Dale Miller

I think something’s wrong with me. This afternoon I actually found myself caring what my yard looked like. Caring enough to actually go out and mow it, even though I could still find the cats. I suspect that’s really a good thing. I probably should spend a bit more time trying to keep the house and yard looking presentable. I might someday want to bring someone home that I want to impress (or at least convince that I’m not a complete slob).

Since I have almost no food in the house, I used that as an excuse to go to Cracker Barrel in Conway for dinner. I must have picked a bad time to arrive, because I had to wait for a table. I don’t usually look around the store there, but having nothing else to do, I made the rounds. Some of the things they have on the shelves are utter junk. Most of it, however, is fairly good quality, but extremely overpriced. I guess they are hoping for lots of impulse buys.

I also located and drove past “Something Brewing”, a coffee house that I had read about in another post. It might be on my list as a place to spend an evening or two. I could certainly use a change of venue.

Am I the only one who wonders …


Star Trek and Barbie??? There just seems something wrong with the entire concept. However, I found an interesting article about the possibilities.

Oh, and yes, I did actually buy this one, so apparently the idea does interest some people. :) But — I got it on ebay for $5.00 (plus shipping).

I went to Sufficient Grounds last night, just as an excuse to get out of the house. I did run into Suzy, who gave me a hug, so the evening wasn’t a total loss. That’s about as exciting as my trips out get. I need to find some venue to meet people (okay, to meet women). I keep trying to convince myself to go to some club, but I just can’t manage to put myself in the appropriate frame of mind. Past experience tells me it wouldn’t do much good if I did. I tend to sit on the sidelines and watch. I really need to get over my fear of approaching women. They might well tell me “no”, but there is at least a non-zero chance that one could say “yes”.

I took Belle to the vet for her first set of shots today. Stephanie (the gorgeous young woman at the front desk) told me that I had really nice legs. That made me feel good. Did I manage to somehow use that as a segue into asking her to dinner? Of course not. Maybe next month (but I doubt it).

I came back home and started phase two of the bathroom project — installing a shower. I managed to get the carpentry portion done, and the fixtures in place. It looks about as I intended. I just have to plumb it now. That should actually be easier than what I did today.

Does anyone think of this when I mention installing a shower?

Okay, so I’m weird. I thought you already knew that. I want a shower outside.

My day off was fun, productive, and expensive. I spent most of the morning in bed, which I think I needed, even if it did throw my sleep schedule off. About noon the sun came out and I thought about going out to a lake. I decided to just lie out on the deck instead. I don’t have the option of girl-watching or jumping in the water to cool off, but I don’t have to drive anywhere, I can be in the air conditioning quickly, and I don’t have to wear a swimsuit. All-in-all not a bad trade-off.

Then I decided to start on one of my home improvement projects that I have been putting off for quite a while — combining my laundry room with the smaller bathroom. I tore out the wall between them, and have it mostly cleaned up. I was rather pleased with how easy that part of it went. I made a trip to Home Depot tonight and bought everything necessary to install my outdoor shower (at least I hope I did). I’m going to try to get that part of the project underway tomorrow. Plumbing is not my forte, but I think I can manage most of this. Connecting into the water supply may be interesting. The pipes in my house are polybutylene, which is not a type I have worked with before. I will be using CPVC for my new shower, but I must connect somewhere. :)

I had dinner at “On The Border”, which had its own issues. I waited quite a while for a table, and then over 20 minutes from a waitress to take my order. Apparently they had changed the sections around and my waitress thought someone else had my table. They eventually straightened things out and I was able to actually order food. It’s really not too bad to sit at a restaurant. I always take a book with me, and I have a bit of a chance to people-watch. It’s not like I had anything else pressing on my agenda.

After I ate I went to Barnes and Noble and spent more money. I think I bought more books at one time than I have in several years. I should have plenty to read for a few weeks.

Oh, and the good news — while I was having dinner I received a phone call. The evening computer operator found my car keys. They were in the midst of a bunch of fiber optic cables that I had been coiling up on Wednesday. I guess I pulled them out of my pocket for whatever reason, and didn’t pick them back up.

Yesterday was a good day. I’ve been forcing myself to have a number of those recently. I started out early working with Guil to try to get the second port on our HSG-80 controllers working so we could have some redundancy on the production disk connection. That attempt was a dismal failure, but I haven’t had time yet to research why. Then spent much of the morning changing out network switches in Ross hall. It’s always nice to be able to pull out some of the ancient hardware that really should have been replaced a couple of years ago. Heather was out, so I taught the water aerobics class at noon, and spent part of the afternoon giving the MIS staff an “intro to UNIX” course. Next we start the fun “DCL to shell script conversion” course.

