Blogging Ottinger (tim)

It is a little discouraging when the vast majority of the responses you get in a given week are porn spam. I have marked and deleted almost everything I’ve gotten for the last week or two. I guess spam never sleeps. S’okay, I know that there are friends and others reading. It’s good of you to keep up with me. And I’m glad to be keeping the porn spammers at bay so at least this one place can be tidy (as long as I can keep it so).

You may recognize the title from an old Rich Mullins song. I wish I were sufficiently like Jesus to really know how hard it is, but I’m trying enough to realize some of the difficulty. The problem is how much less we are than He is.

We have to learn to be patient because God is patient. In fact, He is far more patient than we think he should be. We would have escalate our issues into inticing or intimidating or forcing things to be done. We would have cleaned up the world, driven out the evil, righted the wrongs, given up on some, pushed others. But instead we have to be patient as Christ is patient. That’s not easy, and sometimes not fun.

We have to be gracious because He is gracious. We have to give second chances and thirds, forty-second and forty-third chances even. We’d be pretty happy to draw the line and write off those who hurt us too many times, just as we’re often ready to give up on tasks that are hard or painful for us, but instead we need to soldier on. We have to give forgiveness and kindness (especially the unmerited kind) even when we don’t feel like it, because He did. This is hard.

We have to be generous because He is generous. So what if he decides to give our friends or relatives (or worse, rivals) talents and blessings and any number of good things? What if those who come late to the faith are given blessings beyond those who’ve grown up in it? What if he gives wisdom whereever he pleases, and gives goodness as it seems right to him? What if He gives more to others than to us? What if He gives us talents in areas other than the ones we would have have chosen?

Of course, the whole goal is to be increasingly Christ-like. That is hard, especially when I’ve spent time becoming increasingly me-like. I know that His way is better, and I’m suddenly glad that the way is to be patient, generious, and gracious — because otherwise there would be no place left for me.

Yes, it’s hard to be like Jesus.

A friend told me about Specimen, a guitar company in Chicago. They have a variety of off-beat guitars with unique features. Quite a number of them are made from aluminum and have a riveted-together battleship or bomber look. I personally like the Flame Top Pippin. This looks like two different-sized les pauls, sawed in half longways and fused together. I can’t argue with the reach it gives your fret-hand. It’s pretty for all the asymmetry. It’s odd.

Here is a small photo, from the link above

Comments (1)

Well, this makes up my mind for the next non-tech book I want to buy.

I found this article at dying church, and it sums up a lot of what I’ve learned recently.

The UN now recommends that member countries use open source software. It might seem funny, but open source really is a political issue. It is economic policy, it affects the dependencies between countries. Also, some of it is really good stuff.

If you want to act like a major country and start using OSS, you can do that. You could switch to Linux or you could start to use open source software on windows. It doesn’t cost you anything to try it, and you might find that it makes you a better and more independent country.

I should have blogged this a long time ago. Here is a blast from the past: What Businesses Can Learn From Open Source.

I quit reporting on this a long time ago, but it looks like the SCO lawsuit finally has generated some exciting news. I’m hoping that these documents will provide some kind of proof wrt all the conspiracy theories. If SCO is really just a front for other companies to try to stop Linux or IBM, we should start to hear about it. How cool would it be if that were NOT the case?

Either way, this should resolve all but the most unreasonable of those conspiracy theories.

Here are some interesting links to distributed version control systems. I need them for work, since I’m taking interest in bringing DVCS or DRCS (same thing) to agile projects. It could eventually be a kind of specialty even.

* SVK
* Bazaar-NG
* Darcs
* Monotone
* comparisons

I just have to get permission to do it from my clients, and get my feet a bit wetter.

I’m really interested in distributed agile work, however much it may sound like an oxymoron. To research it, I need to join a distributed agile team. It’s a crazy idea needing crazy people, and probably requiring too much time. But what fun it would be!

Woohoo.
The future of palm is linux? For those of us using linux-based PDAs, this is certainly not tragic.

Now maybe we’ll have a lot more applications and features in our open-source-friendly palmtop computers, written in GTK (another choice I applaud). Maybe even WxPython? Coolness abounds.

Excellent move overall.

