a trampled flag on a city street
old age is changing me. i've felt fairly self-relient since i left for UC at 17, working to support myself, trying to pay my way through college. paying rent, buying a car, getting married, etc... now, totally dependent on myself to survive, renee's and my quality of life riding solely on our shoulders, has mentally shifted me away from depending on God for things. five years ago i would rollercoaster emotionally with him, resist him, get frustrated with him, feel thrilled by him, sit in awe of him... good or bad, i was still at least in contact with him. now we just kind of co-exist in a dry blah-ness.
i'm sure i've talked about this before. but i just recently noticed the correlation between being self-relient (from a financial/stability standpoint) and my attitude towards him. i don't have anything i feel like i'm relying on him with. in my head, i know that every step is at his discretion - everything i have was a gift from him. in my heart, i feel like i'm taking care of myself.
dan burton at lifespring yesterday made an interesting distinction about sheep and their shepherd. shepherds do not stand behind the sheep and prod them and force them in a direction - he walks in front of them, and they choose to follow. it's their call on whether or not they follow, though. and they're clueless enough that they will follow one second and then wander off in another direction the next.
how well he knows us, huh?
i guess one benefit of old age is the black + white lines start to dissolve. i once took comfort in seeing everything in terms of absolutes... i guess it comes to you that the world isn't that way and it's just your way of seeing things that makes it so... and while the absolutes are still there, your efforts to categorize everything as a 1 or a 0 become exhausting.
in that spirit i hit up el apple store in kenwood on saturday to play with a macbook. don't worry - i'm still not ready for their coloring book OS just yet. good gravy, applications still stay open after you close them! savages.
but as machine that'd primarily run Windows, it has appeal. the new keyboard is a little weird, and not having a second mouse button or a scroll bar is a little weak (you use two fingers on the trackpad instead of one to scroll, and click the mouse button with two fingers on the trackpad to right-click). plus i hear it runs really hot. it's also a little heavier than i expected. on the flipside, i dig the built-in webcam, the magnetic latch, and the glossy screen. for $1100 base it runs windows faster than most of the other alternatives... and apple finally saw the light with hardware upgradeability (you can replace the hard disk yourself). i guess it makes sense that as these machines become more like PC's, i start to like them more.
the dualboot functionality is what initially drew me in, but this video of the parallels virtual machine manager is extra tasty.
so i may be selling my current laptop in the next couple of months... although i may wait til the 2.0ghz model's price drops to $1100.. definitely waiting til any big reports of hardware issues get resolved.
I'm teasing Dara with the idea of us buying a MAC once we are married. I'd grab a MacBook Pro and use the virtualization software to run Mac OS and Windows at the same time. I'd love to dual monitor it out and have MAC on one screen and Windows on another. That would be the sweetest.
10100111010110010100111
and that's the way i'm seeing the world today.
To your original point, Justin, I just have one thing that came up yesterday morining while I was reading my bible. I'm guest speaking at the high school youth group here at the Vineyard in June and I was reading up on some of my favorite stories in the Gospel. I spent alot of time reading the story about Peter walking on water. Everyone knows the story and can give a great lesson about it, but I started thinking about the last time I thought of myself in this story. I think it's not a matter of looking at Jesus and knowing he's there. We all have that, but our poblem is that we're sinking, but we don't know or care. We're still looking around, paying more attention to what's surrounding us than we are to Jesus. I understand where you're coming from. It's much harder for me to spend time reading the Bible or praying now that I'm married (even just a week). It seems somewhat less important. The problem is that I'm happy and content with where Theresa and I are and I just want to enjoy the ride. I don't know what it will take for me to realize I'm sinking and I need Jesus. It took Peter thinking he was to death before he called out "Lord, save me". Hopefully it doesn't take that for me.
To you Steve, I say:
01010011 01110100 01100101 01110110 01100101 00100000 01000010 01110010 01100001 01100111 01100111 00100000 01110011 01110101 01100011 01101011 01110011 00100001
So there.
P.S. your binary translates to gibberish.
NERDS, UNITE!
(or 01001110 01000101 01010010 01000100 01010011 00101100 00100000 01010101 01001110 01001001 01010100 01000101 00100001).
01001001 01010100 01010011 00100000 01000001 00100000 01010100 01010010 01000001 01010000
yeah well i know that my binary is gibberish. i did that on purpose. you see, i'm okay with the fact that i don't know what the hell i've said, or what the hell everyone else is saying with your one's and zero's and your cereal box and $200 and your hand grenades and the stick...
and the children!
For those of us who don't know what they're talking about check out this link.
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/cerealbawks.php
Group X.. whatever happened to those dudes?
Nothing happened to them, they're still in my work MP3 playlist!
P.S. Justin, you're paranoid..it's not a trap.
Young Neef picked up a macbook and so far enjoys it a lot. he confirmed the heat being a little excessive, but beyond that he says it's a nice system. he also mentioned that Amazon has 'em cheaper right now, and that Renee could potentially get us an educator's discount on it.
schfifty five!
J, funny thing...I posted today about just about the same thing as you (and Ed) are talking about. I just now read your post. It's good to see that a few of us are going thru this crap right now. So maybe you guys will accept my invitation (see today's post)
By the way Steve, you said "5483687", and you can forget about be trying to convert thoes other fools numbers, I can't count that high anyway!
why do you know these things?!!??!?
Does that make Young Neef a 21st Century Digital Boy?