A Sad Sight

I saw something that saddened me while riding home from work today.

There are two older guys who are always walking around Redlands. They wear old school suits with really brightly colored vests that look great. One in a green vest, the other in a burnt yellow vest. I don’t know their names, but they are a part of Redlands to me. I see them so often when I’m out walking or going to and fro near downtown that they’ve nearly blended into the scenery and will be missed when they are gone. Mr. Green carries the look of authority between the two by my eyes, so Mr. Burnt Yellow has always appeared shy, but ready to leap to the ready.

The sad sight was of Mr. Burnt Yellow in a wheelchair being pushed by his partner. It’s the first time I’ve seen them not wearing their trademark suits; the first time I’ve thought that a day would come when they wouldn’t be walking endlessly around Redlands.

I don’t know who they are, but I will miss them when they depart for brighter shores.

Technorati Tags: Redlands, death, pondering

My Predictions for 2006

A lot of people are making predictions for 2006, so I thought I’d join in the fun.

• One or both of my parents will start blogging
• At least three friends of mine who aren’t blogging now will be by the end of the year
• Google’s stock will drop, probably in response to data security issues
• Yahoo! will make an offer to buy Six Apart, but Six Apart will choose to remain a private firm
• As WordPress gains more popularity as a blogging tool, plugin developers will start creating tools for both WordPress and Movable Type side-by-side. Rumors will fly about the two blogging tools merging, but nothing will be confirmed or denied in 2006
• President George W. Bush will face the possibility of impeachment due to misinformation at the start of the Iraq war, but will be no more impeached than President Bill Clinton was before him
• The Blu-Ray format for next-gen DVDs will take off for a while when the PlayStation 3 is released, but ultimately fail when Microsoft announces HD-DVD support built-in on Windows Vista as well as a second generation Xbox 360 that supports the format for movie playback (games will not appear on HD-DVD discs)
• With the advent of yet another format to watch your movies on, smart companies will allow you to turn in VHS or DVD copies of a movie and give you and 50 to 75% discount on the same movie in the latest format. The old copies will then be recycled. This will take off quicly and companies that don’t do this will be left in the dust.
• Most of the movies in 2006 look to be sequels, so I’m going out on a limb to say that most of them will feel like sequels as well. The two Pirates of the Caribbean movies will be excellent, but being filmed back to back will leave the first movie feeling like a separate idea altogether.
• UPDATE: In an effort to make Wikipedia a bit more palatable as a starting point for reliable information, a group of professors, scientist, and experts in various other fields will come together to create a peer review for the online encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s back end will be updated to allow for this peer review. The process will eventually prove too slow for the medium and die a quiet death.

We’ll see if I’m at all right in a year. Actually, some of these were spawned by other prediction lists, but I tried to add my own twist if they were. Really, it was just the thing about President Bush.

Another of Those Days

Did you ever have one of those days when you just felt like you hadn’t accomplished anything? Or worse, when no matter what you did, nothing got accomplished?

I think I feel like this every year during the last week of the year. There’s hardly anything to do, the holidays are mostly passed by, and I find myself looking back at the year that has passed whether I like or not. The trick is to see the positive, but when the daily events of life are feeling so off to begin with, that’s a bit harder to do.

I’ve changed up the site a bit. The blog now exists at blog.lifeofrobert.com to reflect some new things I have coming in my mind. As a result, any links to archived pages are broken and I haven’t been able to get the server to redirect them since my pages are built dynamically rather than lots of individual files for each page you see here. Nothing frustrates me quite like a computer task I can’t get quite right. Even worse is when I get a solution that should work, but doesn’t for reasons unknown to me. Hence the start of my strange, actually bad, mood.

If anyone reading this has experience working with .htaccess files, the RewriteEngine, subdomains, and dynamic pages Movabletype together, I’d appreciate some assistance. Leave a comment and I’ll email you with details.

Maybe I’ll go out and buy a new video game to cheer me up and play it on my new 6.1 home theater system.

UPDATE: I’ve decided to ditch the dynamic pages altogether. Doing so opens up a whole realm of plugins for me to use as well and helps solve the .htaccess problem. While I was at it, I got going and rolled out the new page and way of doing things. Hopefully, the only page that will look odd is the photo gallery.

Christmas Revisited

This Christmas was very different for me than many others. This was the first Christmas in memory that I did not spend any time in my hometown for. I did see family on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but the differences were striking.

Alternatively, this was the first Christmas I have spent entirely in my new home in Redlands. I spent time with friends in the morning, then church, then family, then friends again. The diversity of experiences was a lot of fun.

Mostly, though, I found myself meditating and thinking about what was really going on. As my thoughts often turned to those alone this last weekend, I was continually reminded of the reason this holy day exists. Christmas is exactly that; the Christ Mass where the Christian Church celebrates God drawing near to us in Jesus Christ. The season of the Christ Mass started on Sunday and will last until January 6, Epiphany (unless you are of the Eastern Orthodox persuasion). The season when our culture celebrates Christmas is truly Advent, where we are invited to meditate on those things we need Jesus to draw near to us for.

What I found myself thinking of is the ways Jesus has been hoped for and how He has come to answer those hopes. My hopes of late have been for continued healing of the wounds I have confronted these last two years. In the last week, I have been reminded not of the healing that still remains ahead of me, but of the healing that has already taken place and the good things that have come from it: an increased trust in those around me, friendships slowly restoring themselves to greater glory and richness, and courage to take on new possibilities and explore the many doors that they open.

I wonder what others have thought of these last weeks. How has the season left you? How has the year changed you?

Technorati Tags: Christmas, Jesus, reflection

Predictions for 2006

These are good.  I like the last one and wouldn’t mind at all if it actually happened.

I hope that SixApart isn’t acquired, though.  I like them being small-ish and independent and away from the big, potentially “evil,” corporations.

Peace

The major theme of the Feast of Lights this year is Peace. So it seems fitting to have the last post in my Feast of Lights string be about that.

Sir Cristemas

A song that is likely to tickle the Old English fancy of a teacher friend of mine is Good Day, Sir Cristémas, this one by Andrew Carter.

Hodie, Christus Natus Est!

The third part of the tableau is the angels proclaiming the birth of Christ to the shepherds. The song is Hodie, Christus Natus Est by Healey Willan.

O Magnum Mysterium

There are three scenes in the tableau section in the first half of the Feast. These are:

1. The Annunciation
2. The Birth
3. The Proclamation to the Shepherds

or something like that.

For the birth, the music is O Magnum Mysterium by Francis Poulenc.

Feast of Lights

All that remains now between me and the Feast of Lights is 8 hours of work, a worship team rehearsal, a few meals (one with a friend), a day off cleaning and memorizing the last two pieces of music to not make it into my head, a warm-up, and a meditation.

One thing that has frustrated me in the past has been not having much opportunity to share with friends just which songs strike me the most or carry the most meaning or where the thread of an overall theme for the night weaves in and out of each verse and chord. I intend to post some relatively short (possibly long) posts between now and Friday evening each highlighting a song or theme across songs or whatever else pops into my head. If you want to be free of opinion before coming, then don’t read these until after you attend (assuming you are attending).

First, though, an order of business. For those interested in finding me and others that they may know…