Sunday Brunch on Monday

1.  Do you or should you wear glasses or contact lenses?
No. I should wear sun glasses, but I don't do that either.

2.  What is your favorite type of footwear?
Birkenstock sandals… I love 'em. I have two standard, brown pairs of sandals, plus I recently added a pair of “Birki's” made with a rubber footbed — perfect for when you think it might rain. I've found that my legs will become sore even when wearing good sneakers, but rarely ever hurt at all when wearing Birkenstocks, thanks to their famous footbed's amazing support.

When inside, I prefer to be barefoot.

3.  What is your worst habit?
Worrying. I'm very bad about second guessing myself, worrying about the best way to say something to someone, and so on. I am also a worrier on things like whether meat has been cooked enough at a restaurant. My worrying when around less-than-well-done meat as well as individuals who are sick can cause me to do a good job of “getting” a psychosomatic case of something.

I'm worried I might be forgetting something I should say here.

(The bad habits Christopher mentions also apply to me.)

4.  Are you an average, so-so or very good cook?
I think I'm between average and good. Like Christopher, clean up is a lot of what keeps me from doing it more often.

5. Do you spend more time watching television, listening to music or surfing the internet?
Surfing the internet. I spend far too much time reading blogs, news and other things. Of course, much of my work involves the internet too, so I spend a lot of time on here.

I generally watch television for 30 minutes a day, usually to see something I'm time shifting off of TV Land or some other cable station (I Love Lucy, I Dream of Jeannie, Leave it to Beaver, The Brady Bunch, Green Acres or The Beverly Hillbillies [on WGN] usually). Sometimes, I'll also watch CNN or the Weather Channel (I actually find the latter relaxing, but I don't watch it all that often).

I rip my CD's into XMMS (on GNU/Linux) and iTunes (on Mac OS X), so music goes along with the Internet. I'm currently enjoying Steven Curtis Chapman's CD Declaration.

Plumb Out of Ideas

Well, I was busy all day and then tonight I got to fight with plumbing problems (sewer backing up). It was a real mess, although fortunately it didn't ruin anything, just took awhile to clean up and figure out what was wrong (hopefully). I guess you will just have to wait another painstaking day for my next “real” post.

Sorry to disappoint again!

Power to the People

Power has been somewhat elusive around St. Louis since the storm yesterday morning. I lost power from eight in the morning until after three yesterday afternoon, and overall, I seem to be fortunate. At that point 8,500 homes were without power in St. Charles alone. Some estimates I heard put the metro area total at something closer to 90,000 still without power as of this morning.

Traffic has been a mess because of all this. Many traffic signals are still out or are flashing red because of the outages. Long traffic jams were the norm today. And while waiting in traffic, the most common sight seemed to be tons of trees split right down the middle as if a giant axe had split them apart. I saw one tree, apparently uprooted, that looked like it had probably been there for at least 100 years.

Walgreens employees at one area location today could all be seen congregating at the doorway of the closed store since apparently they hadn't been sent home but no business was possible in the store. One of the fireworks vendors, Red Rocket Fireworks (d.b.a. Crazy Dave's Fireworks), apparently lost three of its ten area tents to the storms — destroying all of the remaining inventory at those tents. Today was the day they were suppose to pack up, so the storm came just a bit too soon to avert the loss of the fireworks.

Quite a storm.

Star Spangled Day

Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Happy Fourth!

That's all for now.

At the Crossroads

Unfortunately, answers have been hard for me to come by. Five years ago, I first felt small, nagging call into ministry. I figured it must have just been a wild thought and I tried to push it out of my mind. I was the weirdo as a young child who preferred having my mother read to me the business profiles from Everybody's Business(a book on top corporations) instead of fairy tales and stories. By second grade I had started to try to figure out a serious, profitable business plan. Within a few years I was regularly reading the business section of the newspaper and even watching some stocks. For nearly as long, the technology business has intrigued me. By my mid teens no one even bothered to ask what I was going to do in life so much as exactly what part of the computer business I was going to be involved in. The computer industry has, to a large extent, existed as the “master status” of my life.

