Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

By an overwhelming vote, Broadway Baptist Church has voted to call Dr. Brent Beasley as Senior Pastor. I counted three against - for better or worse, we embrace our knot-heads. Dr. Beasley preached today prior to the congregational vote and gave a thoughtful sermon on the topic of arrivals and departures. He's got a fairly laid back style, and occasionally illustrated his point using a wry self-deprecating humor. I think I'm going to like this guy. I was able to meet Brent and his family yesterday at a reception at the church and came away extremely impressed, and look forward to having them as part of our church family. Brent's young -- around 38; as I stood line last week after the Pastor Search Committee announced his name, I opined that I was going to have to get used to having a pastor younger than me. A grandmotherly type looked over her shoulder and said, "Get used to it, honey." As I heard it being discussed, Dr. Beasley's first day in the pulpit as s...

Briefly noted: the Pastor Search Committee at Broadway Baptist (where they tolerate misfits and sinners such as myself) announced they'd nominated Brent Beasley as new Senior Minister.  He comes highly recommended. A brief clip I discovered on YouTube of Dr Beasley, talking about religion and the public schools sounding intelligent and rational: a rarity amongst Southern Baptists these days. My deepest condolences to 2nd Baptist Church , Memphis, who is about to lose who looks to be a great senior pastor.

The city of Lynchburg, Virginia, home to the first commercial cigarette rolling machine and first mass market over-the-counter enema, is also home to Liberty University , founded by the late Reverend Jerry Falwell in 1971. Recently Liberty University created a bit of a stir when the ruling powers that be informed the LU College Democrats that they were no longer a recognized campus organization. Said an email from the Vice President of Student Affairs , Mark Hine, " The Democratic Party platform is contrary to the mission of Liberty University and to Christian doctrine (supports abortion, federal funding of abortion, advocates repeal of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, promotes the 'LGBT' agenda, hate crimes, which include sexual orientation and gender identity, socialism, etc.)" He later added, “We are in no way attempting to stifle free speech.” The university has no trouble with the College Republicans. One other bit of Lynchburg's past: according to Wiki...

Despite the vague sense of dis-ease that accompanied my Kubuntu upgrade from Hardy Heron (8.04) to Jaunty Jackalope (9.04), I had, after my earlier struggles with the death of Kaudiocreator and general crapping up of Adept, finally gotten to the point where the system was behaving more or less as I expected. All was right in the land of the penguin. Until 3 days ago. A while ago, a co-worker had turned me on to the virtues of CVS -- Concurrent Versions System, a revision control system . I now use it for a variety of things: several writing projects and websites. I know it sounds dorky, but I swear it's not. I went to update the local CVS repository on one of the several XP boxes scattered around the house. I use Tortoise CVS, where the sound of breaking glass means a bad thing has happened. It sounded like I fell through a freaking window. The CVS server on the upgraded Kubuntu box is now busted to all bloody hell. The files in the repository are all apparently safe and sound but...

Hear that howling sound in the distance? It's the sound of entrenched interests realizing we may actually see some healthcare reforms come down the pike. The usual suspects: the Republicans and their friends in the immense healthcare insurance industry are making most of the noise. The noise is still faint and distant but it will get louder, much louder, as the debate warms up. Cries of Socialism, fraud, rationing of care and third hand horror stories about places where universal healthcare is the norm will abound. Bogus grassroots organizations, bank-rolled by huge corporations will miraculously spring up. Tons of postage will be spent sending out handsome glossy color mailings. Of course the Libertarians are squawking since they don't want to pay for anything, even though when push comes to shove none of them ever seems to turn down any of the government's supposed largess. You'll hear things like: Government healthcare will create a huge bloated bureaucracy Fact: in ...

Youngest son just came down to my room a little while ago and scooped up my entire collection of Doonesbury books. This included "Still A Few Bugs In The System," Gary Trudeau's first collection, published in 1970. "They rock," said he (or something similarly positive), before disappearing into the void. I'm now no longer so worried about the effects of the campus Libertarians at George Mason University on his little heart and soul.

My good friend and occasional intellectual sparring partner, the Whited Sepulchre , recently complained on Facebook, " I want to know why we have to tolerate living in a country where you're only allowed one iPod account per computer. " To which I say: if you choose to use iTunes, you choose to accept that limitation. Don't like it? There are alternatives. Let's start with what's wrong with iTunes -- why you can only have one iPod account per computer. Think this was some weakness or deficiency in the iPod or iTunes? Wrong: this is broken by design, on purpose. Consider this: iTunes is not just a music manager. It's the front end to Apple's extremely lucrative digital music store. You can only have one iPod per computer because that fits their business model. If you had more than one iPod per computer, you might be able to (god forbid) share music between devices. Fear not: alternatives abound. An old Windows favorite is Winamp . It's gone from a...

