I always knew that my Weblog would make me famous.

Back in July, Steven Garrity posted a bit about phantom cell phone vibrations. I commented because I have these pretty regularly [a couple times a week, actually].

Today, a reporter for Bloomberg emailed me to ask if I’d be willing to comment on the record. Being an old amateur cub reporter, I easily assented. As Carla Jean says, “[Y]ou and I are the type of people that make for good interviews. We talk too easily.” [She should know; she's interviewed me before.]

Hopefully I’ll get to see the finished article.

From Reuters: NASA admits that they can’t yet do an on-orbit repair of a hole the size of what brought down Columbia.

“We’ve made a lot of progress, but we’ve not been able to come up with an over-wrap in this time frame that would allow us to fix a large hole,” said [Space Shuttle program manager Bill] Parsons. “Our expectation is that we’ll fix the tank and there won’t be anything like that we’ll have to deal with.“

Read: we’ll cross our fingers and pray.

Now, I know that things like this comprise what you might have to consider an acceptable risk.

Too bad that we can’t convince the American public that we’re gods or something. Apollo XIII convinced America that we were able to overcome anything. Sometimes, too much bad shit happens too fast to save these folks.

Not that we shouldn’t try to fix it, though, if we can.

I’ve had an exceedingly wonderful day, so I decided to finish it by having a glass of Crested Ten on the rocks. This delightful bottle of whiskey came to me via Sean and Kat when they picked it up at the Jameson distillery in Dublin. Their goal: find a bottle that wasn’t outrageously expensive yet could not be procured in the States.

They succeeded. This is outstanding stuff. It’s almost as good as Red Breast to my palate, but then I didn’t find out about Red Breast until I went to Arizona.

After we–myself, the Morrills, and Stephen, mostly—had finished sampling this fine whisky back in late ‘03, I decided that I’d put in storage and hold the rest of the bottle until the Morrills’ anniversary. I picked up the bottle earlier today and realized that it was more full than I had remembered, so I decided to pour myself and a roommate a glass of it tonight as we discussed his women trouble. My glass was celebratory; his wasn’t.

“Jameson may stunt your emotional growth … but who cares?” –Geof F. Morris

Tonight, the UAH SGA was to put on a foam party tonight, starting at 2100.

The bottom fell out up here on Monte Sano at 2105.

Sucks to be them.

This is the first year I haven’t helped put on the foam party since we started doing them in 2001. I wonder if they even knew how to do it.

I’ve been thinking about post metadata for a while, and that thinking was further influenced today by Michael Heileman’s musings.

I’m going to start messing with date formats until I find one that I truly like. I’ll also tweak the layout a bit to fit some refined thoughts about semantics here.

Thanks to one of my .net peeps, I caught up with an old friend tonight: John David Hardy. JD and I went to MSMS together way back in the day, but even though he’d gone to Mississippi State, I pretty well lost touch with him.

Through a fun series of coincidences, I got his home number and called him up tonight. It was good to catch up.

Relationships are the really important things in life.

Rick admitted it, and so will I:

I watch Big Brother on CBS.

Yes, sometimes, I hate myself for doing it.

It was funny, though, to find out that some of my closest friends watch it as well. I think we spent half of lunch that day talking about the show, purely because I felt a sense of freedom in admitting that I watched it.

I think I need professional help to get over my TV-watching guilt.

Either that, or I should just post my Season Pass list and get over it.

The following was an exchange this morning between myself and my associate pastor, Chip Vann.

CHV: “Do you know much about computers?”

GFM: “A fair amount.”

CHV: “Do you know about building Web sites and such?”

GFM: “Enough to be dangerous.”

CHV: “You see, the church needs someone to run the Web site. They’ve needed it for a good year now. You’re like me: young, single, and blessed with free time … so let’s see how much more of it we can claim for the church.”

GFM: [bemused smile] “Sounds good to me.”

Wow.

Just … wow.

Caedmon’s Call’s new album, Share The Well, is going to just absolutely rock. Cliff—one of the vocalists, and de facto head of the band—got my boy Bryan some more cuts from the album the other day. The Dalit freedom song is just … haunting. There’s my boy Cliff, a short and skinny white boy from Texas, singing a Dalit freedom song in both English and the vernacular [Hindi? I'm not sure] with a group of Dalits.

I was listening to this on my lunch break, and I just started crying uncontrollably.

Powerful. I want to find a way to tell this to the band, but for once, I’m left without words to express what I’m thinking.

Alex has some cool news: his Tasks Pro was recently reviewed in Linux Magazine!

Your hard work deserves the kudos, Alex.

If someone can tell me what logical argument Jason Whitlock made in saying that rooting against the 2004 U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team makes you a racist, I’d like to know what it is.

For the record, I’m not rooting against them, but I can see why some might want to do so. I hope they overcome their early foibles and play a good team game to the finish.

Yesterday was five years at TBE.

My job description still changes once a month in some small way.

Wahoo.

News on the XM/PARR front b2blog: The RIAA and XM are upset with the maker of TimeTrax, software that seeks to timeshift XM Radio broadcasts. They’re apparently trying to see if any copyrights/user agreements are being broken.

I guess my quest for a PARR will have to wait even longer. :sigh:

For once, the spammers know what I need. I’m getting all sorts of comment spam attempts for fioricet today, and looking it up, I see that it is … headache relief.

Considering that my head’s felt like it’s been in a vise for the last two days, I find this a wee bit amusing—but not too amusing, because laughing makes my head hurt.

Blessedly, some OTC Alavert is helping some today, although I still have the distinct feeling that someone hung me upside down and poured rubber cement down my nostrils.

If I find whoever did that, you’re toast.

1. I’m going to re-introduce imperfectmirror.org into the gfmorris.net network soon.

2. While waiting for that …

I had a somewhat stunning realization the other night on the plane ride back from Phoenix. Now, understand that, as a United Methodist, I believe in the doctrine tripartite grace: prevenient grace given to all in the understanding of what God is, justifying grace in the penalty that Christ paid on the cross for the sins of the believers, and sanctifying grace that brings us ever closer to God through Christ and the Holy Spirit.

I was wondering what purpose that sanctifying grace truly served. After all, haven’t we been made whole through Jesus already? I understand Paul’s exhortations in his letter to the Church in Rome that we are not to continue sinning so as to get more grace—and that’s because we can’t get any more perfect in God’s eyes than Jesus has already made us.

But then I had a sudden realization: sanctification glorifies God. If someone can see what a pathetic wreck we were before we knew and loved Christ and accepted Him as Savior, and if they can then see what a truly powerful change that justification and sanctification has made in our lives, that glorifies God.

Perhaps more simply put: if I am seen as a “good person”, it is Christ within me doing these good things.

This is not to say that non-believers can’t do good; we see non-believers doing good all the time. But no non-believer does anything good in God’s name, and good done in anyone else’s name but God’s is pretty much wasted, I fear.

…

I’ll close with a remembrance. I was serving as an adult counselor for MissionFest, a week-long mission camp held yearly in downtown Jackson, Miss. My group was working at the downtown Salvation Army house, doing a variety of odd jobs that needed doing. A man walked up to me on the street and said, “Sir, can you tell me why y’all’re out here in the hot June sun in Jackson doing all this for these people?” The only answer that I had for him was this: “These kids are here because they love Christ and want to serve the world.” He stopped, pondered, and went on his way.

I don’t know what difference those words—ones that I’m fairly sure weren’t my own—made in that man’s life, but I know what they made in mine.