After work I went over to my ex-wife’s house to see why her computer wouldn’t connect to the Internet. Mark’s router-and-general-purpose Linux box was to blame. It had an error on boot claiming that it couldn’t find a file and to “press any key to continue”. Since Mark didn’t leave a USB keyboard at the house when he moved, that was rather difficult. I just bypassed the router and plugged Susan’s machine directly into the cable modem. Mark’s machine will be down until I get over there to work on it (or until he’s back from Europe and back in Little Rock, whichever comes first).

I decided to take today off work, just because I could. Since I was able to sleep late, Belle woke me up around 4:30 and ensured that I was not going to go back to sleep. She’s been playing at top speed ever since that time. The good news is that part of the time she was playing with Cinderella. When I went into the bedroom last night I realized that the clock and phone were on the floor rather than the nightstand, so there has been some serious cat-play occurring hereabouts. Belle has also decided that the laptop screen is a valid target. While typing this I have had it suddenly change position as a paw sneaks up from behind and moves it (or Belle comes flying over my shoulder and lands on it. That’s a behavior I need to alter, but training kittens has never been one of my strong suits. :)

Maybe the weather will be nice today, and I can go lay beside a lake and get some sun. If not, I have plenty of books to read at the moment.

Today at work was both better and worse than yesterday. Nothing major broke, so I was able to repair a long-standing problem with a terminal server in the residence hall (and clean up wiring closets while I was there), install and begin some new backup software (and I like it), and generally take care of the sort of stuff that accumulates while major problems are dealt with. The down side is that I managed to lose my car keys — not misplace, lose. I have no idea what happened to them. Fortunately I have a co-worker who was willing to drive me the 45 minutes out to my house to get my spare key, and then 45 minutes back into UALR so I could get my car. It’s annoying and potentially expensive. While I doubt anyone will steal my car or break into my house as a result of finding my keys (since there are identifying markings), replacing the car key and remote opener will be about $100. I’ll probably just decide to live with one key for a while. It’s also possible that someone will find them and turn them in to Public Safety, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for that. I feel silly about this. I’ve never lost a set of keys before. I have managed to misplace them at home for a couple of days, but I knew they were somewhere in the house. This time I have no idea where they could be. At least it was just my car keys and not my work keys. I wouldn’t have wanted to admit to management that they would have to re-key all those doors. :)

My newest feline has finally found her name. A couple of days ago I decided that she was to be named Belle. She celebrated this naming by keeping me awake for most of the next two nights — last night being one of those.

So I woke up this morning feeling that I just wanted to go back to sleep. There was nothing urgent on my schedule today, so I decided to do just that. I sent off an email telling my boss that I would be in a bit late, rolled over, and went back to sleep. I awoke to the phone ringing at 7:20. It was my boss telling me that we had a hardware problem with Apollo and that the production database was down. I looked at it from the house, saw that there was a problem, but couldn’t get much beyond that. I knew John and Guy would be looking at things already, so I dragged myself out of bed, into the shower, and out the door. I walked into my office about an hour and a half later than my usual time, and barely sat down the rest of the day.

When I got to the machine room, the raidset containing the production database was not visible from the host. That is not a good sign. There seemed to be something wrong with the disk array, but nothing that caused any errors. Performing the usual maintenance for a misbehaving computer, I turned the array off and back on. Ah ha! Something happened. Immediately after power-up, we received an indication of a failed drive — in a different raidset. However, we were also able to access the production data again, so apparently the failing drive had managed to confuse one SCSI channel. Okay, problem solved, so we thought. Trying to start the Oracle database up failed telling us that a log file needed for recovery was not present. Sure enough, it wasn’t. We never did figure out just why it wasn’t there, but that left us only one option — restore and recover from the last backup. Since a restore and recover takes several hours, it meant that the administrative system was down all day. As I write this, things are still not back, but I have confidence that Guy has things in hand and will probably have things recovered within the next hour or so.

On the plus side, I had a meeting over lunch (missing water exercise, darn) with a number of campus bigwigs. I was only there because of one aspect of the overall meeting, but it was worth it. I managed to save myself quite a bit of paperwork over the next year or two. I also saved the Provost’s office a bit of work and headache, but I’m less concerned about that aspect of it. :) It sometimes amazes me how little people who are in decision-making positions know about how the campus operates. You would think they would ask the people who do know, but I guess they would rather appear infallible. Maybe that’s why bureaucracies in general manage to make so many “interesting” decisions.

