I’m having a terrible experience dealing with Nordictrack (Icon health and fitness) and it’s partner financing company HC Credit. Consider buying from someone else if you’re on the fence. Unfortunately, they have a setup that discourages efficiency and customer-friendliness, since they seem to recoup profits on their “interest-free” offers by charging crazy fees even without any mistakes on your part and really getting you if you’re a day late. My inquiry about these practices was met with “your fault, it’s in the fine print.” Sigh. Even if I must eventually accept that fact, that’s not the way to leave me a happy customer. I’m out hundreds of dollars to these guys. Don’t buy Icon / Nordictrack. And though the “HELPCard” / HC Credit company has no need to maintain a good image since they are fed “sales” from other companies, never use them if you can help it. Their website is ancient, contains errors, and their call center is unprofessional and difficult to deal with. Makes me want to start up a competitor that operates with efficiency and customer friendliness, and maintains profitability through automation and efficiency rather than through leeching ridiculous fees from people as inefficiently as possible.

This is not from the Onion. We live in our own microcosms and macroeconomic woes impact all of us very differently. Capitalism and abundance breed funny pockets of reality. But this makes me want to re-examine my own hierarchy of life priorities that filter down to discretionary spending.

The LA Times. “It used to be a high point of Goldy Anthony’s life. Every six weeks or so, as a kind of personal morale booster, she and a group of girlfriends would make appointments to see a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon for little touch-ups. He was ‘an artist’ with Botox and Juvederm, she said.”

“Afterward, in a carefree mood, the ladies would dine at a popular restaurant on the Sunset Strip.”

“No more. The sub-prime loan crisis, the housing slump and the general decline of the economy have claimed another covey of victims. Anthony is in the real estate business, and under current conditions, the cosmetic treatments — at $1,800 or more a pop — can no longer be squeezed into her budget. It’s the same with others in the group.”

“‘We used to make appointments together,’ Anthony said. ‘Then they started saying, ‘I can’t go next week.’ People didn’t have the money, but they were ashamed to tell you.’”

“‘I would rather have Botox than go out to dinner, but it’s just gotten so bad,’ said Anthony, 41, who is looking for a job since her career in the mortgage business went sour. She has not had the facial treatments in months.”

“And what’s been happening in Beverly Hills is apparently happening around the country. After years of steady growth, the cosmetic surgery business seems to be going through a rough patch.”

“Cathy Hollingsworth is not in the real estate business; she manages a clothing store. But the 42-year-old mother of two from San Jacinto said she is holding off on $20,000 worth of surgery because she doesn’t think it would be fair to her family in a shaky economy.”

“Her husband’s job with an engineering firm appears to be secure, but the four-bedroom home the family bought 2 1/2 years ago has lost value. On their street in a brand-new subdivision, four or five houses now sit empty.”

“‘If we weren’t upside-down in the house, I probably would take the money out and have it done,’ said Hollingsworth, ‘I’ll have to see how long I can tolerate wearing a girdle.’”

On a related note… Without the familiarity I have, “Grand Junction” sounds like the urban California city and “Mountain View” sounds like the small valley town next to the Rockies

After being spurned by their would-be lover Yahoo, Microsoft attempted to woo the coy bird. Unfortunately, Microsoft, though admittedly rich and powerful, struggles to set the romantic mood. Looking very much like their personification in the Mac switcher ads, Microsoft comes on a little too strong to be using words like “embrace” and “consummate”. Some will accuse me of cherry picking quotes, but these are actual excerpts from Microsoft’s response to Yahoo’s demure refusal to get hitched. As is standard practice in the press, I’ve used “…” to condense their statements (only when necessary, of course)… (poetry quotery best read aloud, beatnik style).

—

“It is unfortunate that Yahoo! has not embraced our full … offering”
“Base… number two … we have”
“Base… number two … does not … provide…unity”
“Yahoo! has no…ring”
“and … so… Microsoft… will … sing”
“our … proposal … we … will …sing”
“…”
“Yahoo! … our … fair …pet…!”
“we are confident”
“we are … great”
“we are … a compelling number two”
“we are … moving”
“moving forward…!”
“we are … moving … to pursue”
“Yahoo! … Yahoo! … Yahoo!”
“we are … moving … to … the right”
“and … we have … the right … steps”
“we are … moving … in”
“easing… in”
“Yahoo! … is … the best”
“It is … increasingly exciting … becoming better positioned to…”
“Yahoo! … Yahoo! … Yahoo!”
“we are … moving … to consummate”
“moving forward … to consummate”
“for… that … embrace…, that … exciting … position…”
“o!”

