Yes, I’m still alive

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , ,

I had to take some time away to clear my head and find myself. It’s a survival tactic; the guy other people wanted Dave to be hasn’t been getting the job done.
Besides, anyone who’s worth anything will like the real Dave better than Dave the Chameleon anyway. Those who like Dave the Chameleon better can go find themselves someone else to be a chameleon. There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of people who are willing. But I think it’s rude to ask someone to change before you really get to know him or her, don’t you?

So I’ve been ignoring the site partly because when I’m paying attention to it, it’s really tempting to try to figure out what to write to make myself popular. And partly because it’s a distraction when I’m trying to figure out who I am. Writing is a big part of me, but it’s only part of me.

So I dug out some things I enjoyed in the past. I’ve been reading F. Scott Fitzgerald and listening to Peter Gabriel and U2 (early stuff, long before they got popular) and Tori Amos and Echo and the Bunnymen. The way I used to do things was to go look for stuff that most people overlooked, rather than letting current trends tell me what to like. So none of that’s cool anymore. Big deal.

The majority isn’t always right. Exhibit A: Disco.

I remember when I was in high school, either my freshman or sophomore year, a popular girl a year older than me came up to me and told me I needed to be more of a rebel. I thought about that and came to the conclusion that I was a rebel. She and her crowd were rebelling against authority figures. I was rebelling against conformity.

Oddly enough, I ended up sitting next to her boyfriend in Spanish class not long after that. We couldn’t stand each other at first, but then it turned out we had a lot more common ground than either one of us could have imagined and we became friends.

I can’t help but think of Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was the spokesman of his generation, a generation not at all unlike ours, a generation that lived to excess and partied harder than any generation before, and up until GenX came along, or since. It’s obvious from Fitzgerald’s writing that he saw the excesses and even though it fascinated him, obviously there was a lot about it that he didn’t like. Yet his lifestyle didn’t change much. The result? The Voice of the Twenties was dead, aged 44, in 1940. Although some of his contemporaries recognized his greatness then, he was mostly remembered as a troublesome drunk.

Would Fitzgerald had lived longer if he’d been more of a rebel of a different sort? Well, I’d like to think so.

I’ve also been playing with computers. I pressed my dual Celeron back into duty and upgraded to the current version of Debian Unstable (I last did that sometime last summer, I think). It’s much, much faster now. I suspect it’s due to the use of GCC 3.2 or 3.3 instead of the old standby GCC 2.95. But I’m not sure. What I do know is the machine was really starting to feel sluggish, and now it feels fast again, almost like it felt to me when I first got it.

I’ve also been playing with PHP accelerators. I know I can only speed up a DSL-hosted site by so much, but my server serves up static pages much faster than my PHP pages, so I want that.

I’ve played around with WordPress a little bit more. It appears the new version will allow me to publish an IP address along with comments. I like that. I’m sick of rude people slinging mud from behind a wall of anonymity. I’m sure they’re much smarter than I am. So they ought to set up their own Web sites, so they can say whatever they want and enlighten the masses. If, as my most recent accuser says, what God wants is for Dave Farquhar and people like him to shut up, it won’t take much to drown my voice out.

OK, I’m done ranting. I’m gonna go in to work tomorrow and be my own person. I’m going to do what’s right, and not what’s popular, even when doing what’s right makes me unpopular. I’m going to stay focused and driven. The possibilities ahead are more important than the mistakes of the past and whatever happens to be missing from the present.

And there’ll be less missing with my vacationing coworkers back in the office.

And everything that’s true about work is true about life at home as well. Speaking of which, when I was out this weekend I noticed I was drawing second looks from girls again. Eating healthy again must be helping. That can’t be bad.

Well, this has to be the most disorganized and unfocused thing I’ve written in years. But I need to post something.

I’ll be back when my head’s more clear.

That wasn’t the Sunday I had planned

Dave Farquhar Personal , , ,

I was hoping that by now I would be upgraded to WordPress, the successor to the b2 blogging program that I use, and that I would have a running DietLinux box on some system, and that I’d be coming back to you with some cool tricks you can do with a Knoppix CD.
I’m 0 for 3.

