Back on line, so little I have to say today

On the one hand, it is nice to have my computer back and be able to post again, but it is August 31 and all I can think of is Robin.

Missing her leaves me beyond words today.

A Transfinite God

I think (not "I know" or "I believe") that a part of God being infinite is that God is transfinite.

Let me explain and define my terms. If we were all points on a plane (a flat, two dimensional world), a solid sphere that intersected the sphere would be a transfinite object (vis a vis the plane).

Just as the number of curves in the plane is infinite (an aleph two infinity), so the number of curved planar surfaces inside a sphere is infinite (and perhaps sufficient to correlate to the curves).

I think that, in some ways, the resurrection makes us transfinite. The sort of thing C. S. Lewis grasped at with his book The Great Divorce. Lewis has things getting more and more real as they get closer to God (all of hell is contained in a speck at the bottom of a crack in the pavement at the edge of Heaven). I suspect that all of our grasping at meaning is limited by our lack of a transfinite nature and by our finite understandings. Which is why John would say that it does not yet appear what we shall be. ("Beloved, it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that, when he comes, we shall be like him.” So love for one another, genuine love")

He knew we would be resurrected and become like Christ, yet his best analysis of that was that we should embrace love, because he could not otherwise define it.

So it is that I don't really know or really define, but it appears to me that much of the infinite may be subsumed in the transfinite.

---

By the way, I listened, a while back, to some of the people whose stories are told in "God Grew Tired of Us." The movie is out now. I think I need to see it.

Comfort the Afflicted

A great essay: http://saoba.livejournal.com/137533.html

I also enjoyed http://www.stardancer.org/kherishdar/ and http://mormonstories.org/?p=312

And I've enjoyed and been inspired by President Faust for the last almost thirty years. President Faust

Off set the thought that a frame doesn't need to be true in order to be effective, and doesn't have to be what you think it is to be reacted against ... sigh.

People too often react against what they read into rather than what they read (or hear, or touch, or see or feel).

More Mormons who like Catholics

We’ve had a growing number of Mormons coming here. Obviously they don’t come here for theological reasons, but they like our emphasis on values.

Lots of family in town to see my dad, made me have fond feelings of my Catholic aunt (whose last e-mail address I have isn't working) and then I found that quote.

Twelve Step Programs

Twelve step programs (such as the one the LDS Church promotes for its members, or AA or OA or others) work because they work. They do so much because they do so little.

There are twelve step programs because they produce results (which is what I meant by "they work because they work"). Without results they would no longer exist. It seems circular, but the programs are a success because they produce results.

They also produce a dramatic result because that result is all they attempt. By limiting their focus so sharply, they are able to continue to achieve it. Every precursor to the modern twelve step programs attempted to reach for more and failed. Keeping free from distractions and diversions seems very important.

I find twelve step programs fascinating because they reflect how easy it is to reach God, at least for the singular miracles of:

• regaining free agency and
• being able to seek God

The prayer of Alma 22:18 ".. and I will give away all my sins to know thee ..." comes to mind when I think of what is really going on in a twelve step program. I also think that what they teach can be applied to every life.

Sometimes we can do so much, because we seek so little, but so specifically, and find the greatest things of all.

Whitney Awards?

"The Whitney Award will be given annually in conjunction with the
LDStorymaker writing conference each March," Wells, the author of
three novels published through Covenant, explains. "This is an
exciting time to be part of the LDS fiction industry, and we hope the
Whitney will become a prestigious and sought-after award."

Anyone can nominate a novel published during the previous calendar
year in any of six categories, and a final academy of industry
professionals will vote on the final ballot. Nominations are being
taken for books published in 2007 by LDS authors at the Whitney
Awards website: www.whitneyawards.com

###

CONTACT:
Robison Wells
Whitney Awards President
robisonwells@msn.com
www.whitneyawards.com

Whitney Awards Committee
P.O. Box 468
Orem, UT 84059-0468

Completely off topic

.	The Dresden Files - The Complete First Season ~ Paul Blackthorne, et al. (DVD) Buy new: $30.99 36 Used & new from $28.97

That was my father's day present, just came in the mail today. So far I've watched the first four shows. My comment "no offense, but this is really, really good." Not that often I can say that about something. I've watched more straight TV tonight than I probably have the rest of the year (ok, I don't watch much television).

Girlfriends are forever

An important lesson to teach girls is that guys come and go, but girlfriends are forever.

You know what I mean. You've all seen a girl or a woman who every new guy she dates, everything else drops out of her life, all of her old friends become nuisances, her children become gnats and she goes into orbit around the newest boyfriend (or sadly, the newest in a string of husbands who don't last).

The same girl will act stupid to attract a guy, will become stupid from acting "as if" and really serves only as an object lesson of how not to be. After each crash and burn her friends are less and less close, less likely to give support.

