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Earlier in the week we finally moved all our books over here to the apartment.  Among them was my big cd carrier, which I go through occasionally to find music I haven’t listened to in a while.  Yesterday I rediscovered my copy of DJ Tiesto’s 2004 trance/house opus Just Be.  I took it to work to listen to (it makes great background music), but now I have "Forever Today" going through my head.  It’s a pretty song, so I don’t mind all that much, and in any case I would rather have something without lyrics stuck in my head rather than some inane snippet from a random chorus bouncing around up there.  The first three minutes of the song are especially lovely, in a linear, artless sort of way–just an anthemic crescendo and fall of strings before the beat sets in.  The album as a whole isn’t terribly creative and isn’t my favorite, but it’s a noteworthy listen.

This is the first evening a while I haven’t been busy doing web work or just dog tired from the day.  It’s satisfying to have completed all the work and for the ball to be in the other court, as it were, and awaiting a return volley of new work.  Diane and I have been watching a lot of Top Gear lately.  I love that she likes the show so much and likes to watch it with me.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Mark Driscoll sermons lately.  He’s been going through 1 Peter and some (most?) of his observations are priceless.  The past couple of sermons have been drawn from the discourse in 1 Peter 3 wherein the apostle addresses wives and husbands.  Driscoll preached two sermons on the passage, the first directed toward the ladies/wives, and the second, which I listened to today, aimed at the men/husbands.  It’s a powerhouse message, if you get the chance to listen to it.  There’s something in there for every man, and he gets quite angry, rightfully so, at those men who shirk their God-given responsibilties as men and husbands,in a variety of different ways.

Diane and I have a chance to hear him speak locally in a couple of months, along with other pastors.  We’ll probably have to alternate sessions since getting a babysitter for all three days could be problematic, but I definitely think it’s worth the effort.

New music recommendation:  Dakota Blonde.  I heard them recently on Coverville where they did a smashing rendition of Men At Work’s "Down Under."  For those of you acquainted with my musical taste, their style won’t come as a shock.  They combine the thoughtfulness of a band like The Innocence Mission with country/Americana inflections of Alison Krauss or Hem and the slightly quirky female vocals of The Weepies.  Thumbs up.

I haven’t felt as inspired lately as I did a few months ago.  I don’t know what it is (or was).  I’ve been doing more web work recently, and that takes a chunk out of most nights.  Hopefully that won’t slow down, either, so I’m going to have to figure something out if I want to stay in it journal-wise.  Most entries, at least the ones I put a modicum of thought into, take a while to percolate and take shape, and that time just hasn’t been there in the evening lately.  I’ll figure something out.  It really is shameful, though, that I’ve had a review of the latest U2 album waiting in the wings for a couple of weeks, but just haven’t got around to un-privatizing it.  I need to finish that.

In other news, there is no other news.  Life continues much as it has.  We’re progressively moving out of the house and settling into the apartment here.  Today my dad came up from Chapel Hill and helped me move some more things out of the house.  He really wasn’t feeling well and it was beyond generous of him to come.  My mom and Gran visited on their way back from Hayesville as well, and it was good to chat with them for a little while.  Luke wanted to monopolize his Nana (my mom) with his book about the US states, and Penelope was a little social butterfly and put on a good show.  It was fun.

* * * * * *

This is probably the best thing I’ve ever written.  Don’t ask me where it came from or who inspired it; I honestly have no idea.  There are days I miss Florida, the six short months I lived there.  The combination of the solitude and the beauty of the ocean all around caused stuff like that to just well up spontaneously.  Here’s another one.  And another.  And yet another.

I’ve probably related this before, but during my time there I visited a number of churches, searching for the right one.  The service of one I visited was held in a local school’s gym.  It was a recent church plant and I remember being approached by the pastor and his wife, an older couple, who wanted to know if they could meet with me.  It wasn’t suspicious, but friendly, and I invited them to my apartment.  They arrived and we chatted for a little while about what brought me to Florida.  I think at that point I had just lost my job and was pretty directionless, so when they told me, quite eagerly, that they had been praying for someone to come and help out with and possibly lead the college ministry at their young church, I was less than enthusiastic.  They were visibly disappointed, and I’ve wondered occasionally how differently my life would have turned out had I taken that chance.  Heck, I don’t even know if they would have supported me at all; they just knew their church had a need and that I seemed like a good candidate to fill that need.

I want to take more chances.

Not much tonight.  It’s been a hard day with the kids in the small apartment.  Maple got fixed, too, and she’s wearing a cone and sad.

In the interest of posting something, here’s kind of a fun article I found today.  The commentary is the best part.

as you start out the climb

I’ve often wondered what Luke visualizes when he thinks about visiting other countries.  We’ll be talking about this or that continent or capital or region, and I’ll say something like, "Maybe one day we’ll go to France/Uzbekistan/Norway/Angola/New Zealand.  Would you like that?"  He nods in response and says "Uh huh."  Sometimes we’ll talk about the particular attributes of a country: whether it’s hot/cold/warm/cool in a given season, whether there are mountains or jungles there, and he’ll file that information away.  But I wonder if he ever thinks about what it would actually be like to physically be there, at ground level, looking around.  I doubt he would think the ground is color-coded like on his maps; he’s beyond that.  We do fire up Google Earth one or twice a week and check out various locales, but that can only tell you so much about a place.  I’m not saying I can visualize any country perfectly either; heck, I’ve never been to a jungle or a desert so all I know is what I’ve seen in pictures, but…  It would interesting to know what pops into his mind.

1. A fun collection of airports I would love to land a plane at.  Heck, I soloed on a half-mile-long, 20-foot-wide runway affectionately known as "the toothpick."  I honestly think Courchevel would be a blast.  It’s the old adage: If you fly by the numbers, you know exactly what your plane can handle.

2. The recent Templeton Prize winner.  For those of you familiar with my anti-quantum mechanics pro-higher dimensions viewpoint, it will come as little surprise that I’m excited by the winner’s emphasis on the direction I think physics should take.  Key quote:

Unlike classical physics, d’Espagnat explained, quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations. If we want to believe, as Einstein did, that there is a reality independent of our observations, then this reality can either be knowable, unknowable or veiled. D’Espagnat subscribes to the third view. Through science, he says, we can glimpse some basic structures of the reality beneath the veil, but much of it remains an infinite, eternal mystery.

That describes higher dimensions to a tee.  We can describe them mathematically, but can’t fundamentally understand them unless we experience them.  I don’t agree with the article’s meandering into Kant and Spinoza, since to agree with Kant in particular about the chasm between faith and reason is unbiblical, and Spinoza was a de facto pantheist, but there is certainly nothing wrong with ascribing to the viewpoint that reality is best explained using higher dimensions that are out of our realm of experience, and that God and the spirit world understand and occupy those higher dimensions.

Cold, icky, rainy day.  It’s kind of hard to believe that just three days ago Luke and I took our first "new walk" (walks are an institution with us) through the upscale neighborhood across the street, wearing flip-flops and shorts.  Today long johns are advisable.  Yuck.

