Two or More

the unthinkable has happened

2011-09-19T13:52:00.002+12:00

I never thought I'd see the day when I would lay aside the excellence of linux and actually enjoy using another operating system - a proprietary operating system at that!

But it has happened. Through various events, an opportunity arose a couple of months back, to use an early Intel model iMac at work. My quad-core i5, 4GB RAM, 64bit debian running workstation was flattened and redeployed with Windows 7, to someone requiring the horsepower.

The iMac, a spare loaded with XP, sitting unused for many months, became my workstation. Needing to run iTunes, and refusing to use Windows outside of a VM or RDP session, my only option was OSX as the spec wouldn't cope with a VM running atop linux.

A good opportunity, I thought, to see how an increasing percentage of the other side live - to see what all the fuss was about.

I wasn't prepared for what happened next.

At first, it took a little time to get used to the slightly different keyboard layout & the plethora of new, sometimes unwieldy hotkey combinations. However, I did feel at home though with the familiarity of the interface having come from a GNOME environment - it was uncannily similar.

Slowly but surely I felt a growing sense of wonder of just how simple it was to use, of how things just worked. I enjoyed that sense of the technology getting out of the way and just letting me get on with what I needed to do. And yet, a bash command line was just a click away...

I discovered I *could* have the comforts of a commonly used mainstream OS and UNIX too. I did a little investigation and found that, completely by happenstance, I had all the right hardware at home to make a Hackintosh. So, for roughly the same time as having the iMac at work, I've also had an almost-Mac-Pro at home.

Of course, my Apple-loving friends all nodded knowingly, tut-tut-ed and wondered why it had taken me so long...

I began to understand that it's not just about a single device, or the OS, or an App Store. It's the eco-system that all these things exist in that is so appealing. It is all there, designed to work together - not perfect, but much closer to completeness than anything I've previously come across - either proprietary or non. And I really like it.

What has ensued is a philosophical crisis of sorts: How can I *like* a proprietary OS? Is this nice, easiness worth giving up some freedom for? Where is my loyalty? If I like this, does this mean I might like Microsoft one day? How am I ever to afford the 'real' hardware to run at home?

Of course, these are all questions of which I'm willing to spend some time on getting to the answer of.

I know there are many among the FOSS community who have tread this path before me - some of whom are much cleverer and whose opinions are valued much more highly, than mine.

But I still can't help but feel a little guilty.

a donkey by any other name

2010-09-30T18:57:00.002+13:00

When I first joined Twitter, back in July 2009, I was somewhat disappointed to find that the closest I could get to my nickname of choice, was nz_d0nk3y. (IRL my nickname is Donkey - after the annoying talking smart ass from Shrek).

Recently, due to two years of inactivity, I managed to score the twitter nickname I wanted. Now, I am @donkey - the only 'real' donkey in the world! Muwahhahhaa! (well, on twitter anyway - and it also now matches my account over at identi.ca).

It's been an interesting ride since then with all sorts of extra followers - like, apparently real people rather than the obviously fake accounts that new followers invariably are.

This past weekend however, it got even crazier.

A couple of tweets came in from some people I'd never heard of - obviously with a friend called 'Donkey'. I normally wait for it to die down and then reply to them all with a Donkey quote from Shrek - just for a laugh - which I also did in this case. A little later, I noticed that I suddenly had about ~25-30 more followers which seemed odd.

Even stranger was the fact that they were all young ladies - and all from Canada (Oh, Canada). One of them happened to mention a name that had shown up in all of the tweets I'd received earlier. On closer inspection, this twitter account had nearly 140K followers and appeared to be some kind of celebrity.

Turns out this fellow, Jacob Hoggard had been a contestant in Canadian Idol and had gone on to front a band called Hedley.

Apparently, they have a friend called Sean (who also has the nickname 'Donkey'), and it was he whom all these people had mistaken me for. The new young female Canadian followers continue to arrive at a rate of a couple a day - a few which I have conversed with (Kirsten; Marylou; Tricia) , all of which seem wonderfully nice and very friendly.

Isn't it interesting the things that happen when you throw millions of people from all around the world into an online community - shared names, perceived shared experiences, mistaken identities and all...

Ubuntu LTS Server upgrade - really difficult?

2010-08-21T11:11:00.008+12:00

At my place of work, we use a Java-based trouble-ticketing system from Atlassian called Jira.

