I Can Only Imagine

Surrounded by Your glory, what will my heart feel
Will I dance for you Jesus or in awe of you be still
Will I stand in your presence or to my knees will I fall
Will I sing hallelujah, will I be able to speak at all
I can only imagine

— MercyMe, I Can Only Imagine

That's a powerful song — one of my favorites. I noticed the entirety of it is now online at www.mercymelive.com, an official part of MercyMe's web site. Rather than using RealMedia or Windows Media, MercyMe was nice enough to use Streaming MP3, so even GNU/Linux users can enjoy it without any issues. Streaming MP3's are also downloadable, here's the address: www.inorecords.com/columbia/icanonlyimagine.mp3.

While you are at it, if you like the song, take a moment to request it on your favorite radio station per the instruction on the site I linked to. Apparently this song has somehow managed to start playing on secular stations — I think it is worth letting those stations know we appreciate it!

Too much to do...

Well, it seems like every-time I start working on this one project I've been meaning to do for eons, I end up with something more urgent to do. It seems to have happened again — I finally started on the project and suddenly several clients need me and the church librarian has told me she needs a new inventory printer ASAP. Hmrf.

On a side note, I'm currently looking for a clock, in good condition, that has 15 hours on its face. If you have one and would like to sell it, please let me know!

Read My Lips: No Taxes?

Another fellow Missouri blog, Sophoristically Speaking, has an interesting entry. According to this entry, a Tennessee court has decided that there may not be a requirement to pay federal taxes. Interesting…

Thy Kingdom is the Fairest, Dear King

Your distinct personality, The Dreamer-Minstrel might be found in most of the thriving kingdoms of the time. You can always see the “Silver Lining” to every dark and dreary cloud. Look at the bright side is your motto and understanding why everything happens for the best is your goal. You are the positive optimist of the world who provides the hope for all humankind. There is nothing so terrible that you can not find some good within it. On the positive side, you are spontaneous, charismatic, idealistic and empathic. On the negative side, you may be a sentimental dreamer who is emotionally impractical. Interestingly, your preference is just as applicable in today's corporate kingdoms.

Also: ever think you've run into food that doesn't agree with you? Well, don't complain unless it is this bad.

The World as a Blog

Well, that's neat! I found World as a Blog, and when I signed on under my URL (to show I was online), I noticed Sisters' Weblog: It Boggles the Mind is also on… (hi Susan or Katie!). I thought that was kind of interesting that two b4G'ers were among the few people currently on that site. Even more interesting, for some reason it never dawned on me that the weblogging sisters aren't all that far away on the map (I should read their blogchalk entries better).

Blogging certainly does make the world seem smaller… I mean, who'd think that I'd end up running into a number of bloggers that are just a hop-skip-and-a-jump from here (Christopher, Pressed, and Le Renard)? For that matter, Jake isn't all that far from here either. Midwestern bloggers are clearly a force to be reckoned with! Perhaps we need to start a Midwestern Bloggers Association (MwBA).

I Dream of Jeannie Restarts Today

Since the pilot episode is being skipped over on primetime (they appear to be airing even numbered episodes this time around, they aired odd numbered ones since Jeannie arrived on TV Land in June), let me give you the executive summary if you are a new (or soon to be) fan. This is a spoiler for the pilot episode, but since it won't be airing again for some time, you may want to read this so that you know how things got started.

Captain Anthony “Tony” Nelson (Larry Hagman) is in the Air Force, serving as an astronaut at NASA in Coco Beach, Florida. During an problematic rocket launch during the pilot, the orbiter that Nelson is in fails to get into space and crashes next to an island. On the (not so proverbial) desert island, he finds an interesting bottle and uncorks it. To his surprise smoke pours out of the bottle and a 2,000 year old genie named Jeannie (Barbara Eden) appears. Jeannie had promised herself that should would forever serve the person who rescues her and immediately seeks to grant whatever wishes Captain Nelson had.

