Blogging Ottinger (tim)

There’s a song that they sing when they take to the highway
A song that they sing when they take to the sea
A song that they sing of their home in the sky
Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep
But singing works just fine for me.

— James Taylor, Rockabye Sweet Baby James

I suppose , perhaps, that there are some people somewhere who experience Christianity this way. Perhaps it helps them to sleep, gives some comfort to endure life as they know it, perhaps lays down a nice pollyanna view of the future to be someday that helps them relax. But that’s not Christianity as I know it.

To me it has been much less comfort than challenge. In conversion, I understood that I was giving up much of the life I identified in. I was going to have to be less introverted, more caring, more concerned for the welfare of others. I would have to be less critical and harsh. I would have to quit writing people off if I didn’t agree with them (or worse yet if they didn’t agree with me). I would have to quit assuming that people with problems earned and deserved them through their own stupidity, and realize that the poor are always with us and that we have to help when we can. And when helping helps.

I’ve probably lost sleep more with concerns over other people. I’ve lost sleep over concerns about how I should help or not help. I wake up some mornings wondering if I have been concerned enough with the balance between doing justice and desiring mercy. I wonder if I should have been more brave and courageous (as we are repeatedly commanded to be). I sometimes see that I have not acted out of humility, but out of the old arrogance and frustration which used to be my companions.

Being Christian has made me struggle with who I am and who I should be. It has made me do things other people would not have done, and kept me from things that others would gladly have done without a second thought. It has required courage, confrontation, transparency, admission of wrong, concern. The hardest of all is to cultivate innocence in the midst of so many situations and people where creative wickedness is valued.

For all of that, it has been wonderful. I much prefer the person I am to the person I was. The change was much more involved than a song and some wishful thinking to help me sleep. The struggles I have now are superior in character and in substance to the struggles I once had. Learning to change my desires has led me to desiring better things for more people. I am more the person I want my kids to look up to, though I’m not all that I wish I could be.

I think that we should be careful, both in and out of the church, not to portray this as “the easy answer” or “cheap comfort.” It would be sad for anyone to set their feet on this path because they expected it to be comfortable or easy. Even while being frequently hard, this way is exceedingly good.

XKCD becomes embittered over the loss of his collection of files. Being greatly upset, he recommends avoiding all DRM-ed content, and draws a comic that suggest that you are better off to just steal to begin with than to have DRM recalled and break the law later trying to recover a collection you’ve already paid for.

If you buy DRMed stuff, it can be taken from you at any time. If you’re okay with that, then by all means go ahead and enjoy the material. Only accept DRM for something you are going to discard after a month or two anyway. You can save yourself a lot of disappointment and embitterment and stay on the right side of the law this way.

If you expect to keep the content you buy, then you must avoid DRM entirely. Use DRM-free content only if you expect to hold onto it and use it freely (time-shifting, format-shifting, device-shifting, etc). I use services like EMusic to get drm-free music. I don’t get the top-ten from the radio, but I keep finding new music to listen to.

There is more out there than ITunes and Audible and big-label stuff. Open your head, pour in something new.

Assume health instead of dysfunction. Good advice.

But if a relatively healthy person—someone who ‘just feels stuck’—receives counseling when he needs coaching, it’s like giving the wrong prescription.

Rees guitars new G90 model is the first I’ve seen which will incorporate the hot new Seymour Duncan SHPR-1 pickups.
I’m would so love to get my hands on one of these.

This seems so sad. I suppose have trouble imagining that people have that much trouble with Linux when they bounce between windows versions, play station, game cube, Palm, and so many other operating systems in the course of a year. Especially when I have seen so many people switch over with so little difficulty.

I have seen people have some trouble. Of course, the comments under the article also says that the linux versions are not being installed well. Given any bad installation of any operating system I would want to give it up. My phone has windows mobile on it, and I can’t tell if it’s not installed well or whether it’s not a very nice operating system to work with. Of course, I am not returning it just because the OS is too clicky for navigation and a bit squirrely to operate.

I think that I would love to have a Linux phone and I would love a Linux netbook. Maybe they’ll make the returned merchandise available to us and I can stick Ubuntu light on it.

I’m looking at setting up a new blog for my professional musings, so that this blog remains a random life blog. I will move my more popular papers to the new location and blog all the work-related, agile, TDD, Python, management, etc to that location.

I’m having trouble with personal branding here. Do I make the name include “agile”, or “object” or what? Do I just call it TimOttingerBlog? Agile Otter? What is too whimsical and what is too bland?

Please drop me some feedback, and let me know what you think.

Agile Otter is the new blog.

I find that not everyone was born using bash, and sometimes people are surprised at some of the little tricks that we old guys have been using for years. Here is one little tip:

Sometimes you have to do something that is just too large for a command line. In some cases, it’s better if you can fire up some editor and make the commands “just right” before firing them.

You can simply type ‘fc’ and (provided you set FCEDIT or EDITOR) you’re immediately editing your last command in your favorite editor.

Better yet, lets say you have a bunch of files you have to manipulate. You can one one of them by hand using the usual trial-and-error technique and then use ‘fc’ to pull it up the successful command in the editor. You can open a separate pane into your directory listing (or in a vim variant you can do “!ls”. Now you can easily repeat all the commands for every other file you need to manipulate. When you exit the editor, your commands will execute as if you just typed them in one-at-a-time. Only much faster.

If the commands to manipulate the first file spans many lines, use the history command to spot the range of lines. If it runs from roughly line 480 to line 520, type ‘fc 480 520′ and then edit out any unwanted lines (syntax errors, etc). You can even save the contents into a separate file to use as a script.

A lady I worked with once told me that the her fitness secret was to put just a little more energy into everything. If you normally did something lying down, try sitting. If you normally sit, try standing.

I decided while running for a train that I needed a little more fitnesse, and so I’ve started walking when I might have caught a ride, and taking unnecessary detours at work (including unnecessarily descending and climbing stairs).

So far my “path of least convenience” is starting to pay some dividends. Little backaches are giving way to better posture. My legs are getting stronger, and I am not as badly out of breath from my walks. I know that it’s hardly the “90 days to a hot beach body” but it’s something I can easily afford on my schedule. I could use some aerobic sports workout, but that’s hard for me to do and keep up with my life.

Some might call it “dawdling”, but I am finding that it clears my mind a bit and helps me to digest information I’ve been collecting. It might be helping my stress level a little.

This is just a little meme I thought I’d pass on.