Three musical things to mention while I let one of my compositions simmer on the back burner for the moment. First off, Time ran a very thought-provoking article the other day on popular Christian artist Chris Tomlin. (Link) It cast Mr. Tomlin in a pretty good light, and perhaps for good reason, all things being equal. After all, commercially speaking, if you can get your target audience to whistle your tunes and/or sing your songs without much training, then you’ve succeeded.
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This is close enough to the two-year, two-month anniversary of the starting of this blog. (So I’m late. Sue me.) Yes, mounty’s corner has been around (at this domain) for just over two years. Before that there was the more-or-less ill-fated Blog-City home that lasted (I think) three months before I decided it was too much effort for so few features. Someone who’s not behind a firewall check and see if that’s still up and running. I’m kinda interested in pulling in the old posts for posterity.
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Random thoughts from one who got up waaaaaay too early this morning:

1. I found a BBC TV series called “MI-5″ (”Spooks” over there). Kinda like CSI with British accents, and fairly clean for European TV. The first episode dealt with this South Florida lady who went over to England and was doing all sorts of bombings at abortion clinics. I had to watch the scene three times where she first speaks, because I swore it was just jibberish. Strange how I got used to the British accents but couldn’t make heads or tails of a (fake?) southern accent.
2. Today’s Scare of the Week goes to John Warren. John bummed a ride off me to the airport at 5 this morning. (I owed him half a dozen favors.) I got up at 4:45a, so I wasn’t completely alive at the time. As I’m exiting I-85 to pull into GSP, John exclaims, “Greenville/Spartanburg?” I thought he was confused about the “Spartanburg” part; he was actually confused about the whole thing. He looks at me and says, “No, man - we’re going to Charlotte.” Now, quick geography lesson. GSP is less than 15 miles from BJU, and at a leisurely pace it takes about fifteen minutes to get there. CLT is 95 miles from BJU, and at break-neck speeds takes a smidge over an hour to get there. So when he started adamantly insisting that he was flying out of Charlotte, not Greenville, I started worrying. We pulled into the departures section at GSP while he ran in to check. Thankfully I was right - he was leaving from GSP. We could have made his 7:00a flight if he had been going from CLT (at that point it was 5:15a), but it would have been tight. Thanks, John.
3. After returning, I was running on 1/5 gallon of gas, so I stopped at one of the three gas stations next to campus. HAVE YOU PEOPLE NEVER HEARD OF 24-HOUR GAS STATIONS??? Turn the pumps to credit card only, make your customers pay first, and you can leave the stupid things on all night.
4. I finally did get gas, and since I was up so early I was starting to get hungry. Usually I can get up late enough so that I start getting really hungry around lunchtime. Not today. Though this fair city has never heard of 24-hour gas pumps, they have heard of 24-hour fast food drive-through, so it was off to Jack in the Box to spend my taxicab payment on breakfast. I noticed they now have this self-swipe card reader on the drive through. I ask you - how on earth is that better service? There’s no indication on the card reader of which way to swipe the mag stripe, so you just have to try a few times until you get it right. And once you get it facing right, there’s no guarantee it’ll take on the first or even second swipe. Both I and the guy in front of me had to swipe multiple times before it worked. Doesn’t save us lazy customers anything; in fact it makes us work more for our fast food. The server at the window has to babysit customers as they swipe, so it’s not saving them any time. And ultimately everyone leaves the place more frustrated. Some help that is.

I’m done now. Time to go back to sleep.

Inspired from an email I received this morning, I want to give you, gentle reader, a chance at demonstrating why you should be the next Poet Laureate of mountyscorner.com. I had sent one of those “mass emails to friends” (the link was so disturbing, while managing not to be sinful, that I dare not spread it around any more than I have). Jordan, frequent guest and as-yet-unregistered commenter, had this to say:

It’s still parked in my inbox, lurking there with silent menace, like the furnace in Home Alone.

I found this quite poetic, and it made my morning (I was still working on my first cup of coffee when he wrote that). So, in that tradition, the Simile Contest is born. Devise a poetic simile to finish this phrase:

“Mornings are like… <your simile here>”

And since “morning” is so abstract, a corollary:

“Coffee is like… <your simile here>”

The contest is open to all, and anyone may submit up to three entries per day in the comments section. In one week I will choose the one I feel is at once the most poetic and the most meaningful (which may include humorous qualities). My personal extreme bias against mornings will play no part in my decision. In fact, I’m going to find a morning person to help me judge the entries. The guidelines for entries are as follows:

1. No crude or inappropriate language/similes.
2. No longer than fifteen words after the “like.”
3. No more than one sentence, and semicolons are frowned upon.
4. It must make sense, somehow, after three reads. If I can’t understand the connection between your object and morning, then no dice.
5. Like Jordan’s comment, the order of the phrases can be re-arranged to make more sense. The key is creativity!