Preface
I am reasonably familiar with aspects of the Christian faith. I am substantially less familiar with any other faiths. The following is written specifically addressing religion as it concerns Christianity, but I suspect it could applied to many others as well.

Religion vs. Belief
I respond to a number of personal ads (the shotgun approach). Women seldom write back to me, but I’ve come to expect that. I’m always excited when I have a new message, even though it’s usually of the “thanks, but no thanks” sort. The other day I received a message from a woman who said that she had looked over my profile and saw that in the religion category I had listed “Spiritual but not religious”. She told me that it wouldn’t work, because she was a strong Christian and would only date a strong Christian. She’s certainly welcome to set any limits she wishes, but what part of “spiritual but not religions” implies that I’m not a strong Christian? As it happens, I’m not, but that’s not relevant.
I’m not a world traveler, and I don’t follow a lot of news, but I do read some things. It seems that far more attention is paid to someone’s religion than to that person’s beliefs. What is the difference? Maybe I can clarify what I mean by those two terms.

Outward vs. Inward
Everyone has a number of beliefs. Some are based on experience, some are based on faith, some are based on hope.
Believing that I can throw a ball up and it will come back down is a belief based on experience. “But that’s not a belief”, you may say, “That’s a fact.” Just because it may be a fact does not make it less of a belief. I can choose to believe or disbelieve facts. Just take a gander at the early Catholic Church and the Copernican model of the solar system. If I internalize it, it’s a belief, whether or not it’s a fact. The nice thing about beliefs based on experience is that many of them are shared by most of the people you come into contact with. There has to be a core shared belief system for any society to exist.
Believing that there is a God, that he sent His son to earth in human form, and that the son died and was reborn to be the propitiation for my sins is a belief based on faith. I can’t do an experiment to support that belief. (Actually, that’s not quite true. I can do exactly one, believe until I die and then see what happens. As experiments go, it fails one major test — repeatability). Whether faith-based beliefs are also fact-based beliefs depends on who you ask. I don’t know of anyone with well-documented personal experience with any deity.
Believing that I will find a girlfriend by responding to personal ads is mostly a belief based on hope. There is an element of experience there, since it has happened in the past, but it hasn’t been repeatable (yet). There is nothing wrong with a belief based on hope, but don’t expect others necessarily to share it.

All of the beliefs I have mentioned are personal. Some may be shared by others, but that is certainly not a necessity.
Religion, however, is expressed outwardly. The Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary has as its first definition “The outward act or form by which men indicate their recognition of the existence of a god or of gods having power over their destiny, to whom obedience, service, and honor are due…”. You may note that nothing in this definition requires belief, only action. That is, to me, a major problem in human society. The outward signs seem more important than the inward beliefs. Take for example the following hypothetical conversation.

“Are you a Christian?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Where do you go to church?”
“At <insert church name here>”

How many times have you heard a variant along those lines? If one is a Christian, it is assumed that one is associated with a church. Matthew 18:20 states “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (KJV) It seems that Christ had no particular need of churches. Why should men place so much emphasis on something that God doesn’t care about?

Form vs. Function
I’m amazed when I go into a computer store and see computer cases which are made of Plexiglass and have neon lights inside, or are constructed to appear aerodynamic or organic. I think of a computer as a box which sits under my desk. If it was small enough to hide the box away I would be happy about it. I’m not interested in the outward appearance of my computer, I just want it to work.
Belief is about function, religion is about form. How many times have you heard the phrase “Sunday Christian”? There are a number of people who go to church on Sunday morning and never think about it the rest of the week. A person who believes something is going to act on it, regardless of the situation. A person who is religious often acts properly only when someone else is watching. Sometimes the two systems produce the same results, other times they don’t.
When Christ was asked which of the commandments was the most important, He responded “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40 KJV). What part of this statement should make us think that it’s wrong to persecute homosexuals, ostracize divorcees, or make war on Arabs?
A person who is truly Christian doesn’t care about a person’s appearance, past or present circumstances, beliefs or religion. They should simply offer love, not condemnation. The problem is, love doesn’t sell newspapers, conflict does. This is nothing new. Just read through the Bible and you will find evidence of form vs. function time and again. In the post-biblical era, just look at the history of the Catholic church, the Crusades, the protestant reformation, etc.