Diane and I had a conversation today about me becoming a car mechanic.  I have to say there are few things I love more than working on cars.  It really doesn’t matter whose car it is (though it will be said some are easier to work on than others), as long as I’m under the hood with a socket driver, ratchet-drive box-end wrench and a long Phillips screwdriver, I’m happy.  I’d like to think my diagnostic skills aren’t that bad either.  I know a lot of that comes with experience and familiarity with a particular make/model of car, but I’ve seen a thing or two in the 9-odd years I’ve been working on them.  I fantasize some days about owning a little two- or three-bay shop that specializes in a particular make or three, and just working on cars all day long.  Of course there are always the attendant hassles of customer service and bookkeeping, etc, but I think the enjoyment I would derive from the satisfaction of fixing someone’s car would overcome that.  It’s all a pipe dream at this point, but Diane is willing to entertain the idea at least in conversation, which counts for a lot.  I dunno.  Idle thoughts on a drippy Saturday afternoon.

We’re moved into the new apartment.  My father-in-law was able to secure the big truck from his work on Monday night and we moved all the big stuff then, including the bed and almost all the furniture.  Monday was our first night spent here.

It’s a nice little apartment.  I feel bad for praising the apartment over the house since it sounds ungrateful, and we are so, so grateful to have had the house initially and for as long as we did.  But it was time to move on, and we haven’t second-guessed ourselves.  Well, at least not to a worrying degree.

I didn’t get to catch the comet a week or two ago, sadly.  However, just behind our apartment building is a little strip of woods, and on the other side of the woods is a huge field with a solitary tree in the middle.  Taking the dog out a few nights ago, even in spite of the streetlights in the parking lot, I could look up and see the night sky through the trees, and I was amazed at how much less light pollution there is out here versus in town.  It makes me very excited about possibly taking the telescope out to the field, or just constellation-spotting with the ‘scope.

We got the apartment today, so it looks like we’ll be moving here in the next couple of weeks.  We’re alternately excited and apprehensive about it, but mostly excited.  The apartment gives us a chance to really be out on our own financially, is in a safer neighborhood and is about half a mile from the rear entrance to Tanglewood, among other benefits.  We’re apprehensive just recognizing that transitions are never simple, especially with a family to consider.  But–nothing ventured, nothing gained.  The potential for great benefit is there, and we’re going to take the odds, knowing Who’s in control of ALL things.

I feel bad I haven’t been posting more regularly, but between moving and the web design business (which is picking up and occupies much of many evenings) and just trying to go to bed earlier, it’s been hard to cram in anything but a brief update.  Hopefully the dust will settle soon.

Luke and I had fun in the snow today.  Work was closed so I had a "home day" to gambol about in the yard.  Until later in the day, the snow wasn’t sticky enough for a good snowman, to Luke’s mild dismay.  But he certainly was busy enough eatingall the snow he could stuff in his mouth, making snow angels and just generally rolling around in it.  

Penelope was another matter.  We don’t yet have any really "snow clothes" for her, so we bundled her up with lots of her brother’s clothes, adding several pairs of socks and tried to put on Luke’s boots, which didn’t work.  She was fascinated by the snow but so frustrated by her outfit that she didn’t last long at all.  I think we got a picture or two…  Maybe.

She’s displaying some sophisticated interaction for a 16-month-old, at least in our experience–interaction we didn’t explicitly teach her.  Diane described an incident today where she was letting Pen play in room, checking on her periodically.  At one point Diane came over to the baby gate, got the girl’s attention and said, "Penelope, come to Mommy!"  Pen ambled over, was almost in Diane’s outstretched arms before she turned around and bolted for a spot next to her bed, giggling as she "ran away" from Mommy.  Diane caught up with her and she had a ear-to-ear smile as she laughed about her "game."  She’s a lot of fun these days.

and I would never try to make you be
anything you didn’t really want to be

The bedroom is a little lighter tonight.  The streetlights reflect off the snow outside and give the closed blinds a gentle glow.  The warmth of the blankets and pillows is always welcome, but tonight the soft light at the windows reminds me of the contrast with the cold and makes the present environment that much more welcome.  The kids will have fun tomorrow; that much we know–a quick peek through the blinds by the bed confirms at least a few inches.

It’s been…a weekend.  My parents visited yesterday and my mom and Diane attended a baby shower for my sister-in-law.  Diane was in charge of the games and a few other things and by all accounts it went very well.  They brought home some of the hors d’oeuvres too–those little mozzarella balls bathed in olive oil really are delicious.  I think we all got a little case of cabin fever; I know I did on account of the cold and rain outside all weekend.  I’m ready for spring and summer to roll around.  This plunge back into the snow and cold is a couple of months late and particularly cruel given that, technically, it’s only three more weeks until spring.  Not only that, but the cloud cover the past few days means that I haven’t been able to deploy the telescope for a comet sighting, and by the time all of this nonsense is over chances are it will be gone, or too faint to see even with the ‘scope.  Oh well.  I need to stay on top of celestial events more anyway.

We’re thinking seriously about moving.  Soon, too–within the next month or so.

It’s something that had been on the horizon for a long time for a number of reasons: This isn’t the safest area in town, Diane didn’t choose this house and it does have limitations as far as accommodating a family, financial considerations, among other things…  This past week brought things to a head, though, since an elderly resident just one street over from us was robbed at gunpoint in the middle of the afternoon–very brazen, to say the least.  Add that to a number of break-ins over the past couple of years, and it doesn’t leave one with the best feeling about the safety of the neighborhood.  And we know that there’s crime anywhere, but add it to the other reasons and you have a compelling case for at least contemplating moving.

So we’ll see.  We visited a very promising apartment complex earlier today.  Whenever it happens, it’ll be hard to leave this little house, but it will be for the best.

1. Some developments in the Facebook terms-of-service privacy situation.  You might think it odd that I take such an interest in the affair given that I’m not a Facebook user, but I see it as kind of a test case for future privacy battles.  I applaud the site’s willingness to be democratic about it given that they do run a free service and they are, technically, within their rights to make what use of the content they will.  But as regards the news, I hope they’re genuine about wanting to work with people to hammer out a mutually-satisfactory privacy statement.  I’m leery, though, given human nature and the general direction of things lately.  This is definitely an exception to the rule.

2. Not sure why there’s any outcry over this.  Pay restrooms are a fact of life in Europe.  And if it means my ticket will be cheaper, I’ll gladly not pay for a service I might not have to use.

3.  The first annual ImageWorks chili cook-off was today.  Nine of my coworkers brought chili and everyone sampled and voted.  Crackers and all the fixings were provided, including (cheap) beer (!).  Needless to say, it was pretty much the best lunch ever.  I love chili.

I’m totally going to dig out the telescope from Penelope’s closet tomorrow night and find this.  Leo is behind a tree in the (slightly darker) front yard but if I get down near the end of the driveway I should get a clear shot at it   If all else fails I could try the backyard with the uneven ground and the illuminated parking lot behind, but that’s not my first choice, even though the sky is less obstructed in the direction of the constellation.  Oh, to live out in the country… 

Should be able to catch a glimpse of Saturn as well.  Orion’s very prominent, and Aldebaran has been looking very red lately too, so it should be a fun night training the telescope on both of those areas, which are celetial gold mines for an amateur astronomer.  Winters nights in the northern hemisphere are great for stargazing, especially bundled up on a cold, crisp night with a warm drink, stationed someplace with less light pollution, which really is the bane of my existence here in town.  There’s so much to see.  Will keep you posted.

