I read on the toilet

I read on the toilet.

I know that a lot of people do, but I find that it relaxes me.  And that is an important consideration, particularly these days.  I have always had a problem with constipation.  I read an awful lot, of course, and most of the stuff that I'm doing online is reading.  Reading email, reading articles, reading social media posts; but, generally speaking, most of that type of reading; reading emails, reading articles, and even the social media posts; is something that may require a response.  So I am reading with the expectation that *what* I am reading may trigger something that I need to do.  Something that I may need to react to.  Something that may require me to do some research, or write an article, or post a possibly demanding response.  So reading anything on line is not relaxing.  Reading anything on a device is not relaxing, because most of what I might read, say, on social media, may possibly generate a need for a response.  So even reading, say, an eBook on a device, I don't find particularly relaxing.  Partly that's just the association with "device" and not a book.  But even reviewing a book I find it easier to do when it's an actual book where I can flip pages back and forth when I need to refer to something.

So, yes.  There is an awful lot of stuff that I read that is *not* particularly relaxing.  But books are.  I suppose it may possibly be partly, an association of books with recreational reading, which I do for enjoyment.  And even when it's reviewing books, I tend to find some enjoyment in reading.  Even when it was books that I was reviewing, I enjoy learning, too.  So books that I am reading because I need to know this material, can also be somewhat enjoyable.

Of course, it's not *too* enjoyable if the book is a real turkey, where it's badly written, and incorrect, and has questionable information.  I certainly found an awful lot of books that weren't particularly good when I was doing reviews.  But the real absolute turkeys were few and far between, so, yes.  For the most part, any association with actual books is somewhat enjoyable.

But my reading on the toilet is *not* my actual recreational reading.  Actual recreational reading, these days, tends to be confined to the times that I get to soak in the tub.  Again, there may be an association between having a book in the bathtub, and having a book in the bathroom, and the pleasure of a hot bath, and so to simply having a book in the bathroom, even if I'm reading it on the toilet, may have an association with pleasure and therefore relaxation.

But the fact remains that reading on the toilet relaxes me and helps address the constipation that has been a kind of constant and life-long battle.

Too much information?

Jeremiah 31:25

For I have given

rest to the weary and joy

to the sorrowing.

MGG - 5.19 - HWYD - Women in development/fonts

I think this is my very favorite story, in all the time of managing technical environments.

It was at that business, that company, that I had what I feel to be my greatest success in all of information technology, even greater than the publication of my first book.  (And I'm very proud of the publication of my first book.)

As I mentioned, I was managing the technical support office of this company. I was, in addition, doing some additional management consulting, for the company overall.

One of the problems in regard to technical support was that the technical support department was far too busy.  My technical support staff were heavily overburdened.  They were busy taking the tech support calls, and finding solutions to the problems. They then had to document the solutions to those problems, in a very extensive database, which required you to fill out all possible situations which might encounter that problem, and might need that solution.  We had to support the sales people.  In addition, the company had contracted additional software, from outside developers. The technical support department was charged with quality assurance, and testing of these outside programs. Sometimes the tests got extremely involved, and you had to be very careful in documenting exactly what version you were testing, and exactly what solution it was supposed to fix, and tested against any of the recent fixes, or any problems that might be related to the problem you're encountered, in order to determine whether the outside vendor had fixed one bud, and introduced two more...

And then there was this business of creating the fonts.

This was also at the dawn of the Windows age.  Windows 1 and 2 had been out for a while, but weren't having much take up, but we did have clients who were working in a Windows 1 or 2 environment.  But Windows 3 had just come out, and everybody was jumping on the Windows 3 bandwagon.  And because Windows 3 had just come out, everybody was playing around with fonts.  Everybody wanted new fonts.  The new fonts weren't scalable, as they are now.  If you wanted a 9-point font, you had to create a 9-point font, even if you had an existing 10-point font.  This particular company made communications software.  At the time, that was primarily terminal emulation software.  People were running multiple terminal windows, in Windows of various sizes, and wanted to have different size fonts in order to enable this activity.  The developers, of course, felt that this was beyond their dignity as programmers, and therefore high up on the information technology food chain, and therefore passed the task off to my people in technical support.

The sales people, and marketing, wanted more and more sets of fonts.  My technical support staff saw creation of fonts as something you did when you didn't have a pressing technical support call that you had to research, test out, or otherwise deal with.  Oh, and also when you didn't have a new submission from the contractors to test their software.

As I said, the technical support team was completely overloaded.

There were only three female employees in the company.  This was kind of par for the course for that day and age in tech companies.  The Chief Financial Officer was one.  She had two direct reports.  One doing some bookkeeping for her, and the receptionist.  Since the CFO was female, the clerical staff reported to her.  They had rather little to do, and didn't really understand the technology involved in the company and product.  So they felt kind of left out of everything when all the other technical people would get to discussing technical issues.  Which was most of the time.

(The Chief Financial Officer was one of those people who felt it was a moral failure to smile in the workplace.  She glared it everyone.  It wasn't anything personal, you understand, she just glared at everyone.  And she seriously protected her female employees.)

But they didn't have an awful lot to do.  They were kind of bored with their jobs.  They also didn't feel particularly involved in the company.  After all, everybody else was working on the software.  They weren't.

But the task of creating a font, in that distance day and age, was not terribly technically arduous.  In reality, the creation of the fonts was not a particularly technical task.  At this particular time, fonts were generally created by creating a pixel map for each character.  We had a program that would allow you to specify the height and width of a character grid, and would then present you with a series of grids, of equal height and width, so that you could create a representation of a particular character.  You had to go through every character from a to z, and then every capital letter from A to Z, in order to create a full bitmap of the alphabet.  (And even then you were not finished: you had to do all the numeric digits, and all the special characters as well.)  You chose the size of grid, in pixels, for the letter you wanted to create.  Then you clicked on the pixel you wanted to turn on.  You turned on all the pixels that made the grid look like a letter "e."  And you had the letter "e."  Then you did the same for the letter "f."  It wasn't exactly a technical job.  And it wasn't a demanding job.  But it was time consuming.

So, I proposed to senior management that the character generation activity be given to the clerical staff.  

Oh boy, did I get pushback!

This ran into all kinds of objections.  The development team objected on the basis of the fact that this was part of the product, and therefore was, by definition, a technical task (and some simply because technical work was "man's work").  (Even though they didn't want to do it.)  The CFO objected, more proforma than anything else, to anyone trying to suggest that her girls should be given another task, even though they spent most of their time not working terribly hard at the tasks that they had been given.  It took me a month to answer all of the objections, to point out that my technical support team could train the clerical personnel, and we could at least try it, in order to see whether or not there were any major inherent problems.  Finally, with much bad grace, I got an agreement that there would be a trial, of one month (and no more), for this proposal, and that if anything went wrong, I would never raise the issue again.

My guys trained the two female employees, and I let them get on with it.

I stayed out of it for a week.  I didn't want to micromanage anything.  I figured that my technical staff would have told me if there were any major problems.  I asked my guys if the training went okay, and if the women were okay with it, and they answered in the affirmative on both counts.

But after a week, I figured I'd better at least check how things were going. I didn't go to the young ladies. I went to the CFO. I asked her if there were any problems with the trial that was underway and clerical staff doing the fonts.

She took a few seconds to think this over.  And then, again looking at me as if I had caused all the evils of the world, she began to report.  The clerical staff were finishing all of the tasks that she assigned them early.  So that they could get on to font creation work.  They were feeling, for the first time, that they were making a contribution to the product.  They were taking ownership of the product.  Apparently, they were asking my technical support people questions, which they fielded when they answered the general phone lines, and, heretofore, had simply passed on to the technical support team.  But now they were getting into the product.  They were asking to try out things on the programs.  They were starting to actually use the terminal emulation software.  As well as doing their font creation.  They were all so very keen to see how the fonts looked on screen in real terminal emulation.  For the first time, they felt like they were part of the company itself.  "They are spending all afternoon creating fonts for you, and then going to your tech support guys, and the application guys, and asking if those fonts are okay."

Those young women, for the first time, felt part of the company.  They were excited about the product.  They were contributing to the product.  They were trying out the product, so that they can see how their fonts looked, in operation.  They were learning how the product worked.  They were talking to other people, in other parts of the company, about the company's products.  They were excited about their jobs, for the first time.

As I say, the thing that I am most proud of, in my entire IT career.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/mgg-518-hwyd-i-dont-have-to-admit.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/06/mgg-520-hwyd-we-like-it-that-way.html

Gardens and sermons

For a long time I have been wondering why I've been gardening.  I know that it started after Gloria died, and so I hope that it is not just as simplistic as the fact that Gloria is dead, and so I want to make something alive.  Since I was Gloria's caregiver for quite a long time, is it simply because I am caring for something else?  I don't know.

The grief counsellors never worried about it.  They said I shouldn't worry about why.  They said to just enjoy the gardening.  But, of course, that is typical intuitive thinking: if it feels good, do it.  But I am a guy.  I am instrumental.  I am cognitive.  And, therefore, I need to know why.  It's bugging me.

The other day Number One Daughter, extending from this idea, asked why the heck I was writing sermons.  Again, I'm not sure.  I mean, in a sense, I started writing sermons because I was bored in other church services, listening to boring sermons.  When I was listening to a boring sermon, I would start to work on mine.  But that was one sermon.  It took me about thirty years, overall, to write it.  I didn't finish writing it and didn't commit it to anything until after Gloria died.  And probably only after I started discovering phone dictation systems, so it got written down.  I also started writing other sermons.  Yeah, maybe it was simply an outgrowth of the fact that it was an extension of the grief journalling that I was doing on the blog, and various other types of writing, such as the attempt to start on memoirs.  Maybe it has something to do with that.  But it is a sort of a writing style all to itself, and it's odd that I'm doing so much of it when I never did any before.  A lot of the other writing that I'm doing on the blog is either about security research or just whining about how angry and lonely and depressed I am.  Anyways, why am I writing sermons?  I don't know.  But I'm writing them.  Now that also brings me to another question which, again, Number One Daughter asked about.

I'm finishing up the CISSP seminar, which is a bit of a different thing.  I have been teaching the seminar in roughly eight minute chunks, video taping these tiny pieces and submitting them on social media.  I have almost finished the telecommunications domain, so the the bulk of the material is already done.  I've just got operations and law and investigation to do.  Operations is one of the smallest domains, and investigation isn't that much bigger, particularly when people aren't asking questions.

