Thoughts from last Wednesday (2010-05-05)
I’m going to start off just trying to type here.
I’m experimenting with the differences between a typewriter and a computer. On the typewriter I find it comfortable to look at the keys, but on a computer keyboard I find it much more comforable to look at the text that I’m typing. I don’t know if that’s becasue of the structure of the keyboard, or something else. On a typewriter the keyboard is inclined enough that you can actually see all the keys pretty easily even when you are typing. But on a computer keyboard, the keys are covered by your hands so that much of the keyboard is hidden. Thus there isn’t an easy way to tell what keys you are actually hitting from looking at the keyboard while you type. It’s actually easier just to watch the screen and see from that what key you’ve hit.
On the typewriter this morning I was having some amount of fun trying to type while not looking at thie keyboard. I think that is still actually a fun thing to do, but I find that I don’t trust myself as much on a computer keyboard as I do on a typewriter. It’s a little harder to feel exactly what I am doing and which kyes I’m actually hitting. So far I don’ty mind it, but I’m not actually sure that it makes sense for me on a continued basics to try to write wrihout looking. I knhow that I make more mistakes when I am not looking, and that it’s harder for me to correct them – in fact I am not going back to correct anything when I write like this. I don’t even know whether I have or haven’t made mistakes.
I don’t know why I don’t have more trouble with the apostrophe which is different on the computer keyboard and the typewriterrs I have. For some reason it doesn’t actually cause me trouble that it ieems to be in different places on the two forms of keyboards. Somehow I am able to not get confused and still keep on writing at a pretty good pace even with the differnce in placement.
Lord Jesus, I love you, I want you in my life. I long to see you more than I do, and to be faithful to you in my walk and in my life. Thank you for saving me and for making me a member of your people and your body. Thank you that you have rescued me from this world and from all the ways that I have led myself into trouble. Thank you for saving me and delivering me from my enemy and the enemies of my soul. Thank you that you have been a friend to me and a friend to my soul. Thank you that you have not left me an orphan, but came to me and rescued me and adopted me into your family and into your kingdom. Thank you Jesus that you are a good king and a great Lord. You are the one that I would want to follow out of all the leaders in the earth and the heavens. Thank you that you came to rescue me and to give me a place amoung your own.
I don’t know if writing this way if I’ll be able to resist the temptation to try to see how much I have written. I don’t know if I need to resist it. I think in some ways, it’s cool that I can’t see how much I’ve written. It helps to avoid the writer’s block effect of the blank page. But on the other hand, I begin to get nervous after I have typed a while that I want to see whether I’m making any kind of progress – which seems to be correlated to length in my head.
I wonder if when I get that feeling, if I would just stop, clear the line, and rest for a moment, and then begin again anew, if that would help deal with that feeling. It may be that the feeling comes from pushing too hard, and trying to keep words flowing beyond the point that there is any need to.
One other thing is that this is just supposed to be a place where I can type my thoughts, not that it has to be a place that I fill with an endless stream of drivel.
I think I have eaten too many carrots this morning. They are making me feel a little queasy, and that makes me not want to do anything.
One thing that I don’t know how is going to effect me is the feeling that my thoughts are just kind of going directly down a hole where I can’t see them anymore. Although in actuality I will be able to see them quite easily when I decide to. Maybe that contributes to the feeling of wanting to look at how far I’ve gotten in terms of writing.
I would be curious to know just how much writing I produce during a day if I am constantly writing.
I don’t know if I like writing the hard parts of a mystery story. Writing about death isn’t fun. Bringing death front and center to be the main focus isn’t fun. But it is powerful, and it is real. It just needs to be made manifest that it isn’t the final end. But that makes it more disturbing in some cases, rather than less. it depends on what happens after death. A life that is cut short, that sends a soul to final judgement that had not make peace with God, that is a tragedy. Although there are times for judgement in this world, and a life that had done horrible things – it might be right to take out of the world. But a life that is cut short without the final chance for repentance provokes sadness. But everyone has the chance for repentance always. Almost none of us come to that final moment without at some point having had the opportunity to address ones state before God.
When Jesus said, Do you think that those on whom the tower of siloam fell, do you think that they were worse sinners than you? No, but I say to you that unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. That indicates our lives are all subject to end, we don’t know when that end will come. So don’t delay in making things right.
