1. Bereavement fares are more expensive than regular fares.
2. Some fundies want to become neo-fundies.
3. “Blog” means “joke” in French.
4. Some people will drive fifteen miles to save six cents on gas.
5. I’m going to bed at 7:30 because I want to annoy my roommate*.

*Actually I have a flight at 9a tomorrow morning, but with rush hour traffic it’ll take me five hours to travel what should normally take 2.5 hours, and I’m NOT going to bed at midnight only to get up at 3a.

I take it back. e-Sword works on FC4. Not well, but it works. All my Bibles and commentaries (including the locked NASB version) translated over quite nicely, and as far as I can tell everything’s there. Email me or comment if you want instructions.

New from Independence Air - Buy one ticket, get ∞ tickets free - more or less - in the new GLiDE program. College students ages 18-25 can pay $250 and join the GLiDE program, and any ticket for flights on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays to and from anywhere east of the Mississippi River are free, plus the usual taxes involved with tickets. One friend took a one-way flight from Greenville to Charleston (a four hour drive vs. a six hour flight, counting connections through Dulles), then went to Providence, RI for the weekend, all for $19 a pop.

PROS:

• where else does one fly for $20 roundtrip without any advanced notice? Typical scenario: Hmmm…tomorrow’s Saturday and I’m bored. I think I’ll take the first flight to New York and the last flight back and spend the day in the Big Apple. All for as much money as it would take to fill my gas tank.
• virtually no restrictions on tickets, and Indepence services quite a few interesting destinations

CONS:

• $250 out of hand
• It’s already pretty late in the summer

If it weren’t for the $250 down, I’d do it. Right now. In fact I’d already be booked on Saturday’s flight to Chicago just for the fun of it. But those two cons are pretty big ones. I don’t have $250 laying around to throw at this, even if the program pays for itself after one ticket. But also I haven’t done any planning whatsoever. Now, if I knew this would be going on next summer, I’d be game for then. I’d set aside the cash and start planning my weekends. I might still try to find out about this. But not now. My weekends are already too full to do something like this and make it worthwhile. But more power to you, the reader, if you feel so inclined to take up this offer.

Yeah, it’s been a while since I last posted. But since that time my new hard drive is in and I finally have both Windows XP and Fedora Core 4 tweaked more or less how I want it. A few music library issues to work out still (why won’t amaroK play MP3 files??), but on the other hand it plays heartily out of all five speakers on my desk. Heh heh.

Install was relatively painless and pretty fast - about 40 minutes to get the basic install setup. Add another hour and a half or so for the peripheral stuff (and I’m still not entirely finished) - nVidia 3D accelerator drivers, media player/sorter software, Firefox stuff…slowly but surely it’s coming up.

It’s fast. I figured it would be. Gig and a half of RAM, it’d better be fast. Plus a large capacity hard drive accessible to both operating systems. I think, though, that Linux must take less CPU overhead than Windows - I’ve got a CPU-intensive program running and it’s doing a lot better than it does under Windows. That, BTW, is all free-of-charge.

I’m going to start experimenting with wine. No, not the strong drink variety. See, Wine Is Not an Emulator. (Key to understanding Linux - geeks with nothing better to do than program all day come up with all sorts of recursive acronyms for their programs. They think it’s cute.) Wine is (not) a Windows emulator. More accurately, it simulates most general API calls under a (get this) Win98 environment. Essentially it’s like installing Win98 without actually installing it. All the DLLs are there, but none of the actual programs. Think of it as a framework. Believe it or not I installed IE6 on my Linux box at work, mainly so I didn’t have to reboot if I wanted to clock out of my job. (How’s that for juxtaposition - the King of Closed-Source installed on the King of Open-Source.) I’m going to try something simple, like e-sword, first, then move on to more complicated programs. Since there is no good Bible software for Linux (that I’ve found), I figure it’s a good place to start. Stay tuned…more to come.

