He is risen. Let us rejoice and be glad in this. Take this time to find your families and renew your bonds of love.
-the Centaur
Pictured: me, Dad, and blurry at the edge of the picture, Mom … all a long time ago.
Posts tagged as “This Guy Called Jesus”
... or, actually, I'm going to be a stem cell donor.
Only 1 in 20,000 actually match, so this is pretty lucky. If all goes well with the physical and blood tests, I'll be helping out someone who's got few remaining options.
Good things do happen.
-the Centaur
P.S. No grief, only 1 in 20,000 match. So check out Be The Match dot org and consider getting your cheek swabbed. Somewhere out there someone may be depending on you - so no pressure. 
I'm not a very literal Christian, but I do believe that a lot of Christianity is good. But I don't think it's good because God says so - I think it's God said so because it's good for you. One example is the Sabbath.
But what is a Sabbath? Going to church on Sunday, then sitting around reading psalms? No, a Sabbath is first and foremost a day of rest, and second a day of worship. And God doesn't ask us to observe it because he's needy for worship: he asks us to do it because we need time off. I'm not going to go into the Episcopal theology which suggests that Jesus doesn't care what day you take your Sabbath as long as you do take one - I'll let my fundamentalist and atheist friends thumbwrestle over that one. I'm just going to take it as a given that we need a day off.
So ... what does the Sabbath have to do with Microsoft Word?
In my personal life, I'm like a submarine: I disappear into whatever project I'm working on (see the bursty timing of my blogposts as evidence for this). And even though I usually have something on the order of four to six major projects going at once, I'm really only good at focusing on one of them at a time. My current project: revising my second novel BLOOD ROCK, which I've been doing since something like September, responding to hundreds of comments from my editor.
I'm down to the wire now. The book is over 100 pages shorter and tighter after months of edits. I've gone from a HUGE list of TODO items that sprawled over two pages down to a short list of items I'd written on the back of a receipt. One of my last items is re-reviewing all the remaining Microsoft Word comments, which I've been doing over the last several days.
But as I did so, I found that somehow I'd either lost my memory or Word had neglected to show a whole bunch of comments to me. Months ago, I went through the entire document in detail resolving differences and addressing comments before starting my big tightening edit, and yet there are real, material important comments I would remember if I'd seen them that only showed up in the last few days.
Having observed Word's behavior looking for possible bugs, I'm guessing either it was collapsing comments when there were lots of edits on a page, or, more likely, this is a scrolling bug that caused some comments to appear "over the top of the page" and thus effectively become invisible. Another alternative is that it might have to do with the "ribbon" ... I recently switched from Word 2004 for Mac to Word 2011 and the interface for comments seems to have changed. A simple interface change; they happen. But that's not the point.
My frustration is that even minor offhand comments from the editor can lead to big changes. If she asks me to delete something on page 204, I might just do it --- but if I don't agree, I generally think hard about whether I need it, whether it's important to me, and if so how to integrate it so deeply into the novel that it's inevitable --- ideally to the point where she'd tell me to put it back in if I took it out, though I don't know if I ever achieve that. :-)
So now I have a whole load of comments that I'm essentially getting fresh. Worse, they're commenting on things in sections that I had previously reworked in response to the editor's written comments, sections where I didn't think there were major in-line comments. So I've spent a great deal of effort fixing things in response to the revision email, the suggested changes, and a long hallway conversation with the editor at Dragon*Con, but I'm now finding dozens of things, both little and great, that would have potentially changed what I would have done.
So ... what does Microsoft Word have to do with the Sabbath? Well ... I am taking today off. :-)
I have a great job at the Search Engine That Starts With a G, but it takes a lot of time - partly work, partly travel time, partly mental recuperation time. And I have a wife, and friends, and cats. By lugging my laptop to breakfast, lunch, dinner and coffee, I can eke out 3-4 hours a night 3-4 days a week, but that's not enough, and generally need to work on my writings on the weekends. This gets especially intense when editing, because I can't futz around doing research reading or shift gears to another story if I'm stumped; I've got to keep my brain focused on the EDITING process.
But my frustration reached its limit last night. I blew my stack and fired off a few frustrated emails to the editor, and decided to take today off. To use the Sabbath that God gave us. I don't have a link to the great sermon that Father Ken of Saint Stephens in the Field gave on the topic, but I do have a link to my atheist friend Jim Davies, who takes Saturdays completely off so he is free the rest of the week to pursue the top priority items on his nobility list. The theology is different - but the idea is the same.