WordPress is up and running inside my firewall, and there are some nice things about it, but if I move, I lose some stuff. Such as? Most of the code I had Steve write for me won’t run under WordPress. No recent comments, no scoring whatsoever, and searching gives you the posts, rather than links to the posts, which could be deadly if you searched for the word “the.”

Seeing the entries right away when you do a search or hit a category link is fine on blogs that don’t have a lot of entries, but when I have 1,200+ of them, that’s bad. It’s better to return titles with links to the entries.

What do I gain? The ability to make entries and not publish them just yet. The ability to close entries to comments. Movable Type-compatible pingbacks and trackbacks. In a future version, multiple categories per post. That’s all worth a lot.

So I’ll move. Not just this weekend, sadly.

A big chunk of the day went to fixing Gatermann’s web server. The nice thing about Linux is you never have to reboot it. (If you run Debian, you can even upgrade across versions without having to reboot.) The bad thing about Linux is that since you never have to reboot it, if you power it down, you really don’t have much way of knowing if the system’s going to come back up. After jumping through way too many hoops, we got the thing booted with a rescue disk, and when I looked at it, I couldn’t figure out how the system ever booted the first time. For one thing, I couldn’t find a kernel. Obviously at some point in this system’s life, something went horribly, horribly wrong.

Nothing we could think of would repair it, so we ended up archiving all the important stuff like /etc, then wiped and reinstalled. I’m sure if we’d persisted, we could have brought it back to life, but from the time he got here to the time I started reinstalling, three CDs had played on my stereo. I can install Debian in 15 minutes on a fast system, and 35 minutes on a slowpoke.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not mad or upset or anything. I’m a little disappointed that I wasn’t able to fix it in 10 minutes though. But then I remember that two of those CDs that played during that timeframe were by The Cure. If two hours straight of The Cure doesn’t make you feel a a little down on yourself, nothing will.

But I’ll have to give Bob and his revolving door of bandmates credit for making me think about it. There was a time when I would have given almost anything to be the biggest Unix guru in St. Louis. That’s over. These days system wizardry is a means to an end. It pays me enough money to give me a house in a middle-class neighborhood, and a car that’s practical yet draws looks, and leaves enough left over to do nice things for people. Although the job can be demanding, I have more free time than Dad ever had. I mean, I found out this morning that three of my friends have started a band and I got to hear a very early mix of their CD. I can get excited, because I’ve got enough time to at the very least go see them. And if they need someone to write some propaganda for them, I can do that.

After dinner, I re-tackled the WordPress project, but that part of my brain’s just fried. I had to laugh at a question Steve asked me in e-mail. He asked why weekends take more out of him than the workweek. I know the answer to that one. Since we’re low-tier aristocrats, we’ve always got stuff that needs to be done. And the stuff around the house can very easily be more draining than the stuff we do for 40 hours a week. And when the workweek gets to be too much, you just call up a friend and take a long lunch–make up the time at the end of the day after everyone else has left and the office is quiet–and talk about home ownership and other low-tier aristocratic things to get your mind off work.

So as much as I’d love to go find some vexing question and solve it and then turn it over to Google to direct people with the question to my answer, I just don’t have it in me. Not today. And thinking about work to try to escape the drains of low-tier aristocracy seems, well, sick.

A Peter Gabriel CD and a book would be really good right about now.