It is hosted on a LAMP server virtual machine in our production VMware environment. The system has been in daily use (well, week day use) since near the end of 2008 - requiring minimal maintenance in that time (the occasional reboot after security updates have been installed).

Up until yesterday, we had been using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server. I decided it was time to move to the latest LTS release - 10.04 - which was released earlier this year and had just received it's first .1 refresh.

Some googling around revealed the potential for various issues with the process so I took a snapshot before beginning - just to be safe.

I then found this link which detailed how to upgrade the server to the next LTS release.

I was shocked at how simple the process appeared to be - surely not?! This is that crazy technical, awful command line operating system with a really high cost of ownership isn't it?

So, SSH'ing into the server, I took a copy of /etc (just being extra safe again), fired up a screen session and ran the command as instructed on the page above.

sudo do-release-upgrade

Various lists were obtained from the internet and upgrades calculated, I then had to press Y to show my acceptance of the results.

Everything slowed down at this point due to our internet connection speed (changing soon, yay!). I disconnected and went to sleep.

This morning, I connected back to the server and screen session to find a reboot necessary. So, Y again and a reboot later the 10.04.1 based system was up and running.

I fired up a browser and pointed to the Jira system - fail. Oh noes, I thought, now it gets difficult.

Well, no, not really. Over the course of various Ubuntu releases since 8.04, the sun-java6-* packages were moved into the partner repository.

So, I uncommented the partner repository in /etc/apt/sources.list, ran an apt-get update and reinstalled the sun-java6-jre package.

A reboot (only to test that everything would start by itself as it should) and Jira is running again, no data lost and inbound email requests to the system are working. Awesome.

Just so you get the significance of that, imagine doing an inplace upgrade (eg not a fresh install) of a Windows 2000 Server running IIS5 and SQL 2000 and have it coming out running Windows Server 2008, IIS7 and SQL 2008.

Two reboots, no data loss, no restores necessary and all done remotely. And Jira was actually still running and available for most of the time except when the box was rebooting and having java re-installed.

Yep, *really* difficult. Watch out.

the inspirational missing fork...

2010-02-04T15:08:00.006+13:00

Yesterday, while preparing my rice noodles, tuna and sweet-chilli sauce for lunch, I realised I had misplaced my fork. And there were no other forks in the lunch room drawers.

Blast. "Oh well", I thought; then grabbed a spoon and went and enjoyed the meal.

Once finished, I realised that, actually, the spoon hadn't actually been that hard to use. In fact, it had worked well - better than I expected it would.

Then it occurred to me; if the fork had not gone missing, I would never have even tried using the spoon - believing it to be 'not suited for purpose' (to use a tech business term, if I may).

I made a mental note to blog about this wonderful thought - the inspirational missing fork - completely unaware that Don Christie (President, NZ Open Source Society) would make a similar comment today on the NZOSS Openchat list:

"..the idea that there are multiple platforms and options is as important as how to use an inidividual platform."

Indeed, how often do we not even think about the possibility of an alternative being completely worthy of performing a given function only because we always had a 'fork' at our disposal.

The trick, I guess, is to look around now for an alternative before the proverbial fork goes missing (or becomes unavailable/unusable for some reason)....

KDE team removes support for underscore, starts enforcing STD3 from RFC1122

2010-01-15T09:19:00.004+13:00

Interestingly, the latest build of KDE 4 (4.3.90 aka 4.4 RC1) no longer supports the underscore character in host names.

While this was allowed in previous KDE4 versions, the KDE team have removed support for the underscore as "STD3 requires all DNS domain names to be limited to Letters, Digits and Hyphen."

Here are two examples of bugs that have been filed and subsequently closed with a 'WONTFIX' resolution: 220500 222291

So, any of you sysadmins out there who have the audacity to have hosts (or DNS aliases/addresses) on your network with the underscore character in them, you'll no longer be able to connect to those hosts using KDE4 apps like KRDC (Remote Desktop) or the Konqueror web browser.

what a difference an AHCI makes

2009-07-05T18:25:00.005+12:00

Last week, I noticed how, whenever huge disk IO was taking place on my Quad-core - with 4Gb of RAM and 64bit Ubuntu - workstation at work, the whole desktop environment would pretty much grind to a halt.

SSH'ing in from a remote machine and using top, iotop and nethogs didn't show anything particularly heart stopping going on either.

I googled around and found that this seemed to be a fairly common problem with any of the newer kernel releases.

