Too Pooped To Party

Paula, Dana and I just returned from our Christmas pilgrimmage to Louisiana. And we’re all exhausted.

It was a nice visit, and Dana behaved like an angel on all the flights, but it’s nice to be back in our own home with our own wireless interenet connection and our own weather and our own timezone.

Oh, and our own beds. Dana has already become reacquainted with hers and Paula and I will soon ambush ours.

Christ, Christmas, and Credit Cards

Randy Jumper, an old friend from grad school, just posted a wonderful piece from NPR.

Excerpt:

I’m not fighting the commercialization of Christmas; that fight was lost ages ago. What I’m after is more radical: Disentangling Jesus entirely from this blight on his good name. I’m out to change the bumper sticker from ‘Keep Christ in Christmas’ to ‘Free Christ from Christmas.’

Heresy? Well, compare Christmas with Martin Luther King’s birthday. On his birthday, nobody ever pays any attention to his birth. Instead, it’s ‘I have a dream’ and his impact on society. We mark Dr. King’s birth by focusing on what he said and did as an adult. Christmas, by contrast, has no time for what the adult Jesus said and did. Christmas keeps him safely shut up as a baby in the manger, where he can’t make his usual noise about people repenting and living a godly life.

…

I’m not proposing that we cancel Christmas. I know, the economy would collapse without it. Fine. Keep the gift-giving and the jingle bells. Let’s just subtract the remaining Jesus element from it and move that over into Easter. Call December 25th Solstice. Call it Retail Day. Call it Holiday Number Nine. I don’t care, just leave Christ out of it. He was not born to be the patron saint of fourth-quarter earnings.

Merry Christmas, Nina!

You know those white elephant gift exchanges–the ones where you bring a gag gift and it goes into a pool and everyone picks out a lame gift at random and then opens it in front of everyone?

Well, they just did that at UNC Chi Alpha, and they caught the funniest gag gift I’ve ever seen on tape. See what Nina got for Christmas! (a 40 second movie in Windows Media Player format)

It’s not obvious on the video, but the gift is indeed a live rat.

My commendations to Brad Novosad for his most excellent discipleship of these students in the ways of merriment.

Thanksgiving 2004

Thanksgiving was quite wonderful.

My brother Greg visited (and we played through Halo 2 on co-op–he had the same reaction I did to the abrupt ending), we had a ton of students over for Turkey Day itself, my friend Anthony got XBox live and we gamed together, and I bought a 200 gig hard drive for under $50. Gotta love those Fry’s “day after Thanksgiving” specials…

Anyway, given my new abundance of disk space I decided to install Linux. I did it once in college and enjoyed playing with it. I expected much the same experience (namely a few days of fighting with arcane and needlessly obscure configuration files), and I have to say I’m blown away by how far it’s come. I downloaded the Fedora Core 3 distribution and setup was a snap. Fedora auto-detected everything (including my sound card and network configuration) and installed a very nice graphical interface called Gnome.

And to top it off, it kept all my existing information intact so that my computer will now boot either Windows XP or Linux at my whim.

How cool is that?

Ouch.

I was out of town all day yesterday and got back late enough that I didn’t bother to check any sports scores. I had had some intimation of the rude information that awaited me in the San Jose Mercury News sports section (owing to an ill-timed consolation call from the Chi Alpha leader at Berkeley).

So we lost Big Game. Again. And we lost Big Game big. Almost as badly as it has ever been lost (although outranked by our 1930 41–0 romp over Cal).

I think the proper attitude is conveyed in Mark Purdy’s column:

Oh, it could have gone worse for Stanford on a windy, blustery afternoon. But only if a tree had fallen on The Tree.

Cal’s 41–6 victory Saturday was so awful, Stanford fans spent the second half leaving in droves — in luxury cars, actually, but in drove-like formation.

Heh. It’s a game we lost, but it’s only a game.

Of course, had we won I’d be singing an altogether different tune about the relative importance of squashing one’s rivals like bugs. But we didn’t win, and so I adopt the more rational attitude. 🙂

That Awful Sinking Feeling

This morning around 9:50 I glanced at my calendar and realized that I had a rather important meeting at 10:00. In Sacramento. 125 miles away.

As my stomach sank into my socks I began making those pathetic, desperate sounds I am prone to make in such situtations, “Urgh. Ack. Jeez. No. Must be a mistake. Shoot. AARGH!”

That may seem mild, but I assure you that if I was possessed of a more flexible vocabulary I would have employed every unwholesome utterance at the stereotypical sailor’s disposal. As it is I probably pushed the boundaries for someone in my line of work–at least internally.

Anyway, I was out the door in a flash and arrived just in time for lunch.

As it turned out I only missed the informational part of the meeting and was able to be present for the decision-making discussions.

Which is fortunate, because the world needs more uninformed people making important decisions… 🙂

My Halo 2 Stats

This is too wild: you can check out my Halo 2 stats (updated as I play), down to the details of an individual game.

You will note, by the way, that I am not particularly good compared to the leaders (but I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad since over 300,000 contenders have thrown their hat into the ring).

Incidentally, the campaign storyline is absolutely maddening. It’s cool as can be up until about 3/4 of the way through, and then it takes a detour into crazytown. And the ending makes you want to rip your eyeballs from your sockets and hurl them at the screen in protest.

Multiplayer rocks, though.

Ukiah, Here We Come!

We’re going to be at Redwood Valley Assembly of God this weekend, so I decided to do some quick research about them.

What I discovered floored me: they meet in the old building which Jim Jones (yes, that Jim Jones) used for cult meetings.

Both cool and creepy at the same time.

This snippet from the church website says it best:

What once was a place used for selfish ambition is now a place of redemption.

I know the pastor, but I never thought to google his name before now. I bet he’s got the most fascinating stories. I really look forward to learning more this weekend.