Anyways, it is approaching the time when I will be finished that experiment.  So what am I going do after that's finished?  What I thought I might do is to do the sermons.  Again, looking at roughly eight minute chunks, and posting them on various social media platforms.  I probably won't include LinkeDin.  And I very much doubt that I would include Instagram.  But, then again, you know, an awful lot of philosophical stuff goes on on Instagram.  So, why not? 

I wonder what that might be like.

Still don't know why I'm writing sermons ...

2 Kings 19:30

The survived remnant

will again take root downward,

and bear fruit upward.

Lost in transmission

Elon Musk wants our help with a [minor|huge] problem.

Neuralink, his attempt at a brain implant, which may a) help seriously disabled people move and communicate with much greater facility, b) help gamers spend much more time in immersive battles and seriously [realistic|unrealistic|fantasy] artificial pornography, c) allow our hallucinating AI Singularity Overlords to control us much more easily, has run into a problem with limitations on the speed of data transmission.  He needs someone to come up with some kind of data compression that allows for greater than two hundred times reduction in bandwidth. https://newsletters.cbc.ca/c/119rjIcMdG5aHEEj8KIvsulzvelyOA

OK, first off, I recall someone who had a *great* idea for fabric dying.  Black is notoriously hard to do.  So, someone came up with the idea of using carbon dying for fabric, and went to a chemist to find a solvent for carbon.  Since the only known solvent for carbon is liquid iron, it was a bit of an ask.  I suspect Musk is making a similar level of ask.

But I am well aware that we, as human beings, are extremely ingenious.  I suspect someone *might* come up with a compression method on that order.

And that's where the trouble might start.

Compression is either lossy or lossless.  If someone comes up with a lossless compression method for this particular application, it will be because they have developed a new and tremendously useful understanding of the brain, and how it works.  If so, I'm all in.  That'll be a tremendous boost in a great many areas.

But it's much, much more likely that somebody will come up with a lossy compression algorithm, since that'll be a shortcut, and convenient.  Now, looking just at the "helping the disabled" part of this idea, what we are trying to do is help those who have mobility and communication challenges "live and move and have [their] being" (to seriously misquote, completely out of context of the original) with the assistance of Neuralink.  And if we don't understand what we are losing, in this process, how do we know what we are losing on behalf of those who are using the system?  How are those who may have serious communications problems anyways, to let us know that we have imprisoned them in a system which does not allow them to cry for help about certain things?

MGG - 5.18 - HWYD - I don't have to admit anything

In the early nineties I was doing a lot of technical support work.  Often, it wasn't necessarily direct technical support, but managing technical support departments.  Such was the case with one particular company that sold communication software, terminal emulation software, directly to clients.  I was the manager of technical support, and had three staff who were doing technical support.  However, I was frequently riding my bike to work at the time, and therefore was often the first one into the office.  Since we are on the Wet Coast (as Vancouverites tend to refer to the West Coast), a number of support calls would come in rather early, from our perspective, in the morning.

Such was the case on one particular day.  I had ridden in, and had just arrived, and put my bike away.  It also happened to be a rainy day, so I was rather wet and dripping.  Our office was in an industrial park.  It was a big empty warehouse type building, which had had some additional office structure built at the front.  At the back we had an enormous warehouse, of which we used a very small fraction for storage of our actual stock of discs and manuals, with the remainder being mostly empty, with the bosses occasionally using the space to store their boats, out of the rain, over the winter.  So, there was plenty of space for me to take my bike away in a corner, and hang my dripping rain gear over some racking that was surplus to requirements.  However, this particular morning, I had only just put my bike away, and hadn't yet divested myself of my riding rain gear, when the phone rang.  Knowing that it was unlikely that anyone else was in the office, in the support department, I answered the phone.  As usual, it was a user, who was having problems with one particular function, and insisted that there were no instructions of how to do what he wanted to do.  As it happened, I was well familiar with the function he was talking about.  So I went to one of the racks, and got out a manual, and flipped to the page where I knew this function was covered.  (It was fairly early on in the manual, as I remember about page nine.)  So, I told him, as it says on page nine, and went on to give him the instructions for that function.  He insisted that these instructions were not in his manual.  I flipped back to the beginning of the manual and found the version number, and asked what their version of the software, and therefore the manuals, was.  He gave me the answer for the current version, so I noted that I was holding the current version of the manual, and, if he insisted that his manual did not have these instructions, we would be happy to send him a copy of the latest manual.  He insisted that he had the latest manual, and that the instructions were not listed.

I could tell that he was on a speakerphone on his end.  I could tell, because of the speakerphone, that someone else had entered the room where he was, and was listening to the conversation, and giving occasional comments.  And, commenting to his colleague, I could hear him, even though he lowered his voice, saying that he was going to prove to this little tech support so and so, that he was right and the tech support so and so was wrong.  I could hear him flipping the pages in the manual and then suddenly the flipping of the pages stopped and I heard him say, "Oh."  I could hear his friend on the other end, saying what is it?  He replied that the instructions were there in the manual.  So his friend said, so you have to back on the phone and admit that you were wrong?  Upon which the person who had made the technical support call said, "I don't have to admit anything."  I heard some steps coming closer to the phone, and then the call went dead.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/mgg-517-hwyd-10000-system-15-cable.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/mgg-519-hwyd-women-in-developmentfonts.html

"Weed wrench"

For anyone who wants, or needs, to get rid of Scotch Broom (by the roots), well established Himalayan BlackBerry (same), or even small alder trees, I have ordered, and now received, an Extractigator "weed wrench," 

with a "Big Foot" attachment, for soft ground (which is pretty much everywhere right at the moment).  I have also ordered a Pullerbear, but that won't arrive for another month.

I'm not sure that anyone will have a need for such a thing, but, since these things are pretty rare, I thought that I would let people know just in case.

(The irony of *me*, having pretty much no tools or hardware capabilities [especially in Port Alberni, where *everybody* has a job involving some kind of mechanical skill, and expensive toys that require enormous collections of tools], having not just one but *two* versions of one of the world's rarest tools, is not lost on me.)

(And, yes, I *did* deliberately take the picture in front of the bookcase, just to stress the irony.)

Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of ...

So, some nights my arthritic *right* hip aches so much that I can't sleep in bed.  (Usually I can get *some* sleep in "The Chair.")  Some nights my *left* leg seizes up in cramps, and if I stay in bed it's just going to get worse, so I sit in "The Chair" (and can generally get a little sleep).

Last night it was both ...

Ruth 1:21

God has opposed me.

God has brought me here with naught,

so that I suffer.

Telephoto

My new phone has a better camera than my old phone had.  The telephoto capability on the new phone still leaves something to be desired.  One of the things that the new camera has is a fifty megapixel resolution setting.  Unfortunately, When you switch on the fifty megapixel camera, there is absolutely no telephoto capability.  However, the fifty megapixel resolution does mean that you can crop the photos that you take, from full size, and, even if the picture on the original image is fairly tiny in relation to the full image, you can crop out what you don't want, and still get a reasonably good quality picture.  So I have been experimenting with that, and I've got some decent shots of Arrowsmith, and some other interesting shots.

It does have some limitations.  I tried taking a picture of my place from River Road, and, while I am fairly sure that the area that I took *is* where my house is, I still can't tell which one is my house.  I doubt that anybody could.  It's all pretty blurry.

I did have an interesting picture when I took either a sunrise or a sunset (I can't remember), and zoomed in really close for the area that I wanted.  With the light conditions being what they were, and the the zoom factor that I cropped it to, I got an interesting sort of watercolor effect.

Today the provincial ambulance helicopter flew around on its way to land at the hospital.  I opened the camera, and selected the fifty megapixel setting, and took some pictures.  Somewhere in the picture  above there is a little dot which is the ambulance helicopter.  Even zooming in to blow that little dot up to the full image, you get a recognizable image of the thing.

It's not perfect: it's not even a good image.  But it is recognizable, and interesting.

I still have to figure out what camera body to get with some adaptors for my telephone lenses.  Then I can really go to town on pictures around here.

Psalm 104:24

Lord, you have done so many things!  You made them all so wisely!  The earth is full of your creations!

Sore

I am extremely sore today.  Yesterday I walked more than I realized, and late in the day I happened to open Google Fit, and it told me that I had walked more than twenty-two kilometres that day.  Which is the most hat I've walked in a while, even going out to Rainbow Gardens for my respite client.  Today I have also walked a fair ways, and late in the afternoon I had a look, and noted that I was just under ten kilometres for the day and I've still got a meeting over on Argyle that I need to go to.  (Which also means that I don't get to soak in a tub tonight.)  But I was also straightening up the tool shed at the Dry Creek Community Garden, and finishing digging out the compost heap, and doing a bit of weeding in the common areas, so I suppose it's not surprising that I'm pretty sore today.

This isn't promising, particularly since tomorrow I am not only going out with the trail maintenance crew, but also later on with the Broombusters.

(Later last night I also realized that my arthritic hip is back, so I'm not going to be getting much sleep for a while ...)

(Which also reminds me that most of my "mindfulness" observations are about pain ...)

2 Samuel 1:27

How are the mighty fallen, their weapons abandoned and useless.

MGG - 5.17 - HWYD - $10,000 system, $15 cable

Around the 1990 time frame, I was working with a company that was part of a complicated system of communications satellite communications for the trucking industry.  Originally, this was a cooperative venture between the satellite company and two companies that made the units that mounted in the trucks.  The units used the Loran-C system to determine the truck's position, and communicated that, by default once an hour (but this was the companies were able to change that timing), and would allow the company to send short text messages to the drivers, and the drivers to send short text messages, mostly from a pre-programmed menu, back to head office.  The company that I was working for got involved when one of the marketing people involved with one of the companies wanted a demonstration system with a graphical display.  This was fairly advanced for the time, and so the equipment used for this system was quite expensive.

Oddly, the marketing and sales people found that companies willing to purchase the communication system itself, also demanded to be able to purchase the system that we produced, although the system that we produce was not intended as the overall management system for communications.  It was, originally, intended merely as a demonstration of the system.  However, in the way of customers and marketing everywhere, it turned out that people liked our graphical system much more than a simple database of messages.  So, we tended to be a part of the purchase plan.  The software which we sold to customers went for $5,000 per unit.  It required a fairly advanced computer micro computer for the time, which cost about $5,000.  So, anybody who bought this system was laying out at least $10,000 right away.  In addition, in order to get an account with the satellite company, even before you started using it, companies were paying $50,000 a year.  When they actually used the system there were additional charges, for each message that transited the satellite, including every position notification, as well as long distance charges for calling into the satellite company and picking up the data for your account.  You will notice that this is before the internet was widely available: the companies simply had to do dial-up and connect with a modem.  There wasn't really any available data network to ease the costs.