One post in particular said that a person had fixed the problem by disabling the SATA disk controllers AHCI mode in the BIOS - switching it back to IDE.

Cool I thought - let's have a go! Interestingly, the BIOS was already set to IDE. I decided I'd try enabling AHCI instead.

Wow - what a difference that made. I then remembered one of the other posts I came across that just said to switch the BIOS setting as that forces the OS to load a different disk controller driver.

It certainly did the trick - said work-beastie is now much faster and more responsive under load.

fleeting moments

2009-07-05T16:24:00.007+12:00

Travelling the 45kms or so to work every day, affords some amazing views of two local mountain ranges - among other geographical features. One particular morning, I was marvelling at the light shimmering on the moving wind turbine blades, the snow capping one of said mountain ranges and the mauve sky behind it all.

As the sun was rising behind the mountains - before it was entirely in view, it's light caught the edges of some clouds on the other side of the ranges. It was an amazing sight - almost like the proverbial 'silver lining' but, instead of clouds, it was the mountains that had the silver lining.

An awe inspiring moment of the wonder of God's creation. It amazes me that some would choose to dumb down the beauty around them .... but that is their choice after all.

Within seconds, this sight had been replaced by the overwhelming brightness of the rising sun - you could no longer see anything in direction. Not any detail at least.

At that moment, I was reminded of some things:
1) How cool that I happened to glance to the east at that precise time!
2) Our lives are as fleeting as that beautiful sight
3) The Glory of God shines much brighter than the amazing sun which He created

I believe we need to live our lives to the fullest - in Him. No matter what beauty is there, it is because we are reflecting His glory - like those clouds were, the sun. And finally, we should make it our goal that it's His glory that overshadows us - not try and make it the other way around.

God Bless
donkey

segfaulting multimedia processes -or- The Case of the Badly Cooled......Case

2009-07-04T19:10:00.010+12:00

A wee while ago (yes, I'm catching up on things I'd hoped to blog about for a while!), I had a problem with my home PC. This culminated in a post to the Ubuntu Forums.

General stability of this machine is great - it's normally on for weeks at a time serving the familys various document/web/email/printing needs - and has done this for about four years with the only major hardware change being a new 7600GT graphics card (most recently - about 12 months ago) and a new Socket 478 P4 Extreme Edition CPU about 18 months ago).

So, what do you guys think? Hardware or software? And how do I troubleshoot this one further? (BTW, I've been a linux user for about 8 years now, so I'm not really a guru and definitely not a noob. Perhaps more of a goob. :D )

Basically, I had an issue where, whenever I'd do some 'heavy lifting' tasks - like audio or video encoding, the app would just disappear. Very odd it was - I tried all sorts of things to fix it. New linux distro's, replacement RAM etc.

Starting the processes from the command line, I was able to see that the app termination was actually a segfault - which I subsequently found in the dmesg log. That and two other distro's (lenny and a Fedora Core live CD) gave errors in dmesg about the CPU overheating:

Turned out to be the CPU overheating. Interesting, there was nothing in dmesg about the CPU overheating - though, when I had Debian on, it did show messages about that - and, when I booted into the Fedora 10 Live CD, it also complained about the CPU overheating in dmesg.

So, to solve the problem, I transplanted the guts of my box into a new case which breathes better and also used the correct heatsink for my CPU (one with a copper core).

The problem was that I was using the same case and heatsink from my old P4 2.8Ghz which wasn't cutting it with the new P4EE 3.4Ghz and the amount of heat it generates.

Once the correct heatsink and better case with more efficient thermal dynamics were in place, the differences in internal temperature were quite remarkable:

If anyone is interested, here's some temps from lm-sensors that show the difference in internal temps between the two cases and heatsinks. These are both just at system idle with no loading.

Before
SDA: 37C | SDB: 34C | GPU: 57C | CPU: 40C

After
SDA: 33C | SDB: 28C | GPU: 40C | CPU: 23C

During loading, the CPU was getting to around 70C, now its able to stay around the 57C - and with no segfaulting going on! Yaay!

The rather cool thing - from my point of view anyway - is that Windows would merely have blue screened under the same circumstances (or just rebooted as the default blue screen setting dictates). Obviously that would make things much harder to troubleshoot.

So linux dealt with the overheating by terminating the offending process. A much more elegant way of handling things - don't you think?

TTF vs ttf in linux

2009-07-01T11:29:00.003+12:00

During a recent migration of a friends family laptop from Vista to linux, I discovered a curious problem.