I’m taking everyone’s advice and doing what I love

Dave Farquhar Personal , ,

I cracked out my IBM PC/AT-turned-K5/100 today and fired it up for the first time since I bought my house. I wanted to download some ISOs and play with some things like DietLinux and Knoppix, but my aged AT is the only system I have with a usable CD burner. The hard drive in my box that contains my good CD burner died back in February or so, and I had other priorities (ahem), so I never replaced the drive. Now I’ve got different other priorities (which I won’t talk about just yet), but even if I had another drive, I can’t seem to find my Nero CD. So it just makes more sense to pull the AT off the bench.
I must have pillaged it for parts at one point because the SCSI host adapter and NIC were both missing. So I replaced them, and fired it up and the HD was gone. I know I saw an HD in there, so I checked the BIOS and found it wasn’t set up right. So I autodetected everything, rebooted, and Linux refused to boot. I popped out the Debian installation CD, selected the “mount a previously initialized partition” option, and saw the partitions on /dev/hdc, rather than /dev/hda where I would expect them. When I was pillaging, I must have pulled the IDE cables and plugged them back in the wrong place when I was finished. I can’t remember those kinds of details anymore. I’d rather spend those neurons remembering details about a girl (like, say, that she likes Tori Amos and Train and Delerious?) than obscure details about a computer I rarely use.

I probably could have fixed it by editing /etc/fstab (actually /target/etc/fstab when you’re booted from the Debian installer) and then re-running LILO, but I’ll always be more confident in my knowledge of hardware than of any operating system, so I reached for a screwdriver and went for the sure thing. Popping the case for the 12th time and rearranging the cables rendered the system bootable again.

The machine’s hostname is burn. Nice. That’s one of my favorite songs by The Cure. I tried a couple of the usual suspects for the root password, and I was in.

Incidentally, I’m doing all of this stuff in pursuit of answers. You’ll be hearing from me again later this weekend.

The best news I’ve heard in a long time: The Public Domain Enhancement Act

Dave Farquhar Copyright , ,

The Public Domain Enhancement Act, which is the result of the Eric Eldred petition, has been introduced to Congress by two representatives from California. It’s now known as H.R. 2601.
This is excellent news.

Write your Congressperson and remind him/her that s/he represents you, not Walt Disney, not the RIAA, not any of the other special interests. Remind the Congressperson that roughly 2% of all copyrighted material retains commercial value after 55 years. So for every Mickey Mouse, there are 98 works that the copyright holder simply abandons and can’t be used by anyone. While that material may not be worthwhile to the copyright holder, it’s still of value to historians, archivists, and hobbyists. Which probably means you. If you’re not one of those three, the products produced by one of those three probably will trickle down to you, in which case you still benefit.

This act will not force Walt Disney to give up Mickey Mouse. What it will do is free any and all works that aren’t worth $1 to the copyright holder to renew.

Some have argued that once a work falls into the public domain, consumers are the losers because there is no commercial incentive to preserve and reproduce them. That’s wrong. Under current copyright conditions, the movie “Cinderella” could have never been made. Freeing old works allows a new generation to adopt and adapt them and make new classics.

While most public domain material is obscure, so is most copyrighted material. But the best public domain material is anything but. The reason Tom Sawyer is so cheap is because it’s free for anyone to copy. And we all benefit from that.

A question for pastors and other church leaders about singles’ ministry

Dave Farquhar Christianity

I want to ask those of you in the audience who are pastors or who are leaders within your church–because I know there are a number of you–a question about singles’ ministry.
Someone asked me the other day if my church has one. It doesn’t. There are lots of reasons why.

I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of creating a Christian meat market. I know where to find one of those already. If I wanted a date tomorrow, I know what church to go to and at what time, and I could walk out of there with a date without trying all that hard. And if I don’t like what I find, I can always go back next week.

Creating an evening church service for lonely people to go to is slightly more conducive to fostering healthy relationships than the local singles’ bar, but they both have a number of things in common, and one of them is that God isn’t going to be the main focus of the majority of the people at either place. It’s simple human nature.

My church has had Bible studies for singles using the small-group model in the past, but those groups had similar weaknesses. Usually the groups started out really well. But the group would implode over the course of a year or two. After a few weeks, half the people in the room would be trying to impress other people in the room, and the other half would be talking and giggling about how their last date with so-and-so went. And as time went on, you’d have couples there who were clearly more interested in each other than with the Bible study. The couples would eventually drop away, and the frustrated people would drop away, and pretty soon you’ve got no group. And God wasn’t much in focus for more than a few weeks with this model either.

There are approximately 170 single people in my church. Some of them inevitably are perfectly happy being single. Some of them inevitably are miserable. Probably most of them would seek someone out if they knew where to look and what they were supposed to be looking for.