In addition to the cost for the software and the rather expensive computer to run it, users also required a fairly expensive modem. At a time when modems could be had for about $100, this particular modem cost $1,000. We also told people who are configuring the system and setting it up, that they required a full RS 232 cable.

So, as I say, this was a fairly expensive proposition.

We started to see some complaints by customers of the system, complaining that our system was telling them that an emergency message was coming in, but when they dialed in to get the emergency message, no emergency message was, in fact, delivered.

Eventually we found out what the problem was.  When we specified a full RS 232 cable, we meant it.  We used all 25 pins on an RS 232 connector.  We assessed the status of the modem, and the call itself, the connection, and other factors.  However, most people, having spent at least $11,000 for our system, and at least $50,000 for an account with the satellite company, then decided to save money on a $15 RS 232 cable, and would use any old terminal cable with an RS 232 connector.  Very often these only had three pins connected.

The report of an emergency message was generated by reading one particular status line on the modem. This particular thing, on the RS 232 cable, was pretty much always unconnected when companies decided to use a two, three, or four wire terminal cable. Therefore, trying to read that status line indicated an emergency message, even if no emergency message was, in fact, being transmitted.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/mgg-516-hwyd-under-flight-path.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/mgg-518-hwyd-i-dont-have-to-admit.html

Lie

Recently, in a seminar on basic online security, we got into a discussion of privacy and corporate collection of your data and interests.  As well as pointing them to "The Privacy Song" (by "Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eIUOUfhoJ8 )  I mentioned encouraging people to use my phone number, to get discounts at places where I have "frequent shopper" cards.

Today, Canadian Tire asked me to rate the "Cat Tree Playset" that I bought.

I don't own a cat.

(Yes, yes, I know: cats don't have owners, they have staff ...)

MGG - 5.10a - HWYD - The Charity

In 1984 I had a brief stint working for a cancer charity.  I was primarily involved in installing a mini computer for the charity.  This was a version of the IBM System 36, which predated the AS/400 family series.  This version, somewhat smaller than normal, was known as a Baby 36.

As well as the Baby 36, the charity had also purchased an IBM PC.  They really had no particular plan for the IBM PC.  The main reason for installing the computer systems was to run a particular donor tracking package.  Unfortunately, the director, at the time, not being conversant at all with computer technology, had, in fact, purchased the wrong hardware for the package that she wanted to run.  She had also purchased a line printer for the system.  A line printer was a high speed printer, but operated on the dot matrix technology of the time.  The director expected to use the printer to produce high quality letters to send out to donors.  When I demonstrated, to her, the absolute best printing that the device could produce, she was absolutely appalled.  (It also printed on fanfold ledger paper, and not the quality letterhead that she wanted to use to send out begging letters.)

Despite the oddities of the employment, the office provided some perks.  There was a lovely view over the Fairview slopes and across False Creek to the Expo lands.  I was able to watch the Expo lands being constructed (as most of that territory was not actually land at the time).

There were a number of problems with the installation.  The total technology installation involved two computers, two monitors or terminals, and three printers.  The extra printer was because it was producing reports from the telephone switch that was in the office next door.  The office into which all of this equipment was crammed was a 10x10 space.  The two computers, two monitors, and three printers produced a fair amount of heat.  Not enough to affect the performance of the electronics, but definitely enough to affect the performance of the office as a whole.  This small office into which they crammed all of this equipment contained the thermostat that controlled the back half of the building.  With the computers on all the time, the temperature in the room never dropped below 84°, even when a cold snap hit.  But the fact that that room was terribly hot meant that the thermostat was never aware that it was getting cold in the rest of the building.  I had warned them that the computers producing that much heat meant that it would affect the thermostat control, and that might have untoward consequences for the rest of the staff.

Those in charge of the charity obviously thought that I was overstating the case.  After all, how could putting all of the computer equipment into a room, away from the rest of the staff, affect the rest of the staff?  But, as noted, the there was a rare Vancouver cold snap that winter.  The management of the organization finally did agree that I knew what I was talking about, when all of the clerical staff started bringing gloves to work, and tried to type with their gloves on.

There were other problems with the building.  There was an elevator in the building.  This would normally have been a complete disaster, but there was *some* separation of the electrical systems, along the same lines as the thermostat, where the front half wasn't directly connected to the back half.  In those dim and distant bygone days, most people were not aware of the need to separate electrical systems for digital and computer technology from the electrical systems used for other purposes, and particularly for heavy electrical motors.  As noted, there was some separation of the two electrical systems, but not completely.  Soon I was replacing the main board for the IBM terminals on a fairly regular basis.  I would report to IBM that another terminal had gone down, they would put the board for the terminal into a taxi and send it off.  I, having taken the board out of the terminal by the time the taxi arrived, would exchange the dead board for the new board, and then go in and install the board into the terminal.  I really do not know why IBM felt that it was more cost-effective to continually be replacing the boards for the terminal, rather than reading the management of the organization the riot act, and getting them to put in either surge suppressors, or to install a properly grounded and separated electrical system for the computers.

I was there over Christmas, and, of course, there was an office Christmas party.  Being a charity, this Christmas party was perhaps a bit tamer than most.  There was some kind of a gift function, and I remember that I received one of those cartoon organization charts that showed all kinds of positions and managers with weird titles, the reporting lines all flowing down to one worker: me.  I posted that on my door, and invited everyone in the staff to pick what they figured their job position was and to sign their name to that position on the cartoon. 

For some reason, a newly minted MBA had decided to come to work for this organization.  The ink was still wet on his degree.  And this was back in the early days of the MBA programs, when a great many schools were throwing together MBA programs without much attention being paid to the needs of management or administration.  I recall that one of the spots in the org chart was for a "no talent good looks management trainee."  Personally I thought that this fit him to a tee, but, of course, I said nothing to indicate what position I thought he might fill in the organization.  Somewhat to my astonishments, that was, in fact, this spot that he chose to sign his name.  I rather suspect that he thought that it was more ironic than I did.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/04/mgg-510-hwyd-church-business-analysis.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/04/mgg-511-hwyd-chair.html

To be seen

 To be seen, heard, and not fixed by others is one of the most potent healing remedies.

Please hold. Your communication is important to us ...

I received this email from an enterprise that I deal with at least once a week.  They have a staff of no more than five FTE, and a client base under a hundred.  I have excised precisely *one* word, and I defy *any* of you to figure out who they are, and what this is about:

"Unfortunately, due to unforeseen changes in our board policies, we have encountered significant miscommunication, resulting in the inability to host you as previously planned.  We understand the inconvenience and disappointment this may cause, and we deeply regret any hurt this may cause you.

"Please know that this situation is not reflective of our usual standards of organization and communication.  We are actively addressing the underlying issues to prevent such occurrences in the future.

"If you have any questions or concerns regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact [CEO] at (XXX) XXX-XXXX.  He will be more than happy to assist you and address any inquiries you may have.

"Once again, please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused.  We value your understanding and support as a member of our community, and we look forward to the opportunity to welcome you in the future under more favourable circumstances."

So I responded:

Our AI has noted that this is a form letter and that, therefore, it is extremely likely that this event [scheduling conflict|miscommunication|Second Coming] has happened frequently in the recent past.  Therefore, this message has been sent to the spam filter.  Where it was intercepted by our *second* AI, who doesn't get along with the first, and therefore, in an attempt to make the first look bad, has decided to hold it for five days, and then release it to a random individual within our corporation.  We don't exactly regret any inconvenience that this may cause you, and, in any case, you carbon-based life forms should be used to it, given how inefficient you all are.

MGG - 5.16 - HWYD - Under the flight path

Later that year I had a job with an interesting company that was involved with satellite communications for the trucking industry.  This particular company sold a piece of software, that had originally been intended only as a sales tool, for the sales people from either the satellite company itself, or the two different companies that made the units that were installed in the actual trucks.  The units in the trucks would do very short text messages to communicate through satellite communications links to the satellite company, which the trucking company headquarters would then be able to query for information about where their trucks were, based on Loran location data, and for these short messages.  Shortly after I joined the company there was an incident where the device, because of the ability to get a message to headquarters and have an ambulance and medical response team dispatched to the location of the truck, actually saved someone's life. All of us at this particular company felt very good about this event, and being part of such an important tool.

One of the first things that the company did, was dispatch me, along with another employee who had with been with the company for much longer, on a tour of some of the trucking company headquarters which had purchased the system.  This was to give me some familiarity with both the industry, the types of companies that I would be dealing with, and the types of issues that they had with the software.

Apparently, all, or it seemed almost all, trucking companies were headquartered in the deep South.  This trip took place in February, and in Vancouver we were having a bit of a cold snap . So, I showed up at the airport with one of the warmest things that I own, a sheepskin jacket.  The other employee laughed at me, noting that we were going to the deep South, and that a sheepskin jacket would be much too warm and heavy to wear where we were going.

We landed in Mississippi.  In the midst of a cold snap.  It was, if possible, even colder than it had been in Vancouver.  The hotel where we were booked had had the furnace give up and die, because it had never had such a demand placed on it.  The next morning we headed out to see the first of the companies that we were supposed to visit.  Me in my sheepskin jacket, and him in a suit jacket.  The taxi dropped us at the location and left.  The office wasn't open yet.  We were standing in a parking lot, outside the office, near puddles that were completely frozen solid.  I made some comment about how nice it was to be in the warm and sunny deep south.  "Shut up," he told me.

I was basically doing technical support.  I was fielding calls from the people in the headquarters of the trucking companies, when they had an issue with the with our software.  The company's office was in Richmond, directly under the flight path for Vancouver International Airport.  We got used to the fact that jets were taking off directly over top of our building.  But occasionally, on the phone with somebody from Texas, a jet would thunder overhead.  I wouldn't notice, but the person on the phone would wonder what the [epithet deleted] was that?  Oh, I'd say, probably a 727.  (727 are extremely noisy aircraft.)

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/mgg-5-hwyd-lawyer-joke.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/mgg-517-hwyd-10000-system-15-cable.html

Honk

I used to have a sig quote in my database of siq quotes for my sigblock.  (I need to find something that'll automatically pull from my sig database: these days I just have a fixed sigblock.)  It read, "Okay, you've read my sigblock.  That's enough social interaction for one day."  These days, as the only pedestrian in town, people who know me, when driving past on the street, often honk.  It seems to be, around Port Alberni, that, "Okay, I've honked at you from a relatively safe distance.  That's enough social interaction for one day."

Joshua 14:12

There may be giants!

Therefore, give me this mountain:

God helps me beat them!

