life in mordor :: mike frizzell’s blog

If you’re American, happy Independence Day. If you aren’t, then just go about your business and don’t mind the loud, abnoxious Americans. We really do mean well.

From Douglas Wilson

I believe in plodding. Productivity is more a matter of diligent, long-distance hiking than it is one-hundred-yard dashing. Doing a little bit now is far better than hoping to do a lot on the morrow. So redeem the fifteen minute spaces. Chip away at it. For example, I have a stack of six books that I am working through most weekday mornings — a page or two of each every time I sit down to read. I do the same thing with writing — if you have time for a little bit, then do a little bit.

A Prayer for CONGRESS, to be used during their Session

Most gracious God, we humbly beseech thee, as for the Peoples of these United States in general, so especially for their Senate and Representatives in Congress assembled; That thou wouldest be pleased to direct and prosper all their consultations, to the advancement of thy Glory, the good of thy Church, the safety, honour, and welfare of thy people; that all things may be so ordered and settled by their endeavours, upon the best and surest foundations, that peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety, may be established among us for all generations.  These and all other necessaries, for them, for us, and thy whole Church, we humbly beg in the Name and meditation of Jesus Christ, our most blessed Lord and Saviour.  Amen.

(from the 1790 First Edition of the 1789 U.S. Book of Common Prayer.)

Ben Witherington critiques Frank Viola and George Barna’s Pagan Christianity (part 2, part 3). He does a good job of exposing the bias and academic trickery behind the book. (Although I do think it asks some of the right questions, as I wrote here.)

While OS X offers you plenty of good tools to get into the geekier side of your computer, monitoring your system can be a bit difficult.  Enter iStat Menus, which gives the user the ability to monitor everything from temperature to RAM usage to network bandwidth from the menu bar.  Available for free at iSlayer.com (although if you like it you should donate), iStat Menus will soon become an invaluable part of your Mac.

Getting Started
In order to get started, all you have to do is click on iStat Menus under Other in System Preferences.  From there, you can customize it as much as you want. 

(click here for a larger version)

Menu Bar
Without running any app (like Activity Monitor), you can easily see how much hard drive space remaining, how much RAM you’re using, how much of the CPU is in use (both Cores), system temperature, network usage (including BlueTooth), and it includes a nifty calendar.  You don’t have to activate all of these, only those you want.

Calendar
The calendar replacement is one of the reasons I installed iStat Menus in the first place.  It takes the standard OS X time/calendar and replaces it with an iCal interface.  Not only can you see the time and date right from the menu bar, but you can also expand it to include the entire month.  From there you can open up iCal.  Definitely an improvement from the stock system time.

Temperature
For anyone using a laptop, the temperature monitor is very useful.  From the menu bar you can see how hot your system is running at, but it also expands to include separate component temps.

An interesting side note: I never would have thought that wi-fi was the hottest thing running in my laptop.  As you can see, it’s at least 15 degrees hotter than the CPU.

Network
The second most useful menu is the network usage meter.  From the menu bar you can see how muchbandwidth you’re using (up and down).  This is useful not only to see if someone is stealing your wi-fi or if some app is calling home, but also to see if you’re being throttled.  (Interestingly, my semi-slow connection here in Springfield can always reach the peak of 10mbs.)

Expanding the menu lets you see peak bandwidth, current usage, Bluetooth connections, your ip address, and how much you’ve downloaded/uploaded.  I’ve yet to find a way to keep the meter beyond one session, so it only records network usage for essentially one day (unless I never shut my laptop down).  I would like to know how much I’ve downloaded over a longer period, like a month.

CPU
Arguably the geekiest menu is the CPU monitor.  I will admit to knowing next to nothing about this kind of stuff, but it’s a useful menu nonetheless.  From the menu bar you can see how well your processor is performing, including each core if you have a Dual Core Intel system.  Expanding the menu reveals usage percentages, a nice visual graph, the top five programs in terms of CPU usage, load averages, processes, etc.  You can even run Activity Monitor from here in order to stop whatever process is killing your CPU. 

Hard Drive
A less useful menu, although some may need it, is the hard drive monitor.  I don’t usually keep it in the menu bar, mainly because I already know how much hard drive space I have left.  Although, from the expanded menu you can see your read/write speed.  If you’re having some problems with a drive, this would be a useful diagnostic tool. 