My dad came up this weekend to help work on the house and yard.  We planted a variety of bushes and trees in the backyard, fixed the fence (mostly) and were going to install an additional security plate to the front door–there have been a few break-ins in our neighborhood–but ran out of time before he had to head back to Chapel Hill.

We had a great time.  Luke did too, especially–there’s little he likes more than to be around "big men doing important things with tools outside."  It just presses all the right buttons for him.  It also had the added benefit that there was dirt involved (well, mulch), and he took full advantage of its presence, making "mulch angels" and flinging it about with abandon.

We planted a bunch of dogwoods in the back and side yard, a few hydrangeas in the corner and some assorted azaleas.  We moved the little oak tree, too, from the corner by the gate into the middle of the yard, where the old (ugly) oak used to be before we cut it down a few years ago.  It was a productive day.  The only downside–and this is a huge downside–was that I lost my wedding band.  My hands contract with the cold and my band, which is already loose as it is, isn’t done any favors in terms of staying on my finger.  Add to that repeated putting-on/removing of the gloves and you have a recipe for disaster.  I scoured the yard for hours afterward unsuccessfully.  I’m going to rent a metal detector tomorrow and see if that turns up anything.  There are stories online of people having success with them, so I’m optimistic.  If I didn’t find the ring just sitting on the ground, chances are it’s buried in one of the mulch areas around the plants, so that narrows the search radius considerably.  So we’ll see.

That said, I find it difficult to express just how much I hate hate HATE not having a ring on my finger.  I’ve been supremely self-conscious about it for the past day and a half, especially in public.  I went to extradordinary lengths this morning at church to hold my left hand in such a way that it wouldn’t be obvious that I didn’t have it on.  One ofPenelope’s favorite things to do when we "visit" her at night is to come to the side of her crib and play with my ring as I hold the top railing.  And most significantly of all, it’s just the symbol that I belong to Diane, that I’m utterly taken by her.  The fact that I can’t communicate that to the world tacitly at the moment is very, very disconcerting.

1. I think I can safely claim my son is the only 4-year-old ever to ask, "Daddy, what’s Kyrgyzstan in French?"  Yep, I’ve had that question.  Multiple times.  And we practice the alphabet in sign language every night before he goes to sleep.  It’s nerd-errific.  :)

2. Penelope is "running" now, though only in the loosest sense of the word, which doesn’t lessen the accomplishment a bit.  She waddles around stiff-legged, usually when she’s holding something in her hands (the area of interest is not on the floor, which motivates her to stand up).  Lately she’s been "running" from Mommy or Daddy to the bed and back, excited as she can be, smiling her two-toothy grin and squealing for all she’s worth.  It’s a lot of fun.

I’ve written about this before:  How mishearing a song lyric can sometimes seem more poetic than the actual lyric.  There are times when I’m actually disappointed with the real lyric and make an (often futile) effort to mishear it when I listen to the song.  The song in question tonight I’ve actually written about as well, but not specifically about the lyric.  A listen in the car on a quick trip to the grocery store earlier reminded me.  The actual lyric:

you hold me just the same way
levon would play
and "the weight" is my favorite song
we’re gonna pull through

What I heard before I knew (and still try to hear):

you hold me just the same way
leave on a plane
and the weight is my favorite song
we’re gonna pull through

The actual lyric is a reference to a song by The Band called "The Weight" (a good song in its own right) and to the drummer, Levon Helm.  The singer waxes nostalgic about a moment shared with her husband involving the song, and how that memory reinforces their bond and reminds them that they face the uncertainties of the future together.  It’s a lovely way of articulating that sentiment, but my hearing of the song, I believe, adds another facet (though it might be a little out of context):

Emotions are always strong when lovers part, and nowadays that event often takes place in an airport (*leave on a plane"), and the sense of impending separation is always acute.  Lovers hold each other in the moments leading up to the actual parting, and the memory of the physical closeness ("the weight" of another against you) can often be one of the most, if not the most, significant memory ("my favorite song," poetically speaking) from the event, the memory that tides the couple over and sees them through until their eventual reunion.

So take from that what you will.  Anyone who knows me knows that I’ll be first in line to defend the original, fixed intent of the artist against the forces of deconstructionism, but in this case I think I can justify it as a deliberate mishearing of the song lyric, and not a deliberate reading into the actual lyric something that isn’t there, which is… kind of the same thing, just in a different sense.  But I’ll always maintain, fundamentally, that the buck stops with the artist, no matter what pseudo-poetic lingistic gymnastics I foist upon the lyric.  Maybe I just like "my" hearing of the song because it involves airports and by extension, airplanes.  Yeah, that’s it.

Here are some interesting developments in the world of online privacy. I had a Facebook account for a little while but deleted it when Diane and I started dating back in ’06. To me, the online social networking sites have all been kind of a waste of time. The privacy issue is a good reason not to use them by itself–the poster of the first article is right on when he says “Take a close look at the terms, especially when the services are free”–but for me the main reason to shun them was just the ephemeral nature of the services they provide. I blog partially as a running record of life but partly (mostly?) as creative expression, and that’s something I intend to keep, not forget about the preceding day as my life moves forward, as is the M.O. on the social networking sites. Call it hokey, but feel like I’m creating a “body of work” here, an oeuvre, if you will, using the more modern technology of the internet to make it easier for me to write and to provide the side benefit of easy expression to a wider audience. Otherwise I’d just write on my local computer or in a paper journal.

Going back to the original links, though, I’m glad there’s an outcry over privacy issues. Maybe people will start to wake up and realize the extent of the electronic trails they leave whenever they make an online purchase or sign up for a new forum or upload a photo. Sure it’s convenient, but there’s always a catch. Free isn’t always (ever?) free. It makes me want to hunker down even more and run our sites off a local server, but that requires expertise I don’t yet have. I think we’ve got a good head start at least, in that all our photos are linked from our webspace and aren’t uploaded to a “free” service and that we’re not signed up for everything under the sun. Gotta stay vigilant.

Interesting reading about the different generations of programming languages. The word "generation" seems to be used in a different sense here, more about the "closeness" of the programming language to the nuances of the hardware it interacts with and less about chronology. The human mind and the logical architecture of a computer are (as yet) very dissimilar, and between the purest expressions of the two paradigms of "thought," if you will, there exists the spectrum of programming languages. The first-generation languages are more "computer-like," and at the opposite end are the fifth-generation languages, which are tailored more to the way humans solve problems and are thus more abstract, so to speak. Among other things, what’s interesting to me is the way we try to connect the human mind to the capabilities afforded by the technology through the medium of software, but how there’s (or seems to be) little emphasis placed on making the hardware itself perform more "humanly," placing less of a burden of translation on the software. It touches on how little we really understand how we think–the mechanisms and the methods–and how difficult is it to create even a rudimentary machinethat would simulate fundamental processes of the human mind. Oh sure, we can build a computer to beat a human at chess, but that’s a "brute force" approach, with little of the elegance and design evident in the flexibility and versatility of the human mind.

