Paul’s Concern for the Galations

It is fine to be zealous, provided the purpose is good, and to be so always, not just when I am with you. Galatians 4:18

Many times as an early Christian, I felt zealous; I was on fire for the Lord. Now and then, I a period of time would pass and I had been away too long from my Christian brothers, I felt a tremendous distancing from the Lord and found myself beginning to “back-slide”. I think it is important to feel this, but also to reverse its traction. One should not be away so long that the fires burn out. You must rekindle the fires forever. This is another great reason you need to attend a church and get involved with small groups. Get a mentor and/or an accountability partner.

Dearest Lord, I pray that there would never be a time too long away from the Body of Christ that I fall into the hands of the evil one. Please guide and protect my family which you have blessed me with, and entrusted to bring up to serve you in the same manner as I. In Jesus’ name I pray these. Amen

Stranger Here

Yes it has been weighing on me that I have not posted is a long while. Thoughts of even giving it up came to mind. I think it is the thought of needing to fill in the gap in a huge effort to catch up. That is just not going to happen tho.

I have been trying to get a raise the past couple months. Seems I may have met my challenge in proving my worthiness. Also just that thought of having to prove myself may not be the point and that my boss may have a different idea of what I am worth to him. IMHO, he doesn’t reward based on your efforts but by your loyalty and social status. May be a sad mis-diagnosis of a fellow Christian… I know. However I will not stand down without a stiff answer. Seems as if business has kept us from meeting since my initial inquiry. That and the lack of courage and preparedness. So I suck!

I’m hoping that we will once and forever lose Made2Manage. The latest stunt is a stiff price for doing our customization. Somewhere about $67k and the kicker is the no liability warranty sticker to go with it! For just a bit more… $87k we can go with a much better IMO, ERP package called Abas. This includes our training, customization, setup, installation, and product. This is a German company and has thoroughly impressed me. Problem is I found this company without much effort. This may be bad based on the lack of research into other companies. My search was narrowed by Linux requirements tho. The next bet was an OpenSource project, but I just didn’t want to back it. If I had a team of supporters here in the office it would be different.

Serving at the church has been picking up too! I am now a “Small Group Connector” who finds a group for individuals looking for Community Groups or Men’s Breakfast/Mentoring groups and such. I also have been helping out with a ToolBox project with the church website. Won’t be helping too much with this as they insist on using Microsoft products. So they are mostly interested in my direction I guess. The other thing is I have been meeting with two mentors quite regularly. Doing some workgroup type studies including some memory verse practice. I also have been helping out with Wednesday evening 4th grader classes. Tonight I have them by myself as the main teacher is out of town. I’m hopping next year I will have my own class. I like the 4th grade too. Not interested in moving up with my class. Still seeking an answer from the Lord on what to do about helping out with Summer Camp next month. It is looking more and more in favor tho!

I have been working on my old hard drive once again. I had been playing with some new partitioning tools from various CDs and ended up using the old standby fdisk for Linux. The trouble had been creating the same partitioning scheme I had written down at the time it was working. I have since figured out how to do this but also figured out a more damaging concept that may be the last straw… c/h/s. Cylinder/Heads/Sectors geometry. Seems I even documented this in the working stage before I doused it. What I wrote down was not the manufacture geometry shown on this drive. So I assume the geometry was changed about three times in the midst of all this. Testing on the documented and recommended geometries didn’t work. What doesn’t work is that I can’t mount the drive. It won’t recognize the system file type. This has not been formatted since either so there may be some extra levels I just don’t comprehend about it needing it. IMO that would be the last straw… in a sense wiping the drive.

This week I have tightened the noose on the spammers. I have been building a blacklisted.rules file that is now up to about 200 IPs and networks that have been blacklisted. With the rampant viruses and spyware out, this is a difficult task. Mutation through the networks seems to be never ending.

Week End

The Wifi saga had another story to tell. The WEP security did lock out the Orinoco clients. I guess I should have thoroughly checked it out. I got a call Wednesday morning with complaints of not getting access. Not much I can do while at home shaving! So when I got in I had swapped him with the D-Link card. All is well with him now. Next is the far back users… he is using a Linksys card but Windows 98. After switching to WEP, I again failed to follow through and reboot his to test. Now his card doesn’t authenticate until after logging in. So he can’t authenticate with the domain server and map network drives until after the initial logging in. I still need to do some research. So I wanted to improve the signal strength by using a booster. Low and behold… Linksys doesn’t sell the signal booster any longer due to FCC restrictions. The remainder of them were pulled off the retail shelves probably two months ago. The good thing is we have two! Since we ended up hooking up our bridge outside the buildings, both were not needed. This did increase the signal strength indeed by about 25%. Unfortunately it didn’t help the Win98 login issue.

