Eclectic Amateur

You died in the place of the One
Who would die in the place of us all.

Kyrie eleison.

May the peace of the Christ Child be upon you and yours this Chrismas season!

The Risk of Birth, Christmas 1973

This is no time for a child to be born,
With the earth betrayed by war & hate
And a comet slashing the sky to warn
That time runs out & the sun burns late.

That was no time for a child to be born,
In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;
Honour & truth were trampled by scorn —
Yet here did the Saviour make his home.

When is the time for love to be born?
The inn is full on the planet earth,
And by a comet the sky is torn —
Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.

— Madeleine L’Engle, The Weather of the Heart

I am firmly of the belief that the “Christmas shopping frenzy” is no less than a Satanic plot to rob us of the proper season of Advent, and to steal the peace and silence that would otherwise prepare us for the coming of Christ.

And, losing Advent, we have lost it in both senses — that of preparing our hearts for the Feast of the Nativity, where we celebrate the first coming of the Infant Christ into the world in history, and of preparing for the Second Coming of the Christ the Lord: this time, not as a helpless infant, but as the the righteous judge of history. And of us. Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.

Come, Lord Jesus!

Come, Lord Jesus! Do I dare
Cry: Lord Jesus, quickly come!
Flash the lightning in the air,
Crash the thunder on my home!
Should I speak this aweful prayer?
Come, Lord Jesus, help me dare.

Come, Lord Jesus! You I call
To come (come soon!) are not the child
Who lay once in the manger stall,
Are not the infant meek and mild.
You come in judgement on our all:
Help me to know you, whom I call.

Come, Lord Jesus! Come this night
With your purging and your power,
For the earth is dark with blight
And in sin we run and cower
Before the splendid, raging sight
Of the breaking of the night.

Come, my Lord! Our darkness end!
Break the bonds of time and space.
All the powers of evil rend
By the radiance of your face.
The laughing stars with joy attend:
Come Lord Jesus! Be my end!

— Madeleine L’Engle, The Weather of the Heart

Free Software hackers, large technology corporations, and Third-World governments co-operating to make computers truly affordable for the vast majority of the world? Jim Gettys gives more details in this blog entry, $100 Laptop / One Laptop Per Child:

There certainly was a lot of publicity last week on the unveiling of the “green machine” OLPC prototype in Tunis last week; google news showed into the hundreds of articles world-wide.

Here is the minimum description of the hardware we expect at the moment. I say minimum, as events and commodity prices may change plans, and delays sometimes mean you get more than the minimum:

• AMD x86 Geode processor, at least GX2 @ 500mhz, but very probably something later, faster and lower power, with the more interesting companion chip (e.g. support for USB 2).
• 128 meg RAM; think cheap, rather than high performance
• minimum of 512 meg flash
• built in 802.11 wireless (probably a Athleros chip, due to its advanced driver), with mesh networking.
• 4 USB ports
• keyboard and large touchpad, which can be put on the back of the display, so you might use it as an e-book
• display (more below; it is novel, and the most likely component to cause delays and interesting consequences to open source software)
• crank generator & batteries; you get to work for your computing

What it doesn’t have:

• fans or heat sinks (saving power, cost and weight)
• disk drive (they are fragile, expensive, and unreliable, and eat power)
• any I/O expandability other than USB
• any hardware/flash expandability

What does this mean to you, an open source developer?

• With luck, a huge new audience for your software all over the world; maybe of order 100,000,000 in ‘07, if everything goes really well (there are about 1 billion school-age kids on the planet, and others want the same kind of hardware for more commercial use). Governments want to buy these by the shiploads. Their motivation is obvious: distributing conventional books is expensive, and all you get is a book. A computer at the $100 price point, if it can last 4-5 years, can be justified on that ground alone, much less the other uses of computers, such as the web, VOIP, email, IM, etc.
• Doing stupid things in your programs can make it hard to put the processor to sleep or use more power than need be. In the case of this machine, this translates to real work to do (think cranking).

Read the whole thing, especially if you are interested in the technical details. If this can be pulled off, I think it has the potential be as disruptive as the original PC introduction. (Whether you think that’s a good or a bad thing is, of course, a separate issue.)

In case you’ve never heard of Jim Gettys, he’s one of the original architects of the X Window System from M.I.T. (this is the basis for the GUI for nearly every Unix or Linux system in existance), and has a resume that makes me wonder what I’ve been doing with my career and life.

