Two questions for husbands

A brilliant piece of writing from Love & Stosny's how to improve your marriage without talking about it:

Remember the famous Far Side cartoon of the man talking at length to his dog, Ginger? One bubble had what the man said and the other had what Ginger heard. The man said a lot, but this is what Ginger heard:

"Blah blah Ginger blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Ginger blah blah blah blah blah ..."

Unless a woman is emotionally connected to her partner, this is what he will hear when she talks to him:

"Blah, blah, blah, failure. Blah, blah, blah, not good enough. Blah, blah, blah, can't meet my needs. Blah, blah, blah, bad boy."

p. 26

They don't mean that Ginger is as smart as the average husband, because they have a similar passage for what a woman hears when her husband talks. The difference is that "failure" (etc) is replaced by "I don't love you," "I won't be there for you," etc.

Can't we stop hurting each other? We probably can't stop altogether, but we probably can hope for better days. Of course I have a plan; it'll probably improve things over a 20-30 year period. It has two parts, wherein a husband must cement his answers to two important questions:

The first question: Whose am I?

... that is, "To whom do I belong?" E. Stanley Jones said that this question, rather than the one below, is the most important question in any person's life.

The answer? If you belong to The Master, Jesus, I recommend that you reach out to him in prayer daily, maybe something like this:

Lord Jesus, you are full of grace and truth, but I am weak and easily distracted. Help me give myself for my wife as you gave yourself for the church. Give me power to understand and to know your astonishing love. What words do you want to say to my wife today through me?

And if she has some discouraging words for me, help me to know what's truly about me, vs what's about her. Help me to remember that you define me; she doesn't. You are my light and my salvation--who shall I fear? You are the stronghold of my life.

When I remember that I belong to Jesus, I'm a better husband, a better employee, a better neighbor. And now for ...

The other question: Who am I?

If I don't know who I am, I'll just bounce around, foolish, disobedient, led astray, a slave to various passions and pleasures, filling my days with malice and envy, hated by men and hating them in return (Titus 3:3), and so on. If we want to be men rather than beasts, there are a few other things we can and should do:

• Relax. Get enough sleep. We'll have a hard time remembering whose or who we are when we're stressed out.
• Say "No" more often. The Master did that a lot; he never let anyone else set his agenda.
• Take time to be alone, or whatever you need to do, to take care of yourself.
• Give thanks daily.
• As Buechner wrote in Secrets in the Dark, there are times when it is quiet and you don't really have to do anything, when
  

  [t]he time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming.
  

  p. 59

  Often we escape: in chores or other busy-ness, media (printed or electronic), etc. But sometimes we need to take time to do what the time is ripe for. Not to escape, but to look back, think about where we've come from, where we're headed, and so on.

The point of all these is to remain centered, to remember who we are.

And part of who you are is husband. You represent Christ to your wife, as I do to the lovely Carol. Let's ask God to help us remember that we belong to him, and to remember what we are about. Because it's really impossible to do well without his help.

Addendum: a point from the Japanese

When we were in Japan, I learned two words translated "help" in English. One is transliterated "tasukeru" and the other is "sukuu". The first is used when you're, say, trying to carry a heavy load and you'd like a hand. The second is when you're drowning and you need someone to throw you a rope.

When I talk about help from God so I can remember whose and who I am, it's this last I'm talking about.

vga=? hello mac mini

Continuing from my earlier posting, I tried booting with vga=0x31b but this mode was hated. What I got instead was this is unrecognized... it offered me a much narrower range of stuff, I mean I got ... whoa,
(EE) open /dev/fb0: No such file or directory
so that didn't work very well. How about 0x318 for vga? Nah, same thing:

Probing EDD (edd=off to disable)... ok
Undefined video mode number: 318
Press <ENTER> to see video modes available...

Oh, I didn't hit any key so it just continued with fb off. So there won't be a /dev/fb0 to use. Oddly enough, 0x305 doesn't appear in the list of modes, if you say "scan". but it works.

I wonder... would 307 work? Nope. They offer me this list:

0 F00   80x25
1 F01   80x50
2 F02   80x43
3 F03   80x28
4 F05   80x30
5 F06   80x34
6 F07   80x60
7 301  640x480x8
8 303  800x800x8
9 311  640x480x16
Enter a video mode or "scan" to scan for additional modes:

If I type "scan" (no quotes) then I get the same list. Oh, the quote mark just gets dumped anyway. OK, if I type "305" (no quotes) I get what the old one looked like. H'm...

OK, so at that prompt, it won't take any of the 1280x1024 modes, and the only 1024x768 mode it *will* take is 305. This is with opensuse 11.0 loaded.