Well with the increase in spam these days, I decided to reevaluate the spamassassin scores. I have dropped the high filter from 8 to 6 and the minimum filter from 5 to 4. Also found some settings to enhance the RBL blacklists. Changing this from 5 to 2 will create a better hit and deny more of them at the door.

More phone troubles. Been getting lots of calls that lag at the start of the conversation and causing the receptionists to hang up on ppl too fast. They are trained to wait longer however now but now we need to figure out what it’s coming from. We have 8 lines and it seems to be happening just on our main line for incoming calls. Learning more about our phone system almost daily now!

Seems to have been a rather slow week in some ways here at work. Got time to answer some backlog in the Gallery forums. This brought my status back up to #8 but not by much; something like a 7 post lead over #9.

Got to meet with both mentors this week for lunch! Even got a call from the men’s mentor ministry leader Wednesday night! It sure is wonderful to have great friends watching out for me. Laying all my troubles out for them on the table seems to help tremendously. Some troubles just can’t be fought alone. Having a group of friends praying for you helps fend off the evil one. On the flip side I find that I am not alone when it comes to the same kinds of struggles. Nothing worse than getting advice from someone who hasn’t been in your shoes before. This new toolbox is going to help me help others.

The Pain of Conviction

The Men’s Mentoring Ministry meeting went off last night. Got out about 10PM. Made for a long evening spent at the church with the normal Wednesday night service before that. I mentioned what I guessed the meeting would be like yesterday. I wasn’t too far off! What I feared most was that we’d all be lined up and those in the known click crowd would be team members and hand pick from those on the wall for teammates. But as I had guessed it… the place was packed with very ambitious guys wanting to disciple and mentor. That is awesome you know! A rather large number on hand were very open about speaking out and even against some ideas. Today I (as one who didn’t speak up) emailed the leader of the ministry my thoughts and suggestions. As I am already a part of a couple mentoring groups wasn’t looking for more ppl. I wanted more resource information and training opportunities. The outcome of this meeting has possibly opened my accountability partners eyes to a real need for commitment in getting together. We both suffer sins of the flesh yet need mentors ourselves.

The home PC is still not working in Windows. I had gone into safe mode and removed the hotfix driver and the hardware device listing. Again… in normal mode it detected the device and installs it. Up to the install everything runs fine, but after it’s installed it crawls again. Checking the BIOS I only have the option of PCI or AGP as the video selection. Oddly I did notice the on-board NIC was enabled which I changed, as well as sound was disabled!?! Sound was never a problem however and to the best of my knowledge the change made no difference. So I’m running out of plans. I guess next I just need to go with the flow. You know… “can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”. Well I will try deleting the Matrox driver and keep the Intel installed or just dump them both. Then try reinstalling the Matrox drivers later. Currently the display properties do show that it is using the Matrox drivers. My guess is that a shared library got overwritten.

Got some progress out of the QC wireless today! Found a driver and firmware update available. The new config utility works great and easier to get around in. Only one problem and that is it’s a bit slower in bringing up the network. But hey, it beats having to set the WEP password every boot.

This week must have had a hex put over the DLT tape backup unit. Friday one workstation was turned off by mistake. Monday the boss turned his PC off. Tuesday had a tape failure. Wednesday I accidentally left the tape cleaner in the drive. However I was able to remember that type of error will start the job the moment it gets a writable tape and so I had the correct tape in for Wednesday. Tonight will prove the broken spell. I should ping the bosses PC since he left on vacation…

Yet another virus out this afternoon! ClamAV calls it Worm.SomeFool, Symantec coins it W32.Netsky.B@mm. So far we have had only four.

This afternoon I offered a suggestion to the church IT manager. Currently the sermons online are in the RealAudio format. It is also packaged as a streaming method. I mentioned that several ppl have asked me how to download them. This proves to be a much larger task for them than they expected. View the ram file for the actual URL and wget the ra file to your disk. Then I run a vplayer command that plays it through RealAudio to a wav file, then I use that to burn an audio CD. What’s so hard about that? So I suggested offering a couple quality versions of a mp3 format. He took the bate! So now he wants me to draw up a plan for the transition. We don’t want to scare the folks already used to this system at hand. Cool, then we could measure the stats to see what ppl like. Now if I could figure how to incorporate using Linux to do this from home. Time to think about this now.