But a good friend? They can be forever. Teach a daughter that girlfriends are forever and she will have friends that last. She will have more confidence in herself, and she will get the message that there are lots of things more important than guys. After all, guys come and go, but skills, education, knowledge, all of those are forever.

I've got a number of posts I've actually written out (I was away from the computer -- life happens). I need to type them up and blog, but I thought I'd share this thought for now. I love my daughters, and in teaching them this lesson, I want them to live full and joyous lives, and to realize that they are forever.

Grief related links ...

Once upon a time, back when blogs were not on-line journals of various types, a blog was a web log -- a collection of places you had been on the web, things you could recommend. I'm doing that now with a post I just read:

top 5 things not to say at a funeral May 9, 2007

Posted by guinever in loss, heaven, grief, healing, everyday life, death, christianity. trackback

In the two years since my daughter’s death, several people have asked me what they can say to a friend who has just lost a child or another loved one. My answer has always been,

There are truly no words. Just listen. Get your friend talking.

Ask about their loved one. Ask what they miss the most, what they remember. If you have some stories to tell about the person who has just died, tell them. They will grasp onto your memories and cherish them.

---

and:

“grief is like labor” revisited one year later March 14, 2007

Posted by guinever in loss, grief, healing, christianity. trackback

As the two year anniversary of my daughter’s death quickly approaches, friends and family have been asking me how I’m doing. Some wonder how I will spend March 22–do I want the women to surround me again in prayer at the cemetery followed by brunch at my house like we did last year?

Others ask if the second year is easier than the first one. A year ago, I compared my grief to labor and I said that grief can be overwhelming just like transition during labor can be overwhelming and I said that this transition will end.

AOLPress -- GNN Press -- NaviPress

There was a rev0lutionary html editor, one that works as a browser as well as a web page designer, with some intuitive parts that have still not been equaled. I own licensed versions of other html editors, but nothing really matches it.

However, with XP service pack 2, it broke. There is a fix.

"

You agreed to the one a copy of this email has been sent to, along with my reply to you, to give that person full credit for the fix.

That web site I contacted is here: http://www.ydegraw.com/aolpress.html"

So, here is the fix, along with the contact information I was given.

Thanks for the quick response...finally found the problem and cured the prob by selecting preferences/general/photoshop4.JPG instead of the default which is trans GIF,ART,Progressive JPG.
Some how i guess windows XP doesn't do well with that setting as soon as i changed it the images appeared again in AOLPRESS .
Thanks for your time it's truly appreciated !

Nice to be able to have it working again. Too bad that it was first declared freeware and then AOL deleted it from all official support. Sigh.

Still available for download from crooks and crannies on the web. The last trace of what made GNN a great ISP, back in the day.

Shangri-la Diet Update

I continue on the diet. My current weight is about 65 pounds down from where I started. My resting point on the diet depends on the amount of exercise I get, something that has not been true for me for some time. It is a permanent life change.

I'm pleased, now that it is closing on my second year, and over a year at this weight or a bit lower.

With the release of the paperback, the hard back is now on sale at Amazon for $3.99.

The Shangri-La Diet (Hardcover) by Seth Roberts (Author) (73 customer reviews)

73 Reviews 5 star: (39) 4 star: (10) 3 star: (9) 2 star: (7) 1 star: (8) See all 73 customer reviews...

One thing Amazon does have trouble doing is separating out things I've bought for myself from the things I've bought as gifts for someone else, often for a birthday or such where they've asked for a specific thing. So I constantly get suggestions, some good, but some completely off base (no thank you, I really don't want to buy any more Web Kinz, I can do without more Magic Treehouse, I already have Harry Potter books, etc.). Other times the books are good, but I already have all the travel guides to Italy I need, you know.

Action & Adventure Adventure All Categories Animals Anthropology Dark Fantasy Epic Fiction Gnosticism Guidebooks Look Inside Health Books Look Inside Nonfiction Books Look Inside Religion & Spirituality Books Look Inside Romance Books Look Inside Travel Books Magic & Wizards Magic Tree House Maps McKillip, Patricia A. More Stuffed Toys Osborne, Mary Pope Philosophy Shinn, Sharon Sociology United States World

A five year old, in pain, scared, weak, afraid ...

Can't swallow well, can barely do more than sleep 20 hours a day, surrounded by monsters and in terrible pain, no siblings or parents who can help.

Feeling they've failed everyone, even their children. Children?! An old man in his 70s (which could just as easily have been a young man in his 70s), with dementia and paranoia, Parkinson's disease having stolen much from him until he is a five year old with an old man's memories and an old man's body, confused, in pain, and in fear.

I sat with him today for a while until he could go back to sleep.

"He makes 'terse' into an art form."

Stuart Marshall described me as the most laconic man he had ever had contact with. The fun line, though, was "he makes 'terse' into an art form."

Made me smile, as in the genre, and for the book I was contributing to (with my own special section, much to my surprise), that probably describes my reputation over the past thirty years.