Suppose I make defaultfbbpp 8 and same for defaultdepth? That will result in a supremely ugly screen, but if fbdev doesn't crash the box, well, then worse things have happened, right? So let me change DefaultDepth=8 and startx.

OK, it does seem to start. Sort of. OK, I started the teen's screen, 1024x768, 8 bits per pixel, very ugly. But will it freeze? I guess I'll find out.... YES. Still freezes. Pingable, but my pre-existing ssh session doesn't respond. Hitting NumLock does not change state of the LED. ctl-alt-backspace, ctl-alt-delete, no response.

Maybe it *is* the RAM and I have to run memtestX86 really for 24 hours?? I'll start it. What is it now, 6pm? Okay....

Meanwhile, it looks like a mac mini is about $700 :(

Father's Day

Today is Father's Day. I wrote about my own dad in 2006, and a little last year about fathers in general. But I thought I'd try to summarize some of the things my dad did that make him a great father.

• He modeled his values to me. Does he preach these? No, he lives them:
  • Empathy: try to see thing from the other person's point of view. He didn't talk a lot about this, but when I remarked that something (a caterpillar?) was funny-looking, he remarked that I probably looked funny to that caterpillar, too.
  • "The people that made this thing weren't magicians. They made it; we can take it apart (and maybe fix it)." This isn't to say "I can do anything", but just a reminder not to give up too early.
  • Kindness: don't make someone feel bad without a really good reason. He was rather annoyed with a colleague who had ridiculed someone else. The deed was done; why make him feel worse?
  • Thrift is good, but never buy something you think might be stolen. It came out that a highly-paid individual at the office had bought a stolen TV set. He didn't have to tell me never to do that; his disdain for that guy stuck with me.
• I wrote about this 3½ years ago, but Dad taught me to do things by doing them with me -- how to wash the car, how to overhaul the cylinders and adjust drum brakes, this sort of thing.
• He always appreciates the food Mom prepares.
• "I'm proud of you!" There are a lot of guys who never hear that from their fathers. I'm glad to say Dad said that to me many times as I was growing up, and he hasn't stopped. Not to say I'm so great, but he makes me feel like I'm great.

Odd that I think of these things now that the kids are all but gone. I like to think I've practiced them as they grew up.

You may have noticed that I don't write as much about my mom as I do about my dad. This is not to say she's not a terrific mom too! I suppose, though, that I think about Dad's example more than Mom's because he's the one I more naturally emulate.

Dad, if you're reading this, I hope the rest of your Father's Day is a great one!

Is this worth the trouble? Well, if there's no opposition...

So I've been part of a team doing sermon study guides for our church. Here's how it works. For any given weekend, two of us sign up to crank it out. We get sermon notes by Thursday, and collaborate on the weekend's guide, which we send to the staff guy by Saturday morning. He polishes it up and posts it on the website (example sermon page and study guide).

This week was a little rough. My partner in crime, who like my lovely wife happens to be named "Carol", had a pile of stuff suddenly come up -- work-related things that ended up taking a whole lot of her time. This is not a frequent or regular occurrence for her (we've collaborated in the past more than once). And though you may find this hard to believe, there were some enthusiastic discussions in my house about how much time I was spending on projects -- not just the sermon study guide, but also on trying to upgrade the computer, etc.

Anyway, we produced the guide and sent it off by Friday morning (yes, we finished early). As Carol and I discussed the guide, she mentioned how all these things had come up suddenly in her life.

That's when it hit me. That was no coincidence. I believe there are spiritual forces at work in the world today, and not all of these forces are good. You might think that's silly, but my observation is that often, when we're involved with serving God or serving the Church, pardon my French but merde happens.

And when stuff like that happens, I take it as a reminder that we're doing something important (otherwise they wouldn't bother).

Before that Friday morning discussion, I was wondering if this was all worth it. Couldn't I leave the sermon study guides to someone else? It seemed like it wasn't worth the trouble. But that Friday morning talk reminded me that some kinds of trouble might be a sign that what we're doing absolutely is important, that it is worth the trouble.

When there's no trouble, when there's no opposition, I guess that's when it's time to wonder if we're doing anything worthwhile.

More pain: OpenSUSE 11.1 on my Dell OptiPlex GX270

I've been saying for several days now that the next computer I buy will be a Mac mini or something of its ilk. I'm getting too old for these sysadmin challenges at home.

The old Dell was running a four-year-old OS (SUSE Linux 9.3 Professional), which had its issues (couldn't run flash10, can't order printing online from kinkos.com, can't run ffox3). Not to mention the scorn heaped upon my computer by the ex-teen's Penguinista friend. Therefore, I thought I'd install the latest stable opensuse distro, which was a lot harder than it should have been. The NFS, printing, and sound were not a real huge issue, but having the box freeze (keyboard and mouse have no effect -- I mean NumLock doesn't even toggle the LED; ctrl-alt-backspace, ctrl-alt-f1, all useless -- can ping, can't ssh in) is quite frustrating.

