Magnetic

As I read this article about how it’s important to wear a coat when it’s cold I looked at the picture and thought: “Richardson has a magnet school for Kindergarteners?”

Pinball Score Inflation

You hear a lot (and common sense and memory tell you) that portions of things are bigger now than they used to be. Coke comes in 20 oz. bottles now instead of 6.5 oz. When the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder came in it was notable because it was so big; now it seems strange to brag about a burger being only 4 oz.

Now I have another example: pinball scores. When I was a kid it was a major achievement to make it to 100,000 points on a pinball machine. I played pinball yesterday for the first time in a long time and found that it was almost impossible to score less than 1,000,000 points per ball. And I stink at pinball!

Joining a domain

Handy tip:  if you are trying to join a Windows machine to a Domain and you get the error message “you must install networking before you can change this computer’s domain membership”, check that the Computer Browser service is running.  If it’s not, start it up.  That did the trick for me on Windows Server 2003 and will probably work the same on other versions of Windows.

A bad week for Ross Perot

It has been a bad week for Ross Perot.  First he sells (or according to some people, had to sell) Perot Systems to Dell.  Then the announcement comes today that the EDS name is going away and the former EDS will just be a division of HP called HP Enterprise Services.  Next thing you know people are going to forget that he ran for President.

I knew they’d get rid of the EDS name eventually, but I thought it would take 2-3 years rather than the year it wound up taking.  I guess I’ll have to update my email signature now.

Popeye’s Honey

If you ever go to Popeye’s and have the urge to put some honey on your biscuit,  you might want to read the fine print on the honey packet before you do so.

If you look closely you’ll see that it’s not honey, it’s “honey sauce”.  The ingredients are honey, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, natural flavor, fructose, and caramel sauce.

Because after all if there’s one thing honey needs, it’s something to sweeten it up.

It is about the consistency of syrup and tastes like honey dialed down to 50% of its normal honey flavor intensity.

Group B

I need to try to track down a copy of The Lost Revolution.  The story of the Official IRA, especially after 1975, is one that has always interested me.  In the old days I would have gotten the Dallas library to order a copy, but their new book budget has been cut by 90%.  I guess I’ll have to pay for my own copy.  I’ll probably have to order it from Amazon UK since it doesn’t seem to have been published in the US yet.

Lough Derg

I recently went to visit the in-laws in Ireland, and while I was there I had the opportunity to make the traditional 3-day pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s Purgatory, more commonly know as Lough Derg.

A friend of ours dropped me off at the visitors center and I rode the ferry over to Station Island a few minutes later.  It had started to rain while we were driving and by the time I got to the island it was a full scale rainstorm with temperatures in the 50s and 20-30 mph winds (and this was on August 1).

Originally the pilgrimage consisted of a period of prayer and fasting in preparation for a 24-hour vigil in a cave on the island.  But the cave was filled in (the reason is kind of unclear) and instead the pilgrims spend the vigil praying in the basilica on the island.

The three primary activities on the pilgrimage are the vigil, the fast, and a series of prayers called ’stations’.   You also go barefoot from the time you arrive on the island until the time you get ready to get on the boat to go home.

• The vigil is officially 24 hours, from 10 p.m. of the first day to 10 p.m. of the second day.  However you don’t really have time to nap when you’re there so you are up from the time you woke up the first day until about 10:05 p.m. of the second day.  For me that worked out to be about 40 hours.  This was the hardest part of the weekend for me.  Several times I found myself dozing off on my feet and almost falling over.  I didn’t get to pray as much as I thought I would on the second day because every time I closed my eyes, sat down, or even stopped walking I started to fall asleep.
• The fast runs for three full days, including the first day before you actually arrive and continuing until midnight after you get home on the third day.  You get one meal a day of dry bread or dry toast or a sort of crunchy oat cookie, and black tea or black coffee with your meal.  You can eat as much of this yummy food that you like at the one meal, but once you get up from the table you’re done for the day.  This wasn’t really too hard.  There were a few times I got kind of hungry but most of the time there was so much other stuff going on I didn’t have time to think about it.
• The stations are a series of prayers that you repeat nine times over the course of the three days.  You say some Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and Apostles’ Creeds while kneeling outside the basilica and add a prayer renouncing ‘the world, the flesh, and the devil’.  Then you walk around the basilica while saying seven decades of the rosary.  From there you go on to a series of those prayers while walking around, kneeling on, walking in, and kneeling in the ruins of the 6th century monks’ cells which by now are basically just six circular piles of rock.  You follow these up with more prayers at a spot by the lake side and then finish the station up with more prayers on the plaza in front of the basilica.  When I got home I did the math and figured out that the nine stations come out to a total of 846 Our Fathers, 1,413 Hail Marys, 261 Apostles Creeds, and 9 recitations of Psalm 19.  The first four stations are done in the afternoon of the first day after you arrive on the island.  The next four are done in a big group in the church during the overnight part of the vigil.  The eighth station is outside again on the morning of the second day after Confession, and the ninth station is outside on the morning of the third day after Mass.