The point? The moment I decided to take the day off, I felt completely liberated. I'm going to do something fun like ride a bike or design a robot brain - or maybe visit a bookstore for something other than their wifi or coffee. Before writing this blog post, I spent the previous hour implementing "Hello World" in every language installed on my new Macbook Air as part of a project to crack my programming knuckles again (and oddly, the hardest language was Awk, which I actually use so much at the command line it's like a reflex. Weird). I've been wanting to do this for weeks, but I've spent it revising. Now instead, I've had a little fun. My batteries are already recharged.
Maybe you're one of those people who find it easy to take time off. Good for you. If you're not, especially if you live in the Bay Area ... take a break. Maybe not even take a break from work; take a break from whatever you won't let yourself take a break from.
... this is still not warrenellis.com. If it was, we wouldn't be leading off from the Episcopal Lectionary for the Second Sunday After Christmas:
Now after the wise men had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod.There are lots of ways to interpret this passage, but I'm most interested in the one by Reverend Ken Wratten of Saint Stephens in-the-Field church. Joseph is performing an action in faith - he's moving to a different country based on a voice he heard in a dream - but based on a realistic response to circumstances. Historians dispute whether the massacre of the innocents really happened, but not that Herod was a tyrant and madman who murdered his own family. So even though we don't normally follow the advice we get in our dreams - and, for the literalists among us, note that in some circumstances the Bible specifically warns us not to - it was nonetheless a reasonable response to the circumstance for Joseph to heed that voice and get the heck out of Dodge. Father Ken's interpretation of this is that we should respond to the circumstances of our life in faith. Not assume that faith will magically shield us from all woes, but realistically look at the circumstances we have and, based on faith, take the response available to us that best fits God's will. If you are not a Christian or other believer, substitute the idea that you should not rely on your ideology to save you, but you should nonetheless take the best action available to you consistent with your values AND the circumstances. (There's more to Christianity than just Always Do The Right Thing, but I digress.) So what does this have to do with cat spray?
One element of responding in faith is that God can use changes in our circumstances to prod us to action - if we are willing to look at our circumstances in faith and try to see how we could, indeed should turn it to our advantage. No matter how trying the circumstances...
Recently, we noticed a whiff of an odd smell and realized the cats had been spraying under a desk in our library, which I've been reorganizing. I wiped up the spray, picked up the stack of three plastic tubs of computer parts, and turned to take them into the kitchen - and a stream of cat urine slid out from between the boxes and dripped all over a pile of papers I'd set out to file. For those not familiar with cat urine, it's the substance they used to "eat through the floor" in the movie Alien. (No it isn't; that's a joke. See the link below).
The cats had sprayed most of the under-desk shelf but the ridges of atop the plastic tubs had sealed it in and trapped the smell - until I moved it, when the funky urine landed on my pile of junk. Everything was trashed: the box for my MacBook Air, an old drawing book, some papers, a record ... but, miraculously, not my comic book artwork, which, in one of those circumstances which gives succor to those of faith and drives our skeptical friends nuts, was completely spared.
God uses circumstances to prod us to make changes we wouldn't do on our own. I had already decided, in a sort of general way, that I needed to purge my library: this brought the point home, and even helped me decide what to purge. My wife and I already knew we needed to get all three of the cats integrated or get rid of one or more of them: this brought that point home, and led immediately to a new plan of action. And we already knew we were a team, but had yet to really accept that we had complementary work habits, but when she cheerfully worked to 5am cleaning while I slept, and then I cheerfully took over while she slept, that brought that point home.
Religious believers, Christians, look on this as a reminder to look at the circumstances that befall you in faith, and try to find the action God has given you that doesn't just cope with the situation, it actually improves it and brings you closer to him. And for skeptics, remember: fundamentally, we live in a spot of this universe where it is possible for life to thrive for billions of years. It may sound cheesy, but life will find a way: and no matter what the circumstances, you can too. Like pilgrims, you may find it takes a long journey, but at least it's possible to reach the promised land.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Lenora irritated by a cat toy, our warring tomcats Caesar and Gabby, and a Youtube experiment attempting to replicate the "acid burning through the floor effect" from Alien.
