It's late, and I need to sleep but I wanted to post this really quickly. Some things that happened tonight got me thinking very seriously about myself and my relationship with God, and I guess I got inspired.
So, this is my new desktop background: Discipline & Desire.
Only available at 1024 x 768 resolution, but I can make version for other resolutions if anyone is interested. Let me know.
It's kinda scary when people I know in, you know, REAL LIFE (not that you, you and you aren't real) start going through my site. Yes, I'm talking about you.
Figured out a nice PHP work-around for that Blogger XHTML problem, and learned all sorts of neat stuff about the PHP string type while I was at it. Funky.
Discovered Miss Norah Jones on the radio the other day. She's got the sort of soulful, soaring voice that sends your mind strolling down memories and poking at could-have-beens.
I've been getting a ton of traffic lately due to an interview I gave for Sobika, a Malagasy website. Along with all that attention has come the five most common questions on the Internet. So before you go off and IM me, here are the answers.
I'm 20.
I'm male.
I'm in California.
I do have a pic.
And yes, I'm single.
If you still have a reason to contact me, I'm more than willing. Please don't start the conversation with ASL. Thank you.
The three day weekend has given me a chance to breathe a little bit. This quarter's looking to be pretty tough. My computer science class, Algorithm Analysis and Design, is remarkably abstract and difficult. I've also been warned about my math class, Introduction to Abstract Mathematics, but personally I've been enjoying it so far. Never thought I'd say that about a math class. English is fun, as usual, and my communication class is basically a story-telling session—typically, the instructor telling stories about her ex-husband. I'm approaching this quarter with more discipline and commitment than I've previously done—I really want to do well, and I've really been intent on truly glorifying God and putting him first in my academics. It's one thing to mutter a quick prayer before a midterm you haven't studied for, it's wholly another to ask for grace to study with tests a good three weeks away and the desire to do something fun welling up inside of you. I know that if I'm committed to humbly, honestly, and fully obeying God, he's committed to giving me success in all of my endeavours. Awesome arrangement if you ask me.
Has anyone else noticed that there are a ton of design sites, especially personal portfolios, that have logos that resemble wings? I compiled a few of these logos over the past couple of months and the similarities are striking. I guess it's a new trend.
Update: Just added rhythmictwelve to the list.
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AvalonStar |
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Chapter3 |
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ClearBolt |
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designchapel |
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DigitalPrings |
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Idiocase |
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rhythmictwelve |
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thrive |
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wrecked |
It's not that these individuals are untalented—some of them represent the very best of the design community. I just found it odd that they all had similar logos.
...and man does he have some Uruk-smiting attitude.
On a nostalgic whim, I ran a Google search for "blog International School of Kenya," on the off chance that one of my old classmates from ISK might have a website. Google returned three sites, two of which pointed to a Washington Post article, 'Crossed Paths in Africa'.
I strongly encourage reading the article. To briefly summarize, American Reuben Gray was driving his son Brandon to a tutor on a road in Nairobi, Kenya, when they crashed into a vehicle driving on the wrong side of the road. The other driver, who happened to be an American diplomat, was able to leave the car on his own power, and call the U.S. Embassy, which sent American personnel to whisk him to the hospital. Gray and his son were left at the scene, and later were taken to a hospital in the back of a pick-up truck by Kenyans who had gathered at the scene of the accident. The article asserts that Gray and his son were treated differently because they are African American, and thus were mistaken for Kenyans and ignored by embassy personnel, regardless of their injuries. Reuben Gray died two days later.
I knew Mr. Gray. He was my younger brother's math teacher, and would have been my basketball coach had I not left a few months before the season started.
I also knew his son Brandon, who was a close acquaintance, if not a friend. I look at his picture in the article, and he's changed very little in seven years. He was soft-spoken and polite, a lanky kid with big glasses. We rode the same school bus, and it didn't take long for me to relate with him as a fellow science fiction fan—it was a relief to finally not be the only one. Alas, while I prefered the magic and wonder of Star Wars, Brandon was a Trekkie, which became the cause of many light-hearted arguments. In fact, the whole family was Star Trek-obsessed—mom, dad, brother and sister. They went to conventions. I think they had uniforms. They named their dog Worf, and I remember how Brandon would get so excited about watching taped episodes of Voyager that relatives had sent. I scoffed at his excitement, but I was a closet Trekkie, and had bought a copy of the Star Trek Chronology while on vacation in Singapore. I gave it to Brandon as a parting gift when I left the country. I'm not sure why—I didn't give gifts to anyone else. I guess I appreciated him for being a friend when many of my own friends had moved away a year earlier. And I think I admired him for being unabashedly true to himself, while I was always trying to be someone else.
