Hey everybody! I’m on day 4 of my week-long vacation at the YMCA of the Rockies.
The trip has had plenty of ups and downs, some of which I’ll venture into detail about, others will remain more private.
My week started on Friday night, driving with the Hart family in my newish Passat wagon. We made great time. Driving at night really seems like the best way for me to travel, and we really had an easy trip out. Baby Luca behaved so well (it helps when his mom is keeping him company in the back). I slept for about an hour during the drive out, missing the only part of the trip I was really interested in seeing: the sunrise.
I’ve done quite a bit of reading so far this week, completely reading Chuck Palaniuk’s Haunted cover to cover. It was quite disturbing for the most part, and very creepy. Chock-full of murder, dismemberment, cannibalism and other evil deeds, it’s not for the faint of heart.
I’ve spent some really great time with my lady friend. It’s not all been fun and games, as we’ve had some really hard talks, but this trip has been an excellent time for our relationship.
Last night Danielle and I went to the Red Rocks to see a Pink Floyd tribute concert, which was followed by a viewing of The Wall (which we skipped out on due to a bitterly cold rain). The concert was great for the most part, excellent music, bizarre lesbians getting high two rows down from us, and of course, Fat Tire beer. My biggest beef with the evening was that I couldn’t sit close with m’lady and enjoy it with her due to our trash-bag parkas. Red Rocks is such a beautiful venue. If you ever get the opportunity to visit, do yourself a favor and go there.
I’ve also been reading A Generous Orthodoxy, which came recommended by Marcus. It’s taught me a lot and piqued my interest in learning more about the other areas of Christianity outside of the Calvanistic fundamentalism that I know so well. I’m not a fan of the book though; the author picks and chooses too much and the whole work seems to convenient to be taken seriously. I’m not sure that a real orthodoxy can arise from his methods, but it is an interesting read nonetheless.
Essentially, the bill would allow the attorney general the ability to deputize the FBI to the point that, in the event of an emergency, search warrants and wiretaps could be handed out willy-nilly, without the approval of any external oversight mechanism. This is an unamerican bill, proposed by our current leadership. This cannot be understated. Any bill that undermines an essential American tradition such as checks-and-balances should be voted down. Regardless of how you vote, realize that offering this much power to a single branch of government causes damage.
Also troubling is how this administration is stretching the notion of wartime. Congress ought to (but certainly won’t) rein in this abuse of terminology (and hence Article II of the Constitution) by clarifying what war is about. Our nation has sinned against itself for many years by allowing the president unmitigated use of the “w”-word. We are not at war with anyone, let alone an ideology (which in my book cannot be defeated as it’s not a sovereign nation).
In the past few years, a lot of talk has been made about how judges are “activists” in that they strike down laws and offer rulings that sometimes go beyond saying something corresponds to the Constitution. If this bill becomes a law, I certainly hope that the Supreme Court does its part in striking it down swiftly, before more abuses are made in the name of my country.
I just viewed an incredibly accessible explanation of multiple dimensions. Go watch it, it’s fascinating. I’d like to hear more proof about the 7th dimension and above, as they seem to be rehashes of the 4th and 5th dimensions (and even the 5th dimension+ seems a bit hokey).
Exactly how does the big bang exist different from a point in the 4th dimension, or a change in the 5th dimension? I’ve no clue. This video really got me thinking about calculus and differential equations (why did I get rid of those textbooks?), as in some ways a derivative is a way of projecting a function into another dimension, whereas an integral would be discovering the functions from which our current function is a projection in a different dimension. For an example, take the measure of distance d(x). A change in distance is velocity, which is a derivative with respect to time of distance. A change in velocity yields acceleration, which isn’t exactly a 5th dimensional function (since we’re not jumping timelines) but no analogy is perfect.
“It can be kept fresh, from our vigilance. The life, or death, of the river of freedom is in our hands.” The river of freedom is such a simple tale (that looks vaguely “Rocky and Bullwinkle”-ish) but it’s one that effectively cuts through to the heart of what freedom and liberty are all about.