All of this makes me wish I had taken more comp sci courses in college. I took one programming course in high school, actually, in between my junior and senior years, learning Pascal at UNC, but there wasn’t much in the way of theory, which is what really fascinates me. But I suppose knowing the nuts and bolts of programming is important as a foundation for wrapping one’s mind around the theoretical issues–it’s like the currency of the computer world; the concepts provide the vocabulary and common ground to build on in discussion.

1. I’ve had “Baba O’Riley” going through my head all morning. Not too pleasant in large doses…

2. Interesting event today. I remember a while ago reading one of those raggedy library juvenile books about “the Future” written in 1977; you know, the kind that make predictions about robot usage in 1994 and the moon base in 2003. One image that stood out was the Earth looking very much like Saturn, encircled by a ring of space debris from collided satellites and whatnot. I think that might be one prediction that actually comes to pass, though when it reach that point and if there’s anything we can do to prevent it is anybody’s guess.

3. Funny story from PC World. As a completely sold-out Mac and Linux user, Microsoft’s perennial blundering is always a source of amusement. On a related note, have I mentioned lately how much I love Fedora 10? The laptop and it are really a match made in heaven. All applications open and run very quickly, navigation is easy, it boots up and shuts down at the speed of light and it seems rock-solid stable. I really can’t recommend it more highly.

everything you needed done was done for you.
now you do it on your own
but you find you’re all alone,
what can you do?

Moonlight streams in the window behind me as I lie here in bed, propped up on a couple of pillows against the headboard. The fan hums and casts a soft draft from the other bedside table as my wife breathes gently beside me. The bright rectangle of the screen stabs into the darkness of the room laid out in front of me as my fingers tick gently over the keyboard.

I can’t remember any more what it was like to been free from responsibility. I used to know–there were weekends in particular, still spread out few and far between, when I had completed all my duties for the day, whether school- or home-related, and I had nothing to do. But even then, my mind wasn’t totally free; I knew there was something I should be doing, learning, reading, taking initiative about. I think this emotion follows most of us our entire lives; it’s what the psychologists like to call some form of primal guilt that we need to rid ourselves of, that we need to self-actualize our way out of. I’m not convinced.

Still, I look at my son in particular and marvel at his life. When he is finished with whatever activity occupies him at that moment, there is absolutely nothing weighing on his mind. Nothing at all. His days are filled with play and fun learning and interaction. And that’s how it should be. I think there’s something to be learned from that, something utterly childlike about his outlook on life at the moment that corresponds with an admonition in the Word to be childlike in our conscious dependence on His grace, common and saving. There’s a connection there, I’m convinced. Children are blessings to their parents in more ways than we know.

Luke and I visited the library yesterday. He had actually slept during naptime, which pushes back his bedtime an hour or so and gives us time to do stuff together in the evenings. We hadn’t been to the library in a while and I didn’t have anything checked out, so we made a trip of it.

He always loves to go and I really enjoy taking him. There’s a kids’ reading area decked out like a jungle/rainforest situated underneath the staircase to the upper level, and his favorite thing is to find the cushions just behind the stairs and camp out with a book. There are a few cubbyholes with Berenstain Bears, Richard Scarry, Curious George and Clifford books and I’ll usually read him one while we’re there. He checked out two Clifford books, and we found some space books in the juvenile non-fiction, so he scored The Moon Book, one about the solar system and one about spacecraft too.

As for me, because of Luke’s presence I didn’t have the opportunity I usually do to just mull around and leisurely scan the bookshelves for something interesting, so I just hit my usual two spots: the computer books and the transportation section. I checked out JavaScript for Dummies again (I will learn this language one of these days) and I found The Airport Book, a 30-year-old but still-interesting photo book detailing the evolution of the airport from the beginning of last century. Good stuff.

* * * * * *

In other news, the stimulus bill that just passed the Senate me physically sick to think about. There’s so much I could say about it I don’t even know where to start. There is nothing good about it; absolutely nothing. It’s wrong on every level, from assumptions about human nature to the economic theory behind it to the concept of the role of government that it represents right down to the historical results from these sorts of massive government interventions. I challenge any good liberal to show me one instance in which a massive taxpayer-funded government intervention has unequivocally succeeded in lifting a country’s economy out of a financial crisis. It’s never happened. So essentially this is a experiment with no historical success record based on a faulty idea of the role of government, deviating drastically away from the founding principles of this country, funded with trillions of our children’s and grandchildren’s money. Wonderful.

I’ve been reading Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed lately and there is so much in the book that rings true with respect to the present situation. Especially with regard to how these agenda-driven policies get railroaded through Congress despite a complete lack of empirical evidence of their ability to achieve the intended result, the book is right on. Recommended.

Went for a run earlier for the first time in a few weeks. It’s only my second time wearing my new running shoes (that I received for my birthday) and it was a wonderful evening for a run–mild and pleasant out.

The warmer weather has the side effect that smells propagate farther. If this sounds disgusting initially, bear with me. When it was colder, a few weeks ago and likely will be in a few days, smells tended to stay closer to their source, whether it was cigarette smoke from a nearby house, flowers closer to the road or the diesel exhaust from a passing truck. But the warmer weather carries the scent to the sidewalk as I trudge by, and any given city block becomes a veritable bazaar of conjured memories and sensations, driven by the smells I pass through.

Diesel and exhaust remind me of walking from the evening church we attended in downtown Nice, under the train bridge adjacent the terminal to the McDonald’s for familiar food and fellowship with other expatriates and friends. Lavender scents (there is one lucky house on my route with the flowers) remind me of hikes up Mt. Rouge in France (properly known as the Baou des Blancs), seeing clusters nestled in crevices of bleached-white rock, covered with mosses and lichens, in between the scraggly, windblown trees. And sometimes a non-specific “Southern house” smell will waft across the sidewalk and bring back more than just discrete memories, but spans of years and periods of life here in the States.

Among it all, a bit prematurely, it will be said, is the mild-spring-night softness of the air, a welcome sensation after the harshness of the past few weeks.

There many reasons to enjoy my runs, and this is certainly among them.

I haven’t written an actual letter in ages. I used to write at least a few a year… I was thinking about that fact earlier along with a whole slew of things I need to actually write down so that I can get them out of the back of my mind and start doing them.

I received a wonderful gift a little over a year ago from an old family friend that I (or my family, for that matter) hadn’t seen in ages. The family whose member sent me the gift lived in France around the same time we did during our second trip, from 1992 to 1994, and the husband worked for IBM, same as my dad. The couple are somewhat younger than my parents and they have an adopted son who is a little younger than David. We used to visit them fairly frequently and have wonderful dinners, swim in their pool and play ping pong on their table. They lived in St. Jeannet, a village a few ridges over from ours and perched underneath a massive cliff, appropriately named Mount St. Jeannet. We could look up from their house and marvel at the scale of the cliff towering behind us, or we could look south toward the coast and see the Var river valley, Nice and even the airport on the water. On especially clear days we could ever make out planes taking off, miles and miles away. I remember once or twice taking binoculars and an airplane guidebook and trying to identify them.

