2sparrows

I picked this device up for about $90, and quickly flashed the firmware with Unslung, which basically means I have my own cheap little linux box now. You can read more here:

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/

So far I have my Slug doing the following:

• pc’s and macs in the house rsync to it on a daily basis to back up all important files
• I have the primary drive mirror to the secondary drive on a nightly basis
• I run an FTP server on it for some docs, so I can get to them from wherever
• I run OpenSSH on it, so I can access it from wherever.
• I run an mt-daapd server on it, which is an “iTunes” server. Basically anyone that runs iTunes in my house on my subnet will see the “Slug Music” server in the list of shared libraries.
• I run both SMB and NFS on it so the devices can mount it directly, not just via rsync.

There’s a lot more that it can do — bascially just about anything a linux box can do. The Unslung version is based on the Linksys firmware and has about 500-600 packages built for it, though I found that most take some tweaking to get to work right. I was tempted to do a debian install, but they don’t have a binary flash pre-built — you have to build your own. And that’s more work than I was interested in taking on right now! At 1st I was tempted to move more to it, such as my web server, or at least portions of it, but I’ve decided to use a real server for that kind of thing, at a real colo.

First, I haven’t updated here since I saw the Dr. to review the second MRI, which really didn’t show much. For a couple of weeks after that, I was really improving and didn’t have much discomfort at all. Then I tweaked it again when I was carrying Reece in the baby Bjorn, trying to climb up “steps” in this little tube. We were at a Children’s Museum and that was the only way to get to the top. At some point while climbing, with the R leg bent and pushing up, the patella tendon was not happy and let me know about it the rest of the day.

Since then, it has slowly gotten better and I’ve been swimming, doing elliptical, and riding, and even did some light running in the grass for a couple of minutes. The patella tendon area improved, but discomfort moved to the medial side, and then to a horizontal band above the knee, kind of in the two aspects of the condyle femur.

Second, I hadn’t seen my PT in some time, and I felt like I’ve lacked structure and consistency in my rehab recently. I have been slack on PT work (though this week I did do some of the strengthening and stretching, and the plyometrics (weave/straddle/skip)). So I went back, and both B. and M. (a doctoral candidate) examined my knee together. They feel at this point I have two things that are inhibiting my progress:

1. My anterior capsule seems to be really tight. What this means is that the sleeve around my knee is tight, either from shrinking or scar tissue, especially where the tibia comes into the knee. So when the knee is flexed, the tibia is kind of pushed in against the femur. They think this explains the recurrence of patella tendon pain, as well as the medial pain I sometimes feel.

2. Overall strengthening needs to occur, especially at the end of the motions. Right now any impacting activities tend to cause me the most distress, and they feel that with better overall muscle strength, the muscles will cushion the impact. We re-measured the thighs, and I’m still 3/4 - 1″ smaller on the right than the left about 6 inches up. I forgot to right down the numbers to compare them to the ones we got just after surgery, but I will try to do that.

So the PT routine will be:

1. anterior capsule stretching
(lie on back, place towel in knee crease, and resist knee extension for 5s, relax, and stretch by pulling knee in for 5s)
do this with internal and external rotation of foot

2. friction massage to patella tendon

3. anterior patella glides (push knee cap down in oscillating fashion) — 3 min

4. hip stretching

5. end-range theraband strengthening

6. squats against wall -experiment with depth

7. machine work

a. recumbent leg press
b. knee extension
c. hamstring curls
d. hip add/abd
e. heel raises (calves)

I can do almost all of these at home, though they think I should go to the gym to help with structure. I am going back to see them in a little over a week to walk through these exercises one at a time to make sure I understand them fully, but I will start them now.

This thing is a bit of a pain to set up — 8 screws to get into the outdoor units battery compartment! I guess that’s to reduce the chance of water getting in, but it seems a bit excessive. The other thing is the manual is terrible. I could not figure out how to get the indoor receiver to synch to the outdoor unit, until I went over and read the reviews on Amazon.com. Turns out the key is to hit the reset buttons with a paper clip on both units until they synch!

Now if only it would rain so I could see if it works. :-/ Seriously, I did test it by spraying water in and the counter does go up, so I guess that’s a good sign that it will work.

/Sean

I’ve been using the iTunes music store pretty much since it came out, and have never had any real issues with the DRM. It’s simple enough to burn CD’s, put the music on your iPod, etc. I would love for Apple to offer a subscription service, but so far they are reluctant to and until one of the subscription services, such as Yahoo, Napster, etc. become a threat, I don’t think they will.

All that being said, sometimes 99 cents per track, or 9.99 for most albums, can be steep if you just want to try some music out. The 30 seconds snippets they provide really aren’t enough in some cases. Of course, when I want to keep the music forever, 99 cents is fine. (I won’t get into the debate over whether I actually own or am just licensing the music here).

So when I saw some ads for eMusic, and their non-DRM’d MP3’s, and the chance for a no obligation trial of 40 songs, I jumped at it. And I’ve decided to stay a member on their basic plan which is $9.99 per month for 40 songs, or about 25 cents a song. You can add bonus packs too if in any given month that is not enough. The other monthly plans are 14.99 for 65 songs and 19.99 for 90 songs.

Their catalogue is not as extensive as iTMS but I’ve found a lot of music I like, including Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Richard Shindell, Woody Guthrie, a tribute to the Beatles, etc. In other words, I have no problems getting 40 songs a month.

