Coming Clean

by Queen and David Bowie

Um boom ba bay
Um boom ba bay
Um Um boom ba bay bay

Insanity laughs under pressure we’re breaking
Can’t we give ourselves one more chance?
Why can’t we give love that one more chance?
Why can’t we give love give love give love?
Give love give love give love give love give love give love?
Cause love’s such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care
For the people on the edge of the light
And love dares you to change our way
Of caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves Under Pressure
Under Pressure
Pressure

…it just makes me feel better lately…

Done and sent to the prof. And it is rough and it is bad… but I’ll wait to hear back from prof before stating how bad it is. But it’s a rough draft and worthy of all scorn that should be heaped upon it.

…I so want to be done…

…but I’ve got 2 more projects aside from this… and final looming in the future… all this to be done within 2.5 weeks

:whimper:

…at least I’ll be graduating…

Rise and Shine by Andrew Peterson

Well I remember how the snow fell in December
and the angels flew in pageants and in dreams
and I came in at 6 o’clock from a long hard day of playing
to the warmth of Momma’s cooking…
or was it the warmth of Momma’s love?

He said, “Rise, rise and shine
The sun is coming in
And the morning light is shining in
Your eyes, rise and shine
The day is coming on
And you know the night is gone so rise”

Yet more musings… generated from Mark Lickona

The question before me is: does love transcend truth? My gut tells me to say no.

In loving us, God asserted a Truth. Which came first? I don’t think the question is binary. They proceeded from the Father together. He spoke in Truth and Love and so here we are.

But, in the hearts of men, truth and love have been clouded such that we do not love each other in truth and we do not speak the truth in love. And so there grows a tendency to believe that truth is relative and love is shallow. But they are not. They are the causal foundations that flow from God. But without each other, they are poor images of the real thing and destined for ruin.

Now… there is perhaps one thing that undoes my argument, and that is Jesus: He who loved us greater than the truth - the truth of His innocence, the truth of His being, the truth of Justice. In the truth of His righteousness, He could have been the ruin of us all then and there - but He suffered without personal need for our sake, for our needs. Truth took the back seat for Love, and a new Truth was born out of that holy sacrificial Love by which we can now be redeemed.

It would do us well then to remember that it is by that Love we are redeemed, in that Love that we are to live and speak the new Truth, and for that Love that we are to live among all men. In all things, first we are to love.

A Late Night Musing… Feedback Appreciated

What is with the struggle characterized in Christianity? Are we trying to lay waste to evil? Truly, the very idea of trying to lay waste to evil is absurd in itself - evil already is laid waste. It is waste in the very idea of itself and is destined in love to be eradicated. If evil were to be personified, it would despise its own self because it knows it does not stand on its own but is a corruption of the creative goodness of our God and ever finds in itself that first cause. And yet evil cannot escape loving itself so much that it will never repent, never give in, and so will rejoice when finally put out of its misery. How horrible evil truly is…

We are captives, born into the bondage of evil through a bent, weakened, and selfish nature. Evil is not something that we naturally come to know and hate - it is something we come to know and embrace and nurture. Our disgrace causes us to love evil. As such, we would not have anything to fight against if it were not for the grace of God. By His fidelity, hope, and love we are graciously offered a second chance, a way back into the life of grace.

And that is the Christian struggle: not putting to death evil but nurturing as we can the life of grace. And we have been gifted by our God with assurances in what nurtures and communicates this life giving grace: hearing and knowing the Word of God, partaking in the Sacraments, prayer, and the communion of saints. And we do those things not to destroy evil but to leave it no room in our lives by, through, and in grace.

And all of that to say this: when we move to oppose evil men and to defeat the evil things they do as well as the evil in our own lives, it would make sense to me that we are not moving out of hate of evil but out of love God and neighbor and self. We are given the tools of grace to call each man to the obedience of faith - faith working in love. And with these tools we are called to move to confront evil in the world. Not to lay waste but to restore and build up by grace, in grace, through faith, hope, and love, within the freedom of each man.

