Time Got Away from Tim
Yes, I did… it got away from me today. So, I guess y'all will have to wait until tomorrow to hear from me about what I've been up to. Sorry.
I'm Sorry...
…for the lack of posting. Things have been hectic this week, but I'll try to get back to posting something a bit more substantial tomorrow or Saturday (at the latest).
Better Late than Never...
In January of last year, my church started reading through the Bible to go along with a two year, all-the-way-through-the-Bible sermon series. To aid in this, we offered One Year Bibles, and I bought one of them. I intended to finish per schedule on December 31, 2004. As it turned out, I soon fell behind, and despite a few weeks where I read two days worth of readings at a time, I found it was hopeless. As it would turn out, I ended up three months and twenty seven days behind schedule.
Does that twenty seven days sound familar? If it does, that's because today is the day I finally finished. Sure, I should be over a quarter of the way through my second time around, but I'm happy to have made it through once. Tomorrow, I suppose, I shall start back on January 1; part of me thought maybe I should try a different reading schedule and return to this one at the beginning of 2006 (thereby again syncronizing my reading with the actual calendar), but I really liked how this Bible organized the readings and I don't think the dates matter all that much, so long as you can remember which one you did last (or use a bookmark).
At any rate, I'd recommend the One Year Bible to anyone looking for a convenient way to read through the Bible. I have the NLT version, but they have it in other editions as well. Even if it takes you the better part of a year and a half, I think you'll find it works out pretty well.
I'm So Tired I Can't Sleep
That sums it up. I'm tired because I've been working like crazy for the last few days, but my mind is racing from everything I've been doing and so I'm not really in the right state to get to sleep. I think I'm going to go read for a bit and see if that helps.
Though grand, the day does now grant to the night,
I call, 'Let sleep come on before the light.'
Late Night Haiku VI
XIV.
A glorious day,
Brings me to rejoice this eve;
Grasp its dying hour.
XV.
The plan unplanned is
Far greater than the one set,
Life made in moments.
XVI.
A sole dogwood tree,
Waves in wind with grace and joy,
Preview of the day.
Computer Still Reeling
Well, as I noted last weekend, I cloned my old hard disk and switched to a new one after some odd crashes occurred and the old disk started emitting peculiar noises. I thought the problem was solved, but the system kept crashing. And started crashing more frequently. So I disconnected the old hard disk completely (previously, I switched to booting from the new disk, but left the old one connected).
Problem solved. Or not. Things just kept getting worse. Soon my system was freezing in a specific pattern four or five times a day. I placed a terminal window running top on the side of my screen so that I could try to see what was happening at the moment of the crash, but nothing terribly useful was yieled in my quest for the problem. So, I am now attempting the final, most severe attempt at eliminating all software-related problems: I wiped my new hard disk clean and have now completed a fresh install of OS X, redownloaded all of the updates using Software Update, reinstalled iLife '04, reconfigured Mail (partially — still working on that), recopied my data (which I stored on my iPod to the extent that I could fit it on there), synced with .Mac to bring back my address book/contacts/calendar, and so on. The system is almost back to where I had it, save for a few applications I have not yet copied back over (MS Office 2004 and jEdit, for instance). Frustratingly, to keep this test from being compromised, I cannot simply copy my entire old home directory back in place, which would restore all of my settings (afterall, Mac OS X is UNIX-based); thus I have the need to reconfigure everything, just incase the settings files of my user account where corrupt at all.
And now I wait. I wait to see if it crashes. I am hoping this will solve the problem, leaving me in the same position I thought I was last Sunday of simply trying to prove to Apple to give me a new hard disk, rather than searching for other problems too. I am guessing the cloning procedure was corrupted by the fact that the old hard disk had/has a problem and that this ruined the integrity of the data to enough of an extent as to cause crashes, but I do not know that for sure.
I do know that if this works out, I will be installed OS X again on Friday or Saturday. This time, though, I'll be installing Tiger (10.4, which comes out on Friday), not Panther (10.3), and I will be doing it to gain new features rather than hunt down odd bugs.
Photo Quest #1
As I said yesterday, I'm not now participating in Flip's Photo Quest meme. Here are the photos and accompanying descriptions for this month's quest:
1. This is my sock drawer drawer, which also collects other miscellaneous stuff, such as my iPod, which you can see in the small black case on the right side. Normally there are some black socks in there that would add contrast, but none of them are clean at the moment.
2. The second photo is of a gas station. This one is a bp station, located in Chesterfield, MO, that was converted from an Amoco last year. The picture size makes it a bit hard to see the prices, which were $2.10/gallon for regular unleaded and $2.20 for “silver” unleaded (though unlisted, I presume premium was $2.30). All prices have 9/10 of an additional cent on them, so you might as well round up a penny. This was taken last Saturday, and was about in the middle of the range between QuikTrip at $2.05/gal. and a ConocoPhilips station that was charging $2.15/gal. For my European friends, that is €0.42/liter (or $0.55/liter).
