Hugh's Worthless Blog

Now that we are trying to incorporate contemporary music into our services I was hoping there was an online resource to link bible verses to popular Contemporary Christian songs. Unfortunately, most artists do not give bible verses to go with their songs... but one very prolific one does!! Yes, it is Steven Curtis Chapman, so I have begun to compile a list of his songs and what bible verses they match up with. You can find my search engine here . So far I have just added his latest albums since "Speechless", but I plan on going back and adding older ones too.

Another Ubuntu success story! We just bought a loaded $4,000 Dell Precision 690 to perform some digital imaging of moon and Mars image data and we were going to set it to dual boot to run Windows XP Pro 64 and a x86_64 version of Linux to run USGS ISIS 3.0 . They recommended using OpenSUSE 10.1 so I downloaded a copy and tried it out. No luck, it didn't like our SAS RAID driver and wouldn't see our boot 80GB drive, and would not touch our dual 500GB RAID volume. I found some hints on trying to load an older MPT Fusion driver with the new 10.1 kernel, but thought I would first try a couple other distros lying around my office. The next attempt was CentOS 4.3 since the USGS site said RedHat EWS 4 was the "alternate" distro for them, and I knew CentOS 4 was pretty much RedHat EWS 4, just open and cheaper, so I gave it a shot. CentOS was able to deal with the SAS RAID controller just fine, but its NVIDIA driver was too old to recognize the spiffy Quadro FX3500 in our Prec...

Well, firstly, one of the cool things about winning from HearItFirst.com was I was able to tell them 6 CD's that I wanted and they would send three of them. That makes what actually showed up in the mail being a surprise, and I love surprises! But instead of telling them 6 CD's, I told them in late October that I wanted 6 current CD's and 2 pre-releases, hoping for a good break. Well, luckily for me, they took their time sending the CD's, so the 2 pre-releases turned into two NEW releases, which they kindly shipped to me! Those two NEW CD's were Jeremy Camp's "Beyond Measure", and the newsboys with "Go". I will have to say since it has only been one day I have mostly listened to (and am currently listening to) "Beyond Measure", but I had earlier listened to selections from "Go" on the newsboys site and it sounds like a good album (much more catchy and interesting than their recent "adoration/devotion" albums)...

Well, last week we held a seismic imaging workshop in our department and we needed to convert our 16 XP machine classroom/laboratory into a X-windows/Linux classroom for the workshop. We were supposed to have only 40 attendees but the demand was high so 70 showed up and they were all supposed to be running X11 for them to work on specific seismic applications. So how were we going to do this? We booted all 16 Dell PC's (ranging from 733 MHZ P-III's with 256MB of RAM to 3.0 GHZ Pentium D systems with 1GB of RAM) and whatever Intel laptops people brought with Xubuntu CD's (version 6.06.1 since the guy in charge was too paranoid to go with the just released 6.10). So for a total cost of about $5.00 (25 CD's at 20 cents each) we converted 16 PC's plus a handful of laptops into X11 desktops, all with the same desktop which we could also convert back into XP systems in 5 minutes by just rebooting them all without the CD's. Plus anyone who walked in with a laptop wh...

Yes, I didn't want to mention anything about the Redbirds during the playoffs since I was afraid I would jinx them, but they amazed everyone (including myself) by winning it all. Unbelievable! They certainly did not play like the lethargic Cardinals we saw August and September. I know I never thought they would make it (as my blog states!) but I am glad I was wrong!

Well, the Christian music industry sure has been nice to me! Last year I won a bunch of CD's from ChristianityToday.com when I submitted my picks for their Reader's Choice awards, and this year just a week after talking about HearItFirst.com and their contest to give CD's and a T-shirt to someone who blogs about them... I won again! So if you ever wondered what type of person wins contests like these, you can say it is someone like me. I don't know what I did to deserve to win, but now, yet again, I will have to try to find space in my CD rack for some more CD's!! I guess I am older and more "market worthy" than your average popular music purchaser (i.e. young adult or teenager) since I am a 40 something with a full-time professional job who still buys a lot of music. I know when you pay $20 to fill your tank with gas, paying less money to get a legal music CD and helping to support hard working, talented musicians doesn't seem like that big of a d...

Hey, I just got an email from HearItFirst.com , saying if they find someone blogging about them they will give them a shirt and 3 free CD's! So, I'll give it a shot here. I actually bought my copy of Chris Tomlin's "See The Morning" from them, since they have a special $10 deal (plus $2 shipping) which was (and still is!) hard to pass up! They also have all sorts of exclusive videos with all sorts of different Christian artists. For example there is an interesting "prank war" going on between the Afters and Sanctus Real, and they have videos from both sides recounting the various pranks.