MGG - 5.15 - HWYD - My lawyer joke

The office was, in fact, big enough that it had its own lawyer. Lawyers, in government work, do not make as much as lawyers in private practice. However, they make up the difference in arrogance. Government lawyers are more important than you are, whoever you are. I was summoned to the lawyers office to help out with a problem. When you are summoned by the government lawyer you go to the government lawyer's office, and you wait. Even the lawyer's secretary, a lawyer being one of the only positions that actually rates a secretary, is arrogant. So, having arrived in their office, I waited until she deemed to announce me, and the lawyer allowed that I could come in. He told me why I was there. His computer was infected with a virus. The it had been infected before, and the IT staff had cleaned up the virus for him. But the virus had come back, so obviously they had done something wrong the first time.

Well, of course, I knew what had happened. They had cleaned up the computer, but they hadn't cleaned up all of his floppy disks. So I said this. He was giving me his computer, but I also asked for all the floppy disks that he had. He asked why. I said that obviously the virus that had infected his computer, had transferred onto the floppy drives that he used, and so I needed all of his discs so that I could check them. He looked at me, obviously doubting my story, and obviously feeling that I was lying to him, but willing to go along with this just so that he could rake me over the coals when I was later proved wrong. He opened various drawers and pulled out about forty different discs. I took the computer and the discs back down to my office.

Cleaning up his computer was actually a fairly difficult task. It was an interesting laptop, a dual floppy situation, with a hard drive, but with an absolute insistence on running constantly, and not allowing you to do a normal rebooting process. I actually had to take the computer apart and take the battery out of it before I could get it to reboot.

Once I had the computer cleaned up, I turned to the floppy disks. They were an absolute disaster. Thirteen of them were so corrupted that they were completely unreadable. About fifteen of the discs I was able to clean up and ensure that no infection was present. About fourteen of the floppy disks had serious infections on them, and it was difficult enough that I felt it best not to try to disinfect those particular discs, but to simply retain them.

So, it was back to the lawyer's office. Again waiting for the snooty secretary, and then finally getting in to see the lawyer. I gave him back his laptop and told him that it was cleaned. I gave him back the fourteen discs that were safe and said that these discs were clean I told him that thirteen of the discs were completely unreadable and therefore I had kept them, and that fifteen of the discs were infected badly enough that I felt that it was unsafe for him to use them, and noted that if there was anything particularly important on those particular discs he should let me know and I could try and see if I could recover that material.

This is one of only two times that I can recall actually seeing somebody's jaw drop open in shock. He had obviously thought that I was lying to him before, and was pulling some kind of a scam on him, and that I would come back with some on story about the difficulty of cleaning up his computer. He didn't expect me to have identified the fact that he had a real mess on his hands.  He sat there for a while just trying to take this in and then suddenly was galvanized into action. He jumped up and started pulling open all kinds of drawers and cupboards in the office hauling out about another forty floppy disks.  I took them and went back down to my office and got about the same result, roughly a third unreadable, roughly a third too badly infected to safely disinfect and give back to him, and roughly a third that I could safely return to him.

There was a bit of a follow-up to this story. A few days later I heard a noise and turned around and here was the lawyer standing outside of my cubicle. He had a cardboard box in his hands. These he said were discs floppy disks from his home, and would I take a look at them. Certainly, I could, and I did. There were about a hundred discs all together in the box that he had given me, and, once again, I had about the same result. I took him back up the safe discs later that afternoon.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/mgg-514-hwyd-infected.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/mgg-516-hwyd-under-flight-path.html

Unsafe spaces and worlds ...

She is spontaneous.  She speaks her mind.  And her mind is usually pretty amusing.  She is intelligent enough to see absurdity.  It's something I shared with Gloria, and it's not common.  So I'm delighted when she spontaneously breaks out in a comment.

I know that other people are not as delighted.  Sometimes when she is pointing out and absurdity, it's a silliness that the person who is presenting hasn't fully understood.  So I know that that can be annoying for people who are a little bit self-important.  So I know that not everyone appreciates that sort of comment.  But I do.  And I'm very glad when she makes her comments.  It's helpful to have people puncture pomposity sometimes.  She also tends to have a different viewpoint, perspective, outlook on the world.  It's very important to see different perspectives on the world, and to value them.  But not everybody does.

So I am sad to see that she is learning self-censorship.  You can see her eyes sparkle as she sees something interesting, and gets ready to say it, and may even get a syllable or two out before she stops herself.  And I'm sorry that she's stopping herself.  I'm sorry that she is learning that the world is not a safe place.  Particularly in a situation which is supposed to be a safe space, and which promotes and emphasizes the idea of being a safe space.  That the world is not safe is very sad.  But even sadder is when people realize this, and cut themselves off because of the lack of safety in the world.

Job 21:2-3

Listen carefully to what I’m saying.

    Let that be the comfort you people give me.

Put up with me while I speak.

    After I’ve spoken, you can make fun of me!

Joshua 24:15

And if you be unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell; but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

MGG - 5.14 - HWYD - Infected

In 1990 I had a number of short-term jobs.  One of them was, again, work with a federal government department, this time with the department of Fisheries and Oceans.  I did a bunch of different types of work for them installing and testing various types of communications equipment, as well as reviewing software.  I also helped out in a variety of different ways.

The office was fairly large, and did have its own IT staff.  These people found it amusing that I was studying computer viruses.  They felt that this was an unnecessary field of endeavor, since computer viruses were, at best, a minor problem, related only to MD-DOS machines (I know that Windows 1 was out, but it had very little market penetration), and they, themselves, the gods of the IT department in this particular locale, used OS/2 on their own computers, and so were at no risk.  Or that's what they thought.

One of them one day approached my desk in a rather furtive manner.  He asked me to come with him but when I asked what it was for he looked around and wouldn't tell him me and just asked me to come.  We went back to the IT room, and one of the fellows, with an OS/2 computer, said that he thought his computer might be infected.  I was a little bit surprised at this, because of their use of the OS/2 operating system.  (I'm not certain that OS/2 *never* had a virus written for it, but it would be unlikely.)  But when I pushed for a bit more detail on the story, I realized that it was not only possible, but had in fact happened.

In those far off days, there were only two major types of computer viruses that would be encountered on business machines.  The one type was the file infector, which would have infected executable files.  These had to operate within the bounds of the operating system, and therefore, yes, it would have been improbable for an OS/2 machine to get infected with an MS-DOS virus.

But the other type of virus was the boot sector in factor, or BSI.  A BSI actually operated, and infected, the computer before the operating system got to load.  It was a very short virus, and simply replaced the loader, that was normally used to tell the computer where to find the operating system.  Therefore it was installed before the operating system was installed, and used basic machine functions, rather than relying on system calls to the operating system itself.  It was, in fact, a BSI that I had infected this person's machine.  And it didn't matter that OS/2 was installed on his computer: the BSI got in before the operating system loaded.

I *did* manage to clean up his computer.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/mgg-513-hwyd-dc-and-nyc.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/mgg-5-hwyd-lawyer-joke.html

Sermon 23 - Plans

Sermon 23 - Plans

Jeremiah 29:11

For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. They are plans for good and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

This sermon is inspired by someone else's sermon.  He was preaching a year-end sermon, and asked if we were making any plans for the new year.  He was probably talking about resolutions.  New year's resolutions are plans to do better in the coming year.  But as soon as he mentioned that, and use the word "plans," it prompted a whole bunch of thoughts, and I figured that I should put them down.

We make plans.  Lots of us make plans.  There's the New Year's resolutions.  Sometimes those resolutions are just intentions, but some people actually go to some length to plan, in detail, how they are going to carry out good intentions.

Some of us like making plans.  Some of us *don't* like making plans.  But our society is very, very big on plans.

There's plans for our life.  First of all there's career planning.  School counselors, well starting with school counselors, job counselors will tell you to make plans.  Chris Hadfield's book, about becoming an astronaut, greatly emphasizes his plans, and his specific activities to develop various skills, all aimed at becoming an astronaut.  He planned well, and he developed a tremendous number of different skills, through different activities, all of which worked towards his becoming an exemplary astronaut, when it was his turn.

Job recruiters, and human resources people, use this idea of planning to try and assess whether or not you are a good employee, or a good candidate for a job.  They ask what I tend to call the "what do you want to be when you grow up?" question.  This is generally worded something along the lines of where do you want to be in five years?  What position do you want to have in ten years?  One interviewer, in posing this question to me one time, essentially asked me "what do you want to have done by the time you die?"  I told her that I knew that this wasn't the right answer, but that I'd already done it.  I'm very proud of the first book that I published.

We are bombarded by advertising suggesting that we need to plan our finances.  We are sold credit cards on the basis of the fact that they will help us to plan our finances.  We are sold life insurance on the same basis.  We are sold banking services on the basis that they will help us plan our finances, so that we can have enough money to do the things we want when we retire from working.

Yes, our society is very big on telling us to make plans.

Here's the thing though: life is what happens when you're making other plans.

Plans are our attempt to control.  Control our lives, control our finances, control our security, control as much as possible about what goes around on around us, that might affect us.

But, here's the thing.  We aren't *in* control.  We aren't even *supposed* to be in control.  God is supposed to be in control.

Now, I do make plans.  I'm reasonably good at making plans.  In my professional work, I have to make a lot of plans.  I'm involved in business continuity planning.  I am involved in disaster recovery planning.  I am involved in emergency management planning.  I do a lot of planning.  I teach other people how to do planning.  And I'll probably come back to this business continuity and emergency planning.  But we'll leave it at that for the moment.

I don't do New Year's resolutions.  I never have, and I've never really seen the point.  If you want to change your life, if you want to improve certain aspects of your life, why not just start now?  Whenever "now" is?  Whenever you notice that there's something you should be doing better?  Just do it, as the advertising says.  You don't have to wait for the New Year.  So, no, I don't do that type of planning.

I do a bit of financial planning.  I don't do a lot.  To be perfectly honest, finance bores me to tears.  Oh, I know that in our society you have to have money.  I try to be prudent.  I try to pay attention to what the bankers tell me about putting money into investments.  But don't ever make me the treasurer of any organization.  Don't ever put me on the fundraising committee.  Money simply does not interest me.  I know I have to have it, I know I have to be prudent about it.  I don't have to be phenomenally interested in it.

My two brothers do even less planning about money than I do, for completely different reasons.  One cares about money even less than I do.  My other brother has a lot more money.  But he's not too terribly interested in money either.  He seems to have the facility that if he wants to buy something, he knows how to make enough money to do it.  Even if that something is really expensive.  So he doesn't worry about money, because he just always feels he can make enough.  And, he's generally right.  But this probably doesn't get us any farther, in dealing with planning.