3. A generic, empty electrical wall plate. Normally this one is behind some equipment, so it is rarely used.
4. This is my beloved omelet pan, which I submit for the frying pan portion of the quest. This pan is just the right size for a nice, fluffy three egg omelet. It hasn't been getting much attention lately, however.
5. Some shampoo. I'm not picky brand wise.
PhotoQuest
Well, I signed up last week to participate in Flip's PhotoQuest meme. I had good intentions to get the photos up a few days ago, but have not. I have completed the quest, but it is getting late, so I guess I'll have to defer for one more day… but tomorrow, prepare to be amazed. Or maybe not, after all, none of the pictures are amazing, so why should you be amazed?
A New Kind of Problem
Well, the new pope has been in office for two days (well, unofficially, I guess — I know his installation into “office” has not occurred yet) and he already has a 21st century kind of problem to deal with. Cybersquatting, namely.
It seems that a creative Floridian decided, just before Pope John Paul II died, to buy up the names he thought a new pope might go by. As it turns out, he hit the “jackpot” with BenedictXVI dot com (personally, I do not recommend visiting the site, as I understand he has ads on it, and I have no desire to support cybersquatting). He wants a papal hat and a free stay at the Vatican in exchange for the name.
I wonder where that puts him in Dante's Inferno? 
Unsatisfactory Simplicity
It would seem that the philosophical system that focuses on eliminating unsatisfactory beliefs, is, in fact, unsatisfactory. Why would this be? Perhaps one can argue that we should return to the idea that humans have some kind of innate desire for the supernatural. We could follow Freud’s line of thought and suggest that this originates from some kind of primeval neurosis or we could follow the ideas of C.S. Lewis and argue that God has placed natural law within us that causes us turn and look for the One beyond the Many. At any rate, we do seem to have a hardwired need to have someone save us.
As I wrote in a past consideration of savior figures (not presently available online, although I should remedy that), “people need the hope of a solution to the problems that plague everyday life, those problems that have no clear answer.” While the Buddha offers what appears to be help for the realization of life’s “unsatisfactoriness,” it is an introspective solution that still leaves the actual saving to the individual. The Buddha is what I would term a “philosophical savior” – he may provide “right thinking,” but the individual receives no substitionary assistance against the sea of troubles that rushes toward him or her. As an American monk, in the classic video series the Long Search with Ronald Eyre, explained, it is all about looking in one’s self. This is comforting to some extent, for we do like the idea of accomplishing our own salvation, but at the same time we seem to sense that we cannot do what needs to be done. If everything depends on me, it seems that I may be in trouble, especially if it is a mental process on which my fate hinges.
Therefore, it seems reasonable that those shown a system like Buddhism may find the simplicity of its system worth trying to adopt, but cannot face dukka, if we wish to call it that, or “the fall,” in Christian terminology, without a life preserver thrown our way. If we acknowledge that there is a cohesive order of some sort in the universe, be it God or the Void, it just seems logical to acknowledge that there must be some help outside ourselves unless the universe is just a cruel joke. We should not ignore the possibility that the universe is a cruel joke, or simply completely gratuitous, but if one has reached the point of acknowledging that a religion offers the key to understanding life, the universe and everything, it seems that we have already moved past the idea that there is no hope at all.
The question I would ask is this: can anyone truly eliminate the belief in a savior completely? As an atheist, C.S. Lewis was angry with God for not existing; that is, even when he did not believe, he believed enough to place the blame on God. I suspect most people who do not acknowledge a belief in a savior, still have someone or something in mind that serves a scapegoat; however they do not acknowledge it to others, or perhaps even themselves. While I am not a Buddhist monk, and cannot know what goes on in a monk’s mind, I wonder if it isn’t something like the mindset of the Deists. As Deists believed that their good works would, in the end, tip the cosmic scale of justice in their favor despite acknowledging failing to be perfectly good, I suspect that many Buddhists may realize they cannot eliminate desire, for even the desire to eliminate desire is a desire, but hope that they will be “desire-less enough” to accomplish their goal. In either case, there is an unmentioned component to the hope. Despite acknowledging an absolute standard, we start to figure that in our cases, the rules will surely be bent just a little. Once we reach this point, there is an assumed savior, for anything that bends the rules for us would be, by definition, someone saving us – a savior.
In the end, no matter how we try to work it out, we come back to this need to be saved. I would submit that the unsatisfactoriness of our own efforts is precisely why Theravada Buddhism does not generally exist “in the wild” without being combined with other spiritual beliefs that help with this need.