Just a quick note here: I finished gate 7 (the final gate) of my Gweenbelt project, passed my oral exam, and am now a certified Thick Thigma Gweenbelt. If that statement made no sense to you, don't feel bad. For the uninitiated, Thick Thigma is a religious cult that is prevalent in many a Fortune 500 company. I'm hoping they'll show me the secret handshake soon.

Okay, I'll be the first to admit it was stupid. In my defense, Plaxo and LinkedIn also ask to login to your email accounts to see if any of your contacts are already members. So when Yaari ("India’s largest social networking site") asked me to, I foolishly said okay. I'd gotten a request from a former colleague, now in India, that said something like: (former colleague) wants you to join Yaari! Is (former colleague) your friend? Yes, (former colleague) is my friend! No, (former colleague) isn't my friend. Please respond or (former colleague) may think you said no :( Thanks, The Yaari Team Since I'd gotten it from an Indian colleague, it seemed at least somewhat plausible. Believing that was a big f**king mistake. I immediately had a moment of regret and quickly logged into the email account in question and changed the password (booyah!). Going back to Yaari proved it to be pretty much a waste of time. I figured I was done with it. Then 2 days ago, BAM !...

Birthday wishes to America's favorite faux right-wing blowhard. Stephen Colbert turns 45 today. What do you give a man who has everything , including our undying devotion? Head over to the No-Fact Zone for more fan-based adoration. Thanks for all the truthiness, Stephen!

Okay, we are fast approaching the middle of May, half a year after the 2008 election, and Minnesota still has only one senator. I seem to recall an election about 8 years ago when the Republicans insisted this electing business needed to be wrapped up quickly. But I guess that was then and this is now. And the defining "now" has Norm Coleman, loser in his 2008 Senatorial race against Al Franken, dragging the results through as many legal challenges as he can manage. Ironically, Coleman's last recount ended up increasing Franken's lead over him. Like Al Franken or not, the evidence remains pretty conclusive that he won the election. Norm: f**king get over it!

Okay, after a week two weeks of dealing with the Jaunty Jackalope upgrade, I'm here to pronounce Audex a worthy successor to Kaudiocreator. I used to rip a lot of CDs, in the past primarily wih Kaudiocreator- (Kaudiocreater was an app that ran under KDE 3.5). After the upgrade to KDE 4.2 , it (along with several other apps) disappeared. I was aghast. I loved Kaudiocreator: it was, in my opinion, one of the best Linux rippers out there. Then it disappeared! I found Audex while googling at work ( during lunch! I swear! ) which promised to be more or less a replacement. I installed with a mixture of skepticism and apprehension, but quickly became a fan. Like Kaudiocreator, Audex has a clean simple mostly intuitive interface, which integrates well with KDE 4. It doesn't have its predecessor's annoying habit of failing to encode a CD if the tag editor doesn't like the genre/label pulled down by the CDDB lookup. One can set multiple encoding profiles using Ogg, MP3, Flac,...

I'm a late convert to the Firefox plug-in StumbleOn, but now I'm a believer. Without it, I would have never discovered " The Sneeze ." Last week the author issued the How To Tell If Your State Sucks challenge to a friend, which - to paraphrase - says, if there's a picture of hot air balloons within ONE CLICK of the state tourism website home page, YOUR STATE SUCKS! He offers up numerous examples, including New Jersey, California, Delaware and New Hampshire. Being the overbearing blowhard most Texans are, I thought, surely Texas wouldn't fall into that trap. Then I went to the Texas Tourism website and started clicking. NOOOOOO! Don't believe me? Go to the Travel Tex home page and click the " Activities and Events " link on the left navbar. Thanks to Stephen at The Sneeze for this bit of humiliation (now blogrolled). While you're there, be sure to check out his series, " Steve, Don't Eat It! "

Finally got up the nerve to upgrade my Kubuntu version of Ubuntu 8.04 ( Hardy Heron ) to 9.04 ( Jaunty Jackalope ). When 8.04/Hardy Heron launched, you could install it with either KDE 4 or KDE 3.5. At the time 8.04 was released, KDE 4 was (in the opinion of some) not quite ready for PrimeTime. I did an install of KDE 4 and decided to go back to 3.5. Since then, I've put off doing any upgrades. When Jaunty Jackalope was released, I read the reviews and didn't see anything that made it an extremely compelling upgrade: faster booting (I never thought it was all that slow), a new packages manager (I liked Adept), and other improvements that didn't seem all that compelling. Still, my curiosity got the best of me. At last I mustered my courage. If you are using Ubuntu or one of its derivatives you know this: you pretty much need to have broadband to take advantage of the myriad package management features. Now that that fact is out of the way... Upgrading is fairly simply, a...