This isn't the first time a news story personally touched me. When Al Qaeda bombed the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, I'd already been in the United States for nearly two years and likely didn't know anyone involved. Nonetheless, I scrutinized every news brief and hoped that none of the names would sound familiar. I later found out that a teammate on my soccer team lost his mother in the blast.
The Washington Post article resonates with the in-depth sketch of Mr. Gray and the description of the expatriat life in Kenya. The description of Nairobi brings back vivid memories of waking to the song of tropical birds and wrinkling my nose at the smell of coffee plantations. When my friends rail about the United Nations or US foreign policy, I'm often silent. While they see huge, impersonal—and perhaps objectionable—bureaucratic machines, I see people like Mrs. Gray and my aunt, who helps coordinate food drops in south Sudan for the World Food Program. I see people who use the framework of existing institutions to do good.
I don't know what to make of the claims that the article makes—as several letters to the editor point out, the other driver's reaction was typical of most expatriats. Although still a child, I was fully aware of the widespread corruption in Kenya, though perhaps parental discretion glossed over the seamier aspects. My father was involved in a car accident where a Kenyan was injured. My mother still uses very vague terms to describe the events of that night and the subsequent handling of the legal issues by her organization's security personnel. I was also aware of the Kenyan ideal of harambee, "let's work together." I'm not surprised that strangers gathered to help out Mr. Gray and Brandon at the scene of the accident—dozens of Kenyans did the same thing in the rubble of the American Embassy after the bombing, long before emergency personnel arrived.
In any case, I'm again reminded of the vileness and corruption of human nature, when we live in a world where sometimes it may be in one's best interest to turn one's back on injured people, American or otherwise, at an accident scene.
Had a lot of fun today (erm, yesterday). My friend John was returning from a vacation in England, and a group of us drove down to San Francisco to pick him up. We decided to make a day trip of it, and had a nice picnic on the Presidio on top of an old gun emplacement. I'd like to go into more details, but it's late and I have to get up early. The reason why I'm up so late is that I've been wrangling with my latest project, a scrollable panorama of the beach where we had our picnic. Getting it to scroll was easy, getting it to scroll while accelerating and decelerating proved far more challenging. I finally got it to work after settling for a slightly different effect than I originally intended. Not quite as complex as I intended (the code is less than 10 lines), but I'm satisfied nonetheless.
I'm probably going to regret this in the morning, but my computer now has another 2 Gigabytes of free disk space.
I deleted my mp3 collection.
Not the whole thing, but most of it. My criteria were simple: if an mp3 came from a CD that I did not own that was readily available for purchase, I deleted it.
Three events led to this purge of my illegal (yes, illegal) collection.
I recently downloaded KazaaLite, and it bothered me to watch my younger brother gleefully download and burn entire albums. This is something with which I have never been comfortable: with a few exceptions, I only downloaded one or two select mp3s from a CD. Nonetheless, my current collection put me on shaky moral ground to tell my brother to stop. This is what started me thinking about the issue.
Second, was a conversation at a recent get-together. A friend joked about the shock his ten year-old brother had when he realized that downloading and burning games was illegal. We all had a chuckle, but a friend pointed out that the boy had a point. I went into my usual self-righteous defense of "selective" downloading, but I was starting to realize how hollow that sounded.
Third, and most powerfully, was Peter's recent entry about struggling with deleting his own collection of mp3s and assorted illegal software. I sent him an e-mail encouraging him to go through with it, remembering how I scrounged up the cash to buy Flash when my free trial ran out while I was still working on the d/votional project. My motivation was a comment from a friend, who said that he couldn't expect God to bless his work if he used cracked software. I realized I could take a lesson from this myself.
Like millions of other people, I chose to ignore my conscience and go the cowardly route. It's sad to see how twisted I am as a human being: when I encounter a potential moral conflict, all too often I simply choose to overlook it, or to trivialize it. I'm hardly fond of the RIAA, but however immoral they may or may not be, it does not excuse sin on my part. I also found it interesting that the claims about rising CD sales in spite of mp3s may be false.
I'm a sinful person, and downloading mp3's illegally is hardly the most serious sin I struggle with. However, I've been repeatedly taught that the war on sin is not meant to be a surgical strike against select targets. As a Christian, I am to fight all sin in my life, in a sort of spiritual carpet bombing. Fighting the temptation to steal quite likely will contribute to my fight against murder, adultery, and idolatry, among other sins. There are no "small" sins in God's eyes.
I've attempted to be pretty thorough about this. I still have a good 800 Megabytes or so worth of mp3s, made up of live recordings, legal mp3s, mp3s from CDs either myself or my brother own, and a number of mp3s I'm not sure about. I intend to do some research on the availability of certain CDs, and pending what I find, I'll be deleting some more mp3s. I've deleted my CD burning software (cracked), KazaaLite and WinMX. My OS is also illegal: I didn't really have a choice in this, since it came with the computer, but I'm not using that as an excuse anymore. UCD students taking CS classes are actually entitled to free copies of Windows and MSOffice, so I think I'll take advantage of that as soon as school starts on Monday. To finish it all off, I'm throwing away CDs I've burned with downloaded movies and mp3s.