I have learned to not be so terse in other settings, and did have one person ask me how someone distilling several hundred pages of my work into a much smaller area could call me terse (the answer was that it was accurate), but this quote made me smile.

Something good in a busy week.

Visiting memories

We went to a baby shower in Wichita Falls. Took some pictures that I've long been meaning to take.

People have been visiting still, leaving trinkets and tokens and memories. I admit that the flowers and statues and rocks and crystals and everything else that still show up make my heart happier. I'm grateful for the kindness of unknown strangers, for the love of friends and for my daughters.

We, too, visit, taking and leaving memories. The company that did the headstones switched hands and lost their artist and craftsman on the third headstone, so the style and execution are much different with that one. But you come to terms with a great deal in life.

Harry Potter and the no spoiler comments

Well, we did the wait in line routine at the local Barnes & Noble (which meant pre-register, pick up tickets with a good place in line, show up, go to the events at the mall, confirm that we could actually buy the book without waiting at the local grocery store and then go back to the line so the kids could have the experience, which they relished). Bought two copies.

The books are consistent with what went before, though the outcome is not required by what went before. I'd have rather seen some people who died not have been killed, but on the whole it was well done and satisfying.

I'll skip the spoilers.

Sunrocket Crashes

Sigh. The service got buggy late last week, today the New York Times reported that they had laid everyone off, I made a call to the 800 number and was told they were not responding or providing service, good-bye (I'm giving you my impression of the recorded message that was much to chipper).

So, I'm switching to FIOS VIOP (since I have FIOS otherwise). Well, for the time I had Sunrocket we saved about three hundred dollars, all in all. Still, too bad it crashed.

I'll be without a working home phone for about a week and a half.

• SunRocket Goes Out of Business, Leaving Customers in the Lurch
• GigaOM Sunset at Sunrocket? Layoffs rumored «
• sunrocket To no one's surprise, SunRocket has ceased operations.
• SunRocket - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia SunRocket was a US-based VOIP provider established in early 2004 by Joyce Dorris

Shut down by spam ... arghhh

I own a domain, adrr.com. I've had it a long time, my e-mail used to route through it. Sigh. Not any more.

Because it is a four letter domain, it is on the list to get spam -- lots of spam, tens of thousands of spam a day -- all of it sent to e-mail addresses that don't exist, but might. Enough that my hosting service had to shut down my e-mail server and briefly had the domain itself shut down.

Many four letter domains are worth a lot, a couple hundred thousand dollars or more. Mine isn't (not to mention, if it were, I'd probably sell it and move everything to srmarsh.com where I keep my slow moving negotiation blog -- having a four letter domain isn't that important to me). Many generate a lot of revenue. Mine doesn't, http://adrr.com/living/, for example, just doesn't have much commercial cachet.

As a result, the "solutions" that cost "only" fifty or a hundred dollars a month just were not reasonable.

But if you've wondered where I've been, I've been "snowed" under, so-to-speak, by spam.

If I could reach back and actually touch them, I'd arbitrate and then collect under the terms of service. Anyway, that is where I have been.

Mary Sue ...

There is a lot of on-line literature. Much of it (well, maybe only 95%) fits into the Mary Sue category:

• http://www.onlyfiction.net/results.php
• http://www.onlyfiction.net/marysue2.html
• http://www.subreality.com/marysue/gsblolfc.htm
  

"You already know Mary Sue. Mary Sue is the perky, bright, helpful sixteen-year-old ensign who beams about the ship. Everyone on the ship likes Mary Sue, because Mary Sue is good at everything. Mary Sue is an engineer, a doctor in training, a good leader, an excellent cook, and is usually a beautiful singer. Mary Sue often has mental powers that may manifest themselves as telepathy, precognition, or magic. Her past is tragic, more so than any other character on the series. (Many Mary Sues have a backstory that reads like a V.C. Andrews novel. This is a clue.)"

A bit of humor, a bit of background, in case your teen or pre-teen is reading on-line stories. Now you know the gist of 95% of them.

Galveston oh Galveston ...

Galveston, oh Galveston, I still hear your sea winds blowin'
I still see her dark eyes glowin'
She was 21 when I left Galveston.
-
Galveston, oh Galveston, I still hear your sea waves crashing
While I watch the cannons flashing,
I clean my gun and dream of Galveston.
-
I still see her standing by the water
Standing there looking out to sea.
And is she waiting there for me?
On the beach where we used to run.
-
Galveston, oh Galveston, I am so afraid of dying,
Before I dry the tears she's crying.
Before I watch your sea birds flying in the sun
At Galveston, at Galveston

Every fourth of July we go to Galveston, to flee town, to avoid memories, to mourn Robin.

This year we had reservations, but the rain was too intense. Today a waterspout came much to close to the condo we rented. But we weren't there.

But I am still bereft.

More Economics

Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist by Tyler Cowen (Hardcover - Aug 2, 2007)

It is neat to see just how books on economics continue to spread.