JADDOG

You parents out there will know what I mean. Listen to the lyrics of this. It’s pretty hilarious, and oddly accurate.

Don’t dump out excess thinset (the stuff the adheres tile to backer board) in your driveway and expect to use just a hose to clean it up.

I ended up scooping it up with my hands and putting it in a cardboard box to get it in the trashcan. Otherwise it probably would have solidified in a huge blob in my driveway, and existed for what would have seemed like eternity.

On the other hand… I think the tile job in the downstairs bathroom turned out pretty decent. This photo is pre-grout. If I remember to I’ll take another photo in a finished state.

A couple weeks ago my church had the pleasure of Bob Kauflin visiting and teaching us. My family had a stomach bug that week so I’ve been listening to the recording. On the way into work this morning I finished it up and was really blessed by Kaufiln’s message. My 10,000 ft view looks like this:

No matter what happens, a Christian always has a hope in our saviour. A saviour that has shed his blood for our sins and will return one day to take us from this life to eternal life.

No matter how rotten of a day or how grim your circumstances seem. Rejoice. Give praise to your Lord. You are living his will and your purpose is to praise him.

Bob Kauflin: Living Like A Psalmist

Just a couple thoughts to chew on from this morning.

¹⁶ For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it;
you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.
¹⁷The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

Psalm 51:16-17 (ESV)

⁴ Blessed is the one you choose and bring near,
to dwell in your courts!
We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house,
the holiness of your temple!

Psalm 65:4 (ESV)

I’ve been having trouble with on particular flash drive while trying to make my dad a Fedora Live USB sitck. Tonight briefly tried to fiddle with it to try and figure out what I was doing wrong. Not paying attention I fdisked my laptop drive and wiped out my drive partition. Kudos to Back In Time. I had a snapshot from december 14th of all my data. Most of anything I hadent backedup was pushed to a code repo elsewhere, so I just reinstalled. A few additional packages, email, VPN and kerb configs later I was back into a dec 14th state.

Back up you’re data!

Earlier this year my laptop battery died. I had to remove it from my laptop to get my laptop to even boot. Through quite a fiasco I hope the battery is on the way and I’ll have it soon. I’ve been without for over a month now. In the mean time my system clock needs updating every time I boot. I guess the laptop needs the battery to keep the system time accurate when the machine is not running. For a while my machine would boot with the date as Feb 06 2009 10pm. Today it seems that my clock boots to Feb 17 2009 10pm. When I forget to run ntpdate to update my system clock all my git commit timestamps are wrong.

Today is the second time I’ve have to fix my dates so I’m blogging this fix so it’s easier to find when/if I ever need it again:

git filter-branch --env-filter \
    'if [ $GIT_COMMIT = 119f9ecf58069b265ab22f1f97d2b648faf932e0 ]
     then
         export GIT_AUTHOR_DATE="Fri Jan 2 21:38:53 2009 -0800"
         export GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="Sat May 19 01:01:01 2007 -0700"
     fi'

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/454734/how-can-one-change-the-timestamp-of-an-old-commit-in-git

I just thrown the above command into a little bash script and called it fix. If you run this more than once you’ll get an error:

$ ./fix
Namespace refs/original/ not empty

To fix the broken “fix” script just rm -rf the directory it’s refering to:

$ rm -rf .git/refs/original/*
$ ./fix
Rewrite 6b37ac946f9b2af3a0e66657038a1c4cafaeab89 (63/63)
Ref ‘refs/heads/master’ was rewritten

As I’m writing this I’m told my manager has tried to ping me in irc to tell me my new battery is in. I didn’t get the message because my client has disconnected for some reason. Now I will have a new battery, hopefully no system time problem and a new irc problem. Such is life.

Tonight a couple of buddies of mine and I saw the new Clint Eastwood movie. Not at all what I expected. The movie had a religious flavor to the underlying story. While there was absolutely no accurate depiction of salvation, there was a strangely touching sacrificial message delivered. Stop reading here if you don’t want the end of the movie ruined. The movie ends with Eastwood’s character, Walt, being shot an excessive amount of times by a gang. This brutal murder is witnessed by many people and has the gang arrested to be locked up for a long time. One of the gang members cousins lived next door to Walt and through out the movie is befriended by Walt, not really intentionally.

I don’t think that the movie was trying to depict the sacrificial death that Christ dies for the sake of believers. Though, the movie does a  fairly good job of it. Christ died for sinners, of whom he owed nothing to. He died that they would be freed from the wrath they deserved for their sins. Walt dies for his next door neighbours, of whom he owed nothing to. He dies that they would be freed from the pain and suffering the gang was inflicting on the family. A fairly important difference is that this family did not necessarily deserve to be mistreated by the gang. Sinners deserve eternal  death.

I’ll admit the parallel isn’t perfect. Though, it was and unexpected ending to an unexpected story. An ending that reminded me of and unexpected sacrifice that Christ made. A sacrifice that those who  believe and follow will live eternally with Christ.

I continue to get a kick out of my first swimming experience training for my upcoming triathlon. My job provides a membership to the college campus gym that’s around the corner from us. On my way to work yesterday I grabbed my suit and goggles and figured I’d get a towel there. My gym membership with my previous job included a towel. Well, the membership I have now does not. Oddly it didn’t take me long, once I found out my membership did not include equipment, to decide to just swim anyways and I’d forgo the towel. So after swimming a workout in the pool for the first time in more than a year. I took a quick shower to rinse off some of the pool chemicals, ran my hand through my hair briskly until it was mostly dry, put my cloths and toboggan on and walked back to work to complete the work day. I’m contemplating just doing that every Tuesday and Thursday instead of fiddling with a towel. I wasn’t unbearable wet when I left the gym.

Was looking for a tutorial on a django plugin and came across this video.
I tried to figure out how to title this post and just didn’t have words for it.
My wife and I got a good laugh out of it.

Found the video here: Leah’s Blog

www.collegehumor.com/video:189177…

I arrived at my sister’s house this morning where my dad was trying to print off tickets on her laptop that he had purchased online for the Biltmore Estate. We were all on our way to visit the estate together as soon as the tickets were printed. My sister’s laptop runs Vista. They had successfully purchased the tickets but everytime they tried to print the tickets Vista would lockup and have to be power cycled in a not so graceful manner. I grabbed my laptop out of my car booted and connected to the internet. Nothing new here, Fedora 9 is good at that. We plugged in her usb printer and dad connected to his webmail. He pulled up the first ticket and just as I was about to reach over and run the add printer function, a notification window popped off my notifications bar. Fedora had recognized the printer, set it up and was asking if we had additional software to install. Dad hit the print button on the browser and out came the first ticket. Kudos to Fedora for avoiding further frustration and saving the day.