Safety Warning: Something I learned the hard way: if you want to get rid of CDs, please just throw them away. Breaking them first looks really dramatic, but they tend to splinter into sharp pieces that you can cut you.
Something interesting just occured to me. Ephesians 4:28 says "He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need." Now that I've fulfilled the first part, God is calling me to make up for what I've done. I've stolen creative work, now it's my turn to make my own. Somehow, I know he will bless me in this.
This entry was originally supposed to be titled "Aliotsy Goes for a Run," but instead of writing an entry, Aliotsy collapsed in exhaustion. So he's writing it a day late. And he's starting to comprehend the twisted pleasure people get out of refering to themselves in the third person. Anyways...
Aliotsy Goes for a Run
"Hey there!"
"You look familiar..."
"I'm your Second Wind."
"Wow. It's been a while. Like, two years."
"You haven't had me around much. Need a hand?"
"Actually, this run feels pretty good...it's been a while since I felt that. Would like to finish strong, though."
"Ah. You aren't quite in competition shape anymore, are you? Slacker."
"Hey, are you gonna help me out or not?"
"I dunno, Tubby."
"Oi! If you're gonna name call, I'll do just fine without you, thank you very much."
"No biggie. Give me a reason to come back."
"2004."
"2004? As in Athens?"
"Uh-huh. The Olympics."
"You're delusional."
"Hey, everybody needs dreams."
"Yeah, looking at you, I'd guess you've spent the past two years dreaming of a Big Mac and fries, super-sized."
"That's it! We're through! I'll finish without you!"
And I did. I've been going out for runs lately. I've tried other running programs so far, but none as successful as this one (not saying much, huh?).
The basic premise is the same: go out for 20 minutes, and build up from there. I employed a different strategy this time, though. Previously, I'd let my sprinter instinct take over, and went out until I felt I couldn't go any further, take a five minute rest, then turn around, finish up whatever time I had left to run, and walk the rest home. Typically, this meant that I ran for 10 to 15 minutes, rested for 5, ran 5 more, than walked the rest.
This time, I utilized a far more brutal strategy. I'd run for 10 minutes, turn around and run for 10 more or until I got home, whichever took longer. No walking, no stopping until I touch my front door.
I started the Saturday before Christmas, and it was painful. Some friends from church saw me and came by to see if I was alright...they said they were "concerned." Hehe. My 20 minutes ran out long before I got home, so my run actually came out to about 30 minutes. It hurt, but man did it feel good to finish. I was tempted to stop often: when my calves started burning 5 minutes into the run, when I reached the halfway point (when I usually stop anyways), when my calves burned on the way back, when I finally hit the 20 minute mark (that was my goal, why go further?), then every step of the way home. But through prayer, I persevered.
I didn't run that Sunday (church basically takes up the whole day), Monday was Christmas shopping, Tuesday was various Christmas Eve activities, Wednesday was a whole day's worth of Christmas activities, so I didn't get back to running for a good five days. Thursday was almost as painful as Saturday, but I could already sense my endurance building.
Friday, I met up with some old high school buddies to play tackle football. I postponed my run, since our games get physical. This one was no exception. On a botched pass play, two defenders leapt for an interception and collided in mid-air in a display of spectacular acrobatics. One got the wind knocked out of him pretty badly, and we ended up taking him to his father's clinic, ending the game prematurely. Hope he's alright.
I ran again on Saturday, again feeling painful and struggling to finish, and again I did, through much prayer. I took Sunday off again, and ran Monday. That felt spectacular! I guess the previous runs built up my pain threshold, because I went at a slightly faster pace without feeling nearly as badly as I did for the first few runs. I fasted Tuesday, in preparation for the New Year, and decided not eating and running should not go together. For the first time since I started running, I was disappointed that I could not go out for a run. I'm actually excited about running tomorrow (today!), which is a good sign if I want to make this part of my daily routine.
I drew a spiritual parallel with running during my last outing. It's kind of like hanging by your fingertips at the rim of a bottomless abyss. Around your legs, a great beast grapples at you, trying to pull you downward while you desperately hang onto the ledge. And even though you fear what may be at the bottom of that abyss, you are tempted to let go and just fall—it's much easier than trying to hold on by your own strength. But praise God, there's another way out. Christ stands above you, offering His hand to pull you up and out of the abyss. This calls for an act of trust: we must not trust in our own strength, hanging onto the edge by our fingertips, and instead trust Christ, letting go and reaching out to Him. Even if we fall, He will catch us.