I asked my Linux buddies at work. Is it a driver issue? I tried replacing "intel" (with quotes) by "fbdev" in xorg.conf -- got no graphics at all. That was easier than updating the BIOS, which I tried next.

No-Windows BIOS upgrade procedure

Careful observation during bootup told me that the GX270 was running the ancient A02 BIOS (short for April 2002??); the latest (and therefore greatest?) seems to be A07. But I had a problem: you're supposed to run this under ’doze :( Now I have a partition on the HDD marked HPFS/NTFS, but of course it has an ext2 filesystem on it. I really (I mean really) don't do windows on this box.

The good news though was that this could be run under DOS, for example FreeDOS. Yippee! But wait. Suppose I burn the CD image onto a CD-R and run it in "live CD" mode. How do I get it to run GX270A07.EXE? I mean, I downloaded it to an ext2 or maybe a reiserfs filesystem, which DOS manifestly doesn't grok. (Smart-alecks out there may refrain from suggesting I write an ext2-to-FAT shim for FreeDOS.) I thought, OK, I'll put it on a floppy disk. I actually have a few of these lying around, and my not-so-trusty GX270 even has a floppy drive! Yippee!

But though I found several disks lying around, they mostly seem to hate the GX270's disk drive. I finally wrote the A07 file onto a floppy, and burned a FreeDOS CD. Oh joy!

Booted FreeDOS, and with the floppy in the drive, typed:

A:\> B:GX270A07.EXE

Nothing happened. Thinking no news was good news, I rebooted the box and wasn't too happy to see BIOS VERSION: A02 on the screen.

What?? Then it occurred to me -- usually programs like this tell you to hit <ENTER> to confirm whatever operation. I saw nothing like that. What to do, what to do? Should I try to find a "good" floppy? Heck, I didn't even know if the floppy drive was any good! Maybe I could burn a CD with the BIOS upgrade on it?

Well, FreeDOS gives you the option of booting in real mode, HIMEM, and one other. At least one of those options lets you see the actual CD as the "X:" drive. "D'oh!" I said to myself. Booting the FreeDOS live CD means it's executing from RAM. I typed "dir X:" at the command prompt and got the actual contents of the CD. Another "D'oh!" -- the CD was DOS/windows compatible by virtue of having that iso9660 Joliet thing on it.

The thought then was: boot the FreeDOS CD "live" (I had no intention of installing DOS on my HDD -- where would I put it?) and run from RAM. Then eject that CD and put the GX270A07.EXE CD into the drive, and say "X:\GX270A07.EXE" at the command prompt.

Brilliant. I found a CD-RW blank and put the BIOS file onto it. Actually I had both A06 and A07....

Booted from the FreeDOS CD-ROM and typed "DIR X;" and got "No such file". What??

In my haste I made a typo -- made the same typo several times in a row actually before finally, carefully, holding the shift key down so that I had the right command:

A:\> DIR X:

That is, a colon, not a semicolon. Once I determined that I could read the files, I issued the fateful

A:\> X:GX270A07.EXE

I said "yes" (twice I think) and rebooted. Was I ever happy to see BIOS VERSION A07 on the screen!

But that wasn't quite enough

But logging in as the teenager still produced a blank screen. Well, almost blank. Also, if I did "startx -- :1" first, then I still, reliably got a freeze. No mouse, no keyboard. Next up: Bad RAM?

I inserted the OpenSUSE 11.1 DVD and selected memory test. We went to church and returned, and MEMTESTX86+ has gone seven full passes with no errors whatsoever. I'm thinking it's not the RAM. Well, the 11.0 HCL page says that everything works under 11.0 on a GX270, so my next theory is that switching to 11.0 will result in a happier box. Pipe dream? I hope not! I'm burning an 11.0 image right now.

Someone suggested that maybe I need to find a cheap well-supported video card (one of those low-end ATI or matrox cards), "but that shouldn't be necessary." Well, I hope not. I swear the next box is gonna be a mac mini.

11.0: No joy

Well, that didn't work. I still get a freeze. ping: yes, ssh: no. Also keyboard useless.

I grabbed a couple of video cards from the office -- both in computers not currently being used. One needs the wrong kind of AGP slot. The other plugs into a PCI slot, but yast2 hung when trying to probe it or something. I could still ssh in, so I became root and said "shutdown -h 0". that didn't do anything until I killed a few processes with HUP and some others with KILL. So I don't think these cards are gonna help me.