RAM
Along with the CPU, the RAM menu is extremely important.  From the menu bar, you see a simple thermometer style meter that shows how much of your RAM is in use.   This in it itself provides a good indicator of whether you are doing too much and whether or not you need more RAM.  Since my meter tends to run high, it’s obvious my MacBook needs more memory.

From the expanded menu, you can see see the actual numbers, how much wired, inactive, active, and free RAM you have.  You can also see what apps are using up most of your memory, which in my case is Safari.  Again, from this menu you can quickly bring up Activity Monitor.

Conclusion
iStat Menus is a great piece of software, especially for the obsessive-compulsive types who have to know every little thing about their systems.  It allows you to look under the hood of your computer and see what’s actually going on in there.  I know there’s a myth that people who use Macs aren’t interested in this kind of stuff, but that’s just flat out wrong. 

Philip S. Foner, Labor and the American Revolution, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976

The American Revolution can be approached from many different angles. Some scholars write from the perspective of the leaders, the soldiers, the female population, or the slave community, each attempting to show a different perspective. Philip S. Foner, following a call by Herbert Morais, seeks to resurrect the forgotten story of the working class in colonial America.

In this book Foner seeks to change the predominant idea that the American Revolution was a conservative movement. The Revolution, according to Foner, was not merely a separation between America and England, but a revolutionary struggle that pitted social class against social class in an attempt by the working class to change their circumstances.

Continue Reading…

There’s an interesting meme spreading through the interwebs about zombies.  Imagine you’re in a shopping mall and suddenly zombies attack.  What would you do?  Here are the rules:

• You get one weapon.
• You get one song to listen to.
• You get one famous person to help you.

There are no limitations on the weapon, although a gun that doesn’t run out of ammo isn’t real and a nuclear bomb isn’t really an option.  Also, while you can choose a fictional character to help you, restraint would be appreciated.  So, you probably shouldn’t choose Dumbledore, but Harry Potter might be okay.  (This is a modification of the original rules.)

Here are my answers:

Weapon
A lightsaber would be nice, but the odds of me chopping my head off would be about 1:1.  Same goes for a sword.  A shotgun would be good (seems to work in most zombie movies), but I would have to carry around a lot of shells to take care of all the zombies; plus, reload time would kill me.  Some kind of mech suit would be nice, but I think the zombies might be able to overwhelm me as I slowly move through the mall.  So, my weapon of choice would be the Halo 3 chaingun.  Granted, I would still have to carry around ammo, but the time between reloads would be fairly spaced out.

Song
If you’re going to kill zombies, anything but heavy metal seems out of place (unless it’s a John Williams score).  Therefore, my song would be Die, Die My Darling by Metallica.  It’s a pretty short song, so I would have to listen to it about 100 times.

Famous Person
This is a tough one.  Alice from Resident Evil would be a good choice, as she has some experience in this department.  Bruce Campbell from the Evil Dead films would work too, plus he’s pretty funny.  Someone good at killing, like Darth Vader or Conan the Barbarian, would do.  But what I need is someone who is good at hand-to-hand combat, good with range weapons, and clever enough to get me out of any bad situations.  My choice: Chuck Norris.

Now it’s your turn; answer the questions here or pass it along at your own blog.

Here’s a good question at The Church and Postmodern Culture: what do you do about July 4th weekend church meetings?  More specifically, if you are visiting family and their church has a very patriotic meeting, how do you respond?  Would you choose to attend in order to avoid offense?  Would you choose to not attend?  Would you confront your family members and/or their church leadership?

My thoughts run fairly negatively on nationalist displays in church buildings.  I don’t think American flags, the Pledge of Allegiance, the National Anthem, etc. belong in a worship meeting directed towards God.  While I acknowledge the freedoms we enjoy here in America, including that of religion, patriotic displays have no place in our liturgies.  At best, it blurs the line between church and state; at worst, it is outright paganism.

That said, it doesn’t seem appropriate to confront people with whom you do not worship.  I would simply choose to not attend such a service and have a frank conversation with my family.  I would encourage my family members to consider all that the Scriptures say about the state and whether we have gone a bit overboard (and, of course, open myself up to be taught; I could be wrong).  I would encourage them to take the issue up with their church, but not do it myself.  

Now, if the service is in your own church, well that’s a different question.

Here’s a clip from The Colbert Report with Bishop N.T. Wright.  I was worried for him in this interview, but he did a great job and really got his points across.

It is obvious this church has fallen into the heresy of bad grammar, which was condemned at the Council of Strunk and White of 1918.

HT: Apostrophe Abuse