Author: AKMA

I like to live on the edge. For instance, this morning, I didn’t watch my step when the moving walkaway came to an end.

So, this morning I opened the file of my St. Hilary’s Day sermon, and discovered that the “sermon” portion of the text that had been between the heading and the leftover idea-scraps after the ending — all the stuff I’d been planning actually to say, was gone.
 
Luckily for me, and uncharacteristically for me, I had printed a near-complete draft of the sermon toward the end of the afternoon yesterday. So this morning begins with me rolling in to the Center, scooping up my printed notes, and retyping them. Since I was going to give the text a once-over for polishing and refining anyway, the effect is the same. It began, however, with a most jarring turn.
 
Update: I printed rather earlier in the afternoon than I had imagined when I typed the words above. The preserved fragment amounts to about half of the sermon text I had prepared. We’ll see how this all plays out.

I password-protected the wifi access point I’m using now back when it was in my office, and I wanted to be able to say something reassuring in case IT enforcers came around to give me grief — but when I get home tonight, I’ll track down the procedure for opening it up. Bruce Schneier knows, and that’s good enough for me.

I saw the link to Schneier’s post on BoingBoing, where I also heard word of the development process for Chandler. I’ve been wondering what Mitch Kapor was up to for years; it seemed as though Chandler was supposed to be ready about four years ago, and I hadn’t heard anyone mention it till now. I hope they whip it into shape; a free cross-platform calendaring/productivity app stands to make a big difference to many users.

In order to avoid working on my St Hilary’s Day sermon, I’ve been poking at my osascript problem again. I don’t feel like learning vi in order to edit crontab, so David’s very helpful comment doesn’t advance my cause. In case it’s a helpful clue to anyone, the series of parent processes runs from osascript > sh > python > launchd > kernel task. I don’t run Dashboard or the Automator. For now, I just kill the process, and all is dandy; but it would be more elegant to remove the problem and to continue treating the symptoms.

Over at Typophile, the current “Type Battle” involves combining a randomly-chosen band name, a randomly-selected sequence of words as a title, and a random image as an album cover. The results are impressive; if you’re releasing an album sometime, you might consider recruiting a designer from the Typophile community.

Why is it so hard to get to the “friend requests” list on Facebook? The only direct way I know of to check on whether I have any requests pending involves going back to an email notification and clicking in from there.

I’m not sure how to count this, but although I sat down to further my standing in the International Biblical Studies Writing Month project, I ended up producing negative results. Shortly after I opened the file I was working on, I got an email message from Chuck Campbell about the lectionary essays I submitted last fall; they needed a final going-over, and would I please trim them by several words each? Since I ordinarily write in a very compact style (the outcome of a writing process that constantly poses the question, “What work is this phrase doing for you?”), there’s rarely any fluff that would make an obvious candidate for omission. Taking out twenty words here, forty words there, fifty words in another essay, requires some reweaving of the fabric of the piece.
 
So I spent my day raveling and reweaving, raveling and reweaving, and ended up a hundred words in the hole. Now, I also put about two hundred words into the sermon file I was working on, but I had written those on scrap paper over the weekend (along with my thank-you notes, which are in the mail now) (the thank-yous aren’t on scrap paper, they’re o nicely printed cards featuring a tinted woodcut of Matthew the Evangelist; making the cards was part of the delay). So I don’t think the sermon-words count for yesterday’s accomplishment total.
 
Today I have to pick up Margaret at the Philadelphia airport after her triumphant appearance at the Society of Christian Ethics meeting and her visit chez Sessum, drop off some clothes to be dry cleaned, push laundry through the washing/drying process, and write and read some (I’ve realized that part of my writing block comes from not reading enough). If I don’t hit max wordcount today, I hope I can at least hit min word-reading.
 
(Judy is having trouble leaving comments; I don’t quite know what’s up with that, as Derek seems to have been able to comment successfully. I’m getting the same security message as Judy this morning. I hope this condition doesn’t persist, since I adopted WordPress largely for the commenting feature. If you have a comment to make, persevere!)
 
Alert! Cool Googlosity Feature! On a hunch, I just typed the carrier name and number of Margaret’s plane flight into the Google search box, and Google correctly parsed that data and offered as the first search result a link to the actual status page for that flight — but on the search results page, it also listed the flight’s origin, destination, scheduled departure and arrival times, and its present status — right there atop Google results page one, no messing with airlines’ arcane “enter this data into that box and click the following agreements, and by the way what’s your credit card number, your flight club number, and an email address at which we can harass you for the rest of the internet’s lifetime.”

Anyone who has gotten a paper back from me with the annotation “asserted, not argued” should recognize Patrick’s entry concerning Prof. Marianne Meye Thompson’s expectations of her students. You may not like it, but I’m not the only one who expects students to write thoughtfully and argue a case.
 
