CRASH!

"Crash" fortunately is not the sound of a bone-breaking fall, or the collision of vehicles hitting each other at high speeds.

And I'm not referring to the movie "Crash," one of my all-time favorites.

It's the sound of a hard drive. My hard drive.

Don't you just love that?

After a great time visiting family at Thanksgiving, covering parts of Pennsylvania, while passing through Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and of course, North Carolina in one four-day period, the last thing I wanted to come home to was a hard drive that was unresponsive.

But I did. And it was.

We have two computers at our house. The primary computer is the one that has the hot-running "Prescott" Intel P-IV chip in it. (and by "hot," I don't necessarily mean it is fast, I mean it runs very very hot! warms up the whole room!) It is also the machine that holds our itunes library, Picasa photos over the last four or five years, Quicken, email, etc., etc. This is not a hard drive I can afford to lose, but clearly there are some bad sectors.

Even though I had turned both the machines off while we were gone (which may have caused the problem, who knows? I leave my computers on 24/7), when we fired it up, it didn't take long for the error to reveal itself.

Well, I am attempting to recover my hard drive data with a little piece of software called Spinrite. I learned of this program because I am a regular listener of the fairly geeky Security Now podcast. This software is interesting. It is a svelte, compact little piece of machine-language software that boots from either your floppy drive or your CD-Rom drive. Once you buy it, you run it to create a little .iso file that that it runs from either source (including even a USB flash drive, though I couldn't get my computer to boot to that). My computer doesn't have a floppy drive, only a DVD drive so I knew I was going to have to get this little program onto a CD.

If I didn't have the other computer, commonly referred to as "the kid's computer," I don't think this would have worked. Fortunately, though it is several years old, it has a little 4X CDRW burner. After downloading some freeware that allows you to install .iso files to the boot sector (this is very important, otherwise the bios will not see this disc as a bootable disc, but only as a disc with an .iso file on it!), I got the Prescott computer to load the software and start working on the drive. It found the bad sectors right away and started trying to recover the data.

As I understand it, the software works literally bit by bit, flipping each bit from what it is to the the opposite, then back again (0 to 1, back to 0). If the sector is bad, it saves that bit to another part of the drive that is healthy. My drive is 160 GB. Spinrite has been running now for six days, non-stop. It is 80% finished with the drive. After this week's long investment, I hope it can salvage the drive long enough for me to copy it to a new hard drive! I'll keep anyone interested posted in this exciting saga.

I'm Dreaming of No Christmas Music - not now anyway

File this one under "Puh-leeze!"

I don't often listen to the radio. I've become a podcast junkie. But yesterday I was without my iPod and decided to not listen to talk radio. I was shocked to flip around the dial and hear a Christmas song (if Rod Stewart's "Favorite Things" counts as a Christmas song). But then I pushed the scan button and heard Elvis singing "Blue Christmas." I kept flipping. More Christmas music.

Why? Why must we endure this? I like Christmas. I even like Christmas music. But I like it only between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Really radio stations in Raleigh? Really?

We're a week away from Thanksgiving! Let us enjoy THAT first.

Oh--and the decorations. I couldn't believe as I walked into a Home Depot before Halloween that all the Christmas trees and lights were up.

Get ready for Christmas after Labor Day next year.

The only word you'll ever need

Sheila and Abe

It's funny how YouTube intuitively links videos from one to the next. I guess it's based on the tagging system. Well, I had posted a video of Tommy Walker doing "To God Be The Glory" for the benefit of our team here and after reading a comment someone had left there, I noticed a link was made to this Abe Laboriel and Friends video below.

This video was made this past summer at the Saddleback worship conference. Not only was I there, but the person who shot this video had have been sitting almost next to me as this was the exact perspective I had on that little mini-concert. Sheila E, who some of you may remember from the 80's, is now following Christ and is playing at the drums. You can see her come down and grab her father out of the crowd to come up and play some of the Latin instruments with her. It's ashame the audio isn't better. We miss all the goodness and deep pockets of Abraham on the bass. It was fun though a little crazy.

Here's a picture I took of Sheila playing her trademark white-with-butterflies latin percussion.

An esoteric funny

While checking the web on compatibility issues between Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) and Finale, I stumbled upon this post from a user on a Finale message board that made me laugh out loud:

I got Leopard today too. It was a gift from my son because his pit bull ate my 10.4 system discs. The dog runs fine on 10.4.

Like Bart, I will install it on a non-essential Mac and check it out.