I think maybe that’s what Jesus is talking about when he says agree with your adversary on the way, before you get to the judge, because once you get to the judge, you will be forced to pay to the fullest cent.
[The thought box is the little one line text field that I use for writing currently – it’s just a way I’ve configured my text editor – It seems to dramatically help me with being able to write without experiencing "writer’s block.]
I have thought about calling the thought box the pensieve after the Harry Potter books, but that might be a little esoteric to anyone not familiar with those books. And in this case it doesn’t capture memories, but just running thoughts. For me to capture memories in it, I would have to think about those memories in verbal form, which is actually kind of hard to do as I’m reading the text I’m writing.
If I were going to actually try to notate memories, I might have to try not to look at the text I was producing.
I don’t really want to be working on anything more today – but there are things that I really should be working on, that I don’t know whether there is any way to get out of.
So far trying to do remote administration through emacs is a bit more awkward than just logging in through putty and running the programs directly on the server.
I’m thinking about the fact that I really don’t have anything prepared for the meeting tonight.
I’m about ready to go, so I guess I’ll probably shut down this buffer in just a few minutes.
Random Thoughts from last Tuesday
If this is just my buffer for all my random thoughts today, will I actually use it for stuff or will I just end up writing random stuff elsewhere?
I’m not sure whether it really matters whether I use emacs or vim for text creation, and really for text editing, vim and emacs with viper mode are essentially the same. The only real difference I notice is when I am trying to navigate source code, vim has some features that are currently easier and more reliable than it seems like the equivalent viper/emacs features are.
One of the problems with stream of consciousness typing is that I get into loops that don’t really go anywhere.
I love you God. I am so thankful that you are in my life, in my heart and in my soul. I am grateful that you have taken me out of darkness and given me new life. I am grateful that you did not leave me in the mess that my pride and arrogance had created. I am grateful that you have taught me humility and goodness, and that those are more valuable than all the greatness that I longed for before.
I am grateful that your life is so good that you were willing to give of yourself to help me. I am grateful that you did not leave me alone to fend for myself in this world, but you were willing to come into my world and do what it took to help me out of the mess that I had created.
I am thankful for all your grace in my life and all the ways in which you were willing to deal with me with kindness to bring about the grace of God in my life. Thank you Lord that you were willing to give everything to bring about the situation where you could gain me and all those others like me that you have saved.
I don’t really know whether there is anything to recommend vim over emacs just for writing. Once stuff is down, if I wanted to go back and edit it, I think I would probably prefer one to the other, with the default going to Vim at this point, but I’m not sure. Maybe if I were more competent with Emacs, I would begin to prefer it for the editing.
I don’t really know whether it makes much difference where I type stuff since I can pretty much make emacs and vim behave similarly enough that it doesn’t make a difference to me.
given that, I’m not sure that there is really any difference except from the standpoint of what to do after stuff is finished.
There are really only two real differences I can detect between emacs and vim at this point for what I am trying to do. One is that emacs can be made transparent. The other is that vim seems slower sometimes, and seems to hang once in a while when it updates something. Otherwise it really is almost indistinguishable after a little bit of work to make them behave similarly.
The advantage that emacs has over vim, is that other emacs funtions are available and the same emacs instance that is open on the buffer, can be used to do other things also, and still refer to that buffer as necessary. The advantage of vim is that it can be expanded to full screen and then all the vim standard editing commands can be utilized.
I think that for this kind of thing, it makes sense to use emacs, because I really don’t need vim’s editing capabilities, and it seems useful to only have one editor that I am trying to use.
One thing I think that I like about emacs, is that it really is more configurable, so as my tastes change, I can move things around and still use emacs, where with vim, it contains more functionality out of the box currently, but really isn’t that configurable, at least not for me. Every time I have tried to configure it beyond it’s basic nature, at some point it starts to feel clumsy also, like I’m just bolting things on. Emacs feels more seemless when things work, but it feels like it’s more work to get things to the point where they are working. Vim has more functionality out of the box, and is easier to configure for small changes, but once you try to do major things, you run into it’s limitations.
I still think Vim’s actual editing commands are in general cleaner and better, but for just writing, I don’t really need those. It’s only when I’m doing editing or text transformation that those things really come in handy. But for just writing, they are really pretty equivalent for me right now. Given that, emacs has some advantages just from the standpoint of doing other things also. It has a fairly mature file manager in dired. It can connect to other servers better than vim’s netrw capabilities. It has a sql client that I use regularly.