My good friend Tim Borland is running 63 marathons over 63 consecutive days. His wife Michelle and kids Kailey and Colton are performing the feat of living on the road for 2 months, in an RV along with Tim. And all of this for a great cause - to raise funds and awareness for a terminal genetic disease (A/T) which doesn’t have a cure today but is much closer as more and more research is done. A cure would also provide valuable insight into the mechanism of other genetic diseases. To help spread the word, the A/T children’s organization is sponsoring a contest to get website and blog mentions - do it and win a Nintendo Wii! Here is the official info.

Ultra-runner Tim Borland is running 63 marathons in 63 days in order to raise funds and awareness for the A-T Children’s Project in their quest for a cure or life-improving therapies for ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T). A-T is a rare, neurodegenerative disease that affects children, giving them the combined symptoms of cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, and cancer. Children with A-T — born seemingly healthy — are usually dependent upon wheelchairs by the age of 10 and often do not survive their teens.

To run with Tim, join a tailgate party, or make a donation, please visit the A-T CureTour website. There, you can also view the daily video blog produced by filmmakers who are making an independent documentary on the A-T CureTour or enter a contest to Win a Nintendo Wii.

I’m reading a book called Balancing Your Family, Faith & Work by Pat Gelsinger. Pat is the Senior VP in charge of the biggest technology group at Intel, the Digital Enterprise Group. I wanted to record here some of the ideas that impacted me and why.

When my time on earth is complete I want to be like Paul and have run the good race (2 Tim. 4:7) and used up every ounce of energy, minute of time, and dollar of resources for his purpose and kingdom.

I think I’ve had this idea in the back of my head for a long time, and have feared it. I feared what I would lose by trying to ‘give my all.’ But lately, I’ve been seeing that living this way yields the most satisfaction. What is satisfaction? I think it’s essentially our closeness to perfection (in abstract) or how close our heart is God (what to actually pursue). This equation comes about when pursuing perfection if “perfection” is a personal God.

Everyone derives satisfaction from all sorts of things on a short and long term basis. Eating a great meal is a small bump in our satisfaction level over a short period of time. Being happily married and raising a family can be a large source of satisfaction over a long period of time. But every experience in our life can operate in isolation, or contribute to the slope of our life over time as time goes to eternity (infinity in the x axis). Are we using and allowing experiences to bring us closer to perfection and keep us there (infinity in the y axis)? I.e. do we change for the better - become closer to God? Or do we return to where we were?

I think of the satisfaction bumps as divine updrafts - blessings from God. But we don’t have wings. We don’t have the means to approach heaven over an infinity of time (consistently change for the better and grow closer to God). The only one who can forever bring us along closer to infinity is infinity Himself. Our own efforts at life result in death by chaos (sin) or death by crystallization (law). We don’t have a source of eternal life within us. If we are to gain ever greater satisfaction, we need to put to death our independence and rely on God. God has made this possible by creating a space/time connection to us through Jesus. He enables us to relate to the infinite without being burned away in our imperfection. He provides our perfect example. And obeying Him as Lord gives us the wings we need to approach x/y infinity (eternity/perfection).

Cheesy graphs NOT TO SCALE. ENLARGED TO SHOW TEXTURE. INFINITY NOT DEPICTED.
Satisfaction in Ourselves	Satisfaction in Christ

As I was reading this book I rediscovered that this process isn’t completely about sacrifice and self-denial. It is the most rewarding path possible. My fears were real, but unfounded. The key is Christ - without Him, I do have the downslope of every temporal satisfaction to look forward to. With Him, I can look forward to infinite love and joy.

As much as I love the print quality of my R800, I have to thoroughly withdraw any recommendation to buy one of these, or any Epson inket as far as I can tell, unless you print very often. As an occasional photo printer, you would be financially better off hiring a personal assistant to be on call to come pick up your flash card and drive back and forth to a photo lab to print your picture.

