ThinkBlog

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/

These gentlemen have put out an NTFS driver for Linux that’s as easy to compile into your kernel (or, easier still, install via RPM and modprobe) as any driver I’ve ever seen.

I came to 64-bit Fedora with the expectation that I would be able to access the other half of my hard drive easily, just mounting it with ntfs. Imagine my surprise when I found that it wasn’t in the kernel! Look to these guys for even 64-bit RPMs for Fedora Core 4 x86_64. (I was planning to be “That Guy” who built and sent in an rpm, but alas, someone beat me to it just yesterday.)

Their website has instructions, so I won’t echo them here. Get on it!

http://nomis80.org/

If, like most geeks, you are used to using Gaim whether you’re on Windows or Linux boxen outfitted with GNOME, you have probably become accustomed to using Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab to cycle forward and backward through tabs in your IM window(s). (What, you didn’t know you could do that? Also try Alt+#, where # is the number of the tab you want to see.) But when I installed KDE on my Fedora box a couple of days ago, I found to my horror that Ctrl+Tab was caught by KDE as what switched desktops.

I don’t switch desktops that often, because number one is my only primary workspace (though I send monitors and all sorts of other miscellany to 2, 3, and 4). So a quick Googling came up with a solution, brought to you by Simon P., to whose website I link in the title as a token of my appreciation.

In his words,

In the Control Center, go to Regional & Accessibility -> Keyboard Shortcuts, then scroll the list to System -> Navigation -> Walk Through Desktop List, select it, select None for the shortcut, and that’s it.

http://www.petitiononline.com/lin64swf/

I just installed Fedora Core 4 for the AMD x86_64 CPU architecture (i.e., “arch”) and was disappointed when I found out that I would need to use a 32-bit version of Firefox in order to browse sites that have MacroMedia Flash.

This is but a minor blow to my usability. I don’t play games or watch movies in Flash, and mostly it’s a nuisance in the form of web-ads. But there are plenty of people for whom Flash movies are a full-time business, and they’re suffering because of this. This affects not only Linux users, as though it were a fringe problem, but also 64-bit Windows XP.

This petition is a call for MacroMedia to recompile Flash 7.0 for the x86_64 (and other 64-bit platforms). It’s exploding with newcomers and is able to compete with Intel processors valued at four times their cost. If you’d like to be part of the solution, sign the petition. (I’m sig number 1234.)

A couple of nights ago, as seems to be the pattern these days, I was up till about 06:30, so I saw the sunrise coming over the southeastern part of town. It was beautiful, so I took a picture. Here’s what turned out:

With a little color/contrast/gamma correction, the colors really pop:

I just watched Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time since I was probably five. That was a great film, when Ford was at the top of his game, just before Blade Runner. Among the many bits I appreciated as quality Spielbergian filmmaking (along with a fantastic soundtrack—John Williams is certainly a jewel among soundtrack composers) or as overwhelmingly nostalgic were things that I didn’t understand in the slightest when I saw it at a young age.

One of the things that struck me in particular was the seed of relativism tucked away in its sandscape. Notice in the last scene where the Shekinah glory of God comes roiling down across the steps and out of the Ark: the horrific, consuming God of Abraham, Isaac, and Moses, as it were, the Almighty One of Israel strikes down all these Nazi oppressors who dare to look upon the contents of the Ark.

In the very next scene, we see Washington, D. C., whereat Jones is arguing with colleagues about what is to be done with the Ark; and then, in the last cut, it’s wheeled away in a wooden crate, identical to so many others, in a presumably-top-secret American government warehouse by some average Joe who has no idea what his paws are wheeling down the aisle.

So we have an ambivalent relativism. On the one hand, the God of the Ark is given the symbolic victory over the supreme human evil: the Nazis. On the other hand, it is a talismanic, automatic incantation on the level of B-rated mummy movies: just as in the “mummy” flicks, the Egyptian gods protect mummies of royal lineage and high stature for their own sakes from the obviously inept or corrupt hands of archetypal evildoers, so in Raiders do we see the God of Israel protecting nothing more than His Ark of the Covenant from unworthy hands (and eyes).