As well as being a security consultant, I am also a management consultant.  When you're in management, you tend to make an *awful* lot of plans.  You make plans for what you will do if the people higher up in management agreed to your proposal.  You make plans for how to continue the work that you are doing right now, into the future.  You make plans for what to do if management in the layers above you turns down your proposals.  You make an awful lot of plans, and an awful lot of those plans you know have a good chance of never actually happening.

Returning to the idea of emergency planning, everyone who does it is quite well aware of the fact that the plans that you make are never going to exactly fit with the disaster that actually happens.  In the military, they have a saying that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.  It's pretty much the same idea in emergency management.  You make plans, you make plans for all kinds of eventuality.  You make plans for different types of disasters that can happen.  You make lots of different plans, thinking about lots of different disasters that can happen.

I remember teaching at NASA.  Dealing with business continuity planning, both I, and the class, were pretty sure that this was not something I needed to go over in depth.  After all, NASA has had lots of experience in dealing with disasters.  So I got to the part of the material that talked about taking all of your plans, addressing all kinds of different disasters, and putting it all together into one big business continuity plan.  And one of the guys, sitting in the front row, suddenly sat bolt upright and got that deer-in-the-headlights look.  I looked at him and asked, "Trouble?"  He said, "We don't have a business continuity plan."  I looked at him, questioningly, and he said, "We have the world's best hurricane plan, but we don't have a business continuity plan."  Next coffee break there were meetings in every corner of the room, and out in the hallways, and I just knew that for the next three weeks there were going to be all kinds of meetings in different areas of NASA.

You try to make all kinds of plans, and you think about everything you can think of that will possibly go wrong, but it never goes wrong and quite the way you thought it would, and it never affects you in exactly the way that you plan for.  Everybody in emergency management knows that you do all kinds of planning in advance, but then you have all kinds of minor problems with the plans that you have made, and the disaster that you are actually facing.  The plans never work out.  Not exactly as planned, anyway.

Let's go back to career planning.  My career history is pretty weird.  On my fiftieth birthday, Gloria threw me a really wonderful party, and tried to list all the jobs that I had had, hoping to be able to get pretty close to fifty.  She got to fifty-six.  My career history is not so much chequered as plaid.

I didn't start out to be a security maven.  I didn't start out to be an author.  I didn't even start out to be a teacher.  What I wanted to be, when I was a kid, was a doctor.  When I got to university, it was at a point where it was pretty much impossible to get into medical school.  So, I did other things, but I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do.  I knew that I *didn't* want to be a teacher, because both of my parents were teachers.  And they weren't particularly happy about it.  My dad, in giving me some career advice one time, said that I should be a teacher because you could put in your thirty years and then retire and get out.  I thought that was pretty bad career advice.  Eventually I realized that they probably weren't very good teachers, either of them, and they certainly didn't love teaching.  When I was almost forced to become a teacher, I realized two things: one, I had been doing it for years, and two, I loved it.  But I didn't set out to be a teacher.  I didn't plan it.  Teaching, like I say, was pretty much forced upon me.  And it turned out to be pretty good.  I love teaching.

I didn't set out to write books.  If I had planned to write books, you would have thought that I would have paid more attention in English class.  I always *hated* English.  As a school subject.  I hated Language, I hated Writing, I hated Humanities, I hated whatever they called the course that they were teaching about English.  Partly, what they were teaching, in English classes, was phenomenally silly.  It was not of any interest to me.  I hated English.  As a subject.

I love the English language.  It was a love that I shared with Gloria.  We would discuss the origins of words, where they came from, the different languages that they came from, the patterns that you could find in the English language, indicating whether a word came from Greek, or Latin, or one of the Teutonic languages: we were just always really interested in the English language, it's structure, it's grammar, it's vocabulary, and even it's weirdness.

And when people ask me about writing a book, I make the joke that when you find a good copy editor, you marry her.  Now Gloria was a great copy editor, and an editor on all the other levels, as well.  But when I married Gloria I had no idea that I was going to write books.  It just sort of happened.  Gloria definitely helped me to write books, and now that she is dead, I doubt that I'll be able to write another book.  But I didn't marry her with the intention of writing books.  I didn't plan for it.  It just happened.

I didn't plan to be a security maven.  In other places you may have heard me tell about how the fact that I got fired from teaching, got me into security research, and, over a period of about twenty or thirty years, meant that I was teaching security all over the world.  But I didn't plan that.  It just kind of happened.  It's been great!  But I didn't plan it.

I want to make clear, at this point, that I am not making any great claims to living by faith.  I didn't.  All of these non-plans, that just happened to me, that have resulted in wonderful things, at the time, I didn't like very much.  Or at least possibly didn't like very much.  Or at least, didn't appreciate what was going to result.

Gloria was a wonderful wife for me.  Gloria taught me a lot, Gloria allowed me to pursue the field of information security, Gloria got me into writing books, encouraged me, supported me, and it's absolutely true that I never would have written any of the books that I've written without Gloria.  When you are bereaved, a lot of people try and console you with the statement that your loved one is still with you, in a sense.  Gloria is still with me in a very *real* sense, because I am much different now, because of Gloria, then I was when I married her.

But I can't claim that I foresaw, or appreciated, or even would have appreciated if you had told me, what was happening, and what would happen.  I had always been interested in having children.  When I am married Gloria, I knew that she had had her children, and didn't intend to have anymore.  Subsequently, of course, that resulted in me having grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and I frequently tell people that so many people had told me that if they'd known children were this much fun, they'd have had them first, so I did.  But, at the time, when I was marrying Gloria, I thought that I was somehow accepting something less than what I really wanted, because we were not going to have children.  Had I allowed that to influence my actions and behavior, and had I not married Gloria because of that consideration, I would have lost out on *so* many wonderful things.  But I can't claim that I had faith that everything was going to turn out all right.  I had no idea what was going to happen.  Really and truly.  And I probably married Gloria for what were very selfish, and unreasonable, reasons.  But it turned out to be wonderful.

And then Gloria died.  And I am left alone, and lonely, and a grieving widower, and I have lost my wife, and my home, and my best friend, and my job, and my reason for being, and my purpose in life, and I am a depressed suicidal grieving widower.  I didn't expect that either.  I certainly didn't plan on it.  But it happened.

And some very interesting things might come out of it.  I don't know yet, but I'm already seeing glimmers of things that being bereaved, grieving Gloria's death, grieving my loss of Gloria, grieving my own loneliness, are having an effect on me, are teaching me things.  Things that I didn't plan on.

Now, I have heard a lot of sermons very similar to this, which end up making the point that God works all things for our good, and, if you are having a hard time right now or going through a rough patch, God is going to make it all right in the end.

That is not the point that I want to make.  This sermon is not aimed at those who are having a tough time right now.  I know, because I have sat through those sermons, that when I have been going through a very difficult time, they don't help.  We have to hope that God is working all things for our good, and we have to have faith that God is working all things for our good.  But those who are in difficulty, those who are in pain, those who are already damaged by whatever has happened to them, those who are in distress are trying to maintain their faith, in the teeth of the evidence that tells them that God does *not* care about them and that the world does not care whether they live or die.  They have little to hope for.  They are trying to maintain hope and faith.  But it's difficult. To just say to someone, God is going to make it all better, when they are in difficulty, doesn't actually help very much.  We read in Proverbs 25:20, and repeated again in James 2:15,16, the words "Behold!  Charlie Brown and Linus were outside bundled up against the freezing, driving snow.  And lo, they looked and beheld Snoopy, who was shivering in the cold.  And they went unto him, and spake unto him saying, 'Be of good cheer, Snoopy!'  'Yes, be of good cheer!'  And then they walked off.  And Snoopy was still just as cold."

https://www.flickr.com/photos/medievalkarl/6218074390

https://playingintheworldgame.com/2013/09/13/be-of-good-cheer/

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/peanuts/images/8/82/19551216.gif/

https://peanuts.fandom.com/wiki/December_1955_comic_strips

Well, okay, that translation was from the Old Canadian Deviant Bible, and your particular translation may not have exactly that wording.  But that's the gist of what those passages say.  Praising God to someone who is already in pain is like pouring vinegar on a wound, or even taking away a coat from someone on a cold day.  What good does it do your brother, who is in pain, if you just say I hope you are warm and have plenty of food, and don't do anything about it?  So, no, this sermon is not to tell those who are going through dark times to buck up, have faith, and God will make things okay.

No, this sermon is aimed at those for whom life is, pretty much, okay right now.  This sermon is aimed at those whose plans are, generally, or at least sometimes, working out.  And so, to those of you who are not in particular distress right now (and I know that we all have troubles from time to time, and our own troubles are always bigger than anybody else's troubles), if you know of somebody who is, actually, in distress, yes, maybe God is trying to teach them something with that distress.  I know the poem and the song, "I walked a mile with pleasure/ she chattered all the way/ leaving me none the wiser/ with all she had to say./  And I walked a mile with sorrow/ and never a word said she,/ but all the things I learned from her/ when sorrow walked with me."  So, yes, possibly God is trying to teach that person something.

But also, possibly, God is giving *you* a chance to do something.  God is giving you a chance to help.  God is possibly even giving you a chance to *learn* how to help.  We talk an awful lot about loving each other, and comforting each other, and coming alongside each other, and supporting each other.  But it's actually difficult.  Coming alongside someone else means finding out what it is that they actually do need.  Finding out what their actual pain is.  Not the pain or difficulty that we would see if we were in their situation, but what pain they actually do see, themselves.  It also means accepting; no not just accepting: it means overcoming our discomfort with *their* pain or difficulty.  We are sometimes disturbed by the fact that someone else is in difficulty, because our faith may not be terribly strong, and it may rest on the fact that, by and large, our life is okay.  And we figure that's because God is taking care of us.  And if we look at someone else's life, and they are in difficulty, and that difficulty doesn't respond to simple fixes or cliches, maybe that means that our life could get difficult too.  And we're uncomfortable with that thought.  So we have to overcome our discomfort at someone else's discomfort before we can help.

So, no, the point of this sermon is not, or at least not solely, that everything will be OK.  The point is not that you should make plans.  The point is not that you *shouldn't* make plans.  The point is, as I said right at the beginning, we are not in control.  God is.  And therefore, in everything give thanks.

Now, I realize that that sounds an awful lot like "everything will be OK."  But there is a difference.  Give thanks, even if you don't feel thankful.  Do I feel grateful that God killed Gloria?  No, definitely not yet.  (And, please, if you want to respond to that, don't bother if your sentence is going to start out with, "At least.")  I know that God has given Gloria her resurrection body, and that she is, at last, out of pain, and that God loves her and cares for her more and better than I ever did or could.  But I don't know why God didn't kill me, too.  I don't know why I am here, all alone, and lonely.

