September 2005 Archives

I would really like a Thunderbird Polo shirt. I'm much more impressed with Thunderbird than I am with Firefox, but that may be only because I have the option of using Safari, and have never been stuck with Internet Explorer as my only (or even default) option.

However, I call into note the blown up picture of the Thunderbird shirt linked to above. Ultra-Cotton? What is it, some kind of hydroponic cotton grown in zero gravity and run thru a cotton gin on the moon? Maybe I should take up the Highland Ultra-pipes, with twice the drones as before, and an amazing TEN notes!

Is this the insanity similar to the instructions on a bix of toothpicks that had Douglas Adams so worried?

This is a theory I've been developing for several years now, as I've worked in UU groups, specifically YRUU and UUYAN. With both YRUU and UUYAN, on a congregation or district level, you have 2 modes of being: Pastoral and Programmatical. This concept should be pretty familiar to anyone who has worked with growing churches and districts.

I am very impressed and amused by this new accounting of Creation. I urge you all to read, and discuss amongst yourselves.

"Everyone has a story and many of these people need someone who will listen to their story. As time passes for the people in the Red Cross Shelter in Hattiesburg, telling their stories seems like the only thing they have control of. " ~Annette Marquis

Somehow, I didn't know that Annette has been doing this for the past 10 days, but now that I do, she gets a spot right here on the blog. I've not managed to read through it all yet, nor will I until tonight, but from the intro and what I have, it's amazing work.

Good Luck Annette!

Once again, I made it to my destination and through my events unscathed. Once again, I can't get HOME from these excursions.

This time, my flight was delayed on the taxiway in Newark, and I couldn't make it between terminals fast enough (let alone thru security again), and missed by flight to Detroit. So I'm posting this from Newark Liberty Airport, where I will be until 6am. Just once, I like to make it home according to schedule.

I'm sitting in Logan International Airport, eating Twizzler cherry nibs, waiting for flight 1197 on Continental Airlines. The meeting went well, and I have what I think is a decent grasp of the roles I have volunteered for and been assigned. These include...

Plenary Tech Leader

From what I understand, I will be working with the GA Volunteer Committee Technology Director (which happens to be filled by the person who filled My position the past 4 years), and the CMI crew (the light/sound/projection/subtitling company we employ), to make sure that Madam Moderator gets to the stage and finds a working microphone, that the Delegates who want to yell at each have working mics of their own, and there is a working timer telling us all when the person at the mic will have it shut off, and our sanity saved. I also get to sit in the "script meetings", which seem to be important.

Evening Entertainment

With the District Organizer, and her Special Events Coordinator, I get to plan the four evening entertainment events including dances and coffee house(s). There will be more posted here as things go along, I think, as I'm rather excited about this.

Let it be sounded from every bell tower, muezzin, and coca plantation:
There are NO decent coffee shops within easy walking distance of 25 Beacon Street and 6 Mt. Vernon Pl. Period. End of bloody statement.

Good News: I actually get along with the members of my committee!

More Good News: Meetings Rock, and this group of people rock too. If you didn't hear (likely, if I didn't already tell you), Tim Murphy is the new person on the GA Planning Committee, to fill the spot vacated by our resigning member.

I think I learned more today about how the GA has worked in the past and will work in the future, than I have learned in my entire GA experience to this point, as well as more of the history of the UUA and GA and what's happened during them in regards to racism, and the development of the caucuses, and the myriad of "special interest" groups in the UU world.

Now all I need to do is survive the rest of the meeting with my sanity and dignity intact.

Generally, I think Detroit Metro Airport sucks. But until today, I'd never been in the new McNamara terminal, which is awesome. I admittedly didn't want to have to fly out of here. I don't like crossing picket lines, and the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association Local 5 (another website hosted by Provide.Net) is engaged in such activities outside.

I've been in a number of airports in the US and abroad, and Detroit Metro has always failed to impress. It's old, but has none of the majesty of some of the other airports, and in the old terminal there is NOTHING to do. In the NEW terminal however, there's WiFi provided by Concourse Communications while not free, allows access through most of the major WiFi carriers, and more interesting places to eat, read, etc.

More impressive to me however, was the Transportation Safety Administration workers and how polite and easy going they were, even though I hit most of their flags. Apparantly my name is on a federal No Fly list, resulting in a bit of delay at check-in. I'm currently wearing a kilt, 20-something, carrying a bag PACKED with electronics, and generally get pegged by every security person at every public facility every time. My belt and kilt set off the metal detectors (They were impressed I knew to take my boots off), so I got the full pat down and magic wand, and I think my laptop bag scared them, so they bomb-checked it, made me turn on my laptop (it was only asleep), etc. If these are what the security people are like at every US airport, no one should ever need to complain.

While Tessie was in Boston for her C*UUYAN meeting, I've been using Gizmo for phone purposes. Putting my big toe into the VoIP pond, as it were.

Gizmo has some nice features. For $5 a month (3 month increments), unlimited calls in. They currently have a limited number of cities that call those numbers home. I chose a Boston number. I figure I'll likely save somebody in Boston some money by having them call me "locally". Outgoing calls are 1.3 cents per minute, which comes to quite a bit cheaper than most of the phone cards I can buy.

The quality is decent, especially when I can use my Bluetooth headset. It does seem to suck up more bandwidth than I think VoIP should. It's not happy unless it has 192kbps+ in available bandwidth, which is the bitrate I rip music MP3's at. Spoken word can be FAR lower than that.