Okay, the name alone caught my eye. But tell me, does this look an awful lot like the Ovation Breadwinner to you, only much prettier?

I never played one, but they are cool looking in their way. I liked the looks of some of the semi-hollowbody ones.

I found another great podcast, and have soaked up the first four or five episodes. It is the Mayberry-driven church, the adventures of some big-town, big-church ministers who have relocated to the world of small town living. It’s great to hear the perspective of people who have moved from big to small, and who have embraced it. Great stuff.

Wanna go nuts? Switch back and forth between java, C#, C++, Ruby, and Python. Read articles, write stuff, try to go and work normally.

It was much more pleasant, by the way, to switch from statically-typed languages to dynamic ones than it is to go the other way. Switching to static languages is very frustrating because of the loss in fluidity. You can create and dissolve lists, tuples, structures, and hash tables so easily in python and ruby, and loops make so much sense. Then you have to do looping in C# or C++ and the syntax gets back into the way. Or you want to return more than one value from a function, and it becomes tedious because of out parameters and the like.

Well, anyway, my original intent was to grouse about how knowing a lot of languages and how crazy it is to keep them separate when you are programming.

People are always talking about what a serious business marriage is. I am told that you really have to work at it, and you only get out what you put in, minus a little. There’s all this about how you have to work hard to impress each other with diet and fitness and gifts and tokens of affection, and how you have to spend not only time, but quality time. You have to schedule your time, and make priorities, and all that. It sounds risky and difficult and amazingly self-sacrificing.

Man, that’s pretty scary. I’m glad I never knew that when I met my wife.

See, we’re not really bright when it comes to romance. We just love to hang out together and we like to talk (especially on long rides or after the kids are asleep). We lounge across each other whenever possible, and have been known to be holding hands or hugging or touching pretty much all the time. We actually like each other and are best friends. We enjoy being together and doing things together, and even doing nothing together.

I’m probably the worlds least gifted in “material thoughtfulness”. It never dawns on me to pick up gifts and candies, and I am not good at picking up hints or understanding what other people like. If the honeymoon is ever over and I have to start working at this I will probably wash out. I don’t plan little surprises and trips, and I have to ask my wife for money to buy her stuff, so surprises are out of the question. Hey, she manages it better than I do, and I respect that. We tend to each kind of rely on the other’s strengths.

That’s where I’m really lucky. My wife has a lot of skills and talents. I really respect her abilities and idea. She’s different in intellect — maybe it’s intuition or body language or something — she’s more emotionally aware of other people’s feelings and motivations. She is adventurous and likes to try new things and new places. She’s got a killer memory, whereas mine stinks. She can do math so fast and accurately, it makes my head swim. She’s also good at getting things done. If this honeymoon ends and I have to compete with her, she’ll clean my clock. I don’t know how my emotionally squeamish self-absorbedness will even get to play in the same league.

So I’ll be all upset when the honeymoon is over and all the work and planning and effort kick in. I’ll miss this spontaneous honeymoon kind of living. I’ll need new skills and abilities, but then at least I’ll understand what all this relationship talk from the pros is about and how it is for those other “normal” couples. Man. Things will be different.

Maybe we’ll be able to at least squeeze out another 17 years together before that happens.

Note to self: when Blair says “XXX Hot”, he really means it. All those other guys may be kidding, but Blair is one of the few who must absolutely be taken seriously.

Today I had to mop Blair’s After Death sauce off of my burger in order to eat it. That doesn’t generally happen. I’m not a total hot pepper madman (I don’t drink Dave’s Insanity for fun) but I like the hot stuff pretty well. In fact, there are few foods that I think are best kept totally pepper-free. But I was lit up. I had one of those burning, tingling, sweating, crying, nose-running experiences. What a crazy time. It was hot enough that I wasn’t having fun.

Of course, I don’t know if I was just feeling sensitive today with the head cold and all, so I have to try it again soon just to be sure. I definitely was feeling alive. I’m sure that this sauce will be excellent for the times when I need to stay awake.

Every once in a while we get news that really is news: The RIAA says that DRM actually helps you. It’s news to me. Of course, it’s news to Ken Fisher too, and he’s not buying it.