Said friend had a bunch of add-on TTF fonts in Vista which they still wanted to be available to them in linux. No worries, I thought - I'll just copy them out of the windows partition and put them in ~/.fonts and away they'll go.

Or not, as it turned out.

Curiously, some were showing up in OpenOffice, and some weren't. Several font cache updates, reboots and various google searches later, they still were not showing.

At that point I thought I'd better have a look in ~/.fonts to see if I could spot a pattern with ones that were appearing, and ones that were not.

Bingo! All the non-working ones had extensions of .TTF - while the working ones were lower case.

Right, I thought - there must be a whizbang bash command to fix that! Off to google for help again and I was able to construct this command:

for i in *.TTF; do mv "$i" "`basename $i .TTF`.ttf"; done

Voila! Now all the fonts showed correctly (after a restart of OpenOffice of course).

Capitalisation only makes a difference in a real operating system after all!

FLORIDA COURT SETS ATHEIST HOLY DAY

2009-01-09T08:45:00.000+13:00

In Florida , an atheist created a case against the Easter & Passover holy days. He hired an attorney to bring a discrimination case against Christians, Jews & observances of their holy days. The argument was it was unfair that atheists had no such recognised day.

The case was brought before a judge. After listening to the passionate presentation by the lawyer, the judge banged his gavel declaring, "Case dismissed."

The lawyer immediately stood objecting to the ruling saying, "Your honor, how can you possibly dismiss this case? The Christians have Christmas, Easter & others. The Jews have Passover, Yom Kippur & Hanukkah. Yet my client & all other atheists have no such holidays."

The judge leaned forward in his chair saying, "But you do. Counsel, your client is woefully ignorant." The lawyer said, "Your Honor, we are unaware of any special observance or holiday for atheists."

The judge said, "The calendar says April 1st is 'April Fools Day.' Psalm 14:1 states 'The fool says in his heart, there is no God.' Thus, it is the opinion of this court, that if your client says there is no God, then he is a fool. Therefore, April 1st is his day. Court is adjourned."

and so, a new one begins

2009-01-01T00:26:00.003+13:00

As of 26 minutes ago, it became 2009.

20-0-9. That last one went crazily fast. One wonders what this one has in store.

Whatever the happenings, God remains sovereign.

Rather Him than me, that's for sure.

a few of my favorite things

2008-12-20T17:16:00.004+13:00

I love looking up at a clear night sky. One of my favorite things about where we live now is that the night sky can be beautifully clear. Very little ambient light to cloud the view.

Just the other night, after popping the puppy to bed, a glance at the sky stopped me in my tracks. It was amazing, awe inspiring.

With that, and the time of year it is, I was reminded of a brightly shining star, rising in - what I'm sure must have been - a brilliantly clear middle-eastern sky a couple of thousand years ago - supernaturally lit and placed by the power of God, to point the way to the Saviour.

It struck me then that, as Christians, we are like that star. Placed where ever we are by God, and (by his grace) reflecting His glory and being used by Him to point the way to the Saviour.

The choice then, to follow - and lastly believe - rests with the observer of the star. Just as it was with the oriental kings we read about in the Gospels.

So, as we celebrate Jesus' birth, remember, the choice is yours.

Merry Christmas.

a historical day

2008-11-16T21:56:00.002+13:00

Wow. I actually saw a Spitfire in the air today for the first time. What an amazing sight - and an amazing sound.

Very special to see an amazing piece of history performing as designed.

geek humour

2008-10-16T12:30:00.001+13:00

I came across these two links today, which I thought were extremely funny. There you go.

Hamlet: Facebook News Feed Edition
History of the browser user-agent string

Enjoy!

A change of OS can void warranty...

2008-09-07T00:10:00.003+12:00

I'm totally gobsmacked.

Today, I was talking to a friend about her new Vista laptop and the various troubles she's been having. She said she'd love to run Ubuntu on it but couldn't because removing Vista would void the laptop's warranty.

Now, I can understand playing with the hardware itself voiding the warranty (overclocking etc), but formatting the hard drive and installing another OS? What the ....

I did a bit of googling on the subject and it turns out to be quite wide-spread too - apparently a lot of people have been told this by various manufacturers.

Watch out for that I'd say.. certainly makes even more sense to buy a machine with nothing on it.

love capacity

2008-07-16T23:00:00.007+12:00

Today was Grandma's funeral.

