Life is like a DHCP Client, your given an IP address for a period set forth by the DHCP Server. You can hold onto the IP as long as the server will allow you too, or you can release the IP address in an effort to obtain a new one.

While we are limited to what life throws at us (the IPs given the the DHCP Server), we are not necessarily at the whim of the DHCP Server, we too have choices to keep the IP given to us or choose to release and/or renew.

Recently, I made a tough decision to release my IP address that was currently assigned to me. It was not a choice that came easy. One can only take so many attacks from the outside before changing your IP address is the only obvious option. You spend so much processing power on the incoming attacks that you don’t have time to perform what you where made and designed for.

Clearly, Server Admins know how many resources incoming attacks take on CPU’s… and not surprising in life, we can find ourselves in the same situation… spending brain power on processing and fending off an attack than doing the work of what the server was designed for.

While I will have to wait awhile before getting a new IP address, until the offending attacker moves on to another host/victim, it doesn’t stop me from lower my brain load and getting back to business of what I was designed for.

I thank everyone for their support during this time and for my God who has just shown He is in control of the situation, no matter what attack is being thrown at me. While some might view God as a firewall that would protect you from the attacks, I see Him more as a System Admin, letting you do your own thing, but taking control and providing adjustments along the way.

I never realized until this morning, how much the game of Frogger is applied in driving, especially crossing busy roads with no traffic signals. While I typically like to take the fastest route and go with traffic patterns because it “flows” vs stop and go routes, recently I have been forced into the stop and go with construction backing up my usual route.

It is clear that not everyone played hours on end of frogger when they where younger as I did, because they have a hard time getting across busy 4 lane roads with a middle turn lane in the middle.

For example, while I could drive straight across the road and wait for traffic to clear in both directions like most people tend to do through my observations, which can take significantly longer time to cross, I will wait for a small break, enough I can accelerate and I will make a right turn and speed up and get over to the middle turn lane and stop… and wait again until I can cross the next section of road to get to the other side. I have gone is one road over and saved countless seconds of despair waiting for traffic to clear in both directions.

The National Weather Service in Topeka has issued a Tornado Warning…. ah! I love severe weather. Back in my younger years, we had a tornado come by and take out a house just down the street while it bounced along. That happened the 2nd week of March. So, when March comes around, I make sure that the Weather Alert is working, and my chase gear is ready. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the opportunity to chase in the last few years and hopefully, I will find a few close storms to be worthwhile adventures for me this year. In fact, I’d vote for a direct hit, but I may not live through it, since my house would probably just crumble in on top of me. Plus, I don’t wish such disaster on anyone, even myself.

Of course, this year I will have my iPhone and well, that would make it easy to get the latest updates this way, now if I could just overlay radar on the Map software on the iPhone, I’d be set.

Call me Snoozer, cause I haven’t been updating my blog on my monthly basis. You’d think with amazement’s from Apple, like the MacBook Air would at least bring me back from my deep slumber. (Did I ever mention I love my iPhone and it’s still as awesome today as the day I bought it?”) The crazy thing about my absence is it really has nothing to do with sleeping, it happens to be with productivity.

How so you ask? I’m glad you asked, because I was going to tell you.

Somewhere around mid Dec 2007, I got about 4 hours of sleep one night. Not a big deal, life goes on. The next night, 4 hours of sleep. The following evening, faced with the fact I hardly slept the previous two nights I zonked out at 7:30pm. A far cry from my midnight-2am bedtimes. About 4:30 in the morning, I woke up completed rested so I got up. I had one of the most productive days I had in a long time. But with the holidays fast approaching, I didn’t really give much thought to it. I have known for a long time that the more productive I am between wake-up time and noon, the more productive I am in the afternoon. The morning time, makes it or breaks it.

Well, right after Christmas I ran into purely by chance, an article blog post on “early rising“. Normally I would not have read such rubbish but considering my experience a few weeks earlier, it caught my interest. The writer when on to talk about how he gets up around 4:30 or so each morning, and is terribly more productive and successful. He keeps his wake-up schedule no matter what, weekdays and weekends and never sleeps in. His bedtime is when he can’t stay awake anymore and it changes from day-to-day, by as much as an hour or two. This seemed like the appropriate approach. Instead of “sleeping in” to catch up on sleep, you just got to bed earlier.