Overall, it works for what it does, but I'd not be using it to replace a landline or my cell phone... yet.

He tossed again, finally grumbling enough that he stirred his companion, who murmured something as she turned in her sleep, red curls falling to cover her breast, the moonlight giving her bronzed flesh a pale luster. Slowly, the old man uncoiled himself from the blankets and stood, grabbing his bulky purple robe from the chair and pulling it about his shoulders. He took a step away, then turned to gaze upon his partner again before leaning over and kissing her forhead. Walking out the door, he glanced to the corner, at the smaller bed with the child in it, the spitting image of her mother but for the straightness of her red tresses, and the black streaks from her temples. Smiling, he decended the stairs, stepping over the dogs at the bottom and made for the kitchen.

It's been nearly a month since ConCentric. I can't find minutes online anywhere, and my ConCentric reps have not received any (I know that, since I live with one of them and we share a mailbox), nor have any of the others that I converse with regularly who I know were there.

So I begin to wonder... what was the point? Why was there ($450x100 people?) $50,000 spent, for me, the Convenor of the Heartland District Young Adult and Campus Ministry Sustainability Corps, to have NOTHING to talk to any of my local groups leaders about, here at the beginning and most important part of programming for the church and school year? What was the point of my approval of nearly a third of this years HUUD YA/CM budget to send my 2 Co-Moderators to ConCentric?

For a fresh view, I'll switch gears and put on my General Assembly Planning Committee hat. It's interesting to see that... ConCentric has produced nothing for me to take to that body either. It could have easily proposed Featured or Sponsored programming, and gotten somewhere between $500 and $3000 to produce it, but they did not.

I truly feel like I'll be at my Planning Committee meeting next week and be able to say "Our Young Adults have nothing to contribute to General Assembly in St. Louis." If our UU churches are being accused of having a country club mentality, I would hate to see ConCentric and the Conference Planning Committee in action, because from what I see coming out of them, my local country clubs sit on their hands less.

Wake up C*UUYAN. You've spent another years worth of budget, with nothing to show for it. You're letting the rest of the UU world pass you by, and you don't seem to care.

I need to stop making plans. When I make plans, Bad Things Happen.

I'm not talking the plans to visit the parents, or wash the dishes (yeah right!), or go to the grocery store. No, I mean Plans with a capital P. The ones that take time, effort, and money to make.

When I was in South Africa in July of 1996, it was winter, and I offhandedly said to some of the other youth on my bus "You know, it'd be kinda cool if it snowed while we were here. It IS Winter after all." They all told me to shut up, they were all on summer vacation, but the next day, sure enough, it snowed for the first time in 30 years in the area we were in, approaching Bloemfontein. We were so delayed getting into town, we didn't get to see the home of J.R.R. Tolkien.

In 2001, I started making plans to go to New York. I wanted to visit a couple friends of mine who lived in or could get to The Big Apple, and to see my cousin who lives there and works as an actor in on and off Broadway shows. One of my plans was also to eat at the restaurant in the Twin Towers. Guess what didn't happen, and why?

In the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Three, I was headed to Boston in June, but I had another trip being worked on, to work with a youth group in Vermont/New Hampshire. I figured since I'd be in the area, I'd go see the Old Man on the Mountain. April comes and goes. May Day arrives, and just thereafter, who came tumbling down? You guessed it.

Fast Forward to now. Just as I start plaking some plans to go to New Orleans for the 2006-2007 New Years... Katrina comes in and drowns the city like a child playing with ants and a puddle.

So far, to the people I've told this all to, I've been likened to lorry driver Rob McKenna (So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, by Douglas Adams), and a Horseman.

Sometimes, there really are days when I wonder who is playing a game of intergalactic bar billiards with us... and if my soul is the ante.

Adapted from sfmuseum.org by dmlaenker

A major earthquake struck at 5:13 AM.

By 7 AM federal troops had reported to the mayor.

By 8 AM they were patrolling the entire downtown area and searching for survivors.

The second quake struck at 8:14 AM.

By 10:05 AM the USS Chicago was on its way from San Diego to San Francisco; by 10:30 the USS Preble had landed a medical team and set up an emergency hospital.

By 11 AM large parts of the city were on fire; troops continued to arrive throughout the day, evacuating people from the areas threatened by fire to emergency shelters and Golden Gate Park.

St. Mary's hospital was destroyed by the fire at 1 PM, with no loss of life, the staff and patients having already been evacuated across the bay to Oakland.

By 3 PM troops had shot several looters, and dynamited buildings to make a firebreak; by five they had buried dozens of corpses, the morgue and the police pistol range being unable to hold any more.

At 8:40 PM General Funston requested emergency housing - tents and shelters - from the War Department in Washington; all of the tents in the U.S. Army were on their way to San Francisco by 4:55 AM the next morning.

Prisoners were evacuated to Alcatraz, and by April 20 (two days after the earthquake) the USS Chicago had reached San Francisco, where it evacuated 20,000 refugees.

Welcome to San Fransico, 1906.

This actually happened about 2 weeks ago, but I've not been able to blog much. There's a new version of the blogging software I use for this site, Movable Type.

The interface has had an update, and is no longer almost monochrome. One of the biggest updates is ease of using multiple weblogs, which I'm doing on this site for this, a couple widgets I'm adding to the sidebars, and for my comic. As a special until the end of September, all personal licenses are $30 off.

If you feel like really getting deep and dirty with your blogging software, Movable Type is the way.