2sparrows

The God Squad is a Jewish Rabbi and Christian Monsignor (priest) that has a syndicated newspaper column that shows up every Thursday in our paper, the News and Observer. They answer religious/spirtual questions, and the view points of both the Jewish and Christian faiths brings a unique perspective to their answers.

This past week they had an answer that contained the following exerpt on faith that I really liked:

Rarely can you convince someone of the existence of God. Faith, for the most part, is more of the heart than the mind. We sometimes believe that if we put our faith in a loving God that this loving God will spare us from any pain. When faith is tested by setbacks, one either grows stronger in faith or runs away from faith.

True faith thanks God for each day. It makes time for prayer. It looks for the presence of God in life. It recognizes that some suffering is hard to understand and harder to figure out. When faith unites us with God, it creates a great peace, one that will last forever. When someone says there is no God, it should represent the beginning of a discussion, rather than the end.

I am much more of a “mind” person in everything exept my faith. And while I enjoy apologetics immensely, I always think the arguments just don’t cut it at some level. So when it comes to faith, I rely on my heart to tell me what is true, not my mind. Some, especially non-believers may view that as a weakness, but I view it as a feeling that there are some hings beyond what humans can know in this world.

And this answer from the God Squad really fits in with what I believe.

I found this recipe in a Readers Digest while waiting in a waiting room to see a doctor, and thought I’d try it out. I thought it was ok, but Kelly really liked it. I need a 9×9 pan as the 13×9 one I used meant that the egg mixture was too shallow, so the top of the bread dried out a bit.

Banana French Toast
Preparation time: 10 minutes. Baking time: 50 minutes

8 slices Sun-Maid Raisin Bread
2 medium bananas, cut in 1/4-inch slices
1 cup milk
4 ounces cream cheese, softened
3 eggs
1/3 cup sugar
3 tablespoons flour
2 teaspoons vanilla
powdered sugar ( optional)

HEAT oven to 350°F.
PLACE four slices of raisin bread in a single layer in a buttered 9-inch
square baking dish. Top with bananas and four slices of raisin bread.
BLEND milk, cream cheese, eggs, sugar, flour and vanilla in a blender
or food processor until smooth. Pour over raisin bread. Let stand 5 minutes
or refrigerate overnight.
BAKE 40-45 minutes (50-55 minutes if refrigerated) until set and top is toasted.
Let stand 10 minutes.
CUT French toast into diagonal halves and remove with spatula.
Dust servings with powdered sugar if desired.
Makes 8 servings.

In my quest to clean up my desk top at home, I’ve done several things. I started using both my work laptop and home PC at the same time. All things that need a VPN connection (work email, intranet web browsing, SSH to various internal hosts, etc.) are done via the laptop while everything else (IM, web browsing, personal email, music) are done via the home PC. I recently wrote about synergy which allows me to use a single keyboard and mouse to control the two PC’s, and while I’ve had some issues with that and had to go with a hardware KVMP to supplement the software KM synergy, it has worked fairly well.

The KVMP I got is the IOGEAR GCS1734:

It’s alot fancier than some on the market but what drew me to it was the fact that it allows you to share USB peripherals (thus the “P”). Once I switched from SSH tunnels on my work laptop to VPN, I lost the ability to do anything on my local home network, including printing via a shared printer, without quiting the VPN. But with the USB printer plugged into the KVMP, I can switch it over to my work laptop and print. I also think I will do this with an external drive at some point.

I’m actually using the KVMP as a KMP — no video switching. I’m using two screens for the two computers. This is a four port unit though I’m only using two now, but I like the upgrade option if I ever add a home linux server or even a mac mini. The unit comes with four cables that include audio, video (vga), and the USB connection, so you can also share audio between multiple PC’s to one set of speakers, though I’m not doing that now.

Overall the unit is pretty nice, but I was using a 5 or 6 year old keyboard and mouse that came with an old Aptiva. So I thought I’d upgrade and I thought wireless may work well in order to continue the clean up. I first tried a wireless Microsoft comfort keyboard/mouse combo, and was fairly happy with it. It did have a lot of extraneous keys that I’d never use, but I really liked the slight curvature of the keyboard. Not quite as radical as a fully ergonomic keyboard, but just a nice curve to keep the wrists at good angles.

Alas, the microsoft keyboard did not work at all with the h/w KVMP. After some research it turns out that almost no wireless keyboard/mouse combos work with any KVM’s — or at least they are not supported. So if it does work, you are kind of lucky.

IOGEAR told me that they have a wireless keyboard/mouse combo, the GKM521R, that would work with their KVMP. I picked it up for about $10 after rebates from Amazon! Overall it does work fairly well, but you do lose the keyboard control of volume, being able to open up web, mail, or the calculater from a single button, etc.

What is nice about using the IOGEAR keyboard with their KVMP is that the hot keys do work. So I can hit “scrl-lock, scrl-lock, #, enter” to switch to the PC on port #. Or if you just want to swtich the key board and mouse, and not the USB peripherals, hit “scrl-lock, scrl-lock, #, k, enter.”

At first I was not crazy about the tactile feedback of the IOGEAR compared to the microsoft unit or my very old keyboard, but it has grown on me. However, the backspace key is too small — a normal sized key instead of a double key, and that has been hard for me to get used to. In addition, the Enter key is quite large, and I often hit it when I’m trying to use the pipe “|” key. Another thing that drives me crazy is the mouse uses rechargable batteries, and I have not yet gotten used to charging it, so it often dies on me.

