hatch for being so insensitive to the feelings and personal space of others. Shame on you Rob and Tom for being boorish cretins who exemplify all that is wrong with machismo. Shame on you Rupert for not living up to the glimpses of the real you we see in brief flashes. Shame on you Kathy for taking your anger at yourself out on another woman who has been victimized. And shame on you Alicia, Amber and Jenna for just going along with it all.
Here is a snap shot of the spam (and real mail) I’ve received since February 1, 2004. On the one hand I’m extremely pleased with SpamSieve and it’s accuracy rate. On the other hand I am somewhat overwhelmed that 95% of the mail I get is spam.
{{ $image := .ResourceGetMatch “FebruarySpam.jpg” }}
In the summer of 2000 I noticed that I had a slight protrusion in the upper rim of my belly button. Gradually it grew in size until it was about the size of a dime, and stuck out about half the diameter of a dime. When pushed with a finger it would recede for a time, only to reappear later.
Some internet searching lead me to the realization that I was the proud father of an umbilical hernia. A visit to the local surgeon confirmed my suspicions and within 10 days I had out-patient surgery to repair my outie. Once the swelling went down and the scar healed I was once again an inie.
Fast forward to February this winter. We had significant snow this year which was slow melting off the driveway. When it did melt it revealed a layer of ice. When there was just a small amount left I managed to step on a patch of ice and fell. At the time I seemed okay. My leg was a little sore the next day, but years of break-falling practice during my martial arts career paid off as I didn’t get hurt. Or so I thought.
The last week of February I developed a pain high on the inside of my left leg. It was a dull ache that came and went, sometimes becoming uncomfortably intense. Usually shifting my position or standing eased the pain. Over the course of a day or so it felt as if my left testicle had been bruised. I was more than a little uncomfortable, and starting to get worried about what was causing this pain.
Given my history with the umbilical hernia I immediately thought I must have developed an inguinal hernia. For two or three days I fretted and lost sleep worrying that I would have to have more surgery. I just didn’t want to face this reality. Each day I’d get up and hope that the pain wouldn’t return, and each day for most of a week it did return. Finally I started talking about it to Michele. She was immediately supportive of my seeking out a surgeon and discussing a remedy. Remembering my previous surgical experience I did some internet searching to see what the techniques were for repairing an inguinal hernia.
Imagine my relief when reading the symptoms for inguinal hernias and realizing that I did not have those symptoms. The pain didn’t go away when I laid down, and it was often just as bad in the morning as it was in the evening. Standing for long periods of time didn’t seem to aggravate it either. I was stumped. What was making my groin hurt?
Then the light bulb went off. I had pulled muscles in my groin the day I fell on the ice. The pain I was feeling was a groin pull. The relief I felt at dodging the hernia surgery bullet was immense. Since that time the pain in my leg has abated considerably and now it only faintly twinges when I push off hard in some directions with it.
The moral of the story? Talk about what your fears are so you can get past them and discover their cause. Who knows, the answer might be far easier to deal with than you think.
I took my laptop and went to the park for lunch today. There weren’t any wireless connections I could find from inside the park, but as I was leaving one sounded, so I parked on a side street and tried to connect. Being unsuccessful I went to a spot I know has a connect able, un-encrypted wireless access point and surfed the Internet from there.
Doing this raises an interesting ethical question or three. Is my using a wireless equipped laptop to surf their un-encrypted connection stealing? Is it hurting them in any way? Is it wrong? I can see both sides of the issue. I know that I would be upset if someone were to park in front of our house and use our connection. That’s why I took the time and trouble to secure it. But the geeky, “I’m superior than you are”, voice in my head says that if they didn’t want me to use their connection they’d secure it.
If it were a restaurant or coffee shop that provided free wireless internet then I would have no compunction about using their “service.” And even though my connecting to the net through some homeowners connection isn’t going to cost them any money (it’s already paid for) I feel like I am taking something from them. If nothing else I am acutely aware that I am invading (however virtually) their space and their home.
I guess maybe this isn’t a group ethics question, but rather it’s a question of personal ethics. Can I live with myself knowing that I have electronically invaded someone’s home purely for my internet fix? Or do they lose control, and ownership of, the wireless signal once it leaves their house?
I’ll probably continue to “borrow” connections from time to time, but I think living with the knowledge that I can slip into and out of their homes largely, if not totally, unnoticed will haunt me every time I go on the air.