The wife in the family–let’s call her “Debbie”–is the friend referenced above. Debbie’s father was a pilot and I think because of that she appreciated my fascination with all things aviation-related. We kept up with them a little bit once we all returned to the States but fell out of touch. And a year ago, out of the blue, Debbie and her husband called my parents to catch up. She must’ve found out that I was still interested in airplanes, or had pleasant memories of me plane-watching from their terrace (and probably discovered that I had gone on to earn my private pilot license), because she wrote me a wonderful letter and gave me a scrapbook-ish illustrated biography of Saint Exupéry. It was a very thoughtful gift, and although she did provide her phone number and e-mail, it’s the sort of thing where the thank-you needs to be hand-written.

I honestly can’t believe it’s taken me this long to do it… It’s shameful, really. One day this week, for sure.

it was my favourite place to be
i could hear them breaking free
but they could not see me

Our Valentine’s Day dinner date was this evening. The grandparents, accompanied by an aunt and uncle, came and babysat the kids for a few hours while Diane and I went to Noble’s Grille for dinner. She had the steak; I had the salmon; both were delicious. She was lovely in her brown wrap and hair done up with waves and curls, and conversation was brisk. For the most part, we successfully avoided the subject of the kids, and instead talked about her experiences working in restaurants, my conflicted emotions about an ongoing friendship with a pastor of a church we visited, her reservations about flying over the Atlantic, some anecdotes from our dating days and other things. Speaking of which–part of the reason we picked the restaurant was that it was the site of our three-monthiversary way back in mid-2006.

Our life has changed so much since then it’s difficult to remember what it was like before. I reread old journal entries and find that the emotional memories conjured up are becoming increasingly faint. From experience, though, emotional memories are just like anything else–ignore them for a while and you’ll be surprised at their intensity the next time something (usually unexpectedly) happens to trigger them. I imagine it’ll be like that with the transitional time a few years ago.

In some ways memories are like literature or classic music–they have to prove themselves by standing the test of time. There’s an initial period when the memory is very immediate, and then it has to go dormant for a while, to germinate in order to emerge in time stronger–and more accessible in some ways–than it was initially. We’re too impatient most of the time. We need to keep in mind that we rarely know which things really matter until a span of time passes, the shaft of light of memory converges again to focus and we’re able to distinguish the significant from the superfluous. And bring that to bear on the present–therein lies wisdom, I think. Not that any of us remember perfectly, or even well, but it’s incumbent upon us to try our best.

Diane found this video a day or two ago. It pretty much speaks for itself… It’s amazing how far we’ve come in a little over 25 years, and it’s increasingly difficult to imagine life without the electronics that surround us. I think we owe it to our kids, at least, to remember what it was like before and to be able to articulate that to them.

My favorite parts of the video are the caption that reads “Owns Home Computer” and the end, when the anchor discusses the cost and speed of the service. Classic.

into everything

I had a physical yesterday for the first time in ages. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, not because I was concerned, but it is a bit of an inconvenience and an indignity–all for a good cause, mind you. But I made the best of it.

I checked out well. The doctor said I was going to be his most boring patient of the day, always a good thing to hear. He said to reassure my wife, who had made the appointment for me (we’re going to start scheduling them near birthdays–good way to remember) that I would be around for a long time. “Lord willing,” I added hastily, and he agreed.

The highlight of the visit for me was when I found out the doctor is a pilot. We were making small talk and he asked how I came to the area, and I gave him the Reader’s Digest version of coming for pilot school and meeting Diane and so on. So we found a common interest. He’s part owner of a Cessna 182 and flies out of Smith Reynolds. He said he would like to fly twice a week but usually only gets in the air about once, which sounds about right, given weather and schedules and the like. He and the plane’s other owner are working on their instrument ratings, and he talked casually about the expenses of maintenance and some of the newer avionics upgrades he’s done.

I have to say it took me back. My one “year of flight” all came tumbling back at we talked, and when he mentioned offhandedly that if I ever wanted to take Luke up he’d give us a ride I nearly scheduled something right then and there. There’s absolutely nothing like it. It gets into your system like few things can, experiencing that degree of freedom and speed and all the rest. What prompted his offer was a comment by me that I would love nothing more than to be able to just fly with Luke for an hour every Saturday morning. Just to be able to say to him, after donuts with Daddy, “Let’s go flying,” and then putter around the area for a little bit, do some sightseeing, practice a couple of landings and then go home for lunch… How much greater could a Saturday morning be?

I miss it. I don’t regret in the slightest any decisions I made with regard to Luke and Diane (how could I?) since I know absolutely that the Lord had me–and always has me–exactly where I need be for His glory first, and my good next. I think what makes me the most happy when I think about that period of my life is that I did get to fly that one time with Diane. That really is enough, to know that she experienced it with me, if only for a few minutes. She knows, and that means the world.

Greatly enjoying some Madeleine Peyroux on the playlist here at work today. So what if she channels Billie Holiday with every intonation? She’s another artist doing her best to stem the tide of ephemeral, vapid pop in favor of some more lasting, substantive, heck–tasteful. Besides which the music is just… Hmm, how should I put this? Valentine-ish? It’s worth a listen.

Here’s an interesting article I read in PC World today. I think the point of the article is true–we’re moving away from having to actually write/compose anything and further in the direction of actual face-to-face interaction, albeit electronically-moderated. The funny thing about newer technologies like texting or posting on social networking sites is that in many cases, in spite of their immediacy, the goal of the user is sometimes to be more obscure. Why would anyone want that, you ask? The risk of emotional confrontation. Let’s say you’re involved in a feud with another person for whatever reason. Why send an e-mail, much less actually call, much less actually meet in person, when you can simply text them a few lines from your cell phone and feel better about the situation, regardless of whether or not anything’s actually been resolved? I’ve seen this happen many times. Our communicationis becoming less substantial as it becomes more “convenient.” If that isn’t the great irony of the technological age, I don’t know what is. Life is more convenient that it has even been in human history thanks to technologies from the refrigerator to the microwave to the internet, but our societies are more stressed, more harried, more rushed, less able to articulate coherent, rational thought, less introspective, less complete than they’ve ever been. I think that should tell us something about human nature, something that should have always been obvious except that it’s been suppressed.

On a related note, the story immediately reminded me of instant messages between my parents and myself back in college, when I used to IM all the time. My friends and I, rightly so, treated IM as a sort of conversation, sending snippets and phrases and quips back and forth, but rarely anything more than a line or two per response in those tiny IM windows. Whenever I’d have an IM conversation with either my mom or dad, though, I would say something, expecting a relatively quick response, only to get a paragraph three minutes later, complete with punctuation and capitalization. The events of that anecdote definitely anticipated what the article alludes to: The communication generation gap is growing in ways distinct from previous generations. And not in particularly positive ways, either.

Still trying to set up everything I need to run the business on the laptop. It’s a lot of stuff. Trying to find open-source alternatives to all my graphics programs has been alternately exhilarating and frustrating. That said, it is nice to feel the capability at one’s fingertips once everything is downloaded and installed. I’m not a “gadget person” at all, but even I told Diane yesterday, after finally getting web core fonts installed in Fedora, that it feels like the laptop is becoming my “Swiss army knife” of web design. So far I’ve got GIMP (Photoshop alternative), Inkscape (Illustrator alternative), Bluefish (my text editor for HTML and CSS), FileZilla (FTP client), OpenOffice (documents and administration) and I’ll need to figure out a way to emulate or at least get screenshots from other browsers. It’s been daunting, and I still need to become really fluent with the software, but I think I’m almost done and besides, it’s fun.

