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.
Pray Believing!
This thread at SCF was exactly what I needed to read tonight, especially Kevin's post. He said his new motto is “Pray Believing!” and that reminded me how often I fail to do just that.
When praying, I often find myself saying “Lord, if this is possible…” But wait a second, if I have faith, why am I saying if this is possible? So I correct myself, it is possible, after all, all things are possible for God.
Yet the problem is not over just yet. Then I resort to what Kevin called a “timid 'well, I guess if you want to do it, God, it would be okay, but I understand if you don't' prayer.” I have tried in the past to remind myself of Matthew 17:20, but all too often I find that I don't keep this verse's lesson in mind.“For most assuredly I tell you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will tell this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”Kevin quoted the similar verse Mark 11:22-23 and that too is worth marking in my brain. There are things I have been praying about that I am convinced are things God has led me to pursue. If I am convinced of this, why do I always prefix my requests with if's? If I am not even confident in asking, I certainly do not have the mustard seed faith to move a mountain; Jesus' example is one of confidently asking for that which one believes to be God's will. While I could certainly be wrong about where God is leading me, I should trust that God will show me that, if need be, and instead focus on praying with the confidence that He has led me to seek this path.
It is simple enough to say that. Now I must try to live it. I need to “Pray Believing!”
Ratzinger's It
In case you've been in a cave all day, German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (78), has been chosen as the new pope under the name Benedict XVI. He is the first German to serve the office since the sixteenth century. It is a bit of irony, I suppose, that the last German pope, Andrian VI, presided just after the beginning of the Reformation schism and I believe the last German pope before that, Victor II, was the first pope elected after the Great Schism of 1054; take that for what you will. The new pontiff does not look to be too much a of friend of ecumenism, having previously criticized the Protestant churches that have established dialog with Rome. On the other hand, his orthodoxy is a good thing in many ways as opposed to electing someone who might have been inclined to lead the church in too liberal of direction.
Ratzinger has previously served as prefect of the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” better known by its old name: the Inquisition.
On a Lighter Note
And, timely enough, a theologian friend of mine passed on a little humor concerning the Cardinal turned newly elected Pontiff. The story goes that Cardinal Ratzinger dies and goes to Heaven. When he arrives there he waits with two other theologians to talk to God. The first one goes to see God, and comes back weeping. “How could I have been so wrong for so long,” he sobs. The second theologian is nervous but goes in and comes back out weeping and exclaiming “How could I have been so wrong for so long?” Then the Cardinal goes in to see God. Soon after God comes out weeping and says “How could I have been wrong for so long?”
Hard Disk Problems
Well, after spending some time last month helping my pastor with his dying hard disk, it seems I caught the same bug, so to speak. Early last week, my PowerMac G5 started to emit an odd sound — I ignored it at first. Then on Friday, I noticed that my hard disk was a lot noisier during drive access than before. Shortly thereafter, Mac OS X crashed — one of the only times it has ever done so. Taking note of this, I called AppleCare on Saturday, went through a bunch of tests, but came up with no problems on the drive.
Given that it was continuing to emit noises, I decided to go with my gut and buy another drive to back the whole thing up to. I purchased the newer variant of the same drive (both the new and old drives are Seagate 160 GB 7200 RPM SATA disks, but the newer one supports “NCQ”), installed it quickly, thanks to the effortless and tool-less hard disk install procedure that Apple engineered, and then used CarbonCopy Cloner to make a perfect copy of my old drive. Less than two hours after I opened the box for the new drive, I was running OS X and all of my applications on the new disc, with the old one relegated to backup status. The majority of that time was waiting for files to copy; it took 89 minutes to clone 70 GB of data from the old drive to the new one.
Still, I need to figure out a way to prove to AppleCare that something is fishy with the old drive. Today, the system froze twice, each time when I tried to do something fairly intensive with the old hard disk. This is unusual for OS X, which is as stable as you'd expect a BSD Unix to be, that is, rock solid. Since the drive is under warranty for another year and a half, perhaps I just need to wait for it to die completely or do something that will allow diagnostics to detect the problem, but I'd really rather have them send me a new drive now so that I can trust what has become my backup drive. If I can convince them to do so, I'd have two reliable hard disks, allowing for redundancy.
