the P.Pole v.2.1

I went to register for my fourth and final year in Victoria Park C. I. yesterday. Seeing some school-time acquaintances (even though Facebook insists that they are friends) and the halls of my academic home for the past three years after such a long absence as only summer holidays can afford gave me an almost nostalgic feeling. The peeling paint in the cafetorium was being painted over as I walked in yesterday and it felt strange that they should begin fixing up the school now. I quite liked the worn look of the place.

As for my timetable, I’m thrilled, absolutely thrilled (no really, that’s not sarcasm hiding in those italics) at my coming year’s setup. This might be the very first time I’ve gotten the best of all worlds in terms of who I have to teach me. To recap, in grade nine I had Quejada (ver. Prego 1.0) for English, which switched to Usprech (the IB coordinator) when she left for maternity leave. This wasn’t fun to begin with, but ended up quite nice. In grade ten I had Quejada (with a vengeance) again, but for History this time. I also got Messere (bless his heart) for Economics, which was, what I thought at first, terrible, since I had been hassled (read: “yelled at”) by him when he sub’d one of my math classes during the first semester of grade ten. Grade eleven landed me with a full year of quite possibly the worst teacher I’ve ever encountered, Olsheski. She has aspirations to head over to Geneva (Switzerland, I think) to be an IBO employee/teacher/etc. (good luck). I’ve ranted about her before so I won’t go into things again.

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I’ve thoroughly tinkered with Ubuntu and spent quite a deal of time on tweaking and setting up my desktop. I now know a lot more about Ubuntu and how it works (completely differently from Windows obviously). I’ve also got a list of applications I’ve tried out and decided worthy of keeping for Ubuntu.

10 of my killer Ubuntu apps:
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You’re a falling star, you’re the getaway car.
You’re the line in the sand when I go too far.
You’re the swimming pool, on an August day.
And you’re the perfect thing to say.

And you play it coy, but it’s kinda cute.
Ah, When you smile at me you know exactly what you do.
Baby don’t pretend, that you don’t know it’s true.
Cause you can see it when I look at you.

And in this crazy life, and through these crazy times
It’s you, it’s you, you make me sing.
You’re every line, you’re every word, you’re everything.

You’re a carousel, you’re a wishing well,
And you light me up, when you ring my bell.
You’re a mystery, you’re from outer space,
You’re every minute of my everyday.

And I can’t believe, uh that I’m your man,
And I get to kiss you baby just because I can.
Whatever comes our way, ah we’ll see it through,
And you know that’s what our love can do.

And in this crazy life, and through these crazy times
It’s you, it’s you, You make me sing
You’re every line, you’re every word, you’re everything.
You’re every song, and I sing along.
‘Cause you’re my everything.
- Michael Buble, Everything

Not much to say except that this song was played at the last LoaH and I really like it (this one, not so much their version). That will be all.

This morning I began my first earnest venture into the world of Linux, starting with the n00bie friendly Ubuntu Province. This required me scapping my entire XP-Vista dual boot and a whole day’s worth of installing, configuring, borking, reinstalling, and reconfiguring. Sure I could’ve spent more time reading tutorials and less time fidgeting with things beyond me, but that’s neither adventurous nor fun. Anyway, at this moment I am writing from Opera, on a fresh Vista install (from scratch). I would’ve written from Ubuntu if I wasn’t currently in the middle of grabbing a copy of Bioshock through Vista.

There were some casualties along the pilgrimage to open-sourced holy ground, most notably my Haruhi episodes stored on my first partitioned drive. Somehow Ubuntu’s Gparted partitioning software accidentally labelled my “Cartoons” drive as empty and cleared it out. It’s not a big deal since I’ve watched everything in there and I can just as easily redownload the files I really want (i.e. Haruhi goodness). I also have yet to get either of the OSes to give me any MP3 playback capabilities (I have audio system cues in Ubuntu, not Vista, but neither can play any songs). I’m assuming these are unrelated problems and not due to broken hardware.

I am really loving Ubuntu’s awesome eye-candy (any Windows or even Mac users could be jealous) but am also finding the somewhat complicated (for n00bists like myself) install procedures. Ubuntu really handles differently from Windows, in that it takes a lot more self-investigation and tinkering to get things to work just right. I’ve had to look up countless tutorials on different ways to get software loaded up on Linux and I’ll still be relying on those kinds of “read me” type pages to get me through the initial “break in” period of new OSes.

More on this later (with screenies too)!

A few days ago, I heard on the radio that a Priest of the Church of England had sought advice from a marketing expert to get ideas to attract a greater audience since in Britain, more people go to shop on a Sunday than attend service. The radio host had used the term “trying to sell God” in reference to this and this was quite alarming to myself. It’s a dismal state we’re in, when the privilege to meet your maker on a Sunday is overshadowed by a mundane task such as heading out to the local mall for a look-see.

The phrase “sell God” really got my attention since I suppose that’s how many people (Christians included) happen to see evangelism. Coming to know God could very go along in the same list as getting that expensive new computer or buying a luxury vehicle. It’s something nice to have if you’ve got the time for it and if it’s presented by the salesman just the right way.

One way to make a relationship with our Creator extremely attractive is to paint the horror stories of what would happen if you didn’t know God so vividly that you could hope to scare your listeners into coming to Christ. Here’s a quote from a post I read on Pulpit Magazine:

It seems that many of today’s gospel presentations are geared to trap someone into a logical corner where reason dictates that they make a commitment to follow Christ. Reason does make this demand, and so does Jesus. But Jesus structured this command in a way that caused the person to ask, “Is Christ more valuable than everything in life?” Most of our gospel presentations ask, “Do you want to go to hell? If not, then follow Christ.”

This is another case of one of those “Half-empty or half-full” paradoxes. On one hand, yes, if you do not know Christ you will go to hell, and yet convincing people to want to know Christ solely because of fear of hell does not agree with the Biblical model for evangelism. Christ is to be treasured, not conned into signing up for.

Just FYI, the 2006/2007 and 2007/2008 Hosanna Planning Committees went to Emily Provincial Park this past weekend for the annual pre-year end retreat that Arthur likes to hold. Not everyone could make it but we had nine of us there and Pastor Matthew Gunn to give us four messages over the course of the three days. I’ve worked with Matt before (when we went to Longlac on a STM last year for two weeks) and he has shown himself to be nothing short of an earnest, although more than slightly awkward, minister of the Word of God. Here are the messages he had to give to us while we were there: › Continue reading

Sick of constantly hearing about how awesome the R&C series has been, I decided to get my hands on a copy of Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters for the PSP and just kill it like my old Crash Bandicoot games (same kind of game, different feel and gameplay). Well, I’m about an hour into it and it’s everything (if not more than) it was hyped up to be.

What struck me most powerfully was how very polished this game looks. If it’s one thing I don’t like, it’s seeing franchise titles lose massive quality (especially in the looks department) when new entrants are made for portable consoles (case in point, Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven for PS2 versus Tenchu: Something or Other for PSP). The disgusting details on the PSP title there put me off of trying more titles that started out (well, not exactly started for Tenchu, but at least dwelt there temporarily) as PS2 franchises and have now been adapted for and continued on the PSP. I was, however, dead wrong in making this presumption about all games of this kind, as the following CG screens I snapped from R&C: SM will show.

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