My own beliefs

I was not raised in a church, so I didn’t have my expectations set as a child. I began attending a Baptist church at the age of 16 because that’s where the cutest girls in my high school went. I hoped that associating with them in that manner might help me over my social anxieties. It didn’t work, but it did introduce me to some good Christian people, and a number of “religious” people. At the time I was not a believer in a God. I wanted to make everything fit a scientific theory and believe (there’s that word again) that the fact we existed was just a fluke. As I’ve grown older, my views have changed. As I look over the world and read what little man knows of the universe, I find it very easy to believe in a creator. Whether this is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent entity or just one who was powerful enough to create a universe as a class project, I don’t have a clue. However, I simply can’t reconcile that creator with one that demands worship from his creations.
It seems silly to me to conceive of a creator that would be that petty. I also have trouble believing that man is alone in the Universe. There is simply too much out there to imagine that this one insignificant planet is the only one to develop intelligent life. Again, this doesn’t fit with my idea of a creator.
What of a soul, or an afterlife? I really hope the Christian concept of Heaven is wrong, because it sounds utterly boring. I think I would rather go to Valhalla, or somewhere that has a bit of fun. By the same token, I want to believe that there is something that continues on after this body dies. Either way, I intend to postpone finding out for as long as possible.

This weekend hasn’t gone as well as last weekend did, but it hasn’t been particularly bad, either. I took Friday off from work with the intention of spending an afternoon beside a lake. By the time I was all ready to get out, clouds had moved in, so I decided to run errands instead and use Saturday for tanning. I went into Little Rock, had the oil changed (along with air filter, PCV valve, etc), bought too many books, stopped by a shoe repair shop to have some new heels put on my black pumps, and had dinner at Sufficient Grounds. Nothing particularly exciting, but not a bad day. The only bad thing was that I was wearing my last good pair of pantyhose — brand new out of the package that afternoon. When I arrived home and was fumbling with the door key, Sandy decided she wanted to come and love on me. In doing so she shredded my hosiery and put a small hole in my leg. The leg will heal, but Hanes pantyhose are expensive.

Saturday I was supposed to go to the computer room for about an hour to for HP to change out a disk controller and upgrade firmware for a SAN switch and a FibreChannel controller while I was there. I showed up at 9:00 as did the HP rep and Guil, one of my co-workers who was to deal with the switch while I did other things. As usual when dealing with computer issues, things didn’t quite go as planned. We have the only single-controller HSG80 that our F.E. had ever seen, and that made the issue of saving the configuration an issue. Once assured by HP that I had, in fact, correctly saved it to disk, he changed out the controller. That was the only part which went well. Trying to upgrade the firmware in the HBA ended up causing the CDROM drive to be ignored by the system. Apparently the supplied upgrade instructions were a bit wrong, and mistakes at the console level have interesting consequences. Phoning the experts, turning the entire system off and on a couple of times, and typing the correct command allowed that upgrade to proceed. The switch was another matter entirely. The firmware was so far out of date on it that the current upgrade procedures didn’t work. Guil and I fought with it for a couple of hours before finally deciding to pull out a redundant switch from another SAN and place it in service until we could deal with this one sometime not on a Saturday. Between one thing and another it was after 2:00 p.m. before we left UALR. Since I was out, I ran by Dillard’s to buy more pantyhose. Naturally, given the way my day had gone, they were out of the ones I wanted. The saleslady suggested I try Preston and York as a substitute. I like them! And, even better, they are less expensive than Hanes. I stopped at an antique mall on the way home and picked up a General Electric C403 clock radio. It was listed as working, but no such luck. The clock works, but not the radio.

So far Sunday has consisted of cleaning up the house a bit, researching AM tube radios, and reading. It’s cloudy again, so I still haven’t gotten any sun this weekend. :( I now know that a GE C403 is of the type known as an All American Five, so it shouldn’t be too hard to get it working, if I can find tubes. I think I may to try to pick up a couple more from eBay or elsewhere to have as spare parts.

I really need to obtain a small audio recorder of some type. I spend quite a bit of my time in the car thinking of things I would like to write, but then lose most of them before I manage to sit down at a keyboard. I composed most of a discourse on “Belief vs. Religion” yesterday, but couldn’t reproduce it now if I had to. I need to make myself start writing more. I’ll never be an author, and I don’t know that I want to be, but writing things down sometimes helps my clarify my own thoughts.