Here is Where I Carry on about my Daily Life, and usually some stuff about Technology!
excitedWe have 4 Bears Tickets!!!! and at a total of $152.50 we didn’t pay all that much.
So, We will rock you silly little pansy Vikings fans and look like jackasses while doing it.
The only bummer is I’m betting they don’t play a lot of good players because the game basically means nothing in terms of the playoff picture. They already announced they are starting Ortman this week instead of Grossman. Oh well….NFL games are still a lot of fun to go to.
Bears with another great win. I only caught the last quarter, and I saw a few late game breakdowns, (mostly that punt return) but I expect that won’t be a problem when playing a worthy team, and we aren’t winning by three possessions.
Now all we need is a Ravens win, and we are golden for tickets. I have already seen a couple different blocks of four for a total of $200 (not bad at $50 a ticket).
Saw Narnia, absolutely loved it. Great flick, made from a great book. I’m almost finished reading Prince Caspian. I’ve decided the original order is better, there is just no way reading the magicians nephew first is a good idea in my mind.
Also, wordpress 2.0 is coming out before too long. It promises some useful upgrades and new features, I’m hoping to get it installed after there are some updates for LivePress.
Christmas is good. I’m missing the snow down here in southern IL. It is nice to finally see my folks new church, and catch up with the family.
sadIt is with sad tears in my eyes that I let you all know one of the better shows on TV with a great movie to follow it up, is officially no more.
This is the article that talks about Joss Whedon’s announcement that the movie Serenity will not turn into a franchise.
Sad day.
I’ll spare the non-technical types, and just beg for help from people better than me with Linux.
Oh yes, and GO BEARS!!!!! According to Seth, Rex Grossman is the touchdown Jesus. I had to agree with him. I think the bears have found their new starting quarterback who will get us some decent points.
I spent some time over the last week or so checking out the forums on Zimbra’s website, trying to iron out some kinks that were preventing a few of the components from starting up.
Well yesterday I fixed the last one, and this thing started to fire on all cylinders…or at least it wanted to fire on all cylinders.
I got every service up and running, but the extra load those missing services created pushed the computer into crap-ola land. It totally choked the thing. And, more searching on the zimbra website found that the minimum requirements were 512 megs of ram, I had 64. 8 times less than what is required. But I also found that 256 works OK for a test box.
Well, Rob from work knows this place up north of the cities that does computer recycling. Nothing is guaranteed, but everything is 5 bucks.
I picked up a grand total of 640 megs of ram, and two pentium 3 processors (one 866 MHz, and one 800 MHz) for 30 dollars. One stick of RAM didn’t work, and I haven’t tested one of the processors, but I suspect that will be OK.
So, Zimbra started without a hitch first time, loads much more quickly, and the web interface is going great. Now I just need to get it to send mail 
The good news is I have enough hardware to setting up a second server either as a router / domain controller / file server, or I could start working on that asterisk box I was thinking about getting going.
Piper said something today that got me a little annoyed. He was talking about the importantce of pointing out God’s wrath, and hell and what-not while evangelizing. And he made some remark to the effect of saying that if you put too much emphasis on this life instead of the afterlife we end up with churches turning into social clubs that promote self-esteem over evangelism.
I don’t think I agree with his statement (I don’t remember it in it’s entirety, if you want to know exactly what he said download the sermon or transcript from today on Desiring God), but in some cases I agree with the generality of his observation. One needs to only throw a stone in a major old city to find a church that has slipped into social programs over evangelism.
But, he sentiment really annoys me in what he said.
I don’t think I would be a Christian if I didn’t think it would improve my life before I die.
It just seems silly to me to be a Christian without seeing any pre-death benefits.
Sure, I’m likely to suffer more for the calls of Christ, but I’m also more likely to be happier while suffering or enduring hardships of life. We should see bondage broken, addictions ended, sickness healed, thinking transformed, and attitudes changed on this life, not because it is the primary focus of our faith, but because that points us to God. Sometimes I think all some people believe Christianity is the study of a book, and the assurance of the afterlife (fire insurance Christians, Lauren calls them). And those things are important / appealing to a limited number of people. I figure that has to be more than just that.
Sometimes on the way home from work I listen to a call-in talk radio program called “Talk the Walk”. It is a christian program, and sometimes it is really interesting, but I can’t help but listen and think that too many conservative evangelicals have eaten the menu, and thought that was the meal.
Of course I don’t think that about a guy who made up the term “Christian Hedonism”, and who’s favorite tag line is “God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in Him,” but I do sometimes wonder if he hasn’t taken a bite out of the thing as an appetizer when he talks about stuff like this.
I was watching Smallville the other night, and Clark Kent said something that got me to thinking.
He was talking about being brave without being invincible. He was wondering if he would have the balls to do the stuff he does if he weren’t invulnerable, and then he mentioned something about being impressed with guys in the military because they are doing something that has impact on the whole nation.
I got to thinking, when does the transition happen between Clark Kent who can barely keep his friends, loved ones, and school safe from the evil of Kryptonite powered freaks in Smallville and the City / Country / Planet / Universe saving Superman who protects everything around him.