I got to Patrick’s page from Judy’s Research Blog, which was discussing Tim’s link to Mark’s comments about preaching. Since, in a moment of insanity, I have acceded to a contract for a book about preaching, I’m heavily invested in this topic —but this morning I’ll merely note that the vast preponderance of preaching that I’ve heard functions at the level of “it could be worse” or “mildly enjoyable.” If preachers depended on the quality of their exposition and presentation for their bread, a great many would be in different lines of work. One result is that preachers and churches have a notion of “evangelism” or “mission” that involves “inducing people to do things that they know aren’t so pleasant, but really are in their best interests, and not as bad as they might be” rather than “You really have to hear this!” or “Come on and do this with me, it’ll be a blast.” It’s castor-oil evangelism, and it’s utterly self-defeating; it guarantees a lukewarm result. It institutionalizes a sense of our mediocrity, but with the weird rationalization that we ought not do better (it might be “inauthentic” or “a performance”). After all, priesthood of all believers, let the greatest among you be a servant, blah blah blah — ignoring the “varieties of gifts” and “different parts of the body with different functions” passages that pertain more cogently.
 
I’ll name this elephant: “Incompetent Self-Justifying Vanity.” “Incompetent,” because so few preachers show the capacity to read and interpret Scripture sensitively, responsibly, carefully, and express themselves clearly and effectively; “Self-Justifying,” because so many fall back on pallid pseudo-theological rationales for this state of affairs; “Vanity,” because so few willingly to face the implications of their relative mediocrity.
 
I’d write it off as my just having a headache this morning, but Tim’s and Mark’s and Judy’s comments embolden me. Honest, if you expect people to take the gospel seriously, would it be so unthinkable to suggest understanding it well and communicating it effectively?

• I haven’t written my thank-you notes yet. I will. It’s complicated, but I’m not ungrateful, just tangled.
• Part of what’s tangling me is a forgotten obligation to write lectionary comments, about which I politely asked to be reminded well before the deadline — but that request fell through the cracks.
• Plus, we had a very full holiday schedule, which I aggravated by enacting my file-maintenance obsession. On the other hand, I have some spotless, up-to-date file directories of which I’m very proud.
• We’re shipping Josiah back to college this afternoon, at which point Pippa and I will be on our own for a few days.
• I just found out that the seminary had forgotten to remind me that I’d be responsible for the self-pay part of my medical coverage during the “unpaid” part of my unpaid leave. This is OK, but I’m a shade anxious because I suspect the car needs some expensive repairs that I’ve been putting off.
• At the same time, my trusty second-generation iPod’s firewire pins and battery have stopped working; it’ll play if it’s plugged in to a power source, but it doesn’t recharge or communicate with a computer (for adding or deleting tunes).
• The there’s the Hilary of Poitiers sermon for next Monday.
• I have to walk the dog. That, at least, I can get done, and it doesn’t cost anything. I’ll hum to myself as I walk her, in the good old-fashioned way.

The household is back down to three now, but not the usual three; I dropped Margaret off at the airport this morning as she makes her way south to the Society of Christian Ethics meeting, then lingers for a few ays with Jeneane, George, and Jenna. On the rush-hour drive into Philadelphia, we listened to the Irish NewsTalk radio program for which I was interviewed last fall (download it here, if you want).
 
The producers handled the odd situation of the show pretty well — that is, because some wire got crossed in Ireland, I couldn’t actually participate in the discussion with the other speakers, so they interviewed me later and dubbed in my parts. If I’d actually been on the line when some of my interlocutors said what they did, I would have needed to respond directly to their remarks (especially the casually condescending characterizations of Judaism, or the supposition that postmodernism entails disregard for truth). But I didn’t say anything that struck Margaret or me this morning as arrantly foolish, and although I spoke at about half the words-per-minute rate of the other participants, I managed to generate vaguely sensible responses to the interviewer’s questions. I’m still awestruck, though, at the speed with which other participants poured forth verbiage; not all of it bore on the point that was nominally in view, but it just kept coming! I get worked up and talk faster sometimes than I did on the tape, but I doubt I ever reach their pitch of prolixity.
 
Now, as a half-hearted participant in International Biblical Writing Month, I will own up to having three lectionary mini-essays to tackle right away, a sermon for the feast day of Hilary of Poitiers, and (of course) this book about Matthew’s Gospel that constitutes the rationale for my sabbatical leave. At least I have a framing idea for my Holy Week sermons at Christ Church, and can begin putting some time into those. Will update on progress as it comes.

One of my Christmas gifts this year was a new hard drive — and I’ve spent much of the past few days backing up, reorganizing, archiving, weeding, and so on. In the course of giving up and loading all my photos into iPhoto, I observed that iPhoto’s “gargantuan library bulge” problem hadn’t been resolved since I last tried it as an archiving tool.

On a whim, I thought I might upload my photos to Flickr, mark them as private, and see how close I came to my monthly upload limit. Only then did I notice that Flickr had removed all bandwidth limits for Pro accounts; I can upload everything, archive it there, mark it “private,” and only flip selected photos to “public.” I’m a shade uneasy about relying on a service whose terms are subject to non-negotiated changes, but it does solve a swarm of storage problems.

Anyway, if you see some old photos cascading through my Flickr feed, that’s why.