If you’re a Star Wars fan like myself, you will enjoy this. (Via D?F.) Also this. (Via someone; I forget whom.)
Darth Vader mashups…
Leave a reply
rsync and the trailing slash
There may be no better piece of software in general use today than rsync. It is the heat. Without it, it would be practically impossible to backup data.
Full stop.
But.
I don’t think I will ever figure out what to do about the trailing slash. If you read the man page you will see that
rsync (options) src dest
results in a copy of src being put in dest, but
rsync (options) src/ dest
results in copies of the contents of src being put in dest.
This is actually pretty cool. Except that bash’s tab-completion slaps a trailing slash at the end of any directory, so if you’re backing up foo/ and bar/ you have to be extra-careful that you don’t make a mess of things.
(Or I supposed you could put
set mark-directories off
in your .inputrc file.)
the new iMac
Normally you can expect a blog update on Thursday or Friday, when I’m procrastinating on my sermon. But I didn’t get to it this last week, because I was busy setting up our new 20″ iMac (specs here). It is a thing of beauty.
But the best part is that I inherit the old family eMac for my main machine. The Linux machine has been retired.
It isn’t that I loved Linux less, but that I loved Mail.app and Accordance and iTunes more. And I’m willing to learn to love iPhoto and the rest of iLife 08, but we’ll have to see about that. Also MarsEdit, which already I can’t hardly blog without. (Not that I blog much with, either.)
The Dance
We have Netflix, and after almost a year, I’ve kind of run out of movies (and TV shows) I really, really wanted to see. Soon I’ve started to receive stuff from my 2nd tier, but I’m also watching some concert DVDs. Last night I watched Fleetwood Mac‘s The Dance.
Whoa. What a great band. Even Her Nasality was in good form. (At one point she was saying “thank you” to the audience after a song, and she grinned, and you could see just how beautiful she was back in the day.) I’m approximately clueless about all things guitar-ish, but if I weren’t, I bet I’d be pretty impressed with Lindsey Buckingham. As it is, I just like his songs and the way he plays them.
The sound was outstanding, too, much, much better than the “live album” sound that turned me off the genre years ago. As it happens, I have the album, but with 7000-odd songs in iTunes it doesn’t come up that often, and when it did, it’s easy to forget that it’s not a studio album.
5.25″ Floppy Disc
A couple of months I posted this picture to my Flickr account:
It’s a fine photo, and I did a great job of masking off the background so you only see the floppy drive unit.
It’s also my most-frequently viewed picture there now.
Why? Do people who only used 3.5″ floppies, and for the last four years only USB drives, really not know how lousy these things were?
Amazing things you hear on Christian Radio
I was driving to the hospital yesterday listening to the local Christian radio station. Somebody (I listened, but never heard who) was explaining why his Bible was better than the one person who had called in preferred.
“The New American Standard,” he said, “is based on the Nestle Text, where the King James is based on the Textus Receptus. And the Textus Receptus is a more pristine text.”
(Pristine? I’m reminded of the Monty Python “Cheese Shop” sketch. [See here if you’ve never had the pleasure of watching it.] The proprietor says his shop, which is out of dozens of kinds of cheese, is nevertheless “the finest in the district.” The customer demands that he “explain the logic underlying that conclusion.” The shopkeeper replies, “It’s so clean!” To which the customer replies, “It’s certainly uncontaminated by cheese!” The TR may be pristine, but reality is messy.)
This “expert” went on to prove his point by citing Revelation 12:18-13:1, which may be merged in your Bible into a single verse 13:1.) The Nestle text says estathe (“he stood”) while TR says estathen (“I stood”). The difference is a single letter, like the difference between “he” and “she” in English. So either the dragon stood on the beach and watched the beast coming up out of the sea, or the author did.
1. Is this a major theological topic? Really? Does this level of difference really matter, or is this a case of hair-splitting (and probably mint-tithing) Protestant Scholasticism? How does it really matter whether the dragon stood watching or John did? (No. I take that back. Spare me. Please!)
2. The reading “I stood” is supported by the Byzantine Majority Text, Latin Vulgate, and others. The reading “He stood” is supported by P47, a 2nd century papyrus, in addition to the codices Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus.
In short, the King James reading is a fine translation of an inferior text. (Pristine though it may be.) The most popular evangelical translations all have “he/the dragon” as, of course, do the more scholarly translations like the NRSV and the NAB.
(For more about the TR read these summaries of its history, its critics, and its defenders (links within one longer article).)
I feel for the people who have no better resources to turn to than Christian talk radio. Bummer for them. And shame on the flat-earthers who continue to support the TR.
Spotted in a church kitchen
I was just in the kitchen a moment ago. I was recharging my AM/PM 44-oz tankard with Wal*Mart “Dr. Thunder” beverage (which, from the taste, is relabeled “Mr. Pibb,” a knockoff of Dr. Pepper foisted upon us by Coke).
When I was there, I noticed that the people preparing for the luncheon tomorrow had left a package of “premium napkins” open on the counter. The brand name was “Vanity Fair.”
I wondered what Bunyan would think, then I wondered how it is that “Vanity Fair” came to be a positive-sounding thing you’d like to associate with your product.
Another one bites the dust.
You may recall the troubles I have had in the past with elliptical trainers. And now, for the first time, I can show you that the troubles are by no means over:
There were some additional problems with this unit, but they pale beside the great honking one you see here. Think about this before you drop $170 on a Weslo 620. (Made by Icon, who make Image and Ironman brands as well.)
I’m not dead, I’m just networking socially
It isn’t that I’ve died, although I’ve been away from this site for awhile. Rather, I’ve signed up for some of these time-waster Web 2.0 social networking sites. So in addition to Flickr, which I’ve had forever — 18 months at least — now I’ve begun to use del.icio.us pretty seriously, and I’ve gotten a Backpack site and Facebook and Twitter accounts. (Why they invented tabbed browsers.) So if you’re curious what I’m up to, that’s what.
Quick impressions: Twitter is just right.
I don’t like Facebook much. It’s got that gated-community (“franchulate”) vibe, which is irritating. Also, it’s way too ambitious. Comparing it to Twitter is like comparing Yahoo! to Google circa 1998: an overdone “portal” vs. a clean and elegant search engine. Today, Google can get away with doing everything, because they’re bloody geniuses. Facebook? Eh. For them it’s 1998, and they should realize it.
Backpack, I’m not sure about. The potential is there for me to do something useful with it, but I haven’t, so far.
On the other hand, they’re social networking sites, so they have a lot (“almost everything”) in common with pyramid schemes. I don’t want to go invite all my buddies to join your site, thank you very much. I actually like the no-strings commitment free approach of blogs, myself: surf over there, read it, and be on your merry way. Bookmark it if you like it, or move along if you don’t.
You should have seen the one that got away
I like this video clip that shows the relative size of some things we might, otherwise, think are pretty big: the Sun, Pollux, Arcturus, Rigel, Betelgeuse, My Cephei.