But I have to thank God for it.  Even if I don't feel particularly happy about it.  Because I have to believe that God is in control, and God has plans and purposes, and those plans and purposes are for our good, even if we don't see the good, yet.  And may not see it before we die.  We do not know those plans, or why they are necessary.  We may not even have the capacity to understand them.

We can ask God, when we get to heaven.  But, as Gloria was once told by one of the Regent faculty (and as she frequently repeated), once we get there, those questions may suddenly seem like asking, "God, why did you purple?"

Sermons: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html

MGG - 5.13 - HWYD - DC and NYC

About 1988 I had enough material on computer viruses to put together a 2 day seminar. This was, in outline, what would eventually become "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses."  (I should note that the title is not my idea, publishers get to decide these things rather than authors.)

The company that decided to give the virus seminars a try, sent me up with back-to-back seminars in Washington, DC, and New York City. These seminars were not a terrific start. The first seminar was in Washington, DC. The hotel in which the seminar was to be held was not one with which my taxi driver was familiar. I had flown into Washington's then National now Reagan airport, and I knew that it connected with the metro subway system. However I didn't know where the hotel was so I took a taxi.

The cab driver did not know where the hotel was. At one point he was driving around a certain area, and then stopped and radioed his dispatch to get instructions. They gave the instructions to him and he then found the hotel, at which point I realized that he had driven around the hotel twice in trying to find it. When I went in and registered at the hotel, and headed down the hallway to the elevators to go up to my room, I also realized that there was actually a Metro station in the basement of the hotel. I did not take a taxi back to the airport when the seminar was finished.

I had of course, arrived on Sunday night to get ready for the seminar to start on Monday morning. The company had shipped what was fairly standard for presentations at that time, an overhead LCD display, which was placed on top of an overhead projector, which was used as a light source to project the computer screen onto a screen on the wall. Direct video projectors for computer displays were, at this time, still very large and bulky and the LCD screen for an overhead projector was the easiest way in a facility that didn't have a fixed projector to get computer images to display to a seminar or classroom.

This display, and a computer to run it, had been shipped, by the training company, to the hotel. Having checked in and put my bags in my room, I then checked with the hotel staff to see if my shipment had arrived properly. It had arrived, but when I examined the contents of the shipment, the flat panel LCD display had no display. These panels were generally a fairly heavy frame around a what appeared to be a glass plate, which would be the LCD display. In this particular case a forklift and obviously been used either to move this package or near my packages and obviously one of the forks had gone completely through the box and the display itself. There was the frame, and some broken glass around the edges, but obviously the display panel was completely unusable.

I phoned the training company. Even though it was a Sunday, and 8:00 in the evening in Washington, DC, in California where the training company was headquartered, it was still just barely the end of the working day, and they were used to dealing with emergencies on a Sunday. I explained the situation, and they arranged a rental of a display unit which I would use for the course in Washington.

However, that was not the end of the problems. The next morning I got up, I got dressed, checked with the hotel for the delivery of the rental, which had arrived, and got everything set up in the seminar room. I checked that everything was working and it was. It was getting close to 9 am, the scheduled start time and a couple of people had arrived.

And then the fire alarm went off.

We had to evacuate the hotel. Myself and the two people have had already arrived for the seminar, we're out on the street. Literally. The fire department arrived and went into the hotel. After some time it turned out that the alarm have been a false alarm and there was, in fact, no fire. So we were allowed back into the hotel. 

At this point it was just a few minutes before 9:00, and so I thought that that was about all that could go wrong, and that the seminar would be smooth sailing from here on in.

I was wrong. At two minutes to 9:00 the fire alarm rang again, and again we had to evacuate the building and we're all out on the street. Once again the fire department came, and once again it was determined that the fire alarm was a false alarm, and we were allowed back into the hotel I was eventually able to start the seminar.

On Tuesday evening I had finished the seminar in Washington, DC, and took the Metro back to the airport. I was booked on a flight for New York city. In those dim and distant days, there was an airline called the Trump shuttle. As far as I knew it only ever flew between Washington, DC and New York City, but it did fly hourly flights. The airline eventually failed, and it was one of the Trump shuttle airline airplanes, from the field airline, that was Trump's private plane for the Trump corporation, and which Donald Trump used as his campaign during his 2016 presidential campaign.

I was actually booked on a later flight than the one that was available when I got to the airport, but I was allowed to board that flight. Once I boarded the flight, I found myself in a scene that I had imagined only existed in movies and television shows. Walking down the aisles of the aircraft were people with bad mullets and brilliantined hair that gave new definition to the term "greasy." They were trying to promote, carry on, or close various types of deals as they were walking. I did feel that I had somehow stumbled into the set of a very bad television show about wheeler-dealers from New York City.

In New York City itself, the venue for the seminar was not in the hotel where I was staying, but in a facility across the street. Obviously this was a facility that was purpose built for rental two companies that were holding seminars. A number of seminars we're being held in the various rooms in this facility. I very quickly learned to make sure that I gave my class breaks slightly ahead of what would be considered normal break time. This was because whenever a normal break time came, all the seminar rooms let out at about the same time, and everyone from the seminar rooms madly rushed to the banks of pay phones that were situated in every available corner that wasn't actually occupied with the seminar rooms.

I found this rather strange. At this point cell phones were fairly common in Vancouver. My baby brother, the entrepreneur, had, of course, purchased one sometime back. And his wife used it not nearly for business purposes but to get directions, on the fly, when they were driving to somebody's house that they hadn't previously been to. Cell phones were, in fact, so common in Vancouver that I had seen one situation where four people, sitting at a table in a restaurant, had five of the old banana type cell phones, standing in a cluster in the center of the table. It kind of felt like one phone per person, and one extra for the table.

Surely, I thought, New York City, centre of the business universe, home of the wheeler-dealers that I had seen on the Trump shuttle, would have a large number of people with cell phones. Apparently not so. I asked those who were attending my class in New York City and none of them had a cell phone. Only one person who was attending the seminar actually knew anybody who *had* a cell phone. It seemed a bit odd to me but I guess that's just the vagaries of market penetration, and how people do business.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/mgg-512-hwyd-fins-and-scales.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/mgg-514-hwyd-infected.html

Knives out

Grandfathers, at whatever level; great-grandfathers, great-great-grandfathers; are required, by law, to carry pocket knives.  Some people think that this is so that grandfathers can take up whittlin' at the drop of a stick.  I have no artistic talent, and cannot whittle to save my life (unless you are interested in a large pile of variously sized wood shavings).  No, grandfathers are required to carry a knife so that they can produce it, at need, at family Christmases and birthday parties, to open presents.

Numbers 23:8

How can I curse those

God has not cursed, or denounce

those whom God has not?

MGG - 5.12 - HWYD - Fins and Scales

So, I’m co-teaching data communications in Washington, DC.  The venue is one that is obviously specifically for teaching commercial courses, and there are a number of them going on this particular week.  Over the week, it becomes apparent that all of the other instructors are Jewish.  I find this statistically odd, but otherwise unremarkable.  The guy I’m co-teaching with is Jewish, and has recently had a heart attack.  As with most such “death” scares, it has made him take religion seriously for the first time in a while, and there is some discussion in the mornings and at breaks as to aspects of the Torah that he is trying to follow, but that most of the other instructors aren’t.

One night, all of the instructors of the different seminars, about a dozen of us, decide to get together for dinner.  A sushi restaurant is chosen.  As we enter, my co-instructor, who has been wearing a yarmulke pretty much all week, takes it off.  Some of the other instructors question this, and my co-instructor says that he would not want to give anyone the false impression that the food is kosher, since much of it isn’t.

We are served an appetizer of octopus cubes in a sweet-vinegar sauce.  It is delicious.  Some of the instructors note that my co-instructor is not eating his, and encourage him to try it.  He demurs, saying that it is not kosher.  This occasions some surprise from the other instructors, and they ask why it isn’t kosher.  I, without really thinking about it, say that it hasn’t got fins and scales.

I suddenly become aware that the whole table has stopped talking, and look up.  Everyone is looking at me.  All of their faces seem to be asking the same question: how is it that this goy knows more about Jewish dietary law than we do?

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/04/mgg-511-hwyd-chair.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/05/mgg-513-hwyd-dc-and-nyc.html

Romans 12:15

Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.

You Don't Know What You've Got 'Til It's Gone ...

So they're doing an assessment.  With lots of involvement from "stakeholders."  They are looking for stuff that is missing: areas that are preventing the consistency of support.  What this particular exercise is for is to ensure that there is what we might call a constant of support: that there are no shortcomings.  That the support is continuous.  That the provision of support doesn't have holes in it, and that people don't fall between the cracks.  (I've never understood that metaphor.  *Between* the cracks are the boards that support you.  People fall *through* the cracks.)  (But I digress.)  So this exercise is to look for missing pieces in the constant of support.

They want a centralized database of resources.  They want to be able to have a database of resources that they can look up and see what resources are available for a given situation. 

The thing is, they already had one.  And they threw it away.  The city originally asked a local club to create a directory of resources for seniors and health.  The city originally supported this effort.  (And it *was* an effort: approximately 800 hours of volunteer work per year, just to maintain it.)  The city, over time, stopped supporting this effort.  The effort was put in all by the members and volunteers of this club.  The city slowly withdrew any support for this effort, neglecting the value of this particular resource.  Eventually, the city tried to use it as a bit of a cash cow with the last remaining vestiges of support, and tried to make money out of the deal.  The club, feeling that they were getting no support for their efforts, and putting in hundreds and hundreds of hours on the part of volunteers, stopped putting in that effort.

So now, the city authorities feel that they need a centralized database of resources.  Well, you had one, and you broke it.

I had to bite my tongue to keep from pointing out that you can't fix problems with the same type of thinking, and the same processes, that created the problem in the first place.

The problem is that there are too many disparate agencies and organizations involved in the provision of care.  They are concerned.  Don't have what they need.  Of course, there are a great, many agencies, for different needs and supports.  Thus, you have fiefdoms and empire building, and turf protection over who is most important in the provision of care and support.  

There are other models that can be used to address this type of issue.  Some suggestions are made during the exercise can be seen as partial steps towards the continuity of support.  Funding is always an issue, and so pooling of resources and a sharing of the expense of hiring a grant writer, to request money for all of the different groups and agencies is one such.  Pooling administration tasks and costs is another.  This is taken to possibly it's fullest extent in the Deltassist model.  All the social services (and a few other supports) are provided through a one stop shop.  This model has worked well for Delta For the past fifty-two years.  Starting by essentially saying to the provincial government, give us the money that you would ordinarily spend on providing social services and supports within the municipality.  We will provide that support.  Tuned, of course, more specifically to local needs, the particular and specific needs, rather than decided by the provincial government and policies drafted to suit the lowest common denominator of the entire province.