I did this for about 3-4 weeks with great success. However, the 4:30 time frame was to close to my 6:30 routine of getting ready for the day and getting the girls up, dressed, fed, and taking them to school. It was a real bummer to break just when I was hitting top speed on my work. So, I decided to try 3:30am, and this was the magic number and just what I needed, by 6:30, I am ready for a break and starting the morning routine. The other end of this is I do get tired very early at night, by 6-7pm I am really starting to feel the effects of getting up early. I pretty much have to go to bed no later than 8:30pm if I don’t want to face the 3:30 alarm like a bear.

What an interesting year it has been. While it has been met with any ups and downs (more downs, mind you), I must mark it off as a successful year. While things didn’t always go the way I wanted, nor did much improve, it takes a little bit of insight to see that this was not a bad year at all. In fact, in my experience, it seems that when everything can go wrong and does, good things are waiting on the other side. With 2006 ranking in with 2007 as the least of the desired, I can only hold out that 2008 will be a year of improvement and hopefully 12 months from now, I can write, I had more ups than downs for 2008.

We have lucked out thus far in not losing power with the storms we have had. My mother, has been out for 7 days and appears she might be out for 5-7 more. I can’t imagine a week without power. They even held out on getting a generator until today. Guess even those who think they can cut it, eventually give up the rough life for one controlled by electricity.

Merry Christmas everyone. In a world of political correctness (of which is not found here), my your season be a mess, but may your Christmas be filled with joy.

My gosh, time flies. I was looking outside the other day and there was a clock just flying along. Silly clocks. Wish they would fly slower.

Seems like I typically stay pretty busy these days. My youngest daughter’s 3rd birthday was last week, along with my fathers 60th. So we had a big birthday bash with that side of the family at our place. Plus, the girls decided to spend most of last week sick, out of school and daycare. Luckily, I have managed to stay clear of the any sickness, short of just being “sick and tired” of a few unresolved issues in my life. I must admit, I did get a flu shot this year, that was a first for me. After spending most of 2006/2007 winter sick, figured it was time to take precautions and be on the offense this winter.

What I enjoy most about winter time, is that my grass doesn’t grow. It’s so nice. You can just forget about one area of responsibility for a few months. The downside, it’s cold and the potential for ice and snow. I don’t mind the cold, but I dislike the ice and snow.

That’s about it for this update. Stay tuned next month for another exciting blog entry!! Don’t hold your breath, please.

Boo!

I am too lazy to upload this to the gallery, so I will just post it here. Some things change, other things don’t, but this is just a little glimpse into where the magic happens.

I rarely blog, because I rarely blog. Rarely. I will provide a quick update to all my Googlebot’s out there who tend to visit my site frequently, or more so than real people.

I love my iPhone, it is as cool today as it was yesterday. I have installed various modifications to it with the “hacks” that are available and installed Apache, which was kind of fun, a web server on my iPhone. I’m sure there is a great reason for this, but escapes me at the moment. The best thing about the hacks is the ability to have a terminal on the iPhone, to be able to SSH to other systems. The Terminal that is available for the iPhone, lacks proper emulation so when you connect to a Linux server, the output is garbage for the most part. But, it is a work in progress.

My new iMac is awesome, I love it, I love it, I love it. It is so much faster than anything I had been using to date, and with my 4GB upgrade, it runs VMWARE perfectly, so I can literally run Windows and Mac OS X, all at the same time, with no lag on either side. Plus, the added 24” display, makes a nice dual display setup very nice.

Everything else is pretty much the same, which is a mixed bag, kind of like Chex Mix.

Take a blast to the past and see if you can find the name of a few BBS’s I used to run. Interestingly, I don’t remember my BBS being called one of the names and the other name was only for a short while. The real name of my BBS, at least what it ran last as, was Mac’erland. Or, as my friend used to call it, “Macer’land”. (Yea, Matt – ha ha ha).

This past weekend, I put in around 30-35 hours in 3 days. Trade2Win launched a site that had been in the works for 3-4 months. While I didn’t do the design, I had a hand in several details and the site migration. It was fun, but left me pretty tired and my sleeping schedule all messed up. Poor Me.