This is not warrenellis.com. If it was, I would be more irritated, irritable ... and interesting.
(Also, Warren Ellis doesn't post me-too station idents because he's overslept for church after a long night writing. I don't think he does go to church, but if he did miss church because he'd spent a hard night writing, the minister would come to him, at the pub, when Warren Ellis was damn well ready - God being everywhere, of course, and it's the minister that would need him some Ellis. Me, I need me some God.
Stupid earlybirds. Why doesn't anybody have proper Evensong anymore?)
-the Centaur
(Also, Warren Ellis doesn't post me-too station idents because he's overslept for church after a long night writing. I don't think he does go to church, but if he did miss church because he'd spent a hard night writing, the minister would come to him, at the pub, when Warren Ellis was damn well ready - God being everywhere, of course, and it's the minister that would need him some Ellis. Me, I need me some God.
Stupid earlybirds. Why doesn't anybody have proper Evensong anymore?)
-the Centaur
Continuing my attempts at computational archaeology: before the dawn of the dawn of time ... or at least the dawn of the Internet ... computer people had .plan ("dot plan") files, chunks of text you could read from the command line using the finger protocol.
This protocol is often deactivated nowadays, but it was Facebook at graduate school at Georgia Tech in the early nineties. The following was mine, from apparently late 1995. Like my attempt to find my first web page, this obviously isn't the earliest version of my .plan file, but at ~15 years it's the oldest bit of online presence I've found about myself yet.
Obviously, some things have changed ... the "love of my life" died (the love itself part, not the person) shortly after writing this, as evident from the editor's note. I then went on to marry the lovely Sandi Billingsley, the real love of my life. Some of the other friends listed are no longer with us, or no longer with me and my friends. For the rest, well, read on - this is a completely unfiltered snapshot of me fifteen years ago:
The Centaur's Bio (his Old .plan File) Hi. This is the personal page of the Centaur, otherwise known as Anthony Francis. I'm ostensibly a graduate student in Artificial Intelligence at the College of Computing, but that's just a hobby. For the past eight years, I've been a science fiction writer, a vocation that became professional when I published my first short story, "Sibling Rivalry," in the February 1995 issue of _The Leading Edge_ magazine. The love of my life is a redheaded historian, Shannon Duffy. When I'm not with her I spend time with my best friends in the Edge Group, which consists of Michael Boyd, David Cater, Anthony Francis, Derek Reubish, David Stephens, and Fred Zust in the core Edge franchise as well as William Morse, and Stuart Myerburg in our recently opened Atlanta branch. [Editor's note: Sad to say, Shannon and I are no longer together; we simply had different ideas about where we wanted to take our lives. We're still friends, though, and hope to keep it that way.] I'm sorry, I can't tell you what we at the Edge Group do; we'd have to kill you (we do bad movies, good software, and great times, in no particular order). When I'm not hanging with the Edge Group I'm jamming with my other best friends Steve Arnold, Eric Christian and his fiancee Chalie, Joe Goldenburg, Kenny Moorman and his wife Carla, Ruth Oldaker, Mark Pharo and his wife Yvette, Patsy Voigt, and Fred's girlfriend Marina. The weekend tradition is to jam with William, Stuart, Mallory and sometimes Joe at Anis, Huey's, Oxford at Pharr, Phipps and wherever else we can get into trouble. (Occasionally, you can find me at the Cedar Tree or Yakitori Den-Chan with Mark & Yvette). If not, I'm either hanging with Fred & Marina, Eric & Chalie and Dave & Ruth up in ole Greenvile, South Carolina, watching (or filming) movies at my house, eating dinner with my loving parents Tony and Susan Francis, perforating the odd target with musket fire at Eric's or just noshing on late-night food at Stax' Omega or IHOP. If I'm not doing any of the above, I'm liable to be curled up with Shanny in O'Flaherty's Irish Channel Pub in the French Quarter in New Orleans, listening to Irish ballads and soaking up each other's company over an Irish Coffee (her) and a diet Coke (me). Since people have asked, my favorite authors are H.P. Lovecraft, Larry Niven, C.J. Cherryh and Douglas Hofstadter, in that order. My favorite TV show is Dr.Who, followed neck-and-neck by Babylon 5 and Star Trek (TOS TNG TMS DS9 VOY ANI, in that order) and nipped at the heels by the Tripods and the Six Million Dollar Man. My favorite comic book is Elfquest, followed closely by Albedo Anthropomorphics, Superman, Cerebus, and Usagi Yojimbo. My favorite band is Tangerine Dream, although I do listen to Rush, Yes, Vangelis, and Genesis. My favorite style of music is now called "New Age" (uuugh) but used to be called electronic music, minimalist, or just electronic rock. My second favorite style of music is soundtrack music (music for the visual image). I can stand rock. I