Author: Dave Farquhar

Unjust and harsh

Dave Farquhar Society

I see that Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the now-convicted mastermind behind the abduction, imprisonment and killing of Daniel Pearl, has been sentenced to death by hanging by a Pakistani court.
Sheikh’s lawyer called the penalty “unjust and harsh.” Read more

I thought this went without saying, but…

Dave Farquhar Christianity

When someone e-mails you or a group of people asking you to pray for still another person, just do what the person asks and don’t start rumormongering, OK?
I heard of an incident recently (if you want to assume I was involved in it somehow, go ahead) where a longtime friend e-mailed a group of people s/he thought trustworthy and knew prayed on a regular basis. S/he gave some details about the situation. I won’t go into them. I’ll just say there were a few taboos involved. The person who was suffering from the problem didn’t want this to be common knowledge. Read more

Reaching out to my brothers, locally and far away

Dave Farquhar Personal

I’m tired. I got home from work at arbout 4:45 and immediately started writing up a study for Friday night. I had about an hour before I really needed to leave… Well, at 6:15, I mostly had the study written. I’m GenX to the bone.
The study went well. We split into two groups and I had one of my partners in crime, Jon Schmidt, take the other one. He muddled through my notes. Since the study could go in a lot of different directions (we talked about generational sins and demonic influence–yes, I am a sucker for controversy) I literally put together twice as much as we needed, so we’d be able to go either direction. I could tell from hearing Jon that he indeed went a very different direction than I did. But both went well. Read more

Another All-Star Flub

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , ,

I remember when the All-Star Game actually mattered.
Well, it didn’t matter–it was still a game that didn’t count, but the guys who showed up, they showed up to play. There was a lot of pride at stake. My first All-Star memory was the 1983 game. The American League hadn’t won a game in years. Then the California Angels’ Fred Lynn came up with the bases loaded, smacked one out of the park for the first-ever All-Star grand slam, and carried the AL to victory.

These days, the only purpose the All-Star Game serves is to give Baseball Commissionerwannabe Bud Selig another opportunity to make a fool of himself. Read more

Windows XP networking advice

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

I ran into a problem yesterday with a VPN client not working in XP. After a Usenet search, someone suggested that removing the QoS client (which does nothing useful anyway) fixes the problem about 80% of the time. In my case, that worked.
If something networking-related isn’t working right in WinXP for you, try removing the QoS client and see what happens. At the very least, you’ll speed up networking slightly, and at best, you’ll fix the problem.

So you think Linux is unproven?

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , ,

I’ve had arguments at work with one of the managers as to whether Linux is up to the task of running an enterprise-class Web server. When I mention my record with Linux running this site, the manager dismisses it, never mind that this site gets more traffic than a lot of the sites we run at work. So I went looking this afternoon for some sites that run on Linux, Apache, and PHP, like this one does.
I found a bunch of small-timers. Read more

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Dave Farquhar General

I spent some time preparing a new web server. It’s minimalist. I hope it’ll do the job. If not, hardware’s cheap, and this server’s doing a job that needs to be done. I really need to run this blog on something other than my main workstation. But there’s another reason.
Soon, I’ll be bringing another blog online. Not written by me. I don’t do this for just anybody, but this isn’t just anybody. I won’t say much, because I don’t know yet what it’s going to look like, but this person has the most important message of anyone I know right now, and will hopefully use this new forum to share that message. So that blog’s going online, even if it means I have to go buy a little hardware. I’m always willing to go spend a little money for a good reason. Read more

My spiritual journey

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , , , , , , ,

I guess this is as good of a time as any to write my spiritual autobiography. It’s not as long of a story as some–years of apathy have ways of shortening stories.
I guess I could sum up my current state in a couple of lines: Reach the world. Work within the system and change it from within.

Here’s how I got there. Read more

What I’ve learned in my current video project

Dave Farquhar Video , , ,

This is a selfish post. I want to record my notes of what I’ve learned on my current project so I don’t forget them, and so I can access them anywhere. Other video hobbyists might benefit.
This is almost exclusively theory, so it should be applicable to any video editing software/equipment you find. But as far as specific tips for helping Premiere… I doubt there’ll be anything directly applicable. Read more

Do I have to title this?

Dave Farquhar General

I’ve got a full day ahead of me with not much time to post anything. I’ve read a bunch of things this morning that really disturb me and I’m having difficulty finding words for the things I’m thinking right now.
If you’re looking for something to read, go check out Charlie’s entries for July 4 and 5.