Each time you go to print after it’s been a while, the printer spits out almost a quarter of it’s ink in “cleaning.” Unfortunately, you’ll also usually have a banded print, which means you do a nozzle check, which shows some small clogs. Now you have to run a cleaning cycle, which uses another 1/8 of your ink. In some cases, this works. This last time for me, it didn’t after 3 cycles. So this print I’m trying to print has cost me somewhere north of 50 bucks. I call tech support, and they say “oh, I’m showing your printer is out of warranty. If you want to continue talking to me, you’ll have to pay $9.99.” I’m like, “Nine ninety nine are you out of your mind?!” And he’s like “Hang on, I have to run a cleaning cycle on my mouth - that bumps the price up to $20.”

I’m about to throw the printer out of the convenient second-story window to my left, as this scenario has repeated itself to various degrees of ink burning every time I go to print. Did I mention it’s over $100 to replace all the ink cartridges? PLEASE AVOID EPSON. Unless you have either money or ink or both burning a hole in your pocket. Note that Epson’s tiny little cloggable nozzles and ridiculous ink wasting cleaning cycles and sky high ink prices are probably ok for pro photographers, who make so much margin on prints they can afford ink wastage for great prints. But I am steering most people away from liquid gold ink guzzling Epson from now on.

I’ve replaced all these inks a couple prints ago… Most of them two days ago when I started trying to print the print I haven’t gotten out yet.

Some chilling imagery from a brave reporter for NBC, who is apparently embedded with an anti-squirrel squadron in Cuesta park. But to get this close, you have to wonder - is the reporter a squirrel sympathizer? Might the press actually be aiding the squirrels in their quest to dominate our media and disrupt our normal lives? I mean, I doubt you’d see this kind of “cute” squirrel footage on Fox news.

 

Back in college I wrote a short story involving squirrels for my creative writing class. We peer reviewed each others’ stories, and mine was described alternately as hilarious, disturbing, or both. Well, I’d like to add another description - prescient. Squirrels are making an initial volley of attacks, it seems. A squirrel in a Mountain View park jumped a 4 year old boy, latching on and biting him even as he dropped to the ground and rolled. From the first recent news story:

“As for Andrew, he’s still trying to make sense of the assault. He
declared he’s never going into a park with trees ever again, his
mother said, and he keeps telling everyone the squirrel was trying to
eat him.”

Well, the humans decided to strike back, placing traps and promising to humanely euthanize any squirrels caught (personally, I think they should make an example of squirrels caught, perhaps by hanging them by their tails and shaving them, in full view of the other squirrels). Will the supposedly greater brainpower possessed by the biped combatants ensure victory? There are doubters even among their own ranks. From a later story:

“The squirrels will be back,'’ South Bay wildlife rehabilitator Norma
Campbell said. “For every one you take out, two more will come
in….”

Hide your children.

Well, lest I think prayer was a second-class citizen in life, the next chapter in Desiring God extolled its virtues. I particularly liked the image one paragraph gave me, so I made a lame diagram of it in MS Paint. Yes, it would have been better in Visio. No, I don’t have Visio on this laptop. Anyway, since it’s so lame, I’ll explain a bit. Basically, from one dimension flows many, and back into one. Prayer creates, sustains, or enables the working of all these essential aspects of life, and these aspects in turn fuel our overarching purpose in life, and that which we cannot attain without the Spirit of God: Love! It is true our purpose is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, but that glorification and enjoyment is expressed in love for Him and for others. In the diagram, the top phrases have love at the beginning (Love is the fruit of the Spirit) and the bottom phrases have prayer at the end (the Spirit is given in answer to prayer). Without further ado, here is my lame drawing. www.biblegateway.com is great for looking up bible references in many versions.

 

If I believe my spirit is eternal, while my body is mortal, should not the nourishment of the former be more important, sans exception, than the latter? And yet I have been more consistent in eating cereal! ‘Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ From Desiring God:

This has been the secret of God’s great spiritual warriors. They have saturated themselves with the Word of God. Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission, sustained himself through incredible hardships by a disciplined meditation on the Bible every day. Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor give us a glimpse of this discipline:

It was not easy for Mr. Taylor, in his changeful life, to make time for prayer and Bible study, but he knew that it was vital. Well do the writers remember traveling with him month after month in northern China, by cart and wheelbarrow with the poorest of inns at night. Often with only one large room for coolies and travelers alike, they would screen off a corner for their father and another for themselves, with curtains of some sort; and then, after sleep at last had brought a measure of quiet, they would hear a match struck and see the flicker of candlelight which told that Mr. Taylor, however weary, was pouring over the little Bible in two volumes always at hand. From two to four a.m. was the time he usually gave to prayer; the time he could be most sure of being undisturbed to wait upon God.

