Steve Jones

A friend of mine from Bible Study has been spending his Summer in Kenya working with orphans in Kisumu. I found out recently that he has been posting to a blog regularly. Knowing Steve I have to say that nothing I'm reading about his adventure really surprises me much, but it is an exciting and encouraging read. I can't wait to here the story from the horses mouth when he gets back in a week.

The Photographic Evidence

Well, I put all of the good photos together into a picasa album.

It's the first time I've used it and it is pretty cool.

Enjoy!

Jason

Ireland

This being my first weekend at home in the 4 weeks since I got back from my vacation to Ireland with my brother I can finally get my vacation dumped to the web just in case anyone actually wants to read about it. :)

My brother finally got around to graduating college so we went on the trip that we had planned to commemorate that event. We flew out of LAX on April 8th in the afternoon and arrived in Dublin, via London Heathrow in the afternoon of April 9th. We had made tentative plans for the trip but we really didn't have any specific schedule. We had destinations, and we had plans for lodging for most of the trip, but that was it. Everything turned out great and we didn't really get stressed about getting to this or that tourist destination. We were free to wander around and change our mind at will. The original plan was to be in Dublin, and then go to Killarney and then Cork, and then Glasgow, and then London. In fact, we ended up going from Dublin to Killarney, and then Glasgow and Edinburgh and then home.

The first day in Dublin we found our way to our Hostel from the airport on the bus and had quite a bit of daylight to burn yet. We wanted to avoid jet lag so even though we were tired we were determined to keep ourselves up until at least 9pm. We wandered around the city a while, found a pub outside of the tourist area where all the locals were watching horse racing and there was not a tourist to be seen. We found our way to Dublin castle, and saw some other historic buildings. In our wanderings we went past the Olympia Theatre and as I glanced at the events I saw that Bare Naked Ladies was playing. I checked the date and time and realized that it was in an hour and a half. I went into the ticket office and came out with two tickets. We killed some time in a local cafe which served some very good coffee and then watched the show. As they told us during the concert we managed to watch the bands entire Ireland tour!


The concert was fantastic and we stayed until the second encore by which time we were both quite tired and ready to try and get some shuteye. The hostel that we were at wasn't terrible but sharing a room with 12-14 other people is not conducive to a good nights rest.
Mountain, The next two days in Dublin were well spent, we visited the Guinness brewery, the Temple Bar, the Irish Famine Memorial(eerie), and though enjoyable enough we were ready to get the heck out of the city by the time we caught our train to Killarney. Killarney was definitely a tourist town, but it was small and near a national forest. There was plenty of hiking and sight seeing to do there and after 3 days we decided to cancel our trip to Cork and spend the rest of our time in Ireland there.

We walked and biked our way around the Lakes of Killarney, visiting Torc Falls, Torc Mountain, Mangerton Mountain (Where I got sunburned. Who knew that Devil's Punchbowl would have no tree cover?), Ross Castle, the meeting of the waters, and many other parts of the countryside. On Sunday we went to a small local church which met in the Community Center. We had spaghetti with the pastor and his wife, and went to the farm of one of the members on Wednesday for a Bible study. We had tea by the peat fire while we studied. It was a farm that had been in the family for 300 years.

After Killarny we flew Ryan air to Scotland and after getting fleeced by a cabbie found our way to my friend Janet's place where we stayed for a few nights. We actually spent most of our time in other cities. We went to Stirling to see the Wallace Monument, and Edinburgh for some swing dancing. (I knew Janet from swing dancing in SLO before she went of to Glasgow for veterinary school) We then spent two nights in Edinburgh before heading back to Dublin for our flight home. Edinburgh was a city of great history and we enjoyed our time there but we didn't do all we could as we were running out of steam and getting ready to go home. My favorite part of our Edinburgh visit was a tour of Mary Kings close. A narrow street that was partially covered over by the foundation of a government building in 1753. It has well preserved 15th century architecture, the history of which is well known from public records. The tour guide was dressed in period garb and thoroughly enjoyed trying to disgust, shock, and amuse everyone with stories of everyday life in the 1600s.

Our flight back on April 26th was enjoyable, movies on demand were watched, cribbage was played and we arrived back in the states hardly the worse for wear.

So that is the short version of the trip. It was definitely a memorable vacation for my Brother and me. Many lessons learned about international travel were learned that, Lord willing, we will put to good use someday.

I will try and post again soon with pictures of the event.

My pastor has put up a blog for the Calvary Baptist Church in San Luis Obispo. He also has his own blog where he explores various topics. I thought they were pretty decent so I thought I'd link them and see if 'The Great Search Engine' might up its ranking.