This I just don’t get. Here’s Apple, making noise about programming their software to run on the x86 architecture (meaning Pentiums and AMDs should be able to run it) via some sort of interpreter they’re going to build in somewhere, and yet they’re saying that “Mac OS X will only run on Macs”? Don’t bet on it, Stevie. Remember how IBM lost that battle years ago? If Apple is serious about making their stuff run on something other than the PowerPC chip, they’re going to lose control. Period. Unless they manufacture their own flavor of x86 with a built-in flag that all their software will incorporate, meaning, yeah, you can have your x86 architecture with an Apple on top, but who cares? Apple will still be the only people that can make Apple-compatible stuff. Oh, but wait…there’s a competing operating system from Washington that capitalized on the whole architecture standardization thing and is making more money in more places than Jobs and his folks can think of.

Sorry, but unless Apple has an ace up its sleeve, Jobs is really an idiot for doing this. He knows white-box Apple clones will pop up within a year of their changeoever. It’s what happened to IBM, and that’s why we almost never talk about IBM systems - we talk about IBM-compatible systems. If they make their software capable of running on the x86 chip, they lose immediately. You can argue that they’ll gain a bigger audience in the computer world and that they may recoup those losses down the road, but if they keep turning away suitors like Dell, they’re going to find themselves bankrupt pretty fast.

I’ve done a write-up of the first evening of the FBFI Fellowship over at SI. Read it here.

Today I gave in to a long-standing desire to dump my work box, and I figured while I was at it, why not dual-boot it and get used to one computer with two operating systems? So I installed Windows yesterday and configured it this morning, then installed Fedora Core 4 from a DVD I downloaded.

The only tricky thing (which isn’t really tricky at all) is configuring the partitions correctly. First you should install Windows, but don’t just create a partition on your drive and format the whole thing. I have a 40gb drive - when I was in the Windows setup, I created a 20gb partition (leaving the other 20gb alone) and formatted that first partition as NTFS. Then I installed Windows on it. When I was ready for Fedora, I manually partitioned with Disk Druid. Not that my way is best, but most of the people that have explained it to me suggest creating three separate partitions for a Linux box:

1. Boot partition - create a small (100mb) partition, format it using the ext3 file system, and mount it to /boot.
2. Swap partition - create a larger partition (about as big as your system RAM) and set it as a swap partition.
3. Root partition - create a final partition and tell Disk Druid to take up all space still unused. Format this with ext3fs and mount it to /.

This way you can keep everything nice and neat, in case of a really nasty system error. By creating a boot partition you make sure that, even if the boot partition gets corrupted, you can still boot into something. From there, the install was pretty self-explanatory - all the normal packages, choice of KDE or Gnome (go with Gnome!), etc.

I prefer apt as my package manager, but since FC4’s only been out now for two days, no one has updated their websites to include links to repositories. Fear not - the FC4 version of apt can be found here. The /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ directory contains up-to-date repository locations for FC4, and you’ll be able to do your apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade stuff right out-of-the-box. Firefox is the default browser (v. 1.0.4), but you’ll have to either make sure to install Thunderbird in the initial install (it’s not selected by default) or run apt-get install thunderbird when you’ve set the system up, since it won’t install by default unless you tell it to.

I’m happy. I’m not ecstatic, because there are no 3D drivers for my video card (ATI Radeon 7000), and because there is no program out there that will happily catalog WMA audio files, which means I’m facing the daunting task of either re-ripping all my music or batch converting it and losing quality. But on the other hand it runs pretty well, despite all that. Note to self, though - make sure there are TI 4200 3D drivers available before I put my new HD in…