hate disco. Rap held my interest for a while, but it officially lost me with "Whoomp(t) there it is." My favorite cuisine is Lebanese, a gift from my parents and my family, the best damn extended family in the whole wide world. I shock my parents and family by also appreciating Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Cajun, Mexican, Italian, Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish and Indian cuisine; I also have a great appreciation for the foods of the South, a culture which I find to be both vastly underrated and overdiscussed abroad. When I'm not dining out or curled up with a good book or laptop computer at Captain D's at Corporate Square in Atlanta drinking inordinate amounts of iced tea, I'm at home honing my patented personal tabbouleh (Lebanese salad) recipe, slowly learning to cook Chinese, and honing the art of grilling steaks and microwaving potatoes so that they both finish at the same time. My favorite form of literary expression is science fiction; my preferred style is flashbacks within a framing story, usually in third-person limited, although I've begun to experiment with a more liberal third-person style derived from the narrative structure of contemporary motion pictures. My primary means of plotting and expression are visual images. My favorite fictional creature is, of course, the centaur; however, the genetically engineered spaceborne professionals of *my* fiction bear little resemblance to the bearded primitves that stalk the wooded glades of your average fantasy novel (unfair though that may be to my inspirations, which include the very nice halfhorse folk of the Giesenthal valley dreamed up by Donna Barr, the ambiguous Titanides from _Titan, Wizard, Demon_ by John Varley, and Timoth the warrior sage of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons comic. Just don't call my Porsche St.George a halfhorse too; she'll be liable to pummel a fictionalized version of you in a story sooner or later if you do). My favorite style of AI is symbolic AI with a situated/behaviorist twist. I play around with memory, agents, case-based reasoning, natural language understanding, and semiotics; I have nothing against genetic algorithms or connectionist systems other than the fact that I don't have time to pursue them as avidly. I also fiddle around with animal cognition, and can talk your ear off about chimpanzee culture and dolphin language if given the chance. My favorite style of science is Kuhnian with a cognitive flair. I have no respect for positivism or any of the horrible things it's done for science. My philosophy is somewhere between Kant, Plato and something no-one has a name for yet. To sum: the universe is real; deal, but don't assume you have the answers and *don't* assume that a single level of description can capture all of reality. My religion is theist; I believe in the tripartite single God at the heart of mainstream Christianity, and accept the messiah aspect as my savior. My theology is liberal Episcopalian with a strong theological background in my Catholic upbringing. My disagreements with the Catholic Church are primarily theological and only partially pragmatic; I gave up on waiting for them to catch up with Jesus, but they're still mostly good people. The religious right, on the other hand, is a bipartite oxymoron: neither religious nor right, and certainly not in keeping with the anti-Phariseean radical I follow. Genteel religious discussions are welcome; rude evangelizers will be biblically and theologically diced *before* I turn you over to Shannon, Joe, William, and Eric. Bring references to authorities, but don't expect me to respect them. Arguments against evolution will either be summarily flushed or buried underneath my copies of Eldredge's _Time Frames_, A.G. Cairns-Smith's _Genetic Takeover_, Dawkin's _The Selfish Gene_, _The Saint Paul Family Catechism_ and my copy of the New American Bible, flipped to the part of the preface discussing evolution. Read the gospel of Thomas; it's an eye opener, and you haven't even seen the Dead Sea Scrolls yet... Politically, I am a Goldwater liberal. I believe in war, gays in the military, religious freedom, no state-mandated prayer in schools, free ownership of automatic weapons, licensing of gun owners, aid to the Contras, prosecution of IranContra, investigation of Whitewater, and support and respect for the president regardless of party. I voted for George *and* Bill once each, don't regret it, and would do the same knowing what I know now. I believe in AIDS spending, military spending, research spending, and the space program; I also believe in welfare reform, cutting waste, a line item veto, and perhaps even some kind of budget amendment if I could be convinced it wouldn't get us into trouble in wartime. I don't believe in "school choice", "political correctness", "multiculturalism", "Rush as Equal Time", "the liberal media", "the conservative media", or "anti-special-rights amendments". I don't think we should take "In God We Trust" off of our coins and I don't think we should picket funerals of people who had AIDS. I don't believe acceptance of homosexuals as equal citizens has anything to do with the disintegration of the American family. I don't believe in hobbling industry with overregulation nor do I believe in letting them cut down trees holding endangered species just because they planned our logging programs poorly. My political heroes are Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Margaret Thatcher.Interesting. Well, that is what it was. There are definitely opinions I would tweak, things I now think I got wrong, and snapshots of relationships that no longer hold. But the Edge is still here, I'm still here, I'm still writing, I'm still a Christian, and still a scientist. SO, all things considered, I think I'll have to stand by my dot plan file after all. -the Centaur
