Friends

After reading several depressing, though well written fiction pieces, my soul was starting to feel heavy and congested, so I picked up Blue Like Jazz for a second read.  Donald Miller has my dream job.  Some day I hope to be as inspired and wise and connected to the heart of God to write like him.  In the meantime, I will have to borrow his words:

"I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him or have Him brush your face in a breeze.  I am early into my story, but I believe I will stretch out into eternity, and in heaven I will reflect upon those early days, these days when it seemed God was down a dirt road, walking toward me.  Years ago He was a swinging speck in the distance; now He is close enough I can hear His singing.  Soon I will see the lines on His face."

Fantastic.  Chapter 2 is even better.

Also, I wanna play too (stolen from several others):
"One little compliment can make you feel amazing. So give me a compliment, anything in the entire world, even that my shoelaces are pretty. Put this in your journal. And once you get some comments, put that entry in a memory or tag and when you are feeling down, just go to that entry and this will remind that you're not so bad in other people's eyes after all."

New Belgium's 1554 makes for an excellent beer bread base booze.

Also, it's raining (or about to be raining, judging by the thunder).  I really kind of hope it stops before I have to go home because - unsurprisingly - I've thusfar failed to remember to load my raingear into the luggage on my new bike.

A dear friend of mine gave me what was probably one of the most amazing compliments that I've ever received yesterday afternoon, and I've been riding high ever since.  I'm serious, it was the most encouraging conversation I have had in a very long time, and it sent the dark storm clouds that had been looming over my heart millions of miles away.  Even today, every time I started to have a frustrating time with things, my brain immediately went straight to her words and I felt comforted.

I find myself constantly trying to fish for compliments with certain people, those people who's opinoins I respect.  I want to know the good things that they see in me so that I can build on those things, but also because I simply want to feel good about me.  I want to draw worth and value from their words, their opinions, their perceptions of me.  I long for it, I crave it, I manipulate to get it, and I go through withdrawl when I don't.

Why is it that a friend can give a compliment and I will walk on clouds for a couple of days, yet when I think about God moving heaven and earth to have a relationship with me, it doesn't  stir me one bit?  Am I so accustomed to the idea that God did such a miraculous and wonderous thing as to become wholly man, live, die and come back to life all as a means to forgive my sins and to call me into life that I would just think on it and just go "meh," in the end?  Why can a close friend make such an impact, yet the love, mercy, power and sovereignty of God all seem so intangible and distant?

Perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way.  I'm not viewing God as being my friend, rather I tend to view him as an "it", an all powerful, just, logical "it".  I tend to view him as an object and not a personality.  I'm supposed to have a relationship, but it's hard to do that when you see the person you want to relate to as a large rock.  I need my perceptions to be radically changed.  I thnk I tend to view this whole christianity thing as just that - a thing I do, rather than an intimate relationship with a loving person.  Yeah, this needs to change entirely.  I have a whole intellectual understanding of a relationship with God, but it's not making any sort of emotional connection what so ever.

I want to look forward to my time with God again.  I want to be excited about praying and reading the word.  I want his words to be my comfort and my strength.  I want this relationship with God again, not this continuous act of going through the motions.

I'm tired, and I need sleep.  Here's to hoping that I'm not really getting not sick.

WSJ: People treating pending closure of 600 Starbucks stores as end of the world.

People, people, people - yes, the Starbucks on the corner may be closing, but at least there's still 3 other Starbucks locations on that intersection that you can go to.  Don't panic.

Every so often, I get people questioning as to why on Earth I'd want an EeePC netbook.  Engadget has a story this afternoon wherein Sony and Fujitsu express deep, grave concerns about the entire idea of very cheap computers.

Basically, they're whining that consumers don't want to pay a lot of money for things and that's hurting their profit margins.  Duh.  Paging Captain Obvious to the white courtesy phone.

Here's the real deal: Sony and Fujitsu were the only two players in the "extremely light and super-portable" market and they were making a killing off of it.  Sony and Fujitsu's products in a netbook-ish form factor (<10" screen) typically ran well above $2000, usually well well above $2000.  My Eee cost me a whole $500 and it was the most expensive Eee in the lineup.  That, my friends, is what Sony and Fujitsu have their panties in a bunch over - the appeal of their products is dropping like a rock because now there's a boatload of competition in that form factor and all of the competition costs under a thrid of what the Sony and Fujitsu systems do.

The caveat, of course, is that all the cheap netbooks are fairly low-specced in comparison to their larger brethren.  Here's another little thing that Sony and Fujitsu are apparently not coming to terms with: that doesn't matter.
Nobody's buying ANY untra-small form factor system at ANY price to use as their primary computer - the screen's too small, the keyboard's too small, etc.  I don't care how much processor you've got shoved in there, it's not a good choice for a primary system purely for ergonomic reasons.
People are buying netbooks as secondary systems - take-anywhere processing power to handle the mundane day-to-day stuff, not as their sole Photoshop machine or million-FPS gaming systems.

Anyway, I've discussed this all before.  The only thing new is that Sony and Fujitsu are unofficially admitting that their market is being eaten alive by a dozen different ultra-ultra-portable systems and that they can't make as much money selling a $500 computer as a $2500 computer.  Frankly, I don't care if it's bad for Sony and Fujitsu's balance sheets - it's great for the consumer who (as one commentor on Engadget pointed out) doesn't actually need the super-computer-esque performance that a top-of-the-line system provides.