With that, let the poetic juices flow! And remember to invite your friends to take part in this contest. The more the merrier!

I’m having a beast of a time finishing up a deployable installer for Cygwin that will install an SSH server and not much else. I downloaded the necessary packages and zipped everything up, so that the installer (through some nice command-line options) will install all the packages I downloaded and configure the system correctly. I even got it to run ssh-host-config with the most common options. However, when I go to start the ssh daemon, I have to try a few dozen times (at most) until it will actually start for me. Running net start sshd returns a Windows Error 1067, while running cygrunsrv -S sshd returns a Windows Error 1062. They can’t both be right, can they? But sometimes, if I try one for a while and then switch to the other, it’ll start right up. The closest explanation I found is that it really does start up, but that cygrunsrv doesn’t actually report that status until a while later. I sent this off to the Cygwin mailing list…we’ll see what happens. In the meantime, if anyone has experience in these things, please let me know if you can think of anything that I’m missing.

It occurs to me that the IT profession is necessarily self-endangering. If you work hard enough, you end up solving all the outstanding issues or finishing all your projects, which puts you out of work. (Ultimately we know that most IT [and even non-IT] innovations come not from the imagination but from sheer laziness and the desire to accomplish more work with less effort. At that rate, eventually we will have automated ourselves out of jobs.) However, if you don’t work hard, someone else who does work hard will upstage you, and you’ll be out of a job. Either way, you lose. The really ironic part of it all is this: as much as IT support people the world over gripe about “users*” (c’mon, admit it - we all do it from time to time, for good or ill; and most of the time they’re calling about something we didn’t do right the first time, anyway), they are our job security. If not for their unique and invaluable ability to find all the flaws in our initial hardware/software setup, we would be out of jobs pretty fast. Funny, huh?

*they go by a variety of acronyms and code phrases: ID 10-T errors (self-explanatory if you look at it long enough) and the word “picnic” (problem in chair, not in computer; example: “What’s the problem? I don’t really know…but it’ll be a picnic to solve.”) are my personal favorites. They’re also the mildest. Start lurking in large computer forums and you’ll find a few less flattering ones with more colorful, metaphorical language.

Britney Spears is exactly 5 months my elder. 150 days. 3,600 hours. 216,000 minutes. And she’s been through - what, now? Two husbands? And me still looking for wife #1.

To quote John Bradford (probably): “There but for the grace of God go I.”

I’d like to let everyone know that THE MAP is now online for your viewing pleasure. Details can be found on the actual page. Suffice to say it’s a geek’s paradise. XML, Ajax, LAMP…it’s the best of Enterprisey Web 2.0.

I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.0.5 - as always, WP admins/users are strongly recommended to upgrade. The swag can be found at the usual place and is a painless download and upgrade. If you find something that doesn’t work quite like it used to, drop me a comment or something.

There are also three more bloggers to report over at the list. First off, Pastor Jeff Davis up in Wilson, NC, submitted his blog shortly after the Calvary Quartet (minus me) ministered at his church. Go on by and check out PastorJD’s Weblog. Up next is Susan Elwart, family webmaster and winner of today’s Catchy Title award - I can see her blog now saying, “Hey Guys! Over Here!” And the most recent addition to the list comes from Alysia (and husband Ethan) LaVigne, proud parents and owners of The LaVigne Family blog. Do yourself and these folks a favor and check out the fine blogging on a variety of topics.

Finally, I leave you with a bit of my vacation. This picture (click for the whole thing) was taken on the rocks at the Portland Head Light in Portland, Maine. It was cold, windy, and absolutely gorgeous. There was some concern about whether we were allowed to be out there beyond the fence…meh.

Fifteen hours. It took fifteen hours to get from Telford back to SC. I could almost go back and forth in that time if I were driving my car (and there were no state troopers on the road). Long though it was, and cramped as we were, it was still worth it.
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Welcome to the blur that is my life. We had stops in Palmer, Mass., and Burlington, Vermont, on Tuesday, both of which went quite well. Wednesday found us on the road *again* for another 250 miles. Seems like most of this trip has been spent driving, rather than sightseeing, like other trips. I suppose that’s the nature of the trip, and it’s still been a fun time.
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