lord prepare me, to deal with the pork-tuary…

December 31, 2006 on 11:32 am | In organ, rants | No Comments

i love it when people get married in my church. they always do it on a saturday afternoon, and the wedding planner, who always treats the sanctuary as a showplace rather than a place of worship, always leaves the church in such a state that it takes me around 45 minutes to get the place ready for service. today i did nothing. as my friend bud has said:

The Altar table is solemnly consecrated in a lengthy service which has its roots in the consecration of the Second Temple … it includes washing the altar, anointing it, sealing grains of incense in five crosses cut into it with hot wax from the paschal candle, lighting a FIRE on it, either directly (in the case of a stone altar) or in a brazier (in the case of a wooden altar) in which is burned cedar chips (in memory of the consecration of Solomon’s Temple), the Five Nails from the Paschal Candle, and the rest of the solemnly-consecrated Holy Oils, wine, and incense used for the anointing and consecrating of the table. Altars are NOT flower-stands.

apparently for yesterday’s newly-married and hopefully happy couple, the altar was a trash bag stand – and the organ bench was a trash can. my pastor’s bible was to be thrown on the floor in the corner of the hallway behind the nave – it didn’t belong anywhere near the pulpit. folding chairs were to be left folded, and stacked sideways in the foyer. the burger king bags and cigarette butts on the front porch were a nice touch.

a few years ago, i would try to balance the church’s sound panel back to some usable state for weeks each time little hands played with it, but couldn’t get the console moved where i wanted it in the first place so that i could get to it during the service. finally i began leaving things broken, so that the minister at the time had to do the service with no microphones for himself or the choir. the console was moved the next week.

under the same M.O., i simply gritted my teeth today and cleaned nothing. it physically hurt to walk past the abuse heaped on the only sanctuary i’ve ever known, the only church i have ever called home. but i am tired of picking up after the mess left by the children, and i absolutely refuse to clean up after the adults, most of them afforded the title only due to their age.

when sherri moore-mott held the pulpit there, i was a believer. since she left i have struggled both with my own faith and the constant temptation to leave and find a real church, now more than ever. the church is again on the campus that i consider my home, and is less than a mile from my parents’ house, so attending there makes it very, very convenient to see my parents each week.  now that we’ve switched to a praise-and-worship format i am expected to do less than ever with the salary. but i’ve come to regard my attendance here as a game, to see whether i can be driven away from christianity by the various pastors we’ve had in the past five years, and driven away from playing the organ by the criticisms and insults handed to me by the adults that have passed through.

so far, i’m still winning.

looking ahead…

December 25, 2006 on 10:50 pm | In peeps, tech stoof | No Comments

so, what started out not really feeling like christmas has come more in line with years past.  we’ve got to be up early in the morning to take my dad to duke for a thyroid biopsy, and though he didn’t say much, i know he’s been worrying about it most of the day.  get that, his radiation treatments, and my mom’s knee replacement out of the way and they’ll be in pretty good shape – and i’ll have what i want for christmas.  their health back.

their new tivo box has stood the true usability test – my mom is using it to record shows, then navigate through them without throwing the remote through the screen.  it has already racked up several hours’ worth of recorded content.  i hope they’ll use it.

facing forward, i’ll offer my short-term (and long-term) goals for the new year at work:

  1. www1 back into the cluster.  almost done here.  a couple of minors changes to the netapp and we’ll be in good shape to put this box into rotation.
  2. mod_security semaphore insanity cleaned up on our www nodes.  a simple line to the httpd scripts should fix this but i want to test test test before we put it into production on our main web site.
  3. hash_limit rules added to our LVS firewall scripts.  simon says this is simple.  simon is almost always right.  i hope this isn’t one of the “almost” instances.
  4. janice as a replacement box for our aging login server.  4 CPUs and small disks make it a home run here.
  5. hardware upgrades for music, mirrors, and distro.  have one server lined up here, but will need more.
  6. VCL, VCL, VCL.  talking with the zen q/a guy about possibilities here, in addition to meeting with the VCL folks in january.  i’m thinking about this for the possibilities of resurrecting public.ibiblio.org, the totally automated, anyone-can-contribute library.  very, very exciting if it works out.

home for the holidaze

December 23, 2006 on 10:36 pm | In masonry, ramblings | No Comments

i’m following a 3-day sprint of shopping, shaking my fist in traffic and going on various treasure hunts for my parents by lighting firmly in quiet little oxford.  five days of enjoying time with my family, saving money and going to bed early.  also hopefully finding out what the tenants in our rental house are building on the back side of the house – my dad thinks they wanted a play area for their children, but i think it looks more like a cattle chute.  hopefully the city won’t smack their wrists in the form of plundering our wallets.

next? what next?