Freedom is a wonderful gift from God and it’s one we should cherish amongst all of the gifts with which our Creator has endowed us. Yet freedom is such a painful thing. Among the problems of freedom is the need for control, or at least the perceived need for control. It was a sad time during the video when the river started to become clouded and the people who were enjoying the river tried to hoard it to themselves.
An outsider looking at our society right now may observe many things. One may observe our lack of reverence for freedom. We rush off to protect something we believe in at the cost of someone or something else’s freedom. One may rightly say we’ve lost our ability to cherish it. Our lack of understanding is both a blessing and a curse when it comes to freedom. On the one hand, we readily trade away freedom for something less worthwhile such as a fleeting sense of security. On the other hand, not knowing the power of freedom allows us a childlike enjoyment of it, which often ends when we’ve discovered through our freedoms just how hot the hot stove is, or that freedom implies a sense of sharing and fairness.
I wish our country heralded freedom as our founding fathers did. However, as much as I wish my country would revel in its freedom I wish that much more that my church would. I’ll gladly trade my national hope for a catholic one. Oh that God’s people would recall the joy that true freedom brings and not be chained down. Oh that I would enjoy the true freedom offered by Jesus and his good news.
The founding member of the band, Syd Barrett, passed away. While I’m not terribly a big fan of his work, without him the band would not have been. Thanks Syd, you crazy diamond.
Last night Danielle informed me of an opportunity to watch a Pink Floyd cover band perform “The Wall.” Interestingly enough, the band shares a name with a band in which her high school chemistry teacher was involved. I cannot recall the name of the band.
It’s the remix to the laughable speech and explanation of how the internet works according to Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. Sadly, the senator is the chairman of the US Senate committee that governs telecommunications, so it’s a shame he has so little clue what he’s talking about.
Today’s review is an album I picked up last year. It’s “Hit and Run” by Bill Mallonee. I really enjoyed this one. It’s very soft and introspective. My favorite song was probably Lucifer, which is about cocaine addiction.
Here are the lyrics:
from a simple plant
that was long growin’ there
from the king of the world
to your worst nightmare
got you an old recipe
and some chemicals to stir
it might’ve felt just like God once
but now it’s Lucifer
oh, to be clean
and you know the thing is sleeping
a scratch below your skin
and God knows if you wake it up
you gotta calm it down again
I wonder what it felt like,
when the waters flooded in
and it got too hard to swim
it feels just like a hunger
but you cannot feed the thing
always wants a new song,
that you can’t really sing
never shows you the whole truth
’til the poison’s leakin’ through
what you thought you were doin’
well now, it’s doin’ you
oh, to be clean
and you know the thing is sleeping
a scratch below your skin
and God knows if you wake it up
you gotta calm it down again
I wonder what it felt like,
when the waters flooded in
and it got too hard to swim
when it got too hard to swim
it could take a few years
to dig out of this mine
what with a shaft so deep and dark
it might take a lifetime
choices: they’re like diamonds
you found down there one night
you gotta grab the one that’s your true self
and bring it to the light
oh, to be clean
yeah, you know the thing is sleeping
a scratch below your skin
and God knows if you wake it up
you gotta calm it down again
I wonder what it felt like,
when the waters flooded in
and it got too hard to swim
yeah when it got too hard to swim
yeah it got too hard to swim
I’m constantly drawn to songs about addiction. They speak to a part of my heart that I don’t really understand (I figure few people really do understand that part of themselves).
The entire album is quite pleasant. It’s not the most memorable or shocking album Bill made, but it’s definitely a great example of where his sound and soul has been at in the last few years. It makes for a bittersweet evening’s music perhaps shared by a few chosen friends.
Today I finally got around to working smarter I learned how to use sed.
I’ve been working on a project at work for a few weeks that consists of a few hundred or so ASP files. Each of these files is a bit messy, as is often the case with ASP. So the first thing I’ve been doing is running a handful of regular expressions on each file to clean it up.
Enter sed.
Stream Editor is what sed stands for, but that doesn’t communicate what sed can do. With sed I can take all of the little patterns I’ve been running manually against each file (one to clean up <br> elements, one to clean up white-space) and stick them all into a single file. From there I can execute every command onto multiple files with the greatest of ease.
