I've been reading a lot of entries from people who I knew back when I was in college and with whom I participated in various ministries.  The general theme through all of these is a heavy religiosity which at times is very familiar to me but which also repulses me.  I say this because I feel that people around me generally reject religion and while I am still staff at my church, I sympathise with them.  While I am interested in what is going on in their lives, I feel that the CFC alumni who keep blogs are in a competition to show how holy they are by sharing their devotional times and their observations.  While I say this partly from a bitterness at being left out at times, I know this to be the case.  I can see former CFC'ers who are now actively serving as pastors and missionaries sharing these types of things, but generally my feelings are that these are the rantings of the religiously narcissistic.

I am sure that I am not 100% correct in my assessment, but I know that people write these things because they know they have audiences.  It's no better than when others will write to get comments and eprops.  I saw this while a student at the UofI and while I served as a "co-leader" (nowadays they call them co-servants.)

So having a contrarian streak within me (though nothing like the derfman's contrarian streak) I am declaring that I will only write about things which are "frivolous" and geeky.  Chess, Dr.Who, Mochi, the heck with spiritual insights, I'd rather share them with people in my small groups.

f:  "It's sort of like being drunk."

a:  "What's wrong with being drunk?"

f:  "Just ask a glass of water."

1. Name the book in which this takes exchange place.
2. Who are the participants in this conversation.
3. What is f describing.
4. Bonus points if you can give me the exact quotes from the book instead of my summary from memory.

Normally I won't talk about things I am watching.  Normally I wouldn'be watching Korean videos.  But Rea got me hooked on this one and we've been watching this in the evenings.  I wouldn't suggest purchasing this one in the states as it could get expensive (this series is something like 12 + dvd's)  but rather purchasing it as an import from a site like yesasia.com.

This series has been like crack, at first I couldn't care a whit about these characters, but after having watched this for a while, I'm like one of those korean video zombies.  Fortunately, I am not any more interested in watching other korean videos.  But then since I'm watching this one now, anything seems possible.

There are people who like to compete but don't like to think a lot.  They often find fulfillment in sports.

There are people who like to think but don't like to compete.  They find their way to fields such as science, art and philosophy.

And then there are those who like to think and compete -- and they find chess.

--GM Andrew Soltis (Not sure if it's his exclusively or if he quoted someone else)

Obviously the generalization is inaccurate...  Chess post to follow.

"So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year
war for earth has just begun! Temporarily anozinizing our episode will
NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful
man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your
feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!"

So I give Rea her valentine's day gift.  While she appreciated the gift, she pointed out something that I believe I should take closer to heart, namely I tend to do things too casually.  While I believe that she knows that I have deep seated feelings of love and commitment for her, my expressions of said emotions do tend to be somewhat on the casual side.  But while I'm pondering this, I realize that I used to be much more sentimental than this.  So why has this become a problem?

My thinking is that for some reason, I do not feel comfortable expressing myself in this way anymore.  I tend to not know how far to go.  There were many times when I went too far in my conversations and said something that totally killed the mood, nothing completely offensive, but not something that would be said if I didn't let the excitement of the moment get away from me.  I have caused more than my share of awkward silences and I feel that I'm subconsciously trying to compensate for this by being "cooler" in my responses and expresssions.  I'm not sure even if Rea could handle the avalanche of sticky sickly sweetness that I can unleash on her if I really tried.  Ah yes, there's that too, my perpetual inertia.

These golf balls are great, I'm not much of a golfer, but these look really cool.  The outer layer is transparent so you can see some of the inner structure.  It's supposed to perform really well, but they have this nice gadgetty edge also.  Of course there's a second present, maybe if you're nice, I'll blog about that too.

In the meanwhile, I'll leave you with this:

"My mind to your mind, my thoughts to your thoughts."

Sadly, this doesn't work.

I'm sure that this has been thought of before.