I ventured out to a nearby gas station in the cold this morning before church to buy a Sunday newspaper. Diane wanted to clip coupons in preparation for the upcoming shopping week, and I read the funnies and a few articles here and there. I also picked up the Best Buy flyer from the advertising section and thumbed through it to see what movies were coming out on DVD and what the new music was. I glanced at the computer ads for just long enough to note a couple of things:

1. PCs are really dirt cheap these days, especially desktops. Very respectable machines were selling for around $400, less monitor, and very decent laptops were around $500. It makes me marvel, remembering the top-of-the-line IBM 486DX2 66MHz powerhouse my dad purchased in the mid-’90s for upwards of $1500… And prices were already on the way down by then. Amazing.

2. I didn’t see a single computer advertised with a Linux distribution as an operating system option. This doesn’t really surprise me, but I did note it. It made me think about why people replace computers in the first place. In my family’s history with computers, and in that of most folks I know, they replace computers for two reasons: Either the hardware becomes obsolete and it’s no longer able to handle the more recent software, or the computer gets completely crudded up from disorganization, conflicting files, probably a healthy amount of adware and junkware, among other things. And it’s usually the latter case. People who complain about their computers running slower and slower aren’t usually the types who purchase programs that demand the really high-powered gaming hardware. And to me it really sharpens the appeal of alternative operating systems, whether they be more easy to organize and thus keep clean (Mac OS) or lower profile (Linux) and in both cases harder to hack. When people balk at the price of a new Mac versus a PC they really should think about the fact that they’ll most likely get a lot more mileage out of the Mac. And when you consider that Linux is free… It sounds almost too good to be true.

* * * * * *

I consider myself something of an aircraft aesthetician. I’ve always been interested in aircraft and I’m a vocational designer, and my interest and the skills that allow me gainful employment often converge. As noted in a previous post, a frequent evening activity is to visit airliners.net, the most comprehensive collection of aircraft photography on the internet.

My latest aesthetic focus has been on the size of airplanes’ engines in relation to their visual bulk. In other words, do the airplanes’ engines look like they’re up to the task of powering it? From an engineering standpoint, they obviously are otherwise the plane wouldn’t have been certified or, in many cases, been able to leave the ground in the first place. But do they look the part? I thumb through collections of airplane pictures with that question in mind.

Some planes have engines that look too small: The Boeing 767-400, for one, and the Airbus A330-300 and the Bombardier CRJ1000 are other examples. I’ve always though the Soviet-era Ilyushin Il-86 looked classically underpowered (and it was).

So which planes have engines that look up to the task, or even, in some cases, make their plane look overpowered? The Boeing 777-300, definitely. Just look at those monster GE90s or RR Trents–the power of 100,000+ lbs of thrust each. And the jury had been out on another example until I saw this picture last night and decided: The Airbus A340-500 and -600 series are definitely in. The -200 and -300 series actually look a little underpowered with their 4 CFM56s, but the company decisively rectified things for the larger variants.

I’ve been teaching Luke more French lately, and he’s been eager to learn, which makes me a happy Daddy. He’s all questions these days too, and has been asking me what a multitude of things are in French. Today he hit me with one I couldn’t readily recall: Appropriately enough on a Saturday (“Donuts with Daddy” is a weekly Saturday ritual), he asked me the French word for “donut,” and I blanked. It worked out okay, though, since we do have a French-English dictionary on the shelf, so I was able to give him a fresh installment from my ongoing the-computer-is-not-the-source-of-ALL-information-and-goodness series and show him that many times (most times?) it’s preferable to actually look something up in a BOOK, as opposed to consulting Wikipedia or Google Image Search, our usual online haunts.

Luke’s mind is an absolute steel trap for anything he can systematize (and many things he can’t, “untethered” bits of information) and at age 4 he’s got his numbers and letters down cold. In two languages. With a smattering of Spanish and sign language thrown in for good measure. I wonder what this means? He’s got an insatiable appetite for geography and astronomy, gets that distant, vaguely desirous look in his eyes whenever I tell him that yes, one day we’ll visit Mali or Norway or Cambodia or Lithuania (he loves the word “Vilnius,” by the way) or Argentina or Costa Rica and wants to know all sorts of facts about these various places, whether they’re hot or cold, if they have mountains or jungles, and the list goes on… Is it just mental calesthenics or is he a born traveler? He’s already the picture of contentedness on our yearly four-hour jaunt to the beach, but we haven’t had the resources to tackle anything more exotic than that, not to mention a 17-month-old sister who isn’t yet ready to join the ranks of the jet-set, so… We haven’t had the chance to test our hypotheses about our son. I’m hopeful that we will one day, though, and soon. A trip to another state, let alone another country, would be the singular event of his young life, and I would bet money that he would love every single minute of it.

The French word is “beignet,” by the way.

I have the Faces song “Ooh La La” going through my head as I sit here in bed with the laptop, appropriately enough, on my lap and my eyes burning slightly from the contrast between the bright screen and the dark room. I downloaded that song along with Chad and Jeremy‘s “A Summer Song” a week or so ago, depleting the remaining balance an iTunes gift card I received for Christmas. They’re both nostalgia pieces, both on the soundtrack to the movie Rushmore which I misplaced (read: lost) some time ago.

never been here before.
peculiarly entrusted,
possibly that’s all

Well, after all that talk in the last post about not wanting to have the blogging software on our server until later, I decided to take the plunge anyway. So I’ve been tinkering around with WordPress on our webspace for most of the evening. It’s popular, sure, which makes it a bigger target for hackers, but security seems to be making progress with the latest release, it’s reasonably lightweight and seems to have really good support for web standards. Besides which, I’ve seen some WordPress-driven sites with incredibly elegant source code, so I have high hopes that I can achieve the same. The icing on the cake is that there are apparently several ways to import other blogs (like Blogger and LJ) in the database; in other words, the process stands a good chance of being a lot more streamlined than simply one post at a time. So that’s great too. I’m optimistic. Now if I could just get the file permissions sorted out we’d be in business… Soon, soon.

My aunt got into a pretty bad car accident today. She lives close to my parents, about an hour and a half away, so they’re looking after her. She’s my dad’s sister, never married, and about three years younger than him. She’s okay but in the ICU tonight. The prognosis is for her to be out of the hospital in about a week or so, depending. Prayers appreciated.