Bill

Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia contributions, suffering ensues

Much attention has been given to the problem of students relying on Wikipedia as a source of information, but one professor has turned that problem on its head: instead of term papers, her students now write Wikipedia entries. [Link]

This is awesome! Yes, there are still entries in Wikipedia that need to be filled. Maybe once Wikipedia gets filled up, the prof can turn her attention toward Mahalo!

Blogged with Flock

Seeking a theology of NT music.

I thought it would be interesting to repost a portion of comments I made on a church music blog/discussion board concerning the analysis of a contemporary piece of music. It was late as I typed this initially, but for some reason I was able to crystallize my yet unanswered questions into concise form.

First, the OT idea of doing something skillfully related to music always has to do with performance. The musicians were skillful in the way they played or sang. Never [to my knowledge] is there a mention of the songs played or sung being written skillfully. Yeah, it may be splitting hairs, but isn't it interesting that the text goes out of its way sometimes to describe the skill of the musicians while saying very little about the music itself?

Second, and this may have been thoroughly covered elsewhere in previous discussions, so I apologize for bring it up, but how do we derive a New Testament theology of musical practice from Old Testament descriptions where the New Testament is curiously silent? What are we to conclude about the absolute qualifications of music and musicians from the Jewish/Chosen setting of the Old Testament to the Church/Gentile setting of the comparatively silent (on music) setting of the New Testament?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Productive Day?

I sometimes find myself measuring the productivity of my day by how much trash ends up in my trash can. I don't know if that is a useful tool or not, but at least I feel good about having done something!

I can't WAIT!!

Looking forward to a great game tonight:

Young People Rejecting Christianity, Seeing it as Homophobic

A study released last week by the Barna Group found that under-30s -- both Christian and non-Christian -- are strikingly more critical of Christianity than their peers were just a decade ago.Ten years ago, "the vast majority" of non-Christians had generally favorable views of Christianity. Now, that number stands at just 16%.

From the article:

There's a surprisingly unified sense between young adults, both inside and outside the faith, that the divisive, judgmental authoritarianism that's dominated Evangelical Christianity for the past 30 years has run its course. Furthermore: the "insiders" (as Barna terms Christians) see the same issues and agree with many of the criticisms as those on the outside -- and are openly talking about taking their theology in some new directions. There's an emerging sense that it's time to let go of the harsh legalism that's defined American Protestantism for the past three decades, and return to something more like the Social Gospel that demanded more of Christians than merely passing judgment on the details of other people's lives.

read more | digg story

Bias in the media?

Is there bias in the media? I mean the baseball media? I mean, east coast, New York-centric media?

On the day the Indians become the first team in all of baseball to clinch their division title, here are the offerings on the baseball portion of MSNBC:



Yankee's clinch? No. Sox Clinch? No. Indians? YES. Story about Cleveland? NO.

Magic Number: 5

For some reason, I enjoy reading the opposing team's home town paper to get their take on their sports team. Again, from the Detroit Free Press's Michael Rosenberg:

Well, I always wondered what it's like to be an obituary writer.

The Tigers are dead. Finished. Sans pulse. They are sleeping with the fishes, by which I mean the Marlins.

The Tigers are now 6 1/2 games behind the Indians with 10 to play. That's like being 6 1/2 miles behind in a five-mile race. Their wild-card hopes aren't much better: They are five games behind the Yankees in the loss column.

When the Tigers show up at Jacobs Fields this morning, they ought to wear black uniforms. Sure, it would be weird, but black would go nicely with their red faces.

Something like this is rare for Cleveland fans so we have to enjoy it while we can. But it's nice to see the diligence of a long-term plan coming to fruition. No panic, just stay the course. I like that.

Magic Number: 7

From the Detroit Free Press:

I won't say the Tigers are finished. But if my life depended on them making the playoffs, I'd buy a lot more life insurance.

In the bottom of the 11th inning Monday night, Cleveland's Casey Blake hit one out of the park, and that means the Tigers will likely be out of the postseason.

Wish I could be in NEO, I'd be at a few of these games!

540 extension added to Google Maps

FINALLY, directions from our house to somewhere in north Raleigh will start out correctly. No longer will we be directed all the way over the Triangle Town Blvd to pick up 540 but the maps have now been updated with the nine-month old extension that goes down to 64. What's interesting is that if you click over to the hybrid or satellite view, you'll see 540 still under construction. Also, the western side of 540 into RTP has not been updated. A bit of lag time at Google Maps...