The Church Site and Randall Shanks' (the pastor) blog.

I really think the picture on Pastor Shanks blog is pretty cool.

Adventures in Wii seeking

So I would like to purchase a Nintendo Wii.

Things have gotten to the point now where you don't have to get up 4 hours before dawn and wait in line to get one at a store, but they are still not making it to the store shelves.

Knowing this, and hearing that Walmart was going to have from 15-20 for sale on the 28th of January I decided to drive to the nearest one an hour before opening(6am) and see if I could get one.

I got there around 6:15am and noticed that there wasn't a line, there were a couple of people sitting in their cars who were clearly waiting for one as well. One guy was playing Mario Kart on his DS, and three others in another car were watching a DVD on a portable DVD player.

Around 6:45 this man and his two kids, who looked to be seven and ten years old respectively, parked their car and went and stood at the entrance. I took this as my cue and went and waited behind them. The guy who was playing Mario Kart joined me, as well as another guy who was trying to get one for his kids.

The two kids were terribly excited and telling the story how they set their alarms so they could get up on time. They were wondering if the people who waited all night on the opening launch were too tired to play when they got home, or if they played all day. They were practically crawling out of their skin with excitement.

After about 5 minutes of standing there a Walmart employee comes out and says "All right, who was here first." We all pointed to the guy and his kids. "Here you go, you get the last one." he said giving them a ticket.

I laughed thinking that it was a pretty funny joke and then I noticed that the ticket he gave out said 15/15 on it. Apparently the first 14 went to employees. I can't really fault the employees from snatching them up early. It's not like they get any other benefits for working there.

If I had been first in line I would have given it to the kids anyhow. They are probably going to remember this day for the rest of their lives, and tell it with distant eyes to their grand kids as they send them off to have their Nintendo virtual world immersion chip implanted in their skull.

Some people can be utterly useless

So, I am having a great deal of trouble with EA Games right now. I may have another post that deals with that but first I am going to express my utter amazement at the level of help that I managed to get out of an open source developer. I was trying to run Wine on windows (don't ask) and I could not manage to configure it so I sent the following e-mail to the maintainer of the distribution:

<snip>
I've been through the wiki on WineHQ as well as every page I could
google, and I couldn't find out how to configure the windows version
of wine. I downloaded the windows binaries and I would like to run an
application using wine, and have wine report the version of windows as
Windows XP. (I am running Windows 2000).

I've been scouring the internet for the last two hours but everything
I find about configuring wine says to run winecfg which is not in the
windows binaries that I downloaded.

Is this functionality not yet supported? Or have I just not looked in
the right places for help.

Thank you,
Jason
</snip>

I got the following reply:

<snip>
You can't please check out
http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=402065&group_id=6241

Ivan.
</snip>

Ignoring the obvious problems with English contained in that e-mail, that happens to be just where I downloaded the binaries from. And the contents of the page at the time of this writing are as follows:

Release Name: 0.9.10

Notes:
These packages contains wine dlls and binaries built for Win32.
The files with mingw in the name are built with mingw debug symbols.
The other packages are stripped.
These packages are intended for developers only, if you're a user,
you don't need them.

Wasn't that wonderful? Thank you so much Ivan for your skillful resolution to my problem.

(Sigh)

Lifes little wonders

I just spent some time with two good friends of mine Josh and Maureen and their 7 day old baby boy Sean. They just got him home from the hospital today as there were some complications with the delivery, and he was born with pneumonia.

By the grace of God both mom and baby are doing fine now.

When I was holding Sean it made me think big thoughts. He is still learning to experience the world that we all take for granted. He can't see more than a few feet in front of his face and he already has a curiosity and a desire for exploration that many people walking around this world have long since lost. At what point do we stop paying attention to what is around us. When do we stop seeing the wonders of creation and start just putting one foot down in front of another. Another day of work, another day of school, another day of the same old thing.

I know I pay attention to what is around me more than most, but I no longer have the wonder that I saw in Sean. For instance, this morning I caught a fledgling mocking bird and held it in my hands. I decided to let it go and get back to my affairs. Most people probably wouldn't have noticed it. I saw it sitting on a branch squawking at the sky, recognized it for what it was, pursued it and caught it. I remember doing the same thing when I was a kid, and I wonder if it was more exciting then or if I just think it was. Right now I hear bats hunting outside my bedroom window. If I turned out my lights and let my eyes adjust I could see their dark shapes flitting around. This world is full of life, full of fantastic miracles that so many people miss. The walk right past, or over, or under a million miracles a day.

It's sad really, but seeing Sean explore this grand new world he finds himself in reminds me that all is not lost. I'm going to shut off my lights now.