So I’m wondering if it isn’t time for a new approach. There are lots of books that tell you what to look for and how to find it. There are also lots of venues for trying to find Christian singles, so I don’t see much point in trying to compete with them. I’d rather do something supplemental: Create groups where people walk together through the process of learning how to find and develop a healthy relationship.

So here’s the idea. Get a few small groups together. Perhaps go smaller than small groups and use the accountability group model with five or fewer people. Definitely don’t mix genders. Smaller groups and keeping the gender the same encourages people to be open and honest, rather than shy or trying to be impressive. Walk through any number of the available books on singlehood together, doing the exercises and talking about them. It’s one thing to know all this stuff. It’s another to think about it, understand it, and have people walking beside you every step of the way, offering mutual encouragement and accountability.

The encouragement is necessary because the process can be frustrating. The accountability is necessary because some people just aren’t emotionally healthy enough to have a good relationship just yet, and without help it might take years but with the right encouragement and with leaders to point them in the right direction, the time required could be much shorter.

As more people get interested, you form more groups. As groups get smaller due to people getting attached, you merge them or add new people to them.

I think this might be an idea whose time has come, but I’d like to hear some other opinions.

A trick to give your fictional characters some consistency

Dave Farquhar Writing

So I was reading up on character disorders (shaddup Steve) when I stumbled across an incredibly useful site: http://www.writersvillage.com/character/
Let’s say you’re writing a work of fiction. (Contrary to what some people have told me, I do that occasionally, not every day.) And you want your characters to be interesting. Normal is boring. The most interesting people in the world have something wrong with them. (Say yes.) (Steve, don’t say another word.)

Hey, think about it. Think of the greatest novel ever written: The Great Gatsby. I can think of two characters who showed any symptoms of healthiness in the whole book: the narrator, Nick Carraway, and I’m not even positive about him; and Gatsby’s dad, who only shows up in the end. The rest of them are very interesting people. But you’re in deep trouble if you live next door to any of them.

So give the characters in your story a character disorder.

If you’re like me and don’t remember character disorders from college psychology class, there are basically two types of mental illnesses. There are neurosises (I know I spelled that wrong), and character disorders. A neurotic can be pretty messed up, but a neurotic’s problem(s) are generally treatable and a neurotic still has enough grip on reality to be able to take responsibility for his or her own actions.

Character disorders generally aren’t treatable. A person with a character disorder is generally less pleasant and considerably more dangerous. A person with a character disorder generally won’t take responsibility for his or her actions, or a problem he or she caused. I once had a landlord who liked to threaten to shoot people and put a gun in their hand and drugs in their pocket. He probably had a character disorder.

So what’s this have to do with writing fiction? Basically you answer about 300 questions about a character in your story, and it comes back and tells you what character disorder the person might have. Then you can read a profile and a few symptoms, which will give you some insights into how your character will behave in different circumstances and allow you to give the character some consistency.

No fair trying to use it to diagnose your coworkers, OK?

And no fair trying to use it to diagnose me either. I’m a neurotic. (There. That quote will keep me out of public office.)

The Royals came to me this weekend

Dave Farquhar Baseball ,

Once a year, the Royals come to St. Louis. And, inevitably, I’m doing something the weekend they’re here. This year, I wasn’t. So Gatermann and I went Saturday night. He rooted for his team, and I rooted for mine.
The Cards won that one. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Starting pitcher Darrell May is a flyball pitcher, and Busch Stadium isn’t nearly as imposing to power hitters as it was 20 years ago. Now the Cards are loaded up with people like Albert Pujols and Jim Edmonds, and, well, May got rocked. Then the Royals’ weak bullpen got rocked.

The big surprise was the number of Royals fans there–it wasn’t quite like the number of Cubs fans at a Cards-Cubs game, but it was significant–and, well, they were loud. As the first inning started, the Royals fans in the $11 seats above my section started chanting, “Let’s go Roy-als” and clapping and stomping. They had more energy than Royals fans in Kansas City. I thought it was hilarious.

