In a poor town in a developing country, something’s just not right about a fat pastor.
other
Old pics
So a few years ago I got this brand new Lenovo laptop and decided that windows is for chumps, I’m going Ubuntu all the way.
So I installed Ubuntu, dual booting with Vista.
Then I decided that’s for chumps, real ballers nix Vista and use powerful Linux for EVERYTHING.
That’s where I found out why real ballers are real ballers (and why I wasn’t quite baller)…
This is Wes, one of the mechanics at the bike shop I worked at.
Nice shades breh.
For the record Wes also got the ultimate compliment from the local grom squad: “sweet kicks man.”
Nuff said.
I wonder if he’s still styling the white Tarmac.
This was my daily morning bus trip to UW. Shot with a camera phone out the back window of the bus towards Bellevue, and towards the sunrise (dur).
Complex Analysis. This was one of my favorite classes ever. The prof was legitimately crazy, absolutely brilliant, really scary at first, and more than any (but one) prof I’ve had he truly really cared about us students despite having to teach us little piddly raisins easy stuff compared to type of wild and deep things in math he deals with daily. And being a crazy old codger he somehow was one of the only profs I’ve had who really treated everybody equal. And in a bar fight this guy would lay fools out (did I mention he’s an ex-Navy-fighter-pilot?).
Old phone pictures are like Cliff notes for chapters of life, aren’t they?
Conclusion: always have a phone with at least a decently good camera.
The heart of the Polaroid camera lives on.
Belly feel win
There’s this kid in the office who spends a lot of time trying to bug me. Any way he can make fun of english or white people or my accent or my hair, it’s all free game, lets try to get under dave’s skin.
I resist. I smile and laugh. Always.
But the other day, I fought back.
He walked over and asked me to connect the internet, throwing in one or two of the spanishly-butchered english words and a slimy “yyYYYYeeeaahh.”
But I interrupted. I softly put my hand on his belly. He stopped talking. I took my hand off and he kept talking, so I put my hand on his belly again, more firmly (but still softly).
He stopped talking and sputtered some bad words in spanish.
Yes ladies and gentlemen, this day I won.
Penny farthing bicycle racing
I really, really have got to do this someday.
Note that the guys with beards are about to lap the guys without beards. Just saying.
from evandalevillagefair.com
Families
Two of the families that have children in the sponsorship program, the Lorenzo León family and the Rodríguez Méndez family. One of the families doesn’t have a father, and one of them has basically nothing and not really enough money for food. The other family has a little bit more than nothing, and still not really enough for food.
Also, I’d forgotten how white I am. Dang.
Ceviche
So I’m watching the Real Madrid – Barcelona game last week and eating ceviche (a really delicious central american dish with fresh shrimp) and my gut’s all like “something’s not right man. These shrimp are at room temperature.” I’m a tough guy, so I ignored my gut.
Six hours later my gut was like “screw you.”
Barcelona
Awesomely brilliant timing and speed from la Pulga, two freaking beautiful goals for the good guys.
Yes the good guys beat the bad guys today. And it makes me so happy.
(I’m less happy about dirty-slide-tackler guy snapping Zakuani’s leg the other day. Not cool, man)
Messi’s second freaking beautiful goal. Solo he schooled the three guys in white in the picture, one other guy in white and the enemy keeper.
List of 28 things
1. I’ve never once regretted having gone backpacking
2. Short stories
3. Poverty — ignorant and prideful people both the poor and the rich — poverty-making suppression and abuse of people groups
4. Supermacro help and supermicro help…everything else doesn’t work
5. 1977 Yamaha 250 two-smokers are really, really really fun and loud
6. Teaching (supermicro)
7. Taking beautiful pictures with a digital camera loses it’s charm
8. Catch-22
9. Alaskan bush pilots
10. Alaskan bush pilot
11. The ocean
12. Pike Place Market mini-doughnuts
13. Native America
14. Lost times and lost people that live on in tales and stories
15. The Beatitudes
16. Mayan numbers (I can do zero to five hundred, yo)
17. Queen Charlotte Islands
18. Murtle Lake, BC
19. Princess Luisa Inlet
20. Bicycle mechanic
21. Motorcycle mechanic
22. Whiskey and tobacco
23. Stout
24. Origins of Christianity
25. Galois Theory
26. Rag chewing
27. Indoor soccer goalkeeping
28. The motorcycle wave
St. Patty’s day
And not a Guinness or corned ham with cabbage within hundreds of miles. And than it comes to mind is that there’s not a bunch of friends here to sit with around the table, drinking Guinness and eating corned ham and cabbage and laughing about protestants and catholics and the Irish and beer.
Same old same old, nothing like want to teach you what little things aren’t really all that little.
That all off my chest, I’m going to go home and change into my green boxers.
These kids
These kids make me smile and somedays cry.
What the priest saw
What the priest saw at last was that the lesson of a life can never be its own. Only the witness has power to take its measure. It is lived for the other only. The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to Himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man’s opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic. The heretic’s first act is to name his brother. So that he may step free of him. Every word we speak is a vanity. Every breath taken that does not bless is an affront. Bear closely with me now. There is another who will hear what you never spoke. Stones themselves are made of air. What they have power to crush never lived. In the end we shall all of us be only what we have made of God. For nothing is real save his grace.
excerpt from The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy
Arrival
After trying two commercial html editing programs, two commercial WYSIWYG programs (neither of which I actually bought, just “demo” tried), then both an open source editor and an open source WYSIWYG, right now notepad simply works best.
Regardless of the truth or lack of it in the matter, I do feel like I’ve made it, arrived at somewhere good.
Edit: Jan 19th, 2011
Thanks to a very kind donation, one of the commercial WYSIWYG is now “free” so to speak. At the moment it works best to do a sidebyside mix. This program to quickly arrange visual elements and do things I don’t know the syntax for, then notepad to scrub and polish it. Someday maybe I’ll be cool enough to work fastest straight up notepad.
iTunes
Dear iTunes:
You really, really really suck.
(didn’t edit one single time)
clarifying edit:
Ok, I’m generally not an angry person, but iTunes somehow, by some magical turn of silicon chips, disappeared my second favorite song of all time. Not cool, Jobs.
Resolution
In a decision made in a momentary whim, I’ve decided to resolve some stuff this new year: I’m going to write better the first time and edit more carefully. Also I’ll write more with pen and paper.
(I only made three mid-writing edits to this post. It was really, really really hard ignoring the word-processor-cured urges, but it felt good too).