Fedora Core 4 is on it’s way and should hit the internet-at-large Monday, assuming someone over at RedHat doesn’t sneak the ISO out tonight or tomorrow. This is wonderful, because by the time I download it and burn it to DVD, I will have my new hard drive, assuming Newegg’s shipping is as fast as it usually is. (Time out for an advertisement - Newegg has hands down the best service I’ve found online. When I worked in Philly and ordered parts, they’d come from across the river in Edison, NJ - I’d pay for the basic 7-day shipping and have the part the next day. When I ordered a DVD burner with 3-4 day shipping, I got it on the 4th day; the amazing thing was it was shipped from Chicago that morning. In order to make it on time, they same-day shipped it to me at their expense. Wow!) Anyway, yeah there are school bills and whatnot, but I earmarked the gift money from my graduation for component upgrades. Since I assembled my computer last year, I’ve upgraded the sound card, speakers, NIC (after the on-board one died), and added a DVD burner. This round of upgrades is the last of the “to upgrade first chance I get” list. One stick of Kingston ValueRam - 1gb pc2700 - and one 200gb hard drive for data backup and Linux purposes. I expect to have the parts by Wednesday or Thursday at the latest, then it’s bye-bye Microsoft for me. I’d say it’s been fun, but it really hasn’t. My system specs will now read:

AMD Athlon XP+ 2800
1.5gb ram (1×1gb + 2×256mb)
320gb HDD space (1 Maxtor 120gb IDE and 1 WD 200gb SATA)
Creative SB Live! 5.1 sound card
GeForce 4 TI 4200 video card
52x CD-RW
16X DVD+/-RW
Zip250 (why? Because it was only $3 at an IT yard sale and I had the room, not to mention the money went to Bible Conference)
Logitech Z640 speakers

Next on the “because everyone else has it and I don’t” upgrade list is a DVD+/-RW that can burn dual-layer media (which is sinfully expensive at the moment, which is why I didn’t buy one earlier) and a Firewire card, since my mobo doesn’t support onboard firewire. In a few years I’ll want to swap the mobo and chip out for an Athlon XP+ 3200 or whatever is the best chip I can get for a good price at the time.

All that to say, Fedora Core 4 is due out this week, and I’ll be installing it as soon as I get my hands on it (and my new drive) and let you out there in Readerland know how it went.

By the end of the month, this won’t look the same, and I think it’s a hilarious coincidence at the moment. Here are some June searches:

• dating love marriage
• how to get a date
• ways to waste time

In that order. Dating, Love and Marriage. How to get a date. And, right along with that, ways to waste time. There’s a cynical humor there that few will appreciate, but for you few, enjoy.

[Listening to: The Pennycandystore Beyond the El - Leonard Bernstein - Bernstein Conducts Bernstein (01:56)]

This evening I had every intention of going to grab a quick bite to go and get back to work, hoping to make up some extra hours and devote a good chunk of solid time to this one nagging issue that’s too complicated to get into here. When I walked into Subway and placed my order, the girl behind the counter asked me how my day was. Fairly friendly, almost over-the-top for a fast food worker. When I told her it went pretty well, she got this thoughtful look on her face and said, “You work with computers, don’t you?”

I feel at this point that I should note that the reason this post is going up here is because this marks the first time in almost a year that I have been left completely speechless, and by a complete stranger, yet. I thought maybe I had fixed her computer or something, but I didn’t recognize her. I confessed that, yes, I do work with them, and asked her how on earth she knew that. Her answer: “Your eyes are all bloodshot, and I figured it probably wasn’t because you were abusing something illegal.” Chalk one up to friendly and honest complete strangers.

It is somewhat unfortunate that a side effect of being an IT person is looking like a crack addict. But I’ve had enough ground-shaking and unorthodox requests of my superiors lately that asking to be the first tech in the department to get a 17″ LCD (actually two, since I run a dual-monitor setup at work) would go over like ham at a bar-mitzfah at the moment. Her comment did persuade me to take it easy for a few hours though - I’ll work later, but if I’m bloodshot now going back to work wouldn’t get me anywhere. Strange how people you’ve never met before have such sway in your life decisions, huh?