I Use Adium

There was a time, not too long ago when I first migrated to OS X (from OS 9--that was a long wait for me! but that's another story all together) that I signed up for iChat. At first I ignored it. I never used it. My reasons were simple. First, I resented being interrupted at any given moment by someone, anyone who sees me online. Second, there's the phone. There's email. There are cell phones. There were already a variety of ways to reach me. And of course, most compelling, the two people at the time with whom I would most likely share a chat were in the offices next to me. So why bother?

After moving to NC, I decided to resurrect iChat. I played with it for a while but soon discovered that some of my friends, litterally from all over the world, were on several different chat services. As it turned out, I unwittingly had accounts on many of these chat services already in place. I was an early adapter of ICQ, back in the dial up days.
I rarely used it. I have a Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, and AIM account (iChat works on AIM). How could I see if my friends were online without having to check all these different services?

Enter Adium. This is a great little program for MAC OS X. It combines all of your various chat accounts into one place. As you can see, you may access me from any one of these services below:


You can organize your contacts in various ways, by a custom-assigned buddy list, or by account. My list automatically resizes as people come and go. It lives in the bottom right hand corner of my screen. It may look like any of these windows at various times:


I've now decided that the reason I live with chat on so much has more to do with just knowing that I can reach someone quickly and easily. (Yes, I'll admit, email has become just too slow!). I've enjoyed the instant contact with someone who may be across the hall or half way around the world. Just like most chat clients, you can set away messages if you're busy, or sometimes, you just can't reply to someone right way--no different then not answering your phone just because someone calls.

For those of you wondering what the Windows equivalent of this program would be, I would suggest Trillian, though since I tried it last, it didn't compete with Adium's slickness.

Send me your chat address!

Say What?

Beauty? Yes.
Brains? Well--did I mention the beauty thing?

Let's blame it on the nerves, not the hair color.

Ex-Korn Guitarist Writes About Choosing Jesus Over Sex, Drugs, and R&R

I don't know much about Korn, but now I have a new interest. Click on "read more" below to read this interesting article that is actually a review of a book written by Brian Welch. A couple of excerpts from the article:

"Save Me From Myself" is a primer on the miserable rock star existence he led before he turned to Jesus, seemingly out of the blue, in 2005...The decision to seek God followed an email from a concerned friend. The Bible verse contained in the email made Welch recall a memory from childhood about how moved he'd been when he tried to talk to Jesus. His transformation wasn't instant -- Welch brooded over it and kept snorting meth even as he called to the Lord for help -- but it has been permanent so far.

and

One refreshing piece of Welch's tale is that he doesn't claim life became perfect when he was saved. He has still drifted, trying to determine his path as he sought spiritual mentors, donated to charity, sued his band over money before making peace with them, battled another crippling depression and had a crisis of faith. He will also perk ears with his belief that "All of the man-made religion crap in this world has to die . . . All that prideful, controlling religious crap is what drives young people away from churches." That message might convince the rebel crowd that he's not a holy roller out to shove doctrines down their throat.

Things that interest me about these quotes: 1) The turning point seemed to originate from a concerned friend. 2) Never underestimate the power of scripture! I wonder what the verse was--maybe his book says. 3) Could your/my church have ever reached a guy like this?

read more | digg story

"Armageddon is here" - Jim Cramer

Meltdown:

312 keys vs 88 keys

The future of music is here. What a crazy idea! I'm gonna be obsolete.

I am an Autodidact

I recently stumbled upon this Wikipedia entry and began to feel good about myself. What a weird thing to say. I read an entry that I think describes most of us, but I want it to describe me continually through out my life.

The entry, on Autodidacticism, describes a person who is self-educated or self-directed in learning. An autodidact, also known as an automath, is a mostly self-taught person.

Yes, I have a formal education. Yes, I is a high school and college graduit, and I even have a Master of Arts degree thrown in for good measure. But it was during that graduate time when I learned what it meant to have depth--or maybe that I learned that there is so much depth. Every discipline has it's own basic level of understanding, but one can always keep diving into levels below the "vocabulary" level where you begin to discover that there is a great deal of interconnectivity in the area you are exploring and many other disciplines.

From the article:

A person may become an autodidact at nearly any point in his or her life. While some may have been educated in a conventional manner in a particular field, they may choose to educate themselves in other, often unrelated areas.

That's me. I love exploring various interests in music, church history, American history, baseball history, baseball current, how the internet works, websites, how computers work, networking, how the mind works, social connectivity, streamlining, efficiency, lateral thinking, philosophy, art analysis, movie making, Bible study, word study, Christian apologetics, weight training, pedagogical issues in many fields. I love to dig into something but frustratingly come to a place where I don't know what to do with what I've learned. Still, the fun for me is in the learning!