Next up is the framebuffer. I'm starting now (5pm) by just replcing "intel" with "fbdev" (with the quotes), like:

Section "Device"
  BoardName    "865 G"
  BusID        "0:2:0"
  Driver       "fbdev"
  Identifier   "Device[0]"
  Option       "NoDDC"
  Vendorname   "Intel"
EndSection 

I know from experience this won't work, but I want to see the messages. OK, this gives "AddScreen/ScreenInit failed for driver 0" (no quotes). The log has:

(II) Module fbdevhw: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
        compiled for 1.5.2, module version = 0.0.2
        ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 4.1
(**) FBDEV(0): claimed PCI slot 0@0:2:0
(II) FBDEV(0): using default device
(II) resource ranges after probing:
        [0] -1  0       0xffffffff - 0xffffffff (0x1) MX[B]
        [1] -1  0       0x000f0000 - 0x000fffff (0x10000) MX[B]
        [2] -1  0       0x000c0000 - 0x000effff (0x30000) MX[B]
        [3] -1  0       0x00000000 - 0x0009ffff (0xa0000) MX[B]
        [4] -1  0       0x0000ffff - 0x0000ffff (0x1) IX[B]
        [5] -1  0       0x00000000 - 0x00000000 (0x1) IX[B]
(**) FBDEV(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32
(==) FBDEV(0): RGB weight 888
(==) FBDEV(0): Default visual is TrueColor
...lots of stuff...
(==) Depth 24 pixmap format is 32 bpp
(II) do I need RAC?  No, I don't.
(II) resource ranges after preInit:
      ...elided...
(EE) FBDEV(0): FBIOPUT_VSCREENINFO succeeded but modified mode
(EE) FBDEV(0): mode initialization failed 

Somebody said that the problem had to do with this line:
(**) FBDEV(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32
so the thing to do was, per the above,

Adding "DefaultFbBpp 24" to the "Screen" section and running with 32 bits
depth ("DefaultDepth 32") solves this problem

But hold on a sec, my log has this:

(II) FBDEV(0): checking modes against framebuffer device...
(II) FBDEV(0):  mode "1280x1024" test failed
(II) FBDEV(0): checking modes against monitor...
(--) FBDEV(0): Virtual size is 1024x768 (pitch 1024)
(**) FBDEV(0):  Built-in mode "current": 78.7 MHz, 59.9 kHz, 75.7 Hz
(II) FBDEV(0): Modeline "current"x0.0   78.65  1024 1056 1184 1312  768 772 776 
792 -hsync -vsync -csync (59.9 kHz)

Why would that fail? Ha, because I have the wrong vga mode, that's why:

collin@p4:~> cat /proc/cmdline 
root=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_Maxtor_6Y080L0_Y24H85SE-part6 resume=/dev/sda2 splash=silent vga=0x305
collin@p4:~> 

That 0x305 vga says 1024x768 with 256 colors, according to this page OK, so lemme try with vga=0x31B... Think I'll continue in another post.

You don't... do you???

Dicussing possible meeting venues on the phone with Philip the other day, I pointed out that Togo's across the street serves beer.

"Do you drink beer?" he asked. He was flabbergasted.

In contrast, several weeks ago when I walked into the cafeteria, Dave said to Kong, "Better refill your beer before Collin gets up there."

Yesterday, in a meeting with Philip, he thought I was a vegetarian. So I had to say it. "You think I don't drink beer, you think I don't eat meat... you probably think I'm a virgin, too!"

My wife and teen-ager found this story hilarious.

Creation and the good things of life

Apropos of this weekend's sermon, here's a thought from Merton about enjoyment:

It gives great glory for God for a person to live in this world using and appreciating the good things of life without care, without anxiety, and without inordinate passion. In order to know and love God through His gifts, we have to use them as if we used them not (I Corinthians 7:31)—and yet we have to use them. For to use things as if we used them not means to use them without selfishness, without fear, without afterthought, and with perfect gratitude and confidence and love of God.

Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island, p. 100

Our sermon this weekend made the related point that when we stand in wonder at creation, it helps us to relax, to slow down, to cease striving, as we're told in Psalm 46:10 (NASB NIV). When I consider the heavens, the work of God's hands, my own sense of importance fades (Psalm 8); I get a little perspective on just how important my plans and projects really aren't.

When we enjoy the good things of this life, we proclaim God's goodness and generosity and faithfulness. Of course I'm relaxed; my master gives me way more good things in this life than I deserve, and I don't believe he's going to change next week or next year. (At least that's how I want to be!)

This is not about sloth; this is about fully enjoying, fully relaxing, fully trusting.

So I'm going to practice. Though I have a busted optiplex GX270 (possibly related to its ancient A02 BIOS interacting with something in OpenSUSE 11.1) I'm going into the great outdoors, to be completely unproductive for a while.