Ppetlee's latest entry was written by his wife.  After I commented on the post, truthrain
points out that here is a heretofore unnamed internet phenomenon that
we can describe.  ppetlee's wife's use of his account (with his
permission) points out a phenomenon which may or may not be very common
among couples, namely the sharing of online identities.  I would
think that this would be an uncommon occurance as people like to have
their own email addys, and chat identities, but if someone had an
account on a forum or a blog and their s.o. wished to participate in a
particularly interesting exchange without having to go through the
hassle of joining said online community, they can do what ppet's wife
did and use his account (which was lying there doing nothing anyways
one must admit.)

Hence the title of this blog post.  I hope that no one took the
term and attached it to another phenomenon.  Besides, I like this
use of the term, as Calvin said "verbing nouns is cool."  So
basically it's a consentual (or perhaps implied consentual)
borrowing/sharing of one's online identity in order that one member of
a couple or group may be able to participate in the community to which
the other member of the couple or group belongs.

I'm sure that people have verbed this and used it for assimilation, "we
need to borg those newcomers to get them to feel comfortable at our
church fellowship."  Hmmm that's just too creepy... am I just
barking up the wrong tree?  How about some suggestions, if this
borging thing isn't appropriate.

Something to comfort my single friends.

"St. Valentine was beheaded back in the day. That thought comforts me on a cold February night."
--anonymous quote I found on a gadget website

Today is a much better day to celebrate.  Later tonight after small group, I'm gonna watch Bill Murray and enjoy myself.

I go through computers like some people go through clothes.  My fileserver which I impressed into service as my workstation when my gaming machine went kaput, has in turn gone the way of its predecessor.  Thankfully it is a software issue and not hardware related.  But I still have to move the bulk of my data, and reinstall windows which is a painful process in any case (can you say external hard drive using only USB1.1?  It's faster and more fun to watch paint dry.)  It still works, but for some reason I have limited functionality which is annoying.  There's also a system process which eats up all of the CPU cycles.  I'm thinking that it became a zombie at some time.  I've isolated it from the other machines in the network and run checks on everything else, just my machine.  This is a good thing, but I still have to deal with my machine or lack thereof.  In the meanwhile I am using a combination of Rea's machine, and various laptops which I am borrowing from work to get things done, but it's not the same without a real email client.

So here are my choices:

Get a new machine (if this is the case, it'll be one of those cool laptops, i've been drooling over -- fat chance)
Build a new machine (a little more realistic, especially since I can get good computing power for relatively little money)
Reinstall windows and continue as before (while a workable solution and most likely to happen, it'll just postpone the inevitable, when I am forced to choose one of the above.)

Hopefully, I will be able to reconnect my ipod to the computer after reinstalling windows.  I don't really keep songs on it, just videos and podcasts, so restoring it shouldn't be a big deal.

Jae the Athlete?!

This week I got to go with other church guys to Bobby Sul's church (Grace Christian Church) to play a friendly game of basketball.  Now, I've never really played basketball.  I remember taking p.e. when our gym teacher would explain the rules to us and give us drills, but I've not played in any real way since then.  On top of that, I'm hopelessly out of shape and my cardivascular system could use a lot of work.  But I had a lot of fun.  There's no way that I can have the same level of playing skill as the guys there, but I accounted for myself reasonably well.  I will attribute this to an ability I have to make my body do what I want it to do (the root of video gaming skills) combined with the low expectations of my peers (quite reasonable as I'm not generally known as an athletic person.)

But my own concerns aside, I not only did better than expected, I had a lot of fun.  I guess it really matters with whom I play.  Hmmm, so I've been missing all of this cool stuff when I miss gym fellowship.  I guess, more than getting better at the things I do, I should look to have as much fun as I can while I do them.

I've been following the Palestinian election and I have to say I'm somewhat ambivalent about the result.  Lluang
has his take on mattersand I agree mostly.  I'm torn between
outright horror and a morbid curiosity about what Hamas will look like
when they have to take the responsibility of governing.  I've
listened to a lot of big talk from Hamas politicians in the last two
weeks, but I'm not sure how they will do as a majority government when
all the experience they had was in a subversive opposition role. 
Basically what will they do when they have no one to blame but
themselves for the state of things.  I would think they will still
find someone to blame.