I was wishing I’d worn my Royals shirt. Fans dressed in enemy colors didn’t used to do well at Busch Stadium, but Gatermann told me that’s very different today. Everyone sitting around me was good-natured and polite and had a sense of humor about my allegiance.

As we walked out, one guy complained about being harrassed for being a Royals fan, but I couldn’t tell how serious he was.

And I have to say I was very impressed with the play of Cardinals’ rookie second baseman Bo Hart. He’s already a fan favorite, but when you come up and get multiple hits in your first three games in the big leagues, you’re bound to become a fan favorite. He seems to be a scrappy player with a lot of guts and a lot of heart, along the lines of former St. Louis fan favorite Joe McEwing, or Anaheim’s David Eckhart, or former Met and Royal Keith Miller. I found myself cheering for the guy, even though I was rooting for the other team. You don’t see a lot of players like him.

The encouraging thing to me was that the Royals won the other two games of the series. I know the Cards aren’t having their best season, but they’re a strong team with two superstars who are of at least equal cailber to the Royals’ two superstars, and position by position, they’re the stronger team anywhere but first base.

I still don’t think my Royals will win the World Series. But this is going to be a fun year.

Date or Soul Mate… reviewed.

Dave Farquhar Book reviews

Date or Soul Mate? How to Know if Someone is Worth Pursuing in Two Dates or Less seems like it has as many homework assignments per page as my college algebra textbook did. I’d verify that, but the bookstore was offering $15 for that textbook and I didn’t ever want to touch it again. So I guess selling my college algebra book paid for this one, nine years later.
It was a really good trade, in case you’re wondering.

Even though it’s a lot of work, and if you’re lazy you shouldn’t touch it, the work is extremely worthwhile. Author Neil Clark Warren has been married forty years. That’s good and bad. I want to be married 40 years, or preferably more, and he has some ideas how he stumbled into such a great marriage. So that’s good. The bad side is, well, it took me a lot less than 7 1/2 months to forget what it’s like to be single and unattached, so I can only imagine what he’s forgotten in 40 years.

He does know one thing. He does know the desperation one starts to feel after a while–the desperation to date the first willing and available candidate that passes your way. And then to hold onto it even if there are indications it’s not a very good match because there are no other prospects around, or there’s no easy indication that any of those prospects would be any better, and starting over is a lot of work, so it’s easier to fix the relationship you have. Not to mention there’s the risk that you’ll break it off and then your prospect will say no, leaving you all alone again.

I’m still trying to figure out where that feeling went after I read the first chapter. Somehow the book put my mind at ease, which, if you ask any of my friends, is a big accomplishment.

The first assignment is to answer 20 questions about yourself. They’re probing questions. It took me at least an hour to answer them, even though I’ve answered some of the exact same questions at least a half-dozen times in the past year. A later assignment is to trace your family tree as far back as you can. But you have to write down everything you know or can remember about each relative. Yet another assignment is to write your own autobiography, in 5-year increments.

That’s just in the first 38 pages.

But the book has a major disappointment in it as well. Chapter 9 talks about a test that assesses your qualities. The basic idea is that you need to figure out what you’re worth, assign a numerical score to it, then go find someone whose worth is within 50 points or so of your own. He talks about a couple he counseled. The man scored 650, and his fiancee scored 825. He was thrilled that he was landing someone out of his league. But the downside is insecurity. Eventually she’s going to meet some men who score in the 800s. She’s going to feel some attraction towards them. So then what?

Warren points out that people frequently overvalue some of their qualities and undervalue others. This got me excited, because I’ve probably been guilty of both. I’ve often felt, while engaging in the dating game, like a tourist in a foreign country. I have money and I see the prices, but while I know the value of a dollar, I don’t know much about the value of a euro. And when I have dollars in my wallet but the price is in euros, it’s harder to know a good deal when I see one.