I’ve been interested in the Soviet/Russian space program lately. The DVD series I got for Christmas covers NASA in exhaustive detail but omits any references about their rivals in the space race except as a passing mention for their firsts like Gagarin’s flight and the first spacewalk or cooperative projects like the Apollo-Soyuz docking and Russia’s help with the ISS. The book I got for my birthday discusses their achievements, though, and overall, the impression that I get is just one of mass chaos and disorganization, a wild technological stabbing at space compared to NASA’s calculated resolve. It’s been said one of the biggest ironies of the space race is that the space programs of the two nations were directed in ways opposite the prevailing philosophies of their regimes. In other words, a very bureaucratic, centralized nation like the Soviet Union allowed widespread competition between rival firms in the hope that a better design would emerge, whereas the United States, the most capitalist nation in the world, conducted a very monolithic space program under the auspices of one agency: NASA. I think history shows that given the immense technological hurdles to be overcome to achieve the goals of the space race, not to mention the scope and mobilization of national resources required, the greater focus made possible by NASA’s approach was clearly the best. Still… The overlapping patchwork of programs on the other side, in contrast to NASA’s linear Mercury-Gemini-Apollo-Skylab-Shuttle sequence, is fascinating. More to come about this, I’m sure.

1. Still working on the website. I might have to go back to Blogger, though, since they will let you post via FTP, something LJ (apparently) won’t do. It’s going to be a lot of work no matter how it’s done. At this point it’s looking like most of the transplanting’s going to have to be done by hand. 1200+ journal entries is a lot to move, but… I just want more control over the journal’s look and feel, not to mention having it under my own domain name, etc. Eventually I’ll probably install an actual blog application on my server, so that I can have control over everything, but we’re not quite there yet.

2. Today was one of those rare days at work where I accomplished literally everything on my to-do list. Everything that could be done was done. Project managers even approached me periodically with little rush jobs and I was able to knock those out. It was a good day.

3. Listened to a song earlier that contained the oft-used pop song lyric “It feels so right.” Now if that isn’t a nonsense statement, I don’t know what is. I don’t care if it’s “poetic” or some garbage like that. It’s on the same level as something like, “I feel like it’s the wrong thing to do.” No, you think it’s the wrong thing to do. The distinction between emotion and rational thought is blurred into meaninglessness in every arena these days. And frankly, there are few things more frightening to me than legions of people traversing the day making ethical decisions based mainly on how they feel. But sadly, the more I look around me the more I fear that’s where we are.

Luke continues to be interested in all things geographical and astronomical. Needless to say, this pleases me very much, all the more since I didn’t push him that direction; he just became interested in it of his own accord. Last night, since he slept at naptime and could thus stay up a little later, we took a trip to the local Michaels in search of some styrofoam spheres with which to make a solar system.

Now, it’s not like he needs a solar system. In his room, the kid has two solar system posters, two solar system pictures illustrated by his aunt, a little plaque with his name and a couple of planets on it, a solar system made up of detached planets and a solar system mobile we made last week. But he didn’t have anything three-dimensional, an omission even he noticed when we were making the mobile out of paper last week. He made a “spherical cage” of sorts with both his hands and asked, “Daddy, can you make them like this?” So we had a discussion about the difference between circles and spheres, and yesterday it was off to Michaels.

We found a pre-painted solar system sphere kit that even came with the wires needed to attach the planets to the sun. Good thing too, since the styrofoam spheres in the floral section ended up being considerably more expensive than I had anticipated. So we purchased the kit, returned home and assembled it. The colors were a little off–Venus isn’t really bluish green and Mercury isn’t orange, among other things–but they got the essentials right and he was pleased. I hung it from the ceiling and now the boy has a whopping eight solar systems of various types in his room.

I think what makes me the most happy is that he gets excited about the same things that got me excited as a boy. I don’t mean he has the same interests–though we do share many–I mean that when we went to Michaels he got excited about the paint supplies and the dinosaur assembly kits and bottle rockets and the little wooden bulldozers and sailing ships. There’s absolutely nothing commercial in his life. He knows the basics: Mickey, Minnie, Bugs Bunny, Winnie the Pooh, etc, but beyond that, nothing. And it leaves room for the more typical boy fascinations to emerge. I’m really enjoying this, not just for his sake but because we really do have a lot of fun together these days. The wooden airplane we assembled and painted Sunday night and the solar system we got yesterday are evidence that his mind can handle more complex projects. From here, it’s only on to bigger and better things…

Got back yesterday from a great weekend at my parents’. We left on Friday, arrived and settled in. I had a meeting with a web design client (and good friend) almost as soon as we got there, and that went very well. Every little bit of supplemental income helps and web design work is a great from a value/time standpoint (i.e. I get paid a lot per hour). We piddled around for a little while, played with the kids, had my mom’s fantastic lasagna for dinner, put the kids to bed and watched the new Indiana Jones flick, which was passable but entertaining. Paul called from Alaska to wish me happy birthday, which was very thoughtful.

Saturday morning Diane and I left Penelope in my mom’s care while we took Luke to visit the NC Museum of Life and Science in Durham (a veritable institution in the area that I remember visiting well-on 25 years ago when I was in preschool myself). It was a little cold and rainy, but we had a great time with the weather exhibits and all the space stuff and the geology and technology stations. Luke wanted to stay on the (excellent) playground longer but we decided to see the butterfly exhibit, and that was great fun too. One butterfly in particular seemed to take a shine to me and landed on me three times, inspecting the surface of my fingers with his little proboscis every time. He was very cute and we took pictures.

We returned home to a surprise birthday party Diane organized for me! It was my first ever, and well attended with lots of old friends and all their kids. Neomonde deli catered and I had a wonderful time visiting with everyone. David (brother) even sent me a video birthday message which I greatly enjoying watching.

Saturday evening Diane and I were going to go to the symphony as referenced below, but she had been up since very early the night before, so we ended up just going out to dinner at a local restaurant and called it a night. And Sunday morning we returned home. Good weekend. It was hard to leave but good to be back. Satisfying.

Today was a wonderful 30th birthday. I’m fortunate to work for a company that actually gives its employees the day off for their birthday; not only that, they give us the flexibility to choose the day as well (within reason). I chose tomorrow to make it a nice long three-day weekend.

We’re visiting my parents tomorrow in Chapel Hill, and Diane and I have a date lined up for Saturday night: dinner and pops tickets to the NC Symphony. I can’t remember what the show’s about, but it’s always a good time.

Diane and Luke made some cupcakes (which the kids heartily enjoyed) and I received Spaceflight, a book that I checked out from the library recently and just fell in love with. It’s chock full of details from every era and milestone in the history of space exploration. The illustrations have to be seen to be believed–they have every space vehicle from Sputnik to Orion computer-modeled in truly stunning detail. And there are beautiful photographs, bio, technical specifications. It’s definitely worth owning.

Dreamed about Twinkie last night. It’s the second (or possibly third) time that’s happened in the past few months. Both times I remember thinking, during my dream, how much I loved that car. It did see me through a lot. And it was fun–I used to say that below 30 mph, the car was in its element. It was light, the steering was sharp and the engine was torquey and flexible. I think more than anything I really miss driving a stickshift… Hmm. Diane avoids driving the Saturn (my little commuter car) at all costs. I wonder if I could… No–there have been a handful of times where she’s needed to drive the automatic Saturn because I’ve had the Volvo, or for some other random reason. Granted, that’s really only happened once or twice a year, and… No. Can’t do it. No.

In my dream, I drove Twinkie to Carmax to trade it in for a newer Tercel, one of the really boxy ones from the mid-’80s that was actually 4WD. They had two models, one a blue automatic sedan and a red wagon. My preference was for the wagon, since it was more practical, and I looked through the back window to the front console to see if it was a stickshift, which it was. I turned around to look at Twinkie, which had mysteriously become auburn-colored and very shiny. Turning back to inspect the “new” Tercels, the sedan had become the manual one and the wagon had changed into the automatic car, which was frustrating… That’s when I woke up, I think.