Yet, I know it is not me. Knowing that does not necessarily make it easier to escape what has become so entwined with my identity, however. Many who find out my intentions are horrified that I'd give up what appears to be such a “lucrative” path. And at times I feel almost foolish for wishing to change directions. What right minded person would give up being in the industry of the times? I've battled the thoughts in me for years trying to readjust my course to where I had been heading. But its hard to argue with where you feel called.

The future remains very murky to me, which is the most difficult part. Obviously, for the moment, I am going to keep on doing what I have been doing. But then… It's just that. But then what? That's what I really don't know. I've been praying about it for years, but answers elude me. I feel almost as if I get further mired in the swamp of indecision as I move forward. On the other hand, my realization that my purpose is not what I am doing now is becoming only clearer as time passes.

It is a weird thing. At times I feel like a failure. I'm not suppose to be doing this, right? I always prided myself for knowing exactly where I wanted to go in the future. As others tried to figure out what they wanted to do, I [thought I] knew. The reality that I really didn't is troubling.

Part of me feels called to somewhere in academia to train up people. I love the intricacies of apologetics and theology, and I love exploring them through socratic method. I have also spent a lot of the time that I've been involved in computers training people, albeit with a smaller, often in a one-on-one type of setting. Another part of me feels torn towards a more active roll in ministry — it is fine to sit within the hallowed halls and talk about what should be done, but maybe I would be better on the front lines. Or maybe not. That is the conundrum. Either way I will have ample opportunity to continue to flex and develop my other passion: the written word.

Maybe I know just what I need to know for now. Enough to move forward toward whatever the destination is for me. Maybe if I knew what the future held it would be too much to deal with just yet. Still, such a loose sense of purpose and direction — especially aimed away from what everyone expects one to continue to do — is hard to explain and harder to get people to accept. Whether those who know me accept it or not is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but it does not make it any easier in the short run.

So for now, I just keep plodding along toward the horizon where I will hopefully reach my next stop. Perhaps my current work isn't so much a mistake or detail so much as a provision of the luxury to take my time reaching where I need to be. I am sure God has it all planned out, I just with he would drop the “map” down to me so I could see that ahead of time.

It's All About Me

Josiah blogged about an article on people checking their Google rank (that is, how many hits come up when you search for your name on Google). If I search only for “Timothy R. Butler” (which mostly guarantees mostly stuff referring to me and not someone else, I get a “rank” of 7,150… on the other hand, if I go for a more lenient search that also includes “Timothy Butler” and “Tim Butler” (which also pulls in other people's stuff, I get 18,300.

While it is somewhere in between, I would suspect, I would generally think the first search is closest to the correct number. After all, my full name is used pretty much every place, including articles, e-mail and even blog comments. I have thought about shedding some of the “formality” on blogs, but after commenting that way so long, I don't want to make things too confusing… you know? In person, virtually no one calls me anything other than “Tim,” so it would seem logical that I would go by “Tim” online too. Oh well. Y'all already know that anyway (why did I just have an unstoppable urge to say “y'all”?).

At any rate, it is interesting to see, even though it does not tell me much. What's your Google rank?

Organizing

I spent today cleaning and organizing. First, during the day, I organized my office, rearranged the wiring for my computers and did other useful (hopefully) tasks. Then tonight I cleaned off my bookshelves and rearranged things. I got a lot of books off the floor and onto some new shelves. That makes everything look nicer.

Incidentally, I realized today that one year ago last Sunday (June 12) was when my Ruby iMac (aka “Catbert” on my network) arrived over FedEx Ground. Its amazing it arrived in one piece considering my experiences with FedEx Ground… but the seller on eBay did an excellent packing job so it all turned out OK. The G3 400 really ran nicely then and runs even better now that it has Panther installed on it.

Tomorrow I hope to finishing backing up my PC's hard disk and then do an upgrade to Fedora Core 2. I also need to reinstall a copy of Windows XP. Its hard supporting users running it without a copy of my own that works (my copy died about three months ago — just refused to boot any longer).

My Week This Week in Review

This week has been a busy one, but busy in a good way. On Monday, I went over to the Apple Store to buy a replacement for my aging Dell laptop. The replacement comes in the form of a PowerBook G4 12” with SuperDrive (1.33 GHz) — this system seems to combine an ideal set of tradeoffs between power and size, providing a system that is quite fast but fits in my briefcase so that I can carry it around easily. Mega thanks go to Kevin, who provided me with information about his experience using the 12” PB. While I was there, I took advantage of the substantially discounted .Mac subscription, the $99 off printer rebate (to get the HP 5850 wireless printer for only $50) and the available “Incase” case that is designed to be thin enough to fit in another case… my briefcase.