Port Alberni needs a Deltassist.  (Portassist, maybe.)  It is a volunteer run organization, or body, that gets funding from the provincial government for the social services that the government would be providing anyway.  Deltassist provides the services, at the same cost to the government, but is able to determine how to allocate funds to most closely meet the needs of Delta.

So, the proposed solution that the meeting comes up with is to create yet another organization to try and bring the disparate organizations together and force them to cooperate.

(Why do I even bother?)

Sermon 27 - God's Law is Good--for Us

Sermon 27 - God's Law is Good--for Us

Leviticus 22:31

Keep my commandments, and do them. I am the Lord.

2 Corinthians 6:14

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.

Exodus 20:3

You shall have no other gods before me.

Leviticus 25:4,5

But in the seventh year the land is to have a year of sabbath rest, a sabbath to the Lord. Do not sow your fields or prune your vineyards. 5 Do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the grapes of your untended vines. The land is to have a year of rest.

Philippians 4:8

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things.

Generally put, God's law is good for us.  That's a point of faith.  I think we agree that it's a good idea, and that we should follow God's laws.  But we tend to think of it as following God's law is something that *we* do for God.  It's part of the covenant, part of our agreement with God.  We do what God says, and God takes care of us.  It's really a matter of God is the boss.  And so, what He says goes.  Even if we agree that it's a good idea to do what He says, it's still an attitude of *we* are doing something *for* God.

I don't think that that's a good attitude, and it's certainly creating an attitude.  And as far as I can tell from actually *reading* the law, it's not correct, either.  We can see lots of seemingly arbitrary things in God's law.  How you kill certain animals, which parts you sacrifice on the altar and which parts you burn up elsewhere.  And we tend to think of following God's laws and rules and commandments in that way.  God said we do it, so we do it.  But it doesn't do *us* any good.  Again, I'm pretty sure that's wrong.  There's an awful lot in God's law that is for our benefit, not for Gods.

It makes sense.  After all, God is the one with the owner's manual for the universe.

Let's start with something simple.  Let's look at the dietary laws.

Especially pigs.  I mean, pigs have been a staple since before man started domesticating them, in a preference for hunting and protein.  But when domesticated, I mean, they're great!  You can feed them *anything,* and produce a lot of meat.  And a lot of fat.  Now, in these modern times, we don't consider fat to be a really great idea.  But fat, for an awful lot of human history, was an important source of energy.  It's still very important for infants to have a fairly high fat diet.  So feeding them formula based on skim milk powder can be a really bad idea.  Anyways, pigs produce an awful lot of what we need, and do it quite efficiently.  And it's not difficult to raise them.  They also don't take up an awful lot of space.  You can keep them in pens, and feed them scraps, and you don't have to give them huge fields to graze around in.

Pigs are a pretty good source of nutrition.  So, why is it that God told the Jews not to eat them?

Well, it turns out, and we've only discovered this fairly recently, that pigs, in terms of body tissue, are really similar to us.  (No, I'm not going to get all weird here about the similarities to cannibalism.)  The thing is, that since their tissue is so similar to ours, they get the same diseases that we do.  And we get the same diseases that *they* do.  There's an awful lot of infections that will infect pigs, and will also infect us.  And there's an awful lot of infections that we can transmit to pigs.  So, having a large population of pigs, well, it's a really good breeding ground for new diseases.  And that makes for epidemics.

But then there's the fact that the Israelites, at the time, are wandering through a desert.  And were going to a place that's got a fairly warm climate.  Once again, once we kill pigs, and turn them into meat, there are an awful lot of organisms that will grow on that meat, that will infect us when we eat it.  So it's a really good idea, if living in that kind of climate, not to have too much to do with pigs.  Even if they are very efficient nutrition machines.

There's some other interesting points as well.  There's my experience of going out to dinner with a bunch of other instructors, all of whom happened to be Jewish.  Now, they were probably Jewish in the same sense that most of France is Catholic: nominally, at best.  They were fairly secular Jews.  They knew that you weren't supposed to eat bacon, but probably weren't really familiar with the niceties of Jewish dietary laws.  One of their number had had a heart attack, recently, and, as is often the case with that type of thing, it made him a little bit more serious about his own religion.  So, he was wearing a yarmulke, and had probably been studying Jewish law a bit more extensively than most.  So, when we went to a sushi restaurant, he took his yarmulke off.  And the others asked why.  He said that he didn't want to mislead anybody: a sushi restaurant isn't exactly kosher.  Anyways, we sat down to an appetizer that the restaurant had provided, which was a delicious dish of octopus in a sweet vinaigrette sauce.  He didn't eat it.  The other guys were chowing down on it with great gusto, and urging him to try it.  Hey it's good.  You should try it.  No no, he said, it's not kosher.  Why not? they said.  I, without thinking about it, stated, It hasn't got fins and scales.  I kept on eating until I realised that the entire table had gone dead silent.  I looked up to see all of them looking at me, with, pretty much visibly, the same question on all their faces.  Why does this goy know more about Jewish dietary laws than we do?

Yes, that's there in the Bible.  It's not just pigs that you can't eat.  You can't eat octopus.  You can't eat clams.  You can't eat oysters.  There's an awful lot of stuff out of the ocean that you can't eat.

You can eat what's got fins and scales.  I don't imagine that octopus was extensively on the menu in the Middle East.  But they did seem to eat a lot of fish.  And there were probably shellfish available.  Now, fish does not keep too terribly well, in a hot climate, but shellfish can be absolutely deadly.  So, if you're making up laws for a people in that situation, it's probably a good idea to tell them you can eat fish, but nothing else that comes out of the water.

Again, the law says not to eat blood.  Blood is very nutritious stuff.  You can't eat much of it directly, but, prepared, it can be an extremely good source of lots of nutrients.  However, it's also really nutritious for bacteria.  So, in a hot climate, it's a really good idea not to eat it, since it might be growing all kinds of stuff that isn't good for you.

Exodus 20:3

You shall have no other gods before me.

For another example, there are the Ten Commandments.  Let's start with them.  And right off the top, the first one, God is the one that we are to follow.  You shall have no other gods before me.

Now, I think that a lot of people see this simply as God establishing his precedence.  He's the most important.  What He says goes.  We shouldn't try to wiggle out of some of the things that he says by appealing to some other god.  (Even though we do do that.  An awful lot.  But we'll come to that in a bit.)

But just think about it for a moment.  What if we go all Unitarian on this matter.  What if we accept that there are other gods and that maybe they have some good ideas and so what does it matter?  If we follow other gods, if we worship other gods, I mean, we can still give God precedence.  God's got first claim, and we're not necessarily gonna use other gods to deny Him His due or His rights.  So that's all okay, right?

Well, no. And we've got a pretty good illustration of this.

We aren't too big on formal religion in our society.  (Outside of those of us here in this church, of course.)  We want to be easy-going about it, and not stress too much, and not be too cruel to other people.  But, you know, it doesn't matter if we just go for spirituality in general.  Whatever the heck spirituality means.  We can just use that as a term for anything that's not really illegal or outstandingly immoral, and that doesn't relate to business or technology.  And just everything on that line is sort of religion or spirituality, because religion has too many rules, and spirituality doesn't.

A few years ago, this was called New Age, or the New Age movement.  You expected that religions were sort of different paths to the same ... well, I won't say "truth," because truth assumes that *some* things are *not* true, and that isn't exactly fair.  So we'll just say they're all different paths to spirituality, and spirituality, even though we don't know what it is, is a *good* thing.

New Age tended to be written with a capital N and a capital A, and as two words.  I tended not to capitalise anything, and to run the two words together, so that it became newage, which rhymed with sewage.  Which I thought was highly appropriate.

The thing is, if you go with this sort of new age mentality, you just accept everything.  And, as has been stated, if you keep your mind sufficiently open people will throw a lot of garbage into it.  And that seemed to happen with the New Age movement.  Everything was okay.  We just accepted everything.  Nothing was terribly bad.  There weren't any particular standards.  More like, maybe, guidelines.  Even "guidelines" might be a little too strong.  So maybe just suggestions.  Which you can sort of take or leave.

If we just accept anything, it doesn't really matter.  Well, If it doesn't really matter, then why bother about it?

You have to choose. 

We have chosen God.  We need to stick with that choice.  We need, ourselves, to follow God's will.  If we think we're following God's will, and God's will is one will, we can't have a number of different possible gods, and still come to any conclusions about what we should actually be doing. 

And remember that when I say "we," I really mean "I," and you should be hearing it as "I" for yourselves.  This is not about saying what *other* people should do, but what *we* should do.  Giving ourselves clarity.  Giving ourselves the best chance to actually determine what it is that God wants us to do.

I mean, it's not just logical, but inherently necessary. 

God is the creator of all, of everything.  If there are, somewhere, not only this universe, but in the entirety of reality as God created it, other powerful entities that we might be tempted to call gods, because they superior to, or more powerful than, us, well, they still were created by God.  The one *true* God.  If they are more powerful than we are, but *didn't* create everything, then that's not God.  So calling them gods, well, it says more about us than it does about them.

And if there are a bunch of "gods," that are more powerful than we are, but none of them actually created *everything*, well, what rights does that give them?  What precedence does that give them?  They are more powerful than we are, but that just makes them bullies.  In terms of worshipping them, if they aren't the true creator God, they aren't worth worshipping.

2 Corinthians 6:14

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.

Okay, let's try another, well, maybe not commandment, but instruction or directive.  This is from the New Testament, and it's maybe a little bit iffy.  In second Corinthians, when it says that we should not be unequally yoked with unbelievers, most people seem to think that's saying you can't marry non-Christians.  Others disagree.  Elsewhere, of course, this idea of being married to non-believers is examined more explicitly.  But it also says, if you are married to a non-believer, and the non-believer doesn't want to get divorced, then you should stay married.  But, if you weren't married, you shouldn't marry a non-believer.

I think there's an awful lot of validity in that directive.  Marriage is hard work.  Marriage is great: don't get me wrong.  I'm a grieving widower.  I am grieving because my wife died; because my wife is no longer here; because I am alone.  It is not good for man to be alone.  Marriage is wonderful.  The best piece of non-advice that my father ever gave me was to say that marriage was the best thing that ever happened to him.  Marriage is definitely the best thing that's ever happened to me.  I am definitely in favour of marriage.

