TQ: Jobs

Here are my answers to this week's TQ from Mark.

1. What was your first real job; part of full time? Cutting the grass on weekends doesn't count unless you worked for someone other then yourself.

If it has to be working for someone other than myself, then I guess I still don't have a “real job,” and probably won't for a long while. Nevertheless, the self-employed (and/or “freelance”) person that I am, the first memorable money producing job was probably doing some Perl development in 1998 or getting my first sell of advertising (to Microsoft, incidentally) on a site I was producing in 1997.

2. What was your worse job ever? How long did you last? What made it so bad?
Taking job to be project, since I've never really changed jobs: I'd say producing an auction metasearch a few years back. The pay was very good (I kept raising the price because I wanted out of the project, but the client was willing to pay even my escalated pricing), but it was just a miserable, mindnumbing project of combing HTML pages for traits I could use to figure out where key data was at auction site after auction site. It lasted a few months, ending after the site launched and no one seemed to care to use it.

3. If money were not an issue, and you could change careers right now, what would you start doing?

What I hope to be doing in 5-6 years. Teaching theology and religious studies at a college (four year, perhaps liberal arts, not Bible college) or university. My primary focus would be in the philosophy of religion. In an ideal world, I'd also be able to dabble in my other academic interests, particularly literature and economics. Money isn't the issue, credentials are — I need to get through at least a masters, if not a Ph.D. before this is going to happen.

4. My mother has said countless times that she would rather work for a man boss then a women boss? What is your opinion on the subject of male vs female bosses?

I have never taken well to bosses, I'll admit, hence why I've found being my own boss a much more ideal situation (though, in reality, doing my job means every client is my boss). I'd have to say it depends much more on the individual than the gender — I've worked with and under both men and women; both can be hard at times.

5. What do you think the ultimate job (for anyone) would be?

To me, I think the ultimate job would be an academic job. What could be better than exploring your favorite subject, doing research and writing on it, and teaching it to the next generation of those interested in your field? Of course, I realize I find academia much more appealing than many people do. I tend to think there is no one ultimate job, to be honest.

Note: The questions on this page written by Mark are governed by the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.5 license. I believe my responses are allowed under fair use and therefore are not licensed under the Creative Commons license (I don't want people messing with adapting my personal opinions, thank you very much).

The Apple Code

My blogging buddy (and friendly OS nemesis) Mark had a fascinating dream that sounds almost like the Da Vinci Code turned into a story about operating systems. Mark would make a good substitute for Prof. Robert Langdon in such a book — maybe he should write it, after all, computer debates do have a tendency to take on a religious feel.

Unfortunately, Mark still has not seen the light concerning Mac OS X, so I need to help him understand the nature of this “insanely great” platform.

Now 5x Faster! Mark rightly questions how Apple could go from claiming that PowerPC was better than x86 to announcing the new Intel Macs are “5x faster.” You'll notice that the 5x number only shows up on the comparison of PowerBook vs. MacBook laptops. This is for the simple reason that Apple couldn't get a PowerPC G5 processor into a PowerBook, and hence everyone was still using a Pentium III-era competitor in the Pentium M and D-era. I think very few were deluded in this regard. The PowerBooks do handle extremely well given their aging architecture, but that's a testament to *nix not to the architecture (though RISC still seems admirable in many ways). I would suggest that the PowerPC remains a superior architecture (even Linus says so!), but that PowerPC needed someone of the likes of Intel or AMD to be pushing its desktop-oriented progress forward for it to have become a success (PowerPC's manufacturers primarily focus on the embedded space).

The Mac Pro is a different story. If you look at the numbers, while it is faster, it isn't that much faster, especially when you consider it came out almost a year after the PowerMac G5 Quad. The Xeon should be faster, because it is significantly newer and has more cache and other goodies. If we ask whether the PowerPC G5 was “slow” because a processor that is a year newer and has more cache happens to go a small amount faster, then we should also ask if pre-Woodcrest Xeons are perhaps “slow” too. The answer, of course, is no, they are just older. In fact, even in the case of the PowerBook, I would add that the Intel Core line of processors not only speeds things up because of the delay in any significant upgrades for the G4 series laptops, but also because Intel has made seismic leaps in progress over the last six months.

