CYOA 4.5: Gregorian Chants

Riley tried to steady her head as an FBI agent named Mark Stevenson droned on about the situation. How had Jon gotten himself involved in this?

“Mrs. Turner, I’d like to say I know who has Mr. Turner and your son, but I’m afraid the local detective has proven less than cooperative in providing us with information. Fortunately, I had a wiretap installed on the department’s phone line and was able to get some key information that my associate is processing at the moment. It seems a group named the Variant Alliance is involved.

“Unfortunately, your county’s detective happens to be the FBI’s former man in charge of Alliance activity, a post that was not filled after his resignation from the agency. I’m afraid if he doesn’t cooperate, finding your family is going to be quite difficult, but I’ll be darned before I’m going to beg a county detective to cooperate.”

“Sir, with all due respect, we’re talking about my family here. If you have to prostrate yourself before the jerk, do it. I just want to know where Jon and Isaiah are… before, before…” Turner’s voice broke up and she started to weep.

Stevenson had a strange sensation come over him; he actually pitied the sobbing woman in front of him. He flipped open his phone and dialed Herrick. Maybe he could intimidate Herrick into cooperating. “Stevenson here. You’re in a lot of trouble, Detective. I took some liberties to listen into your conversation with Mr. Dakmoore and see you’ve been keeping a lot of information to yourself. What exactly are planning to do – play Mr. Hero and save the day? I’m going to talk to Chief Jonson and ask that you be suspended.”

“I’m not surprised you did that. Look, Stevenson, I had my reasons… I’ll meet you at 1700 hours and I’ll brief you on what I know. But I need your assurance that you’ll keep me on the case and play by the rules I know will work in dealing with Dakmoore. They’ve just taken… they’ve taken another person.”

“I’d be interested in your briefing, but I’m afraid I’m still going to have to talk with Jonson. You’re clearly not a team player, so I have no room for you on my team.”

“Look, Stevenson, they’ve taken my fiancée. I need to be on this case.”

“The last thing I need is to have someone with a personal cause on this case, detective. I’m going to have to take over this case. Your behavior has only reinforced my dim view of local departments and frankly your sudden willingness to cooperate is quite telling.”

“So we agree on something – I’m not exactly thrilled with you either. But listen, you know I’m the only one who knows how the Variant Alliance works. They have some demands that need to at least appear to be satisfied; this is something I cannot accomplish alone and you know good and well that you’re never going to get this case solved without me. Leave Jonson out of this – you know you need my help and, while I hate to admit it, I need yours.”

“That’s not my style, detective.”

Riley glared at Stevenson. What was he doing? It sounded like he was refusing to work with the detective that he had just finished saying he needed help from. All of these agents were alike – big heads and no compassion for those actually being affected by crime, she thought. “What’s wrong with you, you, idiot, do whatever he wants,” she blurted out. She couldn’t believe she had just said that to an FBI agent.

Stevenson turned and cast a surprised look her way.

“Look,” Herrick said, “I never kept the information from you to hurt Mrs. Turner – I know I know this group better than anyone else, and I made a call that I could work better alone. Dakmoore is keeping an even closer eye on me than I expected, however, and without some serious action occurring, I think he is going to kill all three of his hostages tomorrow. Let’s save these games for later and stop the Alliance before they proceed. OK?”

Stevenson sighed, he didn’t like being put in a situation where he must cooperate with a defiant local detective, but Turner’s exclamation made him feel a bit guilty. Perhaps he was acting just like Herrick. At the very least, he was not sure how he’d solve the case if he didn’t garner Herrick’s cooperation.

What will you do? Show you are the superior agent that you know you are and agree to work with Herrick for the good of Mrs. Turner. (5.9) Hang up on Herrick and go see about getting him taken off the case and the force. (5.10)

How to Continue CYOA
The first two people to comment here requesting to do so will get to continue the story on their blogs. Just pick which story direction suits you and run with it. Why not give it a try?

As Christopher explains on his blog entry about this, you will probably want to link backward to the previous part (or perhaps both previous parts) so that someone new can read the whole story. Also, it will be helpful if you title your piece with your option number, and likewise provide numbers to correspond with the options at the end of your segment of the story so that things continue in an easy to follow fashion.

Christopher has given permission for participants to “steal” his CYOA graphic (featured at the beginning of this piece), so you may want to include that in your entry for easy identification. Have fun!

Dishing Out About Cable

The other day, it dawned on me. My telephone is digital service provided by the cableco, as is my internet access. Yet, I have a satellite dish. Surely, the cableco could offer something to make it worth my time to switch to cable tv, too, right?