Well, Chris Tomlin released his new CD "See the Morning" and I had to rush out and try to be the first person online to post all the lyrics! So here are all of the lyrics to "See The Morning" . I was also one of the first to post all the lyrics to Jars of Clay 's "Good Monsters" , and I've been getting lots of hits there. I will have to admit that "See The Morning" sounds pretty much like "Arriving, Part II", but what's really so bad about that? Everybody can't be like Jars of Clay and keep you guessing what their next album may sound like. And even though I like both of these albums, my favorite album released so far this year would have to be "Wide Eyed and Mystified" by downhere . I have put all of their lyrics to their album online too, even if it won't be as popular on the Google searches!

Hey, someone here at work is trying to develop some sites for his wife and himself. I think I will link them here to just for fun and see how long it takes for them to get indexed. His wife, Kathy is selling yoga gear at www.handmadeyogaprops.com and he has their family site at www.digbydavis.com . Maybe he will give me a percentage. Another neat new site I found via my account at MyPoints.com is this new CD/movie/game trading site called BarterBee.com which seems a lot like lala.com , but where you can set the price you want to sell your CD's. I posted some unwanted CD's there, and I'll see if anybody will buy them. I have stuff on lala too, but I won't say what my ID is...

This site is linked here and only here. It is a site of 47 unique fractal images generated on a PC by the Fraclab screensaver. The site is http://fractals.wustl.edu/ . Let's see how quickly this gets indexed into Google!

Amazingly, it appears as if the Cards will still win the NL Central simply due to the fact that the Reds and Astros are playing so poorly. Their performance since the All-Star break has been very inconsistent, especially with both starting and relief pitching. However, with the current state of the National League, I can easily see them making it to the NLCS to lose to the Mets. My question is if the Mets have much of a chance against their AL opponent. More surprising yesterday were signs that the Rams may actually have a defense this year. They looked pretty good again Denver yesterday, stopping them pretty much in every situation. Amazing...

Wow, the Cardinals just got swept by the Pirates. Getting swept by the Tigers or White Sox is one thing, and getting swept by the Cubbies was bad enough. But getting swept by the Pirates? Now that is pretty sad. The amazing thing is that they are still 1.5 games in the lead of the Central Division with the second best record in the NL. So they will still probably be playing in the playoffs in the fall, but the odds of them making it to the World Series this year are slim, and the odds of that actually winning the World Series are pretty negligible. Go Red Sox! What is really the run away winner during this summer (besides the Mets) seems to be Ubuntu Linux. They have been embraced by Sun as a supported Linux distribution on both the Opteron and SPARC platforms, and their 6.06 LTS release (Dapper Drake) has been very well received. They have just released the first major bug release (6.06.1) which addresses over 300 bug fixes including some SPARC issues. MEPIS 6.0 was finally released ...

Or in my case, one good blog deserves recognition in my own worthless blog! I was recently interviewed by Sharon Harvey Rosenberg and she wrote a nice article about my calculators, so I am linking back to her. I am sure her blog gets a lot more traffic than mine, since she talks about worthy subjects and mine is, well, WORTHLESS!!

Well, my most noteworthy news since my last post is that my lovely mymirrors site died an untimely death since I was hosting it on a dedicated server a friend had purchased for his business. But after one specific mailing from the server someone complained about, the hosting company took it off line, reformatted the drive and sold the IP address to someone else! So I had to move my mirror site elsewhere. So I ended up moving it to my mighty Dell Optiplex GX1 in my office running Xubuntu 6.06. Yes, a Pentium-III with 192MB of RAM and a 12GB hard drive! But it serves out the files just fine. I have put the latest Puppy, DSL and SLAX versions there and nobody has complained! The Cards are in a mighty big rut right now, having lost six straight games to the White Sox and Tigers. The most amazing part is they are still 2 games in first place in the NL Central just because the Reds have not been able to take advantage of the Card's slide. Luckily now they will come home and play some ...

Wow, I knew Ubuntu 6.06 was coming out June 1, but everyone else wanted to get into the summer releases it seems. This past week has shown new releases from many of my favorite distributions, including DSLinux with a release candidate of their 3.0 release, Puppy with a brand new 2.0 release, and from the grandfather of Live CD's KNOPPIX with their first new official release in months, 5.0.1DVD. But the big news was Ubuntu (along with Kubuntu, edubuntu and Xubuntu) who came out with the "Dapper Drake" 6.06 with "LTS" (long term support of three whole years!). I tried loading Xubuntu 6.06 on an old Dell GX1 Pentium III w/ 128MB of RAM and it installed flawlessly and runs like a champ. However, when I tried to install Xubuntu on my 256MB Gateway P-II box it still hung on boot. Bummer! So instead I tried the new Puppy 2.0 on there which booted up beautifully and quickly. I must admit I prefer Synaptic and apt-get to the Puppy installers, but when it comes to a f...