In other news, Google did me in, and axed Macosx.com from the ranks of stardom. So… not sure how or when we will regain our prior position. In the blink of an eye, we dropped our daily usage to 1/4 of what it was the days, weeks and months before. Guess I’ll have to start being a better SEO Guru.

I realize my updates have been few and far between as of recent, but then, you’ve come to expect that from me and I didn’t see any need on not meeting those expectations. As my TODO LIST gets long and longer…. I hope that a RUSH OF MENTAL FOCUS would overcome me… so this list gets shorter, not longer.

I’ve been SUPER DUPER busy lately, hopefully I can return to post some things in a week or two. Like anyone really cares. Right Googlebot?!

My wife has long accused me of just “leaving” the room or a conversation when she gets up to go the bathroom, or address the needs of our girls. This annoys her and she tells me about it. Now, when she leaves, she says, “Will you be here when I get back?” This has always been attributed to my ADHD, unable to sit still. I will say that I figured it was related to that, but after reading this guys post on INTJ’s, it might be a characteristic of that other interesting part of me and not my ADHD at all. I never leave a productive conversation, when I leave… I figure there is nothing else to say and “move on…”.

I am really excited. It has been 7 years since I last bought a printer. My current laser printer needed a new fuser, my Ink Jet (hand-me-down) needed new color Ink cartridges, so I figured I’d take the money required to repair everything and spend about double and pick up a brand-new Dell Color Laser Printer. I have had my eye on this printer for quite some time. It has awesome reviews and in comparisons did far better than HP printers… and the price was terribly attractive through a company I found online selling them at a discount. Assuming everything works, and it shows up today I will be chomping at the bit to print out some color pagers.

UPDATE: Well, as I mentioned before, I have a personalized edition of Murphy’s Law. The printer came in, but the alignment/registration is off on the prints. So, now I get to go through the hassle of getting this thing fixed, replaced or whatever. JOY JOY JOY. Welcome to my life.

Update 3/9: After messing around with the thing, and reseating every part in the printer and doing about 500 alignment tests and modifications, I think I got it working. I will need to test it out a few more days before I call Dell.

Since I gave my life to Christ in 1993, I have had an avid interest in Bible Prophecy. In 1993, the “End Times” seemed so far away. While certain things, prophetically speaking, had already happened such as Israel returning from dust in 1948, the possibility of the world coming together, the world focusing on the Middle East, and the puzzle pieces just didn’t seem to fit. But, here in 2007, the world has changed drastically. Some, theorize, that on Jan 1, 2007, Daniel’s 70th week began. The common Christian belief, portrayed in the “Left Behind” series of the rapture happening prior to the beginning of the 70th week has made most of the current events go unnoticed. Yet, not one, two, three, four, or even five prophetic events may have already taken place and went unnoticed by mainstream Christianity. Things like, the Europeanon Union’s ‘Recommendation 666’ which establishes a powerful foriegn relations peace builder position in the EU frame work. The 7-year European Neighborhood Policy which runs from Jan 1, 2007 – 2013. It has a mid-term review, which aligns prophetically with scripture, and yes, Israel is part of this. Israel confirms a coveneant with many for 7 years. Many countries in the middle east are participating in this ENP framework. Israel is looking at giving up Judea and Samaria, of which is prophetic. The war with Lebanon last year, may have been prophetic or may have just been a scermish of the prophetic event yet to come. Israel’s Sanhedrin (a religious body from the Old Testament, started two years or so ago) is looking to purchase sheep to start animal sacrifices on the Temple Mount this coming Passover. Should they be allowed to do this, the prophetic implications make everything else which has fallen into place, even more solid. But, should this event happen, it will go unnoticed by most Christians.

Friends, I invite you take a look at yourself deeply and ask yourself, are you like me, a non-perfect being? Would you like to know, without any shadow of a doubt, that you will be in heaven when you leave this world, based not on good works, going to Church, or the bad things… but solely based upon the work of Christ on the cross, the ultimate sacrifice for our sins. A free gift to all who have faith and believe.

You see, the Jews of Israel, either this year, or a time in the future, will begin sacrificing animal offerings to God, a symbolic act that was done prior to Christ on the cross. Since they reject Jesus, their desire is to begin this symbolic act. You don’t have to do anything symbolically, you just need to believe. To recognize that your not perfect, a sinner, and you need a Savior.