Woodstock.IsTheGeek.net

If you thought you weren’t going to get heartfelt ramblings, you were wrong. Yesterday’s post was somewhat interesting, and it was probably brought on by any number of factors, most of which have nothing to do with what was discussed.

Anyway, moving forward. Since Rachel is away at a conference with the car, I didn’t have an independent method of transport to get to church this morning. I coulda shoulda woulda called someone from church to see if I could get a lift, but couldn’t find anybody’s phone numbers. Slack I am.

So, I went looking for something else to fill my morning. It started with looking at home loans, which makes my head spin, and I’ve got plenty of information, but not much I can do until tomorrow. So, I figured I should spend some time doing something God-related. Of course, I should be doing something God-related every day, but that’s another kettle of peanuts.

So, I jumped on the iTunes store to see what wonderful podcasts I could find. I found the Desiring God sessions by John Piper, and starting downloading one, but then noticed Brian Houston’s podcast. So, as slow as it is, I started simultaneously downloading one from each. Brian Houston’s arrived first. It was entitled “This is Your Day”. It’s got two parts.

First off, he talks about counting our days and making every day count for something. A lot of people remember the ‘big days’ in our lives, the weddings, funerals, holidays and parties. But what about all the little days in between? For Christians, Sunday is the first and most holy day of the week. For Muslims, Friday is the most holy. For everybody else, who knows? Let every day be a good day.

In part 2, Brian reminds us to ‘Not let the sun go down on your anger’. That’s from Ephesians 4:26. Every time the sun goes down, it comes up again the next day. So if the sun goes down and you haven’t dealt with an issue or problem in your life, the sun will come up with it the next day.

I’ve been carrying a lot of issues every day, for thousands of days. The sun has gone down on those issues every day, and come up with them every following morning.

So let the issues go, and let the sun go down with those issues resolved.
If the sun isn’t eclipsed by those things, the Son will shine.

Let the Son shine and the problems will be fixxxed.

peace

I was listening through some old music today, and it brought back memories. I’d never really remembered my seniors’ jersey and why I’d had a song title and the lucky number 13 printed on the back of it instead of something boring like my last name and the year I graduated.

The song was Fixxxer by Metallica, and it played today. Listening to it again, reminded me why… 5 years of high school, 5 years of pain.

Through prayer, quiet discussions and meditation, I think that some of the damage has beed repaired, but the best solution that creeps into my mind is to stab the pins into a different body, preferrably one of the 250-odd who caused the pain the first place. Now, it doesn’t take a genius, biblical scholar or second year psych student to work out that this solution isn’t going to solve the problem. Back to the drafting board I think.

With luck, I might find a solution before my 10 year anniversary. With prayer, that solution might be peaceful and blessed.

Through friends who know friends, I heard that some of those 250-odd were somewhat internally injured by their own actions towards me, if that was any consolation, I’d be happy. It wasn’t, in fact, it makes things worse. That more lives were damaged along with my own, doesn’t make for a more cheery future.

While those years are still unforgotten, they are moving away from being unforgiven. Am I Fixxxed? No, but Im a little less broken.

…Peace

I was chatting with Bajar today, and he commented on the quality of my blog. I suspect he’s been marching through Columbia or something, but I’ll accept the compliment graciously. Since someone is reading it, I figured I should post something.

This week has seen the return of our favourite work colleague “Leave”. He’s really quite nice and gives us time to do things away from work. It would be nice if  “Leave” did our work for us while we were gone, but beggars can’t be chosers. Since my darling wife is on leave as well, we decided to take a bit of a trip and see where it would take us.

We drove south through Kenilworth (which is quite lovely, but I don’t think I’d like living there), tasted some cheese at the Kenilworth cheese factory and had a picnic.  The cheese was good, but some there was a man who somewhat ruined the experience. I shall call him Grumpy McGrumpster, the grumpiest grump that ever did inhabit the cheesery. Basically, the cheese factory also had wine available from one of the local wineries for tasting. For some reason, Grumpy McGrumpster didn’t like his standard serve of wine and decided to do what he does best. Now, within worrying about whether or not the sales girl/s had completed RSA training or not, he continued to do his thing until they agreed to give him a ‘proper’ glass. Now, the ‘proper’ glass they gave him was probably 200mL, which might be ‘proper’, but it’s not standard. After all the grumping, Grumpy McGrumpster managed to upset 3 sales people, 2 small children, and one blogger in a peartree. At this point, said blogger left to continue on his journey.

After a bit more of a drive, we arrived at Maleny Hideaway. This place is brilliant. It’s off the main road and down a fairly narrow, windy driveway (which is also quite steep by the way). The owners were really friendly, the bed was comfy, the shower was hot, and breakfast was tasty. Thank you Kerri and Gavin, it was really good night away from home. Each of the guest rooms are also painted a different colour. Ours was a pinky, purply colour, but nothing overdone, while another we saw was a pale blue. Not a huge thing, but a pleasant individuality.

Since we had some time to kill, we headed to the Maleny Hotel. Now, the hotels in Gympie need to work on their appearance. Nothing at home quite has the atmosphere of the Maleny Hotel. Watching one of the bar staff check the door lock, then close the door, then walk away, without considering that they’d locked us on the balcony, was quite an experience. The rum went down well, and we headed off.

We ate at Capricio’s Italian Restaurant. The atmosphere was really nice, you don’t believe how much of a difference is made by not having top-40 music blearing through a restaurant, until you have something soft and subtle instead. The staff were friendly enough, without being in-your-face. The food was hot and very tasty and the service was prompt. My highlight for the meal was watching a group of half a dozen children stare bug-eyed through window as Paul (the host) topped pizza after pizza, ready to be cooked in their very fancy rotating pizza oven. All in all, I couldn’t fault the evening at all.