How about one post on three completely different topics? I'll start with my usual boring drivel about Linux distributions to get rid of all but the diehards. Canonical has just released the second Beta of Ubuntu 6.06 (The Dapper Drake) which fixes "serious flaws in the installer". Hmmm, maybe that is why when I was trying to install Xubuntu onto a Pentium II box it got stuck and went nowhere (I ended up using DSL instead which installed flawlessly). I guess the final release of Ubuntu is supposed to be ready June 1, so they only have one more full month. Next topic is a much more popular topic of discussion, Major League Baseball!! Who would have guessed that near the end of April the only three teams in all of MLB with 15 wins would be in the NL Central? Okay, so maybe people would have guessed Houston and the Cardinals, but they would have also guessed the Yankees and maybe the White Sox. Whereas the White Sox are close, it is good to see the Yankees having to play c...

Aha, the MEPIS team has released an Alpha of MEPIS 6.0 which is based on the soon to be released Ubuntu "Dapper Drake". As usual it is available for download from ftp.wustl.edu . I will have to try it out myself, as I haven't tested any of the Flight releases of Dapper Drake myself yet, having stayed pretty much with 5.10 (Breezy Badger) on most of our systems here. Frankly, I am starting to prefer GNOME over KDE, even though I use KDE on my main Linux station in my office (I do prefer konsole over gnome terminal, but that may just be due to familiarity). I'll have to test out the MEPIS 6.0 Alpha as a LiveCD and see how it looks. One thing I don't understand is why Ubuntu must have separate LiveCD and Install CD versions where MEPIS has always worked fine just having one CD do both. Go figure. As for the Dove Awards , as expected Chris Tomlin walked away with a bunch of the top awards including Song and Artist of the Year. And it sounds like there was an unannoun...

Time to update this worthless blog! It looks like KNOPPIX Version 5.0 DVD has been released at CeBIT but I also bittorrented the Engish ISO image and dumped it on wuarchive for folks to pick up and try. There is also a copy of Accelerated KNOPPIX there, hacked by some Japanese folks to make KNOPPIX boot faster. It seems to work pretty well. The KANOTIX folks also released a 2006 CeBIT version of their updated CD version with KDE 3.5.1 which can be found here . As for my former favorite distro, MEPIS , they have made news by deciding to use Ubuntu as their base distribution instead of just plain Debian. Frankly I think that is a fine idea since I have been using Ubuntu now as my new standard distro now anyway. Since the "Dapper Drake" version of Ubuntu should be finalized up here in a couple months (due June 1, 2006) I am sure a new MEPIS should be arriving shortly afterwards. When is does I will post it on my MEPIS mirror on wuarchive .

I know nobody really reads this, but I have to keep updating it to keep Google's Bot happy (and to keep it parsing my links!). First a shameless plug again for our church, Mt. Zion United Methodist Church , since all the links to it in Google point to their old dead domain name. Come on googlebot, spider our sad little website! Speaking of church, let's change the subject to Christian music, where I must congratulate Audio Adrenaline for winning another Grammy , no matter how meaningless those awards really are. I have also been listening to a lot of Chris Tomlin's Arriving album that I recently picked up cheap. Great stuff! He is also nominated for a bunch of GMA awards which are almost as meaningless as Grammy awards, but, hey, we all love award shows.! What other sites should I plug? I know Puppy Linux just came out with version 1.0.8 and DSL ("darn" small Linux, as I like to call it) came out with 2.2b. I wanted to run just a SSH server on a delapidated P...

Wow, I haven't been posting regularly with my extremely boring, worthless posts! Here's one. It looks like MEPIS 3.4 is getting close to actually being released. As usual I have the latest release candidate posted at wuarchive.wustl.edu . I have also been playing with Puppy Linux 1.0.7 which now includes the X.org X server which runs very nicely even on my old delapidated systems. They are definitely keeping the releases well updated. On completely unrelated news, I was a bit saddened to hear that Audio Adrenaline has decided to call it quits after 15 years as a band. They really are not the same band that started out in the early 90's anyway, and I am sure Tyler Burkum will continue on his musical career in some manner. In any case I will have to convince the contemporary band I sing with at my church to perform something in their honor, perhaps "King" for which I grabbed the sheet music from worshiptogether.com .