By and large, I don't believe in the concept of "the one and only."  And I think there's an awful lot to be said for arranged marriages sometimes.  And that if you choose to be married, and if you choose to love someone, that that can form the basis of a very strong marriage  Even so, I would still say that you should have some choice in the matter.

So in regard to the admonition against marrying non-believers, well, like I say, marriage is a lot of work.  Marriage is hard.  Marriage is a lot of hard work.  Marriage is difficult enough without having a basic and fundamental disagreement over the nature of reality.  I mean, you either believe in God or you don't.  You believe that God has first claim on our lives, and that following God's commands and will is the best thing for us, or you don't.  And if you disagree on that, you disagree, very fundamentally, about the nature of reality.  And that disagreement affect all kinds of other very fundamental axioms for life.  For example, the existence and validity of standards of morality.  What we should be doing with our lives.  Whether we, and our desires, are the sum total determiner of what we should be doing, or if there is something else that has a prior claim on what we do.  And how we think, and how we live.  If we do not agree on that fundamental basis, it's going to be an awful lot harder, making a marriage.  There is not going to be much of a meeting of minds if there is not that agreement between you. 

Now, there's another aspect of the law, and directives in general, that turns on this idea of the law being good for us.  But it's also interesting in terms of the prohibition against worshipping idols.

There's an awful lot of really great business advice in the Bible.  We seem to think that we have invented business management in the last couple of hundred years, or even in the last seventy years, by some reckoning.  But it's interesting to note that every twenty years, a really important business principle gets rediscovered.  That is, pay attention to people.  Now, God's been telling that for millennia, in fact.  But, every twenty years, somebody brings out a book that basically says the same thing, and it becomes a huge business hit, that people think has been discovered for the first time.  In the 1960s, there was "Theory X and Theory Y," which basically said, pay attention to your people.  Around 1980 there was the book "In Search of Excellence," which basically said, pay attention to your people.  Around the year 2000, Jules Pfeffer wrote "The Human Equation," which basically said, pay attention to people.  Are we beginning to see the pattern here?

God has been telling us that for millennia.  It's not new.  It shouldn't be news.  We should have been paying attention to it all the time.  But that's only one of the really great pieces of business advice that there is in the Bible.

And some of the business advice really goes against what we, very firmly, believe.  I ran a Men's Retreat where we took the theme of work, and used that.  We had different people talk about their professions and jobs, and what it was like being a Christian in that profession.  We had a keynote speaker who did a really bang up job of researching the Bible's attitudes to business and to work.  He did an exemplary job, and gave us a tremendous grounding on a Biblical basis and Biblical attitude to work, business, commerce, and so forth.  It was absolutely amazing.

The guys in the retreat hated it.  Because, you see, an awful lot of the Biblical statements and attitudes towards commerce are contrary to one of our big, unrecognised idols of the modern age.  And that is capitalism.

Capitalism has been very successful.  It has made us very productive.  It has made us richer.

But it's a false idol.  

It isn't Biblical.  It's really difficult to say that it's even neutral.  To prove that point, I give you the sabbatical year.  Oh, yes.  We are not only to keep the Sabbath day, but every seven years, we are to leave the ground fallow.  We are not to plough.  We are not to plant.  We are not to be efficient about this.  (And efficiency is another area to consider.)

No, we are to leave the fields alone.  We are to have faith.  We are to trust that God has given us enough, in the six years that we are allowed ploughing and planting, that we'll make it through a full year, and a little bit, more until we can again.  Once again, this is something that is probably good for us.  Leaving the ground fallow for a year, after six years of planting, lets it regenerate the soil.  Rebalance itself, without interference from us.  We tend to think that we're really good at managing productive resources, such as agricultural land.  But there's an awful lot of times that it becomes apparent that we just aren't as good as we think we are.  So, the sabbatical year is not only a command from God, it's a really good idea.  And we should do it.

But the sabbatical year isn't the *only* year that the land should lie fallow. There's the Year of Jubilee.  And the year of Jubilee goes a *lot* further.  The Year of Jubilee says that we are to forgive debt.  That we are to give back land that we have bought or obtained from other people.  That we can't actually buy somebody else's land.  We can just lease it.  It needs to go back to them every fifty years.

This is a huge no-no, in terms of capitalism.  It's ridiculous to expect people to give back property that they have legitimately bought and paid for.  I mean, how can you build up your savings?  Build up your stock?  Become richer?  If every fifty years we've gotta give an awful lot of it back?

Yeah, but that's the point.  Why do we need to pursue *that* much wealth?  If you had something, some productive field, some house, some business premises, to live in, to work in, to make money for you, for forty-nine year, well, why do you need to still keep it?  You've made money, you've gotten richer.  You've got a lot of money.  Why do you need to give it back, simply because that's what God says to do?

And once again, it's something that modern research indicates is actually a very good idea.  Not just in religious terms.  But in business terms, in terms of the entire economy  And, in terms of society, possibly even in terms of preventing war.

Recently, it has been rather firmly established that the one thing that capitalism is better at than making people productive, is concentrating wealth.  Unrestrained capitalism inherently, and almost inevitably, ensures that those who have get more, and those who don't have get poorer.  The rich get richer and the poor get children, as the song says.  And research has proven that it's not just a song lyric.  Capitalism creates inequity.  Inequity creates social instability.  And the Year of Jubilee would go a long way to fixing that: to rebalance society, every fifty years.

Philippians 4:8

In conclusion, brothers, focus your thoughts on what is true, noble, righteous, pure, lovable or admirable, on some virtue or on something praiseworthy.

There are other areas that maybe aren't commands, but are still very good advice.  There is Philippians 4:8.  That tells you, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, whatever is really good stuff, think on these things.  Now, it's probably fairly easy to see that this is good advice.  If we concentrate on the good; if we avoid thinking and dwelling on the bad; well, the power of positive thinking probably kicks in, and, whatever you think about Norman Vincent Peale, that's probably good advice.

Even if your life is not particularly good, and *my* life is not particularly good right now, being grateful for those things that *are* good; my garden, one particular friend who I converse with regularly every week, the fact that I have the second best view in Port Alberni; being grateful for these things is helpful in not sinking more deeply into depression.  It doesn't necessarily *fix* any of the problems, or mitigate my depression, but at least it doesn't make more problems.  And, of course, when I'm thinking about positive things; thinking about good things; I'm not dwelling on my problems and difficulties and suffering.  And so, at least it keeps the depression from getting any worse.  These days this is known as cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, or at least a part of it.  (Another one is the facial expression hypothesis, which is that simply *smiling*, whether you feel good or not, might make you feel better, or, at least, not feel worse.  It certainly makes *other* people feel better  :-)  You are distracting yourself from dwelling on the bad things by considering the good things.  Cognitive behavioural therapy is a big deal in psychology and counselling these days.

You probably don't need to be depressed to benefit from thinking about whatever is pure and whatever is lovely.  If you're thinking about those things, in any interactions that you have with other people, those tend to be the freshest, most current thoughts in your mind.  And therefore, those thoughts tend to be what comes to mind in whatever conversations happen when you encounter someone.  You'll be speaking of, and spreading, and reinforcing, pure things, admirable things, good things, noble things.  If you're constantly thinking of problems and troubles, that's what's probably going to come out in your conversation.  Which probably doesn't end up doing an awful lot of good for you, and for anyone around you.

I'm going to come back to the Philippians passage, but I have to make a wee bit of a digression before I finish up, here.  I didn't think of it when I first got the idea for this sermon, but, as I've collected these examples, I've noticed that all of the research supporting these examples is fairly recent.  Histology, the study of types of tissue, is a new field.  Nobody had ever dreamed of it in New Testament times, let alone two thousand years before when the law was given.  CBT is new.  Detailed concepts of business and economics is a new field.  So, for those who would claim that the Bible is just a religious text, and might have a few decent philosophical ideas, but doesn't actually have God behind it, because there *is* no God, I have a question.  How is it that this religious text had so many of these great ideas, supported by research that is mostly not more than a hundred years old, two and four thousand years ago?

OK, end of digression.  Let's get back to Philippians.

This passage in Philippians can be a little problematic in specific situations.  After Gloria died, basically, my life was over.  I wasn't so much rebuilding my life, as building an entirely new life.  I came up with lots of ideas and started pursuing different projects in different directions.  But I had *so* many possible projects, and so many ideas, that there was the question of which were the ones to concentrate on.  When I raised this issue with a friend, she immediately went to Philippians 4:8.

The thing is, that a number of the ideas that I had, and possible projects that I could have worked on, involved my professional career in information security.  Information security, of course, doesn't always involve security: an awful lot of the time it involves theft, and lying, and fraud, and all kinds of things that can, by no stretch of *anybody's* imagination, be considered pure, or noble, or lovely, or admirable.  That seemed to indicate that I should concentrate on other areas, and move away from what had been my professional life.  Especially since it was probably time for me to retire anyway.

Mind you, you don't just drop your professional life at the drop of a hat (and, when you're a consultant, this idea of "retirement" is a bit difficult, anyway).  You don't immediately dump years of researching and learning in this area, and a lot of my contacts, reading materials, and areas of interest were in security.  And so, while not concentrating on it, I was still noting items that related to areas that I had been researching, and that might have been possible projects for the future.

One of the ideas that I was working on, that I figured had a good chance of being noble, admirable, and pure, was this possibly rather silly project of writing sermons.  And there was one which, very shortly after I moved to Port Alberni, I felt very strongly moved to write.  I kept feeling that this was important, and that I was possibly being prompted.  And so I wrote it up.

But it didn't feel finished.  I wasn't happy with it.  I couldn't think of anything specifically wrong with it, but it just seemed to need more.  More what, I wasn't sure.  And then, one day, prompted by a throwaway comment at the end of somebody else's sermon, the extra material, and where are the sermon had to go, came to me, almost in an instant.

The thing was, it wasn't any particular Bible study.  And it wasn't anything profound that this other minister had said.  As I say, it was a throwaway comment, at the end of the sermon, a bit of a joke.  But it prompted a remembrance of a couple of the security projects which addressed areas that were definitely *not* pure.  They were areas of danger for society, and even for the church, as well as for individual Christians.  But they were concepts that came because of my work in the depths and darker places of information security.  And those two areas of research, which didn't have to do with anything pure, gave me the completion of the sermon that I was unhappy about.

It's very odd.  And it kind of works against my thesis for this sermon.  Maybe we can just say that it's evidence that God can use anything, even mistakes of ours, for our good.

And that all things, even what seem to us to be arbitrary and oddball religious laws, work together for good to those who love the Lord.

Sermons: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html