It’s not that Elijah prayed and called fire from heaven to show the heathen the glory of God in spite of themselves. It’s that the trigger clicked, the mechanism by which wrath was released was set into motion, and when the mission was accomplished, the Shekinah and all the angels of death returned to their little box.

And then that box was put into a larger box, just like all the rest, and was wheeled away into a government-kept warehouse where all the other magical artifacts from Long Ago & Far Away, presumably each with its own significance, each with its own unique “powers.” What we fade away from to black as the credits roll is a symbol of what has happened in America and across the globe since 1981 and before: the packaging of varied and sundry gods into little non-descript crates, each with some value, some greater, some less, to be found by the merely curious and motivated.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?path=AS...=9325

Briefly, since I will be soon starting to post some of my reactions to Camus’ (really very rich) journals from “the early years,” I have to say—if you get the chance, do read them.

They’re like a Rorschach test, of sorts. He writes in such a terse, compact style, approaching Hemingway in its lack of clarification or adjectival exponentiation, that whatever you get out of it is due in large part to what it dredges up in you. His words are the iceberg beneath which lurk a world of subjective meaning. Check them out sometime.

I was sitting there having some wings and drinking a nice tall water at a pub downtown tonight [technically last night; this is a slight back-post], sharing my testimony with some friends—two I met within the past two weeks, the third I’ve only known since January of last year.

I tell you what, when I prayed for friends so desperately last winter, I never realized I’d be so blessed as I have been. But it took getting out there and pounding the pavement, too. It hit home with me tonight, over and over again, that the Lord answered my prayers when I stopped feeling sorry for myself and reached beyond myself to be a minister to others. There are some situations where God really reaches me through my willingness to focus on Him instead of my need. I think that’s important across the board. Last fall, I was waiting for people to just fall into my lap; finally in winter I got involved in a Bible study, and my wellness grew in proportion to my willingness to be there for others.

It’s not true that “God helps those who help themselves,” however much people quote Franklin as Scripture; He helps those, rather, who know they are beyond help except from Him. But neither does he reward those who sit and sulk. Amen.

A professor of mine last semester recounted, with all the smug satisfaction that a philosophy professor could muster (that would be hyperbole if philosophy professors didn’t actually exist, mind you), a brief snippet of a conversation he and a colleague from the English department had had in the elevator:

“You see, [sir], that’s the problem with you philosophers: You think you have all the claims to truth, what with the logic and the historical things. We, of course, in the English department, really have the answers to human experience.”

Yesterday in my class on existentialism, the professor was recounting the rise of psychologism in philosophical tradition, which—briefly—posits philosophy under the head of psychology as explanatory both epistemologically and from a standpoint of logic (as classically defined). Then, of course, the backlash, and the various means by which philosophers (often violently) dissociated themselves from psychology, created quite the mess for everyone involved.

During the discussion, Franz Brentano (1838-1917) was brought up as the grandfather of the two schools of neo-Kantianism, but having been a student of Aristotle, he apparently had none of this schism between psychology and “pure” philosophy. His students included Husserl and Freud, among others.

I’m majoring in psychology and philosophy; and I’ve always said that if I could triple-major, my third would be English. They all evaluate human experience. Camus and Sartre—even Plato and, in a way, Hobbes—came at philosophy from the literary angle. Freudian theory is packed with philosophy—indeed, psychologists these days now either lament over or belittle (or both) his entire corpus because so little of it can be verified empirically; but philosophers admire the airtightness of his arguments, however Victorian.

Psychology is the marriage of physiology and philosophy; literature is the result of psychology plus experience or, if you like, of all three (and then some) as made manifest in the author. I hope in my life to be able to draw from and instruct via all of these areas and more; but I do wonder if these fell into this trap because of an unwillingness to embrace truth when they saw it because of politics, or fear for their jobs.