I’ve got Andy Peterson up on the play list, and it’s Come, Lord Jesus. Man… talk about evoking emotions and thoughts… it might behoove you to listen to this song as you read this post… wait for “oh well there’s a burning down inside of me”…

Foremost in my mind are the times when I’ve met the Lord - when I knew He was present to me - around me and in me.

The one I’m remembering now was on my night of homecoming to the Catholic Church. The whole night stands out like a mystic story - something too fantastic to be real. Oddly enough, while receiving our Lord in the Eucharist along side my fellow sojourners stands out as a pivotal point from that night, it’s not the highlight that I remember. The highlight came before when I was presented to be Confirmed. To my right was a boy not much older than 7 or 8 - an age that I recognized as the time I started on my own journey with the Lord.

As we walked up to the altar, I was a little taken back yet overjoyed to see this child. I said to him, “Happy Easter.” And he answered, “Yes it is!!!” with the excitement normally reserved for Christmas in his eyes. And He said something like, “Are you receiving Jesus, too?” And I remember smiling ear to ear more than what I said, but I suppose I answered, “Yes, I am. How about you?” And he answered, “Yes! He is coming into my heart, and later I’m meeting him in Communion!!!” The joy this child showed really humbled me and gave me the emotional grounding I was needing for the night. I’ll never forget him, and I have no idea what his name is - but I think of him as a messenger of Jesus to me.

I know where that boy was in his heart -
he was in the Spirit and with our Lord.
What an exciting time! What a thing to share!
How fortunate I was to be in his presence!
How fortunate I was to be brought into His presence by him!

The other time was recently at the Eucharist. As a convert, you often wonder: “Am I believing in this as I should be?” God knows I want to, that I pray - at times feverishly - for something more than just a trust and an act, that I try to see what I want to believe is there - what our forefathers say is there. Perhaps it is a foolish endeavor - a work and not obedience.

This time I went to receive and as I took His flesh into my mouth, I prayed, “I eat the flesh of the Lord.” And I felt overcome. And I thanked Him. And then as I received His blood into my mouth, I prayed, “I gulp down His blood.” And I felt reassurance. And again I thanked Him. Perhaps not every time you receive something you are to feel, but the few times you do, you cherish them. They are personal. And I have cherished and reflected on that experience a fair bit lately. I now try to remember saying that particular prayer now as I receive Communion. With a guilty conscience, I’ll admit part of it is a hope to find again that confidence of presence and reassurance, but also because it was in that prayer that He gave another glimpse into His presence around me and in me. And I’ve been looking for that lately. That and where He’s leading me.

Come, Lord Jesus. Amen.

Over on AYOR the other day, cozart, the Sage, and I were making arguments about the nature of Church and among them the authority of the Church came up. The argument then started to swing in the direction of Sola Scriptura vs the Church.

Well, I pulled out a Catholic Apologetics favorite, 1 Tim. 3:15, which reads something along the lines of:

if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in THE household of God, which is THE church of the living God, THE pillar and buttress of truth.

THE is my capitalization for emphasis.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, cozart tells me I’ve got a busted translation, and so he quotes it as:

if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, A pillar and buttress of truth.

This is from the ESV. Notice how the last THE in my translation turned into an A in cozart’s translation?

The definitiveness of my argument was now in jeopardy. Major suckage. You got to hate it when definitiveness gets called into question.

Interestingly enough, every other translations I looked at - NIV, NASB, NRSV, NJB - treated the passage in the same translative vein of how I presented the particular passage.

But the Sage came into the discussion and made a seemingly authoritative argument for middle ground for the time being but with a definite lean towards the ESV while he went to check it out. Well, I just couldn’t stand by and let someone else do all the dirty work for me. So, I hit the forums, the blogs, and few emails asking people to look at this for me.

This is the first response I’ve got back

So, while I’m on my AYOR hiatus, y’all read over this, perhaps debate with Jimmy some, and have me something a little more firm when I get back to the boards!!