Things that make me laugh really hard, somewhat inexplicably:

• Any cartoon featuring Senor Cardgage
• Mr. T Facts
• The reviews for The Best of David Hasselhoff

As a lapsed private pilot, I’ve been asked a couple of times for my take on the recent airplane crash in the Hudson river near New York City. Here it is, in a nutshell: It’s second nature for the pilot. I mean, those are the kinds of scenarios you train over and again for in the simulator and can manage in your sleep. That said, I still can’t really imagine exhibiting the kind of piloting finesse demonstrated in that particular plane–an Airbus A320-200–on account of the sidestick controller it uses (as opposed to the traditional yoke). Think about controlling something that massive with small wrist movements of one hand… It would just feel totally unnatural. The F-16 was the first plane to use the sidestick, but in its case it seems a little more reasonable, given that the F-16 is a much smaller, highly-maneuverable fighter. Honestly, the sidestick’s inclusion on every modern Airbus–even the A380 (!!)–is a major reason for me to favor Boeing products. The latter just seem much more pilot-friendly. The comments of several airline pilots I’ve talked to corroborate this.

As far as what caused the plane’s engines to fail, there’s no way for an engineer to design an engine to withstand that kind of event. Jet engines are routinely tested for birdstrike resiliency, but that test basically consists of a cannon firing a dead chicken (or equivalent) at an engine running on a test stand. Both engines ingesting multiple birds during a high-power setting on climbout is an unreasonable thing to expect the engines to withstand. So I don’t fault the engineers in the least for their design decisions. It was just bound to happen, I think, and I’m glad it turned out the way it did.

Apologies for the style change. I’m not a big fan of the current layout/look, but it’s what came with a style update necessary to access certain options that will (hopefully) give me more control over the journal’s look and feel. The new suffernfamily.com is under heavy construction at the moment and the plan is to seamlessly integrate this journal when all’s said and done. So I’ve been poking around LiveJournal a little bit, probing its strengths and weaknesses as far as that’s concerned. And the news so far is not good, I’m sorry to say. I kept a journal on Blogger for a couple of years after we were married and it was much, much easier to integrate into our website. The stylesheet was obviously fully customizable, but the kicker was that the source code was as well, so I could delete or comment out sections that weren’t needed. It was very easy to use. I’ve a good mind to contact the LJ gurus and ask if something similar is possible. In a perfect world I’d even like a redirect so people visiting this page would be automatically forwarded to our new site once it’s up, but I’ll settle for just being able to integrate it the way I want to. We’ll see.

go on and make me up
oh, i’ll still be your defender
and you’ll be my missing son
and i’ll send out an army
just to bring you back to me.
’cause regardless of your brothers’ lies,
oh, you will be set free

I adore this song. I adore all the songs on this album, actually. It meant a lot to Diane before she introduced it to me, and I’m glad she did. It’s poetic, lyrical Christian music made with actual artistry… Sadly, there aren’t many singers or bands out there about whose music that can be said. Over the Rhine is the only other band that readily comes to mind.

It’s been interesting to trace the evolution of Derek Webb‘s theology through his music. He was one of the focal points of the band Caedmon’s Call before he split with them to pursue a solo career (though recently they’ve reunited, I’ve heard). I bought one of the band’s first albums back in the mid-’90s and although the music was sold in Christian bookstores and labeled as CCM, the songs on that album were by-and-large very dark and full of doubt. Webb had a more upbeat number on the album called “Bus Driver” that achieved moderate success, he wrote “I Just Don’t Want Coffee,” which is definitely more angsty and existential and contributed a riveting song called “Center Aisle” that describes his reaction to a friend’s suicide. One could argue that he didn’t choose the circumstances that produced those songs and was just writing from his experience, but whatever the case, it was, overall, a dark beginning. And it’s interesting, if you follow the evolution of his songwriting, from his later Caedmon’s albums through to his solo career, while he certainly can cover more downbeat material, there’s more lyrical consistency and he seems less tempestuous than he used to be. He wallows less in his own emotions in favor of extolling the God Who transcends his circumstances and the emotional responses they provoke. Beyond the dedicated pleasure derived from his music, it’s really encouraging to be able to witness a Christian artist come into his own and mature at once musically and spiritually.

as surely as the rising son
oh you will be set free

Kind of a sad day. I remember being little and going to Circuit City with my dad and brothers, and there being something really exciting about it. Maybe it was the name: “Circuit City.” It sounded like something out of a sci-fi movie, complete with X-wing fighters and photon torpedoes. Or maybe it had something to do with the sensory overload that assaulted me as soon as I walked in the door. There weren’t many stores at the time that had a similar effect, and I wasn’t yet jaded enough to begin to resent the intrusion; I went with the flow, and I remember thinking it was just really cool. And while most of us could see their demise coming–the store in our area is particularly shoddy, and I much prefer the local Best Buy–I’ll always have fond memories of trips to Circuit City with Dad.

Interesting to think about the vast grid of connections that’s led to the recent economic downturn. It really is a prime example of the butterfly effect.

The downturn is global in scope and has affected the economies of whole countries, mainly through the cascading failure of central banks. The health of those central banks is tied to the health of investment firms with whom they partner. The investment firms themselves are interconnected, meaning a failure of investor confidence in one will affect them all to a degree. Most of the firms in question dealt in mortgage-backed securities to some extent, but there was one whose downfall had more of a ripple effect in the industry. The MBSs that firm dealt in are bundles of mortgages, primary risky mortgages, packaged together in an attempt to mask the risk associated with them. In any investment product like that, the overall health of the asset is calculated based on the average health of the securities that it comprises. The mortgages are risky, sure, but on average there are more good mortgages than ones in default, and this keeps the security’s average value from tanking. However, there definitely comes a point at which the number of bad mortgages in the security reaches a criticality, and the security becomes, in effect, worthless. For the security to reach that point, there had to have been one mortgage that tipped it “over the edge,” so speak. And most mortgages don’t go bad instantly–there’s a process by which the bank notifies the homeowner that he’s past due, months to respond and so forth. However, the bank has to pull the plug at some point, after the homeowner has been sufficiently down-and-out or irresponsible. Most homeowners don’t wake up one day and patently decide to be irresponsible with their money; it’s a long series of little decisions that get them where they are. It could be something as simple as, say, buying a beer at a local convenience store using the last money available to cover the mortgage payment.

So, going the other direction, the global economic downturn, affecting billions of people, could have been caused by the decision to buy a beer–a beer that caused the homeowner to default on his mortgage, which caused the security to go bad, which caused the entire MBS to be worthless, which caused the investment firm’s product line to be viewed in an unfavorable light, which caused investors to pull their money out, which caused the firm to fail, which cascaded through the investment industry, causing other firms to fail, which caused smaller banks to fail, which caused larger banks to fail, which affects the whole range of industries in a given country, which countries are interconnected in our global financial world, causing the economic downturn we’re all experiencing.

Little things matter. Food for thought.