September 2005 Archives

I am a christian; it's no secret.  I also like to think of myself as a logical, mostly rational person that does not blindly follow without thinking.  It is really annoying that within the scientific community it feels like christians are constantly relegated to some sub-standard form of intelligence simply because they believe there is a God and He did come down and die on a cross for our sins.  It's not like we help the problem though.  As a community we have many theories, arguments, and papers which claim they can prove the existence of God in a scientific way.  Why are we always trying to remove faith from the equation?  Jesus taught that faith is a good thing.  So why do we try prove beyond any doubt that God exists?  What is so wrong with faith?

I've read a number of these articles purporting to prove God's existence scientifically.  And to date, I haven't read one that convinces even me as a christian.  I suppose it's also relevant to note that I've never read anything that conclusively disproves the existence of God either.  It seems to me that both are a matter of faith and scientific "proofs" are just ways to satisfy our doubt.  It may seem like I am saying that we should stop trying to explain the existence of God scientifically--I'm not, I think it's a worthwhile thing to explore.  But let's stop wasting our time with arguments that are obviously weak and admit that we are not there yet.  Let's rely on our faith and the power of God to change hearts because that's the only thing that will. 

I started out writing this post thinking I would write about evolution and explore a little why I don't think it is in conflict with the christian world view; but, here I am at the end of this post and I've said very little about evolution and christianity.  In fact, I haven't said anything at all until now.  I guess I'll leave that for another time but it is something that I would like to explore sometime.

Until later, happy days and good nights! 

Recently I've been learning a bit about VMS because I have had to use it on occassion down here in Australia.  I'm pretty good with unix; but I know next to nothing about VMS and am prone to making comments like "why would anyone want to use VMS?" or other not so polite comments.  I've been informed that VMS is actually quite an intuitive system and is far superior to unix.   I hope that you can detect the  sarcasm in my voice because nothing could be further from the truth.  Now before I go to far down the road on this VMS bash I would like to say that I don't know a whole lot about the system and that there are some things that sound pretty cool about it such as the versioned file system, the complete control over users in the system and the resources they are allowed, and finally the clustering abilities the system had.  Back to my complaining.  Firstly I have been told VMS is intuitive because commands are english like copy or dump verses cp and od.  While I agree that it's probably easier for a new user to understand the non-abbreviated nomenclature of VMS i am not convinced that this is a feature that makes me want to use VMS, it's not difficult to learn the commands in unix and after you have been in the unix world for some time they are quite intuitive.  At any rate that's not really where I take issue with VMS it's in it's filesystem that I get really annoyed.  The first quiestion I would ask anyone who claims that VMS is intuitive is how do you get to the root directory?  In unix it's "cd /" simple and to the point.  The filesystem is a tree and it makes sense.  It takes me 5 minutes to explain how the filesystem works ot a newbie.  In vms it's "set default [000000]" remind me again how that is intuitive?  Why 6 0's and not 5?  Turns out it has to do with old hardware but I am amazed out how anyone can call VMS intuitive after that.  How about getting to your home directory.  In unix (tcsh) you would type something like "cd $HOME" or "cd ~" the second is convient and the first is very intuitive.  Now the VMS version "set default SYS$LOGIN;" not hard but definately not intuitive.

I am not a fan of new OS's being rejected because they don't feel like unix but you have to admit there are some really nice things about unix and it's a good thing that vms is dying.  The future is not vms and there is a very good reason for that, it's because the OS has evolved beyond it.  It was good for it's time but it's time to move on.

Ok I'm done ranting now.

Over the last week I've been paying my dues here in Alice Springs, Australia.  It's the second time I've been here in a month!  It's really not that bad; the first time it was exciting because it was new.  But, there's not much out here and it doesn't take long before I start missing everyone back home.  Most of my days are spent either configuring the beowulf cluster or playing with this site.  Oh well, I like being useful and don't mind being down here so much--one week down, one week to go.

On another note, I've done a bit of customization to the default template in movable type.  I'm not done yet but I like the progress I've made.  What do you think?  I also installed Gallery and will hopefully get a template that makes it look integrated with the rest of the site here.  So maybe in a few months this site will come together with some more conent and be a bit more interesting.

It's getting late here (around midnight) and there's a few other things I would like to get done for tonight so I think this is the point where I sign off for the night.  Maybe I'll have something more interesting to say next time. 

Let me begin by saying "Welcome."  If you're here you have probably come because you know me and I told you to check out my website.  But, if your just some random bloke then allow me to introduce my self just this once.  My name is Jeremy, Jeremy Fergason that is.  I live in Tucson, Arizona and work for a small government contractor, Rincon Research Corporation, as a computer programmer.  Not too long ago, I graduated from the University of Arizona with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science.  In the near future I expect I wll be attending some school for some sort of masters degree; possibly in Electrical Engineering or maybe Mathematics.

For those of you that remember previous incarnations of this website, you may have noticed that all the old content is gone.  To make a long story short I got extremely fed up with the blogging software I was using because it didn't do everything I wanted.  For instance it did not have an elegant way of handling random quotations.  Many irritations like that added up so I started searching for some new software.  At one point I even began to program my own blogging system called Avalerion (if you would really like to see it, it is available here: www.sf.net/projects/avalerion).  Avalerion progressed with some steadiness and if somebody put some effort into the default template it actually would not be a bad system.  However, I found Movable Type and decided that I did not want to spend my time replicating a system that many people had already done and done fairly well.  So I downloaded movable type to evaluate it and decided that I liked it pretty well.  I figured out a fairly elegant solution for random quotations (see: http://birdhouse.org/blog/archives/2002/12/random_quotes.php) and most of my other irriations were also addressed so I figure I might actually end up liking this system.  It would be nicer if the whole thing was php instead of perl though--whenever, I think of perl cold shivers go up my spine.  But, I figure you can't have everything.

In the months and years to come I hope to update this site with useful information for my friends and family.  And just maybe something I post will spark the interest of some random passer by.  So in short, welcome to my website and I hope you enjoy it.