My Heart is Moved

I was just reading the blogs written by Jared and Kirstyn.
I love the raw honesty of this generation.
They inspire me.
They want to live full out.

They have compassion for the unlovely and have no patience for pretense.
I don't ever want to be pretentious - especially with them.

They have a quick willingness to do anything and go anywhere that is not clouded with the caution or disillusionment of having lived on this earth 50 plus years.
I envy their passion and their enthusiasm.
I want to fan it into fire and join them in the passionate flame.

I'm proud of them - and I think God is too!

I choose to speak words of life over other people. I choose to speak words of life over myself.

The promise of the sunrise drives me on.

I am not afraid to dream big dreams.

Your heart is free. Have the courage to follow it.

It's hard to trust God; Giving-everything-back-to-him-constantly hard. But I'm going to do it. Because I don't know what else to do.

This is a great inspiration for me in my search for passionate life.

In case you hadn't guessed, the italicized words are quotes from their blogs.

New "Air"

Well I suppose I'm not completely back. I have allowed myself to step into the deep waters of computer maintenance and upgrades. MacWorld 2008 didn't help either. But more about that later.

The things you have to do to just get back up to speed. After picking up my laptop I needed to reinstall all my programs - which is time consuming in and of itself. But I also needed to try and remember all the programs that I had downloaded (mostly freeware) that I use on a regular basis. It is sometimes a long process where you suddenly realize that you used to use a particular program to do a certain activity - then you look for it online and download it.

I also ordered more RAM which came today and needed to be installed as well.

And now my son is actually thinking of buying a new laptop - which brings me back to MacWorld. Steve Jobs always presents a Keynote Address where he explains the new things they are releasing. Maybe it's only interesting to Mac geeks - but it is part of the Mac mystique and Apple really does push the technological envelope (pardon the pun - Steve Jobs pulled his latest thin laptop out of an envelop during his keynote).

In case you haven't heard or just don't follow the goings on in that parallel universe where all the planets are Apple shaped, the folks in Cupertino (Mac headquarters) have released a new thin laptop called the Macbook Air - already being dubbed the "Airbook." It really is thin and has a high "Wow" factor.



It's called the Air because there are no cables and the loading of programs is done wirelessly. It really is cool.



However I don't think that my son will get it. It doesn't have enough ummph for him (not enough ram or hard drive space).

I'm Back

I have my computer again - finally. (Do I need to apologize for not blogging?)

I know it shouldn't have taken that long but it did. Here's the story.

On Thursday (December 27th) I heard a high squeaking sound from my computer and the Powerpoint presentation I was looking at refused to load. I tried to fix permissions (equivalent to running a program to make sure your registry items are accurate in a Windows machine) but that took a really long time and didn't help. I realize now I should have stopped everything and tried to back up my recent work. I realized my last backup was a few months ago and I lost my emails, addresses, bookmarks and some of the work I had done. I lost some recent docs I had been working on and most disappointing was that I had lost all of the recent audio recording I had done with my daughter. I think I lost some photos and some songs but those were not significant and can be replaced (songs) or copied from my wife's computer - which has all our recent photographs.

On Friday, I took it to a friend of a friend to get it repaired. You know the drill - my friend (a Mac guru who I called on Thursday evening) said "I know someone who fixes Macs out of his home. He's a great guy and can do it real cheap!" My friend's friend told me it should be ready soon - maybe even this evening but Monday for sure! Wow! Great!

On Monday I found out that my friend's friend's Mac expert was out of town on vacation over Christmas and New Year. Tuesday was New Year's Day. Wednesday I went snowboarding with Jared. Thursday was busy so I called on Friday. The response? The hard drive they ordered hadn't come in yet. Monday I called again. It should be in today. On Tuesday they told me they were having difficulty finding the hard drive I wanted - shortages due to the Christmas season.

So Tuesday afternoon I picked it up and took it to CPUSED (or BeamEcho) the guys I originally was going to take it to. It was ready by Wednesday at lunchtime - and at a cost roughly the same as what the other guy would have charged me.

The lesson in all this ... ?

Backup! Backup! Backup!

And go with the guys you know will fix it fast and right.