Now, Dish Network has been good to work with. They have good technical support and they were offering a “free” DVR before anyone else. On the other hand, the Weather Channel lacks local forecasts, I can't get any of the local public service channels (occasionally, for instance, the City of St. Peters might have something interesting on, as does Lindenwood U.), and the DVR is not a dual tuner, so if it is recording, you can only watch what you are recording (that doesn't make much sense, now does it?). Dish, these days, gives you a dual-tuner recorder, but they want fifty bucks to replace the old one that I now own, since I was under contract. The one $50 will get me will be a no-charge leased unit instead of one that is mine to keep (although what you do with a satellite tuner/DVR if you cancel service is beyond me anyway…).

So, I called the cable company, Charter Communications. After talking to several people and getting multiple different answers, I finally got the bottom line: they offer about $13 in discounts for getting the “triple play” package (phone, internet and TV), but they are more expensive than Dish, so I'll end up at the same price point as before. Their DVR is also only a 40 hour one versus the 100 hour one that Dish gives out. On the other hand, they offer the aforementioned channels and some others, a GNU/Linux based DVR (a Moxi box) that can be expanded with an external hard disk, photo card readers, etc., and you can even transfer non-flagged material over Firewire to a computer or burner. Moreover, it consolidates all communication and media services onto one bill.

The question is whether it is a wise choice. Charter is ranked lowest for technical support of major providers. In my experience with their internet service, it is pretty good actually, although presently I need to get a technician out because I cannot download anything of substantial size (100 MB or more) without losing the connection). On the bright side, they have a new CEO who is promising to focus the company's resources on improving support and since I live in Charter's home city, we'll probably see any improvements first…

Google Maps Now for Safari

Google seems to have finally made Maps available for Safari, which is a real treat. It seems very user friendly and I like the fact that you can drag maps around and zoom in/out without having to wait for the page to reload. The only thing they could do to improve it is make a way to point out to the program if it gives you a route you do not want to take. I was trying it out, and it seemed to like going through various crime ridden areas to get there rather than taking the freeway. Sure, I like to save two minutes as much as the next guy, but it is not always worth it.

Tim in the Hands of an Angry God?

When I run into Jonathan Edward's Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God once in a week, I stop and think about his masterful sermon. When I run into it twice in the same amount of time, I start to really ponder it. When I run into it three times in a week, I start to wonder if someone is trying to tell me something.

On Sunday, our pastor preached a sermon that was based in part on Edward's sermon. On Tuesday morning, my American Lit class studied Edward's sermon by chance, since the professor had been sick the week before and therefore was behind schedule. On Tuesday afternoon, my Religion in America class took an unscheduled detour to hear part of the sermon preached by the professor. I don't know but I'm starting to get a bit paranoid!

102.

That's the number of brute force attempts on Cedar since November. It is depressing to think that so many people have tried enough to set the alarm off. There are, of course, many more that tried only a few times. Like e-mail spam and blog spam, all of this seems to be done by bots; if the number of bots continues to increase at its alarming rate, it seems inevitable that the house of cards will fall… it is just a matter of when.

Road Map

Ok, so here's the deal. I'm (re)learning Koine Greek. So far, I'm making progress on parts that stumped me previously. I've also spent a good amount of time refreshing myself on stuff I already knew at sometime in the past but no longer could recall in a productive fashion. I wasn't sure if taking 3 out of the 15 hours of my semester schedule and dedicating it to a course that fulfills absolutely no requirements was a good idea, but now that I'm in the midst of it, I think it was a good choice.

The interesting thing is that the instructor taught himself Latin last year so that he could teach that as well. Apparently, he says it is relatively easy to learn Latin once you get use to Greek. Ideally, I will be good to go with Greek by the end of the semester — not a Greek whiz, but with enough knowledge to work my way through it. Where to go from there is the question, but the professor's remarks about Latin have me intrigued.

I'm thinking about trying to see if I could teach myself Latin later this year. If I could do that, presumably, it would make it easier to reach a practical goal: to learn Spanish. In the future it will be a necessity to know Spanish around here (see my previous post on that, here), so I need to quit talking and accomplish something about that soon. This might help and allow me to pick up one of the nicest sounding languages ever to be created along the way.

Ayeeeee! IE!