As a whole, no surprises, if we don't look to find fault with Apple just for the sake of finding fault.

Apple the iPod Maker. It is true that Apple now draws a significant portion of profit from the iPod, but I would note that it is still a minority of their business, and most people now seem to have come to grips with the reality that it cannot be Apple's primary focus forever — especially now that Microsoft has decided to go into its “we'll lose money for as long as it takes to beat our target” mode against the iPod. I don't think anyone other than Sony (with their PlayStation) and Google have held up to Microsoft when it decides to lose short term money in order to win a market, and right now even Sony is in for the fight of its life. The Redmond road is littered with companies such as Netscape and Palm that have been unable to resist Microsoft.

Apple the Evil DRM User. iTunes does not make the iPod DRM laden. If you never use the iTunes Music Store, you will never touch DRM. It is that simple. Now, why do pragmatic foes of DRM such as myself use the iTunes Music Store? Because every once-in-a-while I'd like one song from an artist, and I sure like paying ninety-nine cents a lot better than $13.99 for that one track. (And, by the way, you do get a nice digitized album cover in that price, and if you buy the whole CD you often get a digitized booklet and perhaps a music video, so the point about lack of album art is moot.) I don't know how many others are like me, but I for the most part have what I call my “two track rule.” If I try a new artist (or old one, for that matter) and find that I want to buy more than two tracks from a given CD, I refuse to buy any more from iTMS and wait until I feel like coughing up the price for a normal CD. Right now, for example, I have an embargo on buying any tracks from MercyMe because I have bought a track or two from each of their CD's, and now I'm going to either buy nothing more from them or buy a real CD from them.

Apple the Stealer of Virtual Desktops. XGL vs. Spaces is really a stupid kind of comparison. This is really looking at things backwards. While it is true that XGL and related technologies have provided 3D representations of virtual desktops first, I would note that all of these FOSS implementations appeared initially as ways of cloning Apple's Exposé, which premiered in June of 2003 at WWDC and was released to market in October 2003 as part of OS X 10.3 Panther. Spaces continues by adding the virtual desktops that FOSS has had for years, yes, but Apple was the one that came up with 3D accelerated navigation of running applications — Spaces is a logical extension of Exposé. Yes, Apple is copying virtual desktops, but XGL is nothing more than playing catchup with Apple's Quartz Extreme (which showed up in OS X 10.2 Jaguar in 2002) and the aforementioned Expose. Apple was the first to offer an OpenGL hardware accelerated desktop, something Linux is just starting to offer in a consumer oriented distro this summer and Windows will not offer until next year.

Booking It Some More: LOTR

In my last post, I promised to redo the book meme, this time going with the book unquestionably closest to me. As it turned out, there was a book right behind me last night I didn't even notice. The Lord of the Rings: the Complete Best-Selling Classic is the rightful book to submit for this little amusement.

Open the book to page 123 and find the fifth sentence.

“Its walls were of clean stone, but they were mostly covered with green hanging mats and yellow curtains.”

Post the text of the next three sentences on your blog along with these instructions.

“The floor was flagged, and strewn with fresh green rushes. There were four deep mattresses, each piled with white blankets, laid on the floor along one side. Against the opposite wall was a long bench laden with wide earthenware basins, and beside it stood brown ewers filled with water, some cold, some steaming hot.”

(This is my first reading through the Lord of the Rings, by the way.)

Not What I Usually Quote on Here

Christopher tagged me with this interesting meme.

1. Grab the nearest book.

I walked over to the nearest set of books (not being in the middle of a research project, I don't have any books on my desk), which — as I quickly remembered — is my Scripture shelf. Between me and the shelf is a bunch of books, but these books are ones I ordered for classes this fall and have not unpacked yet, so I continued to go with looking on the shelf. Not wanting to type in Greek characters and thinking simply opening up an English Bible wouldn't provide anything terribly unusual for this little meme, I decided to grab the first non-Bible book on the shelf. Is that cheating? I went past the standard Bibles, past the Greek Bibles, past the Torah and Tanak, which took me into Other Scriptures (I try to be somewhat organized so I can find what I need when I need it, although I have a ton of books to reclassify at the moment). Ah, the first one there is the Qu'ran. (Penguin Classics' The Koran translated by N. J. Dawood.)

