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Life is a fusion of interests and energies, a crossroads of many different pathways of thought. This is an attempt at living into that messiness.

Faith and Flexible Beliefs

November 13th, 2009

I’ve recently started contributing as part of a new(ish) blogging project with several other Church of the Brethren young adult theologians. The site is called Already and Not Yet, and was originally an outgrowth of a conference I helped plan last year. Occasionally I may do some cross-posting with this site as well. This is one such occasion …

(Original post available here)

The last several posts on here have touched on the issue of belief, particular beliefs and practices we understand to be “Brethren” in nature. Rather than talking about particular beliefs, I’d like to take a step back and foster some discussion on belief in general.

Recently I stumbled across this excerpt from a recent Rolling Stone interview of comedian and satirist Steven Colbert:

Rolling Stone: A lot of people view what you do as liberal vs. conservative. But what you’re saying is that the show is really about people who are flexible in their beliefs vs. people who are fixed in their beliefs?

Colbert: If there’s a target in our present society, it’s people not willing to change their minds. If you’re not willing to change your mind about anything, given how much is changing and how the sands are shifting underneath our feet, then that dishonesty is certainly worth a joke or too.

It got me thinking about how having flexible beliefs in the midst of our quickly changing, shifting world relates to being people of faith. Keep Reading »

This post is part of my Upgraded Linux Backup series.

One of the challenges I faced in configuring my new backup system on my Ubuntu Linux-based server was setting up my two external drives to mount at the same place in the filesystem.

Why? Because the program I use to manage my backups, BackupPC, expects the storage “pool” to always be in the same place. My options were to write a script to change the BackupPC configuration each time a different drive was plugged in, or make the pool mount in the same location regardless of which drive I’m using. Because I was working with LUKS-encrypted volumes I faced additional complexities which made it  difficult to use other methods (like volume labeling) because of how Gnome handles and mounts such encrypted volumes.

While it took a while to make it work, once I figured it out it did exactly what I needed. Now, I’m sharing my results with you to save you the trouble of doing all the research yourself!

Keep Reading »

This post is part of my Upgraded Linux Backup series.

After obtaining (and assembling) my new backup hardware my first order of business was to get the external hard drives formatted and set up with drive encryption. Since I’m swapping out one drive to store off-site I wanted to use drive encryption just in case it somehow ended up in someone else’s posession. In Ubuntu, the easiest way to encrypt a whole drive is using LUKS. I chose LUKS because it is easily readable by most Linux computers and can even be set up on a Windows PC, if absolutely necessary. This post will walk through the (remarkably simple) process of setting up encryption and formatting.

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White Chicken Chili Recipe

August 18th, 2009

Let me start off by saying that I’ve been making a lot of soup the past several months. Since January I’ve made soup almost once a week, with a few weeks off around our vacation this summer. Part of the reason for this is that every Monday night my wife Becky and I host a dinner and conversation get-together at our house, and I like to keep the menu simple – usually some kind of vegetarian soup and fresh baked bread.

But even with making soup nearly every Monday and often eating the leftovers for lunch throughout the week, sometimes there are other not-so-simple (or not so vegetarian/vegan) soups we like to eat. White Chicken “Chili” is one of those favorites. While I haven’t deviated much from the recipe I started with, over the years I have tweaked this dish to where we really like it a lot. Keep Reading »

This post is part of my Upgraded Linux Backup series.

Before I get to what my new backup hardware consists of, it might be helpful to know a bit about my existing (old) setup. My home network consists of a workstation, a laptop, a netbook, a seldom-used garage PC, and a multipurpose server. Among it’s many duties, the server is a centralized backup server, allowing the various computers to back up files each night. It runs on an old AMD Athlon motherboard with 512MB RAM, using a 30 GB drive for the OS and programs and a pair of 200 GB drives for storage and backup.

Prior to this upgrade, the backup drive was regularly at 95% capacity. Even with the intelligent pooling technology used by the BackupPC software it had become necessary to limit the number of nightly backups I was keeping in order to make space for the unique data from the various PCs.  So I decided it was time to upgrade my storage situation.
Keep Reading »

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