So I've been working my ass off on something at work for the past ... oh, I dunno, two weeks. That's not entirely true - I've actually been working on it since September, but the really nasty, push 90-hour-weeks two-or-three at a time have come in about four surges, two last year and two this year. Nothing I seem to do seems to push this forward, because it isn't a coding problem, it's a manipulate-large-sums-of-data-produced-by-massive-systems-to-generate-an-evaluation-for-a-feature-launch problem whose intermediate steps take anywhere from thirty minutes to eight hours and whose end-to-end steps can run from four hours to a whole week. So if you make a mistake early on in the process - and it's easy to do - it's no fun starting over. And if something else changes during your work on the process, guess what? You start over again, even if you did nothing wrong.
So what can you do? Work harder, work smarter, ask for help from those more experienced - and there are probably a dozen blogposts I could write on how I've improved my process during all this - but sometimes that's not enough. So you come in early, stay up late and stress your body out until you're so sick you have to call in and work from home because work-related stress is tearing up your guts so much you can't eat or sleep and you just want to GET this DONE. And still sometimes that's not enough - so you keep pushing harder.
Or, you can pray.
I'm not a "Bible believing" Christian. To me, that's almost an oxymoron - Jesus Christ was a real person and what the community of faith that he founded wrote down about him is a pale and often misleading substitute. But a Christian has to take the Bible as the first primary source about Jesus - Scripture is what we've got, and Tradition and Reason have to take it as it is. But even as Reason speaks quite loudly that we can't take Scripture literally as history ... it also speaks loudly to ask us why the Church that Jesus founded was inspired to collect those books in the first place. Just because the Israelites and the early Church didn't have modern standards of evidence, we still have to ask: what experiences did they have that prompted the writing of these books, and what lesson did the collators of the Bible want us to learn?
Turn to the Old Testament. During much of the latter half of Exodus through the Chronicles, the authors of the Bible depict the Israelites committing shocking acts of genocide against the native peoples of Caanan - as a friend of mine said, it would suck to have been an "-ite" in the days of Joshua. But did the Prince of Peace really want those stories recorded as an example of how Christians should behave? Not for the genocide, surely, and even in the Old Testament text when the Commander of the Armies of the Lord speaks to Joshua son of Nun, he does not take sides even as the Israelites are about to attack Jericho and destroy it. I think instead it's to demonstrate why we should put our faith in the Lord. Again and again through the Old Testament, the Israelites are shown failing on their own merits and succeeding when when they put their faith in the Lord: overcoming giants, huge armies, and even toppling the walls of Jericho. Whether or not the battle of Jericho happened as depicted in the Bible is beside the point - the meaning of the story is that people can tackle impossible odds if they put their faith in the Lord.
Case in point: my Jericho, that massive data collection problem that I've run rings around for months. I literally made myself sick last night staying up super late to get the evaluation done and, while I produced some approximate estimates, I still had many problems. I worked from home all day, again literally fading in and out of productivity and half-conscious stupor, until finally I'd done all I could do. I tossed my estimates "over the cube wall" via email, grabbed some dinner, and went to Writing Group. On the way home, slightly rested and refreshed, started thinking about the problem again. There were a few minor things to try but the very next step was starting over from scratch. I thought back about the power of prayer, about recent sermons I'd heard and readings I'd read, and I turned to Jesus (not theologically, I've already done that, I mean, once again, literally here, I think of him riding in the seat next to me in the car, or exercising on the next treadmill when I'm working out) and said: you can solve this, can't you? Because I can't do this on my own.