In the war for claiming truths, I see myself as a medic and a liaison—I just hope I don’t get run through by my colleagues who believe me a traitor, lest my career as a professor be “nasty, poor, brutish, and short”!

I just spent a couple of hours at a friend’s house recording some voice-overs for some trance tracks he wanted to mix—during and after which we recorded some other things, some funny, some serious, but all of it was a blast.

Of the fruits of our labors, behold these, and enjoy!:

• What I was supposed to say—this was the objective.
• Then came a goofy, mid-state slang version.
• I tossed in my interpretation of the opening sample for track ten off of Propellerheads’ Decksandrumsandrockandroll.

Some of the more serious parts were Isaiah 40:1 and 40:28.

Last but certainly not least, when Chris picked up his metal guitar, I added Jesus’ words in John 8:58, to what I think is fantastic effect.

The argument has been put forth that, while arguments are either evaulated in a binary scheme—as valid or invalid—feelings are necessarily valid. I think this is an example of a self-esteem gospel, some pop-psychology mumbo-jumbo along with the prevailing wisdom among parents that it’s best to be “great friends” with your kids (often at the expense of their respect for you, and to the great peril of their persons).

Emotions, like ideas, are faculties of rational minds. If all feelings were necessarily valid, then they would be unevaluable—nothing that our minds could comprehend would be able to sway our emotions. This is prima facie untrue: the art of rhetoric is based on certain precepts and reasons, and even a personal offense may seem more or less an imposition when all facts are taken into account.

An emotion that is based on faulty understanding, ignorance, or no apparent intellectual stimulus is, then, invalid. The child that pitches a fit over not getting a piece of candy in the drugstore check-out line at her will—that fit is invalid because it’s based upon the faulty reasoning that whatever she wills is the best thing for her. The man who laughs at a funeral is schizotypal—we call him sick, because there is a mental imbalance there. A mood swing from a chemical imbalance due to drug abuse is understandable from a pharmacological standpoint, but rationally invalid.

I stood among many under the tutelage of a speaker once who said, “Whatever you are feeling is always perfectly valid. Just let it out, or experience it as it comes; no one can tell you that it’s wrong, it simply is.” Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s wrong, Jack. I’m sure this is the same line of thought with which Bacchic prostitutes whored themselves; I’m sure this is the line of reasoning that keeps depressed people ill, and cruel people enraged.

When you’re feeling upset, stop and ask yourself if it’s reasonable for you to be so. Don’t buy the lie that you can’t control yourself. You will find that, if you’re willing to overcome your rationalizations, a bit of self-critique will quench the fire of your anger or balm the sting of your weeping.

A very dear friend of mine is among the many men who consider a girl’s smoking of a cigarette to be a deal-breaker when it comes to dating her. (In fact, this month’s Men’s Health reports that of 2,758 men to visit MensHealth.com, “Smokes” was tied at 22% for first place among “deal breakers,” along with “Dated your best friend”.) To him, it’s not only disgusting in its own right (ashtray-breath, the heightened risk of lung cancer, &c.), but it also speaks to the psychological factors: perhaps a Freudian oral fixation? (There are many other factors here, but lest it sound like I’m throwing off on smokers, I’ll hold my friend’s peace.)

Now, it doesn’t particularly bother me to kiss a girl who smokes—I dated a couple of girls during my early college days, and they were very sweet—though I couldn’t bring myself to marry one, since it’s drastically important for my kids not to see either of their parents die a slow and painful cancer-death. After all, I used to smoke, and even now partake every once in a while of a nice cigar or pipe—and some girls really hate the taste of coffee, so it evens out.

But all that nonsense aside, I think it runs deeper than an oral fixation. Granted, I could be projecting my year at Clemson, but I think that girls who smoke habitually are confessing that life is too much for them, much in the same way that Camus views suicide. Have you ever been in a place where everything is different than what you’re used to, and in an intimidating way? Where you can’t find anyone to talk with who won’t think less of you for existing? When I see these girls around Columbia smoking, it looks like to me that same kind of “badass” smoke screen, literally, that says, “I’m tough! … I promise. Really.” To the one with discernment, it fairly screams, “I’m alone and scared. I want a friend, but more than that I want you to leave me alone because you could hurt me, whoever you are.”

