End of a Streak

Yesterday I had to boot into Windows to do work. I needed to use a proprietary third party app, and they weren't nice enough to send us a Linux version. It made me feel kind of dirty, like I need to repent of that sin or something. It broke a 3.5 week streak of doing all my work under Linux.

Cleaning Out My Desk

I left work early today after cleaning out my desk, and they told me not to come in tomorrow.

Fortunately that's because Toyon is moving to a new building, and the movers are starting tomorrow morning. The move is fairly short, but it will drop my commute down to under a mile and a half. The new building is much nicer, but the thing that excites me is that now we will all be in a single building, so I won't have to walk down the street just to meet with someone. The one problem is that now I need to figure out what to do with the 300* out of date business cards I have left over.

*: Complete estimate, and probably wrong. Actual is between 100 and 1000.

More On Linux

I have continued to use Linux at work almost exclusively. In fact, I only booted into Windows once last week, and that was only to load some new music into iTunes, and then I was back to Linux. This week the only time I've booted into Windows so far was an accident, so I didn't even log in. Needless to say, I've been happy with the environment, and continue to gain skill with the Linux and related tools.

Yesterday someone taught me how to compile and install the Linux kernel, which was convenient since a new version just came out. I just went through and trimmed a bunch of features out of my kernel. By default the Gentoo kernel installs with support for a lot of things that I will never use (like random motherboard chipsets and read support for Apple's file system). One feature in particular made me wonder a little:

Support for hot-pluggable CPUs

Fortunately that one is disabled by default. Still, I'm wondering who would actually have a real use for that.

Ok, my kernel is done compiling. Time to see if I accidentally removed any kernel options that I actually do need...

Update: Success!

Music for a Cause

Over the past couple of months, I've gotten two new CD's, both at Church. For each of them, the production costs were paid for in full, so that all of the suggested donations could go to Missions work. As an added bonus, both of them are excellent CDs.

The first was worship music performed by natives of Philippi, South Africa. As you will most likely agree, if you have heard any, African worship music is a joy to listen to. All of the proceeds from that went to support Bridges of Hope.

The second was made available just yesterday, and is a compilation of musicians at our Church, with two-thirds of the songs being originals by members of our Church. What surprised me was that very few of the original songs seemed like originals to me, because they are songs that we sing regularly on Sundays. I loved discovering that a good share of our worship music is straight from the hearts of our people within our Church family. The proceeds from this one are going to International Justice Mission.

I don't consider this to be anything revolutionary, nor do I consider myself a saint for buying them. Still, I really like the idea, and wish that the sales of all worship music was handled in such a way.