December 22, 2006 on 9:30 am | In rants | No Comments

sometimes i face a dilemma between choosing the free, environmentally-responsible bus system versus chunking a mortgage payment’s worth for an on-campus parking permit.  unfortunately i ignored my co-worker’s suggestion that i park in the commercial lot on rosemary street for the day, as the gates were up and there was no attendant.

i ignored his suggestion because i was already at the park and ride, staring at the next bus marquee telling me that the S would arrive in 4 minutes.  it had been counting down from 15 minutes since i got out of the car.  an HU bus pulled up.  “you probably want to get on,” the driver told me “cause the S ain’t runnin today.  you gonna be waitin here all day.”  the HU couldn’t take me where i want to go in any directy way because of road construction, and i couldn’t walk from where i got off of the HU to where i wanted to be because of more construction blocking off the entire block, but walking from the hospital up to sitterson then back to manning is preferable to standing at the bus stop, sucking on a lollipop.

how much did chapel hill/carrboro pay for the blessed next bus system, the astonishing real-time bus tracker that estimates arrival times for routes that aren’t running, the one that discourages drivers from waiting on would-be riders running to catch up to their bus because they’ll get in trouble if next catches them leaving behind schedule?

they would have better spent that money on raises for drivers like jerry, the HU driver who went way above and beyond to make sure that each of his passengers knew how to get where they needed to be despite the various road construction sites, despite reduced bus service due to the impending holiday, and the fact that chapel hill transit has no holiday schedule or route alteration notices posted on their web site.

the heads of every organization i have ever worked for have stressed that it is the people who make or break the group.  it appears that chapel hill transit is no different.

slight wastes of time…

December 6, 2006 on 8:59 pm | In peeps | No Comments
  • having a friend invite me over to his place to hang out, then not answer his phone when i get there.  good thing i knew his WEP password (i set it).  i hung out on the stairwell for a while, then left.
  • trader joe’s.  what was all the hype about?  why was it so packed, with empty shelves?  it was about half of a whole foods, and could fit in a corner of southern season.  and whole foods and southern season actually import food and sell it.  nearly everything on the shelf was “trader joe’s” brand – i didn’t examine anything to see whether the food was actually canned in nebraska or somewhere equally non-exotic.
  • the 36-page document i read today on NFS client performance under Linux when using a particular device for primary storage.  executive summary:  buy more RAM.

in better news, my mom scheduled her knee replacement surgery for the end of february.  by that time my dad’s incisions from his aneurysm surgery should have completely healed, and he should just about be done with the radiation treatments for his prostate cancer.  as he said today, if they keep going to duke, eventually they’ll be healthy again.

how to reset a wordpress admin’s password

December 5, 2006 on 11:25 am | In tech stoof | No Comments

this was just enough of a pain in the butt that i feel justified in blogging the solution for the benefit of others. i simply wanted to reset someone’s forgotten wordpress-admin password. okay, that should be simple:

mysql> update wp_users set user_pass=password('newpassword') where user_login='admin';

but that didn’t work. google stalking sez install phpMyAdmin. bleah. but then i find out wordpress uses double md5 hashes. okay:

$ echo 'newpassword' |md5sum |md5sum

but that didn’t work. oh, wait. it uses double md5s in the cookies, single for the login:

$ echo 'newpassword' |md5sum

but that didn’t work, either. a wise and very valuable co-worker points out that mysql uses base64 md5s, so we want to set it from within mysql:

mysql> select md5('newpassword');

copy the generated the hash into your buffer, then update wp_users appropriately:

mysql> update wp_users set user_pass='fed83e9bf36cd4dcedb83e20a9251fea' where user_login='admin';

yay, locumteneo!

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