As I mentioned above, it was a howling rainstorm (a cold howling rainstorm) on the first day when I got there.  The first three stations were completed in that storm, walking barefoot around the basilica on the stone paving and then walking around on wet brick to soccer ball sized rocks while trying to keep track of where I was in the prayer sequence.  A couple of times I was almost blown over by the wind.  Despite the apparent misery I was actually kind of enjoying it.  It was supposed to be a penitential experience so I wanted it to be as penitential as possible.

During the night we prayed more stations in big group in the basilica and then in between we had about 20 minutes to try to stay awake through.  The main activity was drinking something called ‘Lough Derg soup’ which consisted of hot water with salt and pepper in it.  That drink has been part of the experience for decades if not centuries, so gave it a try.  Maybe there’s something to it since it did wake me up.  I don’t know if there’s a stimulant quality to hot salty and peppery water or if it just tastes so foul it keeps you awake for 20 minutes.

On the second day we had a break from the regular schedule.  In addition to the twice-a-day masses we had an extra mass at around noon.  It happened to be a Sunday and RTE, the Irish TV company, picked Lough Derg to be the site of that week’s Mass of the Week.  I must have gotten on TV since there was a camera a couple of rows right in front of me doing crowd shots.  It was right in the middle of the 40 hour vigil so hopefully I didn’t doze off on TV.

My feet and knees were sore for a couple of days after I got back from all the barefoot walking and kneeling on rocks, and my ankles were also sore for a while, I guess from all the walking.  In addition to the stations and the four Masses (five in my case) the middle day of the pilgrimage also includes Confession, renewal of our Baptismal promises, and the Stations of the Cross.

Like I said earlier I didn’t get as much praying done as I had hoped.  We had a fair amount of free time in the afternoon and evening of the second day but I was so exhausted all I could do was trudge around various points of the island looking at the architecture and reading various historical tidbits.  There was a rock chair in a hidden spot overlooking the lake that I found and that was nice and peaceful and I was able to get some praying done there before I had to get up and resume my hike around the island.

Over all I found it to be a rewarding experience and would recommend it to anybody in Ireland who has time to fit it into their schedule.  Due to the weather the season for pilgrimages runs from the end of May until the middle of August.  The facilities on the island are open for other activities such as one-day retreats and school retreats during the rest of the year.

Odd coincidence

I have always felt drawn to the Carmelite hermits of Christoval, TX.  Not to join them or anything, but I appreciate them sitting out there in the middle of nowhere, pursuing their calling to sit out there in the middle of nowhere praying all day.

I also like to watch Big Love.

Little did I know there was a connection between the two.  Turns out that the FLDS compound (aka YFZ Ranch) in Eldorado, TX, is a neighbor of the Carmelite hermits, and the guy who keeps an eye on the YFZ Ranch at the Texas Polygamy blog is also a friend of the Carmelites.  His latest page of aerial photos of the YFZ Ranch also includes some pictures that show just how out in the middle of nowhere the hermits are.

Another CCD post

CCD finally resumed normal operations yesterday after about 5 straight weeks of special topics and/or weeks off due to Lent and Easter.  We’re in the home stretch for First Communion now — this was the next to last lesson.  We’ve got one more lesson next week and then a week of run-throughs at the church so everybody knows where they’re supposed to be and when.

We did our first bit of ‘practice’ communion in class.  Fr. Vic brought some unconsecrated hosts and I started walking the kids through the procedure for receiving communion.  It’s a good thing we did too.  Upon the first taste of the hosts there was a lot of squealing and giggling and complaining about how yucky it was and even several cases of the kids taking it back out of their mouths.  Things were a lot calmer the second time around and after class some of the kids were asking if they could have another one like it was a Dorito or something.

Video phone

I have a friend from Ireland who came over to visit us for a couple of weeks and while he was here he showed us his little ACN video phone.  It’s basically a netbook with a built in VOIP phone and webcam and a phone interface and keypad in place of a regular GUI and keyboard.

He was really jazzed about these phones, but I wasn’t that taken with the idea of seeing the person you’re talking to.  He brought his phone from Ireland with him so he could use it to call Ireland and people in Ireland could use it to call him.  For the most part the kids left it alone, and then a couple of days before he left our middle boy (4) decided the phone looked dirty and he would help out by cleaning it off.  He then proceeded to use a water pistol to squirt water all over it and that shorted out all the electrical stuff in it and it was dead as a doornail.

We were unable to revive the phone before he left to go back to Ireland.  We offered to buy him a new one and the deal we arrived at was that since he wanted to get one with a US number, he would sign up for a US one and we would pay for the phone and the initial setup.

The phone arrived at our house yesterday and I decided to set it up so that we could use it to call him in Ireland until we got it to him over there.  My opinion of the phone has gone up since using it, particularly with the setup.  It worked right out of the box without having to refer to the instructions.  I just plugged the Ethernet cable into the router and the power cable into the outlet and turned it on and after a few minutes of setting itself up it was ready to use.

When they say you need a broadband connection you really do.  If you’re in audio-only mode it works fine with crystal clear sound.  If the video is on that sucks up most of the bandwidth and unless you’ve got a really fat pipe it winds up looking like an old Japanese monster movie where the lips are out of sync with the voices (when you can hear the voices at all).  Our friend thought the bandwidth issues was on his end and he was going to call BT and see if there was something they could do before calling us back this afternoon our time.