It was nice, and altogether not as sad feeling as Grandad's was last year. I think that may be because Grandma's passing was less of a shock... That, and the fact that there was no piper playing at this one. Wow, the emotional energy from a lone piper playing something like Amazing Grace - it's just incredible to experience. Always makes me cry like a newborn.

I was asked to read some scripture at the funeral. 1 Peter 1:3-9 to be exact. My Aunty apparently chose me to read that one as she knew it would be of special significance for me, being a Christian and all. That was very sweet of her.

Grandma and Grandad were so in love - it was amazing. They'd been married over 60 years when Grandad died a few days short of his 90th birthday. And Grandma celebrated her 80th not two weeks before she passed - around 9 months since Grandad went. They had this wee heart shaped photo frame with a photo of them in it. Each of them died holding it.

My wife and I have always looked at their marriage and held it as something of an example to us. It is our hope to be that happy, that in love - still - after 60+ years too.

It struck me that we all have the capacity to love like they did. We all have the ability within us to express love for another - whether we do or not is a choice that is up to us.

Go on - I dare ya!

God Bless
donkey

life, again - or the end of another

2008-07-12T22:39:00.006+12:00

You may recall late last year that my Granddad passed away. Well, this morning, his beloved wife, my Grandma, followed on.

It's obviously a really sad time - but not quite such a shock as when Granddad went. In a way, it's nice to know that the pain of loss, the confusion and the sorrow will be over for her now.

This time around, we find ourselves unable to afford the trip for all of us to attend the funeral. There's to be a special family 'mixing the ashes' ceremony in Oamaru on Friday which I'm really glad I'll be able to be involved in (as well as the funeral).

On another note though, we have an old friend from Auckland staying the weekend for his 68th birthday. He's a lonely soul - and looks forward to his annual trip down to stay with us. It's nice to have him here and bring some happiness to a brother.

God Bless, and good night.

off with the xandros, on to eeebuntu

2008-06-26T18:35:00.006+12:00

Wandering around the net looking for EeePC information, I came across this.

Ok, that and the fact you can't effectively secure the sudo access on this wonderful machine, made me have at look at options.

Right now, I'm using eeebuntu - the Netbook Remix Edition.

Very nice - particularly the UME launcher....

Startup and shutdown is a *tiny* bit slower than the standard Xandros install - but not so much as I thought it might be. In fact, once it's going, general use is actually quicker (like starting OpenOffice writer etc). Though, that could be because it's the 2.4 version rather than the 2.0 version...

avoiding strife

2008-06-16T15:13:00.003+12:00

Proverbs 20:3 "It is to a man's honor to avoid strife, but every fool is quick to quarrel."

I'm sure we could all do with more of this in the world. Not the cowardly kind of not talking about anything, but just not seeking for strife.

Of netbooks and laptops

2008-06-11T17:51:00.013+12:00

So, yesterday morning, my shiny new EeePC 900 arrived. One of the first few in the country no less. Very cool.

After having played with 701 series for some time through work, I decided that I'd really like one of those as multi-purpose kind of 2nd home PC cum roadtrip toolbox. I decided to go for a white one as I wanted something different from all those darkly coloured PCs and always had a soft spot for the white Apple hardware. Plus, wifey likes the pearlescent white finish. :-)

I'm staying with the Xandros linux OS for now, though I'm watching Ubuntu's netbook remix with interest. That would be rather cool as I use Ubuntu at home (~7yrs) and work (~3yrs) at the moment.

So far, I've loaded up some useful work type stuff (nxclient from nomachine.com, pptpconfig, wine+VNC viewer - the enterprise one with AD authentication, bluetooth pairing to use the Palm 750v as a 3G modem) and some more personal stuff (GnomeSword, mplayer).

The quick among you may have noticed the bluetooth reference - no, it's not built in. I purchased a wee micro-USB dongle for ~$25 off of trademe - works a charm too.

Watch this space....

Security and feeling safe.

2008-04-28T22:41:00.004+12:00

I'm at a regional managers meeting in Hamilton at the moment. At tea tonight, I was talking with a guy about a country he visited about three years ago.

He relayed how there were armed guards escorting him around as the company he worked for had had staff held hostage by local people to extort money from them. So there was a lot of real in your face type security - the guards, airport type luggage and people scanning at hotels etc.

The next thing he said intrigued me and I instantly saw an interesting parallel.

He said, "I decided I'd never go back there again - I just didn't feel safe."