Your thoughts? Maybe I’m completely off here.

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be. Thomas, à Kempis

Integrity has no need of rules. Albert Camus

We come late, if at all, to wine and philosophy: whiskey and action are easier. Mignon McLaughlin

Specialist: A man who knows more and more about less and less. James William Mayo

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend. William Blake

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field. Niels Henrik David Bohr

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us. Herman Hesse

Den der kun tager spøg for spøg og alvor kun alvorligt, han og hun har fattet begge dele dårligt. [People who take fun only as fun, and serious matters only seriously, haven’t fully grasped either one.] Piet Hein

“When I suggested this to him,” Tarrou continues, “that the surest way of not being cut off from others was having a clean conscience, he frowned. `If that is so, everyone’s always cut off from everyone else.’ […]” [p. 175]

Here’s the scene. Tarrou, the soft-spoken, streetwise historian of the novel, reports that the criminal Cottard, who has the suspicion of murder hanging over himself all throughout the novel but whose sordid past is regarded indifferently by his colleagues whose plight we read here.

Camus was very concerned about the guilt of us all, not just the feeling of guilt but the absolute knowledge that we are, in a profound way, guilty of grievous wrong. This is part of the absurdity of life, for Camus, since it amounts to sin without attrition, sin sans God. Cottard makes a good point, however simple. The reality of Christian communion is that we are shattered from one another in a foundational way until we come together in Christian unity. This is the effect of true love, then, that we experience something that transcends this horrific isolation.

In what seems to amount, after my having read his early Notebooks, to a coded confession or autobiographical account, Camus puts the following words in the mouth of Tarrou in speaking with Rieux, the “main character” and the physician of the novel [p. 222]:

“To make things simpler, Rieux, let me begin by saying I had plague already, long before I came to this town and encountered it here. Which is tantamount to saying that I’m like everybody else. Only there are some people who don’t know it, or feel at ease in that condition; others know and want to get out of it. Personally, I’ve always wanted to get out of it.”

Do we want to get out of the sin that entangles our hearts, or are we comfortable being martyrs to our flesh? Jesus asked of the lame man (John 5:6), “Do you wish to get well?” This was no idle question. He asks of us the same: do you really want to rid yourself of the plague within? Or would you rather carry it around for the excuses it gives you to act sick?

I just noticed that this copy I picked up from the library, in its typical tobacco-residue beige, carries on its spine the title, “THE PLAQUE“. “Oui, monsieur, it was a terrible time for la hygeine….”

---

References:
Camus, Albert. Gilbert, Stuart, trans. (1969). The Plague. Alfred A. Knopf: New York.

There are three kinds of coffee drinkers in this world. There are those that just drink it to get jacked: they like the rush or, like many of my Adderall-popping exam-cramming colleagues, would otherwise drink coffee only if it contained more sugar and milk than coffee essence in parts per million (commonly heard at Starbucks ordering such heinously sweet concoctions as a “venti white chocolate mocha with extra sprinkles and a few spoons of raw sugar, please—with one shot only, thanks”). Then you have the type that have grown accustomed to the taste of coffee, for one reason or another, but who are trying to nine-to-five it on three hours of sleep (et cetera). The third type—among the many of whom I am one—are the idealists, who see symbolism poured into every mug they drink—and love the taste as well as the amped-up teeth-gritting glory of it all.

Briefly, then, coffee is for the dweller in the abstract, the taste of hope. Allow me the pleasure of explanation.

When you select the whole beans from a shade-grown grower (since you do, right?), knowing that the lighter the roast the more caffeine per bean (the Indian blend Monsooned Malabar being the highest available to all but the one who special-orders from the local roaster), you grind up those beans to release the aromas and oils that make the bean so delectable.