Often I’ve thought “I don’t have time to read today, I’ll just pray on the way to work.” George Mueller, a great saint of God, shares in his autobiography a turning point in his spiritual growth. It’s encouraging me to put in the work necessary to adjust my schedule so that I have time to read scripture every day.

Before this time my practice had been, at least for ten years previously, as an habitual thing, to give myself to prayer, after having dressed in the morning. Now I saw, that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God and to meditation on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed; and that thus, whilst meditating, my heart might be brought into experimental, communion with the Lord. I began therefore, to meditate on the New Testament, from the beginning, early in the morning.

The first thing I did, after having asked in a few words the Lord’s blessing upon His precious Word, was to begin to meditate on the Word of God; searching, as it were, into every verse, to get blessing out of it; not for the sake of the public ministry of the Word; not for the sake of preaching on what I had meditated upon; but for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul. The result I have found to be almost invariably this, that after a very few minutes my soul has been led to confession, or to thanksgiving, or to intercession, or to supplication; so that though I did not, as it were, give myself to prayer, but to meditation, yet it turned almost immediately more or less into prayer.
…
The difference between my former practice and my present one is this. Formerly, when I rose, I began to pray as soon as possible, and generally spent all my time till breakfast in prayer, or almost all the time. At all events I almost invariably began with prayer…. But what was the result? I often spent a quarter of an hour, or half an hour, or even an hour on my knees, before being conscious to myself of having derived comfort, encouragement, humbling of soul, etc.; and often after having suffered much from wandering of mind for the first ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour, or even half an hour, I only then began really to pray.
…
As the outward man is not fit for work for any length of time, except we take food, and as this is one of the first things we do in the morning, so it should be with the inner man. We should take food for that, as every one must allow. Now what is the food for the inner man: not prayer, but the Word of God: and here again not the simple reading of the Word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts…

From John Piper’s book “Desiring God,” I resonated with this section because I have lately felt the frustration of reaching the end of all my “mountains.” I’ve been unhappy and guilt-ridden at my unsatisfaction in life, when I have so much to be grateful for. The unsatisfaction has driven me to seek lesser things (”exciting” tech news stories, driving fast, etc..) when I had a thrilling lifelong set of challenges right there. I think the key is that I forgot myself in the world. I forgot that the gnawing void of dissatisfaction cannot be filled in this world; no, we are on a climb that only reaches the peak when we meet Christ in the next. So I’m off now, to work on this internal mountain, knowing that I will experience intense joy and grief intermingled until I’m together with the object of my climb.

Conquering the Internal Mountain of Pride

There is an analogy here to a powerful motive that exists in unbelieving hearts as well. Virtually all people outside Christ are possessed by the desire to find happiness by overcoming some limitation in their lives and having the sensation of power. Heinrich Harrer, a member of the first team to climb the north wall of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps, confessed that his reason for attempting such a climb was to overcome a sense of insecurity. “Self-confidence,” he said, “is the most valuable gift a man can possess . . . but to possess this true confidence it is necessary to have learned to know oneself at moments when one was standing at the very frontier of things…. On the `Spider’ in the Eiger’s North Face, I experienced such borderline situations, while the avalanches were roaring down over us, endlessly.”

The all-important difference between the non-Christian and the Christian Hedonist in this pursuit of joy is that the Christian Hedonist has discovered that self-confidence will never satisfy the longing of his heart to overcome finitude.

He has learned that what we are really made for is not the thrill of feeling our own power increase, but the thrill of feeling God’s power increase-conquering the precipices of un-love in our sinful hearts.

As I said in the letter to my friend Ronn, it is an indictment of our own worldliness that we feel more exhilaration when we conquer an external mountain of granite in our own strength than when we conquer the internal mountain of pride in God’s strength. The miracle of Christian Hedonism is that overcoming obstacles to love by the grace of God has become more enticing than every form of self-confidence. The joy of experiencing the power of God’s grace defeating selfishness is an insatiable addiction.

I loved the delicious, possibly very slightly unhealthy phenomenon known in Hawaii simply as the “Plate Lunch.” It consists of rice, macaroni salad, and some sort of meat. Well, a place opened only a couple blocks from our house that serves plate lunches, among other hawaiian and filipino food. Since I really like it, and want them to do well and stick around, I made a website for them: www.kauaibbqgrill.com. Check it out, and check the restaurant out… yum indeed!