Ok, that should prove interesting.

2. Open the book to page 123 and find the fifth sentence.

“Then others succeeded them who inherited the Book and took to the vanities of this nether life.” (That's from 7.167, for those interested.)

3. Post the text of the next three sentences on your blog along with these instructions.

'We shall be forgiven,' they said. And if such vanities came their way once more, they would again indulge in them. Are they not committed in the Scriptures, which they have studied well to tell nothing of God but what is true?

4. Don’t you dare dig for that ‘cool’ or ‘intellectual’ book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

Well, I provided the caveats to my selection above. I'll try again tomorrow and select a book without any caveats. To make sure I don't time my search so that I'm by “cool” books, I'll try to look at as close to 4:30 P.M. as possible.

5. Tag three people.

Ed, Eduardo and Mark. (All readers of asisaid should consider themselves tagged, for that matter.)

Chihuly at the Missouri Botanical Gardens

Today marked the second time I've had the pleasure of seeing an exhibit featuring the glasswork and paintings of Dale Chihuly, the Seattle-based glass artist. This time was a bit unique: the setting was at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, the beautiful park of exotic (and not so exotic) gardens founded by Henry Shaw over a century ago. Chihuly's works graced not only the main building, but also the gardens themselves, including the reflecting ponds. I did not pay the price of admission to go into the Climatron and see the main exhibit, although I plan to go back to see that.

I've posted some photos of the day in my photo gallery.

Bye Bye St. Charles VW

Well, perhaps the “Butler curse” extends to more than just stocks. Today, Volkswagen of America wrote to say that the dealership I bought my Beetle from has lost its certification to sell VW's. They pointed out the four remaining St. Louis VW dealers and mentioned vaguely trying to bring another one to St. Charles.

Unofficially, I'm told that it has something to do with the fact that St. Charles VW failed to follow through on its agreement with VoA to build a new $5 million dollar showroom. That might sound petty if it wasn't for the fact that the VW dealership shares a somewhat poorly maintained building with Hyundai, Isuzu and Suzuki, whereas their Nissan dealership sits next door now in a building that surely cost at least $5 million, but I bet more.

Oh well.

Late Night Haiku XV

XXXXI. A stream babbles on,
Night slips into a new morn,
It is time to move on.

XXXXII. Moving. Seem to be,
But wasn't I hear last year?
Maybe I've not budged.

XXXXIII. Five, Seven, Five. It goes
simply. The Haiku cares not,
It just records thoughts.

Karl Barth and Universalism

So, does Barth say that all are saved? No. In fact, the patient reader will find on page 417, of the English translation, that Barth explicitly denies a traditional universalist position: insisting that all are saved impinges on God's Freedom just as much as insisting He should save any one person or none at all. If there is one thing that holds together Barth's theology it is that God is “the one who loves in freedom” (c.f.19, 95, 99). Of course, if he stopped here, one might naturally ask why anyone would think Barth a universalist. The problem is that Barth sees God's freedom as so overridingly important that he essentially takes an agnostic position on the issue. God, he says, can make the circle of “frontier crossings” — that circle of people who cross from the rejected to the elected — as wide or as narrow as He wishes (417). In His freedom, God can do whatever He wants.

What we see here is not an admittance of universalism. Instead, Barth is essentially rightly saying he does not know the mysterious will of God. How can we? We know that Jesus is the only way to salvation and that salvation requires spiritual rebirth, but just watching a group of Christians debate whether this or that person is “Christian” shows that we really don't know precisely the point at which one crosses into the Church Eternal. We know the rough outline, but questions such as what to do with “virtuous pagans” who never knew of the Gospel shows how mysterious salvation remains to us.

Like I said, Barth shifts the focus. He prods us. Why are we worrying about the litmus test of salvation? Jesus never told us to speculate about who or how many would be saved, he told us to make disciples of all nations (Mt. 28:19-20). Instead of concentrating on the negative (rejection) we should exclusively concentrate on the “future faith” of those who do not now believe (295-96). As Bradley Hanson writes in reference to Luther's view, we ought to “focus on God's revealed intention that all should be saved” (Hanson 254).