I submit to you that making careful study of God’s word is like grinding the coffee beans of hope. If we don’t get down to the grit of meaning, parsing words and sentences and using a solid hermeneutic, it will be like running water over whole beans—the essential oils will all wash off, and you’ll drink in nothing but the most superficial taste of what God wishes to feed you. On the other hand, grind it too fine and try to find or read-into the text meaning that isn’t actually there, and the Word will become as a bitter, impenetrable sludge, which when ingested will give you nothing but nausea and a case of the shakes accompanied by profuse sweating.

Insofar as the water could be typed as our attention and zeal, the water we run over those beans needs to be near boiling to be at optimum understanding of the Word: if we lack motivation to hear God’s voice, it will be like pouring lukewarm water over the grind, which yields but a filmy dark water, unfit for consumption. On the other hand, boiling water will scorch the beans, yielding nothing but a uniform taste of naught but carbon—just as the ecstasy of overindulgent charismaticism or the strict religion of legalism burns off all nuances of the true love of God in favor of its own constructs.

We pour a cup of brew into the mug and sip. Need we add anything to it? Some enjoy listening to classical music while they study the Word (after all, Bach glorified God with his music by design), like sugar in the brew; some enjoy a bit of creamer—some conversation about what they’re reading so as to blunt the stark edge of the seriousness to which they’re unaccustomed. I drink it black, myself, just as I like studying the Word in silence most of the time, with at first nothing but the Word in front of me.

And now to the flavor. When the newcomer to coffee tries to start drinking it black, unless he’s Turkish or the son of Howard Schultz, it’s going to shock him—it will seem nothing but bitter. And isn’t that how it is to us, when we partake of the Word of God? As soon as we understand it, our flesh is offended—what a bitter taste! But soon we learn the nuances of flavor: there are, indeed, more intricate flavor combinations in fine coffee than in wine, the delicate undertones hidden to the unseasoned sipper—aye, just as men of learning can expound points that the newborn believer cannot yet grasp.

But let us say that one has just had a mug of the wonderful brew. Going down, it may have tasted bitter, but soon the digestion (meditation) thereof energizes the partaker. The mind is quickened, the delicate fingers of zeal creeping from the occipital to the frontal lobes across the scalp and down through the spine; Jesus speaks to the reader who is also a doer of the Word, “This is the way: walk in it.”

No, of course the analogy isn’t perfect. But if nothing else, it certainly helps along the enjoyment of a cup of joe; and to expound this in person is to have a unique segway into a conversation about what Christ is really all about.

Today marks the beginning of classes for full-time undergrad USC students in the fall of this year. I thought this pic would be appropriate since this is the beginning of the full load for most, and I among them (Thursdays are my toughest days, with five classes spanning from 09:30 through 19:30). Hang in there, start strong to finish well, grunt if you need to, and be well.

 

The past few days—maybe weeks—I’ve felt mired in a fog of sorts. There are between five and seven post-drafts, and at least three dozen one-liner “seeds” just waiting to be expounded here. There is a mound of books both read and half-read, calling out to be reviewed. There are paper scraps and notebooks strewn with nebulous ideas and the like.

Lately, I can’t seem to call the Form down into a manifestation; all these Platonic Ideas reside just beyond reach, in the Kantian noumenal where the asymptote of the expressible runs vertically just before the things I want to say.

A certain listlessness. I haven’t had coffee yesterday; nor did I work out, nor run. I was trying to allow my body to rest, to recover, since yesterday I was so exhausted by the time I hit the sheets (at 04:00 after a five-mile run), I figured I needed it. Well, now, here I am awake, and fear to ingest diphenhydramine HCl or doxylamine succinate because their effects linger for days, not hours.

I have been trying to sup on the Word of God, but find a frustrating double-minded ambivalence within even after fervent prayer, like I’m waiting on some soul-shattering revelation. This will come by study; I betimes forget in the dark hours that the meat of maturity is found in the daily doing.

…

Now, having let this sit for over an hour, I’ll retire for a couple of hours if possible, and then leap forth to make half a pot of coffee.