After wishing Jeannie to learn English (she only knows Arabic), Tony is rescued by a search plane looking for him that Jeannie blinks onto the right path (Jeannie folds her arms and “blinks” to make things happen). Before the plane gets to him he wishes that Jeannie is free to do whatever she wants and leaves her on the island (or so he thinks). Jeannie has other intentions and rolls her bottle into Nelson's bag.

After arriving back at Coco Beach, Nelson's first indication that Jeannie came along is after Nelson and his fiancee walk into his house for dinner. Jeannie comes into the room, which needless to say leads toward the eventual demise of Nelson's engagement, much to his chagrin (he finds he can't get rid Jeannie — how do you get rid of magical being that doesn't want to leave?). While Jeannie will generally grant her “master's” every wish, she will not grant his wish for her to leave (since his one wish was that she be free to do whatever she wants, she doesn't have to do what he wishes even though she normally does) — she wants to marry him instead.

This and a few other events lead NASA's psychologist, Dr. Alfred Bellows (Hayden Rourke) to suspect that the crash landing has somehow caused Captain Nelson to be psychologically disturbed. In one of the few times Nelson in anyway acknowledges his having a genie to Bellows, he chases the garbage truck after throwing away Jeannie's bottle with Jeannie in it (even though he wants to get rid of her, he isn't a cruel guy and so he doesn't want her to be crushed and left in a garbage dump). The good captain doesn't rerelease Jeannie from the corked bottle until after Dr. Bellows leaves, so this appears to be some kind of hallucination on the part of Nelson in the eyes of the doctor. As Nelson dug furiously through the garbage truck before finding the bottle, Bellows assures him that he doesn't need to dig in the truck since NASA can get him all the trash he could possibly want.

This pretty much sets the stage for the whole show. Dr. Bellows begins monitoring Captain Nelson's erratic behavior (caused by trying to cover up Jeannie's magic), despite Nelson's attempts to suggest that his digging in the trash episode was only to “fool” Dr. Bellows into thinking he was crazy. From this point on Nelson decides it would be better not to reveal the fact that he has a genie to anyone (a few people will learn eventually, but that's another story).

Also introduced in this episode is Army^* Captain Roger Healey (Bill Daily), Nelson's partner in space program projects. Healey is an all around nice guy, but he's one sandwich short of a picnic — he lacks common sense and always is one step behind what is going on. While Nelson is far more serious than Healey, they get along well most of the time, and Healey is Nelson's best friend.

So, that's it. The stage is set. These few concepts and conditions manage to put everything in motion that made I Dream of Jeannie's plot for five years and 139 episodes. Don't let all of the details overwhelm you, unlike some series — take Star Trek as an example — if you don't remember everything you won't be lost. Things will just make a bit more sense faster if you know how everything happened.

Friday Five: Travel

1. What's the last place you traveled to, outside your own home state/country? Technically speaking, that would be last month when I went over to Calhoun County, Illinois for a ride. You can make a nice trip of it — take the bridge over to Alton, Ill from St. Charles, Mo, then drive down the Great River Road. From there you can take the (free) Brussles Fairy over the Illinois River to Calhoun County, home of the world's best peaches. Calhoun County is a very pretty area and a nice place to spend an afternoon.

From there, you can take the Golden Eagle Fairy across the Mississippi River to return to St. Charles County. Two fairy rides in one day is very nice! Better yet, on my last trip I found out a new fairy opened — now you can take a fairy over to the Great River Road too. This fairy was especially nice in that it crosses over the confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers.

At any rate, if the question was asking the last time I actually stayed overnight, or longer, out-of-state, that would be Indiana last August. I went up there for my grandfather's wedding.