Have you ever been to Montville? If you haven’t, I recommend visiting. If you have a female partner, and you’re taking her along, I recommend locking up the credit cards. I wouldn’t have believed it, but people do actually buy  small pottery toadstools. Not just any small pottery toadstools, but those that you can sit upsidedown in your fridge, filled with vanilla essence, to deoderise it. Fascinating! The pie, with mushy peas AND mashed taters inside, was amazing, and will definitely be recreated the next time I have anything ressembling a pie at home or elsewhere.

All in all, it was a good trip. One that will be repeated as soon as we have the chance.

peace

Woodstock

Mattahan, born Paul Davey is someone I admire as much as any man. He is a DeviantArt legend. Not only is he a brilliant artist, but he has focused at least some of his creative zeal on icons. ‘Icons?’ you ask? Yes, icons. Those small, seemingly insignificant collections of pixels that you click on to open files, applications and other such widgets on your computer, mobile phone or other electronic device.

It’s all a bit weird, but you know me, I love weird. The perspectives he uses are all just that little bit off centre, so things don’t quite look right, bu still look really cool.

Be advised, the icon collections are quite sizable, but they come in PNG format with a cool script to convert them to ICO files for Windows.

I’m hoping he’ll release some more stuff soon, but until then, you can check out his collection at http://mattahan.deviantart.com/

Hokay, so… we went to the show today. It was, interesting, but it was also not interesting. Obviously it’s been a few years since I visited a Sideshow Alley and ho dayum the prices seem to have sky rocketed, but that’s not really a surpise.

We had a look at the various exhibits including the caged birds which were interesting. There was a cockatiel that had the colouring we think Mario will have when he grows up. But really, that’s as good as it got.

Earlier in the week, Rachel noticed that our resident llamas down the road were missing… they went to the Show too. She was most excited to see them being judged today, including several that didn’t seem to be too fond of the judge. He copped a couple of good kicks which of course meant those particular llamas didn’t win anything. We heard the owner of one on the way back to their pen saying something along the lines of “I won’t be showing him off again, getting too old and grumpy like his old man.” I’m assuming she was talking about the llama, but she might have been talking about the judge.

Not being a fan of rodeos and the like, there really wasn’t anothing “happening”, so we came home. Visiting Mr & Mrs Zillmann tonight in their new box-filled house. That will no doubt be a little more lively than the Show.

Now that I’m blogging again, I need stuff to blog about. (Since I’ve decided to keep work and blog seperate, it’ll have to be something else. So, here we go. The Dell Studio One 19 came to my attention today, so I had a bit of a look at it, and figured I’d post something for nobody in particular to have a read…

At first, it looks like Dell has taken the proven (to some) concept of an all-in-one PC and made a few stylistic changes to make it their own. The Studio One 19 looks nice. It’s less boxy than any iMac today and it comes in a range of colours. While this isn’t a huge deciding factor for most people, I think people must be making their family PC a centre piece of a room – like the TV is for more than most – and as a result, they want it to look good.

Now for the really cool bit… it has a touch screen! This is brilliant. Of course, I’m not entirely sure what most people might want a touch screen for – particularly if you had kids (or big kids for that matter) with grubby fingers. It’s a nice touch, and I guess if you combined it with an application like CoolIris, it would make for a very nice “3D” browsing experience for the supported websites  – google image search, youtube, flickr, facebook, just to name a few.

The choice of a 16:9 ratio makes me think that Dell are also aiming this at a small-scale movie market. Most wide screen computer monitors are 16:10 – for example, my 19″ wide LCD monitor has black bars when watching a DVD or playing on the xbox 360, but it also has a native resolution of 1440×900. I would think though, that the 18.5″ display may cause some people problems – especially gamers – because of the non-standard resolution (1366×768). The ratio change may also cause some stretching if your standard wide-screen game images as well, but that probably isn’t going to be a big problem for many people – we’re past games that use geometrically correct shapes for everything.

Speaking of gamers, the one thing that does let this machine down, is the choice (or lack of) video cards. It comes with an nVidia 9200 or 9400 video adapter as standard, without any real options to upgrade. What this means, is that if you want to play anything substantial (flash games don’t count), you’re pretty much going to be out of luck.

The 4GB of RAM is ok, and I guess the part of me that wants more, isn’t going to be happy with a system like this that I can’t pull apart and tweak anyway. I know that Windows 7 is supposed to be less resource hungry than Vista, but I certainly wouldn’t be locking myself in to *only* 4 gig with a new operating system due out before the end-of-life on a brand-spanking-new PC. I always believe in giving myself some room to grow – whether it’s a computer, a house, or a belt, the same theory applies.

All in all, it has a lot of things to make people say “Oooh” and “Aaah”, but I’m not sure that’s enough for AU$2500 worth of computer system. I can build a faster, stronger, albeit more chunky, machine in an afternoon for the same kind of money.

Greetings and welcome to a new edition of the Ravings of a Self-Confused Indoor Enthusiast. The last time I posted was over a year ago, and the last time before that was almost a year earlier still.  That being said, when I moved all of my old posts over to being Private, they all got datemarked as today. So, if you’ve got access to all of those, you’ll just have to guess when they were written. Chances are, if you’ve got access to those, you can remember when the various things happened. I know that looking back, I know I can put my finger on most of them, at least within a month or two.

There will be many things here that will most likely upset people and cause controversy. As a general rule, if you don’t like it, don’t read it. Names, dates, locations and other identifying details will be avoided at all costs, but chances are, if it is about you, you’ll probably figure it out.

Peace