Well, it dawned on me - stupid me - that I have IE:mac at my disposal. Sure, it isn't the same as IE for Windows, but maybe it wouldn't hurt to try out the site in it… Ouch! It looked horrible. So, I tinkered until I realized that my position: relative settings made IE go crazy in some cases (not all). So, I removed as many as I could without disrupting the design and IE:mac now shows the front page pretty well, save for the missing logo on top (I can't figure out why that doesn't show up). The site continues to load fine for me on my browsers, but if y'all would let me know if I messed up or fixed anything from your perspectives, that'd help. Thanks for being guinea pigs.

As I mentioned to Kevin in the comments of the last post, the boxes on the right side are suppose to be sticking off a bit for visual interest. Of course, if it just looks bad, let me know.

Welcome to the New Design

Finally Moving Ahead for My Blog's Third Year

2001: Original Site There wasn't a blog here yet, nor much of anything else. I built the site because I thought it was time I had a personal website. For years, I had been building sites for my company and for others, but never one for myself. Thus one Saturday evening, Tim's Site was born. Minimalism was the object — it was going to be a site where I posted stuff, not were I spent lots of time tinkering with the design.

2001-2002: The Blue and Penguin Theme The site took a turn for the worst in the summer, in my estimation, here when I introduced this interesting combination of my “famous” little rendition of Tux, an ugly blue color and Comic Sans MS for the text. This was a dark day in my web design history. My blog premiered on the site one month before the demise of this design.

2002-2003: Green the First Green being my favorite color, it was inevitable that it would show up on my site eventually. This design was one I worked on over Easter weekend, maintaining the navigation bar of the blue theme, but soothing colors, a more professional feel and no more Comic Sans MS. This design is the foundation of all future iterations of the site until the present one I am introducing today.

2003: asisaid premiers Sitting one day with a notepad in front of me, I started writing down names I could use for my site. Now that it had become mostly a blog, it seems to deserve a decent name. I picked asisaid while thinking of e-mail debates in which I would often reference back to what I had said by saying “as I said,” since people often don't seem to listen in debate (yes, I love to debate). I could also imagine some nice looking logos for it. The first asisaid design was the same as the 2002-2003 green design, save for the header. I do not have the original asisaid header handy, but the one in the picture was incorporated into the design within about two months.

2003-2004: Blue Returns, or the Christmas Theme that Stuck This was the last design to grace the late, great Ciaran's Journal blogging tool. It started out with the Christmas theme with a nativity and then gained the green hill when I got attached to the design and wanted to keep it for the rest of the year. The design was the same as the 2002-2003 green design and 2003 asisaid green design, save for the colors, the hill on top, and the purple/blue background behind the blogroll (instead of the previous white background).

2004-2005: SAFARI Blues After the old blog tool died, I started restoring the site, and came close to making it look the same as the 2003-2004 design. However, I never completely replicated it, leaving out a few things such as the “Recently Said” graphic in favor of a quote du jour (I had started using quotes at the top in October 2004, but had kept the “Recently Said” graphic until I imported the theme into SAFARI.

2005: Green the Second This is the present theme. It is the first theme to ditch almost all tables in favor of a CSS layout. The blog entries may violate W3C standards, but the template is verified as XHTML Transitional and CSS 2.0. Not exactly as dramatic as the War of the Roses, but the battle between green and blue continues as green sweeps back into control of the site. You'll notice it uses similar colors and a similar logo backdrop to the 2003 asisaid design. It's logo background also recalls the November 2002 logo banners of the Sakamuyo log, which I had designed for Kevin. On the other hand, I have aimed to make this theme cleaner, more legible and more user friendly than past designs. I nuked the 2001-style navigation bar that linked to a bunch of outdated pages in favor of a new one, placed a special box just for quotes on the right side, and made a few other tweaks. You'll also notice that I kept the hill scene, but moved it to the bottom of the page. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Blank

My mind is blank right now. I sat down with some ideas to post and they vanished. Oh well.

I did realize something tonight. I can now say that I am now just two months away from completing my first pass through my One Year Bible. Assuming I stay on track, that will mean I'm just about four months behind (or eight months ahead). I really like the One Year Bible. While I've tried other reading plans, the fact that I can just flip it open and have that day's reading organized right there in front of me, rather than having to look at a schedule and then flip to the passages. Despite being behind, all I need to do is use a bookmark and I can easily keep track of what the next reading should be.

Now, just to stay on track for the next two months.

There Goes Another Night

I've just spent the night trying — well, I guess I shouldn't post quite yet, since I post under my real name. Let's just say sometimes I feel even more reassured than normal that I am doing the best thing getting out of the consulting business.

I'll also say that this incident can be blamed for it being at least tomorrow before I'll get the new site design up here. sigh

Fellow consultants and others that must deal with “users” trying to figure out computers, feel free to share your “war stories” below.