2. What's the most bizarre/unusual thing that's ever happened to you while traveling? Hmm… I dunno. The thing that comes to mind occurred on one of my family's semi-annual trips to the Ozarks when I was little. My grandpa (not the one mentioned above) decided to bring a metal detector to look for coins and other stuff on our trip. We didn't have room for it in the car, so it was tied up on the roof. We stopped for lunch at the very nice rest area right outside of Springfield, Mo, and then took back off. As we were pulling out of the rest area, we heard a loud “TTTHHHHHUUUUMP!” It was the metal detector flying off the roof. My mother pulled off Interstate 44 and chased the metal detector up the highway (it was in a cardboard box and drifted away from the car). Fortunately neither my mother nor the detector were hurt.

3. If you could take off to anywhere, money and time being no object, where would you go? Hmm… depends when you ask me. On Monday I would have said San Fransisco for LinuxWorld. Seriously, that's tough, but since it is probably more expensive to get there than other places I might want to go, I'd probably make Australia the destination for this trip. For some reason, Down Under fascinates me. Although, probably I'd rather go to Europe — I'd like to tour through England, France, Germany, etc. I have some friends over there I'd like to meet, so that'd be an added bonus.

4. Do you prefer traveling by plane, train or car? Car, definitely. My legs are long enough that a coach seat on a plane is very uncomfortable for more than a short while (and first class costs too much!). For that matter, I also get an ear ache when on planes, which isn't too pleasant either. Cars are good — you see more, you can go where ever you want, and your stuff can't accidentally go to the wrong destination or get damaged.

5. What's the next place on your list to visit? A new place to visit or just the next place? The next place is probably the Ozarks again — hopefully in mid-fall, otherwise, hopefully at Christmas (schedule permitting). I don't have any plans to go any place new, although who knows…

LinuxWorld: What a Show!

Ah, I wish I was there. Where? LinuxWorld San Fransisco! For those of you not familiar with it, LinuxWorld is the twice a year show during which all the biggest names in the GNU/Linux world (and computer world for that matter) come together to promote their wares. Best of all, dozens of exciting announcements come out of the show.

Consider this week's headlines over at OfB.biz. So far, I've written or linked to stories about IBM Suing SCO, Real Networks announcing a new GNU/Linux media player project, Red Hat Suing SCO (see a theme here?), Oracle becoming completely Linux-ized, Disney switching over to GNU/Linux desktops in some cases, Apple getting a more Free Software friendly license for the poorly named Darwin, and Novell purchasing GNU/Linux desktop supporter Ximian. Interested in these stories? Take a look.

But beyond that there is the experience. All the big names promote new products and let you see the latest — AMD, Intel, Red Hat, IBM, Novell, even Microsoft (yeah, that sounds strange, but it is true). Then there is the .Org pavilion where the great developers and projects of the community show up: KDE, Gnome, Debian, and more. Linus Torvalds, Jon “Maddog” Hall, and Richard Stallman have all been spotted at LinuxWorld.

Maybe I'll make it next year.

Le Sabot Post-Moderne: Not Down... Moved.

John, Discoshaman himself, wrote me about his site. I just mentioned that I added it to my blogroll last night. Unfortunately, it seems, in the process of moving to a new location, his old site went down due to lack of bandwidth. He asked if I would mention the new address, so here ya go… If you are looking for Le Sabot Post-Moderne, stop by www.postmodernclog.com instead of the old address you may have.

Blog Roll'n

Well, I've added a few good links to the ol' BlogRoll (see right) over the past few weeks. I just added Elevation, a new blog (I just got word about it!) that should prove very interesting, I think. Gavenagain is a very nice guy I know and I'm really looking forward to hearing what he has to say here.

I've also finally added a link to Darren Rowse's Living Room, a blog I've been following for some time, but hadn't linked to. It's a great blog with lots of thought provoking content. Darren recently did a cool series on “Underblogs,” those of us who have blogs that aren't quite as well known.

Finally, I've added Discoshaman's Le Sabot Post-Moderne. It's somewhat of a political/culturally focused blog. I really like it so far.