EverydayOrdinary

So last Thursday night was a COM meeting, which we always start with a devotional. One of the Co-Chairs gave the devotional, and she shared a piece that she’d read some time ago, but couldn’t remember the source. Her devotional centered around a single question:
“What if you were the only Bible someone ever read?”

That’s an amazingly powerful question. And convicting.

Do people look at my life and see Jesus? Do they see the message of scripture lived out in my actions? Or do they see the world in me?

I am reminded of a quote I once saw (attributed to Nietzche): “I would believe in the Christian’s salvation if they looked and acted a little more like people who had been saved.”

The question of what comes through when people “read” me is very convicting. The world is watching me; what do I show them?

God help me to live a life that shows Your truths and Your love, more than my own selfishness and worldliness.

Yatta!
My computer is back up and running! Wahoo!

Gone is the water cooling system. In it’s place is a new CPU heatsink/fan, a new GPU heatsink/fan, a new chipset heatsink/fan, a not-new-but-never-used 120mm rear case fan, and just for the heck of it, a new 80mm side case fan.

And, except for the GPU fan, every one of them has blue LEDs. I gotta admit, it’s nifty.

To do:

• I do seem to have hooked up my PLED and HDD wires wrong. I should probably fix that.
• I think I may want to reverse a fan or two for better air flow.
• Needs more blue light. I think I’ll hook up that cold cathode again.
• I seem to be missing the 5.25 bay cover I took out when I had the water cooler in there. I need something to fill the void (I had a fan controller, but never used it, so I don’t really want one of those).
• Eventually I’d like to buy a second graphics card, so that I can use the SLI features.

Well, my computer isn’t so much dead, as it is temporarily out of commission.

See earlier this week: I leave my computer on all day so I can stream my music to my Palm while I am at work. And about halfway through the day, I lose the connection, and Orb starts telling me that my PC is no longer connected.

There are a million reasons that could have happened, Cable company fell asleep, backhoe fade, my PC hung, etc.

So I get home from work, and my PC is off. Odd, but not unheard of. Probably a power failure or something. I go to turn my computer on, and what happens? This horribly shrill, horribly loud beeping comes from my water cooling unit. Never a good thing, so I turn my PC off real quick-like.

Well, this is new, I think.

Turns out there was no water in my water cooler. A pinhole leak somewhere, or it’s evaporating through a relief valve somewhere in the pump or something. So as near as I can tell, when my cooler dried up, my processor got hot real quick, and shut down to avoid burning out.

I add water, and after a tense couple minutes of loud beeping, the beeping stops, and the water is circulating again. Yatta! My computer is fine the rest of the night. I fixed it!

Or maybe not so much.

I leave my computer off the next day, because I still don’t know why I’m losing water so quick. And when I get home, I boot up … and get one loud continuous tone from my water cooling pump. The water, which is still full, isn’t circulating at all.

So I’m finished with it. I don’t overclock anyway, so I don’t really need a water cooler. I’m going to install a decent heatsink/fan. I’ve ordered one from NewEgg, along with some Arctic Silver, and I’ll install it when it get here next week.

So for now, I’m limited to using my pathetic laptop, which was a cheap model I bought in Septermber ‘05 so I would have access to email & the web while I was in New York. I run presentations on it at church (lyrics to the worship songs), but that’s pushing it to the limit, so no Halflife2 or SW:Battlefront for me for a few days.

On the plus side, I was able to use the downtime as an excuse to do some reading, and I finished up “The Twelfth Card.” And next month, the next one in the series comes out in paperback.

I’ve got MegaTokyo books 1 & 2, an english-language version of a Hellsing manga (since I don’t speak or read Japanese), and some cheap Superman (non-graphic) novel about magic or something. And I still haven’t watched Kino’s Journey (Sorry, Ryan, I ended up getting the anime, not Firefly). So I’ll be able to survive without my PC for a few days.

Maybe

I have, quite literally, thousands of digital images on my computer, photographs I’ve taken with one digital camera or another.

Accounting for images in there that I didn’t take, we’ll say 5000 or so. Just in my “JPEG” folder, not even counting my “RAW” images from my DSLR. Most of these images I won’t put up on flickr, ’cause they suck, technically speaking. But quite a few, I will put up. 5K photos is a very many pictures to sort through. But I decided that I will finally buckle down and pick out the ones I’m not too totally embarrassed about because of the quality to post to flickr.

So I went through all the photos in my JPEG folder in an image organizer, culling the decent ones, and the very rare good ones, into an album so I can get a list of which files I need to upload to flickr.

And after all the time I spent dragging the images from the “gallery” over to the “album,” what do I find?

I find that the app hasn’t added a single one of them to the album, that’s what I find.

AAARRRGGGH!!!

I will not be uploading anything new to flickr today.

Or tomorrow (Bible Study). Maybe Thursday, if I don’t go to the Maundy Thursday service at church.

I’m probably going to have nightmares about sorting images tonight.