When I got back to my home office and opened my email, my feature had been approved for launch.
Nothing supernatural is required here, if you're not inclined to believe. I know that. I'd worked hard, reduced the data load of my feature, produced a new set of estimates, and even though this class of estimates had previously been deemed unsatisfactory, the new load was low enough for approval to be granted. You might think it was weird that the approval came on the heels of the prayer, but a proper skeptic, thinking it through, should say that there was nothing mysterious about it: even the timing of the prayer was only to be expected given how long I'd been working on it. (And even if you are NOT a skeptic you need to learn the mental discipline to realize that these things CAN just be coincidences, or you're going to go crazy and turn yourself into a nutcase seeing miracles where there aren't any). So ... was this simple response to a long period of hard work designed to produce that exact outcome an actual miracle? Not necessarily. Almost surely not.
Mmm-hmm. Suuure. You go on believing what you want. As for me? Thanks, Jesus, for coming through again.
-the Centaur
So what can you do? Work harder, work smarter, ask for help from those more experienced - and there are probably a dozen blogposts I could write on how I've improved my process during all this - but sometimes that's not enough. So you come in early, stay up late and stress your body out until you're so sick you have to call in and work from home because work-related stress is tearing up your guts so much you can't eat or sleep and you just want to GET this DONE. And still sometimes that's not enough - so you keep pushing harder.
Or, you can pray.
I'm not a "Bible believing" Christian. To me, that's almost an oxymoron - Jesus Christ was a real person and what the community of faith that he founded wrote down about him is a pale and often misleading substitute. But a Christian has to take the Bible as the first primary source about Jesus - Scripture is what we've got, and Tradition and Reason have to take it as it is. But even as Reason speaks quite loudly that we can't take Scripture literally as history ... it also speaks loudly to ask us why the Church that Jesus founded was inspired to collect those books in the first place. Just because the Israelites and the early Church didn't have modern standards of evidence, we still have to ask: what experiences did they have that prompted the writing of these books, and what lesson did the collators of the Bible want us to learn?
Turn to the Old Testament. During much of the latter half of Exodus through the Chronicles, the authors of the Bible depict the Israelites committing shocking acts of genocide against the native peoples of Caanan - as a friend of mine said, it would suck to have been an "-ite" in the days of Joshua. But did the Prince of Peace really want those stories recorded as an example of how Christians should behave? Not for the genocide, surely, and even in the Old Testament text when the Commander of the Armies of the Lord speaks to Joshua son of Nun, he does not take sides even as the Israelites are about to attack Jericho and destroy it. I think instead it's to demonstrate why we should put our faith in the Lord. Again and again through the Old Testament, the Israelites are shown failing on their own merits and succeeding when when they put their faith in the Lord: overcoming giants, huge armies, and even toppling the walls of Jericho. Whether or not the battle of Jericho happened as depicted in the Bible is beside the point - the meaning of the story is that people can tackle impossible odds if they put their faith in the Lord.
Case in point: my Jericho, that massive data collection problem that I've run rings around for months. I literally made myself sick last night staying up super late to get the evaluation done and, while I produced some approximate estimates, I still had many problems. I worked from home all day, again literally fading in and out of productivity and half-conscious stupor, until finally I'd done all I could do. I tossed my estimates "over the cube wall" via email, grabbed some dinner, and went to Writing Group. On the way home, slightly rested and refreshed, started thinking about the problem again. There were a few minor things to try but the very next step was starting over from scratch. I thought back about the power of prayer, about recent sermons I'd heard and readings I'd read, and I turned to Jesus (not theologically, I've already done that, I mean, once again, literally here, I think of him riding in the seat next to me in the car, or exercising on the next treadmill when I'm working out) and said: you can solve this, can't you? Because I can't do this on my own.
When I got back to my home office and opened my email, my feature had been approved for launch.