I may switch to an MSFT comfort curve wired keyboard at some point, though I’m told some of the keys like volume control, open calculater, etc., won’t work as the KVMP is an emualted one, not a non-emulated one. Sigh. A couple of wires aren’t going to kill me.

Synergy is a pretty neat little software utility that acts as a “KM” switch, where K = Keyboard and M = Mouse. Normally folks use hardware KVM switches to control two or more computers using one keyboard, mouse, and video display. In this case, software is used to control two PC’s each with their own video head.

My set up is a bit strange so it’s not quite as stable as I’d like, so I do have a traditional HW KVM (I’ll review what I have sometime soon) for those times when synergy fails. What is difficult in my situation is that one of my stations is VPN’d in for work, while the other is a home PC. Since I don’t have a static IP for my DSL connection, I 1st had to setup dyndns so that my IP is findable via DNS. I then had to set up a port forward for synergy on my router to always send the synergy port to my PC that acts as the server. Then my VPN’d box is a client of the server, and uses the dyndns host name to reach it.

The reason this is a bit flaky is that all the packets that go back and forth are now going across the Internet to my VPN end point rather than just on the local network. Or if I’m not VPN’d in and don’t change the synergy configuration, the packets are still not passed locally.

About 80% of the time this works fine. Every once in a while it gets a little slow when working on the VPN box, and then every once in a while it fails totally. So I do have the hardware switch I can use.

Overall, though, I think synergy is great! I wish I could be VPN’d in and have the synergy packets flow locally, but that is not possible with our VPN s/w.

One thing that is great about a s/w KM vs. a h/w version is that you can actually cut and paste between PC’s!

Check out www.pandora.com. It’s a (somewhat) new web service that touts itself as a music discovery service. You can enter a few artists or songs that you like, and then it begins to stream music to you based on that information. You can then give thumbs up or thumbs down to the music to further tune your “station.”

They’ve undertaken what they call the “Music Genome” project, in which they’ve listened to and analyzed tons of songs, and categorized them (or more accurately categorized many characteristics of them). So based on the input you give it of what you like, they play you songs that have similar characteristics.

So far I’m fairly impressed, though I’m only in day 2. I’ve given it a few artists like Dar Williams, Holly Cole and Donna the Buffalo, that I thought might be too obscure, and they actually recognized them and have played a fair number of Dar songs. No Holly Cole or Donna the Buffalo yet, so my guess is that they don’t have licenses to play those two (yet).

Their web page says they have about 300,000 tracks now. While this doesn’t come near Apple’s 2-3 million, it’s a good start for something that is really only a few months old. Personally I’d like to be able to feed it my iTunes library, at least the play count number of the songs, and have it build my station that way.

At any rate, I wouldn’t be surprised to see one of the major Internet music services purchase Pandora at some point down the road. While I can’t see Apple doing it since they don’t have a subcription model (though Pandora does have an advertising agreement with them as well as Amazon)). Yahoo purchased MusicMatch, which had a similar “recommendation” feature though it was not done as a “genome” project. So I’m not so sure about them. Maybe Napster?

If you want to listen to my radio station that I’ve been working on the past 2 days, click here:

2sparrows radio

We had our Indian Night on September 17th at Tamera and Vernon’s house. I had posted the recipes a few days ago but never wrote an introduction post, so here it is. And yes I know it is now December, almost 3 months after Indian Night. It took a while to get all the recipes together, and then it took a few days for me to decide if I wanted to expand my knee blog to include everything. WordPress certainly makes it easier to publish certain things though I’m not sure of the format yet. Maybe I should have more pages instead of categories…

Anyway, the attendees were Marty and Connie, Robert and Rae, Patti and John, Tamera and Vernon, and Kelly and me. We had a great time and there was, as always, way to much food. But it was all fantastic and most of the recipes follow.

I had PT today and we started iontopherosis. This is basically putting an ionized version of cortisone into my knee using a device similar to the electrostim device. I had thought my Dr. had said this would help with the scar tissues, but my PT said it is supposed to help with the swelling. I’m willing to try anything at this point!

As my patella tendon area has been sore the past few weeks, my PT 1st checked that out, and said it does appear to be “jumpers knee” or patella tendonitis, with the main sore part just where the tendon “inserts” into the patella on the medial side. I had started to doubt this as I thought it was the patella bone itself that was sore, but the PT found that it was where the patella connects to the bone, and that is still considered patella tendonitis. I still find it odd that this is a “new” pain 2 months post surgery that I don’t recall ever having before surgery. But then again I’m no longer sore where I used to be sore. :-/

We put two pads on each side of the knee where the portals are, with one covering the jumpers knee area, and two lower on the leg. The lower ones are link electro sinks so the current flows from the top ones down. It did not feel at all like electrostim where this is enough current to make the muscles contract. Instead, at the very beginning, there was a very tinly tingling. Towards the end I did feel a very minor burning on my legs under the lower pads, and when we took of the top pads, my skin was quite red. (I’m glad I shave my legs or pulling the pads off would have hurt!)

I need to do this same procedures approximately every other day for the next week before we know if it will help me or not. There is some controversy in the field on whether the process works at all — the question is whether the ionization can disperse cortisone deep enough, I guess. My PT thinks my swelling is close enough to the skin that this may help.

I sure hope so, as ever since I did that 20 minute run and felt great, I’ve had to limit myself to no more than 5 - 10 minutes of running due to the patella tendon tenderness. I have been able to continue to bike on an indoor trainer up to 30 minutes and walk on a treadmill without causing any problems.