My wife and I are big Tivo fans. We bought our first unit three years ago and have been avid users ever since. The problem with one Tivo is that it isn’t two Tivos. So we bought a second one, a Series 2, just last month. Due to our viewing habits we have the original one located in our bedroom, for late night viewing of old situation comedy reruns. The Series 2 machine is in our home office area, where we watch the rest of our weekly schedule. The big screen television in the living room is now used for DVD movies and special programs.
In the month that we’ve had both machines the percentage of live television we watch has plunged to zero. Just this past weekend we remarked that it had been a while since we’d watched anything live. And with the Tivo’s fast-forward capabilities we never watch commercials. As close as we come to live television anymore is waiting until 20 minutes after it starts recording to begin viewing so that zipping through the commercials won’t catch us up to the live broadcast.
This past weekend I also remarked that I was looking forward to seeing the Oscars this year, as I wanted to see how the final Lord of the Rings movie installment would fair.
You guessed the rest. Not having seen any live television for a while meant we were totally unaware that the Oscars were on LAST night. Oops. Tivo is pretty slick, pausing live television, recording every episode of a season pass, searching by actors or other keywords, et cetera. But it can’t go back in time to record a show the user was ADD enough to forget to program in the first place.
Sigh.
Over the weekend I picked up the Visual title “Unix for Mac.” I have another Visual series title, and like that book, this one is easy to work with an informative. Although some of the information is very basic, the book as a whole is a great learning tool. Even though I have been poking around in the guts of Mac Unix for the better part of a year now, I picked up several new ideas, tools, and tips.
The area most fascinating to me is X Windows. I only vaguely understand all I know about X; perhaps just enough to get myself seriously off the known map. Following the steps in the book I downloaded and installed fink and Fink Commander. Using fink (a package manager) I was able to easily download and install the latest XDarwin build. The process made me feel a bit like Alice as a simple “fink install” command resulted in an astonishing dump of console messages in my terminal window.
Later that same day I decided I wanted to try the KDE desktop package for XDarwin. There was a bundle entry in the list of packages through fink that, when installed, would collect all the necessary bits and put it all together for me. This process started with the same seemingly simple command “fink install bundle-kde-ssl”. I did that more than 12 hours ago and it is still churning along.
To be fair, my computer has gone to sleep in this time period. But for a single command to result in hundreds of thousands of lines of output is rather astounding. It’s like the Energizer Bunny, going and going and going. All of this just to see what it would look like. Wow.
Update: The build of all the KDE packages spanned 36 wall-clock hours. Twice my PowerBook locked up completely (due to other factors) and twice Fink resumed the build when I restarted it. I am very impressed with Fink, and even more wowed by being able to run KDE 3.1.4 on my Mac.
For the past year or so I have enjoyed having my PowerBook at work, especially since I was able to plug it into the LAN there and have full internet access. Through the magic of DHCP it was assigned an IP address, and thanks to my knowledge of an open HTTP proxy, I was able to surf the web, exchange chat messages, and generally enjoy the Internet.
The open proxy existed to allow a federally funded group to have access to the Internet through the State’s network infrastructure without resorting to creating IDs on the LAN for them. Apparently the agency has finally gotten around to addressing this hole in the network. Either they are filtering access to the proxy by IP address (unlikely given the randomness inherit in DHCP managed networks) or they are doing it by network login ID. Either way the result is the same, I’ve been cut off.
Now I do have Internet access via my agency assigned ID, but that access is highly monitored for “appropriateness” and people have been terminated for inappropriate usage. So other than a few technical sites directly related to my assignment here, I tend not to use that access path. I dislike and resent the whole “big brother” approach but I don’t want to lose my job through civil disobedience. Knowing about the open proxy allowed me to expand the list of sites and services available to myself without exposure to the draconian access policy in effect.
I have mixed feelings about the new tighter network at work. On the one hand, as someone who is concerned about network security, I appreciate their attention to detail and desire to protect their infrastructure. On the other hand, as a strong advocate of individual freedom and responsibility I don’t appreciate the punitive and restrictive approach to Internet access taken by this agency. In my opinion, taking a “father knows best, big brother is watching” approach places the employees in the role of errant child. People will rise to the level they are allowed, treat them like children and you’ll get children. Allow them to be responsible adults and you’ll get responsible adults.