“Peculiar Christendom, whose most pressing problem seems to consist in this, that God's grace in this direction should be too free, that hell, instead of being amply populated, might one day perhaps be found empty.” (Short 149)

That is, Barth does not promote universalism but questions any overriding concern in the condemned as condemned. Admittedly, as Brown jokes in his book, Barth will never face a heresy execution for “espousing a doctrine of limited atonement,” but that still does not make him a Universalist (95). Instead, he takes a more radical, yet more orthodox, position by simply rejecting the church's overactive interest in restricting God's freedom in the matter. God has told us our job (to preach the Gospel) and as such, as John Keats says, that is “all [we] need to know.”

Works Cited
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics. Vol. 2.2 Trans. G. W. Bromiley, J. C. Campbell, Iain Wilson, et. al. Ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957.

Brown, Robert McAfee. The Collect'd Writings of St. Hereticus. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964.

Hanson, Bradley C. Introduction to Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.

Short, Robert L. The Parables of Peanuts. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002.

QOTW: Adopt a Theologian

I decided to revive my old Question of the Week meme once again. Let's start out with a bang.

Q - What theologian would you say you align yourself most closely to?

O - What appeals most about this theologian's theology?

T - How would you respond to those who disagree with that point?

W - What do you find yourself disagreeing with this theologian on?

Day After Tomorrow

Thanks to an airing on one of the Cinemax channels that I was able to nab via DVR a few weeks ago, I watched the Day After Tomorrow tonight. Given the critical thumbs down it seemed to receive, I did not have very high expectation for it, but it was able to exceed those expectations.

Note: this post is a spoiler on a number of plot elements.

This movie, in my opinion, shares a lot with the Da Vinci Code. Yes, more than that I happen to disagree with the world view displayed in each. More importantly, both dabble on the line between truth and fiction, and as such, probably mislead a lot of people unable to deal with such blurrings. In both cases, the fiction/fact blending is what makes the storyline compelling, so I'm not saying that such a mix is a bad thing, only that people need to be cautious.

Having watched the latest iteration of War of the Worlds a short while back, I couldn't help but see much of the plot as the same. An invasion from the skies, something covering most surfaces, cities utterly destroyed across the globe — in short, simply good summer mega budget movie fodder. The difference between the two movies is that far more people, people I'd not question the mental state of, believe in the eventual reality of Day After than of War of the Worlds. Aliens with tripods probably won't invade, but perhaps the Atlantic conveyer really will shut down.

If we get past that and put the two films on the same level, science fiction, then I would say that Day After Tomorrow offers a much more compelling version of the cataclysmic than does War of the Worlds. The acting was good and the characters were well written, likable people. While Tom Cruise never managed to make me care about his character's fate, Dennis Quiad did so early on in Day After. Both are men that are absorbed in their own projects to the detriment of their children, but Quaid's Jack Hall comes off as misguided, not just a jerk.

No, I don't think tomorrow we will face “super-cool” winds that will instantly freeze everything. But just because I don't expect something to happen doesn't mean it can't make for good fiction. We just have to remember it is fiction.

Other Notes of Biases: One other thing should be said. The film is politically tilted about as far as it could be without donkey logos flashing on the screen. The well meaning, if not terribly fast to respond, president looks very much like Al Gore, suggesting all kinds of possibilities. (“This is where Gore should be,” perhaps?) Likewise, the evil vice president, who later sees the light, has a Cheney-esque air to him, though not as much as the president matches Gore. More importantly to the story, the global cooling seems to stop for the most part precisely at the U.S. border, allowing Mexico to be the “good guy” that allows all of the “illegals” to come from the U.S. fleeing the storm. At the end of the movie, when the vice president has become president, he spells this out, noting the “hospitality” of the countries that we previously looked down on as “third world.” Finally, the last remarks from the space station note how clean the earth looks now that the Northern Hemisphere is shut down, but that seems unrealistic both because pollution wouldn't disappear that fast, and (here's what Hollywood doesn't want you to know) the worst pollution comes from newly industrialized countries such as the ones hosting the refugees.