In my last relationship, I know she undervalued herself a good portion of the time. I’m pretty sure she overvalued me, but I have no idea by how much. I know I undervalued myself, largely on the basis that she never has much trouble finding dates and I’ve sometimes gone years between dates. Was I overvaluing her? If she’s a 650 and I’m an 825, then I have a lot to be excited about because I have a great future ahead, because there were a lot of things about her that were, well, great or very close to it. And if she’s a 750 and I’m an 800, then I know we were a good match that just didn’t work because we didn’t have enough in common.

But the test isn’t anywhere in the book. As far as I can tell, it’s in another book by the same author titled Finding the Love of Your Life. That’s frustrating. I understand why–my own book had a chapter in it that was similar to a chapter in another book by the same publisher, and my editor didn’t like it at first. But the context was slightly different, and the book was clearly missing something without it. Why should I make the reader pay $20 for another book to get information I just told him or her was necessary? I stuck to my guns and the chapter went in.

That said, the book had a lot of practical advice. I felt better after reading it because I found I instinctively do an awful lot of the right things, especially as far as the kind of person to be. But one thing I immediately took from it is that I really need to make more of an effort to shave every day and be better about getting my hair cut every six weeks, and to dress a little bit nicer. I’m frequently told that I clean up nice. But when I’m trying to get away with shaving every other day and pushing my haircuts for eight weeks instead of six, I may not draw that second look, so someone could easily overlook the things that matter more.

It says a lot that my outlook on relationships increased dramatically after reading this book. The first few days and weeks after breaking up are a roller coaster anyway, and that probably has something to do with it, but there’s some substance behind this high. The book helped me objectively evaluate where I’ve been. I can see that I’m not coming out of the best relationship that ever existed. I knew for a long time that it had problems. I know now that it would have taken some work to find out if they could be fixed. I can take that knowledge I gleaned from the book, and I can sleep knowing that I wasn’t the one who gave up, that I would have been willing to do the work. I can combine that with something else I learned from the book: There are women who will really value a man who’s willing to work that much, who’s willing to make them that important.

There are no guarantees that the next date will be better than my last, but I would say I like my prospects for my next relationship after reading this.

It also says something that I was able to read the book in just a few hours. I’m a fast reader, but this book is pretty light reading.

There are some books that you pick up looking for empathy. This book isn’t one of them. The author isn’t shy about his PhD and his 35+ years of practice as a psychologist and he works from the assumption that the reader has no particular expertise in the area. And at times he’s blunt. This is a book you pick up looking for solutions. To be blunt, if you’re looking to get happily married and minimize the amount of time and money you waste on dates and dead-end relationships, this is a good book to read. (Note to whoever may be reading this and take offense: I didn’t say my past relationships were dead ends, OK?)

This book isn’t a home run, and it’s absolutely not a timeless classic. What’s frustrating about it is that with the addition of that test mentioned in chapter 9, it might have been. But what I will say in this book’s favor is that there probably isn’t any single relationship book that will answer everybody’s questions. Any given person will probably need to read two or three or four of them, at least. And this book, in spite of its big gaping hole, ought to be one of them.

Why was I cruising Lindbergh on a Friday night?

Dave Farquhar Personal

“Honda!” a teenager yelled out the window as I sat at a stoplight at the intersection of Lindbergh and Lemay Ferry roads. I was in a lineup of tricked-out cars. Mine was the least tricked out.
I was in between Christian bookstores. I’d been out in search of whole-wheat pasta, black pillowcases, and two people I know. I found the whole-wheat pasta. I hoped one of the Christian bookstores would have the last thing on my list. Lemstone had all their books marked down by 20% because they were moving. They had about 12 books left, total, in the store. None of them was what I was looking for. So I braved the cruisers and headed off to One Way.

I was searching for Date…or Soul Mate? How To Know If Someone is Worth Pursuing in Two Dates or Less by Neil Clark Warren. I read another one of his books five or six years ago and it helped me then. He has some good advice.

I have a few motivations for reading this particular book, and regular readers can probably guess most of them. Maybe all of them.

I found it, in the Men’s section, of all places. There were more books on singlehood in the Men’s section than there were books about dealing with being male. Including some written by and for women. I may have to revisit some of the others. I’m thinking I’ll post a review of Date or Soul Mate? when I’ve finished reading it.