So, the entire crew of us went to see yesterday’s Tigers game at Comerica Park. (I didn’t know that I’d miss Michigan and Trumble, the Only True Home™ of the Tigers, so much, but that’s another story …)

It was a beautiful day for a baseball game, sunny and hot, but with a breeze. Marring the perfection, however, was the blaring of the speakers directly above our heads as we sat 4 rows below maximum nosebleed.

I was coping, but Nancy was developing a horrific headache. It didn’t help that the Princess Rachel, in her cheering enthusiasm, had developed a rather piercing shriek to her constant “Go Tigers! Go Tigers!”

By the fifth inning, Nancy had to finally tell Rachel to please tone it down. “Save it for when someone hits a home run.”

Rachel, disappointed but obedient, puts on her sad face, quietly nods her assent …

CRACK!

… and Brandon Inge knocks it out of left field for a tie-breaking two-run homer.

“Yay Tigers! Yay Tigers!”

The sheer choreography of it was breathtaking, and a thing of beauty. 🙂

Wendell Berry, on the importance of being current:

Contemporaneity, is the sense of being “up with the times,” is of no value. Wakefulness to experience — as well as to instruction and example — is another matter. But what we call the modern world is not necessarily, and not often, the real world, and there is no virtue in being up-to-date with it. It is a false world, based upon economies and values and desires that are fantastical — a world in which millions of people have lost any idea of the materials, the disciplines, the restraints, and the work necessary to support human life, and have thus become dangerous to their own lives and to the possibility of life. The job now is to get back to that perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, in which the foundations of our life will again be visible to us, and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery. In that world all wakeful and responsible people, dead, living, and unborn, are contemporaries. And that is the only contemporaneity worth having.

— Wendell Berry, Standing By Words, (p. 13)

I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
-- G. K. Chesteron, The Ballad of the White Horse


God have mercy.

LORD, how long?

Ah, noteriety!

I got to spend a few days basking in this impressive accomplishment:

“You mean, you got a lawyer to call you evil? Wow …”

Yes! Not just “evil”, but “profoundly, deeply evil“.

How did I achieve this state of “metaphysical perfidy”? Why, by simply letting Dale know that the final preview chapter of The Protector’s War was up on the website.

The metaphysical part comes with managing to do it on his birthday. 🙂

However, glory is but fleeting. I find myself entirely outdone and outclassed by this final comment:

Of course, as soon as THE PROTECTOR’S WAR is out, I’ll be putting up sample chapters from A MEETING AT CORVALLIS, the last in the trilogy… 8-).
— S.M. Stirling

Instead of writing here, I seem to be leaving comments strewn about on other people’s blogs:

At Jeff Culbreath’s, Distributists, Agrarians, and Biophysicists

At Dawn Eden‘s regarding Rod Dreher

Wrangling with Todd at Dale’s regarding the merits of Sing a New Church

So, Linux, Distributism, and the connection between them, Rod Dreher and the clerical sex abuse scandals, and liturgical music. More reasons why this place is called “Eclectic Amateur” …

Mr. Franklin Jennings, noting my admiration for the Curley’s pantry and my desire to build my own bookcases, has graciously offered his advice:

If you have a drill, and a steady hand, adjustable shelves are the way to go.

Cut two sides from 12″x1″ pine or other wood of your choice. Place a 1″x1″ cleat at the bottom of each, flush. Place same cleats at top, inset from the top by the actual width of your 12″x1″ (about 3/4″, but measure your wood to be certain.

Drill two series of holes down each side piece, to accommodate dowels which will support shelves.

Assemble top and bottom to sides. Attach 1/4″ plywood to back, which greatly stabilizes the box. Cut shelves and install with the dowels.

You’re a smart guy. Examine an adjustable bookshelf at Wally-world and you’ll see exactly what I am describing.

Good luck to you!

Thank you!

What’s funny (and kind of sad) is that I am quite familiar with the Wally-world adjustable bookshelves, through long association with Sauder furniture (as both a customer and as a former employee).

The points that have been stumping me have been (a) how to do the corner joinery simply? and (b) is a fixed shelf in the middle necessary for stiffness? All of the units I’ve seen have at least one fixed shelf. But, they use 1/8″ or thinner paperboard for the shelf backing, not 1/4″ plywood as you recommend. So, the plywood adds sufficient stiffness to make a fixed shelf unneccessary?

Not to mention the twin devils of (a) time! and (b) my practical skill levels being more like Maclin Horton’s than Will Hutton’s.