And when in our lives does that transition happen (if it ever does) between us taking care of the people around us, ministering locally, praying for the sick and hoping for healing, barely getting by while leading small groups, and people heading up international ministries, writing position papers that really change peoples minds and hearts, delivering talks and sermons that inspire masses of people, raising hands and praying for a massive audience which suddenly feels the coming of the Holy Spirit in powerful ways.
What distinguishes those things? What is put inside of some of us from birth that enables us to rise to those positions, and what do we do in our lives that help us grow into that potential?
Just some odd thinking provoked by my nerdy television habits.
Today I went to a Microsoft System Builder Round Table meeting.
It was excellent.
They gave me stuff, specifically a memory key with some neat beta tools, slides, and even some NDA stuff on it (they assumed I’m under NDA with them, but I’m pretty sure I’m not). Also they gave me two T-shirts, and some literature on some of their new licensing. They had give-aways of course, and I won a copy of windows XP pro, which I will probably never use, unless I give it to my dad to finally make his copy legal. I wanted to win the Exchange server Enterprise edition with a 25 seat license. That is valued at somewhere areound 3 grand I think. I was a little disappointed since I know we could use it at work.
I learned a bunch of new stuff about the OPK tools (or the windows PE cd) and I recieved a new tool called the OPX tool on the key which won’t be out until January 15th as a public beta. So that was cool.
All-in-all I have to say microsoft is no slouch in how they approach some of this stuff. And if there is one really great reason to not install Linux commercially, it is that I’m not aware of any tools to do massive deployments like Windows PE / OPK tools for Windows 2000 / XP / Vista.
The new OPK tools for windows Vista look impressive.
That is enough nerdery for now.
Well, after many go-arounds with hardware and uninstalling software, reconfiguring, and reinstalling software I have a functional Zimbra server.
It very, very slow on my celeron 566 MHz (with 66 MHz FSB) and 64 MB of RAM, but it does work.
I was talking to a co-worker today and he might have the cure for my RAM woes. But if anyone out there has some PC100 or PC133 ram that is out of use, I would love to get it from you so I can beef this up for regular usage and start hosting some email for people.
Anyway, I’ll post more on it if I get it working a little faster.
If anyone is interested it isn’t that hard to set up, and most of my problems came from hardware issues, so give me an email if you want more details on what problems I ran into.
Anyone have any old computers that are broken, but still have functioning RAM, and power supplies. I also might need an old case or two. Let me know if that is something you have, cuz this weekend I’m trying to get all of my computer stuff sorted into the working and not working categories, pitching all the not working stuff, and then building up computers with the working stuff.
Right now I’m mainly lacking in ram, and things to mount the hardware to.
My old computer (yes the one I used to kick) is not strongly interested in letting me finish installation of Zimbra.
So, I am finally breaking out some parts I’ve had lying around that I picked up from work.
Specifically I have two of these Single Board Computers, which need processors and memory.
My friend Rob has a spare 1.2 GHz Celeron socket 370 processor that should work in there, so I think I’m going to be able to get one of these things off of the ground with little to no investment on my part. I figure most of the stuff inside of my old pc should work to get this new board up and running, I just need to find some cheap, or free memory.
So, then I will reinstall Fedora Core 4 Linux, and try one more time to get zimbra up and running, and accessible to the world.
Between now and then I need to learn up on domains, and primary domain controllers, how that relates to LDAP directories, and SMTP and how to make MX records do what I want them to do.
If you have any knowledge about those subjects, or know a good place to get top-to-bottom information (meaning I don’t know too much about any of those topics) please share it here.
Just in case you didn’t know. I think the internet is freaking awesome.
Not as awesome as my wife, but still, pretty awesome.
Without the internet I wouldn’t probably hear much about my pal ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
wizgandalf’s recent engagement, or get to hear dwchang whine about how cold wisconson is. (GO BEARS!)
Thanks for the feedback with the tech questions. I’m still getting to some of them. Feel free to post more. I think I’m going to ’sticky’ that one to the top of my journal so it will be easy to get to any time you have a technical question.
Jeff posted the most so far, mostly because he got a kick out of asking them in Haiku’s per Rob’s suggestion earlier in the post that I should post my responses in the form of a haku.
This weekend I managed to get Fedora Core 4 installed on my computer. Now I need to get it to find an IP automatically via DHCP when it starts. I think it isn’t because I had my shitty old ethernet card in it at the start. But I fixed that by getting out one of my $3 linksys cards I used to buy up all the time, and it found it right away.
I didn’t get Ubuntu linux installed on my desktop yet, but I will when I finish installing Zimbra on the old computer.
I might need some help with getting an internal domain set up behind my router, so if anyone knows anything about setting up domains, please let me know, so I can IM you sometime this week.
That is all for now.
This weekend I need to relax and rest, because I have been sick. So I was thinking what would be better to do with that time than install software. I mean, it takes a long time to install an operating system, most of that time could be spent napping. Then when you wake up, something is done, and you feel accomplished with just a little effort prior to napping.
( What will I install? )