I thought it ironic that one would (quite rightly) feel unsafe in a place where there was a huge security presence - all these extra, and very obvious, protocols and safeguards. In fact, the very presence of these things created a sense of things not being safe.

Amazing how millions of Windows users have yet to identify this.....

Flavours.....

2008-02-06T07:45:00.002+13:00

We (my wife and I) have recently come to the conclusion that we're not entirely pentecostal afterall.

We're also not entirely conservative. Perhaps you could say we're 'preservatives'.

Certainly goes along with the whole 'salt' thing.... ;-)

life, etc (cont'd)

2007-11-27T21:29:00.002+13:00

Well, it's been just over a month and I still choke up a bit thinking about Granddad...I guess that'll happen for a while. I seem to be more sensitive to tear-jerky moments in movies at the moment too.

A new manager has been appointed at work which is great. Said manager has no IT experience or knowledge whatsoever which necessitated a new position - Team Leader, IT. I managed to get appointed to that role.

Interesting times ahead....

life etc...

2007-10-13T17:53:00.001+13:00

So, my Granddad passed away recently. He was a day off of 91 on the day of his funeral. Unfortunately, we didn't make it to Dunedin in time to see him before he went.

Rather upsetting really - but it was lovely to catch up with family, and spend some time with Grandma before returning home.

Dunedin, and the South Island in general, is a beautiful place. For some reason, though my wife and I have never lived there, Dunedin feels like home. I suspect that we will be living there at some point in the future.

While away, I found out my boss resigned - and his boss would like me to be acting manager in between him leaving and a new manager starting. All rather daunting - but a good opportunity to try something different on for size.

Maybe it's time to move 'up' from being a techie? We shall see.....

interesting vista....

2007-10-13T17:47:00.001+13:00

Just helping a friend set up a new PC he bought. Brand new dual-core HP - nice piece of kit for an off the shelf thing.

Took an age for Vista to configure itself and be ready to start tweaking and installing stuff. Actually was quicker to boot an Ubuntu live CD, repartition the hard disk and install a whole operating system (and more!).

Rather interesting I thought.

a thought..

2007-02-08T10:31:00.001+13:00

Do they call it 'fast' food because you shouldn't be eating it?

Renew the wonder...

2007-02-07T14:42:00.001+13:00

I read this over at Our Daily Bread this morning and felt challenged by it.

I'm constantly amazed how these guys thousands of years ago were going through stuff that is exactly what people still go through today (talking about me here!). The impersonal structure of religiosity, the filling up of ones day with many things and the constant sapping of ones spiritual passion.

Back to basics - love God above all else, love one another. Should it really be as hard as mankind tends to make it?

I don't think so.

If it means anything to you, ask Jesus to renew the wonder of Him (our first love) today, right now even.

If it doesn't mean anything to you, well, that's a whole other story then eh!? I pray you continue to journey towards the wonder that He is.

Bless ya
donkey

Time lag

2006-12-08T12:46:00.001+13:00

Wow, it's hard to believe it's almost been a whole year since I made this blog and stuck a post on it. Show's just how time flies eh? Or at least, how much time I have to blog anyway......

I really would like to publish stuff here more often but, well, you know how it goes.

I'm currently trying out Beryl/AiGLX on my Ubuntu workstation at work. Veerry nice indeed - and a lot faster than I figured it would be with all the extra eye candy. Doesn't work so nice together with my gDesklets at the moment but I guess that will be addressed in future releases of both pieces of code.

A crazy thing happened yesterday - our church got 'fire-bombed' as the Pastor put it. It's quite amazing that the damage wasn't more extensive - it could quite easily have been much worse. As it is, it looks like God intervened super-naturally and put the fire out. We've been left with a smashed window and a burnt hole in a curtain where whatever was on fire was chucked in through the hole in the window - and a small patch of scorched carpet. Awesome eh? Old hairy legs must be getting a bit anxious about the headway we're making in the community for God...

Must dash anwyay - this could well be all until next year! But I'll continue to hope it won't be......

Welcome

2005-12-16T10:27:00.002+13:00

Greetings.

I'm not sure I'll actually get time to blog often but I figured the first step was to actually set one up. Then we'll see what happens.

The name is based on a reference from the Bible. Yes, I'm a Christian and I love Jesus.

You'll probably find comments on that as well as linux, computers etc here - perhaps even other things.

Thanks for stopping by.

God Bless