I finally got the F650 sold yesterday.   I didn't cry or anything, just gave it a pat on the fuel tank after we'd strapped it into the truck.

Coincidentally, I also got the first payment notice for the Yamaha yesterday, too.

We went to the drive-in last night, which was double-featuring Wall-E and Hancock.

After the credits started rolling on Hancock, I turned away from the screen and started putting the pickup truck in order.  A few seconds later, I start hearing police sirens coming in from the distance and heard, from somewhere towards the back of the lot, "Put the gun down!  Just put the gun down!"  I looked around the truck and saw a group of people milling around a few rows behind us - this was truly an "Oh, shit." moment.

I turn around to check on my people and then see that Hancock has one of those "after the credits" scenes playing.

Ganked this from little_teacup

"One little compliment can make you feel amazing. So give me a compliment, anything in the entire world, even that my shoelaces are pretty. Put this in your journal. And once you get some comments, put that entry in a memory or tag and when you are feeling down, just go to that entry and this will remind that you're not so bad in other people's eyes after all."

CNN: Futuristic windshield aims to help older drivers.

I'm sure that this is well-intentioned and all, but let's be realistic - this doesn't go nearly far enough and yet it goes too far.

Not far enough:

Frankly, what the (observed) majority of older drivers really need from a windshield are two key features:

1. Some fantastic extension ability where the windshield can drive itself down far enough to chop off the entire front of the car and significant portions of the interior, finally allowing the driver to see over the dashboard.
1. This would also help out by making the car completely inoperative - a key feature, indeed.
2. A robotic arm that would move the driver's seat back so that they're some measurable distance back from the steering wheel.
1. Poor grandma's gonna get crushed if that airbag ever deploys.
2. No  mirror in the world has enough adjustment to properly show your vehicle's blind spots if your driving position is physically in front of the mirrors.

Too far:

If you start outlining things on the road (people, animals, farmers' markets...) you're just going to be giving them targets they're going to fixate on.  Lesson #1 about driving: you go where you look.

Let's face it - there comes a point in life where it's probably just best if you STOP DRIVING.  A bus pass is far cheaper than retrofitting your Caprice Classic or Buick Land Yacht with a heads-up display and prescription windshield. 

Speaking solely of the technology, though, some of that stuff looks quite interesting.  Having inched my way across Wyoming more than once, some fancy gadget that could point out where the road should be during a white-out would be much appreciated.

Reusing your styrofoam coffee cup: good for the environment.

Reusing your styrofoam coffee cup whose bottom you poked full of small holes during a teleconference: bad for your shoes.

In the immortal words of Alan Tudyk's button:

I am now forced to install iTunes (which I have resisted for years) just so I can watch "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog".  Why can't Apple just put a stinking web front-end on the iTunes store so that I don't have to download a 60.5MB installer that's going to completely take over my computer once it's on there?
I don't want iTunes, I just want to watch a video.

Update 8:13a:  Maybe not. It may be a combination of Flash, traffic and maybe work's blocking Hulu.com. That being the case, I'm going to cleanse my system of iTunes (who wanted me to pay $2 for free content) and try again this evening.

Update 6:30p: Finally got to watch it.  The world and its dog managed to down the server for a while, but I think it was worth the wait.

check out helpanurse.blogspot.com
this is where my and another Peace Corps Volunteer
that are working together on some projects
will be updating our work.
THANKS :)

Joss Whedon's next project, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, debuts its first episode (of 3) online tomorrow.

Why do you care, you ask?

1. It's Joss Whedon, and he is my master now.
2. It stars Nathan Fillion
3. ...and Neil Patrick Harris
4. ...and they both sing.
5. It's free because Joss Whedon is just that cool.

I now have a new sway bar, bushings  and suspension end-links installed in my Saturn Ion.  My mechanic friend who helped me to install it informs me that I'm welcome to take my car to the dealer in the future.

Rather than being out in the open underneath the car, Saturn Ions (and the Chevy Cobalt) unhelpfully route the sway bar above the sub-frame and around an engine mount so you have to remove a significant portion of car in order to get to them.  Adding insult to injury, the nuts/bolts that hold the end-links on can only be removed with some form of special tool or an air-grinder with a cut-off wheel.

Apparently, Sunday's "FoxTrot" comic tried to parody a few of the geekier web comics.

I'm gonna award this a "Fail" for the plain reason that their general readership is going to sit there and go "Huh? I don't get it." a lot.

Online comics parody-ing print comics: not fail because pretty much everybody reads print comics and the ones that are typically singled out for parody are the ones that are in every newspaper in the world (Garfield, FoxTrot, Snoopy, Dilbert, etc.).

Print comics parody-ing online comics: exceptional fail because it's only a small percentage of the public that reads any webcomics and a smaller-yet percentage that seeks out whatever particular one you've chosen to parody.

It's roughly equivalent in "fail" to Rolling Stone magazine reviewing the Piddly-burg Symphony Orchestra's Wednesday matinee performance: your usual readers aren't going to have a clue what you're talking about and, more importantly, aren't going to care.