Nothing supernatural is required here, if you're not inclined to believe. I know that. I'd worked hard, reduced the data load of my feature, produced a new set of estimates, and even though this class of estimates had previously been deemed unsatisfactory, the new load was low enough for approval to be granted. You might think it was weird that the approval came on the heels of the prayer, but a proper skeptic, thinking it through, should say that there was nothing mysterious about it: even the timing of the prayer was only to be expected given how long I'd been working on it. (And even if you are NOT a skeptic you need to learn the mental discipline to realize that these things CAN just be coincidences, or you're going to go crazy and turn yourself into a nutcase seeing miracles where there aren't any). So ... was this simple response to a long period of hard work designed to produce that exact outcome an actual miracle? Not necessarily. Almost surely not.
Mmm-hmm. Suuure. You go on believing what you want. As for me? Thanks, Jesus, for coming through again.
-the Centaur
From two to three this morning I served on the Maundy Thursday Vigil today at Saint Stephens in the Field, the local Episcopal church I attend.
Maundy Thursday is the day Jesus instituted the Eucharist and was arrested, according to the Bible and tradition. Rather than a Maundy Thursday service, Saint Stephen's holds a vigil from evening to the time of the Crucifixion. Someone is in the church all hours of the night.
There's no way to know exactly when Jesus was arrested, but I've always thought the hour of darkness was pretty close to two to three AM, so that's a special time for me. Being arrested, humiliated and crucified for essentially telling the truth and trying to do the right thing would be terrible.
The first thing I read during my part of the vigil was from the Great Litany from the Book of Common Prayer; I thought it was apropos in our current time of trial:
Then I read from the Bible, first another apropos passage from Sirach 21:8:
After that, I started reading the Passion from the Gospel of John, and then went on to read the remaining readings for Maundy Thursday: first from the Gospel of John, then from Exodus, then from the Psalms, then from 1 Corinthians.
I leave you with the close of the Maundy Thursday service:
Maundy Thursday is the day Jesus instituted the Eucharist and was arrested, according to the Bible and tradition. Rather than a Maundy Thursday service, Saint Stephen's holds a vigil from evening to the time of the Crucifixion. Someone is in the church all hours of the night.
There's no way to know exactly when Jesus was arrested, but I've always thought the hour of darkness was pretty close to two to three AM, so that's a special time for me. Being arrested, humiliated and crucified for essentially telling the truth and trying to do the right thing would be terrible.
The first thing I read during my part of the vigil was from the Great Litany from the Book of Common Prayer; I thought it was apropos in our current time of trial:
We humbly beseech thee, O Father, mercifully to look upon
our infirmities; and, for the glory of your Name, turn from us
all those evils that we most justly have deserved; and grant
that in all our troubles we may put our whole trust and
confidence in thy mercy, and evermore serve thee in holiness
and pureness of living, to thy honor and glory; through our
only Mediator and Advocate, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Then I read from the Bible, first another apropos passage from Sirach 21:8:
8: He that buildeth his house with other men's money is like one that gathereth himself stones for the tomb of his burial.
After that, I started reading the Passion from the Gospel of John, and then went on to read the remaining readings for Maundy Thursday: first from the Gospel of John, then from Exodus, then from the Psalms, then from 1 Corinthians.
I leave you with the close of the Maundy Thursday service:
Peace is my last gift to you, my own peace I now leave with
you; peace which the world cannot give, I give to you.
I give you a new commandment: Love one another as I have
loved you.
Peace is my last gift to you, my own peace I now leave with
you; peace which the world cannot give, I give to you.
By this shall the world know that you are my disciples: That
you have love for one another.
Life has felt bleak since 9/11. Is there anything to be thankful for?
Let's see...
Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings become movies. Lucy Lawless appears on the X-Files. And Star Trek returns to the air.
Dating. Improv. Visiting Mom. Karate. Debating with friends.
George Bush celebrated for saying things sensible. Naomi Wallace celebrated for saying things unfashionable. Jerry Falwell excoriated for saying things hateful. Jerry Falwell now saying nothing at all.
T'Pol.
Discussing the religious implications of quantum physics with my oldest childhood friend until 3am.
Weblogs. Smalltalk. Programming Perl in UNIX for Windows.
Getting a t-shirt from my favorite restaurant because I am their favorite regular.
The best burrito chain in the city opens right up the street. Cold milk and Halloween candy. Warm sunshine in November.
All in all, sounds pretty good.
What should you be thankful for?
- The Centaur