[Listening to: Chichester Psalms: Ps. 131 [+/-] [131:1]O LORD, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time forth and forevermore.; 133:1 - Leonard Bernstein - Bernstein Conducts Bernstein (09:44)]

I apologize this is so late in coming. Perhaps you were sitting on pins and needles waiting for this. I’d suggest you not do so next time, since that is both painful and possibly quite unsanitary.

Total Hits: 13,280

Most Popular Post with 182 views (owing to SI, I think): Is this dialogue?

Browser Breakdown: Firefox again holds the lead for the nth month running. Once again, mounty’s corner’s clientele prefer the open-source browser over the behemoth that is IE.

1. Mozilla Products: 3,191 (48.86%)
2. IE: 2,747 (42.06%)
3. Other: 593 (9.08%)

Most Popular Referrer: Note the very strong leaning. I suppose I should let the knowledge of where my reads are coming from influence my subject matter, but I hate any vicious cycle, good or bad; so I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, and whenever Greg Linscott wants to stop sending visitors my way he can do so. But, Greg, please don’t. I have to imagine that readers of SharperIron are also regular people who like a little humor every now and then.

1. SharperIron with around 136 or more referrals
2. BlogJones with around 29 or more referrals

And now, your favorite part of these stats (which is why they’re last)…THE SEARCHES!!!

• Responsibilities of a Mounty - to find humor in everything, and to publish that humor as time permits. And to fix computers.
• how it relates to 20th century chichester Psalms - as opposed to how “it” relates to the 12th century Chichester Psalms?
• will this search make your strange searches list? - nope. Not strange enough. Why did you search twice?? I don’t have a “strange search aggregator” (though such a thing would be really cool).
• PICTURES OF SHOTGUN FORMS - I’m not certain I want to know what a SHOTGUN FORM is. Also, please don’t shout; mounty’s corner is a shout-free zone.
• lousy novell groupwise vs outlook - Lesser of the two evils, right there. Got the “lousy” part right, though.
• “parent directory” mp3 OR wma OR ogg OR wav “police” -html -htm -download - I have no idea what this is.
• “partition” “elijah rock” - I imagine people can only remember fragments of my site, and so they combine those fragments into one search string so they can find it. I didn’t think the domain was all that difficult to remember, personally.
• fedora core 3 raspy sound - I’ve found taking the screwdriver out of the hard drive helps that raspy sound.
• pastors alumni 2005 email rooster - I know what he meant, but the whole “email rooster” thing is just a very funny mental picture.
• xylophonists from South Carolina - Why?
• Biblical Separation” +politics - I’d say that sums up about half of the separation thing.
• “READ THE NKJV OR ESV” - What did I say about SHOUTING??? And forget the NKJV. It’s a pretender compared to my English Standard Vulgate…er, Version.
• romantic dinner places in downtown greenville, sc - I’m gonna park here, because after going to a wedding last weekend I’m feeling a little left out in the cold. Why, WHY, I ASK YOU, would I know anything about romantic restaurants in this benighted little town? Do you think I’ve been sneaking in dates on the side and not telling anyone, or perhaps that me and my other hopelessly single friends go to all the romantic restaurants together just on the off-chance that we will be someday changing our status from single to taken? About the most romantic I’ve gotten is Don Pablos!! … Okay, I’m done now.
• how to get a mounty - I doubt it works this way, but I wonder if this is related to the previous search? It came in about the same time.
• epaphroditus lawson - I’ll have to suggest that. I’m sure Dr. Lawson would get a kick out of that. EDIT: You know, someone looked for that in March, too. Very strange indeed.
• trust and obey contemporary midi - I’m sure someone’s done it. And I’m pretty sure I’d fall over laughing if I heard it.
• laptop squeals during startup - First, is it a good squeal (”I’m getting activated again! Joy!”) or a bad squeal (”No! Not you again!!”)?
• Quirky anecdote about Antonin Dvorak - So one day Tony walks into his house and sees a Rabbi, a Monk, and a Sikh…this really isn’t working…
• If the Lord tarries acronym - You needed to search for this? ITLT, or maybe ILT.
• update 2005 email addresses of all women and men pastors and churches guestbook in europe - Last I checked my website is not a Big Brother database. It’d be cool if it were, though…
• “john macarthur” giveaway - Someone’s giving John MacArthur away?