On Wednesday, of course, I spent the morning in Kirkwood watching the KMOX broadcast mentioned in my previous post. As I commented on that post, it was an amazing event. Bill Sammon autographed a copy of his book Misunderestimated for me, and Charles Brennon autographed the receipt (not wanting to sign someone else's book). While waiting for Mr. Sammon to finish signing the book I got a chance to talk to both him and Mr. Brennon for a short while. I stood in line and posed a question during the broadcast, which afterward caused Mr. Brennon to come over and talk to me for a second again (he seems just as nice in person as he does on the radio). The broadcast will be shown on TV on C-SPAN 2 on Sunday, June 20 (I'm not sure of the time yet) — if you're interested, I'm the person posing the very last question, assuming it makes the cut for C-SPAN.

Thursday, I spent the afternoon adding a wireless router to my office network. While a Wireless Access Point (WAP) would have made a lot more sense, I needed another switch, and a Linksys Wireless router includes a switch in addition to a WAP for the same price as just the Linksys WAP. The Linksys Wireless 54G Router installs pretty easily into an existing routed network. Just plug a standard ethernet cable coming from the other router into the fourth port of the router, disable the DHCP server on the wireless router and change its IP address so that it doesn't conflict with the wired router… and presto!

Today, I did a house call for a client — cleaning up her computer and returning her son's computer which had been dropped off to me for repairs earlier this week. Everything went well, and AdAware blasted a record (from my experience) 735 adware, malware and spyware programs from her computer. That should help a lot.

While I was there I also looked up available broadband services for her. She's about 11,000 feet from the DSL CO, meaning she can get SBC Yahoo! DSL, although it might not be the fastest. I then checked on Charter Pipeline, which was also available. At that point, I noticed that Pipeline's speed had been upped from 2 Mbps to 3 Mbps and decided to give Charter a call when I finished.

Before doing that I followed up on a speed test I had run yesterday and confirmed that my modem was only running at 765 Kbps instead of the promised 2 Mbps. So, I checked my modem's status page and it turned out I had been reprovisioned back down to the now non-existant 765 Kbps plan that costs $3 more than the faster plan I thought I should have. That explains why my bill didn't drop $3 starting in March like it was suppose to. Fortunately, the rep I got at Charter fixed my account settings, reprovisioned the modem and supposedly prorated my bill. Broadband Reports' Speed Test and CNet's Speed Test both seem to confirm that everything is now up to snuff. An extra megabit over my previous 2 Mbps connection is a real treat!

Tonight I took it easy, just doing a few minor projects like moving some of the final data off my old server and onto ServerForest. Then I watched a part of the Reagan memorial at the Reagan Library on C-SPAN. I found Michael Reagan's eulogy especially touching. I was also impressed by the Biblically strong sounding pastor of the Reagans. It is unusual to hear a prayer “in Jesus name” and speeches including many references to Christ from even pastors, if they are given the opportunity to do a big public event. This pastor did those things, and that was certainly nice for a change.

So, that's my week. I type this as I lay on my bed, getting ready to turn off the PB and call it a night. How was your week?

Tomorrow, Tomorrow

Tomorrow, I will be going to the Kirkwood Civic Center for something rather fun. Charlie Brennan, of KMOX radio St. Louis (AM 1120, which can be heard around most of the country when conditions are right at night), will be broadcasting live there and a local pancake place, Chris's Pancakes, will be providing breakfast as well.

CSPAN is coming to St. Louis and you are invited! CSPAN will tape a broadcast of KMOX's “The Morning Meeting” with Charles Brennan on June 9, 2004 from 9 to 11 a.m. The program will originate from the Kirkwood Civic Center in Kirkwoood, MO. The featured guest will be bestselling author Bill Sammon of Fox News and the Washington Times. Please join us by calling 314-444-1842. Admission is free. Food provided by Chirs' Pancakes and Dining.

I'll let y'all know how it goes.