First, I’d like to thank my friend Patrick for sending this to me as a Chrstmas present. I had read a review of it in the local paper, but probably would not have read it on my own without receiving it as a gift. But now that I’ve read it I am glad that I did. Thanks Patrick!

Second, let me quote 2 Timothy 3:16-17:

16All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

More on that in a bit.

The book is sort of a layman’s introduction to textual criticism. Though I’m no expert, I have studied this a little in a New Testament class in college many years ago. Dr. Ehrman is considered one of the worlds experts in this field at this point. It’s funny, as Kelly is pretty sure he taught her New Testament class many years ago at UNC, where Dr. Ehrman is a professor. And I have the Teaching Company’s New Testament course on CD, which is taught by Dr. Ehrman. In that, he argues that Jesus was an Apocalyptic Prophet (and not the son of God).

I would venture to say that many Christians would find this book offensive. I, however, found it very good. While I have known that there are some descrepancies between the manuscripts of the New Testament in existence, I had never really dug into some of the more interesting ones. Overall the book does a great job of discussing the types of changes made and why they were changed. At one end is those minor accidental changes such as a misspelled word, while on the other are changes made for theological reasons.

I won’t go into any specific examples here, even though I had dog-eared several pages of them. But in the conclusion one thing I found quite interesting is how he shows that Luke and Matthew, which most scholars agree are based on Mark, actually changed Mark for their own purposes. The evidence here is compelling. And the opinion of Ehrman strikes me as the correct one to have:

The point is that Luke changed the tradition he inherited. Readers completely misinterpret Luke if they fail to realize this — as happens, for example, when they assume that Mark and Luke are saying the same thing about Jesus. If they are not saying the same thing, it is not legitmate to assume they are — for example, by taking what Mark says, and taking what Luke says, then taking what Matthew and John say, and then melding them all together, so that Jesus says and does all the things that each of the Gospel writers indicates. Anyone who interprets the Gospels this way is not letting each author have his own say…

There are a couple other items I want to quote here. I should not that Dr. Ehrman became a born again Christian in his high school years, and then went on to study further, 1st (in his own words) to a very fundamentalist school (Moody), and later a more liberal school (Wheaton), and then to an even more liberal school (Princeton), and eventually he “lost” his faith. That context may be useful in some of these quotes:

[on one of his professors] But he was not afraid of asking questions of his faith. At the time, I took it as a sign of weakness…; eventually, I saw it as a real committment to truth and as being willing to open oneself up to the possibility that one’s views need to be revised in light of further knowledge and life experience.

I suppose when I started my studies I had a rather unsophisticated view of reading: that the point of reading a text is simply to let the text “speak for itself,” to uncover the meaning inherent in its words. The reality, I came to see, is that meaning is not inherent and texts do not speak for themselves. If texts could speak for themselves, then everyone honestly and openly reading a text would agree on what the text says. But interpretations of texts abound, and people in fact do not agree on what the texts mean.

Now, back to 2 Timothy 3:16… Dr. Ehrman tells us that he came to the conclusion that the Bible is a very human book, and has been from the very beginning. He decided that it could not be the inerrant word of God, and that it could not be God “inspired” (God breathed). I think he actually does a nice job of not trying to shove this view down his readers throats. While there are a few places in the book where I felt he was being a bit flippant to others with a more hard-line view of scripture as the inerrant word of God, overall he kept the bias out of it pretty well, and just presented evidence that there have indeed been changes by humans, especially early on before professional scribes got involved, and that some of those changes do have theological implications.

(One example of this — perhaps flippant is not the right word here — is the title “Misquoting Jesus.” That’s a title that was chosen, in my mind, to create a stir and therefore generate more sales. Maybe that was the publishser’s decision. )

I’d like to add one more note. In “The Case for Christ,” Lee Strobel has a chapter on this very subject. At one point there is a statement that the New Testament has survived 99.5% in tact, which of course doesn’t really jibe with this book which talks of hundreds of thousands of differences. (And in fact, in the Case for Christ, there is mention of hundreds of thousands of differences as well. However, it goes on to argue that the majority are minor and I’m supposing that’s where this percentage comes from, though that is not 100% clear.)

Granted, Ehrman does say that the majority are non-consequential, but he does point out some that do have theological implicaitons. Strobel, in the form of an interview of expert Bruce Metzger, says that none of the changes put any doctrine in jeoprody. (It’s interesting that Ehrman studied under Metger at Princeton.) At any rate, here are two experts that seem to be disagreeing. Ehrman shows some examples that do have theological implications; Metzger says no doctrines are in jeoprody.

While I’m no expert, I lean toward’s Metzger’s interpretation. In none of the examples Ehrman gives did I feel my faith being challenged by any of the textual differences, even though they were profound. However, I think that Ehrman has made the decision that because we don’t have the inerrant word of God, that he can not believe Jesus is the son of God. He has not lost belief that Jesus existed or was an important figure, as he argues in the New Testament CD course I have.

So, finally, do I recommend this? I can say that if you are a Christian with a strong belief that the Bible is inerrant, this book will probably frustrate you. However, if you are an atheist that likes to keep abreast of such things, or an agnostic who is not sure, or a Christian with a more open mind about this subject, then you certainly should read it.

I have come out stronger in my faith with a deeper understanding of the book that guides my beliefs.