There you have it. You know, I think I enjoy these search comments more than most any other thing I do on my site. It’s a shame it only happens once a month. Oh well. Long live Firefox; and keep those funky searches coming.

Subtitle: And the reason everyone outside the movement is perptually going, “Huh??”

So a few nights ago I’m running with a friend of mine who was born, raised, and baptised a Presbyterian (PCC; I hope he’s happy with the European spelling of “baptised”), and we’re holding this little chat concerning what in the world we Fundies are doing. He pointed out that there seems to be something of a fashion trend in our movement. It’s kinda funny, really, because it almost exactly mirrors any other fashion trend, including clothing. I know, wierd statement - let me explain. Every summer, the powers that be cluster in some European city like Milan or Paris and decide what the trends for the next year will be. No one knows exactly what criteria they use to decide this; in fact, if it weren’t for the folks in New York providing a little more of a sane opinion on world fashion (did I just say that?) the summer and fall fashions would be even more outrageous and hideous than they already usually are. (Though I hear that Bob Jones-issue skirts are all of the sudden fashionable and are selling at Old Navy like nobody’s business. Who would’ve guessed?) But these fashions change all the time. One summer, brown is in. The next summer, no self-respecting person who follows the fashion world would ever dream of wearing brown clothing, and despite the closet full of evidence to the contrary, they can’t remember the last time they bought anything that looked remotely brown. Thus it is in the Fundamentalist movement. This year (or perhaps decade; these things move a little slower than clothing fashions) it’s quite popular to be a Calvinist. It’s also popular to be more Covenant than Dispensational, to the point where a whole slew of people are suddenly committed post-tribs. And just as we of the younger generation wince when we see our fathers wearing a plaid shirt with a striped tie and blush to think of them ever wearing a leisure suit, so many younger folk roll their eyes and shake their heads at the poor old fogeys who don’t believe 120% in God’s Sovereignty Over Everything and The Pre-Tribulation Rapture Of The Saints.

Okay, personal confession time. I’m quite comfortable with the idea that God chose me before I ever had an inkling of Him. To those who immediately associate sides with that, they’d grab me and declare me a Calvinist. My response is, whatever. Not because I’m a 5-point Calvinist, but because I don’t care what other people label me. I know what I believe, and I can show you why I believe as I do from the pages of Scripture. I think it’s a convincing argument, but some on whom I’ve tried those arguments come back with a “maybe…but I think I’ll stick with what I’ve grown up believing.” Guess what? I’m not offended! And when someone comes to me and starts going on and on about how possibly, just maybe, the lack of a break in thought in I Thess. 4 [+/-] [4:1]Finally, then, brothers, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more. For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you. For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness. Therefore whoever disregards this, disregards not man but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you. Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another, for that indeed is what you are doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one. But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words. going into chapter 5 indicates Paul’s fully expecting his recipients to be around when “the day of the Lord” comes and how this may be chronologically out of order but not logically, et cetera, et cetera, I just smile, listen, nod, and say to myself, “Maybe, but we’ll know for sure eventually, won’t we?”

Now, the point of all this….my PCC friend thought it pretty funny. At least he has a church doctrinal statement that he signs off on, and pretty much everyone is his “movement” believes the same as he does. Perhaps something like that might benefit our movement? On second thought, I’d hate to see the arguments that would come out of that council meeting. Phew.

I had at one time tried getting a job with the Transportation Security Administration at GSP. Now, I’m glad I didn’t. This sign was seen at the checkpoint line at GSP. Guess they’re really getting serious about messing with screeners: