Nonsensical Ramblings of Mark

I am not sure what it is but I have a hard time being coherent/staying awake on Sunday nights. My wife and I have been watching The Complete Jane Austen series on PBS and last night was an adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. For the longest time I was wondering when Mr. Darcy was going to show up. I realized a couple of things just this morning: Even though both titles (Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility) have the word "and" in them they are not the same book. as a result: No matter how long I waited I wasn't going to be graced by Mr. Darcy's presence. My head hurt for a while trying to guess which one of the girls was Lizzy and which was Jane. For a while I was conviced that Colonel Brandon was actually Mr. Bingley but without Darcy by his side the whole thing made little sense to me. I guess there is some spiritual application in this somewhere, but maybe I just need to lay off the English breakfast tea at night.

Absolute insanity. That is the only phrase I can describe what happened last night at the Champions club I am the director of. The Iron Chef/Platinum Baker competition was a complete circus and I was reveling in the energy that the competition brought to the club last night. The pinnacle of the night was the macaroni salad competition where four of the top clubbers had to make their salads live in front of a cheering (at times absolutely frantic) crowd. Chants of "Luke! Luke! Luke!" and "Go! Go! Go!" and "Iron Chef! Iron Chef! Iron Chef!" filled the room as the four battled it out for macaroni salad supremacy. It was a lot of work (we had to call in reinforcements for judging and food preparation) and was one of the more expensive special events we put on (I am not shy about spending money) but we'll do it again, Lord willing. There was great participation from the clubbers as there were a total of 25 dishes that were prepared and had to be judged to d...

I will be starting a new internet radio station (WDRK) soon that will play Butterfly Kisses and Thank God I'm a Country Boy (in that order) 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I may throw in some Crumbacher, but don't get your hopes up.

My parents kept good company. They made sure we did as well. They hung around people that loved God and, through their minor failings, showed us that not only was a love for God attractive but it could be incorporated into a "normal" life. The people on the periphery for us were those that did not share the faith that we did and engaged in behavior that demonstrated that lack of faith. I wouldn't say that we lived a sheltered life...there were plenty of bas examples to go around and we fell victim to some of them. But the life they constructed for us was a life where we were surrounded by people that could articulate their faith and show that it meant something to them. I want to do that for my boys as well. I want them to compare and contrast the faith-filled life with the one that is lived apart from God. I want them to see genuine and fraudulent believers in a church setting and for their presence to raise questions and, prayerfully, a bit of abhorrence as well. I want...

Hopefully this morning is a change back to where I had been. Last night I felt great and knew that I was going to have plenty of energy to get up and get jogging again. I broke our treadmill a while back and have had to jog outdoors for quite a while. Obviously the winter had me inside in the morning more often than I would have liked but recently we've been dry and cold. The cold I don't mind so much because I sweat so profusely when I run, but when it is wet and cold, well, there's ice and stuff...you know? I also don't like to jog in the road as much as on the sidewalk for safety reasons. So this morning was great. Cold and dry I started out and along the familiar route that I normally take and I was so happy to have the energy and drive to get it done. I know this is a gift so, after the run, I thanked God that I was able to complete it. I only had to divert into the road a couple of times due to snow and ice on the sidewalk. Hopefully this is the beginning of me ru...

I admit to the condition I find myself in more often that I would like: I need kicks in the pants. I love my bed, the couch, Masterpiece Theater...all of the stuff that I do not necessarily need to be doing, but I like doing it. A lot. This year in the Champions there is a friend of ours that has given me kicks in the pants when I needed them and she does not even know that she is doing this. This week we are having an Iron Chef competition and it is going to be a logistical nightmare. We have had to call in reinforcements in the form of a small group that we know would attack the opportunity with great gusto and, with their help, I think we are going to pull it off. OK, now we just need to do it. The funny thing is I had this on the calendar last year and chickened out. This year, I had no choice. You see this person asked me to give her a calendar of the special events that I had planned for this year and, like clockwork, she has taken the opportunity to promote them before I could p...

I have a noisy Dell GX280 at work and I was looking for solutions to the issue when I ran across the toggling of the hyperthreading option in the BIOS as a possible solution. It turns out that hyperthreading is turned off by default and it wsa reported that either turning it on or off results in the quieting of the PC. There were conflicting reports on this so I decided to try it. It didn't work. What it did do, however, was allow me to multi-task to a greater degree when I have a single process that is consuming a great deal of processor cycles. I found that a processor-intensive application will not slow down my ability to check email with Outlook or surf the web with Firefox to any great degree. As processor- and memory-intensive as these applications are I found them to be much more sluggish under the conditions I have described when hyperthreading was turned off. In fact, this quick synopsis of hyperthreading technology from Dell corroborates my experience.