I hate writing research papers. Especially stuff like this. I’m disappointed I didn’t have the time to get to the applied portion and just report on that.

Anyways, so I’ve been working on evaluating Real-Time Linux. What’s that?

Well, you’ve essentially got three kinds of modern operating systems.
- The kind that gives a set amount of time in slices for each program on the processor; these are increasingly rare for desktop/simulation systems
- The kind that allows a program to say “I’m more important than the program running” and the OS does its best to give the processor to that program. This is why today’s graphics and audio work so well - they’re filling in the time gaps that a lot of other programs would not otherwise use and just leave open.
- Then you have the kind that lets programs say “I MUST BE SERVICED within x time” and the OS guarantees that the program will get run within that deadline. This kind of operating system is very important for military applications, simulation applications, and other time/life critical applications.

Linux up before the latest version (2.6) was more in the first vein, but there were patches to bring it into the second vein - the preemptible / soft real-time vein. 2.6 is defacto preemptible and has been optimized to bring latency down. The real holy grail though is this last vein - the hard real-time - where a program can be guaranteed to be serviced within x amount of time.

It would drive down the costs of a lot of new developed time-critical applications (e.g. military) and possibly by porting some older military apps to this new platform. Why? Because Linux is Free - Free as in liberty. Everything about it is there for someone to come along and do something totally different with it at no cost except time. There are some restrictions about how you can then give your work to other people - but the military isn’t exactly known for selling its secrets. It allows the military especially but also the emerging private space industry for example to essentially be on an increasingly ubiquitous, reknown, and stable platform at zero cost except for the programmers - which they will be paying for anyways. And programmers are cheaper when the skill set is more widely accessible.

So anyways, that’s what I’ve been working on. That’s what I’ll be working on through the weekend trying to pull a rough draft together: explaining this in more detail, what’s available in this vein of computing, and how we go about comparing them to each other. Hopefully it will come along easier than I think it will - that’s always a nice thing when it happens.

So, I’ve had this printer… for over 2 years now… and I’ve never been able to get it installed right because it’s got a complicated software suite for a driver instead of JUST A FREAKIN’ DRIVER!!!

So, anyways, the symptom I would always have with this beast would be that after like 2 hours of fumbling around with installing/uninstalling the driver, I’d finally be able to get my printer to print.

…until I wanted to install some other piece of software, at which point Windows would say “Hey, you’ve got this incomplete driver installation… I should uninstall it before I install anything else, okay?” And I would sigh and hit okay and watch 4 more hours of pain and suffering being born before my eyes.

But today, something new happened. It worked. First time through. Past the regular hang-up spot and closed itself without any error messages or ctrl-alt-del fiascos.

…so, I’m happy that it’s installed now… …but I’m still mad that it took 2 years before it decided to cooperate.

weird. frustrating. done.

I will never uninstall this printer. …that is unless it has me fooled and will uninstall itself the next time I install some new software

So, one of the things I’ve been looking for lately is some kind of young adult Catholic blog ring. There doesn’t really seem to be one of my flavor… so I might be able to help facilitate one from the ground up.

Anyways, I thought I might go ahead and pimp one particular new blogger - Matthew Lickona.

I’ve been reading his blog the past few months (shortly after Lent started) after I read an excerpt from a book he has just had published - Swimming with Scapulars: True Confessions of a Young Catholic.

The dude is on target. A number of us read Adam quite a bit, and I find this guy is in that same pleasant, thoughtful vein - but very much Catholic.

I haven’t had an opportunity to read his book, but I’ll be ordering it shortly. All the reviews I’ve read are essentially very, very positive because of how he communicates the raw, authentic Catholic life that it seems so few are after these days. The general theme I’m sensing is a postmodern tale rooted in an authentic Catholicism. So, blog pimp for Matt. And a pimp for his book. I hope you’ll take an interest in them. I’ll get a review out after I get my hands on the book and can read through it.