That said, it is usually a bit of a hassle to get anything new working on it. I can usually expect to spend at least a day playing around with stuff to get to the point where I have all the magic right to get a new thing working. And there are frustratingly many things that almost work, but not quite.
This is in contrast to vim, where like I said, I don’t even bother trying to use most plugins, because I’m so used to plugings not working or not really adding anything valuble. On the other hand Vim had <em>almost</em> everything I need built in. Certainly everything for text- editing. It doesn’t have a good shell, but neither does Emacs on Windows really.
I was just able to control vim from emacs through vim’s remote-send command. That could make things pretty cool if I can get it to somehow work with emacs.
I don’t really know when or if I will actually be able to do all the stuff I want to do as far as writing. The whole, stream of consciousness thing is not all that wonderful as far as producing quality. I think that there is a lot that I would like to write, but I am not at all sure that what I have to say without actually thinking about stuff is really worth reading. I am wondering how much I could actually write if I just wrote whatever came along for as long as I could stand to type. I think that this would enable me to put a lot of words on the page, but I am really not conviced that it would make anything worth reading.
Why is self-control not legalism? I am glad it is not, but how is self-control different from ascetism. How is self control different from self-denial? I don’t know that I totally understand the differences. One is a work of the Holy Spirit. The other tends to be a work of the flesh, although even self denial can be from the Lord if it is in the process of us doing the right thing or learning how to deal with a lack in our lives.
I wish that there were a command line version of the bible for Windows. I wonder how hard it would be to make one. I don’t think it would really be that hard. I could probably do it reasonably easily. I wonder whether it would be better for me to learn how to do it in C, or to take the quick and easy route and do it in tcl. It would probably be very easy to emulate the kjv bible that is on Ubuntu in tcl. It might not be quite as fast, but I bet it would be fast enough, and with the bible, you spend most of your time reading and not searching. So I think it would be ok.
Jesus, help me to know what to do with my life and the abilities you have given me. Help me to be for your kingdom and useful for your kingdom. I want to be able to be a good and faithful servant. If there is a way for my life to be for the good of many, I would like that to be the case. How much will I have to sacrifice to be able to help others? How do I gain that which I will need to sacrifice?
How do I gain the provision to be able to work on the things that I think are useful?
I think it would be useful to have a variety of bible software: a website for the creation of custom bibles, bible programs on the iphone, ipad and possibly android devices – bible software for computers.
I think I could do all of those things, but how do I do that while trying to make a living?
How do I both have a family, make a living, do the work of God on a personal level, and make things that will enable the word of God to be more easily found and used?
I think there is vast room for improvements in Bible study software. I don’t know how to navigate the publishing world though to bring my ideas to pass.
I don’t know whether publishers would welcome my ideas, or find them a threat.
Here is my little writing place – this is the place where I write
The Lord is good. He is faithful. He is wonderful. Jesus is the most good in all of creation. He is very good. He is both great and good. He is great because He is good. God was so pleased with His goodness that He made Him to be the greatest in all creation. He raised him up and gave him a place that is above every name, above every person, every thing that is in all creation, both in this world and in that which is to come.
Jesus is wonderful, and He is worth trusting totally. He is the best and most good in all of creation. He became the fulness of God in human form and He became one of us so that He could feel what we feel and experience what we experience, so that He could be a faithful high priest, able to intercede for our weaknesses. He is a good God and a faithful friend. What other god in any religion has made themselves known in that way? What other religion has presented a god of goodness like our Lord? Where else could one look for such a God as we have? This is a God that is out of human understanding. When one looks at all the religions that have come about in human history, none display the combination of majesty and humility that is evident in the truth that is in Jesus. He abounds beyond our imaginations. He is wonderful and good and true. He is full of goodness and full of truth and full of blessing. He is full of blessings for us. He is full of desires to see us prosper. He is a good God. He is a good friend. He is a friend that was willing to lay down His life for His friends. That is the definition of love – the greatest love – that one would lay down his life for his friends.
Jesus is our best friend. He is the best friend you could have. He is both the best in the since that He is the best, most good, greatest in all creation, and he is our friend. He is our best friend in that He was willing to do beyond our other friends were willing to do – He was willing to die for us, and to suffer all the pains of the punishment for our sins, so that we could be free. That is a best friend.
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